What is *worldbuilding* for?

Sadras said:

Whether you do it in advance or at the table surely it doesn't make a difference about the importance of world building?

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Well, as I intended the term in the OP fiction created at the table is not worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, as I've used it, is establishing a setting, and setting material, in advance of play. ( [MENTION=6776133]Bawylie[/MENTION] used the term in a broader sense not too far upthread. That's fine; I think I got he was saying clearly enough. But [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] was not using it in that broad sense, I don't think, of any way of establishing the setting.)

Lanefan said:

pemerton said:

... tend to be devices for forcing GM narration rather than obtaining access to GM notes

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And this is what I just don't get: from the player side, what's the difference? The players/PCs are obtaining access to new information; why does it matter in the slightest on the player side what its metagame source might be?

Either way, the DM is going to narrate the hopefully-informative results of whatever the PCs have tried to divinate. Whether from notes or from top-of-mind that narration in theory should be and sound the same

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I don't see any reason to suppose it should sound the same it all.

Think of it this way - preparing a speech is very different from having a conversation. No one would suggest that engaging in conversation is just like writing a speech but in real time!

Likewise in RPGing. A GM who narrates content as part of a conversation with the players about the shared fiction their PCs find themselves inhabiting is doing something very different from a GM who tells the players something that the GM made up all by him-/herself some time earlier.

Lanefan said:

You've done the work ahead of time thus making it much easier to be consistent and clear with your narrations, and thus during the actual play you can focus on the here and now - action resolution, rules questions, playing NPCs and monsters, stuff like that.

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I have doubts about this contrast. A big part of playing a NPC or monster is giving voice to his/her/its personality, personal backstory, motivations, etc. To focus on playing the NPC or monster is to focus on establishing those things, and what they mean in the current situation. So I don't see how thinking about those things is any sort of distraction from playing that character.

Lanefan said:

you see your role in your game as much more of an actual participant - a player - than I do. You want to share in the unexpected plot twists, and be surprised at how the story goes. You don't want any spoilers, as it were; and you want your own game world to organically unfold around you just as if you were a player.

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Well, this is (more or less) what Dungeonworld means when it says "play to find out". Although the process for the GM is very different for the players, because they occupy different roles in the conversation that makes up the game with different sorts of authority over the shared fiction, over framing, etc.

But that is not an answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for". It's an account of how play proceeds with less, or no, worldbuilding. It's main relevance to this thread is that the answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for" is not otherwise RPGing can't take place.

Lanefan said:

I'm not there to play in my own game (other than via NPCs), I'm there to provide a game* for my players to play in

<snip>

In my own game I already know all the spoilers, as such is my place and my job, and I know how the story might go at least for the time being. I don't know how it *will* go - the PCs can certainly surprise me with what they do, and when that happens I have to react accordingly. But that reaction is as a neutral arbiter, not as a fellow player.

* - 'provide a game' includes pre-designing the world (maps, history, cultures), pre-designing and tweaking the rules (mostly homebrew these days) and then providing access to them, coming up with a possible storyline or three, and usually hosting.

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OK, but what does it mean to "provide a game - with predesigned world, maps, history, cultures, possible storylines - for my players to play in"?

The language you use, that I've quoted, is metaphor. (Contrast: if you provide a swimming pool for your friends to swim in, that is literal, not metaphorical.) To answer [MENTION=284]Caliban[/MENTION], the main agenda of this thread is to dispense with metaphor and try to get some descriptions of actual social practices, and their rationale.

For instance, "providing history and cultures for your players" presumably means telling them these sorts of characters are permitted; these other sorts aren't. It might mean, if a player declares an action "I search the room for a copy of the missing map", replying "You find nothing" without rolling the dice (or perhaps pretending to make a check but in fact stipulating the answer regardless of the roll), because you have written down, in advance, the contents of the room and they don't include a map.

What is that sort of stuff for?

pemerton said:

Well, as I intended the term in the OP fiction created at the table is not worldbuilding. Worldbuilding, as I've used it, is establishing a setting, and setting material, in advance of play.

