What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Lanefan]

Breaking one bit out here...

In the real world, people travel from A to B and survive; even flourish! In fantasy fiction, people travel from A to B without dying or being maimed along the way. (Conan does a fair bit of it, for instance; so do the protagonists in LotR.)

...

Aragorn didn't become dead, diseased or lost travelling through Moria. Nor did Pippin.

Yet the party that reached Lothlorien was not the same as the party that left Rivendell: they arrived down by a wizard. That's a rather big change to the party that wouldn't happen if the journey was simply handwaved.

Further, were this an RPG all the other characters would have gained some decent xp for events along that journey.

And to take this to the next stage: the party that left Lothlorien didn't in fact arrive anywhere, as it split in three (and lost a PC) partway along.

The original Underdark module, D1-D3, doesn't imply that the PCs will become dead, diseased or lost travelling from the fire giant dungeon to the Vault of the Drow.

Perhaps not, but in the other big underdark adventure Night Below any travel through the underdark involves serious risk.

 

[Lanefan]

And now for the other bits...

Does your modern-day setting have a mechanic to track credit ratings? Vaccinations? Familiarity with a wide range of cuisines (whether as consumer or as cook)?

Does your fantasy setting have a mechanic to track holes in shoes and clothing? Blunting of blades? Shoeing of horses?

In order: not unless needed, no, if someone wanted to roll for this for a PC then no problem; then no, no but it probably should, and no.

And none of these are as important - by a huge factor - as tracking wealth.

In my BW game there is a Resources mechanic. That game is about (among other things) gritty survival.

In my Cortex+ Heroic game, there is no wealth mechanic. That is a game about vikings trying to find out why there are strange portents from the spirits of the wood and in the Northern Lights. Wealth is largely irrelevant. When one of the PCs robbed the drow of their gold, he earned a persistent d8 Back of Gold asset. There is no need for a special mechanic to track that.

So in the vikings game they don't know how much coin they have? (and it's not a "special mechanic", it's simple recording money in vs. money out) Now don't get me wrong - I dislike economics etc. probably more than the next guy, but even then I want to know how much wealth my PC has at any given time...and I also want to know what's out there for me to spend it on.

Let's just start with one assumption: that social interaction won't change the party.

That is already so far removed from my RPGing experience that it's hard to know what to do with the rest of what you say.

"Irrelevant" social interaction e.g. with a friendly gate guard is great to RP through but is very unlikely to generate any quantifyable mechanical change to the party. It might change their views or their level of knowledge or whatever, but nothing quantifyable.

"Irrelevant" combat with a sea monster in the Pacific has all kinds of opportunity to generate mechanical change to the party: Falstaff drops his magic sword overboard, Gwenivere gets hauled off the ship and drowns (and her body is never found), and Halfred's spellbook gets soaked and some of the spells in it are ruined.

If you want to play a RPG in which more time is spent worrying about random encounters with jermlaine than finding out whether or not the PCs can keep their promise to the dwarves to help them with the giants, well, no one's stopping you. But that sort of focus is not inherent in the idea of RPGing.

That sort of focus was inherent from day 1 - wandering monsters.

The answer to this is simple: if everyone wants to play an encounter with giants, why would we bother spending time on a trip through the Underdark? (Or from DC to Tokyo. Or whatver.) If you like that stuff, then good for you - knock yourself out! But if the players want to go to where the giants are, then a quick narration is fine.

This is my point, though: just because the players want to go where the giants are doesn't mean the game world should just let them, particularly when the intervening risks are already known and even still when they are not.

If the players want to go to the giants they will almost certainly get there at some point. But neither they nor I will know how much time (both fictional and real) it'll take until we play it out.

And you know this because . . .? What level are these PCs? How powerful are their healers? What other magic are they using? How heroic are the martial characters? And how long is it since they took an extended rest?

For whatever party I'm running I would know these things, but it wouldn't get to this point as I'd have played out the dangerous bits in full. But even if I didn't I could factor their abilities in if it came to a shorthand determination of what changes may have occurred during the trip.

Being down a healing surge is trivial - a good night's rest and you're set to rock.

There's so much assumption and projection in these comments, that they're very hard to take seriously as analysis of gaming techniques.

My main assumptions are:

- any game set in what could be a real-world setting with magic added on will at least try to maintain some form of general realism where and how it can;
- where maintaining this realism takes time (e.g. playing out the risky bits of a long journey) that time will be taken;
- that I have control over my character and its resources (e.g. I know how much money it has!)
- that real-world time is not a limiting factor

Like I said to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], this is all just nonsense. I posted, upthread, an actual play account of the session in my main 4e game where the PCs were in the mausoleum of the Raven Queen. At one point, one of them had a vision of the tarrasque breaking out of the earth onto the surface of the world.

In my Dark Sun game, the opening scene took place in an arena, where the crowd were responding to news of the death of the Sorcerer-King of Tyr.

Cool. This is the sort of thing I was asking about.

In a player-driven game the players hook the GM, not vice versa.

The Sorcerer-King of Tyr just died? That's not a hook, it's a trawling net!

