What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Lanefan]

In 13th Age only PCs get One Unique Thing but the GM is certainly free to make NPCs equally unique if they like. To an extent I think this is a good idea - NPCs should certainly be interesting - but not so interesting that they step on the PCs' toes. 13th Age very much takes the view that the PCs are The Heroes, analogous to the protagonists in fiction.

Ah. So kind of the opposite, then, of the small-fish-in-a-big-pond type of PC I prefer. Fair enough.

Why would a character with no player need to be a special snowflake? It's just there to be a challenge or a help or a source of exposition or whatever, the DM plays it for a bit, then the next one...

Because the same rules that apply to PCs need to apply to NPCs, if the game world is to maintain any believability or verisimal...whatever that word is. The special-snowflake bits of any given NPC might never become relevant during its interaction with the PCs, but that doesn't mean those bits shouldn't exist.

Lanefan

 

[happyhermit]

"Worldbuilding" is for creating that feeling that so many people love. The feeling that they have access to this other but "real" world to experience, explore, and most importantly (as opposed to stories) interact with. The type of feeling that is different from one where they can modify that world externally. Whatever you want to call that feeling; "immersion", some kind of "stance", whatever, but it's a real thing and something that a lot of people like (it's one of the main reasons I play TTRPGs). There are many other things "worldbuilding" can do of course, but that's the one that it is uniquely suited for.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Because the same rules that apply to PCs need to apply to NPCs, if the game world is to maintain any believability or verisimal...whatever that word is.

Meh. Verisimilitude is a subjective experience, it needn't be founded on objective 'fairness.' PCs /are/ different, they're the players' characters, if they're not the focus of the story, they're the focus of the experiencing of the story by the players.

The special-snowflake bits of any given NPC might never become relevant during its interaction with the PCs, but that doesn't mean those bits shouldn't exist.

On the contrary, if something doesn't come up in the play of the game, it doesn't exist. You're thinking of simulations.

13A is decidedly less a simulation than D&D, which wasn't ever much of a simulation. Besides, even at its most simulationist - 3e - D&D had different rules (NPC classes, for instance) for NPCs.

 

[Arilyn]

Ah. So kind of the opposite, then, of the small-fish-in-a-big-pond type of PC I prefer. Fair enough.

Because the same rules that apply to PCs need to apply to NPCs, if the game world is to maintain any believability or verisimal...whatever that word is. The special-snowflake bits of any given NPC might never become relevant during its interaction with the PCs, but that doesn't mean those bits shouldn't exist.

Lanefan

In 13th Age, your one unique thing does not actually have a game mechanic. You can't take "world's greatest swordsman," and get a bonus in combat. Your one unique thing is a hook to make you, well unique. There is no reason for an NPC to have this, as they are not the protagonists.

And you can take a grand one unique, like "destined to be the cause of the end of the 13th Age," or something really frivolous like "my hair changes colour everyday." If a NPC has some sort of destiny, or a unique trait, this just comes up in play, it's not a feature that should be formally written down in a stat block. One Unique Thing is what makes you the player unique. It's not a "physics of the world" kind of thing.

But you are right that 13th Age characters are not small fish. Their actions impact the world, and they will be noticed, for good or ill.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I haven't read thru the thread but I think I can say something interesting about worldbuilding based on my experience playing in Paul Mackintosh's 'Dream Game campaign' in the late 90s and early 00s. It was an intense game, the most involved and detailed in which I've ever participated. I have on my bookshelf 3 volumes, each 60 pages+, of players' information notes concerning what happened in each session, theoretical works about the nature of dreams, and so forth. My understanding is that the GM's notes were far more extensive.

It was a game primarily of hidden knowledge. We played ourselves - students and former students of Glasgow University - who, under the tutelage of a man known as The Professor, an academic at the university, were able to enter the dreams of others. The Professor had used his techniques to provide psychiatric care. In the course of this he became aware of the existence of Externals within dreams - entities of an unknown nature that seemed to be causing harm to his patients. The Dream Game campaign detailed our adventures both within dreams and without as we encountered what appeared to be a linked group of Externals and humans they had influenced.

