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

[Andor]

I don't have to do anything of the sort, because there's no "railroad box" to think outside. That's an unfounded assumption on your part about my games. The fact that I expect my players to give me some advance notice before completely changing their current focus in the campaign in no way implies that they aren't able to make whatever choices they want.

Speaking for myself, I don't expect any sane GM to have built up so much of the world that I can point to any random spot on the map and he'll know who lives there, what their plot hooks are, and who was their first love.

My problem has frequently been however that GMs who don't do enough world building are left floundering when I approach the main problem that was supposed to be the main focus of the evening from some angle they weren't expecting. Not hareing off on some random plot. Not being deliberatly disruptive. Just trying to do what the GM wanted me to do in a way he didn't expect. Like by trying to contact the local thieves guild to see what they know about the guarded warehouse, and do they have some back way into it?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Thing is, even if the only foes are the alligators I still have a ready-made world to use again.

This is one of those things I see thrown around a lot. I guess I just never considered using the same campaign world twice. We pretty much assume each and every time we start a new game that it takes place in a new world.

I like the variety of playing in different worlds each time. I feel too restricted when I'm running in a world with a bunch of established parameters. I can't run a campaign about finding the 5 parts of the Drow Rod of Supremacy in a world that I've established has no Drow. So, I come up with the idea for the campaign and then fill in the world details around that plot.

Each detail I write for one campaign would only cause one more limitation on future ones. Better to start from scratch each time.

It took almost a year of play in my current game before any of my players saw a map of what lay beyond the Empire's borders; a map which I'd drawn over a year before the first session. Some here seem to think this is not the right way to do things, but I'll go with what works, thanks.

Good for you. I don't mean that sarcastically. If you have the time and feel it's worthwhile then I think it's a great idea. However, since the average duration of our games tends to be 3-6 months before everyone gets bored, half the players real life concerns make them stop playing, or any number of other things...it seems silly to me to spend too much time working on a world for that game.

Plus, it just seems too much like actual work to me. It's almost like homework. I didn't like doing homework when I was going to school. I was notorious for turning in assignments very late or not at all. I spent the time playing games with my friends rather than doing work. It's the same when I run a D&D game. DMing can be fun, as long as it doesn't require me to write anything down more than a couple of point form notes when I have a free minute or two. As soon as it requires me to draw maps before hand, plan out geography, come up with a list of NPCs and the like it takes all the fun out of the game for me.

The fun part of it is at the table for me. Roleplaying that Ogre attacking the party. Seeing what the PCs will do when faced with the Dragon, and so on.

 

[Scribble]

My problem has frequently been however that GMs who don't do enough world building are left floundering when I approach the main problem that was supposed to be the main focus of the evening from some angle they weren't expecting. Not hareing off on some random plot. Not being deliberatly disruptive. Just trying to do what the GM wanted me to do in a way he didn't expect. Like by trying to contact the local thieves guild to see what they know about the guarded warehouse, and do they have some back way into it?

Some people like lots of information about a subject they can use for this purpose. They have a book or a binder full of notes that they can either quickly reference or remember when you ask that question.

Someone like me on the other hand? The more notes I have on the subject the worse I get. I get nervous I forgot or missed something, I spend entirely too long reading what the answer is, or I just end up making something up anyway. Big books of notes and lots of detail do me absolutely no good. A DM like me just needs a few key ideas, and improv will fill in the rest. I just can't do it any other way.

 

[Kask]

I don't have to do anything of the sort, because there's no "railroad box" to think outside. That's an unfounded assumption on your part about my games. The fact that I expect my players to give me some advance notice before completely changing their current focus in the campaign in no way implies that they aren't able to make whatever choices they want.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that this is wrong. It is a matter of taste/preference. Some players don't mind being limited like that, some do. Ultimately, you DM for your group. Either they like/don't mind, being somewhat limited or they don't.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Speaking for myself, I don't expect any sane GM to have built up so much of the world that I can point to any random spot on the map and he'll know who lives there, what their plot hooks are, and who was their first love.

