What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Sadras]

These remarks seem oriented towards a style of play which is (in a broad sense) puzzle/mystery solving - CoC adventures can be like that, where if you don't solve the puzzle then you lose the adventure (in the sense that you can't continue) - or, alternatively, which is about playing through the pre-established story.

I hazard a guess that is how most DMs (including me) run their adventures (the second option). Certainly MiBG (Murder in Baldur's Gate) and LoftCS (Legacy of the Crystal Shard) were designed that way.

The other is "indie"/"story now" style - where the significance of the map being hidden isn't because it is a puzzle-solving challenge, nor because it is a clue to get from A to B, but because something in the dramatic essence of the situation or the characters calls for a hidden map. If the map is discovered (eg by a successful Scavenging or Perception check) then that particular dramatic need is satisied, and things unfold one way. If the map is not discovered (eg because a player never finds his/her PC in a fictional context that allows the framing of a check to find it; or because a check is made but fails) then that dramatic need is frustrated, and the resulting complications lead to things unfolding a different way.

This echoes my preferred game play. Secret backstory in our table's lycanthrope storyline being that The Hound was a beloved mentor of one of the PCs. He (player) missed all the story-line clues, only to eventually have The Hound reveal himself when the party made themselves too troublesome for him to continue to ignore them and so confronted them revealing his nature. That was GM pre-authorship added onto player derived background. I suppose this could have been developed at the table but I wouldn't know where to begin. By doing it my way I was able to frame clues properly and set-up well-thought out situations and so when the big reveal occurred (4 years of RL game-time) the player loved it.
He could have solved it earlier and that would have been perfectly fine too.

EDIT: I'm just glad as DM the campaign never ended before I could spring the surprise twist - that their arch enemy was a dear friend and mentor.

The peddler, the feather, the tower and the dishevelled figure were authored by me as GM - they were elements of framing.

...(snip)...

I'm not interested in arguing the meaing of words - that's a tedious pastime that I'll leave to the pedants.

I'm interested in discussing a particular pheneomnon in RPGing - namely, GM pre-authorship of setting. If you don't think "worldbuilding" is an apt label for that, fine - in your imagination substitute some other term into the title of the thread.

Well, I think that is the issue - the meaning of words - where you seem to differentiate between framing and worldbuilding.
Framing a scene can (usually does if not always) lead to worldbuilding.
A tower has been established through the framing - a tower that wasn't there before. I don't know how you can't see it. I believe this is where everyone is having the disconnect with you.

 

[Sadras]

Reading this, it seems like an example of GM-authored setting and backstory being a major driver of play, with at least some of that happening "behind the scenes".

Agree. Sometimes the PCs play a player-selected tight-themed campaign (my current Iron Ring campaign with all PCs connected to in someway to the organisation) while other times they each have individual player designed-backgrounds with a common bond of being in a company with me as DM interweaving and evolving much of their background into the current campaign for stronger player-investment.

The riddle, the terrorist attack, the lycanthropes, all seem to be story elements established by the GM.

Did the players know that a consequence of failing to solve the riddle would be the destruction of the inn etc?

No, but they knew something dire would occur. The first two stanzas along with 2 terrorist attacks that had occurred revealed that the third (and last) stanza hinted at another attack.

 

[Lanefan]

Let me put it this way. If you're playing a game, would you rather your character be dealing with something new....an unknown dungeon room, or a new part of a quest, or an interaction with a long sought NPC....or would you rather your character be walking through the cleared rooms of a dungeon waiting to roll high enough to find the secret door that leads to the rest of the adventure?

I'd rather be doing the first, but I accept as a part of the game that there's going to be times when I'm doing the second.

And, if the party's just walking around the cleared dungeon waiting to roll high enough to find the secret door then we're doing it wrong. We should instead:

- map the place out and look for any "missing" areas or out-of-place dead ends, then focus our search there (ideally we did the mapping already, during our initial exploration of the place)
- bring to bear any and all divination and detection spells and-or abilities we have access to
- think back on any odd behavior by the dungeon occupants that maybe we ignored at the time - could they have actually been defending a secret door that we never bothered to look for?
- trash the place, if we haven't already - maybe the door we're looking for is simply concealed behind a tapestry or buried under the manticore's bedding straw

And if all else fails, abandon the mission and go find another one.

Lanefan

 

[Jester David]

Did you actually read the post I linked to?

The peddler, the feather, the curse, Athog, Jabal, the tower, the dishevelled figure - all were authored during the course of the session.
The peddler, the feather, the tower and the dishevelled figure were authored by me as GM - they were elements of framing.
The curse was narrated by me following a failed Aura-Reading check on the feather.
Jabal was narrated by the player in the course of making a Circles check. Athog was narrated by me as a consequence of that check failing.

