What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Aldarc]

Ramming my head into a brick wall would have provided more value than reading the first sentence of your reply, Aldarc.

If you are just going to unnecessarily insult me, Jeremy, and condescend to me about your 30+ years of gaming experiences, then it's clear that you only plan on offering the east wind for wisdom. I don't know who lobbed that cornfield up your rear, but you should have dislodged them before you decided to post your reply. But there are many other ways you could have gone about your reply before choosing to be a dick about it.

 

[Sadras]

I don't know who lobbed that cornfield up your rear...(snip)

Too funny.

Back on topic - I tend to think worldbuilding is not the issue, if your DM is boring they are boring period. Worldbuilding has nothing to do with it.

 

[Fitz Mac]

Aenghus you still playing D&D in Cork ?

 

[Fitz Mac]

[MENTION=2656]Aenghus[/MENTION] you still playing D&D in Cork ?

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

All too often a DM who gets a little too into building his world will provide an experience that is, at best, boring (sorry, the world's just not as interesting to anyone esle), and at worst consists of dragging you through his world to meet his NPCs & tour their locations, and /not be allowed to do anything that might disrupt their cystaline perfection/.

"Crystaline perfection" is the perfect phrase for DMs that take it too far.

This is something I've heard of, but never experienced at the gaming table. I would not want to wish it on any player.

The closest I've come is a DM that was running a successful AD&D Realms campaign set in Undermountain. He'd just begun reading the Wheel of Time books and became hooked on the idea of the party traveling through a portal in Undermountain to the Savage North, but one that reflected the WoT series.

He was cool about it; warned us up front of his intentions and everything. We said yes and off we went.

That part of the campaign wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either. Our DM tried mightily to turn us on to what he thought was cool about WoT, but to no avail.

Eventually our DM realized things were not going well, apologized and said our characters could keep their gained levels and magic items and we'd return to Undermountain with all that occurred handwaved away.

I've also heard of Forgotten Realms DMs that are so enraptured with the idea of having their campaigns follow Realms canon that they spend way more time obsessing over how to justify the party's minor changes to the Realms timeline than they do stocking dungeons and planning encounters; instead of being a resource, the great grand weight of thousands of pages of Realmslore become an impediment to the DM.

These are two lessons I take into account when I run my Realms D&D campaigns.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I am not saying that "per encounter" balance is a sufficient condition of mechanical balance between classes. (How could it be?)

I'm saying that "per-encounter" balance is a necessary condition of a game allowing events to unfold in the way I describe, while also achieving mechanical balance across classes. Whereas "per day" balance is at odds with this, because in order to achieve that sort of balance across classes it requires the GM to treat the "future" of play as in some sense fixed or foretold (so as to generate the pressure and consequences that in turn will yield the balance).

And I was saying it's not. A party of all wizards in 1e, for instance, uses daily recharge mechanics for all characters and is also balanced among characters. 5e does a pretty good job of class balance while using multiple ability recharge balance points. It also has warts, but it's not a necessary condition that a game be encounter balance to have class balance.

Instead, your point seems to be 'to have encounter focused play your need to have encounter balanced abilities' which is pretty trivial on it's face -- you're almost stating a tautology. Of course encounter balanced abilities lend themselves to encounter focused play. The bit about class balance, on the other hand, seems tacked on and non sequitur.

Where did the word "failing", or any synonym, appear in the post of mine that you quoted? I identified a contrast that is, from my point of view, salient. Since when did identifying a salient contrast - which is not utterly at odds with a contrast you have been drawing for the past page or two - become a (purported) identification of a failing in a ruleset?

"Unrealized." Unless you've invented a new definition for that word, of course, it means 'not achieved.' IE, "failed" to achieve.

However, I'm willing to concede I may be very wrong, as it occurs to me that I assumed you meant "character" archetype but you actually said "player" archetype. It occurs to me that I'm not sure what player archetypes you're talking about (and, surely you're talking about players because you don't confuse the two terms) nor exactly how game mechanics would prevent a player from realizing his archetype. Could you elaborate on this?

Semantic arguments can be quite surprisingly reversed, don't you find? I assume that's why you're perfectly willing at accept other's definitions and phrasing of things and try so hard to avoid semantic arguments yourself. I find your wisdom enlightening.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Anything can be taken too far and handled in a bad way. I just don't know that I understand what people are cautioning in this thread. ... But I don't usually see GMs world build to literally give people a tour. There are usually hooks, drama, conflict and adventure that result from the world building details.

Oh, I don't generally see the extreme that I label 'setting tourism,' either - but it can be so awful when you do encounter it (or worse, have that horrible moment when you realize you're doing it), that it's quite memorable.

A thread this long can't easily have retained it's original point, but, I think it was part "you don't /need/ worldbuilding, try Story Now!" and part "ooh, a hornetss nest, think I'll poke it - again!" and, of course, the always hopeless "there're RPGs other than D&D y'know, here on the 'general' rpg board we sometimes talk about 'em... no, really..."

 

[Ovinomancer]

For my own sake following here, how does this current discussion on encounter design/balance connect with the overarching discussion of what worldbuilding is for?

And though some of you are indeed doing this, it may also be helpful to look more broadly at how other game systems (other than iterations of D&D) have designed their encounter/day assumptions for characters.

