Playing D&D: Homebrew or Published Setting? Why?

[Tales and Chronicles]

I'll usually do a large-scale map with a few details filled in and a two-pager of background info for the players. One thing I encourage is for the players to share world-building WITH me. I want their ideas and suggestions and incorporate them in one form or another as we play. If the campaign continues on I'll update info in a more comprehensive format for player reference, but it's never been more than 10-15 pages and a few maps.

Usually the trope will be that the players hail from a relatively small region of the world and are more or less unfamiliar with the outside other than a few tidbits of lore they've picked up growing up. This allows a primary pillar of play, EXPLORATION, to actually mean something. The players see and experience fantastical, new things. Think of the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings. They had a smattering of info of life outside the Shire but most of it was little more than rumor and old tales.

Going off topic for a bit: I you like collaborative world-building, I can point you toward the quick rules for world mapping that Beyond the Wall (an OSR) uses; its really fun to use with your table at the start of a campaign. In short, each players takes turn in adding stuff on the table, going around the table twice. They decide a vague direction (north, west etc) and a distance from the starting point of the campaign. They then roll a 1d8 to see what kind of feature they add to the map (a town, a dungeon, a place of power, a ruin etc) and then make a Int check to see if the information they know is reliable; this result is not shared with the players, so the PC can venture in a dungeon thinking they know what they are about to face relying on false information. The DM then ask for a last turn of the table where each player can add a element of flair to one location of another player.

I was thinking that people who love to share world building with the table might love those rules.

 

[Gradine]

As a DM I used to homebrew my settings until I discovered the wonders of Eberron.

Now my players don't want to play in anything else and I don't particularly to DM anything. That my change eventually, however.

My favorite settings as a player were always "homebrew" to the extent that they were adapted from other material. I played in one game based on the original Thief PC games where I played an apprentice Keeper that was a blast. I'm currently staring at a miniature Tallneck figure on my desk and thinking it would be a blast to come up with a post-apocalyptic setting a-la Horizon: Zero Dawn (though D&D would clearly not be the best system to model that).

 

[Lanefan]

Just to play Devil's Advocate:

As human adults that have lived their entire lives on the planet Earth (some assumptions there, but I don't think they are unreasonable!) don't we all have an enormous store of knowledge before we go "adventuring"?

In the modern world, yes; but in a typical medieval or even renaissance situation knowledge of what was beyond your own borders was slight if any, and often tinged with myth and-or misinformation. And that's for the educated class. Many peasants didn't know much beyond their own village and a few villages around it.

I know many of the flora/fauna of such planets as Athas (Darksun), Toril (Forgotten Realms), Oerth (Greyhawk) and the like through reading various campaign supplements. I know the movers and shakers on those worlds, the nations, the rulers. I know the Veiled Alliance are good guys and the Scarlet Brotherhood are bad mofos to be avoided.

Which is exactly why I don't use canned settings, nor do I like playing in them: the average low-level PC wouldn't know much of this, if any.

A typical adventurer on the Sword Coast isn't likely to know anything at all about the flora and fauna to be found around Silverymoon...

Typical medieval-style D&D worlds* don't have the internet, or much else by way of mass information distribution. That's why you have sages - specific people who know (or claim to know) stuff about specific things but even then don't know it all. Otherwise, you've got to go out and learn it all for yourself - sometimes the hard way.

* - except maybe Eberron - always an outlier - which might have some sort of mass info distribution via magic.

In short: be careful not to transplant modern-day levels of world knowledge onto a setting that's anything but modern-day.

Lanefan

 

[VikingLegion]

In short: be careful not to transplant modern-day levels of world knowledge onto a setting that's anything but modern-day.

On the flip side of the same coin, even though many of these worlds are medieval-style, they are not medieval. I can't seem to find the excerpt, but somewhere on record there is a snippet where Ed Greenwood explains the uncannily high literacy rate in the Forgotten Realms. Maybe it's due to the presence of priests of gods dedicated specifically to knowledge - these guys mission is to spread literacy and learning to all, it's their very dogma. And they can magically transcribe books in a fraction of the time, so the "dearth of texts" thing is less viable. I think gnomes have a primitive printing press in FR anyway, and probably on Krynn if it doesn't blow everything up and drown the village in ink. Traveling bards bring news of the day from hither and yon.

I totally agree with you on the average peasant farmer, or even characters from Athas, as simple survival is all that most people have time to worry about. But I would think more cosmopolitan cities like Greyhawk, Waterdeep, Palanthas, Glantri, etc. would have a much more learned average populace. If it's not too magic rich for some group's tastes, I could see the use of minor illusions to enhance plays/public performances, town hall meetings, etc. I guess what I'm saying is, maybe it's somewhere in the middle of what we each hypothesized? Surely without the internet there wouldn't be nearly as much knowledge spread, but I'm 41 and lived the first ~20 years of my life without a cyber presence. I still knew what Australia, World War II, avocados, and automobiles were. I guess television would account for a great deal of that, but even factoring that out, I still picked up plenty of incidental information.

Adventuring PCs, I would assume are at least 16 years of age (or the non-human equivalent) before they go out for the first time. I don't buy that they are complete tabula rasas, with the only knowledge being what the DM reveals to them over time. How can you not know at least the names of the gods of your world or who the king that rules over your fiefdom is?

