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by Kurokiku on Fri Mar 29, 2013 1:32 pm
I think Colonel_Masters says a lot of things that make sense, but I'd like to add something else in particular.
It's completely okay for a world to be much bigger than the characters that inhabit it. In fact, I think most of the time, it should be. The reason for this is simple: you can always narrow the focus of a given plot without narrowing the scope of the actual world. You could run a RP in one tiny prison colony on a nowhere planet where the world is actually composed of several galaxies, if you like. The trick is to keep the focus on the stuff going on in the colony. Galactic politics can be running apace while the characters just drift by day to day in labor camps or whatever, and technically that's within the scope of the setting, but it doesn't become a factor in the story unless someone's new waste dumping law causes a bunch of space-garbage to hit the colony at high velocity or something.
Granted, you probably won't show the council or whomever debating on the law, but you'd sure as heck describe the impact and what it does to the planet the characters are on. The wider world can also have influence in character backgrounds and histories, or even appearances and personalities (particularly if aliens are involved in this example). The characters may never make it out of the colony, never so much as step into a spaceship, but the world lore will influence how they think, what they do, and what they're willing to believe.
I may have mentioned this before in a slightly-different context, but think of it like an iceberg: only the tip is ever written IC, but you want the rest to be at least somewhat formulated so that the setting maintains a certain depth or gravitas. So the world can be much, much larger than the writers will ever have use for (as it is in the multiverse), but that doesn't mean you need to show everything that happens in it, or give the characters every possible opportunity.
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