Well, for me, it does follow. Games that use many daily abilities encourage a more strategic form of play, and strategic play requires the ability to gain knowledge about future events so you can plan. This can also be served by knowledge of past events that can be used to predict future possibilities. That kind of knowledge is poorly served in games that use narrativist techniques, as the "now" is the focus, not the "later". This means that games with more daily ability uses will tend to favor more worldbuilding as a feature rather than a bug. Games more encounter based have much less need of worldbuilding because of the 'now' focus of play and lend themselves to narrativist techniques.

To me, analysis of action balance points does display some things about worldbuilding.

I'm going to pimp on Blades again to discuss a subset of this: worldbuilding as a game mechanic. In Blades, the mechanical order of play reinforces the worldbuilding - a dark, magical, corrupt city that will push you around and down. It does this using the downtime cycle which first starts with a check to see what this dark world does to your gang. I love this mechanic, as it pushes the game's theme and tropes through an unavoidable game mechanic. It mechanically uses the worldbuilding of the setting to great effect in generating new conflicts. But, it does this without engaging any player ability/resource mechanics -- its outside of that analysis.

I bring this up to say that ability mechanics, while an interesting discussion point and a useful tool in evaluating game rules and their most applicable playstyles, is not the sum or best method of game analysis -- there are aspects that don't fit that paradigm. So, while ability mechanics are useful, it's important to not become wedded to an analysis that depends solely upon them. And this goes for GNS/forge theory -- it does not address the sum of game design, but instead a facet (a large facet, but a facet). Using it uncritically leads to unwarranted overconfidence in your assessments.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Games that use many daily abilities encourage a more strategic form of play, and strategic play requires the ability to gain knowledge about future events so you can plan. This can also be served by knowledge of past events that can be used to predict future possibilities. That kind of knowledge is poorly served in games that use narrativist techniques, as the "now" is the focus, not the "later". This means that games with more daily ability uses will tend to favor more worldbuilding as a feature rather than a bug. Games more encounter based have much less need of worldbuilding because of the 'now' focus of play and lend themselves to narrativist techniques.

I'm not seeing the strong coupling between daily-resource management games and 'strategic' play vs encounter-focus and 'narrative' play. A game could use a longer-term player resource to license narrative changes, for instance, you have a limited number of plot-points to make, and you can use them strategically to develop the story. A game with no regenerating resource (static or consumable, for instance) could still involve strategies to make best use of them.

I mean, I do see /a/ correlation, having started with D&D and gone for the depth of Vancian casting, I certainly see it in that context, there was a strategy aspect to managing a caster back in the day, beyond just managing daily 'slots,' for that matter. It's less pronounced in 5e, where casting has far fewer limitations, less strategic, more 'gonzo' I suppose. ::shrug::

Or FATE, a poster boy for narrativism, no? FATE progresses in scenes, but you have resources and complications that are persistent and need to be managed over the course of multiple scenes.

IDK... the distinction, while a real difference in mechanical design, seems almost a red herring to balance or world-building or putative 'styles' or whatever. I don't think 'unit of balance' sums it up, at all. 'Balance target' might do it better. Games should try to be balanced, it's a desireable quality - but imbalance can be used to narrow the functional range of play intentionally as well as unintentionally.

Pem made the point that a game which 'needed' so many encounters per day or whatever restricted the GM's options in running the campaign, and that's true. I don't think it's often the point, but the same can be said of player options, and that can be part of the point, to put a lot of options on the table, but with the intent players learn to gravitate towards the most functional ones, which just happen to be the ones that support the game's intended theme/feel/genre/whatever...

And I was saying it's not. A party of all wizards in 1e, for instance, uses daily recharge mechanics for all characters and is also balanced among characters. 5e does a pretty good job of class balance while using multiple ability recharge balance points. It also has warts, but it's not a necessary condition that a game be encounter balance to have class balance.

Whether you balance an RPG just around The Encounter, or just around an assumed day length, or just around acquiring imaginary wealth, or whatever, you're choosing to balance only a fraction of the ways it might reasonably be played. A game aimed to balance at 6-8 encounters/day is imbalanced at 1-3, if it also needs 2-3 short rests, it can be imbalanced at 7, too if there were 6 short rests or only 1. A game balanced over a 'whole campaign' (as classic D&D arguably was meant to be) is imbalanced at every session in that campaign, but when you look back at having completed the whole campaign with all the same players & characters, maybe you see "oh yeah, it kinda all evened out, didn't it?"
Or not.

I think that's part of the point. Balance to a restrictive formula of workable play isn't really balance, it's just tip-toeing past imbalance.

For instance, a game in which everyone's resource re-charge anew for each encounter (Like 7th ed Gamma World) might be balanced within the structure of an encounter, but it's either ignoring things that happen outside the encounter, or risking not being balanced in other contexts (like 'exploration,' traditionally a big part of GW, actually).

Either way, there's a lot of potential play that can't be realized without coping with balance issues in some other way.

"Unrealized." Unless you've invented a new definition for that word, of course, it means 'not achieved.' IE, "failed" to achieve.

Or 'unrealized' can refer to potential not yet developed.

 

[pemerton]

I think the issue of lingering consequences is different from the issue of class mechanical balance on a per-encounter (short rest) or per-day (extended rest) basis.

They're similar in kind, in that they both aim to limit balance to only a sub-set of the potential range of play. Balanced at X amount challenge in Y unit of time is simply imbalanced everywhere else.

I don't follow what you're saying here. Lingering consequences don't, on their face, seem like they are aimed at limiting balance.

FATE progresses in scenes, but you have resources and complications that are persistent and need to be managed over the course of multiple scenes.

Again, I don't see how these points about persistent resources/complications bear on a discussion about the way recovery schemes factor into cross-class balance.