What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Jacob Lewis]

Worldbuidling - Huh!

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing!

Good god, ya'll!!

 

[Jester David]

On classic D&D, the dungeon was a type of puzzle. The players had to map it, by declaring moves (literally) for their PCs. The players, using their PCs as vehicles, had to learn what was in there: this was about inventory - having enough torches, 10' poles, etc - and about game moves too - searching for secret doors, checking ceilings and floors, and so on. And finally, the players had to try and loot it while either avoiding or defeating the monsters guarding the treasures and wandering around the place - this is what the combat mechanics were for.

The game is something of a cross between a wargame and a complex refereed maze. And *worldbuilding* is all about making the maze. I get that.

But most contemporary D&D isn't played in the spirit of classic D&D: the players aren't trying to map a maze; when it comes to searching, perception and the like there is often an emphasis on PC skills (perception checks) rather than player game moves; there is no clear win condition like there used to be (ie getting the gold and thereby accruing XP).

In the classic game, alignment (and related aspects of character motivation) become components in, and establish the parameters of, the puzzle: if I find a prisoner in the dungeon, should I be rescuing her/him (after all, my PC is lawful and so I might suffer a GM-imposed penalty if I leave a helpless person behind)? Or is s/he really a succubus or medusa in disguise, trying to take advantage of my lawful foibles? This is one reason why divination items like wands of enemy detection, ESP medallions and the like are so prominent in classic D&D - they're "game components" which, once obtained, allow a clever player to make better moves and so increase his/her chance of winning the game. And their function relies upon the GM having already written the dungeon, and having already decided what the truth is about the prisoner.

But in most contemporary play, character motivations (and alignment etc) aren't treated purely instrumentally in that waym as puzzle components and parameters. I'm expected to develop my character, and to care about his/her motivations, for their own sake. This is part of the standard picture of what it is to be a good RPGer.

So, given these difference between typical contemporary play and "classic" play, what is world building for?

You say "And *worldbuilding* is all about making the maze", but it's not. "Worldbuilding" refers to the act of creating an imaginary world. Like "roleplaying" it's a term that predates "RPGs" and "D&D". We know the first source, the December 1820 issue of the Edinburgh Review. Making fantasy worlds has long been a part of fantasy fiction, which long predates the hobby.

Keep in mind that the "classic D&D" you describe where the world is the dungeon never really existed.
The first game Gary Gygax played was in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor game. And a month after Gary himself began working on the playtest rules of what would become D&D he expanded out of the dungeon into the City of Greyhawk so the players would have a location to sell their gold and treasure.
Worldbuilding as a location of fantasy RPGs pre-dates Dungeons & Dragons by two full years.

While the early part of the game focused on dungeons, that was as much because it was the easiest way to design plots and hazards. Adventure design was in its infancy. But very quickly other products like T1 Village of Hommlet or The Keep on the Borderlands were released, which much attention on the setting and the people. Given Gary wrote and put The Keep on the Borderlands in his Basic Set for new players, it sure looks like he intended people to consider the region above the dungeon and interact with NPCs.

 

[darkbard]

That's not a failure, in my view. It's a success (they were trying to find the map, they found the map, therefore success) with a DM-forced complication.

Failure narration in this example always has to somewhere include "you don't find the map". It's black and white: you either find the map (success), or you don't (failure).

I do not understand why you choose to live in such an absolutist world. Are you not familiar with the concept of "fail forward," a component of many, many games and even embraced by 4E D&D?

Other options exist for other other players in other games (or, potentially, even with the game systems you prefer). Yet you persist in demanding only the "Lanefan method" is even viable! How can someone have an honest debate with you if you refuse to acknowledge other ways of doing something exist, even if they're not for you?

 

[darkbard]

But @pemerton doesn't seem to like the idea that the DM has superior or overriding authorship over the players. I haven't posted much in the last year or two, but this is the same underlying agenda he's been pushing for years. Nothing wrong with that, but he (you) does seem to be advocating for it as the Right Way to Play D&D. But to me this comes down to campaign group preference, and a diversity of possible ways of playing.

