What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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. 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.

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

Well, lets just say that there was AT LEAST one PC (Gimli) who was QUITE well served in his interests by a more detailed exploration of Moria. Several scenes also developed various characters. Pipin made a fool of himself, Frodo was 'dead' for a while (testing the other characters), Gimli discovered the fate of Balin, Sam discovered a bold streak, they discovered the nature of Durin's Bane, Gandalf fell, Aragorn became the party leader. These were all fairly interesting scenes that certainly relate to these characters, have a close tie to the general campaign theme, etc. It was more than a journey.

I would note, OTOH, that Tolkien equally skipped over the trip through Dunland which came right before Moria (and was 3x longer in time, and probably 100x longer in distance traveled). He merely touched up much of what the various PCs saw/did in Lothlorien as well. Later much of the travels of the 9 Walkers were summarized. Sometimes even parts where they faced significant danger, adversity, and in a few cases even outright fighting.

Does travel through the Underdark involve serious risk? There is no answer to this question. Any answer is simply invented by whomever answers it, as there's no such thing as the Underdark, and most of what might live there is utterly fantastical and thus also made up. It is exactly as risky as is required to elicit the type of story that is wanted, no more, no less. This is true regardless of what story-telling technique you use.

I mean, in D&D genre lore, the Underdark is a place which certainly contains a wide range of exceedingly deadly foes, and is usually thought of as a location for fairly high-level adventures. Moreover, drow, kuo-toa, duergar, etc. are generally held to exist there and be some of the more 'mundane' of the creatures to be found. That doesn't mean that every trek of 10 miles or even 50 miles is filled with actual danger. It seems to me that, in many cases, color could be created by explicating this danger somewhat. This could take the form of encountering the remains of unfortunate travelers, signs of powerful malevolent creatures, possibly even seeing such creatures, meeting other non-threatening travelers with tales of danger, etc. etc. etc. Obviously ACTUAL dangerous encounters, difficult/dangerous/deadly terrain, etc. is also a possibility, IF you want to spend more time on this element. That might be true if the players have evinced a desire to explore this region, if such an encounter serves some useful story purpose, etc.

IN GENERAL when PCs have a destination with story significance in mind, there's little reason to fiddle around delaying them more than to describe what they see, and maybe require a check as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] did. Honestly I don't even go for the check stuff anymore. I just tell the players "You can spend a Vitality Point (HS) and reach your destination without further incident, or you can play out an SC to get there, but in that case failure might have bigger consequences."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

What makes it important? It may be important TO YOU because tracking it is something you like to do, or you like to have PCs with goals like "accumulate a huge amount of gold" or something like that. Admittedly that's a fairly common motivation amongst people...

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.

As I said, I'd want to know in SOME situations. MOST of the time I've found that players don't even really track it accurately anyway. One guy says "Oh, we'll split the treasure from last week" and writes 20% of it on his sheet, and the guy that had it all written on HIS sheet didn't bother to mark that. 3 weeks later nobody even remembers. I assert that, for any party above level 2, in any D&D game that the coins marked on their sheet are just some sort of approximation, convenient number, or even simply made up "Oh, didn't I find 200gp in that orc cave? Yeah I must have that on me somewhere....". Its pretend money, it has no fixed amounts associated with it, and mostly in D&D it was just rolled randomly on some dice anyway.

"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.

But I don't play to find out how the numbers on my sheet change. I play to learn about my character, his place in the world, what he's going to do next, and even who he is connected with. Numbers are boring, I crunch them with large clusters of computers all day, they mean less than nothing in the end.

"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.

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

Again, so what? I mean, these things MIGHT be significant, but there are plenty of significant things that the players ASKED FOR that I can inflict them with. Random sea monsters weren't on that list, so lets just move on! If all we are getting out of this is effectively the color "here be monsters" then I can describe the trip as long and tedious, except when the sea monster was sighted.

Wandering monsters were invented pretty much as an anti-5-minute-workday rule. If you try to rest in the dungeon, you get gnawed on all night until you either leave or die.

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.

And that is our point, YES IT SHOULD!

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 we did play it out. I described the trip to the giant cave. Actually I think it was [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] that described it, I sort of just implied it was the next thing up. It just wasn't dramatically signficant.

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

I think your assumptions have some fundamental flaws, but we've already covered that ground.

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

As I recall from the bits of description of it I read that event pretty much drove all the action from there on out, either directly or indirectly.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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)

Geologically speaking, we know little enough about the internal dynamics of the Earth that its difficult to make conjectures about what is or is not possible. Now translate that to some other 'planet' with some completely alien origin etc. and IMHO any considerations of geographical plausibility are pretty much out the window.