 

[Sleepy Walker]

How can you not know at least the names of the gods of your world or who the king that rules over your fiefdom is?

Because I as a player (and most of my play group) did not know the gods or the kings or the city locations until we had played enough. Just like how many puzzles are solved by the player with a few hints (depending) and not intelligence checks, information about the world is not necessarily known by the being playing the character.

Having a handout or orientation session would solve this, but extra work is extra work and such things are not something all players want to do with their free time.

*Edit. also want to say that the gods of Chult and their forms put my head for a spin. It is hard to put a name to a personality to a form when the name and the form have no meaning to you. All I remember is that the monky is crazy and the hair/unicorn/narwhal thing is chaotic neutral.

*edit 2. Missed more conversation than I thought I did. Looks like my post's thrust was already covered. apologies.

 

[jgsugden]

I've done both and I prefer homebrew. Why? D&D is an RPG. A role playing game. Characters play a role in a story that you collectively write - and it is far easier to write a story in a world that you fully control.

Playing the FR is frought with questions like, "Why wouldn't the Red Wizards have tried to stop them and take control?" or "Wouldn't Eliminster have stopped that from taking place?" And what happens when you take the story in direction A and then they release a new source material that conflicts with it? In my experience, it was testy players.

Playing in Dragonlance means that you're dealing with Kender.

Playing in Greyhawk means dealing with many decades of lore designed for prior editions of the game.

Playing in Dark Sun means inheriting a lot of weird politics, environments, races, etc... More change than a normal group can handle IMHO.

Give me a world that I know in depth - and where I have control over the past, present and future.

 

[Afrodyte]

From the number of posters that responded with "Homebrew" as their answer, how do you go about disseminating this vast amount of information to your players? Do you produce handbooks of professional or near-professional quality with maps, charts, etc? Do all of your players want to read hundreds of pages of text to become familiar with your world? During a session, when your players have a run-in with the Knights of Kardonixx, do they know if these guys are noble, upstanding types, or an order of power-mongering bullies? Because those kinds of details are really important in the split second they have to decide whether to approach and hail the Knights, or jump off the road into the bushes to hide and/or prepare an ambush. Or do you "pause" the game in order to give them an exposition dump before resuming the action?

I don't do any of that. My campaign notes tend to be all of 10 pages long, tops, and this includes things like house rules, homebrew races, class tweaks, equipment, and so on. In situations where the homebrew setting is closer to standard D&D, the campaign notes can sometimes be a page long.

The idea is not to have all of these specific details nailed down right at the beginning. I find too much front-loading a detriment to fun and engagement. Most of the work I do on worldbuilding is about evoking a certain feel, which in my experience is a far more efficient way to give players a sense of what sorts of stories and characters would be appropriate.

 

[MechaPilot]

When you play or run a game of D&D, do you homebrew up your campaign setting or use a published setting? Or are you one who takes from Published to use in Homebrew or vise versa?

I find, for myself, that it really does depend on whether I'm running the game or playing in the game. When I run the game, I usually prefer to use a homebrew just due to the Lore aspect. That is, I know the lore of the world because I'm making it up.

However, when I play, I like playing in published games as I can read up on the lore and feel more immersed in the world.

How do you feel/do this? And, more importantly, why?

I prefer to run games in my homebrew worlds. I just like them better than most of the published settings (though there are published settings that I do really like: namely Ravenloft, Planescape, Spelljammer, and Eberron).

However, this also changes depending on my players. My current group began with a friend who wanted to play in Forgotten Realms (which I don't particularly like, but I was willing to work with him because he's my friend). Also, since I'm working and still in school I needed to use published adventures because of time constraints, and the 5e adventures are (for better or worse) mostly set in FR.

That said, I have rather recently transitioned the group from FR to my homebrew world of Tenesia. To do this I had the area of FR where the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure takes place magically transported onto an island in my setting. The PCs are going to start dealing with being in another world in the next session, and people from the mainland are going to come to the island to investigate. The setting change will be a significant subplot that occurs as the PotA adventure runs. In the mean time, it allows me to do some work converting other adventures for use in my setting.

 

[Rich Ostorero]

Homebrew. Been playing since the "white box / 3 tan booklets" days. There was no implied setting back then.

About 20 years ago, I was hit by a lot of good ideas in rapid succession and started building a honest-to-Gygax game world of my very own. One of the better ideas I got hit with was that of wild magic / manastorms that can act as portals between dimensions. The time my players found a broken down Volkswagen on the high road and thought it was a monster was fun... as was the time they found a book called "Mein Kampf" by a guy named Ghandi...

 

[fba827]

Home brew (as both player and DM)

1. If a published setting there is usually the ‘one person’ who knows more of the history and lore than the DM on one random topic that throws things off for the DM; home brew keeps DM in control or lore

2. If a published setting, those that don’t know, or simply know less than the vocal majority, may feel less immersed; homebrew puts everyone on the same player knowledge level

3. As DM, homebrew gives me more creative freedom not just at start but as the campaign evolves


Not saying it’s for everyone, as it does take more time and requires more lore explainations for every significant event, but it works exponentially better for me.



3.