What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

More and more I'm thinking that preference of one style over the other is a personality thing. The way you have to think about player facing games reminds me of the way actors talk about their craft. It takes a different mindset than most of us have(much more left brained). That also would jive with the difference in the number of DM facing games vs. the number of player facing games. Just like there are a lot more of the rest of than people who are actors(or think like actors), there are a lot more DM facing games out there.

That's not to say that people can't enjoy both, but I think the preference for one over the other is going to go hand in hand with how people think and perceive the world.

I've found that the vast majority of people are quite capable of enjoying either, when they are done well. Most players have been trained by D&D, which has really never escaped its roots entirely. They come pre-educated with the very thought pattern [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] was using there. It takes some time and familiarity to unlearn and realize that the Story Now game is a much more open book.

OTOH Children almost invariably attempt to play Story Now. Often the adults try to reign them in, but in fact they are excellent players. The uninitiated of all ages in fact often do this, they attempt to enact their vision of where things should go and how the world works. Typically they get 'taught' to follow someone else's lead. I think you could also say this is something that arises from general socialization. Independence of thought is not encouraged in this world.

 

[Lanefan]

1) This is an RPG, not a work of fiction. The whole point of an RPG is to play the characters

Yes.

to explore what the existence and experiences of a character are about, and the ramifications of their beliefs and personality.

Dear gods, no!

I don't play to psychoanalyze my characters or deep-dive into their angsts and drama (except for occasional comedic purposes). If I wanted that I'd find a Vampire LARP where I could angst myself into oblivion.

The purpose of playing an RPG is to play the characters and bring them to life, sure, but also to see what kind of story can be collectively woven by the party these characters are a part of for however long they last. And to weave that story requires a solid and consistent backdrop...the game-world or setting built either by [insert favoured RPG publisher here] or the DM.

2) You're not JRRT! (neither are any of us).

No, I'm not - which means you'd have to put up with my much lesser turn of phrase when it came to setting description, because it's all I've got.

Now, I've actually run games in a single persistent fantasy world for 40 years, give or take, and I ASSURE you it isn't even nearly in the same realm of elaboration of history and various other elements. It probably has a lot more descriptions of towns, forests, roads, mountains, etc than 3rd Age M.E. but that's about it.

Over 40 years you'd have built up a pretty good knowledge of what's where in that world and how things function, right - good enough to be consistent from session to session and (if necessary) campaign to campaign? Great - you're good to go!

Further, with all this game-world knowledge you're in a better position than most to have things happening behind the scenes in an internally-consistent manner.

 

[Lanefan]

I think this is a really interesting point. You are thinking with the mind of a player in a DM-centered game, and applying your conclusions to a Story Now game.

I'm looking at it as if I were a player in it, and approaching it from that perspective.

The GM in Story Now HAS NO AGENDA. There is nothing significant about the bazaar, whatsoever. It was invented 5 seconds ago and it is a nullity, "gate gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi soha!" It is literally empty of meaning. The GM put the player there so that the player could exercise his interest in a particular theme, in an exercise of RPing. The plot significance of the place will arise out of the interaction of these two (probably more) participants. If the player says "Oh, I want to go to the library, I ask the guy at the stall here which direction to find that in" then that's all the meaning there ever was in that scene. He's not 'missing something' because he didn't stick around. That's exactly the sort of logic which would apply in DM-centered play instead! How many times have I pixel-bitched some room at the end of a hall, thinking "The GM put it here for SOME reason, didn't he!?" In a Story Now game I can just walk out, any potential meaning is unrealized and its meaningless to even ask "what would have happened if I'd stayed there?"

In a DM-centered game I could also just walk out; and in either type I could always later muse on "what might have happened had I stayed there?"

It is hard to overemphasize this point, it is a sort of category error. Reasoning this way about Story Now is simply not going to make sense.

I think I'd be a lousy story-now player as I'd constantly be asking for enough information to give me choices about what to do next, and constantly asking about what we just potentially missed out on between one framed scene and the next.

I'm a chaotic player - sure I can set goals and beliefs for a character while rolling it up but that doesn't mean I'm going to want to stick to that story if something more interesting happens by; and I'm always going to be on the lookout for that 'something more interesting'.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, I largely disagree. A reasonably well-formulated and run Story Now game will feel like a pretty coherent narrative. It MAY deal in less detail with some relatively peripheral things than your game might, but the story will be complete and should feel complete and dramatically cogent to the players. No game I ever ran was ever described by anyone, to my knowledge, as a highlight reel.