CONSISTENCY might be a goal, IMHO mostly because it allows the players to reason about their character's actions (IE if we go 52 miles in this direction trigonometry says we should end up at location X).

While there's no 5000km long 1500m high ridge on Earth its not actually THAT far off from reality. The East African Rift forms a scarp on its eastern side which is 1000's of feet high and runs for more than 1000 miles (I'm sure there are breaks and I don't know exactly how high all of it is, but if you have been there you will know its a HUGE geological feature, you can't even see the other side).

My point is, I'm not super worried about it, nor am I constrained in terms of what I can frame into existence (or that the players can).

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.

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

Fair enough, but none of that seems out of reach to me if I'm creating things whole cloth. I can't set the map down in front of the players, but I can ask them what they want to do.

 

[Maxperson]

Well, lets just say that there was AT LEAST one PC (Gimli) who was QUITE well served in his interests by a more detailed exploration of Moria. Several scenes also developed various characters. Pipin made a fool of himself, Frodo was 'dead' for a while (testing the other characters), Gimli discovered the fate of Balin, Sam discovered a bold streak, they discovered the nature of Durin's Bane, Gandalf fell, Aragorn became the party leader. These were all fairly interesting scenes that certainly relate to these characters, have a close tie to the general campaign theme, etc. It was more than a journey.

And it was never supposed to happen. They were supposed to go over the mountains, but their goal was blocked(to use a Story Now term) by encounters.

IN GENERAL when PCs have a destination with story significance in mind, there's little reason to fiddle around delaying them more than to describe what they see, and maybe require a check as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] did. Honestly I don't even go for the check stuff anymore. I just tell the players "You can spend a Vitality Point (HS) and reach your destination without further incident, or you can play out an SC to get there, but in that case failure might have bigger consequences."

Which prevents Moria from happening in a Story Now game. They had a significant destination in mind before they were blocked and had to go through Moria instead.

 

[Maxperson]

And that is our point, YES IT SHOULD!

Why should the game world just let them get to where they want to go? I mean, I get why the metagame in a Story Now campaign should let them, but why should the game world be the same way?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The travel route was only important in LotR, because Tolkien didn't fast forward it, playing a standard D&D game instead of fast forwarding like Story Now. They actually had to walk and plan their way through obstacles that @pemerton says are unimportant in his example. The thing of high importance was getting the ring to Mt. Doom in Mordor. Secondarily, it was important that Aragorn become king. That's it. Nobody sat the council at Rivendell and said, "It's important to me that we see Moria on the way to Mt. Doom", or "Hey, one of my goals is to see Lothlorien." You're making up importance to characters that wasn't there.

Again, Gimli was QUITE interested in Moria and several times mentioned going there. In fact I think he even said so at the Council of Elrond (well before it was on the table as an actual route). Aragorn was VERY interested in going to Lothlorien, as his girlfriend was there! And truthfully, all the adventures of the 9 Walkers were of key importance. Aragorn and Gandalf arrived at Theoden's Hall at a very critical point, as did Merry and Pippin arrive at Fangorn. Again and again it was clear that the events set in motion by the Fellowship were critical. The War of the Ring would have been radically different, even lost, had they turned out differently.

In fact, IMHO, it was the very struggle, the exercise of will to do all these things to resist Sauron which was the whole point of the story. By their choice the weak took up the highest duty, the strong gave them to chance to accomplish it, the final acts of the defiance of the Noldor against the Valar was played out, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

How rich? If hiring a couple of porters to carry my heavy stuff through the jungle is going to cost me 2 g.p. per day per porter, I'd like to be able to just look at my character sheet, see I've got 105 g.p. right now, and know I can confidently hire these guys for 20 days (80 g.p.) and still have a bit left over. (and next I'll be on to the DM for some geography in order that I can - using maps and local knowledge/lore - make a reasonable estimate of how long this trip is gonna take and whether paying my hirelings is going to run me out of money before we even get to the adventure)

Or how poor? Can I afford to buy a spare set of good shoes at 3 g.p. or am I restricted to the cheap ones at 12 s.p. that'll wear out faster?

Rich, or poor, enough to possibly be a motivation to adventure, if that's stated as one of the character's needs is money (he is desirous of such). Otherwise I have little desire to muck around with making the players delay the whole thing so they can what? Pick some pockets for a few extra gold? I mean, feasibly (though I think its a bit thin and I can come up with better) you could use this as an option in some sort of time-constrained situation where the PCs have to gather resources so they can launch their expedition before plot consequence #12 kicks in. In any case, a wealth check can work just as well as arithmetic here "make a check, ok, you passed, you've got enough gold in your purse to pay the porters for several weeks of travel. You know this SHOULD be enough time to get to the Lost City."