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I don't agree with that assessment of the word, mostly because I as DM have had to 'world build' on the spot during play given that players ask for information I might not have prepared or even thought about regarding the setting. So for me worldbuilding is a continuous process.

innerdude said:

Interestingly, I think worldbuilding is actually ONLY relevant in the context of playing a character, in the sense that you care about the character's motivations, drives, the history that shaped that character to be the way he or she is now. It's only when you come out of the dungeon and start looking around that it even matters---if you're the type of player that actually wants to place his or her character into some kind of setting context.

If you don't care about any of those things, I don't know that worldbuilding is truly all that relevant. And classic "Gygaxian" D&D seems to agree with this. As long as your character/player is head down, delving deep into the dungeon, none of that fiction-y, character backstory context matters much.

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Well, I'm including writing up the dungeon as an instance of worldbuilding. It's part of the (imaginary) world, after all, and is "built" by the GM.

innerdude said:

The real question is, how much backstory is necessary to create high enough emotional stakes to make gameplay interesting?

<snip>

Character only matters when there's a context for the character to matter in. Worldbuilding is about creating that context.

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The answer to the first question is surely "it depends"..

I've played interesting sessions of Marvel Heroic RP and Cortex+ Fantasy Hack where the backstory was pretty basic. It's all about these characters, here and now, doing this thing eg Nightcrawler, Ice Man and War Machine go out to a bar in DC, and chat up some women who happen (it turns out) to be the B.A.D. Girls trying to extract Stark intelligence from Rhodey; in the ensuing action (mostly emotional/mental conflict) Nightcrawler seduces one of them, while War Machine leaves another hanging from the top of the Washington Monument until Bobby builds some ice steps so she can get down - and then, at the dramatic moment when everyone coalesces at the Smithsonian to try and steal the Stark shuttle on display, rides in on an ice slide and carries her off into the sunset.

It's not exactly great literature, even by the standards of Marvel; the characters are shallow and broad-brush in their depictions, and the backstory is the barest of geographic and established character tropes (eg Rhodes works for Stark Industries, and evil people want to steal Stark's clever inventions). But it was fun enough as a RPG session.

I would think of other campaigns that I run as having a bit more depth, but even then the emotional stakes can be established by one or two key details: thinking back 20+ years ago to a Rolemaster game, one of the players established (at PC creation) that his wizard character was from a little village outside Greyhawk (Five Oaks) and had been tutored by a powerful mage who was on the run from enemies and lived in a hollow tree outside the village. That mentor, and his tree, were the focus of a number of episodes of play (the PCs seeking help; the mentor disappearing; etc - all the stuff you'd expect) - but it didn't depend on knowing who the mentor's enemies were, let alone mapping out that hollow tree.

I don't know if you disagree with any of the above - maybe you think it's an elaboration of your point? I'd be interested to learn. I think it does put some pressure on your claim about context being necessary for a character to matter. I don't think that has to be true. And I think people can very quickly identify with a character if that character is portrayed with a degree of vividness (in RPGing, that can mean tapping into recognised and enjoyable tropes rather than great acting, obviously), even if the context is pretty thin, and suggested mostly by the portrayal of the character.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with rich context. But I don't think it's essential.

When there is context underpinning a character, how do you see participant roles relating to that? Eg if the character is meant to matter to X, and the worldbuilding is done by Y, is that a problem? Or not?

Sadras said:

I don't agree with that assessment of the word, mostly because I as DM have had to 'world build' on the spot during play given that players ask for information I might not have prepared or even thought about regarding the setting. So for me worldbuilding is a continuous process.

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OK, but (if you want to) you can still answer the question I asked in the OP. Just rephrase it as "Many GMs establish significant amounts of setting information in advance of play. What is that for?"

pemerton said:

OK, but (if you want to) you can still answer the question I asked in the OP. Just rephrase it as "Many GMs establish significant amounts of setting information in advance of play. What is that for?"

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Besides all the myriad of other reasons provided by posters above, the table doesn't waste precious play time on worldbuilding.

