Let's start with the most basic step we can: defining setting. Setting is the collection of a story or game's physical locations, the way the world and the creatures and people in it interact, sets of cultural ideals, and other details we use to determine what normal and unexpected behavior in the story or game will be. That is to say, the setting of a D&D game includes ideas about medieval life we have from popular culture, specific homebrew additions from the DM, our own preconceptions about how society works, our ideas about how our character fits into society, and other details inform just about everything that happens.
So then setting represents and impacts quite a lot. In fact, let's try to list things that are not setting: player characters, their actions, and the collaborative story that emerges from playing. Yep, that's about it. When it comes down to it, the DM is a setting machine whose job is to provide enough of it to help the players tell the story. It's really only the players who can add things that are definitively not setting in terms of how the game functions. (As a DM who specializes in roleplaying my NPCs, I'd say it can feel like I'm stepping outside of setting, but the NPC's inner worlds are still exterior facts that impact their own experiences, much as setting does.
So this is why setting matters so much in a game. I remember playing Call of Cthulhu and seeing players satirically act out 1920s-style misogyny in a way that would have felt weird and out of place in D&D or another game because the setting allowed for it. One of the things we understand about the 1920s is that women had basically no rights in the western world and especially the United States, and that becomes part of the game.
This is why so many people--be they experienced gamers or first time players--will instinctively do the same thing while roleplaying in D&D and specifically mention fantasy elements. Every backstory in D&D seems to have high fantasy elements in it--because that's what these worlds are like, the setting tells us. I've created characters with essentially no magic or epic fantasy circumstances in their backstories, and it works, but I was always the only person at the table with a simple background that didn't have to be rooted in fantasy. We know what the setting is, and we want to fit into it, so we do and say what seems to fit.
This can be a powerful thing, knowing that you are expected to behave in a certain way. I won't delve into the worlds of psychology and sociology, but I will say that both players and GMs will often do things because they believe they are expected, myself included. It's not a bad thing, either. Sometimes, what a story really needs is someone doing the thing we're all thinking of. Honestly, a lot of campaigns are designed to end on heroic deeds, and those deeds usually come from a sense that it's what's expected of them as heroes tasked with the quest.
I think about this in terms of other games that I've played, and I can see how even things like how the GM describes the game can impact behavior. I played a game called Exalted once long ago, and my GM described the class I had chosen as calculating and aloof, which reflected the kind of grisly work I was to do as a kind of cosmic undertaker. I took this into consideration in my roleplaying, and my character was always at an arm's length from the party right up until the end when the campaign died to a party split (not my fault). I wouldn't say that my character was responsible for the party split, but I would say he didn't help it, and I don't like that looking back. But while our beliefs about what's expected of us can complicate things, I think they can be used for good.
To make that point, I will use another experience, this one from my time as a teacher in charge of D&D Club. I asked a particular group of hijinks players what story ideas they wanted. A few of the players in the group, not students I'd met before, offered very mild suggestions about adventuring. But several of my students were also in the group, and they knew me well enough to know that I'm playful and permissive. They threw out some more risqué options such as "The 9 Levels of Hell." Because there were middle schoolers in the group, I adjusted this to "The 9 Levels of Heck," and we went with it. Each session, I would devise some silly unpleasant situation to be stuck in using more suggestions. The fact that the players believed I would hear them and knew I would do what was expected of me and deliver, we were able to have a really fantastic campaign.
But that aside aside, let's get back to the final thrust of our question: if setting matters so much, what is it about D&D that captures the fantasy setting so iconically? After all, there are less competitors in the fantasy tabletop game niche than there are in other niches, like the wealth of horror games out there. I think that the answer here is that D&D was the first to market, and competing with the giant seems unwise to most.
But that doesn't explain how fantasy does so much heavy lifting for D&D. I've discussed on a gaming podcast with my wife how D&D is not the most easy or approachable first tabletop game for people; many other games are simpler, more intuitive, and less cumbersome. It would make sense that D&D being most people's first tabletop game anyway would have to deal with the legacy and popularity of the game, but its claim on fantasy, which makes up a large amount of book sales, television show and movie premises, and video game development--but again, more or less only D&D for tabletop games.
I would argue these last two ideas are actually more closely related. D&D has the legacy and popularity to be the behemoth in the industry. As a result, and because D&D has always had claim to fantasy, D&D's setting being fantasy was solidified and more or less had to go unchallenged (lawsuits help with this kind of thing, even though D&D was itself beset by lawsuits when Gary Gygax was using Tolkien's work in early game materials). And so D&D equals fantasy equals D&D. You want to play a fantasy game--go to D&D. You're playing D&D--behave like you would in a fantasy world. The end result is everyone performing a fantasy story together, and it reinforces it again--D&D equals fantasy equals D&D.
Setting is so vitally important to tabletop roleplaying games that we even try to sell each other on them by pitching the setting. Literally an hour ago, I pitched the campaign I was describing above to my friend; I described zero story and 100% setting and rules. I'm a writer, and I included no story in favor of mostly setting. Because that's what really impacts the majority of a game experience, and we know that on some level. Moving forward, I want to embrace that. I've put time and energy into describing the setting of my D&D homebrew setting--at the time of this writing, my homebrew section has 60 full articles--but I don't know if I've used it well. Sure, I have all this information written, but it's nothing if I can't use it in my games. So moving forward, I'm planning to increase the amount of setting I give in response to players so they can get a more complete experience. (I'm doing this within moderation--more is not necessarily better.)
That's all for now. Coming soon: a pirate D&D one-shot, how to modify D&D for a western setting, and imagining the future of tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!
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