Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[AbdulAlhazred]

But I wasn’t talking about rumors. I was talking about a general fact or a specific fact. Exactly how they are introduced to the game can vary, and certainly they could be presented as rumor or as uncertain, but they can eually be presented as fact.

And I am just saying, there are no general facts, that is a non-existent category of nature. This is another of the several things which Buddhist Philosophy has to teach. Things only exist in the specific, there is no general. You can generalize, take one specific fact, fit it into a pattern, and create a rule, this is what science does. The key point is you must start from specific facts, nothing, no knowledge proceeds directly from general to specific. At best we first generalize by observing specific cases and creating a hypothesis, and often a mathematical model, which provides predictive power in new situations.

So, there's no such thing as 'general knowledge of orcs', there must be SPECIFIC ORCS before there can be general knowledge of them. The existence in the MM of an entry 'orc' is not, by itself, sufficient to make orcs part of the world. I mean, its a fantasy game, you could hypothesize some sort of Platonic higher realm in which orcs exist as an orc archetype and then posit that someone 'dreamed about it' or it was 'revealed' or something like that, but now you've done some ACTUAL world building and create a specific orc fact (as well as a fairly significant element of cosmology).

 

[Riley37]

And herein is another reason why I mentioned ideology earlier. You seem to buy in to, unexamined, the myth of progress that our global western society tells itself, seeing this not only as obviously true on a grand, sweeping scale but also at the granular level of the individual.

So you say. Are are telling Shidaku, that the beliefs S. holds, cannot be beliefs which S. has examined... because anyone who examines those beliefs, without exception, will naturally and inevitably reach the same conclusions you have reached? That strikes me as an arrogant perspective.

Perhaps you should demonstrate that *you* have examined the ideology which denounces global western society, when you accuse others of failure to examine their own ideologies, and when you also jump to conclusions on which ones they practice. Motes and beams, beams and motes.

your claims about the naive, unlettered "savage."

Whoah. That is not an accusation to make without strong cause. Could you specify *exactly* where S. has made such claims, on that topic, referencing S.'s precise words, in full context?

I could even cite Socrates's fear (in the Phaedrus) that writing would lead to a decrease in human brain capacity

That fear, which you know *because you read the Phaedrus*, which you are now mentioning *by written word*, over the Internet, across millennia and from one continent to another... fellow human, your ideology has some non-trivial blind spots.

If you assert that writing has decreased *your* mental capacity, I won't argue, but get honest about Socrates and his understanding of "brain capacity". Did he follow Alcmeon's theory... or was he the source of Aristotle's belief that the heart is the seat of intelligence, the brain is a cooling mechanism for the blood, and humans are more rational than the beasts because we have a larger brain to cool our hot-bloodedness?

Some related points:

I cannot, with full confidence, claim that the *sum* of my knowledge exceeds that of, say, the Mbuti whom Colin Turnbull describes in "The Forest People". They know things I don't, and I know things they don't.

But I do, with confidence, by direct observation and comparison, assert that the *range* of my knowledge exceeds that of my parents and my grandparents. I know about the extermination of smallpox (yay western global culture), *and* I know about the proliferation of industrial carcinogens (boo global western culture). I can draw a more accurate map of the Earth than they can, because they grew up with the Mercator projection, and I grew up with the *questioning* of the Mercator projection. I have travelled more than they did, and met a MUCH wider range of my fellow humans, because that's more readily available for me than it was for them. I play D&D, and TRPGs more advanced than D&D, *and* I also know some old-school skills such as conveying coastal landmarks by recitation of sea shanties, and I know folk tales from a much *wider* range of cultures than my parents or grandparents. I look at the Moon, and I see the "Man in the Moon" of my grandparents, and the Rabbit in the Moon from the story of Chang'e, and Neil Armstrong's footprints.

Mental illness runs in my family. I am a member of the first generation whose resources to mitigate the consequences includes formalized cognitive-behavioral techniques, and medications more specific (and less destructive) than hitting the bottle. Hand in hand with that, I'm in the first generation which can admit the family pattern, openly and without shame, or at least not as much shame. You got a problem with me calling that "progress"?

So if you wanna wax all nostalgic about the Good Old Days in which humans knew at most a thousand of their fellow humans, and only within 100 kilometers, and they used bronze tools and they *liked* it, uphill both ways, then de gustibus nil est disputandum. Make Infant Mortality Great Again! (Also death in childbirth for mothers.)

More that just a matter of taste, though: take a dozen farmers from the Bronze Age, ask them to feed a hundred people, and if you're person #83, *you gonna starve*. Take a dozen farmers from some over-industrialized agribusiness farm in the USA, allow them only the tools their great-great-grandparents used, and they'll feed more people than the first group. They'll take a day or two to get over farming without tractors, but they know what a horse-drawn plough looks like (they've seen an antique, as I have) and they'll figure out how to make one, while the Bronze Age farmers don't know that such a thing is even possible.

