Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Arilyn]

Yes, I do as a matter of fact. It may be possible that the 'Story Now, No Myth' gaming can produce believability, consistency, and coherence, but the poster in question does not in fact actually practice 'Story Now, No Myth' gaming but does a ton of world building and then claims that it is 'Story Now, No Myth' gaming. That's the most infuriating thing about these ongoing threads. What pemerton actually does is engage in heavy myth, high preparation gaming, and then if at any point he improvises anything in the process of play because he improvised that one thing he hadn't prepared for, he claims he's doing 'Story Now, No Myth'. His examples repeatedly bear this out. Improvising something on the fly is not the same as 'Story Now, No Myth', no matter how hard you may claim it is.

Fundamentally, that's the reason these threads are such an incoherent mess. pemerton will spend pages detailing all of his world building and preparation, and then he'll call that 'Story Now, No Myth' in utter violation of all logic and reasonableness.

One of the main reasons a GM will adopt a high preparation approach typical of sandbox is that it allows him to improvise things on the fly using all the work and brainstorming he did before the session. That's one of the goals of the high preparation, top down, high myth approach. It allows you to infer what is in the spaces you didn't fully detail, and react to things you couldn't fully expect.

But basically, because such an approach is not fashionable, doesn't have a lot of cool buzzwords, and isn't what the cool people say that they are doing, pemerton actually runs a very traditional game - which can be proven from his examples - and then goes and claims he's engaging in some novel, fashionable, hip thing. Fundamentally, we're dealing with a GM that used to be a very rigid GM that ran things like RoleMaster, and I think exposure to ideas like 'No Myth' inspired him to take his game in new directions and he learned things from reading those articles, but as to what he actually practices it's not actually the thing called 'No Myth'.

I've read all those pemerton examples too, and have not reached your conclusion at all...

So, after all the debating in the "What is World Building For?" we decided to give "No Myth" a serious try. I am a player in a 13th Age campaign. We are not using the world that comes with the setting. All the stories are driven by the players' backgrounds and one unique things. So far, it's working just fine and, is in fact, an intense experience. The world feels just as solid and coherent. The stories just as engaging. There is a tangibly different feel and a sense of immediacy no one expected. In other ways, it's running like any other rpg.

Does this mean, we've seen the light, and have abandoned world building? Nope. We see advantages in both styles. New GMs might usually be better off with a more classical approach, and mysteries need prep. "No Myth" works great, however, and we're having a lot of fun.

pemerton may seem overly critical of world building, but at least he's been involved in both styles, and can therefore comment on his preferences, with experience of both under his belt. Seems like the detractors cannot.

 

[Celebrim]

I've read all those pemerton examples too, and have not reached your conclusion at all...

Since pemerton and I stopped talking over this very point, I don't feel its fair to him to continue to debate it. But after like the fifth thread where he described drawing a dungeon and stocking it and backgrounding it, and then described his play as some sort of revolutionary 'no myth' because in the course of play he invented one new element he hadn't fully detailed before, I decided I'd had enough.

I have no desire to argue over your personal experience. I'm glad whatever new approaches you've adopted have led to success for your group. Although I will say "all the stories drive by players backgrounds" doesn't in and of itself mean you are playing no myth, it just means you've given your players agency to tell the stories that they want to experience. And you can do that within a 'no myth' framework on in a 'low myth' or 'high myth' classical sandbox.

'No myth' literally means that the GM does not decide anything before he starts play, and on the fly changes things based on the direction of play. All myth is created through play. It certainly is a tangibly different feel, I'll grant you that. What it actually does is subtly different shift in the table's aesthetics of play. When you mention "mysteries need prep", you are actually wrong. You can do a 'no myth' mystery. Heck, I can do a 'no myth' mystery (although in point of fact, I never do). What is actually going on in my opinion behind that statement is that you have certain aesthetic expectations about a mystery plot that you at some level realize that 'no myth' play would invalidate. I encourage you, even if you disagree with me, to keep that statement in mind as you go forward with your 'no myth' play.

 

[happyhermit]

...
I don't understand the point of your first sentence.
...

It's quite simple really. Certain things will be difficult to impossible in a game, it's a part of what makes a game work/seem "real", etc. This can be accomplished in many ways; system rules, house rules, table consent, GM, etc. If you want to state a preference for more of one and less of another, that's fine as long as you realize there is nothing inherently bad about any of them. But making it seem like this is something unique to worldbuilding would be wrong of course.

