Forked from "An Epiphany" thread: Is World Building "Necessary"?

[Hussar]

2004? So? Are you saying that's when you started playing?

No Kask, that is not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if my join date is five years ago, then perhaps, just maybe, I've been gaming for AT LEAST five years. The fact that I started gaming in 1980 is beside the point. I generally find that getting into pissing contests and trying to appeal to authority doesn't help in these discussions. Anyone who is feeling that their points are so inadequate that they require bolstering by telling all and sundry how long they've been gaming should possibly go back and rework their arguments.

Just a thought.

Ok, the 10 things I would want to have completed in two weeks...

NOTE: I am assuming that I have presented a brief summary of Gulmenghast (perhaps a page long) to my players and it is met with approval as a place they want to adventure in...

1. The racial write-ups how they relate to one another, attitudes towards
each other and differences from the generic PHB descriptions... (as an
example in Gulmenghast Shifters, Genasi, and Tieflings are the result of
long-forgotten alchemical and arcane gene-modification of humans with
the essences of beasts, elementals and devils that arose in response to
the invasion of these peoples lands by the Dragonborn Empire thus there
is an ancient enmity between these groups)
2. General descriptions of the 7 wards and The Severed Realms
3. Map of The Pinched Quarter with encounter charts
4. Fleshed out maps of The Quivering Catacombs, Badger Bayham's Brew
and Breakfast, Miss Skifin's General Tradehouse and Emporium, The
Shrouded Bath House, and The Gate Towers (Have no problem stealing
maps off the internet to cut down on work... )
5. General description of the two religious orders in Gulmenghast
6. List of Major NPC's w/stats (mostly re-skinned from MM, again to cut
down work)
7. Macro-level government of city in broad strokes
8. Macro-level political structure of The Pinched Quarter
9. The stats for the Lawbringer's stationed in The Gate Towers
10. 10 secrets; one for each Ward and 3 on a micro-level for The Pinched
Quarter

Now, I have a job, a child and am preparing to get married in September, so I don't have a ton of time... that said I enjoy working on my campaign and I generally devote an hour to an hour and a half before I go to sleep to working on my wiki. So total man hours is somewhere between 7 hours and 20 hours to complete the above... so less than an actual day out of 2 weeks.

Honestly Hussar, I find (and I am assuming here) what you call "adventure" design doesn't take that long unless I choose to do it from scratch without using all the maps, stats, monsters, traps, etc. that are widely available in the books and on the internet. The actual world I'm creating for these adventures to take place in, it's consistency, verisimilitude and logic are things I can't grab pre-made and tweak. I also find that the more fully fleshed out my world is the better informed I am as to the specific tweaks I should make to give it a Gulmenghast feel as opposed to a generic high-fantasy setting 6432577 feel. YMMV and all that of course.

A couple of points here. First one is, please stop with the strawman that if you don't do world building you are forced to have "generic high-fantasy setting 6432577" and I'll stop calling it setting wankery. Deal?

Second, let's not lose sight of the fact that your campaign setting is very small. You're limiting yourself to one city. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It sounds interesting, but, it does cut down on the work load.

But, in any case, let's split the difference on your time estimate and call it 15 hours. 15 hours of work to detail one small setting all before you sit down to do a single adventure. Granted, you've got a couple of locations here to play with, at least you have maps of them, but you have not statted a single encounter, nor created a single adventure. Say that's another 3-5 hours of work for a decent sized adventure.

See, right there, that's my problem with the idea of world building first. You've spent a fair bit of time, and yes, I do think spending 15 hours (give or take) on preparing to start writing adventures is a long time.

And, to boot, you have only the barest bones of setting here anyway. This is just the start. You have several hours of work ahead of you to add any really meaningful detail to most of these sections. Right now, beyond a very small handful of points, would you call this a fully fleshed out setting? I certainly wouldn't.

/disclaimer - the following is a joke, please take it as a joke

What happens when your players want to meet the thieves guild

/end joke.

 

[Kask]

I will have a description of the places that the PCs go, and they'll suspect I have descriptions of everywhere. When the truth is, I have descriptions of the 3 locations I expected them to go during the first session. I'll have battle areas that look planned out and monsters that work well together and compliment each other's strengths to make them more interesting to fight.

That approach works very well at low levels. At mid-high level, it falls to pieces rapidly.

 

[Hussar]

I see your point. I don't fully agree with it, though. Rather, I think adventure creation should be addressed separately from campaign creation. It requires different levels of "zoom", different skill sets to some extent, and different levels of investment. Some people might run brilliant adventures but all-but-ignore campaigns; conversely, I had quite a lot of enjoyable gaming with a GM in college who was very negligent about plotted "adventures" but had a campaign that kept his players immensely busy with politics and social interaction alone. And as I've said before, I don't think the two disciplines are very often in conflict. They scratch different itches; world-building feeds the inspiration that is necessary for the perspiration.