I'm sure [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] doesn't need me (or anyone) to defend him, but I think you may be misreading the tone of his posts. While he certainly advocates for a certain style of play on the regular, I've never seen him declare another form of gaming as wrong (that seems to be [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] 's approach). Yes, he's articulated many times what his preferences are, but that's very different from mandating how others should play in order for it to be the "Right Way to Play D&D."

 

[Nagol]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "handling worldbuilding collaboratively with the players".

I don't know of any game in which the player is simply authorised to tell the GM how many bars there are in Baldur's Gate,

A player of Fate can do that with a declaration though it would be an odd choice of aspect to assign.

but part of the context for this is a lack of context for the suggestion ie I'm not able to think of a context in which action declaration by a player for his/her PCs would entail determining how many bars there are in Baldur's Gate (eg if, in the game, there is a trivia contest on, it seems unlikely that the actual answer to the question would matter, and so it seems unlikely that anything would be at stake in the player rather than the GM deciding on what that number is.)
<snip>

See the movie The World's End for a case where it matters.

 

[Nagol]

The last of these doesn't sound like a puzzle at all. As for the others, as I posted not far upthread (in response to [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] and [MENTION=40176]MarkB[/MENTION]), I'm curious about how the puzzle-solving works, when there are so many (imaginary) elements in play which can introduce parameters to the puzzle to which the players have no access (in practical terms).

Right. As the OP said, I think puzzle-solving play is not so common in contemporary RPGing. Given that it's not, then, what is worldbuilding for?

To provide constraints for the players to hitch their creativity to. To provide a fence limiting the active region for player action. To provide levers the players can choose to pull (or not) . To provide resources engaged players can take advantage of. To provide canvas where the players can see the consequences of the meaningful actions writ large. To provide cues about genre-appropriate action. To provide a backdrop of themes and common tropes.

Can some or all of this stuff be provided without backstory? Sure. Does world-building via backstory give a different feel to the campaign and offer a different experience for the players? Absolutely.

 

[Aenghus]

These are extremely different things.

I disagree, as I think your definition of "world-building" is far too narrow. To me, world-building is an umbrella term that embraces multitudes, any building or creation of elements of a fictional world is potentially "world-building", whether that's architecture, language, history, geography, economics, technology, religion, philosphy etc. People can and have pursued such activities for their own sake long before RPGs. In some cases these works can attract a fan base who become invested in the fictional world. Some of these people may in turn attempt to add detail to the fictional world themselves.

Adding depth to a fictional world can involve almost anything, as producing a self-consistent world is vastly difficult. It's impossible to detail everything, which is why viewer buy-in is important

Now, "RPG world-building" is world-building specificially in the context of RPGs, and I think the qualifier is needed precisely because there are many examples of fictional world-building unconnected with RPGs.

A model railroad is a physical artefact. I can "explore" it by looking at it, noticing the intricacies of the track network, seeing if there are configurations of signals and vehicle movements that will engender collisions, etc.

But a fantasy or sci-fi story is not a physical artefact (the book itself is, obviously, but the story is not the book - it's the abstract object "encoded" by the words which are physically expressed by the type in the book). And I can't "explore" it other than by reading it, or having it read to me.

I left out some of my thoughts on this topic in my last post. An actual model intended to represent a fictional place, well-built, can illustrate a lot to viewers - Architecture of the buildings, settlement design, climate, geography, population, defenses, agriculture, religion, iconography, justice, etc etc

Often the creator will add fictional detail to the model, coming up with fictional inhabitants for the buildings, relationships, language, history, etc. The diorama could be frozen in time, expand in a piecemeal fashion with the addition of trees, buildings and other landmarks, or jump ahead in time with major changes.

In any case, the urge to create is essential to what I see as "world-building", and it can be a solo pursuit, a collaboration, or involve passive consumers, or secondary contributors.