Yes, I had seen that.

My point was that in the session where the mage was decapitated, the existence of the tower had been previously established. (I am making the assuming it wasn't created in the same session, as the linked post was from 2014.) For the session where the PCs returned to the tower, it had effectively been pre-authored. It was established. It was an element of the world. There was continuity.

For the purposes of that session, it doesn't matter if you had created the tower personally, it was the result of a random roll, if it came from a published campaign product, or even if it had been generated by a player not currently at the table. It's source was moot and had no impact on the unfolding of the plot or the challenges of the story. It didn't modify any roles or alter the choices of the players.

Despite what you may think, it is possible to run a RPG session without all the story elements having been made up in advance.

I have run multiple sessions entirely on the fly, thank you very much.

My current 5e campaign began with notes on a fight to start the session in media res but the rest of the session was entirely improvised. I've done dungeon crawls through randomly generated dungeons created by websites. And I've done completely spontaneous games planned off the seat of my pants while hanging with fellow gamers when someone has said "hey, we should do some gaming!"

But I've also done several pre-published campaigns, running two Paizo APs and the Dragonlance adventures. I've also spent several years running pre-published modules for organised play. And I've done a number of homebrew games with various levels of scripting and preparation.

I've run campaigns set in Ravenloft, the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Golarion, the 'Verse, a galaxy far, far away, and a half-dozen homebrew settings of various degrees of fantasy or modernity. I've been a part of a zombie apocalypse game set in my hometown. And I've collaboratively built worlds, where each player takes turns adding towns, regions, factions, and similar world elements as the need arises, creating a mosaic world.

None of this is correct.

I disagree.

Which is the crux of my point, which keeps apparently going over your head. I'll try again...

I'm interested in discussing a particular pheneomnon in RPGing - namely, GM pre-authorship of setting.

The question I tease earlier is: why does it matter when the GM does so rather than anyone else?

Unless you're playing with telepaths who can also see your notes, players don't know the source of a piece of the setting. If they see a giant fey tree filled with sprites at the edge of their vision, they have no way of knowing if that tree exists because they failed a travel check, if it's a random encounter from a table, if it's a planned encounter prepared by the GM, or if it's a scripted encounter part of the pre-published module. The different illusionary. And irrelevant to the players so long as they have a choice with how to interact with the tree. That's what matters: the freedom for players to choose how their character interacts with the elements of the adventure.
The source of the world details has zero impact on session itself.

Having watched many, many episodes of Critical Role, I have no idea which social encounters and NPCs were planned well in advance and which ones were created spontaneously because the players decided to go into a random store. Because it doesn't matter to the flow of the story.

To hammer the point home, what was the source of my example? The giant tree covered by sprites. Which published adventure was it from? Or was it really from an episode of a streamed game? Or was that from my homegame? Or was it just something that popped into mind? Couldn't it also have equally have come from multiple sources, since few people generate ideas entirely in a vacuum?

If you think it makes no difference to the character of RPGing how, when and by whom setting elements are authored, then I don't know what to say! You're obviously looking for a veryvery different experience in RPGing from what I am.

After reading several of your threads over the years, I don't think anybody looks at RPGing just like you do...

 

[RedShirtNo5.1]

Pemerton says that in Gygaxian play, a significant goal of play is for players to make action declaration statements to trigger the GM to read stuff from his/her notes.

I say that in Pemertonian play, a significant goal of play is for the GM to read stuff from his/her notes to trigger the players to make action declaration statements.

 

[Lanefan]

Pemerton says that in Gygaxian play, a significant goal of play is for players to make action declaration statements to trigger the GM to read stuff from his/her notes.

I say that in Pemertonian play, a significant goal of play is for the GM to read stuff from his/her notes to trigger the players to make action declaration statements.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, I had seen that.

My point was that in the session where the mage was decapitated, the existence of the tower had been previously established.

<snip>

For the session where the PCs returned to the tower, it had effectively been pre-authored. It was established. It was an element of the world. There was continuity.

For the purposes of that session, it doesn't matter if you had created the tower personally, it was the result of a random roll, if it came from a published campaign product, or even if it had been generated by a player not currently at the table. It's source was moot and had no impact on the unfolding of the plot or the challenges of the story.

<snip>

Unless you're playing with telepaths who can also see your notes, players don't know the source of a piece of the setting.

Do you really believe that last sentence?

None of my players is telepathic, and yet they know that stuff is being authored by me in response to their action declarations - because they see me do it.