In hindsight, perhaps not. But in play it would feel like one, at least to me, if we were being jumped from one framed scene to the next with nothing in between.

We had a guy in our crew who ran a 3.xe game for a while, and it was just like that - finish one set-piece scene, jump straight to the next; from highlight to highlight. A lot of this was due to the DM having about the attention span of a chicken (he's like that with movies too - if there's more than 5 minutes between action scenes he gets bored); but it annoyed the players to no end as they felt very railroaded and never had any chance to interact with anything other than the set-piece scenes. I'm reminded of that game every time you guys describe this story-now stuff and how it works, as the end result seems so similar.

Nor is it in any sense shorter than your game. Maybe you get to play more than I do? Possible, and good for you, but on the whole we're likely to each play some amount of RPGs and whether its slogging through lots of trivia or high adventure isn't going to change that.

We may well play about the same # of hours in a year - not sure.

But if a game engages my interest it doesn't matter to me how long it takes (real time) to resolve the story. 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? So what? I'm enjoying the game every week, and as long as everyone else is as well then that's all that matters.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

A question is slowly beginning to occur to me...let's see if I can phrase it at all clearly.

If the game, here somewhat paraphrased, proceeds thusly:

1. Player during char-gen specifies goals, beliefs etc. for her character, at least one of which includes a specific end point or problem to solve (e.g. free my brother from possession by a balrog).

2. Player during play can set the success condition for an action declaraction to be a step toward solving that problem (I check the feather to see if it'll help against balrogs)

3. Player can in effect repeat this as necessary, with variants, until the action declaration succeeds (PC has moved one step closer to freeing her brother)

4. Player can repeat 2 and 3 above, each time getting another step closer to solving the problem provided the dice co-operate, until the fiction reaches a climax point

5. At that climax point, player can specify the success condition being that the problem is solved (e.g. no more balrog in my brother).

My question then is, particularly if the dice rolls go well for this player isn't this all just a slow-motion violation of Czege? In step 1 the player sets the problem, in steps 2-5 the player also sets the solutions and if the dice go her way she cannot be stopped from achieving them. Even if the dice don't go her way she can only truly be stopped at 5, with an outright fail on her roll in that climactic situation.

Lan-"Czegemate?"-efan

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has several posts just upthread that are really on-point.

It's not more railroading to establish the situation as an exciting one rather than an unexciting one. It's not more railroading for the most salient element in the situation to be "What do I make of this feather-selling peddler?" rather than "Should I look for a bazaar or a sage?" A moral or thematic choice doesn't become more pressing or poignant because framed in terms the GM thinks interesting ("There's a slave being beaten") than terms the player has made salient ("Would you try and steal the feather?" "What do you do when the leader of your cabal asks you to leave town because you're bearing a cursed feather?"). The campaign world doesn't have more depth because more play time was spent asking the GM for information about the fiction, rather than actually engaging with and helping establish the fiction.

An individual player may prefer to be told some fiction rather than contribute to creating some. But that's a property of the player; it doesn't entail any particular properties of the fiction.

 

[Maxperson]

I've found that the vast majority of people are quite capable of enjoying either, when they are done well. Most players have been trained by D&D, which has really never escaped its roots entirely. They come pre-educated with the very thought pattern [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] was using there. It takes some time and familiarity to unlearn and realize that the Story Now game is a much more open book.

I think most could enjoy both as well, but they will still have a preference for one over the other.

OTOH Children almost invariably attempt to play Story Now. Often the adults try to reign them in, but in fact they are excellent players. The uninitiated of all ages in fact often do this, they attempt to enact their vision of where things should go and how the world works. Typically they get 'taught' to follow someone else's lead. I think you could also say this is something that arises from general socialization. Independence of thought is not encouraged in this world.

Yes. Once we start teaching the kids critical thinking and other ways to survive and thrive in the real world, the other type of thinking goes away. For a few, though, the
actor thinking"(for lack of a better term) remains, and that type of thinking seems to be the mainstay for player facing games. Anyone can learn that to a degree, but they won't be as good or as comfortable with it as those who never grew out of it like the actors.

 

[Maxperson]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has several posts just upthread that are really on-point.