Until now it hadn't occurred to me but the game bore many resemblances to early D&D:
1) A game of hidden knowledge where the GM has a secret map, and even secret rules, and the players are trying to uncover them. The game rules were not hidden but the workings of the universe very much were. We believed Externals may come from a 'third world', a spiritual plane, with our own world and the world of dreams being to some degree known and the third a complete unknown. We had pretty good evidence that some Externals were the spirits of the dead, and believed that some were non-human. We knew that Externals interacted with one another and probably had a hierarchy. We knew that Externals could use dreams to control humans but we never learned to what ultimate end. This is all my interpretation and some of the other players may disagree with me even about these seeming basics.
2) Dreams were much like dungeons. We even operated in a similar way to Gygax's advice in the 1e PHB, attempting to identify objectives (often with limited success) and avoiding distractions.
3) It was a sandbox game. Paul always did a large amount of prep for each session, knowing there were a number of dreams we might enter. Towards the end of the game we were noticeably running out of patients as they fell under the sway of Externals and we were forced to enter our team-mates' dreams as we ourselves became infected by Externals. It was darker than D&D in that while we were to some extent gaining knowledge, things in general seemed to be getting worse. The in-game version of Paul died and attempts were made on our lives in the 'real' ie non-dream world.
4) We played ourselves so there wasn't much roleplaying in the sense of Actor Stance. This is in fact the same as Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor game.

A traditional game by today's standards, this was very much "world-centric" rather than "player-centric", and imo very successful. The attached excerpt I think gives a flavour of our frenetic misadventures in dreams and our attempts to make sense of them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

From the Dungeon World rulebook (p 49):

Look over the character classes and choose one that interests you. To start with everyone chooses a different class; there aren’t two wizards. If two people want the same class, talk it over like adults and compromise. . . .

Later on, if you’re making a replacement character, you can choose a class someone else is already playing.​

And with respect to NPCs, there is this (p 178):

Are there other wizards? Not really. There are other workers of arcane magic, and the common folk may call them wizards, but they’re not like you. They don’t have the same abilities, though they may be similar. Later on there may be another player character with the same class but no GM character will ever really be a wizard (or any other class).​

So the issue you raise isn't generally going to come up!

In our experience it is fairly uncommon for two PCs to be built as the same class anyway, though it is certainly possible. It could even be desirable in some situations (a 'thief campaign' or something). In any case, one PC could be a different race, which can make a decent difference in powers. You can also 'MC' in DW (at least some classes can, its sort of a case-by-case thing). In that case it could be pretty easy to differentiate.

Some classes though are pretty straightforward. You will surely be somewhat different, moreso than 2 OD&D fighter, but it could get a bit redundant. Some classes wouldn't work well at all as multiples. The Barbarian for instance. You CAN make distinctive ones (a dwarf with heavy armor and a giant axe vs a Conan-type) but the barbarian has some very distinctive moves that would seem odd coming up on more than one PC!

I think 2 wizards wouldn't be much of a problem though, there are a good number of spells to pick from for differentiation.

As for an 'NPC Wizard', this isn't even a coherent idea in DW. NPCs don't really play in anything like the way PCs do. For instance they generally don't make 'attacks' (IE Hack and Slash or Volley) as PCs do. Most monsters have 'moves' but they are really just options for a GM move when the monster is part of the fiction (IE a dragon can breath a fiery breath, but this would be done when the GM has a 'hard move' available, and it would simply do damage, though PCs could try to Defy Danger and avoid some/all of the damage).

The point is an 'NPC Wizard' using the PC Wizard rules simply wouldn't work. The GM doesn't trade moves with the PCs or even with the whole party, moves happen in a sequence dictated strictly by narrative framing. Nor do most PC moves make sense in the GM context. In the case of spells, some of them could be turned into GM moves, but then you'd have a 'wizard-like monster' which is exactly how DW does it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The first system I know of that has a "one unique thing" element to PC building is Over the Edge (also Jonathan Tweet, about 20 years before 13th Age!).

But there may be earlier versions of the idea. (I'm not counting points-buy or lifepath games, which allow any given PC to be unique but get there via a universal process.)

Well, Metamorphosis Alpha (and thus 1e GW), has the mutation charts. You get some random number of random mutations. You can pick to be a non-mutated human, a mutant human, or a mutant animal, but the actual mutations are all luck. There is a WIDE variety. This means it is possible you might get the same one now and then (some are more common than others) but you'd have to roll a LOT of characters to get 2 that weren't pretty unique, except PSHs of course break that idea, but the idea with them is they're the ones that can really use tech, so they become the equipment hangers. In any case radiation is all over the place and causes, you guessed it, more mutations! So its actually a sort of random 'unique snowflake' kind of a setup. I always really liked 1e GW, even if it does have a few serious flaws, mechanically. Classic early TSR, great ideas, a few really nice creative mechanics, and a lot of really poorly executed stuff around that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Clearly, then, an example of the game system trying to (for better or worse, could be either) enforce some metagame conceits in campaign play: that there will be relatively few PCs (at most, one per class) and thus no very-large parties or numbers of players at the table, that PC turnover will be very low to zero (because otherwise you'll run out of classes to play), that there will be a wide range of classes within any party (all-rogue or all-fighter parties, for example, are in effect banned), and so on.

Curious...