Your comment has the same plausibility as saying that someone in a conversation with you won't be able to tell if you're actually responding to them, or just reading them a script. Much, I would say most, of the time, they actually can.

The tower would not even have been an element of the fiction established during play except that the player declared a check to make contact with a senior member of his cabal. Likewise in my Traveller game, the trinket markets wouldn't even have been conceived of as elements of the fiction except the players decided that their PCs would go to look for signs of alien manufacture.

The players can tell this without being telepaths. They're not idiots. They know that I am responding to their action declarations. It's obvious.

And if you think it doesn't matter, when the PCs return to the tower months (years?) of actual time later, that it is the tower of a NPC whose character is intimately connected, both in the fiction and at the table, to the mage PC - well, that's also wrong. That's actually pretty fundamental to the play experience.

From time to time my daughters have derived pleasure from the fact that I put their bikes together. The phenomenon in RPGing is not identical, but it has some similiarities: it makes a big difference (to me, and as best I can tell to my players) that this is our fiction that we established together playing the game.

EDIT: some more responses to a baffling post.

After reading several of your threads over the years, I don't think anybody looks at RPGing just like you do...

Well, given that most of my analysis is highly derivative of Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, Luke Crane, Christopher Kubasik, Eero Tuovinen, and probably others I'm forgetting to name (Robin Laws in some moods would be another), that surprises me.

Christopher Kubasik wrote the "Interactive Toolkit" about 20 years ago (I just Googled it - 1995). This stuff is not cutting edge.

The different illusionary.

This is just a bizarre thing to say. As if my choices don't matter, because it's possible that an alien who controlled my brain by remote control might have me do the same stuff.

It's completly typical, in human creative and expressive endeavours, for origins, participation, mutuality of input, etc to matter a great deal.

And irrelevant to the players so long as they have a choice with how to interact with the tree. That's what matters: the freedom for players to choose how their character interacts with the elements of the adventure.
The source of the world details has zero impact on session itself.

The current state of my BW game is that the mage PC is locked in a prison cell, but Jabal is also there with him - having come to pay a "friendly" visit. I think the PC is going to try and kill Jabal.

The idea that it makes no difference to this how Jabal became an element of focus for the campaign is just silly.

 

[pemerton]

Framing a scene can (usually does if not always) lead to worldbuilding.
A tower has been established through the framing - a tower that wasn't there before. I don't know how you can't see it. I believe this is where everyone is having the disconnect with you.

What disconnect?

Obviously framing a scene with a tower establishes setting. My point is that it is not pre-authored. It occurs on the spot as part of the ongoing back-and-forth between players and GM.

This relates back to a reply upthread to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION].

One consequence of pre-authored setting is that the GM may (frequently does, I believe) use it to declare actions unsuccessful based on secret considerations of fictional positioning. (This is what the map example has mostly been about.)

Another is that the pre-authored setting reflects the GM's conception of the concerns/themes/direction of play. As I posted just upthread of this, the idea that there is no interesting difference here strikes me as no more plausible than the idea that conversing with a friend is no different from reading a script to them.

 

[pemerton]

I say that in Pemertonian play, a significant goal of play is for the GM to read stuff from his/her notes to trigger the players to make action declaration statements.

What notes?

Eg this:

each also wrote up a immediate goal-oriented belief: I had pulled out my old Greyhawk material and told them they were starting in the town of Hardby, half-way between the forest (where the assassin had fled from) and the desert hills (where Jobe had been travelling), and so each came up with a belief around that: I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother and, for the assassin with starting Resources 0, I'm not leaving Hardby penniless .

<snip>

I started things in the Hardby market: Jobe was looking at the wares of a peddler of trinkets and souvenirs, to see if there was anything there that might be magical or useful for enchanting for the anticipated confrontation with his brother. Given that the brother is possessed by a demon, he was looking for something angelic. The peddler pointed out an angel feather that he had for sale, brought to him from the Bright Desert. Jobe (who has, as another instinct, to always use Second Sight), used Aura Reading to study the feather for magical traits. The roll was a failure, and so he noticed that it was Resistant to Fire (potentially useful in confronting a Balrog) but also cursed. (Ancient History was involved somehow here too, maybe as a FoRK into Aura Reading (? I can't really remember), establishing something about an ancient battle between angels and demons in the desert.)

The framing is a direct response to the player's authorship of a Belief: no notes. The magical properties of the feather (fire resistance, and the curse) were consequences narrated in response to the check: no notes.

