This is the current version of the abstract for my paper. Thank you again for the donations that made it possible!
*So* rusty at technical writing.
Abstract. The fictional worlds (settings) created for roleplaying games are unusually subjective entities. The setting in which one group plays is not the setting in which another group plays. The player group has substantial prerogative in standard play to rewrite and expand the setting. More importantly, the player group determines which portions of the game setting and rules are meaningful and to what degree.
It is standard for players to extrapolate connections between small details in the provided world. This creates new content that they consider implicit. Other groups may possess a fundamentally different understanding of the setting that is consistent to a similar degree with the material the game provides.
In effect, roleplaying games in their static published form do not describe a single fictional world and story but rather a large multi-dimensional space of fictional worlds and stories organized by unifying constraints. In every fictional world based on the canonical Exalted setting, the Scarlet Empress disappeared in Realm Year 763, five years before the story begins. This is a unifying constraint, but it is not a specific fictional event: there exist valid instantiations of the Exalted setting in which she was kidnapped by demons and in which she retreated, voluntarily, to the Heavenly City of Yu-Shan.
It is a traditional conceit in roleplaying games to imagine that the setting material does contain fixed data with a fixed meaning, even though this is technically false. It is also traditional to imagine that the rules of the game are external constraints on the players, approximating but not defining the physics and metaphysics of the world. These ideas compensate for the fallibility of game designers by focusing attention not on the game as printed or the game as played but on the Platonic ideal.
Exalted: the Fair Folk describes a world in which, quite literally, anything can happen. The Wyld in the Exalted game setting is intended to represent a primal Ginnungagap of myth, a place with no fixed rules where chaos gives rise to fragments of stories and events.
In this context, the conceit is not possible. There is no fixed world to describe. The game rules by which players can construct stories must accurately reify the actual physics of the setting. The game rules cannot provide meaning. They only provide constraints and structure.
This paper examines the construction of roleplaying game settings from a perspective of structure and constraint, using the design constraints and decisions of Exalted: the Fair Folk as examples of the difficulties and possibilities involved. In this perspective, each rule and datum in a roleplaying game is a tradeoff between lost possibility---the stories you can no longer tell---and structure, which facilitates consensus and quality in the creation of the stories that remain.
Okay, not yet. Counting all the P.S.s and the miscellaneous stuff I wrote but never posted, there are 500 entries on site. ^_^