The Art and Science of Worldbuilding For Gameplay [+]

[Aldarc]

I don't think that a great depth of lore is necessary for world-building. I understand that some people like it. It inspires them and provides them structure. However, I also think that an overabundance of lore can also feel stiffling and it does not always translate to "playability."

A rich depth of lore doesn't mean that the setting is all that playable. I was inspired when I first read Tekumel. I was impressed by the tremendous depth of lore and languages that went into the setting. You can look up glossaries and grammar books for the setting's conlangs. A sociologist could spend their time dissecting the social structures and cultures of the game. However, I also had no earthly idea what players would actually do in this setting. I still don't. My initial inspiration did not translate to being inspired to play or run the game. I also don't exactly think it's a coincidence that Tekumel has failed to gain much traction, even before the M.A.R. Barker scandal. And look at HarnWorld, another hyper-detailed lore-rich setting: it remains an incredibly niche setting despite being a medieval fantasy game.

In contrast, Stonetop instantly clicked with me as a setting when I first encountered it as a series of "look at what I've done" posts on a Google+ Dungeon World community. There was barely any lore. There was a picture of the village and its surrounding environs, a playbook for the village, plus the game pitch: "the players play adventuring inhabitants of a remote Iron Age village and dealing with problems of the village." Without all that much lore revealed at that point, I knew what the adventurers would do. I grasped the playability of the setting nearly in an instant. All the world-building lore revealed since then, especially in the preview documents for the book, have been helpful but the world-building has really only reinforced what was already revealed.

This is generally why I don't equate more lore with greater playability. There are so many playable worlds out there that are light on world-building lore and so many unplayable worlds (IMO) that are heavy on world-building lore.

When talking about the playability of a setting, themes are easier for me to engage with as a GM and player than the sort of world-building that emphasizes lore. The Nentir Vale and World Axis setting is another setting, IMHO, that is built on themes over lore. I have an idea of what players can do less because the oodles and oodles of lore but, rather, because the themes that are supported by what lore there is.

 

[prabe]

I don't think that a great depth of lore is necessary for world-building. I understand that some people like it. It inspires them and provides them structure. However, I also think that an overabundance of lore can also feel stiffling and it does not always translate to "playability."

{snip}

This is generally why I don't equate more lore with greater playability. There are so many playable worlds out there that are light on world-building lore and so many unplayable worlds (IMO) that are heavy on world-building lore.

When talking about the playability of a setting, themes are easier for me to engage with as a GM and player than the sort of world-building that emphasizes lore. The Nentir Vale and World Axis setting is another setting, IMHO, that is built on themes over lore. I have an idea of what players can do less because the oodles and oodles of lore but, rather, because the themes that are supported by what lore there is.

I think you can have plenty of lore for your setting--I have a fair amount for mine--but I do not think it's possible to overstate the importance of having blank spaces in your lore, the same way you might (probably should) have them on your map. I mean, you probably don't know everything about your world anyway, so why not be honest about what you don't know?

 

[Reynard]

I don't think that a great depth of lore is necessary for world-building. I understand that some people like it. It inspires them and provides them structure. However, I also think that an overabundance of lore can also feel stiffling and it does not always translate to "playability."

A rich depth of lore doesn't mean that the setting is all that playable. I was inspired when I first read Tekumel. I was impressed by the tremendous depth of lore and languages that went into the setting. You can look up glossaries and grammar books for the setting's conlangs. A sociologist could spend their time dissecting the social structures and cultures of the game. However, I also had no earthly idea what players would actually do in this setting. I still don't. My initial inspiration did not translate to being inspired to play or run the game. I also don't exactly think it's a coincidence that Tekumel has failed to gain much traction, even before the M.A.R. Barker scandal. And look at HarnWorld, another hyper-detailed lore-rich setting: it remains an incredibly niche setting despite being a medieval fantasy game.

In contrast, Stonetop instantly clicked with me as a setting when I first encountered it as a series of "look at what I've done" posts on a Google+ Dungeon World community. There was barely any lore. There was a picture of the village and its surrounding environs, a playbook for the village, plus the game pitch: "the players play adventuring inhabitants of a remote Iron Age village and dealing with problems of the village." Without all that much lore revealed at that point, I knew what the adventurers would do. I grasped the playability of the setting nearly in an instant. All the world-building lore revealed since then, especially in the preview documents for the book, have been helpful but the world-building has really only reinforced what was already revealed.

This is generally why I don't equate more lore with greater playability. There are so many playable worlds out there that are light on world-building lore and so many unplayable worlds (IMO) that are heavy on world-building lore.