It's not more railroading to establish the situation as an exciting one rather than an unexciting one. It's not more railroading for the most salient element in the situation to be "What do I make of this feather-selling peddler?" rather than "Should I look for a bazaar or a sage?" A moral or thematic choice doesn't become more pressing or poignant because framed in terms the GM thinks interesting ("There's a slave being beaten") than terms the player has made salient ("Would you try and steal the feather?" "What do you do when the leader of your cabal asks you to leave town because you're bearing a cursed feather?"). The campaign world doesn't have more depth because more play time was spent asking the GM for information about the fiction, rather than actually engaging with and helping establish the fiction.

An individual player may prefer to be told some fiction rather than contribute to creating some. But that's a property of the player; it doesn't entail any particular properties of the fiction.

The railroading comes in when you as DM move the PC to spots of your choosing, even if the reason that you choose those spots is based on criteria the player came up with. You have made the determination about the PC moves and where the PC goes, which may be different than the player would have chosen based on his criteria. Even if the player can then have his PC leave to go somewhere else, the rails have already been installed. Being able to leave after the railroad trip just means that it isn't as hard of a railroad as it could have been.

 

[Aenghus]

Even with GM-driven games in the "weight" or "depth" of game settings, from heavily detailed worlds dripping with lore and consequences under every rock, to lightly sketched minimalist settings that get added detail only when PC action makes it necessary. IMO the sort of bottom-up world development that results from starting in a dungeon, adding a village, then a second adventure location, then a town etc is likely to be closer to the lightly-detailed group of settings.

The less detail a setting has, the less consequences are associated with particular locations, and the less there is of detail that would make arbitrary player goals impossible or irrelevant.

I've never seen a "No myth" setting for a GM-driven game, but I have seen extremely light settings that get close.

Framing PCs into a location in a heavy-weight setting may bring with it lots of consequences, some or all unknown to the players, so it could be railroading.

Framing PCs into a location in a lightweight setting has a lot less inherent consequences, and is less likely to be railroading IMO.

"No myth" locations, as I understand them, only have as much or as little detail as the participants want, and typically don't get in the way of the focus of play which is the player goals. Such locations will often carry no inherent consequences, the focus of play is on the player goals, and the onus is on the dramatic decision points re these goals and their interaction to provide player agency and drive the game, not the location or the setting.

If everyone involved in a group is content with the level of detail of the setting I see their choice as valid whether that's a highly detailed gameworld or a barely there setting. These choices do have consequences for the type of play they encourage,typically highly detailed worlds constrain the PCs more , low detail worlds constrain PCs less.

This is on the basis that railroading is obstructing meaningful PC decisions. Meaningful decisions rest in different places in different styles of play, whether location-based, event-based, goal-based etc.

I would hope to assume it's obvious that these styles, or any style of play, only works if all participants are sufficiently on board. No style of play can stand up to constant frustration or unhappiness on the part of any of the participants, something has got to give (game changes, players leave, revolution and a new GM, group falls apart etc).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes.

Dear gods, no!

I don't play to psychoanalyze my characters or deep-dive into their angsts and drama (except for occasional comedic purposes). If I wanted that I'd find a Vampire LARP where I could angst myself into oblivion.

The purpose of playing an RPG is to play the characters and bring them to life, sure, but also to see what kind of story can be collectively woven by the party these characters are a part of for however long they last. And to weave that story requires a solid and consistent backdrop...the game-world or setting built either by [insert favoured RPG publisher here] or the DM.

No, I'm not - which means you'd have to put up with my much lesser turn of phrase when it came to setting description, because it's all I've got.

Over 40 years you'd have built up a pretty good knowledge of what's where in that world and how things function, right - good enough to be consistent from session to session and (if necessary) campaign to campaign? Great - you're good to go!

Further, with all this game-world knowledge you're in a better position than most to have things happening behind the scenes in an internally-consistent manner.

See, I don't imagine that I can create an 'internally consistent world'. I don't even know what that means exactly. I tend to set things in this one setting FOR MY AMUSEMENT, not that of the players (I mean, maybe some of them actually are amused when they encounter a 1970's pre-1E PC, [MENTION=2093]Gilladian[/MENTION] would be the one to ask...). Now, I don't think its making it a bad game, but it isn't really needed for Story Now, and I frankly don't think there's a ton of original ideas or truly creative stuff in my world.

And I'm not sure I care about 'psycho analyzing' anything, but what you describe TO ME involves knowing the character's motives, goals, thoughts, ideals, whatever is at least central to their character. It is called a 'character' for a reason. What I need, in order to explore that, is some sort of tension. You understand people in crisis. This is relatively uncontroversial, and even mundane, all people understand it.