About a generation ago, German farmers taught a tip to farmers in India: if you don't let the fruit touch the ground as you harvest it, it lasts MUCH longer before going bad. *In the absence of any other change in methods* that means more edible food reaches more people. Whether they cut fruit off the vine with bronze sickle, iron sickle, or ergonomic stainless-steel shears, the *knowledge* to use a wheelbarrow or bag, to reduce contact with the ground - that knowledge has value independent of the hardware. The transmission of that kind of knowledge, becomes more possible, than when each human knows only some of the nearest thousand other humans.

But I digress.

 

[Riley37]

The existence in the MM of an entry 'orc' is not, by itself, sufficient to make orcs part of the world.

True. *If* orcs are part of the setting which your table uses, then you might have more fun using the MM's description of orcs and their stats, than if you started from scratch.

Similarly, if a miniatures wargame supplement includes stats for the T-34 tank, that book is not, in the process, demanding that your wargame is set in or after WWII. If your wargame is set in 1612 and does not involve time travel, then you are free to ignore those stats. If, however, your wargame is set in 216 BCE and you wanna play out whether the presence of one T-34 on the Roman side would change the outcome of the Battle of Cannae, then you may find those stats convenient. Those stats, for orcs and for the T-34, are an *offer*, not an *imposition*.

If you tell your players that the setting is Middle Earth or a close relative, and you've also decided that orcs don't exist and never have, then the misunderstandings which ensue may reduce how much fun your players have. YMMV.

 

[Hussar]

This stinks of cognitive bias of one sort or another, to high heaven really!

Any 2 40 year old human beings have experienced an equal number of days of life, filled with experiences of various sorts. Your average Neolithic Farmer from 3000bc probably knows a HUGE amount about nature, his local environs, the minute details of the lives of the animals and plants he is so close to, etc. His range of experience may be geographically narrower, and his ability to control his surroundings and obtain the necessities of life may be far less if he's dropped into modern times, but tell me. If you took a modern farmer and dropped him on the Neolithic Farm, could he even grow a crop? Without a computer, a tractor, GPS, the Internet, hybrid seeds, modern herbicides, etc.? I strongly doubt it.

You seem to mistake one kind of knowledge for wisdom and discount another kind entirely. unknown known indeed!

On the other hand, that Neolithic farmer wouldn’t have the first clue about any place more than maybe a few dozen miles away. The modern farmer has a pretty decent working knowledge of mist of the entire planet.

 

[pemerton]

No ideas at all for what you want to run/play? I mean I've come to a game pretty empty-handed but I still generally have some ideas for style and theme. Now I know you run substantially more player-authored games than I do and that may relieve some of the burden, but I still suspect the article was not arguing an extreme in response to what they viewed as another extreme (not that people don't do that), but that was my only point there, to come "open and flexible" rather than closed and firm.

Some systems bring more "heft" with them than others.

The experiences I was thinking of when I made my post were: starting a Burning Wheel game ; starting a Classic Traveller game (a bit of a cheat - I had rolled up two or three random worlds in advance, and so dropped them in when I needed a world - but I could have done that while the players were rolling their Pcs if I wanted to); and more than once in classic D&D (either AD&D or Moldvay).

What distinguishes these from, say, 3E D&D, is that each has a kickstart mechanicsm. In BW, the rules themselves generate PCs who are ready to go; in Classic Traveller, there is the random patron table and that - in conjunction with the implicity backstory that Traveller gives to PC - again suggestead a starting point for the game; and classic D&D uses the classic dungeon (which at a pinch can be randomly generated using Appendix A, which is what I did last time I GMed classic D&D).

When I started my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game, I'd pre-genned some PCs which would work either for a viking game or a Japanese game (eg one of the PCs is wolf skinchanger or fox skinchanger, depending on setting/genre; another is a swordthane or a bodyguard; etc). That's an idea as to setting, but once the players voted to go with vikings then they made up some stuff to kick things off (strange signs in the northern lights; the skinchanger having sensed trouble in the spirit world; etc) and I made up some stuff too (as they head north, they come upon a giant steading), and we went from there. Although this system doesn't bring the same degree of "kickstart" as the others I mentioned, it gives the players a lot of capacity to inject their own ideas and direction as it goes along.

So some of this is a function of experience and inclination - which is my paraphrase of what you said! - but I think some of it is also about system design and the sorts of expectations systems create. A system which brings no kickstart mechanism and doesn't give the players much capacity to inject their own stuff is probably going to be more reliant on the GM to do some heavy lifting around setting and the details of framing. As well as 3E D&D I would put RM into this category, and RQ unless you're letting Glorantha do your heavy lifting for you.