When talking about the playability of a setting, themes are easier for me to engage with as a GM and player than the sort of world-building that emphasizes lore. The Nentir Vale and World Axis setting is another setting, IMHO, that is built on themes over lore. I have an idea of what players can do less because the oodles and oodles of lore but, rather, because the themes that are supported by what lore there is.

I agree. "Lore" is only one aspect of world building and it appeals to a particular audience. Other aspects that are important and help playability are strong themes, as you said, but also connections between setting elements, a world structure that emphasizes places and people and things to play with, and tropes that lean into whatever sort of adventures the setting is ostensibly about. For my own part, the most important aspect is the relationship between elements, how this ties to that and leads you to the other. That makes a setting useful for me as a GM, because it enables easy improvisation as players do the things players are wont to do.

 

[Reynard]

I think you can have plenty of lore for your setting--I have a fair amount for mine--but I do not think it's possible to overstate the importance of having blank spaces in your lore, the same way you might (probably should) have them on your map. I mean, you probably don't know everything about your world anyway, so why not be honest about what you don't know?

As I have stated upthread, i don't think blank spaces are particularly important, unless you define a "blank space" as anything not completely exhaustively defined. I mean you don't need a region of literally empty hexes on your world map. There will be plenty of times that you will realize you did not consider this or that. You don't necessarily need to build it in.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I disagree, because a) you don't know what will or won't enter play unless you are restricting your players' choices, and b) detailed world building is inspirational.

I think it is definitionally so, from long and extensive experience. You can, of course, go back and add depth and complexity but that is world building to support gameplay.

So much this. Detailed worldbuilding both allows the players to do things the DM doesn't expect or direct and still have something there when they do, and inspire both players and DM to more fully interact with the world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not necessarily, no. It depends on what we're collectively looking for from the new campaign and what world would suit it.

Generally speaking, I don't design my whole world prior to play, so chances are if I'm using the same setting for more than one campaign, I can use a previously unseen area. Other times, I may use an established setting, and tweak it to our needs.

I honestly think that the key to focusing on playability is to actively not decide all details ahead of time. Which seems kind of counterintuitive when it comes to the topic of worldbuilding, but I think it's very true.

It seems like you are disagreeing with the premise then, if you think detailed worldbuilding harms playability. Remember that this is a "+" thread.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it's the best version of worldbuilding. I see absolutely no point in wasting time on elements of the world the players will never encounter. Is it possible they will encounter something soon? Then start making a rough sketch of that thing. Is it unlikely that they will ever encounter something? Then don't waste time on it.

Don't prep anything that's not interactive. The best example is the Great Wheel and the various planes that instantly kill the PCs. Avoid that. Better to create something like the Elemental Chaos of 4E. That's playable. I would seriously suggest anyone interested in worldbuilding with an eye towards playability take a long, hard look at 4E's cosmology and points of light setting, and Sly Flourish's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master.

The referee tends to lore dump on the players and push the game towards revealing their worldbuilding.

Yes. As per the common writing advice, "kill your darlings." Anything not directly in front of the PCs doesn't matter. Remove the deep lore. Nothing is true until it appears in game. Set the binders aside and focus on the next session. The broad strokes will survive, probably. The details and minutia will not survive. Be okay with that.

D&D 4E's points of light setting and the cosmology they built for 4E was literally designed from the ground up with gameplay in mind.

Eberron straddles the line for me. It was originally built for gameplay. The setting is dripping with inspiration and plot hooks. But after almost 20 years there's so much built up and so much of the map filled in that it can be really hard to play in that setting without either ignoring decades of stuff or being boxed in by the lore. But...Eberron also mostly sidesteps that issue by having the start date fixed across editions allowing the referee to move ahead in time and change things as they go. Winding up a world on the brink of war and seeing where it goes based on the factions involved and the PCs' actions is really amazingly fun.

Settings like Middle Earth are the other end of the spectrum. So utterly locked down and filled in that there's effectively no potential left for new adventures.

You need blank spots on the map and in the lore for the PCs to explore for there to be a game to play.

To me, the ultimate in "gameplay first" would be a starting village and a few nearby hexes with points of interest to explore.

This just sounds like an advertisement for 4e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I have lived in the same inner-city suburb for over 25 years. Yesterday I went for a walk and, within 1 km of my house, walked down lanes I have never been down before (though I must have ridden past them, on a main road, dozens if not hundreds of times).

Given that (i) finding such places might well be part of game play, and (ii) no one can possible author all that stuff in advance, then (iii) it seems to follow that some sorts of "leave blanks" approach is necessary.

Those places weren't blank, you as the player just didn't know about them. The universe didn't invent them for you as you approached.