In RPGing, the players don't (generally) just sit down and read a book (be it a novel, or a fictional encyclopedia) written by the GM. There is a back-and-forth of conversation, and at certain points the GM tells the players stuff about the setting. In many games, some of that stuff is read by the GM from notes (or recited from memory; that difference isn't important at present, I don't think).

The more variant detail, different to the real world, has gone into a game world setting, the more work that players have to put into to attain a mastery of the setting. A minority of players, such as myself, enjoy reading settings and rulebooks comprehensively to get a feel for the game.

As you say, most players don't do that prep work, so a standard way of introducing a world is to create relatively clueless PCs and slowly reveal the world to them in play. This also has the advantage of letting the referee start running the game with limited knowledge of the setting, and learn in play alongside the players.

Which brings us to canon and "fidelity to setting". Some players are highly invested in the game running as described in the setting material, others don't sweat the small stuff and are content with a "good-enough" setting, while still others don't care at all about the setting and want the freedom to do whatever they want without being constrained by a setting.

Also, in many circumstances, when the players canvass or declare actions for their PCs, the GM will adjudicate by reference to those same notes - eg "We go to the shop to ask that guy we met there yesterday" "Sorry, when you get there you see the shop has been burned down" - the GM doesn't decided the shop has been burned down as an outcome of the action resolution (eg the player failed a "Talk to contact in shop" test) but rather has notes that say that, on such-and-such a day, or triggered by such-and-such an event, the shop will burn down.

That is an example of the GM using the fiction that s/he has prepared in advance to determine the outcome of a player action declaration.

In classic D&D, where the fiction in question is the dungeon map and key, these sorts of events give the players the information they need to help solve the puzzle ("I look behind the tapestry to see if there is a secret door there" - the GM consults notes, replies (with no check) "No, there's not"). But what do they do in non-puzzle solving play? Or in play in which the "puzzle" is not, in practical terms, solvable by the players.

To be honest, "Puzzle-solving" always annoyed me from the earliest days, as in it's original presentations it was a test of the player rather than the character, and I found timed puzzles stressful and annoying, especially when in the early days getting them wrong often led to character death. I can see for people who like them they can add an extra element to a module. I particularly disliked the puzzles that involved serious pixel-bitching or depended on local knowledge or slang that wasn't available to us the players.

As the idea of roleplaying, separation of player and character and metagaming evolved in RPGs, I gained a second reason to dislike player-facing puzzles. Translating them to pc-facing challenges can often lose the puzzle aspect others can enjoy, and turn the challenge into a mere dice-rolling exercise.

In my games I avoid puzzles for these reasons, and prefer to present the players with real decision points, some of which are pre-plotted, others of which are improvised. "Real" in that either failure of the task itself is possible, or that failure can be mitigated by some personal sacrifice by one or more of the PCs.

I found searching constantly for traps and secret doors, a necessity in many old school games, a soul-destroying exercise in paranoia, and have a lot less of this in the games I run.

While I have voluminous knowledge of the setting I use, I don't go into heavy details on the plans of the PCs antagonists, keeping a hazy overplan of the campaign, but keeping it flexible enough that I can move elements around in reaction to the players actions and events in the gameworld.

 

[Lanefan]

I do not understand why you choose to live in such an absolutist world. Are you not familiar with the concept of "fail forward," a component of many, many games and even embraced by 4E D&D?

Familiar with the concept? Yes. Enamoured with the concept? Not really.

There's two* mechanical ways of arriving at a narration** of what is in effect a partial success e.g. you find the map but it's behind 6" of glassteel, or you find it but immediately set it on fire by accident. One is fail-forward, where in effect a failure is often mitigated into a partial success. The other is (and if anyone has a better term for this, I'm all ears) more like succeed-backward, where it's a success that's mitigated by other circumstances rather than a failure - which remains a flat failure. Of these I prefer the second approach as - and again I can't think of the best term for this - it in effect makes the game a bit "harder".

And why is this good? Because without some failure and frustration now and then to measure the successes against the successes become ho-hum, and then become expected.