DW tends to have a lot of classes. There are 8 in the core book (at least the edition I have, I'm not sure what newer versions have). There are also a number of official expansion classes and rewrites of existing classes. I have a couple PDFs that contain several more classes. There are easily around 15 or 20 fairly commonly used ones out there. Not as many as 4e, but quite a few.

PCs are indeed not just regular, or even just slightly unusual, people. They're the movers and shakers of the world. DW also has a kind of weird 'power curve', getting more powerful is not really the big aim of DW. For example you really don't gain hit points as you go up in levels. You can definitely get more powerful by having some better moves, magic, etc. but you don't actually get 'better at stuff' per-se. There isn't any sort of 'level bonus' or anything like that. Defenses aren't a thing either, armor provides DR and PCs avoid being hit by rolling 10+ on their attacks, or else making a Defy Danger roll and succeeding. While monsters definitely can be weaker or tougher, they don't have 'levels' either. A tough orc chieftain might be slayable by a level 1 party, but it might still be a viable foe to tangle with a 7th level party (and DW only has 10 levels).

The point is, while level 1 is a 'starting adventurer' its not EXACTLY 'zero to hero' and the focus is more on building up a story and surrounding milieu for the PCs to interact with. While DW has a lot of the terminology and a certain deliberate amount of a kind of deliberate focus on the OSR sort of dungeon adventure experience, it is an utterly different game from D&D, they share very little beyond flavor.

 

[pemerton]

While DW has a lot of the terminology and a certain deliberate amount of a kind of deliberate focus on the OSR sort of dungeon adventure experience, it is an utterly different game from D&D, they share very little beyond flavor.

Part of that OSR-esque aspect of DW, I think, is the focus on the primacy of the fiction. But the way that is actually worked through in play is (I think) utterly different.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I haven't read thru the thread but I think I can say something interesting about worldbuilding based on my experience playing in Paul Mackintosh's 'Dream Game campaign' in the late 90s and early 00s. It was an intense game, the most involved and detailed in which I've ever participated. I have on my bookshelf 3 volumes, each 60 pages+, of players' information notes concerning what happened in each session, theoretical works about the nature of dreams, and so forth. My understanding is that the GM's notes were far more extensive.

It was a game primarily of hidden knowledge. We played ourselves - students and former students of Glasgow University - who, under the tutelage of a man known as The Professor, an academic at the university, were able to enter the dreams of others. The Professor had used his techniques to provide psychiatric care. In the course of this he became aware of the existence of Externals within dreams - entities of an unknown nature that seemed to be causing harm to his patients. The Dream Game campaign detailed our adventures both within dreams and without as we encountered what appeared to be a linked group of Externals and humans they had influenced.

Until now it hadn't occurred to me but the game bore many resemblances to early D&D:
1) A game of hidden knowledge where the GM has a secret map, and even secret rules, and the players are trying to uncover them. The game rules were not hidden but the workings of the universe very much were. We believed Externals may come from a 'third world', a spiritual plane, with our own world and the world of dreams being to some degree known and the third a complete unknown. We had pretty good evidence that some Externals were the spirits of the dead, and believed that some were non-human. We knew that Externals interacted with one another and probably had a hierarchy. We knew that Externals could use dreams to control humans but we never learned to what ultimate end. This is all my interpretation and some of the other players may disagree with me even about these seeming basics.
2) Dreams were much like dungeons. We even operated in a similar way to Gygax's advice in the 1e PHB, attempting to identify objectives (often with limited success) and avoiding distractions.
3) It was a sandbox game. Paul always did a large amount of prep for each session, knowing there were a number of dreams we might enter. Towards the end of the game we were noticeably running out of patients as they fell under the sway of Externals and we were forced to enter our team-mates' dreams as we ourselves became infected by Externals. It was darker than D&D in that while we were to some extent gaining knowledge, things in general seemed to be getting worse. The in-game version of Paul died and attempts were made on our lives in the 'real' ie non-dream world.
4) We played ourselves so there wasn't much roleplaying in the sense of Actor Stance. This is in fact the same as Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor game.

A traditional game by today's standards, this was very much "world-centric" rather than "player-centric", and imo very successful. The attached excerpt I think gives a flavour of our frenetic misadventures in dreams and our attempts to make sense of them.

View attachment 96588

Heh, interesting. It does sound much like the early pre-D&D RPing setups, Braunstein's and such. These were developed primarily by Dave Wesley and of course Dave Arneson! Much more so than something like modern D&D or other RPGs which are using characters and structured rules. Other game systems which have some of the same character, and were current in the same time frame of the late 60's/early 70s, include things like Diplomacy (which is technically a board game, but its actual character is a free-form game of strategy and betrayal in which players take the role of a country and attempt to navigate a web of power plays and deceit which naturally evolves between them due to the structure of the formal rules).