Why Worldbuilding is Bad

wow
irrelevant crap
by a second-rate sf writer
who would have thought such a thing possible?

Running a game takes place in something closer to "realtime" than writing a story, so you need to have some details already in place when your players encounter them, becuase if you have to stop to think about them when they get there, that makes for a really boring game.

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One of the skills of a "good" DM is improvisation, though. Certainly you don't expect everything your players do to be pre-planned, is there a reason we should have all parts of our world pre-planned?

Pbartender said:

You can still have the illusion of a complete world without actually having a complete world.

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QFMFT. Advice has continually been "create only as needed." I totally believe that D&D needs to create more than a novel, but I'm not sure it needs to create all that much more.

Hobo said:

QFT. Although some of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors defy that advice--Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. J. R. R. Tolkien. But I can see his point for an author.

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Ditto. If an author revels too much in worldbuilding, you'll get bored, unless you want that worldbuilding - that's the reason why Lord of the Rings is liked (because the world is only hinted at), and why the Silmarillion is less liked or often called boring - it's only a worldbuilding tale.
Too much world can stifle the narrative

For DMs - they need worldbuilding, because they have to respond in real time. The narrative is developing during play, and is driven forward by the players. Worldbuilding is only "in-advance" outlining of the stage to avoid too much improvising.

However, too much worldbuilding can have the similar result: If the world is too well defined, then it can stifle plots, prevent the players from doing certain things - similar to railroading.

This said, I'd say, that
1) Worldbuilding as preparation in advance is good and swell, perhaps crucial.
2) worldbuilding as a purely intellectual exercise, well this can easily end in the second scenario.

Actually, it's not particularly good advice even for writers. It's advice to "do things my way, not your way," based on a weakness which the author lacks, but to which not all worldbuilders fall prey; i.e., building the world at the expense of the story. He'd spend his time better giving advice about how to approach his own strengths and avoid his own weaknesses - the only topics any of us can truly give useful advice on.

Tolkien would never have written the Hobbit or LOTR if he hadn't had his language- and world-building hobby. Diana Wynne Jones makes worlds the way other people make sandwiches - vivid, realistic, self-consistent worlds and series of worlds about which the reader learns just the right amount. I don't know how much work she puts into the process of creating them, and I don't need to know. The result counts. How you get there doesn't.

There are nine and sixty ways of creating tribal lays, and every single one of them is right. Some people have to have the worldbuilding and some people get bogged down in them and some people can't make them at all, and make a virtue of it. There's no point in making hard-and-fast rules about any of it. Personally, I have to overprepare for every session I DM, every public talk I give, everything I do that involves prolonged speaking. Other people can do satisfactory games at five minutes notice.

More power to everybody. Do it the way that works for you, not the way that works for somebody else.

Sooooooo...by this logic Tolkien is a boring nerd?

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To be fair, that's 100% a valid criticism. Lots of people are fans of Tolkien, but Steve Jackson cut out huge swaths of the books to make things flow faster and to tell a more dramatic story. And the people who are the most intense fans of Tolkien...tend to be boring nerds.

The idea that Tolkien isn't that great of a writer is hardly a revolutionary idea.

Cam Banks said:

...
So are we on two sides of a divide, here? Do we all need the statistics, charts, solved mysteries, and so forth? Or is that just a thing some of us want?

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There are plenty of people who do want the complete atlas and encyclopedia of Fantasy World X. However, the great majority of them ARE great clomping nerds, or at least having a clomping nerd episode.

Who? M. John Harrison? Who are we talking about here? What has he written? Why haven't I heard of anything this guy has done?

Could it be because he's never had a memorable setting? Could it be that maybe there is something missing from his highly esteemed prose? Could it be that this guy is dismissive of 'world building' because he's just not very good at it? Frankly, I wouldn't trust someone who's contribution to the arts seems to be solely deconstructive to be a good judge of the utility of construction, especially if he chooses to refer to it with such phrases as the 'great clomping foot of nerdiness'. Objectiveness in this matter doesn't seem to be his strong point.

I don't know. I've never read a single work buy him, and never even heard of them. I don't know enough about Mr. Harrison to have a well thought out opinion. But I do know that I once ran through the Internet Speculative Fiction list to rate the works I'd read, and by the time I'd finished making my list I'd rated some 500 science fiction and fantasy novels - and none of them were by M. John Harrison and virtually non of which had 'Star Trek' or 'Star Wars' in the title or had a cover with a blouse ripper. But maybe the fact I've never read Harrison is my fault. Maybe I'm just an illiterate pleb. Maybe he's the greatest thing since Tolkien crawled out of the trenches or Delany crawled out from under a rock, but the fact of the matter is that this guy might as well be nobody for all the impact he's making on readers. Because, if he had any impact beyond the respect of his peers, I'd have heard of him and read him.

In any event, I think he offers advice that is to say the least, highly suspect and of questionable value to even writers of speculative fiction much less game referees. One obvious objection is that a lot of writers with more fame and recognition and dare I say literary acclaim than he seem to have done quite a bit of thinking and planning that looks awfully like world building. Another obvious objection is that running a game is very different than writing a story. Another obvious objection is that he doesn't really present an argument, so much as a trite 'just so' story backed with almost religious conviction and with the usual accompanying attack on the pyschology of anyone who thinks differently than he does - and then segues right into a political rant. One wonders whether his peers appreciate being told that there normal process of producing a story is akin to a mental disease. This is normally the sort of behavior that leads me to believe I'd be wasting my time reading anything that the writer read, but I'll avoid the temptation to reply to his ad hominems in kind.

In short, echoing the earlier poster, "utter crap".

UPDATE: Came across this post at random, and should note that I actually had read one of his books at the time of this post. I had heard of, and did try to read his work, 'Light'. Unfortunately, I found the book badly written and childishly 'darker-than-thou' and put it down as a bad cause with in 20-30 pages. Then apparently promptly forgot about it, because I've twice since then checked the book out of the library on recommendation by an online review only to open it and get a few pages in and go, "Oh... it's that one."

Kamikaze Midget said:

So, people are saying it doesn't apply in D&D. Why not?

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Because it is fun.

Who? M. John Harrison? Who are we talking about here? What has he written? Why haven't I heard of anything this guy has done?

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Check out the Wikipedia page. He's not just some hack.

But this isn't about the messenger, it's about what he's saying. He's got at least enough cred to validly offer advise to other creators.

robberbaron said:

He's quite right - if you want the players to move through the world without really being in it.

Personally, I like to know that there is more to a gameworld than a series of dungeons, a list of maidens to be rescued/deflowered (depending upon alignment), etc. Games I've played in which had no depth seemed little more than multiplayer Fighting Fantasy books.

It would be interesting to have a poll on this subject.

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I think characterization does that, not worldbuilding.

In my experience, most worldbuilding is wasted effort since it doesn't really come up. Things too deep below the surface aren't visible. And even immediately apparent details are generally of little irrelevance especially compared to the time it takes to bring them all up.

Defining a setting in broad strokes is the way to go, IMO, since it means you can communicate the fundamentals easily, and it provides stuff to work with without being overly confining.