* - well, probably way more than two; but here my point is to highlight the difference between just these two options
** - this narration could be from the DM's pre-done notes, or made up on the fly, or whatever - here the method doesn't matter

Other options exist for other other players in other games (or, potentially, even with the game systems you prefer). Yet you persist in demanding only the "Lanefan method" is even viable! How can someone have an honest debate with you if you refuse to acknowledge other ways of doing something exist, even if they're not for you?

And from your next post:

I'm sure @pemerton doesn't need me (or anyone) to defend him, but I think you may be misreading the tone of his posts. While he certainly advocates for a certain style of play on the regular, I've never seen him declare another form of gaming as wrong (that seems to be @Lanefan 's approach). Yes, he's articulated many times what his preferences are, but that's very different from mandating how others should play in order for it to be the "Right Way to Play D&D."

Er...your bias is showing.

I don't demand the "Lanefan method" (whatever that is), but when I see my and many others' style of gaming being slighted - and some posters here are very good at slighting something and implying it's wrong without actually coming out and saying so - then yes, I'm going to push back.

Me, I'm not that diplomatic. Within the quite reasonable constraints of forum rules and etiquette I try to just say what I mean. That said, I'd far prefer to be having these discussions and arguments face to face over a beer or three in the pub: way more fun!

Lan-"and the pub option would be way more efficient, too - this whole thread, for example, would have taken about 2 pints worth of time"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

As the idea of roleplaying, separation of player and character and metagaming evolved in RPGs, I gained a second reason to dislike player-facing puzzles. Translating them to pc-facing challenges can often lose the puzzle aspect others can enjoy, and turn the challenge into a mere dice-rolling exercise.

Some puzzles are like this, to be sure. The one I hit most often is the unmappable maze of twisty little passages where there's no functional way to give the players anything to work with on the table (have you ever tried mapping a plate of spaghetti?).

Others, however, can still be solved in-character, sometimes via the players actually acting out with more-or-less makeshift props what their PCs are doing as regards the puzzle.

A not-so-twisty maze, for example, can be solved by the players (in character) mapping it out. A code or cipher can be written out on the game board or a piece of paper and solved by the players in character. A four-lever puzzle can be solved in character by putting four objects on the table and getting the players to use them to show you what their characters are doing with the levers.

What this sort of thing does is allows the players to remain in character while in effect bringing the game world into the real world (via the props) for a moment so they can interact with it. But note that doing this forces you to take the actual real-world time to solve the puzzle (thus real-world and game-world time pass equally during this process), rather than bundling it into a few die rolls. It's also possible the players will fail to solve the puzzle, in which case their frustration simply mirrors that of their characters.

I found searching constantly for traps and secret doors, a necessity in many old school games, a soul-destroying exercise in paranoia, and have a lot less of this in the games I run.

The searching can get tedious sometimes, no doubt there; but put yourself in your character's shoes for a moment: while in a hostile area e.g. a dungeon or enemy territory it's not paranoia, it's reality - the world really is out to get you.

While I have voluminous knowledge of the setting I use, I don't go into heavy details on the plans of the PCs antagonists, keeping a hazy overplan of the campaign, but keeping it flexible enough that I can move elements around in reaction to the players actions and events in the gameworld.

More or less what I also do, in the end. The only difference (and it may not even be a difference, but you don't mention it) is that I also have a reasonably good idea of what would happen going forward if the PCs weren't around to change it.

Lanefan

 

[pogre]

I'm in Lanefan's and Caliban's camps when it comes to D&D. Honestly, possibly with the exception of 4e, this view of worldbuilding and play are very nearly built in. Pemerton made some excellent posts about how the 1e material allows players' input, but those are mostly exceptions.

At my table, players have very different expectations about what level of creative input is expected of them dependent on whether we are playing my 5e D&D campaign or our Ars Magica campaign. Myself and many of my players enjoy both styles. I have players I don't even invite anymore to certain games that require significant player creative input. That's not fun to them - they mostly want lots of action. I love having them at certain games and they are fun and entertaining players. They just enjoy killing monsters and taking stuff.

tldr: I imagine I would have a great time playing at Pemerton's and Lanefan's respective tables.