 

[pemerton]

You presumably understand what is generally meant by "adventure" in the context of RPG, so why this sematic quibble?

Then read "adventure" as "the things PCs do in that game."

To me, it seems that different sorts of things PCs do in a RPG might suggest different sorts of considerations when it comes to building a world for gameplay.

Playability includes a few things. First and foremost in my mind is does the world provide opportunities for "adventure" (whatever that means in the context of the game the world is meant for). Do the player characters have stuff to do in the world? Second and only slightly less important is does the world mesh with and support the game's mechanical elements?

That is a good one for playability: incorporate the intended game system into the world building, if one has been chosen.

These observations about incorporating a game system, and its mechanical elements, suggest a fantasy world, and also a game system which includes discrete "building blocks" of mechanical components that correlate pretty tightly with story elements. D&D spells, magic items and monsters were the examples that I thought of. I've gone through a comparable sort of process in setting design for Rolemaster - it doesn't quite have D&D classes, but it similarly has lists of spells, items and monsters.

The following does a pretty good job of explaining it:

Note my initial response to this topic; I believe he's speaking to world design thats geared towards reinforcing the gameplay loops of the game.

In a broad sense, this means designing a game world and its lore around the idea that, in say DND, there is an actual, logical reason for adventurers to exist and be able to act as they tend to do.

But you can get as nitty gritty with it as you like, which I related to how Nintendo designed the two open-world Zelda games for this purpose, from broad geography on down to how individual things are placed, all of which are deliberately done so as to support and reinforce the core gameplay loops of exploration and discovery.

And as noted, the Zeldas are fully "gamey" in their world design; they aren't realistically designed in any way shape or form. But, that doesn't mean you can't blend more realism with game needs, it just takes a lot of thought from both ends to reach a good equilibrium.

Ultimately, while theres a lot of crossover, typical worldbuilding methods for books and the like aren't always the best for building gameworlds, and I think OP is trying to get at gameworld building and how thats accomplished, versus just worldbuilding or prepping a fixed adventure.

This in turn tends to mean building up sandboxes and open worlds (which aren't actually the same thing, as unintuitive as that may seem), as these are the kinds of gameworlds that can exist as their own systemic component of a game, independent of any specific adventure or story that might happen in it, rather than just as an over-elaborate set dressing for such things

Essentially, the world building takes into account not "the next adventure" but "adventure" in a broad sense.

The apparent endorsement of "core gameplay loops of exploration and discovery", together with the language of discovery, again suggests a particular sort of RPGing.

I've recently been reading T1 The Village of Hommlet fairly closely, because I've rewritten the Moathouse as a Torchbearer adventure. I would count this as an example of worldbuilding. There are some things it focuses on - eg the layout of the village, the arms; armour and valuable in each house; the religious affiliation of each household; - but not others - eg we are told that the farmer in Area 5 (Prosperous Farmhouse) is a widower of middle age, with 5 children, the eldest being two daughters, who is the brother of the farmer to the south in Area 1 (Prosperous Farm Cottage and Large Barn). We are told that this widower is dour and taciturn - but was he like this before his wife died? Does it affect his relationship with his brother (are they close? distant? how has this changed over time?)? What about with his daughters? And how do the daughters, or their brothers, get on with their six cousins in Area 1? Do these families, whose houses are 40 yards apart and separated only by a large barn, hold land in common, or do they farm separate plots?

Looking at Area 10 (Well-Kept Dwelling With a Wooden Sign Showing a Bag of Wool and a Loom), we have "an elderly weaver and his wife, their daughter and her husband . . . [who] moved to the area only two years ago." Where did they come from? What does this tell us about social mobility and economic activity - especially as they also have "four young apprentice weavers, as business is very good". Where did the apprentices come from, and how does this affect the agricultural labour force?

Depending how we conceive of the gameplay intended to take place in the world being built, it seems to me that a whole range of different considerations might apply.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As a very simple example: if the architecture of every building in the world were specified in advance, then when a player declares (as their PC) "I search for a secret entrance" then in many cases the outcome would be predetermined (ie there is no secret entrance, as per the pre-authored architecture). And thus, the direction of gameplay would be limited (ie no secret entrance is going to be found and exploited in this particular moment of play).

Presumably part of the point of world building for game play is precisely to introduce such limits.

The choice isn't, "find a secret entrance", it's "look for a secret entrance". I look for things that turn out not be there all the time. Doesn't affect my ability to make choices.

You're discussing playstyles here, not playability. The types of games you prefer don't approach worldbuilding the way @Reynard posits in the OP, so what you and others are essentially doing here is arguing against the premise in a "+" thread to promote your playstyle. I expect you wouldn't care for that if the roles were reversed.