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What is *worldbuilding* for?
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<blockquote data-quote="Kobold Boots" data-source="post: 7345344" data-attributes="member: 92239"><p>.. and now my response to the OP after 754 other posts. Being hypocritical, (see post 754) I'm not replying to anything other than the OP.</p><p></p><p>Given the descriptions in the OP (dungeon and wilderness adventures) I don't think I'd necessarily call those things "world-building" in considering what I feel is the widely accepted definition to modern gamers. What I'd offer in replacement is this.</p><p></p><p>1. World-building - Creation of the larger game world and macro systems that the game adventures happen in.</p><p>2. Adventure-building - What the players actually interact with. This can have as much or as little interaction with the material created during "world building" as desired.</p><p></p><p>The important thing here is you don't ever have to world build at all. You can run a campaign entirely with adventure building. Whether you do or not has to do with where you are on the next axis of story telling.</p><p></p><p>1. Serial - Adventures don't directly build on one another. They stand alone, even if some of the characters are the same. (e.g. Flash Gordon esque)</p><p>2. Ongoing - Adventures build on each other and directly impact each other. (LoTR, etc.)</p><p></p><p>It's easier to use what I'm calling adventure building when you're running serially. World-building becomes more important once you move to ongoing story development as it's more likely folks are going to start operating at the margins of what any particular adventure is going to hold. For the sake of brevity the acceptance of the margins is where I draw the line between sandbox and conformity storytelling. I'm not going to go into that here. (It's a herring/tangent to the original question.)</p><p></p><p>Now for the Lazy DM wisdom.</p><p></p><p>Your players need to be part of the creative team when you're world building unless you're J.R.R Tolkien and spend 20 years building a world, languages and other stuff alone in your study or you're fortunate enough to be in a book club with other authors on a regular basis. Successful "world-building" at the table means that your players buy in to the immersive quality of what you're doing and that generally only happens when the world resonates with their sensibilities. The "world" doesn't need to be hyper-detailed or be completely developed. All that's necessary is for everyone at the table to find their "cool" piece of it and take part in the narrative.</p><p></p><p>What's all of this for? - It's all to allow people to enjoy themselves in a group and make shared memories. In my case, I've lost a lot of friends in the last year to illness. Many of those friends were gamers. I have memories of my friendships with them, but also a lot of memories of how they played and the silly things we said and did. Building with them was very enjoyable but I think that effectively doubling the resilient memories I have with them through that process may have been the best thing I ever did as far as gaming goes.</p><p></p><p>Be well</p><p>KB</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kobold Boots, post: 7345344, member: 92239"] .. and now my response to the OP after 754 other posts. Being hypocritical, (see post 754) I'm not replying to anything other than the OP. Given the descriptions in the OP (dungeon and wilderness adventures) I don't think I'd necessarily call those things "world-building" in considering what I feel is the widely accepted definition to modern gamers. What I'd offer in replacement is this. 1. World-building - Creation of the larger game world and macro systems that the game adventures happen in. 2. Adventure-building - What the players actually interact with. This can have as much or as little interaction with the material created during "world building" as desired. The important thing here is you don't ever have to world build at all. You can run a campaign entirely with adventure building. Whether you do or not has to do with where you are on the next axis of story telling. 1. Serial - Adventures don't directly build on one another. They stand alone, even if some of the characters are the same. (e.g. Flash Gordon esque) 2. Ongoing - Adventures build on each other and directly impact each other. (LoTR, etc.) It's easier to use what I'm calling adventure building when you're running serially. World-building becomes more important once you move to ongoing story development as it's more likely folks are going to start operating at the margins of what any particular adventure is going to hold. For the sake of brevity the acceptance of the margins is where I draw the line between sandbox and conformity storytelling. I'm not going to go into that here. (It's a herring/tangent to the original question.) Now for the Lazy DM wisdom. Your players need to be part of the creative team when you're world building unless you're J.R.R Tolkien and spend 20 years building a world, languages and other stuff alone in your study or you're fortunate enough to be in a book club with other authors on a regular basis. Successful "world-building" at the table means that your players buy in to the immersive quality of what you're doing and that generally only happens when the world resonates with their sensibilities. The "world" doesn't need to be hyper-detailed or be completely developed. All that's necessary is for everyone at the table to find their "cool" piece of it and take part in the narrative. What's all of this for? - It's all to allow people to enjoy themselves in a group and make shared memories. In my case, I've lost a lot of friends in the last year to illness. Many of those friends were gamers. I have memories of my friendships with them, but also a lot of memories of how they played and the silly things we said and did. Building with them was very enjoyable but I think that effectively doubling the resilient memories I have with them through that process may have been the best thing I ever did as far as gaming goes. Be well KB [/QUOTE]
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