What makes a good campaign world?

[ProfessorPain]

What makes a campaign world playable and fun? For me, it depends, since I have different expectations from different campaign styles and settings. but I suppose the following list captures what makes me enjoy a campaign setting:

-A theme. Not a big fan of highly detailed, in depth settings, with no theme or angle.
-Memorable details and history. Details are important, and logical history is too. But when the details are bogged down by names that are difficult to remember and the history lacks a central narrative, I find I get lost.
-Cool and unusual vistas. D&D is fantasy, and I want to use my imagination. I love strange locations that make the world interesting.
-Believable religion. Personally I don't much care for the way D&D has handled its pantheons. There almost always just a list of gods that govern different areas of interest, but are not tied to place. Also, if you are going to have pantheons, you should have multiple pantheons worshiped by different cultures, in my view. I don't jus want different gods, I want different religions-- clearly hard to do in a fantasy setting where the gods still interact with the population.
-Believable and diverse political structures.
-Conflict. If there isn't conflict in the world, it is pretty hard to stay interested.

 

[Jack7]

Personally, I think you hit many of them PP. Including this one.

For me, it depends, since I have different expectations from different campaign styles and settings.

Also in my setting we use real world religions. My players like that better because they can either then play their own religion (experimentally or not) or experiment with playing another religion or historical religion. That's a lot better than paying an empty pantheon with deities that have no real relation to either the player or the character and tends to make playing clerics, monks, paladins, and hermits a lot more interesting than is normally the case.

We use a real world setting, at least for the humans, so it's also easy to interject personally interesting and relevant history, politics, culture, an so forth into both the milieu, and the adventures and campaigns. Players know some of the characters, situations, and places they visit from history.

I don't usually get to play but when I do I've found that the difference between a really good setting and a mediocre or bad one is whether the setting evokes, for me and the other players, an atmosphere that is personally relevant, and therefore involving.

I also like surprises, to encounter the weird, the truly and unusually magical (in fantasy settings), and creatures that are original, and who have very different and far more interesting motives, other than, 'kill this, hoard that." I personally don't care for monsters who are just numbers or magic which is just a technical science, or characters who are just lists of powers. I do like interesting, complicated, morally challenging, and difficult interplays between different political powers, monsters, NPCs, creatures, forces, races, and religions.

Well, I gotta go. I'm on assignment today and working off one of my laptops. Man I hate laptops and keyboards too little for my fingers. And I can't use my VR software cause of all the background noise. I'm sure I made a slew of typos. That's life though I reckon.

 

[Treebore]

Mine is my current one where I realized I could fit many of the settings I own all on one world, Faerun, Greyhawk, Wilderlands, Airhde, Ravenloft, Blackmoor, The Known World, Mystara, etc... Its amazing how many regions and continents you can fit on one world close to earth size.

 

[jmucchiello]

Anything that makes it bland enough to be palatable to the 5-8 people who plan to play with.

Seriously, for all campaign settings in existence or yet to be created, there exists a set of role-players who would rather not play than to play in that setting. Similarly, there cannot exist a campaign world so dreadful that you couldn't find a group of role-players to take a stab at it.

Try this analogy:

You have decided to bring a single gallon (56 oz these days) of ice cream to you next game session. What flavor do you bring? How do you decide? You want everyone to have the best possible ice cream eating experience possible. (Assume the percentage of people who could not eat ice cream for dietary/religious reasons map in this analogy to people who don't play RPGs. Thus, anyone attending your game session is able to eat ice cream.) Odds are you are going to go with vanilla or neapolitan, a.k.a. bland ice cream. If you take a chance on rocky road or cookie dough you risk displeasing the "no stuff in it" crowd.

Same dilemma. Same solution.

 

[Shades of Green]

The following tends to make a campaign setting fun and facilitate play:
1) Enough places with little or no central authority, so monsters/bandits abound and PCs could make a significant difference (and no one but them could save the day).
2) Many conflicts, and thus many adventuring possibilities.
3) A large number of ruins, caves and dungeons, preferably with a lot of treasure and monsters, preferably with a good reason for their existence in such a state.
4) Cool and interesting reasons for cool and interesting monsters and cool and interesting locations to exist.
5) Several factions that players could identify with (and possibly have their PCs join) and several factions players would enjoy opposing (and thus have their PCs fight against).
6) Interesting politics and cultures making PC-NPC interactions fun.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I don't have any idea of what THE perfect campaign setting is like. In fact, there are a number of different models, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses.

For example, I'm a big fan of Goodman Games' DCC 35. The reason I like that one is because of the lack of plot and the lack of memorable details. It gives you the bare bones you need to make the world your own, and then feel free to unapologetically trash the setting to your heart's content.

I like Paizo's Golarion setting because it provides a hook, but not a gimmick, and then provides a lot of different places. Some areas are based on real world historical settings, while others are more rooted in fantasy. I particularly like the fact that they went to great effort to make the setting multi-racial and multi-cultural.

I also like the more unusual settings, like Darksun, which take the traditional fantasy tropes and turn them on their ear.

 

[S'mon]

Theme is definitely more important than detail. Of course I may not like the theme (Eberron), but if it comes across as just a bunch of detail (Kalamar), I definitely won't like it. I like grandiosity - Mystara's Dawn of the Emperors with the mighty Thyatian and Alphatian empires locked in cold war, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy with their vast sweeps of ancient monster-haunted wilderness dotted with ruins set rround warm seas, or even Greyhawk (1983 set) with its powerful medieval kingdoms emerging from the darkness of an apocalyptic past into a foreboding future.

 

[Corinth]

We've got an answer to this question: S. John's Five Elements Essay

 

[Jack7]

That article was so good Corinth that I downloaded a copy. An especially good point, as an RPG design premise, was this one:

This taps into what may be the most unique feature of RPGs: tactical infinity.

 

[ExploderWizard]

We've got an answer to this question: S. John's Five Elements Essay

A fun article but alas not an answer to the original post. Its a fair observation about what might make a gameworld popular, which is not quite the same as good.