Again, absolutely unrealistic.

The more you tell me about this game the more it seems like the game completely turns its back on any sort of realism, or resource management, or small-scale grittiness. Yes I know it has "Heroic" in its name and that alone should red-flag me as to what to expect but come on, man: even heroes have to pay for food and count their arrows.

Realism, in a literal sense of mechanics which are a simulation of some real-world processes, is NOT the same thing as verisimilitude. The later is actually notoriously hard to define and more of a 'you know it when you see it' thing.

I sure hope these resources can only be created when it makes sense they be available e.g. if you can create a horse while on a ship at sea that's right over the top.

Like all other parts of Story Now, genre logic and fictional positioning are always significant factors.

And what happens if while deep in a dungeon somewhere it suddenly becomes extremely important whether or not someone has some particular piece of mundane gear e.g. iron spikes to wedge a door shut? They can't be allowed to 'create' them there and then; they either had some all along or they didn't, and if they did they'd be noted somewhere and if they didn't then they're out of luck. Otherwise it'd be like these plot points are almost like little tiny Wishes - bleah.

And how many times have the 10th level PCs in your game thought this, and then pulled out the spike they bought at level 1 and wrote on their sheet? It happened quite a bit in my game, but nobody ever really bothered to track how realistic it was that those spikes stayed in the pack for 15 months of high action adventuring! Nor am I so compulsive in my desire to record-keep that I'm going to catch the dozen instances where they might be lost and make all the players check for it, or record exactly how many the elf has expended over that time. My solution? Dice for it. If you're wise and experienced you probably kept up your supplies, but not every character is...

Depending on system or houserules either of these could be a fumble result; and the spellbook mishap could also be a result of a failed item save: Halfred, this isn't your day: a tentacle sweeps your backpack overboard! The backpack gets a save each round to see how long it can keep the water out, but after that fails anything in it that could be damaged by water will need to make its own save.

Yeah, this kind of thing was pretty close to the first casualty of AD&D play in my group. Nobody wanted the tedium and sheer compulsive rulishness of demanding item saving throws and such at every turn. UGH!

Putting the Godswall where it is makes east-going non-magical travel extremely difficult. If anyone at the table (including me as DM) has any reason for the party to go east or for anything to have been coming from the east that trip just became a lot more challenging. I've also just munged up the climate and weather patterns over about a quarter of a continent, retroactive through every minute of the PCs' played careers. Guys, remember that days-long rainstorm and flood you hit while you were out chasing down the Kapoor Crystal last year? Yeah, well that massive cliff I threw in last week means there's no possible way that rainstorm could have happened as putting the Godswall where it is means - now I've worked out the climate patterns - it simply can't rain there that much. Ever. No. Just no.

Seriously? You know more than NOAA does about these things? humbug!

And if I don't catch this sort of thing, chances are a player will; which would in this example probably lead to either a demand for a retcon of the Kapoor Crystal adventure (or at least of the flood part if said flood had any lasting effects) or - more likely - an unspoken invalidation of that adventure and maybe of the whole campaign.

This stuff has to be got right the first time. Making it up on the fly might work out once in a while if you get lucky with it but in the long run is just asking for disaster.

Lan-"regarding the Godswall retroactively changing the weather during the Kapoor expedition, before anyone even thinks of suggesting I should just gloss it all over and hope nobody notices: forget it. I'll have noticed, and I'm not the kind of DM to bury a mistake like that"-efan

This is pure theorycrafting silliness. Nobody knows that much about climate and weather, NOBODY. Nobody that I have ever played with or even HEARD OF is so crazy as to try to question some long past adventure on the basis of their made-up interpretation of the weather consequences of some invented geography.

I mean, sure, some player could call you on how your streets don't line up in the town, but my answer would be "Oh, yeah, that's very interesting! Now, does your character spend the next 3 days figuring it out? Yes? OK, roll a Streetwise check. You succeeded? OK, what did you discover?"

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And it was never supposed to happen. They were supposed to go over the mountains, but their goal was blocked(to use a Story Now term) by encounters.

Which prevents Moria from happening in a Story Now game. They had a significant destination in mind before they were blocked and had to go through Moria instead.