More generally, it can't be the case that worldbuilding is good because it has certain consequenes but worldbuilding can't be bad in virtue of certain consequences. Either worldbuilding does or doesn't have consequences for RPGing. And if it does - which I think it does - then there is a question as to whether those consequences are good or bad given the preferences of any particular RPGer.

It can actually, because there is more than one way to worldbuild, there's more than one way to run a game with worldbuilding, and there's more than one world to build. This results in varying effects and consequences. Just like how a "no myth" game can have a lot of negative consequence for a given persons preferences, or it can not, or it can have only a few, depending on how it's actually implemented.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You pretty much describe my enthusiasm for 4e-style SCs. Really, the mechanics are pretty close to the same thing. I mean, you can technically introduce multiple 'clocks', but I'm betting strongly that a 'success clock' and a 'failure clock' are the very strong choice for standard template. I'm also betting that the failure clock is almost always the smaller of the two. This is just a basic function of how dramatic tension is most effectively created in play. Anyway, I'm sure it works quite well, as your example could be almost literally word-for-word the result of an SC, and I know that technique well.

It would be interesting to see what contrasts there are in the two processes.

Um, no, you're kinda, pretty far off the mark. The structure of clocks and how actions interact with them isn't like a SC. You could using something like an SC and not use clocks, but it's not the same at all.

Clocks are used to track potential events. They are specific. If I set a clock for 'Alarm is raised' then, if that clock fills, the alarm is raised, no matter what action failure caused it to fill. This differs from SCs in that the situation in an SC adapts according to the actions taken. Clocks just are. They can be long term, short term, personal, situation dependent, etc.

In the case above, for instance, the 'success' clock had 4 tick and the 'fail' clock had 6. That's inverted from the SC concept. Further, I could have added even more clocks, like 'the package leaves the building' and set that at a 10 clock to set an overall pressure on the entire score, so 1 success clock and 1 small fail clock isn't the 'usual'. Another example, same game, is that the gang is currently almost at war with one of the neighborhoods. That conflict is currently using a 8 segment clock where the neighborhood get 1 segment filled every downtime phase to represent their actions against the gang, and the gang can take downtime actions (or declare a score) against that clock to remove segments. This isn't a skill roll check, but a fortune mechanic check in both directions. If the clock fills, the neighborhood's goal is to bring the heat onto the gang and they'll gain a wanted level (the neighborhood has hired a barrister to work the courts against the gang). If it empties, it's empty and will start refilling. If the gang declares a score, they can eliminate the clock, but the outcome may be outright war or even a settling of difference depending on the target and outcome of the score.

Long and short, the clocks are a tool for the GM to use to put pressure on situations or to track long term events. They aren't SC's, and how a given scene of a score plays out may be more or less like an SC in 4e. Honestly, I think they may have similar outcomes, but the approach and intent in play is different. There's also the problem that checks in Blades have variable outcomes, so you may be able to tick more than one clock at a time, or may tick a clock hugely in one go. A four clock can be completely filled in one resolution by a critical success or one with a great effect.

Actions are declared by the player and then the GM decides the position - desperate, risky, or controlled - and the effect - limited, normal, great. The player can then modify or change actions if they don't like the situation. If the player rolls, then the result is 1-3 failure, 4-5 succeed with complication, 6 success, more than one 6 critical (you look at the highest die roll in the pool). Desperate actions have bad failures and complications, controlled have mild failures and complications. Limited effect means you get part of what you want, great means you get even more than what you wanted, criticals can go super-awesome levels of impact. Effect is set by the DM by the action and situation, and then modified by the difference in tier of the gang and the target (a tier I gang going against a tier II target is down one level of effectiveness). This means that actions can have outsized impacts on clocks, as the number of segments filled is tied to the position and effect. A desperate failure may fill 4 or so segments, while a controlled failure would fill but 1. A critical success on an great effect might fill more than 5 segments on a clock. So, a clock isn't the same as the number of successes or failures in an SC at all.

 

[Lanefan]

That’s the point. They think they build it for the players and put all this effort in, but the reality is that most of it never gets seen by the players or they don’t care about.

For instance... you may detail the Inn of the Roaring Dragon, in the village of Blumenthal. Detail the landlord, his motivations, the crooked cellerar that’s secretly a spy for the entropy Cult, the names of serving wenches, a map of the inn, the stats for all of them and the items kept in the vault of the inn.

However...

A. The PCs may never visit Blumenthal

B. The PCs may not stop at the inn

C. They might stay but not be interested in getting to know the staff.

If any of these things are true then the three hours spent on these things was a collosal waste of time.

