Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Riley37]

In the rulebook, one example Instinct is to always have a hidden knife on my person, which I think a lot of RPGers could relate to. Another is to always have the ingredients for noodle soup ready to hand. I don't know what that game looked like, but clearly particuar dishes, and their ingredients, were more important than I can ever remember them having been in a game I played or GMed!

http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Pastamancer

 

[MichaelSomething]

World building can be very helpful in fiction. Look at how world building improved My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic!

If you watch the series, you can learn a lot of things about the world like:

Hearth's Warming Eve, the holiday that celebrates the founding of Equestia. It comes with a whole story of how the various pony races came together!
Historical figures like Starshwirl the Bearded, and the rest of the Pillars; who where the ancient heroes of legend.
How ponies activity manage the weather, as in they work to change the seasons from fall to winter, etc.
The process of making Zap apple Jam, and how a strange fruit that requires very weird rituals to produce, put Ponyville on the map.
The Legend of the Mare in the Moon, about an, uh, mare got banished to the Moon.
Cutie Marks, the symbol that appears on ponies that help guide their destinies.

Stuff like this adds depth to the show, as well as give the writers things to use to develop it's characters.

 

[Hussar]

Whereas I view that sort of thing as filling time because the writers don’t want to be bothered with the hard stuff like plot and character development.

 

[Imaro]

This thread is predicated on the presumption that world building is good. It's a reaction to the common wisdom that if you are a DM, you MUST world build and anyone who doesn't do it is running a bad game. A game that lacks consistency, a game that lacks depth, etc. You can find all sorts of quotes for those points all through this thread. The whole REASON for having threads like this is because there is a basic presumption that if you DM, you will world build. Heck, the Dungeon Master Guides presume it. How much ink is spilled in any editions DMG detailing how you should build your game world? Pages upon pages upon pages. 2ed was replete with world building stuff, to the point where the 2e Monster Manual was written with one monster per page (or sometimes more). Compared to 1e where you'd get up to four monsters on a single page.

I mean, good grief, look at the reactions from the first page of this thread:


The world builders took over the hobby years ago. What's being challenged now is the unspoken presumption that this was a good thing.

The thread is predicated on the fact that worldbuilding is bad, it's the premise of the OP, of course those who feel that's incorrect are going to respond first (and in a strong manner, it's their playstyle being attacked with the OP) but I'm not sure how that proves anything... I'd feel like you have a valid point if you could show me a thread where the validity of worldbuilding isn't being called into question but instead is questioning not using worldbuilding. It shouldn't be that hard if what you are claiming is true... right? See IMO, this feels like someone throwing the first punch in a fight but then complaining about being bullied when they are subject to retaliation for said punch.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's largely how I look at it. Take the old Dragon Magazine articles "Ecology of..". Now, these were a ton of fun to read. I really enjoyed them. But, from a practical standpoint, they were about as useful as a rubber hammer. The articles ran about 3000 words - about four to six pages or so by and large. Now, imagine, for a second that the "Ecology of" articles were written by me.

The articles would have a couple of paragraphs talking about what the critter in question is. Fair enough, you need something to frame the game with. You have to define what a Throat Warbler Mangrove is before you can use it in the game. But, my version would then have three to four encounters set up. Maybe a single encounter with the critter, a lair, and then the critter with allies. One page each, with a small map and whatnot. Four page article, one page of information, and three pages of encounters.

Now, if you're like me and you subscribed to Dragon, at the end of the year, you had 12 Ecology of articles that had lots of flavor, true, but, really didn't do much of anything to help you at the table. In my version, you'd have 12 monster descriptions and about 30-40 encounters that you could plug and play in your game. Far, far more useful IMO.

And you have, of course, described the 4e MM1 perfectly! It has a stat block, usually a paragraph or two of general description (sometimes more depending on the monster), a table for doing lore checks that gives DCs for specific facts (which are usually in addition to the general description, though sometimes just allowing access to that by PCs), and then a sample encounter using one of the DMG templates and including the monster. Many monsters have 2-3 sub-types, allowing more flexibility in play.

This was a somewhat controversial style. Some people, like me, liked it. Others hated it. I think its one weakness was they sometimes literally forgot to actually do a basic explanation of what the monster WAS, how it was intended to look and its 'purpose' in the game. This isn't, IMHO, a flaw in the general technique of presentation though, just a criticism of specific monsters.

MM2 dropped the encounter blocks and lore blocks, which was a dead loss. MM3 emphasized fiction and was much more illustrative of the nature of the monsters, which was good, but they STILL lacked the MM1 lore and encounter blocks, which would have added more useful stuff! It could be a page count issue of course. Now that we're SLOWLY freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the dead tree that should be less of an issue....