That's certainly true. I do think that world building approaches do work. Heck, I know they work, I've seen them work, I've played in them and I've done them as well. If this conversation was happening about 5 years ago, I'd be 100% on your side of the fence on this.

What changed, for me anyway, was a dawning realization of a couple of things. One, very few players ever invest even a fraction of the interest in the setting that the DM does. They invest in the story, they invest in the campaign, but, as far as the setting goes, most of the players I've played with aren't terribly concerned with it beyond how it affects their character.

What I realized was that when I was designing campaigns, I'd have all these ideas for the setting - background, history, geography, etc. I'd do research into whatever elements I thought would help, I'd spend hours and hours trying to build my next world. And, inevitably, the stresses of trying to do that AND come up with next week's material for the session burned me out.

And I also found that this happened to many of the DM's I played with as well. So many of them would talk about how their games would fizzle after a few months or maybe a year, sometimes due to various factors, but, burnout seemed to be a pretty common one.

So, I started scaling WAYYYY back on how much world building I did, and focused much more attention on adventure creation - both linear and non-linear - and I found my campaigns worked a whole lot better.

Let me go off on a bit of a tangent here.

One of my absolute favoritest 3e book is Mystic Eye Games' Urban Blight. Fantastic book. Worth every penny. In it, it details 20 urban locations that you can drop into pretty much any setting with a bit of tweaking. They give a bit of history of each location, but primarily focus on each location as a place for adventures to occur. The bar has a slaving operation underneath, the wizard's mansion features a crazy wizard who captures people in clocks, that sort of thing.

Not that the locations are modules. They aren't. They are nowhere near that scripted. It's more like, "Here is this location, here are a few people at this location, here are half a dozen plot seeds for that location".

Now, compare that to most city setting books you buy for any given setting. You get five to ten pages of city history. A map with numbered locations. Each location has a paragraph or two of what the location is, maybe has the stats for the owner and that's about it. Tons of high altitude stuff - history, background, that sort of thing - but it's now pretty much entirely up to the individual DM to start creating adventures.

Not every setting book does this mind you. Ptolus for one does not. Freeport also includes adventure hooks for its locations. Ravens Bluff had their Points of Interest. Fantastic stuff and I wish more publishers went in that direction.

So, certainly you can go the direction of the standard setting book. Lots of background, history and whatnot. It works. It's certainly tried and true. I'm just trying to offer an alternative that I personally think works better.

 

[Imaro]

A couple of points here. First one is, please stop with the strawman that if you don't do world building you are forced to have "generic high-fantasy setting 6432577" and I'll stop calling it setting wankery. Deal?

Where did I state a strawman? I'm sorry but that's how I feel most pre-made adventures, and rightly so since they must sell to as wide a range of people as possible, feel like unless you take the time to personalize them for your game. I think your reading more into it than is there.

Second, let's not lose sight of the fact that your campaign setting is very small. You're limiting yourself to one city. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It sounds interesting, but, it does cut down on the work load.

So there's a standard size a world must be to qualify for your argument? Maybe that's just a bad assumption.

But, in any case, let's split the difference on your time estimate and call it 15 hours. 15 hours of work to detail one small setting all before you sit down to do a single adventure. Granted, you've got a couple of locations here to play with, at least you have maps of them, but you have not statted a single encounter, nor created a single adventure. Say that's another 3-5 hours of work for a decent sized adventure.

I did state I would detail (by reskinning) the major monsters and NPC's of these environments. Second, are you telling me it takes you 3-5 hours to create an adventure in 4e... are you serious? To me one of the easiest parts of 4e is making a combat encounter on the fly by reskinning monsters and adding up XP... especially if you have tables detailing what is found in a particular area. Since the maps are fleshed out anything outside of combat (hazards, traps, terrain) should be covered. I don't need a scripted adventure because the PC's will interact with things and create an adventure from the pieces that have been laid out before them.

See, right there, that's my problem with the idea of world building first. You've spent a fair bit of time, and yes, I do think spending 15 hours (give or take) on preparing to start writing adventures is a long time.

Uhm... but I have less work to do as the game progresses and more freedom for my players than if I had started wth only one option for their "adventure"... that's my problem with "scripted" adventures. I have numerous places, people, and things for them to interact with in a logical and consistent manner, more than enough to run quite a few game nights and by the time it reaches a point where they're exhausted... I'll have even more. Starting out my PC's can explore the mutant-ridden depths of the Quivering Catacombs, become enemies or seek employment with the Lawbringers, come into conflict with or work for The Faceless Man's lieutenants who run crime in The Pinched Quarter through The Shrouded Bath House, haggle and buy goods, get robbed, or hire on as bodyguards amongst the numerous merchant's tents and stalls set up in the Tradehouse or seek out room & board, rumors, employment, and information at the Brew and Breakfast. They're mapped, I have the Mjr NPC's and monsters stated and a random encounter table for The Pinched Quarter.