They tried to go over the mountains. In RPG hypothetical LoTR land they failed some sort of mechanical challenge and were turned back. Then they went to Moria. Here we see EXACTLY why you don't skip to the end of the story! The GM said "Oh, you want to go to Mordor and dispose of the ring... OK, you have to cross the Misty Mountains Dark and Cold!" This is HOW Story Now evolves story. The GM introduces scenes which frame putting the character's goals and beliefs to the test, which is another word for CONFLICT.

Sauron himself is an adversary (as is Saruman). These adversaries are substantial elements of the drama. Without them, without problems to overcome there's no story. Its not 'Story Ends Now'. Our hypothetical JRRT, GM extraordinaire, wisely put a challenge in the player's way. Now, they had a choice, to try to up the stakes on Caradharas and push on, into very likely death, or retreat and choose the grim and uncertain Mines of Moria. The fact that Gimli is served by going to the mines is useful to the GM, but its only one of his goals and not the most central one. In fact in Story Now No Myth, the Mines ONLY EXISTED because the PCs failed on the Mountain and the GM then noted Gimli's "I want to find out the fate of my cousin Balin, Lord of Moria." and hatched a plan (framed a new scene).

This is how these games work.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Why should the game world just let them get to where they want to go? I mean, I get why the metagame in a Story Now campaign should let them, but why should the game world be the same way?

I daresay you already know the answer...

 

[Lanefan]

What makes it important? It may be important TO YOU because tracking it is something you like to do, or you like to have PCs with goals like "accumulate a huge amount of gold" or something like that. Admittedly that's a fairly common motivation amongst people...

As I said, I'd want to know in SOME situations. MOST of the time I've found that players don't even really track it accurately anyway. One guy says "Oh, we'll split the treasure from last week" and writes 20% of it on his sheet, and the guy that had it all written on HIS sheet didn't bother to mark that. 3 weeks later nobody even remembers. I assert that, for any party above level 2, in any D&D game that the coins marked on their sheet are just some sort of approximation, convenient number, or even simply made up "Oh, didn't I find 200gp in that orc cave? Yeah I must have that on me somewhere....".

Well, around here that sure ain't true. We track finances as closely as we track anything else (except encumbrance, we kinda gave up on that ) and after each adventure the accumulated and carefully recorded treasure is divided evenly among the party with magic items being treated as if they were their worth in coin (a major reason we have a magic item price list!). If someone just starts putting random numbers on their finance sheet that's cheating just as much as if they arbitrarily changed their hit points.

Its pretend money

Not to the PCs on whose behalf we are tracking it.

it has no fixed amounts associated with it

Er...huh? 200 g.p. is 200 g.p.

But I don't play to find out how the numbers on my sheet change. I play to learn about my character, his place in the world, what he's going to do next, and even who he is connected with.

As do I, but there's these annoying things called game mechanics we also have to deal with. My preferences certainly run toward less mechanics rather than more but I'll still admit there have to be some. Many of these are numbers which for the game to function have to be carefully tracked and recorded...and among these tracking money is among the least of the problems.

Numbers are boring, I crunch them with large clusters of computers all day, they mean less than nothing in the end.

I seem to keep coming back to my assertion that the boring bits, while boring, are still an essential part of the game and shouldn't be ignored or handwaved. This includes long-distance travel during which things might happen. This includes tracking wealth and arrows and time and distance. This includes resting for three days in the wilderness because the party's all just been beat to ratpoop and need to recover.

Same level and type of essential as the bass player who only plays a repeating three note riff through the whole song - boring as hell for him but the song wouldn't be any good without his contribution.

Again, so what? I mean, these things MIGHT be significant, but there are plenty of significant things that the players ASKED FOR that I can inflict them with. Random sea monsters weren't on that list, so lets just move on! If all we are getting out of this is effectively the color "here be monsters" then I can describe the trip as long and tedious, except when the sea monster was sighted.

Random sea monsters might not have been on that list but travel was, and if that travel takes 'em through sea monster territory there's a chance they're gonna find trouble...or trouble is gonna find them.

Wandering monsters were invented pretty much as an anti-5-minute-workday rule. If you try to rest in the dungeon, you get gnawed on all night until you either leave or die.

Oddly enough, I rarely use them for that purpose. In most of my dungeon-type adventures I've usually got the occupants accounted for, and few are "wandering". Some might be doing guard patrols or whatever, but even then I'll know thier routes etc.

What I do use wandering monsters for most often is situations just like this - a party is travelling through some potentially dangerous territory, let's see what finds them. So: wandering monsters, meet wandering party.

As I recall from the bits of description of it I read that event pretty much drove all the action from there on out, either directly or indirectly.

Makes sense - an event like that is a hook with a million potential sub-hooks and the players jumped at it.

Lanefan