 

[hawkeyefan]

In my mind there's a HUGE difference between "that which may be true" (things which are included in the genre) and things which are ESTABLISHED to be true. The former are simply potential, the later have assumed canonical status and become incorporated within the narrative which makes up the game.

Now, something could be 'tentatively established' as in it could be RUMORED that a dragon exists which has kobold minions. In this case perhaps kobolds are simply legends within the campaign, but their existence as legends is canonical, and the legend could shape the player's decisions. Still, this is not quite the same as 'we met a kobold and had it for dinner'.

Tentatively or not, these things can be established in the game. A general “kobolds serve dragons” in the same way that we in the real world know that ticks latch onto dogs, or “the kobolds of Dragon Mountain serve the ancient red wyrm Infyrana” in the same sense that the tick I just flushed down my toilet had latched onto my dog Kirby.

General or specific, either can be established as fact. This was my point.

 

[Sunseeker]

I don't recall if I posted in this thread already, and unfortunately, the original article has been deleted (if it was recopied somewhere in this thread, great but I have no real desire to go searching for it.

I suspect the writers point was not that you should write nothing, but that you shouldn't write everything and that you should avoid unnecessary detail. Which is a fairly sound argument. Some DM's have details for everything and that can be interesting, but it does present a boundary to engaging with the fiction. Some DMs have no details for anything and that too presents a boundary to engaging with the fiction.

If for some reason I'm wrong and the article is suggesting that you should come to the game with nothing more than a blank piece of paper, I think that's silly, for the same reason that you shouldn't come to the table with veritable volumes of world-lore.

I'm going to go back to one of my all-time favorite phrases:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

A world should always have some known knowns. What the kingdom you come from is called. What sort of people live there. If the world is highly explored or not. - These are hard facts about the world. They are known, and they are typically easily knowable. The kind of things you wouldn't call for checks for.

A world should also have some known unknowns. What that kingdom over there is like. What the total population of elves is. - These are soft facts about the world. They may be knowable, or they may not (but you can learn that you cannot learn it). These elements are best when penciled in, subject to change if necessary, and not detailed in case the players never move in the direction of this information.

A world should also have some unknown unknowns. These can be player-authored elements, or some area of the world the DM hasn't really gotten around to yet. These can be elements that exist only in limited time windows. These can be precipitated elements derived from player engagement with the world.

The problem with sci-fi vs fantasy in the authors context is that sci-fi has a low bar for something being a "known known". How a space-ship works can be readily derived from a diagram, which itself is readily available. The general level of knowledge is high. In the same sense that what the average person knows now is far beyond what even some of the smartest people knew 5000 years ago. Access to new knowledge is easy and transmission of information is direct (say, on a flash drive), as opposed to rare and indirect (oral tradition). It is difficult to create a hard sci-fi setting and then say "Well you can't know that!" or "Nobody knows that!" because that is so incredibly rare.

Some settings try. Star Wars tries. But Star Wars has always sort of danced around between hard and soft sci-fantasy. Star Wars attempts to have "unknown unknowns" with the (aptly named) Unknown Regions. But educated guesses turn it into a "known unknown" fairly quickly.

Star Trek simply says "We haven't learned that yet." but once they reach the information they can learn it. Almost everything in Star Trek would be a "known unknown". Largely for no other reason than the level of knowledge is high enough to assimilate (buh-dun tish!) the information quickly.

Sci-fi in this regard does not really suffer from a plentiful level of available information, since in sci-fi settings the characters typically have the capacity to learn, absorb and generally understand greater quantities of information much faster.

Fantasy on the other hand falls apart when too much is detailed in and too much of that detail is readily available to the players. Questions start being raised about how, if they know of black powder, do they not have guns? Or how we have such detailed knowledge of foreign kingdoms without readily available methods of information transmission (like even a newspaper!). And because the characters themselves often lack the capacity to learn and absorb volumes of complex information.

That all said, "detailing in" is a natural outcome of expanding the lore, which is why some older settings feel less approachable with how much information has already been detailed in. Consider for example how much we know of the Star Trek universe from the Original Series, compared to how much we know about the universe from Voyager or Deep Space Nine. Not to mention the copious volumes of books and comics and other lore materials that have detailed in this universe.

If the article's author is suggesting that when you come up with a new setting you leave a lot to be explored, that's great and true. But that's not what you're going to end up with when you finish playing​ the setting.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The thread is predicated on the fact that worldbuilding is bad, it's the premise of the OP, of course those who feel that's incorrect are going to respond first (and in a strong manner, it's their playstyle being attacked with the OP) but I'm not sure how that proves anything... I'd feel like you have a valid point if you could show me a thread where the validity of worldbuilding isn't being called into question but instead is questioning not using worldbuilding. It shouldn't be that hard if what you are claiming is true... right? See IMO, this feels like someone throwing the first punch in a fight but then complaining about being bullied when they are subject to retaliation for said punch.