My problem has frequently been however that GMs who don't do enough world building are left floundering when I approach the main problem that was supposed to be the main focus of the evening from some angle they weren't expecting. Not hareing off on some random plot. Not being deliberatly disruptive. Just trying to do what the GM wanted me to do in a way he didn't expect. Like by trying to contact the local thieves guild to see what they know about the guarded warehouse, and do they have some back way into it?

For me, fortunately, answering both of these questions is done in pretty much the same way.

The primary method is "figure it out from some other, established, plot point." If you point at a spot on the map I might figure out who lives there based on, say, the terrain (it's a blank field, probably farmers?), what their plot hooks are based on who they are (farmers have evil druids causing blight on their crops!) and who their first love is (farmer fell in love with the woman who sells his vegetables in town).

And though I didn't know the answer to that question before you asked, I'll know by the time I'm done answering.

Same with the thieves' guild. I base it on what the warehouse is (it's too heavily guarded by the guardians for the thieves to know much about it, but they know plenty about its defenses! No back way, though...)

If I'm drawing a blank, I might determine the result with a roll (easy when it's binary yes/now kind of a thing), and go from there.

It's the "snowball theory" of campaign design. I start with a few points, and just snowball details, never going back on them, using them to develop new points as I need them.

It's fun for me to discover the world as my players do like this.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

KM, I can't remember where you fall on the sandbox/script spectrum, but this is almost exactly what I do. Start small, build as I go, often improvise as I play, and never go back on what I have put into play, unless I can do it in a way that makes sense and is fun. I like to double cross or the big reveal about how things were misinterpreted.

I do all this from the prespective of what fits the characters/themes/story that we are telling. The world is molded to fit this. It is very much not a sandbox, but it also allows plenty of character and player choice.

Kask, I find it amusing that you cannot understand how absence of traditional preplanned worldbuilding does not necessarily lead to limited player/character choice. Choice has nothing to do with whether you pretend to know everything about the world before you sit down to play, or if you sit down to play without imagining that you know everything about the world. Limiting choice is a conscious act by the DM that only happens during play, and as I see it, you are more likely to do it if you have previously decided things than if you leave most things up to what happens during play. Pretending to have established "enough" about the world prior to play has absolutely nothing to do with choice. Focusing on events verses focusing on geography has nothing to do with choice. Choice is how the DM and players interact.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yeah, that style isn't much of a sandbox OR a script, but it's a really satisfying way to design a setting as you go, mostly because you only put in work where you want it.

Say you start with the idea that you want them to fight Orcus eventually. You let your players choose whatever. Your players come to you with an elf ninja, a thri-kreen psionicist, a dwarven warlock, a halfling cleric, and a human paladin.

Connect the dots.

Maybe ninjas, who lurk in shadows, are hired by the cult of Orcus. Maybe elves are now all asian, and maybe this elf ninja wants to fight the influence of this god of death on the elves! Maybe Thri-kreens go on "vision quests" like Australian aboriginals, and this one saw a vision of an evil goat. Maybe the dwarf is part of a clan who "dug too deep," and maybe that's part of how Orcus is getting into the world. Maybe the paladin and the cleric are from the same church, raised there as orphans, and forced to go fight the Orcus Cult for the glory of Moradin.

Now, suddenly, you have a surplus of awesome in your setting, and an excuse for everyone to go kill Orcus. All these datapoints are things you can build later adventures on. Maybe the first adventure has to do with everyone meeting in a town where Orcus's cultists have been sighted recently. They all come into town, meet in the tavern, and see that they have the same goals. They team up and fight it and suddenly we're off on a series of quests.