That the game may never encounter some things that great effort went into creating is a known and accepted risk inherent to worldbuilding. A corollary risk is the situation where the party gets to somewhere new that the DM hasn't really designed; but as it looks like the party's going to stay for a while the DM puts some effort into creating that place, and then the party leave and never go back.

Or even better plan the inn and drop it into whichever village the party stay in next.

For something as small-scale as an inn, this is the way to go.

But if what you've designed in detail is a collection of towns and cultures around a big oasis in a desert, and the game never gets to a desert, it's kinda hard to justify just dropping it in somewhere.

Build the adventure not the world. Or rather, build the world by building the adventures.

This came up earlier - not sure if in this thread or another - as a "bottom-up" style of worldbuilding; and it can work really well particularly if the campaign is itself intended to be relatively small scale without much save-the-world or travel-the-world sort of content.

But if the campaign is intended to eventually take in a larger scale then I posit the world or setting needs to be built to that same scale. Me, I usually start on a regional level (e.g. maybe the size of the west coast of North America from about LA to Juneau and inland to about a Phoenix-Denver-Edmonton line) which is where I educatedly-guess most of the campaign's adventuring will happen. Then I go smaller, figuring out nation-states, major towns, major features, etc., then smaller still in the immediate area where the campaign will start out. I'll also go larger, and fit the region into the greater world on the most rudimentary level along with working out astronomy, calendar, weather patterns, and other big-scale things that affect everyone.

So in my example above, if I know the campaign is going to start in Seattle I'd design the Puget Sound area in some detail and place a few adventure sites in it, with the rest of the west coast designed enough so that if the game goes there I've a notion of what they can expect. Also, if nothing else I and the players need to know where various cultures etc. come from - where are the Elven enclaves, where are the Dwarven realms, etc. - and this kinda forces a regional approach. But if they decide to head east of the Rocky Mountains I'll be designing on the fly, as I'll probably only have the vaguest ideas as to what exists out there.

Lanefan

 

[Maxperson]

Ahh, I see. Though your adventure did take you to the location of the library so it makes sense for you to have planned the location somewhat. That they chose not to go there is a shame but I totally agree with the idea to plan a library. However the library could be detailed ready to drop in to which library sized slot you require it in. It doesn’t need to be tied to a single place.

My players have a habit of veering off suddenly in directions I didn't expect. If I didn't have things prepared(mainly by running FR) in areas that they are not headed to, I would be very unprepared.

Having a library ready to go that is relevant to your PCs is helpful. Detailing which towns in your campaigns contain libraries and which don’t and who runs them and their level is uneccessary. It makes better sense to use Schroedinger’s Library. All towns contain one and none do until the PCs get there to find out.

As I covered above, I could just drop libraries when they need them, but that lacks the same kind of depth that a detailed world provides. The fact that the players can trust that even if this campaign isn't anywhere near Waterdeep, that they can count on the Lords running that place, and that the Yawning Portal exists adds dimension to the world. They are aware that the world is vast and a chunk(maybe 5%) is detailed so that if they go places I will have answers for them when looking for people and places. It gives them the sense that the world is a wider place than just what their PCs can see, and that things move without the PCs being present.

Otherwise campaigns end up like Volo’s guidebooks and the Campaign begins to matter more than the excellence of the adventure.

I strongly disagree with this. Those details are not more important than the adventure. They are important TO the adventure. The details add to the backdrop and resources available to both the DM and the players during the adventure. Sure, I could set an adventure in a nameless city, but if I put the same adventure in Baldur's Gate, everyone at the table can draw on things like the Flaming Fists to augment it. The details enhance, not limit things.

 

[Lanefan]

Obviously all RPGing involves the GM saying some stuff. My point about worldbuilding is that the GM spends a certain amount of time relaying those details to the players. For instance, the players have their PCs wander through a town and the GM narrates stuff about it. The players ask who their PCs' friends or contacts are and the GM narrates stuff about it. The players have their PCs look for a market that might sell a desired item, and the GM narrates stuff about the town, about NPCs, etc - triggering the players to declare more actions ("OK, I ask the gate guard if there is a market in town") which result in the GM narrating more stuff.

If the above doesn't happen, then what was the point of the worldbuilding?

If the above doesn't happen then what's the point of playing?

But the above sort of stuff doesn't happen in a game played closer to "no myth" style.

Sure it does, only the GM narration is disguised as scene framing and is not drawn from pre-authored notes. The GM still has to set the table, as it were, to give the players something to interact with even just on a scene-by-scene level; and the underlying action-resolution-narration-reaction cycle doesn't change. The only difference is that as the game world is being created in effect on the fly through play neither the GM nor the players* can effectively plan ahead for anything beyond the relatively-immediate, which to me is a loss.