For example, if I as DM establish a map, the setting calendar, the seasons, where various settlements lie on a map, the general terrain and distance between these settlements, then it will be easy to work out the length of time required to travel from one settlement to another when a player asks me. I could then work out the date of arrival and what that would mean, the number of random encounters I could perhaps roll for and the weather patterns and how that would affect travel - instead of trying to work this all out at the table wasting precious real time.
Add a little backstory and some setting lore to the above details and you have B10, one of your favourite modules (as you have stated many times on this forum).

Now with your roleplaying style method none of that may really be important, so nothing may need to be pre-established. Instead you create a skill challenge for the party's journey.
Failure in the skill challenge might mean the party experienced bad weather, was waylaid by a goblin scouting party, fatigue set in due to disturbed sleep, horse lost a shoe or twisted its ankle, the party got lost, or did not stop the BBEG ritual in time...etc

And that is fine.

EDIT: Slightly off-topic, I have to ask why you like B10 so much given your roleplaying style, if you don't necessarily use the established story and you 'ignore' pretty much all the other worldbuilding information provided in the module in favour of the skill challenge mechanic?
Speaking for myself, I think the module is great specifically for the world-building information provided.

pemerton said:

I don't see any reason to suppose it should sound the same it all.

Think of it this way - preparing a speech is very different from having a conversation. No one would suggest that engaging in conversation is just like writing a speech but in real time!

Likewise in RPGing. A GM who narrates content as part of a conversation with the players about the shared fiction their PCs find themselves inhabiting is doing something very different from a GM who tells the players something that the GM made up all by him-/herself some time earlier.

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Yet to the players it should sound the same. Rarely if ever does a DM read directly from prepared notes - about the only times I ever see it happen are when a canned module tells the DM to read some exposition.

Boxed descriptions in a canned module are different: the DM should use those where provided to ensure all the relevant info comes across...and then describe areas that don't have boxed descriptions (e.g. from a homebrew module) using much the same terminology and presentation.

I have doubts about this contrast. A big part of playing a NPC or monster is giving voice to his/her/its personality, personal backstory, motivations, etc. To focus on playing the NPC or monster is to focus on establishing those things, and what they mean in the current situation. So I don't see how thinking about those things is any sort of distraction from playing that character.

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Focusing on the NPC's stuff is easier if I don't also have to worry about what the dimensions are of the rooms adjacent that haven't been explored yet and whether they'll fit together properly; I have a map for that.

Well, this is (more or less) what Dungeonworld means when it says "play to find out".

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Fine and excellent advice for the players in any RPG - but not for the GM. The GM shouldn't be playing to find out (if that's her goal she should become a player and let someone else GM), the GM should be providing the stage and scene and background and world in which the players can play to find out.

But that is not an answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for". It's an account of how play proceeds with less, or no, worldbuilding. It's main relevance to this thread is that the answer to the question "what is worldbuilding for" is not otherwise RPGing can't take place.

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RPGing can take place, but on a blank stage with no established history or anything else.

OK, but what does it mean to "provide a game - with predesigned world, maps, history, cultures, possible storylines - for my players to play in"?

The language you use, that I've quoted, is metaphor. (Contrast: if you provide a swimming pool for your friends to swim in, that is literal, not metaphorical.)

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No, it's also literal. The maps, the history write-ups, the culture write-ups, the pantheons - provided you accept something that's online as being real then they're all every bit as real as that swimming pool. Failing that, all I'd need to do is print 'em all out on to real paper to make 'em real.

To answer [MENTION=284]Caliban[/MENTION], the main agenda of this thread is to dispense with metaphor and try to get some descriptions of actual social practices, and their rationale.

For instance, "providing history and cultures for your players" presumably means telling them these sorts of characters are permitted; these other sorts aren't.

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Acceptable DM practice, though more a result of worldbuilding than an integral part of it.

It might mean, if a player declares an action "I search the room for a copy of the missing map", replying "You find nothing" without rolling the dice (or perhaps pretending to make a check but in fact stipulating the answer regardless of the roll), because you have written down, in advance, the contents of the room and they don't include a map.

