So then what is world building exactly? Lets try and narrow it down.
I'm sure there are a few things that we can agree on, that fit into the world building category. For example, adding a history to your world, would fall under world building in my opinion. A good example of this would be how Game of Thrones has a fictional history, from the very recent (The Mad King) to very long ago (The First Men). When the DM writes a history for his fictional campaign world, I feel this is part of world building.
Do religions fit in the world building category? Or only under specific conditions?
Are any deities that you make up for a homebrew campaign setting, automatically world building?
I'll confine my reply to
setting that is for the purposes of RPGing.
If the history, or the religions,
don't factor into play - aren't a feature of the actual situations that the PCs find themselves in and hence which the players are engaging with - then I don't think it counts as
RPG setting/
RPG wourldbuilding - because no world has been built in which RPGing is taking place!
A concrete example:
many years ago now (1990 or thereabouts?), I worked on religions for my GH game. I developed an idea which presented the churches of St Cuthbert, Tritherion, Pholtus, Celestian, Fharlanghn and others (some not canonically from GH, like Issek of the Jug) as various denominations within a single religious tradition.
This mattered to the game, as it established a series of setting elements that factored into the way the situation in the City of Greyhawk and neighbouring lands was established. The players understood that there was a common religion riven by theological differences that produced political conflict, and they sometimes exploited that conflict in their action declarations for their PCs. Some ritual aspects of these denominations also mattered in play: for instance, some of the denominations were splinter sects or sub-sects of St Cuthbert's church and so lacked their own clergy, remaining dependent upon the Cuthbertians for liturgical services. At various points the PCs would come upon particular statutes or other ritual paraphernalia which reflected these ritual practices, and draw inferences from them, or use these interdependencies as pressure points (eg blackmailing the Cuthbertian hierarchy with the threat of revealing some of the sects to whom they were providing liturgical services).
Now at this time I was an undergraduate philosophy student, and I wrote up an account of the
actual theological differences among these denominations: so Cuthbertian theology rests on common-sense realism; the church of Tritherion and Pholtus have competing, highly intellectualised notions about how ideas (which are sourced in the higher realm) relate to the mundane world (the Tritherion-worshippers being broadly Kantian with hints of Locke; the Pholtus worshippers broadly Platonist, to the extent that their canoncial scripture was called
The Theocracy). To the best of my recollection, none of this ever came out in, or mattered to, play. It was me going through a series of intellectual exercise about imaginary theologies which was, really, a chance for me to test my comprehension of the relationships between, and especially the points of disagreement between, the philosophers whose work I was studying at the time.
I just re-read the document (some time between then and now I typed it up from the handwritten original), and I still think it's quite clever. But I don't think it's a RPG setting. It's me, sitting then in a carrel in the University library, and now sitting at my computer, imagining a set of theological disputes that covers the broad terrain and the major moves in the European (pre-20th century) philosophical tradition. The fiction isn't
shared.
Yes the world does because you stated that the lore of 4e was default.
<snip>
if everything in the 4e default lore was only a possibility in your world why not state that from the beginning
This is getting into "angels on the head of a pin" territory. But proceeding nevertheless: saying to the gang that I want to GM a "default 4e" game means that I am telling them what cosmology I'm interested in, that we can treat the stuff in the PHB about dwarves having been subjugated by giants, hating orcs, etc, as given. It's not a statement about the metaphysical nature of an imaginary entity ("the gameworld") - it's a statement about expectations, permissions etc at the table.
And it produced the desired result - I got players building PCs with various sorts of connections to the default backstory - Raven Queen worshippers, a refugee from a sacked city wanting to restore the greatness of Nerath, a fey warlock who had entered into a pact after an encounter with Corellon in a forest grove, etc.
Had I wanted to mention orcs at some point, that would not have been controversial. But I never have, and no PC has ever gone looking for any. (It turned out, in our game, that the dwarves of the northern ranges mostly fight against goblins and hobgoblins who worship Bane, not against Orcs who worship Gruumsh.) So does the world contain orcs? Who knows? - it's just never come up. The same is true of some gods (I don't think Avandra has ever come up either) and, as I already posted, some sorts of magical traditions (such as Wardens).
A disposition to allow an element into the gameworld if someone wants it (which is what "let's play a default 4e game" signals) isn't the same thing as actually establishing that the world contains those elements.
I don’t think the distinction you are making here is significant. Kobolds serving Infyrana in Dragon Mountain is far more specific, but it’s just as subject to having to be introduced in play as the basic kobolds serve dragons as general bit of lore. Both are simply concepts or ideas.
This depends a bit on how setting is used at the table - but if
Dragon Mountain is actually a place on a map which is, in some sense, canonical, then this looks like the making of a decision to say a certain thing should the nature of Dragon Mountain come up as a topic in play; plus, in all likelihood, a decision to make Dragon Mountain come up as a topic in play.
It doesn't
have to be: maybe Dragon Mountain and its inhabitants are as abstracted from the reality of play as my theological musings in my old GH game. But as a matter of practicalities, I think decisions made about particular dragons at particular places with particular kobolds servitors are less likely to have that character.