* - this is an overlooked piece here: it's not always just the GM who wants to plan ahead, sometimes players do also; in terms of where to go and what to do in what sequence and over what timespan; and having a more-concrete world really helps in doign this.

One consequence of worldbuilding is that, as a result, certain actions become impossible (eg finding a sage in this town that the GM as already decided doesn't have one). How is it relevant to that consequence of worldbuilding, and whether or not that consequence is desirable, that some other action declarations may be impossible for other reasons?

I also don't agree that worldbuilding needn't make anything difficult to impossible. The sort of thing I've just described is a natural consequence of worldbuilding. That's the whole point of it!

More generally, it can't be the case that worldbuilding is good because it has certain consequenes but worldbuilding can't be bad in virtue of certain consequences. Either worldbuilding does or doesn't have consequences for RPGing. And if it does - which I think it does - then there is a question as to whether those consequences are good or bad given the preferences of any particular RPGer.

That worldbuilding will have consequences in play, e.g. making it impossible to find a sage in a town that has none, is not in question.

What's in question is why this could ever possibly be seen as a bad thing...except by players who dislike not always getting what they want, for whom I have no sympathy and nothing more to say.

In real life, if I come into a town I've never been to before and look around for a shop selling crystals and incense, it's impossible for me to find one there if there isn't one there to find. Same is true in a game world: if there's no sage, there's no sage - and that the GM has determined this ahead of time rather than it being determined on the fly by success or failure on an action declaration is irrelevant to the immedaite here-and-now result. It IS relevant, however, to the long-term overall results: the population and distribution of sages isn't left to the whim of cumulative here-and-now random chance.

Why is this an ideal? Ideal for what? Whom?

If the goal is to have a believable, consistent and coherent setting, with complexity and intricacy in the storyline, without having a significant focus of play being the GM telling the players stuff that s/he has made up, then the first step - as [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has also recently been posting in this thread - is to drop any notion of "neutrality" of the setting.

Which means no more published settings or even shared settings, then, if every setting is supposed to be uniquely built and tailored for the particular group of players/PCs being run at that time.

And how on earth would this work with any sort of shared "organized play" e.g. RPGA in the past or AL now, where characters can be and frequently are taken from one table to another? I ask because if you want your game genre to become at all successful then like it or not it'll have to be able to support this sort of thing.

No. The setting must be neutral.

Why? I mean, what is your evidence for this?

Without knowledge of what's around them beyond just the framed scene the players have no information on which to base...anything.

At campaign start you frame me in a market in downtown Karnos; you provide all sorts of detail about what I can see including that there's a merchant here selling feathers. For that immediate scene, that's fine. But by no means is it all I need.

Where is Karnos? What is Karnos - a mining town, a capital city, a village in the hinterlands, a seaport? What lives here? Who rules here, and how, and why, and for how long? Is this a pirate town, a farming town, a military town? Are thieves and muggers a known and frequent risk, or is the town generally safe? What's the weather doing (beyond your saying in the framing that it's a warm sunny day) - is it likely to rain later? Is there a drought? What's around Karnos - desert, forest, farms, mountains? What modes of transport are available beyond just foot, should I not find what I want here in Karnos and decide to try elsewhere? Are there any unusual local customs or modes of dress etc. that I need to be aware of? Etc., and I haven't even got to nation-region-world-astronomy questions yet.

If much of this wasn't provided ahead of time (i.e. this part of the world wasn't built) then I - as would, I suspect, many players - would be asking most of these questions before I ever get around to declaring an action! Even if the questions don't directly inform my action declaration right now they'll inform my general approach later; and very little of this is stuff players should be expected to just make up on their own (and if they do then the GM has to be scribbling like a madman to record all of it in the interests of future consistency - why not just do this work beforehand when you've time to relax and think it through?)

And how is this an example of players driving dramatic arcs? All you have here is a GM about to set up another "neutral" hook!

The players don't get to write their own adventures; it's on the DM to provide those, even when the players decide to head for the mountains just to see what's there. The players, however, are now driving the overall story; and the DM is in react mode.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

But hasn't [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] already addressed this a zillion times, and posted numerous and extensive play reports that support the fact that Story Now, No Myth gaming, free of the kind of world building you advocate for, can produce the same kind of believability, consistency, and coherence?

Yes, he has.

Do you dispute his examples?

That those instances of play occurred I obviously can't dispute.