You have more information than you'll need for the adventure (which is sandboxy -- the PC's know that Thri-kreen have visions and such, so maybe if they need some divination done, they'll visit the Thri-kreen!), but you also won't have anything that's really irrelevant (The thri-kreen vision is WHY the thri-kreen character is involved), and you'll have plenty of points for unexpected choices (Ah! You want to team up with the cultists to go deeper! That's fine! Thankfully, you have an elf ninja in your party, and a dwarf warlock, and the cultists are used to dealing with those types! Better hide the halfling and the human, though!).

It's kind of a lot of fun.

 

[Beginning of the End]

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.

The relative scale of a setting has very little to do with the amount of work it requires to prepare. I've seen entire worlds described in 34-page gazetteers and I've seen single cities described in 600+ page tomes. (And gotten use out of both.)

But that leads me to a more general point, which is...

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.

I've been talking with a friend about these issues lately, and he mentioned something that I thought was quite useful: There is broad prep and there's deep prep.

What constitutes breadth and depth depends on the scale of what you're prepping, but in general you need to broad prep so that you have a framework to build on, but you should only do deep prep into those areas that the players are eminently going to see.

He recommends thinking of prep in three tiers: The broad strokes, the details, and the development.

For example, if you're designing a village for sandbox play your broad prep might be the name of the village; a map; maybe some quick notes on the town's general history, purpose, location, etc. Your detailed prep might be a dozen or so NPCs and a few locations that the PCs are likely to interact with.

Then, at that point, you wait and see what happens when the PCs actually interact with the village. What inn do they decide to stay at? Which NPCs do they seem to really like interacting with? Those are the things that you should come back in and develop with even greater depth. Everything else (the locations and people they're less interested in) you can leave sketchy.

My current campaign world now comprises several hundred pages of notes and dozens of maps. But it got it's start as a 15-page player handout; 2 pages of "secret pre-history"; a world map with the borders of the major kingdoms marked; a 2-page campaign outline; and a single adventure.

But within that material I had the broad strokes of the entire world laid out: The major countries, cultures, gods, religions, languages, historical events, and the like. It was a broad -- but simple -- foundation.

Everything else that has been designed for that world has been designed as I needed it. And, in general, I follow a pretty simple maxim: If the players aren't going to see it, then it's as if it never existed at all.

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.

I'm going to go ahead and pimp the sig.

 

[Ourph]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that this is wrong. It is a matter of taste/preference. Some players don't mind being limited like that, some do. Ultimately, you DM for your group. Either they like/don't mind, being somewhat limited or they don't.

Unfortunately, you're still failing to grasp what I've been saying. There are no limitations. The players can chose to do whatever they want. Asking them to tell to me about choices that drastically change the direction of the campaign before they make them isn't a limit on those choices.

 

[Andor]

Unfortunately, you're still failing to grasp what I've been saying. There are no limitations. The players can chose to do whatever they want. Asking them to tell to me about choices that drastically change the direction of the campaign before they make them isn't a limit on those choices.

You can say that, but it directly contradicts my own experiences. When I think of a different approach to a problem that the GM didn't foresee, and didn't detail just because, the answer is pretty much always "no", "You can't do that" or "There isn't one". In extreme cases this leads to heavily populated cites with no drainage or sewer systems because I wanted to know if there were tunnnels under the city.

A few times people in this thread have mentioned geology as an explict example of something that is silly to detail. Or local wildlife.

IRL at one point Julius Ceasar had a city under siege. As the romans were masters of hydrology he managed to find and block the underground river that fed their well and the city surrendered in days instead of months.

I also seem to recall a viking commander who noted that there were birds who nested in the thatch roofs of the city he was besieging. Everyday they flew out of the town to eat, and returned at night. So that day he has his men catch as many of the birds as they could. They tied long strings soaked in pitch to the birds legs, and at dusk they lit the strings and released the birds, who flew back to their nests and burned the town to the ground.

Details matter. If the GM added lot's of details beforehand then clever players can usse those details.

In my experience however, unplanned details do not suddenly appear just because I had an idea, or remembered a bit of history.