Then there's this:

We ended up with the following PCs (sheets attached):

* Roland, who served 4 terms in the Interstellar Navy but never received a commission despite finishing a PhD (Educ D);

<snip>

* Methwit, who had poor physical stats but good Edu and Soc and served as a diplomat - it quickly became clear (given his skill rolls) that his status as 3rd Secretary was a cover for some sort of espionage role, and after 3 terms the player decided there was no reason to hang around and risk aging rolls, so Methwit "retired" from the diplomatic corps to make himself available for a wider range of "irregular" operations;

<snip>

* Vincenzo (Baron of Hallucida), the replacement for a belter who died in his first term (crushed between asteroids!), was rolled up last - with Soc B the player went noble to try for a yacht; this looked pretty unlikely when he failed his second term survival roll (by 1) and so had to muster out early with Gambling-2 and Bribery-1 his only skills, and just a single roll for mustering out benefits; but the die came up 6 and everyone cheered - now the group would have a ship.​

Given that all the players had submitted to the randomness that is Traveller - and had got a pretty interesting set of characters out of it - I had to put myself through the same rigour as GM. So I rolled up a random starting world:

Class A Starport, 1000 mi D, near-vaccuum, with a pop in the 1000s, no government and law level 2 (ie everything allowed except carrying portable laser and energy weapons) - and TL 16, one of the highest possible!​

So what did all that mean, and what were the PCs doing there?

I christened the world Ardour-3, and we agreed that it was a moon orbiting a gas giant, with nothing but a starport (with a casino) and a series of hotels/hostels adjoining the starport (the housing for the 6,000 inhabitants). The high tech level meant that most routine tasks were performed by robots.

Roland, having left the service and now wandering the universe (paid for by his membership of the TAS), was working as a medic in the hospital, overseeing the medbots. Vincenzo was a patient there - the player explained that Vincenzo had won his yacht in the casino, and the (previous) owners had honoured the bet but had also beaten Vincenzo to within an inch of his life (hence the failed surival roll).

<snip>

With the background in place, I then rolled for a patron on the random patron table, and got a "marine officer" result. Given the PC backgrounds, it made sense that Lieutenant Li - as I dubbed her - would be making contact with Roland. The first thing I told the players was that a Scout ship had landed at the starport, although there it has no Scout base and there is no apparent need to do any survey work in the system; and that the principal passenger seemed to be an officer of the Imperial Marines. I then explained that, while doing the rounds at the hospital, Roland received a message from his old comrade Li inviting him to meet her at the casino, and to feel free to bring along any friends he might have in the place.

<snip>

Lt Li wondered whether Vincenzo would be able to take 3 tons of cargo to Byron for her. (With his excellent education, Roland knew that Byron was a planet with a large (pop in the millions) city under a serious of domes, but without the technical capabilities to maintain the domes into the long term.) When the PCs arrived on Byron contact would be made by those expecting the goods. And payment would be 100,000 for the master of the ship, plus 10,000 for each other crew member.

Some quick maths confirmed that 100,000 would more than cover the fuel costs of the trip, and so Vincenzo (taking advice from Roland - he knows nothing about running a ship) agreed to the request.

Methwit thought all this sounded a bit odd - why would a high-class (Soc A) marine lieutenant be smuggling goods into a dead-end world like Byron - and so asked Li back to his hotel room to talk further. With his Liaison-1 and Carousing-1 and a good reaction roll she agreed, and with his Interrogation-1 he was able to obtain some additional information (although he did have to share some details about his own background to persuade her to share).

The real situation, she explained, was that Byron was itself just a stop-over point. The real action was on another world - Enlil - which is technologically backwards and has a disease-ridden atmosphere to which there is no resistance or immunity other than in Enlil's native population. So the goods to be shipped from Ardour-3 were high-tech medical gear for extracting and concentrating pathogens from the atmosphere on Enlil, to be shipped back to support a secret bio-weapons program. The reason a new team was needed for this mission was because Vincenzo had won the yacht from the original team - who were being dealt with "appropriately" for their incompetence in disrupting the operation.

That's not reading notes. That's establishing a situation (with elements established by random rolls) in a way that responds to the players' PCs and their backstories.

This is just the Traveller variant of Eero Tuovinen's "Standard Narrativistic Model": the players generate PCs who have dramatic needs of some sort; the GM frames situations which speak to those needs; the players declare actions; those actions generate consequences which inform the framing of subsequent situations.

The main points of peculiarity in Traveller are (i) the random generation of content, and (ii) the fact that the action resolution mechanics sometimes (by no means always) display their 40 year old provencance - they don't always generate significant consequences, and sometimes there are no clear mechanics to resolve a declared action. (Like the trip to the market to find the alien-manufactured trinket that I discussed above.)

