Maybe your post was cut short? Seems like you may have had more to say.
But what you've listed here are, to me, examples of worldbuilding. It is minimal compared to many games. But even just going with the default assumptions of Traveler is worldbuilding. It's just that other people did the worldbuilding years ago, and you've decided to use that world they built. Then you allowed your players to contribute to the worldbuilding with the gambling backstory bit for his character. You came up with an NPC with possible ties to one PC. Then you chose a world, and some others in case they came up.
How is this not worldbuilding?
OK, so just to clear some ground - my purpose in starting the thread isn't to work out what "worldbuilding"
really means. It's to ask about what a certain technique/method in RPGing might be for. And I think you realise that, so the purpose of this paragraph is just to establish that we're both on that cleared ground.
Now, the technique/method I'm interested in is the following - the description may be rough, but hopefully gets at something recognisable: the GM, in advance of play, establishes certain elements of the shared fiction - "the world" or "the setting". These details may be high level and fairly abstract ("Here's the pantheon"). They may be low level and rather gritty ("Here's a map of your inn room"). These details may or may not be shared with the players in advance of play, but that's a matter for GM discretion as governed by certain conventions (eg if we assume that none of the PCs is blind or in the dark, then there's a convention that the GM will show the players at least a rough map of the area the PCs are in, or describe it them if words are being used rather than pictures).
These details can be used to constrain or even veto player choices at PC generation. (That hasn't been discussed much in this thread, but is frequently discussed on these boards.) And, as has been discussed at some length in this thread, these details may be used
by the GM to establish elements of fictional positioning, in the context of action resolution, which are
secret from the players. The result of this is that a player can declare an action for his/her PC and have it fail
not because of a bad roll (this thread has mostly been focused on dice-based action resolution) but because the framing for the declaration -
unbeknownst to the player - has
already been established by the GM to be such that the action can't succeed.
The recurring example of the last point is the GM's prior determination that the map is in the kitchen (hidden in the bread bins) and not in the study, and hence that an action declaration by a player "I search the study for the map"
cannot succeed, in virtue of the GM establishing in advance the content of (that aspedct of) the shared fiction.
A further consequence of the sort of worldbuiling I've just been describing, which is important to me but has received much less attention in this thread than the above point, follows on from the idea of constraints on PC build. When the game begins from this sort of worldbuilding, the focus of play is established by the GM. The "big picture" of the campaign is established by the GM. The local, nitty-gritty moving parts of the ingame situation are established by the GM.
A further thing is that the second and third consequences can feed into one another. So the established but secret elements of backstory which determine - in ways unbeknownst to the players, because while they may know there is secret backstory there they don't know what it is (because it's secret) - whether or not action declarations succeed or fail. So the play of the game, via action declarations, is apt to lead to outcomes that reflect the GM's establishment (in advance) of the key setting elements.
Anyway, that is the sort of worldbuilding I have in mind. I think it's very common. I have played games where it occurs. I read posts about such games nearly every day on ENworld. It's inherent to any AP campaign that it have more-or-less the above character. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] has given multiple examples (both imagined and actual play) which illustrate RPGing in the above fashion.
In the Traveller game I referred to, we started with PC gen tables: I had written up tables that mostly reflected the original ones in Book 1 and Supplement 4, but with an additional line - Special Duty - borrowed from the MegaTraveller tables; and changing a couple of skill entries on the skill roll tables to incorporate (some of) the skills introduced in Books 4, 5, 6 and 7.
And we had a patron encounter table. And world generation tables. And I had a piece of paper with stats for 4 worlds written down (Lyto-7, Byron, Enlil and Ruskin) - their existence as elements of the shared fiction was not established (and in the case of Ruskin still hasn't been - it's there if I need a comfortable, mid-tech world with a bucolic lifestyle and strong immigration restrictions, but so far I haven't).
The nearest recent experience I would compare it to is running a one-off AD&D session where the players rolled up 2nd level PCs and then I used the Appendix A random dungeon generation system to generate a dungeon as they went along.
In both cases, there are tecniques used to establish a setting. In the AD&D case, rolling on the tables tells us what the starting room looks like (there are six to choose from); how long the corridoors are; etc. There are charts for working out whether a room is empty or not, and if it's inhabited, by what. In the Traveller case, I rolled a starting world and the players and I worked out a sketch of it based on the rolls. Instead of the room occupants charts in Appendix A, Traveller has a patron chart, which established this scout in need of assistance as a part of the setting.
Because the player of the noble had already established that he'd won a yacht gambling, but had been hopsitalised as a result - which is how he had met the ex-Navy medic - it made sense that the scout would be needing the PCs' help because her old crew had lost their ship gambling! And because one of the PCs - generated on the diplomat table - was clearly a spy (skill in carousing, interrogation, streetwise, gambling, recruiting, forgery, wheeled vehicles), it made sense that the mission should have a clandestine element to it (although what that was was not established until the player of the spy had his PC seduce the scout, and succeeded in an interrogation roll, which then obliged me to make up some more backstory about the secret element of the job she was offering).
In that example, the setting is not a constraint on PC gen - it follows from it. It is not a constraint on action declaration success - it is generated in response to it. Where details are filled out as part of framing and establishing the situation, the players are contributing together with the GM, and it is this interaction of ideas that generates a setting for the (imaginary) action to occur within.
Another, small but illustrative example: when the PCs stopped off at the world of Lyto-7 on their jump route from the starting world - Ardour-3 - to Byron, the ship owner decided to buy some cargo with the hope that he could sell it on at a profit on Byron. We rolled on the trading tables to determine values etc. But that left the question of what the cargo actually was. The world gen system had determined that the population of Lyto-7 was only a double-digit nubmer of people, and it had no government or law level, but a reasonably high tech level - so clearly it was a research station of some sort. That was my framing. The system had also decreed that the hydrographics of the world were 60%. The player therefore decided the cargo was ambergris (or something similar) collected as a byproduct of the research work being undertaken. Thta's only a modest bit of setting, but again it was not any sort of constraint on action declaration or resolution. Rather, working through those processes, in conjunction with the world gen results, yielded the setting via inputs from both GM and player.
Whether or not you want to call that "worldbuilding", it bears very little resemblance to the phenomenon I have described above. They both establish a setting, a shared fiction, which provides context for play. But the methods of doing that, and the consequences, are almost completely different.
So if you are asserting "RPGing needs setting" then I agree. If you are asserting "RPGing needs situation, and situation brings setting with it" then I agree. But if you are asserting "Because RPGing needs situation to get going, the GM must author some setting in advance, thereby unilaterally establishing some elements of the shared fiction", well then I disagree.