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

I just completely disagree with you, there's no 'increased depth' to be had from playing in a pre-generated environment. I mean, there's no objective standard, IMNSHO, by which to measure such 'depth' anyway, so arguing about it is pointless. Even if we just talked about the # of hours of time put into thinking about setting, I've got 6 game participants doing that during play, which is going to make up for, I'm guessing, whatever hours you might possibly spend outside of play doing it yourself. On top of that I can always engage the players outside of table time too!

I might buy some kind of statement like "different playing styles may generate more or less exploration of different aspects of the world." Even then, I'm not strongly convinced that's an overwhelmingly true statement. It may be weakly true. Perhaps GMs who draw up world maps have a little more established geography, but does any more of it actually matter in play than in some Zero Myth game where its made up on the fly?

The risk with making stuff like this up on the fly is that you'll make something up that's geologically or geographically implausible or impossible and not realize it until it's too late, by which time you're stuck with it because it's affected play somehow. If you at least map out your world (or at least the bits of it most likely to see play) ahead of time you can find and fix these errors before they get baked in...or intentionally bake in some implausibilities as you've had the time to come up with good in-game rationales for them (e.g. the 3000-mile-long mile-high cliff in my game world called the Godswall - geologically ridiculous but I've a good in-game reason for its being there which I won't post here as none of my players know what that reason is yet)

Also, having a basic map of things that would be known to the PCs allows the players to make informed decisions as you can simply plop the map down in front of them and they can use it just like I use an atlas to plan a road trip. We've got two weeks to kill while the wizard trains up? OK - it's 6 days walk to Karnos (port town) then probably another week at sea to get to Spieadeia (big city) - nope, we can't get there and back in time; shopping will have to wait.

Do NPCs and locations that the PCs never see make any difference or add some mysterious quality of depth? I don't think so.

I know I as player have looked at a DM's player-side map and wondered what a particular place was all about, even though I'd never had a PC anywhere near it.

Lanefan

 

[Maxperson]

The risk with making stuff like this up on the fly is that you'll make something up that's geologically or geographically implausible or impossible and not realize it until it's too late, by which time you're stuck with it because it's affected play somehow. If you at least map out your world (or at least the bits of it most likely to see play) ahead of time you can find and fix these errors before they get baked in...or intentionally bake in some implausibilities as you've had the time to come up with good in-game rationales for them (e.g. the 3000-mile-long mile-high cliff in my game world called the Godswall - geologically ridiculous but I've a good in-game reason for its being there which I won't post here as none of my players know what that reason is yet)

White walkers?

 

[Lanefan]

White walkers?

Cliff, not wall. The land to the east of it is about 5000' higher in elevation (with local variance, of course) than the land to the west of it.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, and I found it really interesting how you said, "Yet the anchor for "story now" RPGing is player-established themes, dramatic need etc. And as even a cursory familiarity with literature and film will reveal, something can speak to a protagonist's dramatic need although s/he is not (yet) interested in it." You've been chiding me for putting in things I think the player will find interesting, even though he's not interested in it yet, and there you go doing it yourself. This is like the third or fourth time you've asked me why I do something, implying your way is different, and then posted examples of you doing it, too.

No.

Once again you ignore the difference between player and PC. The protagonist is the PC; it is the player who establishes the protagonist's dramatic need.

This is just one manifestation of a general faiilure to distinguish fiction from reality, and to treat an analysis of the fiction as doing duty for an analysis of how play actually happens.

 

[pemerton]

I just want to add, the WHOLE EXAMPLE was something I made up out of my head as I was typing it, and I have a typing speed fast enough to jam an IBM Selectric (like 200WPM). I've been known to write BOOK LENGTH material in a day, end-to-end. So, TOPS 5 seconds went into that example, I mean, really, max 5 seconds.

It wasn't meant to be a recording of the entire dialog of a sequence of play. It was just an illustration of the concept of what might happen, described at a fairly high level with just enough detail to convey the general concept I was getting at. I don't think you should judge my (and probably not [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s) entire technique based on this example.

Chances are, in actual play, the players would fiddle and digress and wrangle with the dwarves a bit, and ask questions, probably discuss some sort of plan, etc. If they really couldn't get ANY information on their objective then they'd probably start to outright consider what sort of additional measures they should take. Maybe they would send out word for anyone with intel, or ask the dwarves to scout ahead, or approach in a stealthy manner.

Now, mostly my players are guys and gals that cut their teeth on B1 hot off the presses and remember when the 1e MM hit the shelf and amazed us all with its hardcover goodness. So they're perhaps not representative of the degree of experience and adventurer-grade expertise of every group. They might also choose to RP being foolish or whatever, but my guess is they, and probably most other players, will ask questions and be proactive. I MOST SURELY will not get in the way of that! Certainly not in a D&D game. Maybe in Paranoia you sic the computer on them for being clever, but that's a bit different story...

I don't type as quickly as you, and I probably spent a couple of minutes writing up my half-dozen lines of dialogue.