What is that sort of stuff for?

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Because I've already neutrally determined in advance that the map is somewhere else. I know where it is, and I know that in this case there's ultimately only two possible outcomes: they'll sooner or later find it, or they won't. If they find it, great: they can take it back to their sponsor and get paid for it, or they can try following it on their own, or whatever. If they don't find it, great: they can return to their sponsor empty-handed, or they can blow him off and go elsewhere, or they can try making a fake map, or whatever.

Somebody declaring they're searching for a given thing and banging off a natural 20 on a search check doesn't mean squat if that given thing isn't there to find. Example: a party's exploring an old castle looking for the Crown of Axenos, which was last rumoured - correctly, as it turns out - to be here somewhere. I-as-DM have mapped out and populated the castle with a variety of monsters and hazards, and I've put the Crown behind a heavily-trapped secret door off an otherwise innocuous chamber in the first level below ground (it was hidden there by the last occupants of this place, now dead these several decades). When the party's upstairs in the great hall, however, they can search for the Crown all they like - it ain't there, and so they're not going to find it no matter what they try or how well they roll.

This is simple realism - you can't find what's not there. This idea of "say yes or roll the dice" kicks this to the curb, as now all they need to do in a game-mechanics sense is keep rolling (there's obviously doubt involved, so roll the dice) until they hit a 20 and the Crown will appear regardless of where they are as long as they're somewhere in or near the castle. I find this ridiculous.

Lan-"what I'm not sure of with 'say yes or roll the dice' is whether it means the DM is afraid of just saying flat 'no' or the players are unprepared or unwilling to hear it"-efan

pemerton said:

Well, I'm including writing up the dungeon as an instance of worldbuilding. It's part of the (imaginary) world, after all, and is "built" by the GM.

The answer to the first question is surely "it depends"..

I've played interesting sessions of Marvel Heroic RP and Cortex+ Fantasy Hack where the backstory was pretty basic. It's all about these characters, here and now, doing this thing eg Nightcrawler, Ice Man and War Machine go out to a bar in DC, and chat up some women who happen (it turns out) to be the B.A.D. Girls trying to extract Stark intelligence from Rhodey; in the ensuing action (mostly emotional/mental conflict) Nightcrawler seduces one of them, while War Machine leaves another hanging from the top of the Washington Monument until Bobby builds some ice steps so she can get down - and then, at the dramatic moment when everyone coalesces at the Smithsonian to try and steal the Stark shuttle on display, rides in on an ice slide and carries her off into the sunset.

It's not exactly great literature, even by the standards of Marvel; the characters are shallow and broad-brush in their depictions, and the backstory is the barest of geographic and established character tropes (eg Rhodes works for Stark Industries, and evil people want to steal Stark's clever inventions). But it was fun enough as a RPG session.

I would think of other campaigns that I run as having a bit more depth, but even then the emotional stakes can be established by one or two key details: thinking back 20+ years ago to a Rolemaster game, one of the players established (at PC creation) that his wizard character was from a little village outside Greyhawk (Five Oaks) and had been tutored by a powerful mage who was on the run from enemies and lived in a hollow tree outside the village. That mentor, and his tree, were the focus of a number of episodes of play (the PCs seeking help; the mentor disappearing; etc - all the stuff you'd expect) - but it didn't depend on knowing who the mentor's enemies were, let alone mapping out that hollow tree.

I don't know if you disagree with any of the above - maybe you think it's an elaboration of your point? I'd be interested to learn. I think it does put some pressure on your claim about context being necessary for a character to matter. I don't think that has to be true. And I think people can very quickly identify with a character if that character is portrayed with a degree of vividness (in RPGing, that can mean tapping into recognised and enjoyable tropes rather than great acting, obviously), even if the context is pretty thin, and suggested mostly by the portrayal of the character.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with rich context. But I don't think it's essential.

When there is context underpinning a character, how do you see participant roles relating to that? Eg if the character is meant to matter to X, and the worldbuilding is done by Y, is that a problem? Or not?