What I can and will dispute is that this sort of play can provide a campaign that is and remains sustainable for the long term (by which I mean anything beyond just a few sessions), without a ridiculous amount of work probably done by the GM to record everything about the setting that comes up in play so as to be consistent should it ever be encountered again. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] 's game logs - those that we've seen - are exhaustive in their mechanical detail as well as their events recording and probably do give enough info to provide at least some long-term consistency...and in this I maintain that he's so unusual as to possibly be unique. (that's supposed to be a compliment, in case you're wondering!)

Why must this debate continue to run in circles? Unless there is hard counter-evidence one can provide that Story Now, No Myth gaming fails to provide believablity, consistency, and coherence, in the face of hard evidence to the contrary, can we just let this point rest?

In the immediate, it can and apparently does provide all three.

I dispute that it can continue to do so over time, as things get forgotten or numbers/time/distance/locations shift or morph in ways they shouldn't or things get skipped between scenes that end up needing to be retconned.

And note I'm not necessarily suggesting that traditional play (including worldbuilding) doesn't have rocks of its own to run aground on. It does, and over time I think I've probably hit them all. But I also think it's got more versatility in what it can do or be made to do in terms of what type-style-length-size of games or campaigns it can support, which gives it the advantage.

Lan-"having just said I've hit all the rocks, just watch me find another this weekend"-efan

 

[Imaro]

At campaign start you frame me in a market in downtown Karnos; you provide all sorts of detail about what I can see including that there's a merchant here selling feathers. For that immediate scene, that's fine. But by no means is it all I need.

Where is Karnos? What is Karnos - a mining town, a capital city, a village in the hinterlands, a seaport? What lives here? Who rules here, and how, and why, and for how long? Is this a pirate town, a farming town, a military town? Are thieves and muggers a known and frequent risk, or is the town generally safe? What's the weather doing (beyond your saying in the framing that it's a warm sunny day) - is it likely to rain later? Is there a drought? What's around Karnos - desert, forest, farms, mountains? What modes of transport are available beyond just foot, should I not find what I want here in Karnos and decide to try elsewhere? Are there any unusual local customs or modes of dress etc. that I need to be aware of? Etc., and I haven't even got to nation-region-world-astronomy questions yet.

If much of this wasn't provided ahead of time (i.e. this part of the world wasn't built) then I - as would, I suspect, many players - would be asking most of these questions before I ever get around to declaring an action! Even if the questions don't directly inform my action declaration right now they'll inform my general approach later; and very little of this is stuff players should be expected to just make up on their own (and if they do then the GM has to be scribbling like a madman to record all of it in the interests of future consistency - why not just do this work beforehand when you've time to relax and think it through?)

Just wanted to comment on this part of your post as it ties back to the point I think @Celebrim was making earlier in the thread... mainly that @pemerton doesn't play a strictly no myth game. He's stated that he uses pre-authored content including geography, deities, names, places, etc. I think the confusion arises because he then creates a distinction (which honestly I'm still not necessarily clear on where the line is actually drawn) between the things he pre-authors and world-building. However my understanding on no myth gaming (and I don't claim to be an expert) is that everything is created during play. What I feel like @pemerton has done is created a hybrid of the two styles while claiming it's no myth which is actually serving to confuse alot of the issues.

Personally I'd love if someone could point to some actual play video or streaming of no myth gaming... the only one I can think of that uses no myth gaming is the episode on Tabletop where they play FATE... and the only thing they establish before play is the State the game takes place in.

EDIT: Just to note the FATE game is a one shot and I am actually looking for something where it's long term

 

[Sunseeker]

I'm gonna toss out here that much as everyone wants to feel special, people are pretty much the same all over.

By that I mean, unless there is a specific reason for a town, or city, or nation or geographic location to the special, most elements can be repeated without any harm to the game. People tend to live where there are a variety of resources (trees, rocks, water, arable land). Everyone needs food, clothing and shelter so there are likely bakers/butchers, clothiers and blacksmiths/lumberjacks in every town. Most people prefer trade, so towns will almost universally have an inn and a general store (often the same building).

Some players demand to know every different person's name in town and frankly, I smack these players upside the head when they pull this. There's really no reason a DM needs to prep what every townsfolk's name is, it's just silly.

If you can prep a generally "lively" town and can scale it on the fly (oh there are two inns and 5 blacksmiths and 3 clothiers!) then you really only ever need to build that one town. Again, unless the town needs to be a special snowflake for some reason, but I'd advise against that.

I live in Wyoming, about the closest you can get to "long distances between podunk towns" without traveling across Russia. You've seen one midwest town? You've seen them all.