What the example reminded me of, though, was when the PCs in my 4e game pursued a purple worm as it carried off a (swallowed) segment of the Rod of Seven Parts. I don't remember all the details 5 or so years later, but I don't think anyone worried about declaring stealth. And I don't remember exactly how the narrarion proceeded, but I don't think we spent very long mucking about with the travel. The focus of the action was on the PCs' arrival in a cavern where they fought the purple worm and two mechanically different Fang Titan Drakes.

The PCs' prep was collecting some lime to dilute the purple worm stomach acid. Which worked (30/rd dmg > 20/rd dmg).

For me, the bigger picture is the idea that every situation has to have a "lead up", a "telegraphing", where instead of getting into it the GM putzes around giving the players the chance to putz around some more. Let's just get on with it!

Breaking one bit out here...
Yet the party that reached Lothlorien was not the same as the party that left Rivendell: they arrived down by a wizard.

But Gandalf walked through a lot of Moria without dying, or even getting hurt!

If the players want to fight giants, I'm happy to leave the risk of Gandalf-death to that point.

 

[pemerton]

I know I as player have looked at a DM's player-side map and wondered what a particular place was all about, even though I'd never had a PC anywhere near it.

And I know as both player and GM I've looked at a character sheet and wondered what would become of that character.

These are aesthetic preferences. They don't tell us what is possible , or necessary, in RPGing.

My main assumptions are:

- any game set in what could be a real-world setting with magic added on will at least try to maintain some form of general realism where and how it can;
- where maintaining this realism takes time (e.g. playing out the risky bits of a long journey) that time will be taken;
- that I have control over my character and its resources (e.g. I know how much money it has!)
- that real-world time is not a limiting factor

These are aesthetic preferences. Realism has nothing to do with it.

There's nothing more realistic about a story in which the PCs inspect an intersection and one in which they arrive at the giants' cave.

just because the players want to go where the giants are doesn't mean the game world should just let them

The gameworld doesn't let anyone do anything. Nor forbid it. It's just a story.

If a group wants to find out what happens when the PCs fight giants, nothing is stopping them. If a group prefers to see what the GM wants to do, that's their prerogative. But you can't tell me that's giving the other members of the group more agency!

none of these are as important - by a huge factor - as tracking wealth.

Iin a game about travelling through a wilderness, shoes might matter more than wealth.

And wealth can be "tracked" without a mechanic. I can just write down that someone is rich, or poor - much as I write down that they are young or old, tall or short, amusing or boring, clean-living or a drunkard.

So in the vikings game they don't know how much coin they have? (and it's not a "special mechanic", it's simple recording money in vs. money out) Now don't get me wrong - I dislike economics etc. probably more than the next guy, but even then I want to know how much wealth my PC has at any given time...and I also want to know what's out there for me to spend it on.

In Cortex+ Heroic, if a player wants a piece of gear for his/her PC s/he can spend a plot point to create a resource (eg the player of the swordthane can spend a point to gain a riding resource, typically a horse). Assets can be created. Etc. The game doesn't use equipment lists. It simply isn't about gear in the D&D sense.

"Irrelevant" social interaction e.g. with a friendly gate guard is great to RP through but is very unlikely to generate any quantifyable mechanical change to the party. It might change their views or their level of knowledge or whatever, but nothing quantifyable.

"Irrelevant" combat with a sea monster in the Pacific has all kinds of opportunity to generate mechanical change to the party: Falstaff drops his magic sword overboard, Gwenivere gets hauled off the ship and drowns (and her body is never found), and Halfred's spellbook gets soaked and some of the spells in it are ruined.

This just reinforces my point.

Let's put to one side that D&D actually has no mechanics for the dropping of swords overboard, or the soaking of spellbooks. There is no reason inherent in RPGing why a random encounter with a sea monster should matter more than a random encounter with a striking individual. THat's a purely wargaming instinct.

The risk with making stuff like this up on the fly is that you'll make something up that's geologically or geographically implausible or impossible

<snip>

the 3000-mile-long mile-high cliff in my game world called the Godswall - geologically ridiculous but I've a good in-game reason for its being there

The thing is, stuff like your cliff can be made up as needed. Stories of magical geology can be made up as needed. Your Godswall doesn't become more ridiculous, or less, because it is authored at time X rather than time Y. And it doesn't become more exciting as an element of the fiction because a reason has already been made up by the GM. It might be exciting even if no one has authored a reason yet!

 

[Maxperson]

No.

Once again you ignore the difference between player and PC. The protagonist is the PC; it is the player who establishes the protagonist's dramatic need.

This is just one manifestation of a general faiilure to distinguish fiction from reality, and to treat an analysis of the fiction as doing duty for an analysis of how play actually happens.

This is pure evasion on your part. You refuse to understand, and it is an outright refusal on your part as it is both obvious and I've told it to you, that I use PC and player interchangeably. How about you actually respond to my post, and this time use player, okay?

 

[Maxperson]

But Gandalf walked through a lot of Moria without dying, or even getting hurt!

And if Tolkien had been writing in Story Now, he would not only have survived, but only been down maybe a healing surge. After all, their goal was to get to Mordor, so the journey was of no interest to the players. They should have left Rivendell and shown up at Mordor in the next scene.