 

[pemerton]

The modern farmer has a pretty decent working knowledge of mist of the entire planet.

I'm pretty sure "mist" is a typo for "most", but it's kind-of funny because I think a lot of people's "knowledge" of places they haven't been to can be as if through a mist or distorting lens.

 

[Riley37]

So, there's no such thing as 'general knowledge of orcs', there must be SPECIFIC ORCS before there can be general knowledge of them.

Does this also apply to Rodents of Unusual Size?

Is my general knowledge of unicorns - for example, they are herbivorous mammals (ungulates or similar), their horns have anti-venom properties, they are inclined to trust virgin women - possible only if specific unicorns exist in the real world?

Perhaps you found this epistemology and the Four Noble Truths in the same package. I have tested the Four Noble Truths against my lived experience, and they hold up fairly well. I do not know a falsification test for "no knowledge proceeds directly from general to specific".

 

[hawkeyefan]

And I am just saying, there are no general facts, that is a non-existent category of nature. This is another of the several things which Buddhist Philosophy has to teach. Things only exist in the specific, there is no general. You can generalize, take one specific fact, fit it into a pattern, and create a rule, this is what science does. The key point is you must start from specific facts, nothing, no knowledge proceeds directly from general to specific. At best we first generalize by observing specific cases and creating a hypothesis, and often a mathematical model, which provides predictive power in new situations.

So, there's no such thing as 'general knowledge of orcs', there must be SPECIFIC ORCS before there can be general knowledge of them. The existence in the MM of an entry 'orc' is not, by itself, sufficient to make orcs part of the world. I mean, its a fantasy game, you could hypothesize some sort of Platonic higher realm in which orcs exist as an orc archetype and then posit that someone 'dreamed about it' or it was 'revealed' or something like that, but now you've done some ACTUAL world building and create a specific orc fact (as well as a fairly significant element of cosmology).

Yeah, I don’t agree as this relates to worldbuilding. I think what is expected may vary from game to game and that it can be introduced in different ways. But I do think that you can introduce general facts as I’ve described. Could they be subject to change? Sure. But so can the specific knowledge.

Because it’s all made up, after all.

 

[darkbard]

So you say. Are are telling Shidaku, that the beliefs S. holds, cannot be beliefs which S. has examined... because anyone who examines those beliefs, without exception, will naturally and inevitably reach the same conclusions you have reached? That strikes me as an arrogant perspective.

Perhaps you should demonstrate that *you* have examined the ideology which denounces global western society, when you accuse others of failure to examine their own ideologies, and when you also jump to conclusions on which ones they practice. Motes and beams, beams and motes.

Ideology doesn't simply mean any belief a person holds. Ideology means, in literary critic Terry Eagleton's definition, "The largely concealed structure of values which informs and underlies our factual statements[, ...] the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in" (my emphasis).

I was raised in a western (now global) narrative that has a vested interest in maintaining a narrative of progress. I have questioned that narrative, critically, and done a lot of study that has led me to different conclusions.

Whoah. That is not an accusation to make without strong cause. Could you specify *exactly* where S. has made such claims, on that topic, referencing S.'s precise words, in full context?

Here is what Shidaku wrote:

The problem with sci-fi vs fantasy in the authors context is that sci-fi has a low bar for something being a "known known". How a space-ship works can be readily derived from a diagram, which itself is readily available. The general level of knowledge is high. In the same sense that what the average person knows now is far beyond what even some of the smartest people knew 5000 years ago. Access to new knowledge is easy and transmission of information is direct (say, on a flash drive), as opposed to rare and indirect (oral tradition). It is difficult to create a hard sci-fi setting and then say "Well you can't know that!" or "Nobody knows that!" because that is so incredibly rare.

These are the terms those living within a roughly centralized state structure ("civilization") use to denigrate those outside of one. Often accompanying such terms (less knowledgable, in general) are claims of naivete (in the sense of an infantalizing pureness or goodness), illiteracy (as an explanation for lack of knowledge), and "savagery" (as being beyond the refinements of "civilization"). If these do not characterize shidaku's perspectives, then I publicly apologize. But when one makes vague and blanket statements claiming one group is better than another, (the average person today knows more than even the smartest person from 5000 years ago, in this example), the person making such a statement is setting themselves up for misunderstanding.

That fear, which you know *because you read the Phaedrus*, which you are now mentioning *by written word*, over the Internet, across millennia and from one continent to another... fellow human, your ideology has some non-trivial blind spots.

If you assert that writing has decreased *your* mental capacity, I won't argue, but get honest about Socrates and his understanding of "brain capacity". Did he follow Alcmeon's theory... or was he the source of Aristotle's belief that the heart is the seat of intelligence, the brain is a cooling mechanism for the blood, and humans are more rational than the beasts because we have a larger brain to cool our hot-bloodedness?