And, to boot, you have only the barest bones of setting here anyway. This is just the start. You have several hours of work ahead of you to add any really meaningful detail to most of these sections. Right now, beyond a very small handful of points, would you call this a fully fleshed out setting? I certainly wouldn't.

I knew this was coming, you propose a situation where I have the minimum material I would need... then go look, you only have the minimum material needed... Yeah, ok whatever.

The funny thing is that I have set up more choices and varied opportunities for my PC's than are offered by your single adventure. And since you claim it takes you 5 to 6 hours to create an adventure... that means with the same time spent on adventures, that I spent worldbuilding, you could have 2 to 3 scripted adventures ready, I've cited above only a handful of the things the PC's can explore and interact with in a single part of my world and it certainly presents the material necessary for more than 3 adventures without dictating what my PC's will do.

/disclaimer - the following is a joke, please take it as a joke

What happens when your players want to meet the thieves guild

/end joke.

The Faceless Man's lieutenants run organized crime (drugs, prostitution, extortion, larceny, etc.) in The Pinched Quarter out of The Shrouded Bath House. Or did you expect him to have a building with the words "Thieve's Guild is Right Here" carved into it ??

 

[Ourph]

That approach works very well at low levels. At mid-high level, it falls to pieces rapidly.

That's not been my experience at all. As long as the players are on board with the "If you want to do something outside the current campaign context, give the DM some advance notice"-guideline, everything works just fine.

 

[rounser]

I have numerous places, people, and things for them to interact with in a logical and consistent manner

This is usually termed adventure design, if you can actually interact with it. Will you please define terms and answer those questions, because discussing worldbuilding with you is a waste of time unless we know what you want it to mean.

 

[Imaro]

This is usually termed adventure design, if you can actually interact with it. Will you please define terms and answer those questions, because discussing worldbuilding with you is a waste of time unless we know what you want it to mean.

How about you're the only one who keeps harping on this "exact definition" thing... yet have given none yourself. How about you state what you believe and answer the questions yourself... because otherwise discussing worldbuilding with you is a waste of time unless we know what you want it to mean.

As far as your statement above, let me put it this way. IMO a building in and of itself is not an adventure. A building with a fully fleshed out inside is not an adventure. a building with a fully fleshed out inside and npc's that are fully fleshed out is not an adventure. A building with a fuly fleshed out interior, npc's and notes on their activities isn't an adventure. All it is is a component of the world (ala worldbuilding) unless the PC's choose to interact with it in some meaningful way.

You see it's not an adventure and thus not part of "adventure design" because there's no given plot or certainty for it ever being interacted with in any way by the PC's.

I mean honestly what can't you interact with in a campaign world (unless your DM specifically forbids it)? According to your definition, no matter how remote the chance... every NPC I might possibly talk to, pantheon or deity I might possibly offend, monster whose path I just might cross, shopkeeper I may haggle with, land I could ever visit, etc. is not part of worldbuilding but adventure design... so please explain to me what your version of worldbuilding actually allows for.

 

[Kask]

As long as the players are on board with the "If you want to do something outside the current campaign context, give the DM some advance notice"-guideline, everything works just fine.

Like I said, it falls to pieces rapidly. Playing in little predefined boxes (you can't use high level spells unless you give advanced notice to DM) isn't a good campaign style.

 

[Remathilis]

Like I said, it falls to pieces rapidly. Playing in little predefined boxes (you can't use high level spells unless you give advanced notice to DM) isn't a good campaign style.

You can't use high-level spells unless you've given the DM advanced notice.

A wizard must research his spells before hand. Which means he must find a tutor or a scroll to copy from. Ergo, he needs to tell the DM he's looking for said magic. He doesn't magically gain a scroll because he gained a level...

Sorcerers too, must seek to research any spell not in the PHB.

As for clerics and other divines, they must ask at the time of spell-selection if their god will grant it to them ("No, the god of ice will NOT grant you flamestrike!").

But more to your point, I don't see where it is unreasonable to ask players "what do you want to do next session" so I can prepare. If things change duing the game, I'll wing it. Otherwise, they typically stick to plan because they know the game is better with a little prep than if I'm pulling stuff out my kiester...

 

[Kask]

You can't use high-level spells unless you've given the DM advanced notice.

Umm, wrong. A player can't obtain them without DM permission. Casting them (teleport, scry, etc.) if you have them, is a different matter and is only a problem if the DM hasn't properly prepared the campaign world ahead of time. Which of course leads us back to, world building. Funny how that works...