A thread called “Why No Myth Gaming Is Bad” would be met with some strong resistance, for sure.

And it should, really.

Even if we concede that worldbuilding in the sense established in the OP of this thread- that of a GM pre-authoring the vast majority of gameworld details (which is a crap definition of worldbuilding, to be honest, but here we are)- lends itself to railroading or limiting player agency, that still does not mean it cannot be used effectively and responsibly.

Perhaps the risk of railroading and reduced player agency are two things to be wary of when worldbuilding. That’s probably a better way of expressing it. The idea that it must always be bad seems a pretty limited view.

But then I think saying that there are also similar concerns of No Myth gaming would be no less controversial. I would think the things to look out for in that regard are internal inconsistency of the fictional world and also the mosaic effect, where different elements of the world are slapped together on a whim with no forethought.

I’ve played in games where the GM and players were deciding game elements as they went along, and it was not a pleasant experience. It lacked immersion for me, and seemed very haphazard and slapped together. So this is a legit concern for me with that style.

Does that mean that I’ve figured out why “No Myth gaming is bad”?

Or have I just cited a potential issue that I have with that game style and then presented it as the only possible result?

 

[Sunseeker]

A thread called “Why No Myth Gaming Is Bad” would be met with some strong resistance, for sure.

And it should, really.

Even if we concede that worldbuilding in the sense established in the OP of this thread- that of a GM pre-authoring the vast majority of gameworld details (which is a crap definition of worldbuilding, to be honest, but here we are)- lends itself to railroading or limiting player agency, that still does not mean it cannot be used effectively and responsibly.

Perhaps the risk of railroading and reduced player agency are two things to be wary of when worldbuilding. That’s probably a better way of expressing it. The idea that it must always be bad seems a pretty limited view.

But then I think saying that there are also similar concerns of No Myth gaming would be no less controversial. I would think the things to look out for in that regard are internal inconsistency of the fictional world and also the mosaic effect, where different elements of the world are slapped together on a whim with no forethought.

I’ve played in games where the GM and players were deciding game elements as they went along, and it was not a pleasant experience. It lacked immersion for me, and seemed very haphazard and slapped together. So this is a legit concern for me with that style.

Does that mean that I’ve figured out why “No Myth gaming is bad”?

Or have I just cited a potential issue that I have with that game style and then presented it as the only possible result?

Perhaps to cut more to the question [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] asked, I think one of the reasons we probably don't see threads on "Why no worldbuilding is bad." is because complaints about them usually fall under topics like "The DM was so unprepared!" or "It felt like he didn't have anything for us to do!" or as you suggest "It all felt so cobbled together!". The complains about a lack of world build are more ephemeral, the objections are vague and varied because there is so little to focus on. It's hard to form an objection when you don't even know what to object to!

But with objections to world building you can object to specific things. Because that's exactly the problem. Something that should have been left open to interpretation or exploration was instead carved in stone. Something that could have benefited from a little vaguness was instead overly specific. This led to...feeling like we weren't really participating, feeling like we were watching a movie, feeling like we had no control or effect on things. Notice how these common objections to over-building seem to follow a particular thread? That's because they have something specific to object to.

So to get back to Imaro, we don't have threads on why "no worldbuilding is bad" because it is difficult to focus ones thoughts on the subject. But if you've ever read a thread about how someone's DM didn't have their stuff together, you've read a thread objecting to no world building.

 

[darkbard]

Are you familiar, [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION], with the philosopher Slavoi Zizek's take on the Rumsfeld statement you quoted? He points out that Rumsfeld omits the fourth, and natural, category from his list, unknown knowns: those beliefs we hold without being aware of how they act upon us which shape how we act in the world. In other words, ideology.

I'm pretty sure Zizek writes about this in the introduction to The Borrowed Kettle.

The problem with sci-fi vs fantasy in the authors context is that sci-fi has a low bar for something being a "known known". How a space-ship works can be readily derived from a diagram, which itself is readily available. The general level of knowledge is high. In the same sense that what the average person knows now is far beyond what even some of the smartest people knew 5000 years ago. Access to new knowledge is easy and transmission of information is direct (say, on a flash drive), as opposed to rare and indirect (oral tradition).

Here, I think, you have misstated the way you are thinking about knowledge. We know different things than ancient peoples, for sure, and we have access to a vastly greater amount of information on the whole, via literacy and information technology, but individuals do not have more knowledge than our ancestors!