My reason for referencing Plato, perhaps unclear, is that such claims of more or less knowledgable are ludicrous. Literacy no more decreased individual human knowledge, in toto, than living in our modern world increases it over our forebears! It's a question of different kinds of knowledge, not quantity of knowledge. AbdulAlhazred addressed this already, above.

Some related points:

I cannot, with full confidence, claim that the *sum* of my knowledge exceeds that of, say, the Mbuti whom Colin Turnbull describes in "The Forest People". They know things I don't, and I know things they don't.

But I do, with confidence, by direct observation and comparison, assert that the *range* of my knowledge exceeds that of my parents and my grandparents. I know about the extermination of smallpox (yay western global culture), *and* I know about the proliferation of industrial carcinogens (boo global western culture). I can draw a more accurate map of the Earth than they can, because they grew up with the Mercator projection, and I grew up with the *questioning* of the Mercator projection. I have travelled more than they did, and met a MUCH wider range of my fellow humans, because that's more readily available for me than it was for them. I play D&D, and TRPGs more advanced than D&D, *and* I also know some old-school skills such as conveying coastal landmarks by recitation of sea shanties, and I know folk tales from a much *wider* range of cultures than my parents or grandparents. I look at the Moon, and I see the "Man in the Moon" of my grandparents, and the Rabbit in the Moon from the story of Chang'e, and Neil Armstrong's footprints.

Mental illness runs in my family. I am a member of the first generation whose resources to mitigate the consequences includes formalized cognitive-behavioral techniques, and medications more specific (and less destructive) than hitting the bottle. Hand in hand with that, I'm in the first generation which can admit the family pattern, openly and without shame, or at least not as much shame. You got a problem with me calling that "progress"?

So if you wanna wax all nostalgic about the Good Old Days in which humans knew at most a thousand of their fellow humans, and only within 100 kilometers, and they used bronze tools and they *liked* it, uphill both ways, then de gustibus nil est disputandum. Make Infant Mortality Great Again! (Also death in childbirth for mothers.)

More that just a matter of taste, though: take a dozen farmers from the Bronze Age, ask them to feed a hundred people, and if you're person #83, *you gonna starve*. Take a dozen farmers from some over-industrialized agribusiness farm in the USA, allow them only the tools their great-great-grandparents used, and they'll feed more people than the first group. They'll take a day or two to get over farming without tractors, but they know what a horse-drawn plough looks like (they've seen an antique, as I have) and they'll figure out how to make one, while the Bronze Age farmers don't know that such a thing is even possible.

About a generation ago, German farmers taught a tip to farmers in India: if you don't let the fruit touch the ground as you harvest it, it lasts MUCH longer before going bad. *In the absence of any other change in methods* that means more edible food reaches more people. Whether they cut fruit off the vine with bronze sickle, iron sickle, or ergonomic stainless-steel shears, the *knowledge* to use a wheelbarrow or bag, to reduce contact with the ground - that knowledge has value independent of the hardware. The transmission of that kind of knowledge, becomes more possible, than when each human knows only some of the nearest thousand other humans.

But I digress.

I have absolutely no desire for some kind of battle over this issue, derailing this thread further. As I say above, our knowledge today is different. I will absolutely agree if you want to say that much of our contemporary knowledge is more scientific, in the sense of repeatability and demonstrability, even that it is more *accurate* as a result, but that, again, is not a question of amount but kind.

 

[Imaro]

So, there's no such thing as 'general knowledge of orcs', there must be SPECIFIC ORCS before there can be general knowledge of them. The existence in the MM of an entry 'orc' is not, by itself, sufficient to make orcs part of the world. I mean, its a fantasy game, you could hypothesize some sort of Platonic higher realm in which orcs exist as an orc archetype and then posit that someone 'dreamed about it' or it was 'revealed' or something like that, but now you've done some ACTUAL world building and create a specific orc fact (as well as a fairly significant element of cosmology).

I disagree with this. In stating that a particular setting is your default... whether that is 4e's Nentir Vale, D&D's Greyhawk, Tolkien's Middle Earth or World of Warcraft... you are stating that the lore around the race of orcs in your game is the same as the world you are using. I would argue the existence of an entry of orc in the MM ,with accompanying lore, for any of these settings being used as the basis of a game is very much sufficient to make orcs part of that world, at least until the time that you change or modify what an orc is in the world.

Taking this example to another media form... When starting a new character in the WoW mmorpg it is possible that as a player you would not be exposed to an orc at the beginning of the game (depending on your initial selection of race and class)... does this in fact meant that orcs don't exist in WoW? Even though they are a racial choice and are part of the lore of the world, does the fact that you have not directly experienced them in the game mean they don't exist? Or are they a part of that setting by default? Has orc lore in said setting has already established their existence in the setting irregardless of whether you personally experience an orc in play?