 

[Jester David]

Do you really believe that last sentence?

Yes.
I have played in lots of different games with lots of different DMs, and watched games online, and read blogs by DMs about their game, and listened to podcasts about DMing & DMs and no one runs a game just like you...

None of my players is telepathic, and yet they know that stuff is being authored by me in response to their action declarations - because they see me do it.

Your comment has the same plausibility as saying that someone in a conversation with you won't be able to tell if you're actually responding to them, or just reading them a script. Much, I would say most, of the time, they actually can.

The tower would not even have been an element of the fiction established during play except that the player declared a check to make contact with a senior member of his cabal. Likewise in my Traveller game, the trinket markets wouldn't even have been conceived of as elements of the fiction except the players decided that their PCs would go to look for signs of alien manufacture.

The players can tell this without being telepaths. They're not idiots. They know that I am responding to their action declarations. It's obvious.

Your argument can be reduced to:
"I (think/ know) my players can tell when I'm improvising or using pre-planned ideas. Therefore, all players can tell when all DMs are using pre-planned ideas rather than improvising.
And that's a big ol' "no".

Again, I direct you to the latest episode of Critical Role. Watching the episode, the PCs go to several locations and meet several NPCs and which ones were planned well ahead of time and which ones were spontaneously generated because the players wanted to buy books is unknown.

Okay, it can be apparent if the DM is reading from a book or sheet of paper, reciting the read-aloud text. But if I just have a few key word notes and improvise my description, there's fewer tells that I'm improvising or pre-planning. And I can also change details, customising elements to match the player's expectations and respond to their questions.
Ditto is you paraphrase, reading the text and then putting it into your own words. If there is a DM screen, there's no easy way for the players to tell if you're reading from a book, reading from the notes beside the open book, or just looking down to give the impression they're on the right track and you're not just pulling everything out of your ass.

And if you think it doesn't matter, when the PCs return to the tower months (years?) of actual time later, that it is the tower of a NPC whose character is intimately connected, both in the fiction and at the table, to the mage PC - well, that's also wrong. That's actually pretty fundamental to the play experience.

Uh-huh. And that play experience isn't affected if you took a pre-existing tower that was on a map in a published campaign setting and just said, "oh, this is the NPC tower", tweaking the description to match their tastes.
The details that matter are basically madlibs. "This is the <place noun> of an NPC <class> whose is you <relation>." You can mix and match those blanks infinitely but the actual effect on the session is unchanged if the players are racing to their mage brother's tower to save him from an assassin or charging to their thief sister's warehouse lair to save her from a slaadi. The relationship and how it affects the players is the important part and what the players care about. The origin of the specific noun does not.

From time to time my daughters have derived pleasure from the fact that I put their bikes together. The phenomenon in RPGing is not identical, but it has some similiarities: it makes a big difference (to me, and as best I can tell to my players) that this is our fiction that we established together playing the game.

Did they like those bikes more than if you had paid someone else to assemble them or bought them pre-assembled? Or were they just happy to have a damn bike?
Or was it the time spent making the bike the important bonding part?

Well, given that most of my analysis is highly derivative of Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, Luke Crane, Christopher Kubasik, Eero Tuovinen, and probably others I'm forgetting to name (Robin Laws in some moods would be another), that surprises me.

Christopher Kubasik wrote the "Interactive Toolkit" about 20 years ago (I just Googled it - 1995). This stuff is not cutting edge.

I've read some of the same stuff you have and had very different reactions. How I read the Luke Crane bit you posted was very different.

The different illusionary.

This is just a bizarre thing to say. As if my choices don't matter, because it's possible that an alien who controlled my brain by remote control might have me do the same stuff.

It's completly typical, in human creative and expressive endeavours, for origins, participation, mutuality of input, etc to matter a great deal.

The current state of my BW game is that the mage PC is locked in a prison cell, but Jabal is also there with him - having come to pay a "friendly" visit. I think the PC is going to try and kill Jabal.

The idea that it makes no difference to this how Jabal became an element of focus for the campaign is just silly.

I know some players that would be appalled by the idea of the DM just making things up as they occurred. The idea that they're not on the right track or doing the right thing but simply rolling well or having things laid out for them.

Others, yeah, they want the involved interactive story. But many PCs also just want the rollercoaster with the solid plot, even if there are heavy rails. So long as the story is good, does it matter? And there's the challenge of doing better than other groups.

And, again, I'm talking about perception. If the players do not know that there's only a veil of choice or their connections are being added to established content, it makes no different to them because they don't know.