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I may get back to answer your questions, but for know I want to point out a massive hole in your theory: your Marvel game example had a immense amount of worldbuilding, not a little. You leveraged the entire ouevre of Marvel, which, in turn, leverages the real world. You had Stark, B,A,D,, Washington DC, the Washington monument, the Smithsonian, bars, streets, buildings, a cast reservoir of bystanders, etc, all as predefined and established pays off ther fiction. The world you actually played in had almost everything predefined and leveragable by both the GM and the players.

Your second example ignores that Greyhawk was used as a world and only focuses on the tree created by a player. Sure, the tree is important, but you already leveraged the vast work and world of Greyhawk before the tree was even introduced, yet you seem to dismiss this act of worldbuilding as trivial. It is not.

@Lanefan

Don’t have a ton of time so I’ll keep this as brief as possible and hopefully it conveys what I’m getting at.

Let us say you have a table of 4 players to play a game. You ask them what they signed up for.

2 say something like:

“I like to use strategy and teamwork to overcome the obstacles of the game world.”

Another says something like:

“Yeah, me too and I like to see where the story goes as we overcome those obstacles and make choices that we care about.”

The last player says something like:

“Yeah, that all sounds good. Whatever.”

Let us say that their wishes are a very good representation for what the game says on the tin. Now consider the following:

Travel through a hex of N terrain is supposed to take X Exploration Interval per mile travelled. One of the first 2 has a rationed ability (maybe once per day) to facilitate halving that Exploration Interval X and also allows the group information/resources Y and to avoid encounters of the Z variety during that interval.

But the GM either (a) has scaled their hexes nebulously rather than precisely (encoding ad-hoc ruling which allows for fudging for or against the player) or (b) has scaled their hexes really disproportionately (which renders null the player’s decision-point regarding distance/time and game mechanics completely).

This is because the GM has prioritized all of this other stuff in their worldbuilding and either didn’t have the time or inclination to have their world interface properly with game mechanics or (worse still for these players), doing so would disallow the GM to make rulings which would allow them to introduce content that they, themselves, are interested in. The player thought they would have been able to aid the group by circumventing both time and an encounter due to deploying this resource. Nope, they didn’t cross anywhere near as much as they all thought and now they have to camp in hostile areas because of it (which is basically a block by the GM to stall or to introduce content that the GM is interested in playing out at the table). This player specifically, and all the players generally, now know that they can’t rely on precise information from the GM/map to make Exploration decisions (which they signed up for) so subsequent decision-points are going to involve a proportionate measure of insecurity and dissatisfaction.

So the structure of worldbuillding for both the game and the players assumes one thing…but the GM’s worldbuilding methodology and prioritization degenerates into having an entirely different quality that facilitates the GM’s ends and negatively impacts the players’/game’s expectations.

pemerton said:

Bias?

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Yup. Bias.

[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] described world building as art. Presumably, it is the GM's art and the GM's meaning given to the adventure. Art (typically) has an audience. I'm asking if the players are that audience? If the answer is no - eg the audience for worldbuilding is the GM - then how does worldbuiling relate to RPGing at all?

[MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] also used an adjective - your - which is ambiguous between singular and plural. Whose adventure does worldbuilding give meaning to? I am imagining that the answer is the GM's adventure. If I'm wrong, shidaku can correct me.

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And I'm getting the impression from your posts that you think this is somehow a bad thing. It sounds like you think GM's shouldn't engage in "worldbuilding".

Lanefan said:

The GM shouldn't be playing to find out (if that's her goal she should become a player and let someone else GM), the GM should be providing the stage and scene and background and world in which the players can play to find out.

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By now I think anyone who has followed any thread in which you've participated over the last year or two (at least) is quite clear on how you feel about this.

But why you continue to try to shout down those who insist other possibilities exist, indeed that whole RPG systems exist precisely so that the GM can play to find out along with the PCs, and that attempting to play in this style is "doing it wrong" is completely beyond me!

Got it: not for you. But please stop insisting that those who feel otherwise are heretics to be castigated.