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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 2433094" data-attributes="member: 5435">This is a very interesting post.  I've clipped bits of it more to serve as referents for myself in writing my responses than as representative of Fungasite's complex arguments; please do not, therefore, take the shortness of the quotes as lack of context.Such campaigns, I agree, are immensely satisfying when all the players are on board with it.  I love to play in games like this; I love to figure out (or try to figure out) what's going on, and to participate in a grand story.  The downside to this approach, which I've successfully implemented only once myself, is that the players are often not 'on board'.  That's not to say that they're not willing to follow the story you've set out, but even with a good group of players they *will* miss clues and go in the wrong direction, probably more often than not.  Even very good players will do this more than you expect simply because they are not as invested in the world or story as the DM is.  They are invested in their characters, and unless you create characters for them to play that match your expectations for the story, it's highly unlikely that you'll end up with a party that has all the proper motivations.So you as the DM have to strike a balancing act between coherence of the story and free will of the players.  My own personal GMing style pushes me more towards the latter; I'd rather sacrifice aspects of the story so that the players feel in full control of their actions and goals, than have the players leave the table with the feeling that they've been railroaded.Good DMing takes, above all, adaptability, and the ideal 'Story World' has a rich enough symbolism that even if the players go in the wrong direction, you can work with their actions and link them back to the central theme (or even adopt another, equally satisfying theme mid-campaign).This relates back to what I said above; for a Story World to work well, you need at the very least to put some strong limits on what kind of characters the players can create.  My own experience in this kind of campaigning asked for characters that, broadly speaking, came from the more important viking-like culture and had reason to enter the service of the current king looking for fame and glory.  Most did this, but there will always be people who want to be the exception--that party also had an asian-style ninja-like character and a female celtic druid, whose culture and politics brought them in conflict with the story at certain points.Nothing insurmountable--actually, it was the most Viking-like character of the bunch that caused the worst problems, simply because he was the leader of the party in a lot of ways but also the most insular.Between juggling player personalities (which people are most likely to direct the party), character motivations, and player investment in your creation, it really takes some luck to get one of these campaigns going.This is a very interesting point, and one that's already given me some ideas...A most enjoyable anecdote.  It begs the question as to what the best campaign was, though...I'm in full agreement with you here in principle, but it takes a *lot* of effort to put together a world that contains both levels of meaning along with enough diversity to adapt to the typical adventuring party's shenanigans without railroading them. I think that most people's first effort at a campaign world is very similar to the imaginative model that you describe.  They take bits and pieces out of their favorite stories and myths, mush them all together, and if they have some talent as a writer to begin with make the result feel like a unified whole.  If it never gets any deeper than that, then it's not a very satisfying world to play in on the storytelling level, although it can support a perfectly good game of D&D.  (This is what Greyhawk feels like to me.)The mytho-poetic world model that you describe, however, is no more satisfying to me to play in.  If every aspect of the world is governed by the set of correspondances that the DM has chosen as the unifying theme for their campaign, then the world feels sterile--maybe not so much at first, but definitely after the players have figured out the theme.  An ideal campaign world needs an element of historical and cultural randomness to it to give it verisimilitude.What you haven't described is the middle ground.  This is something I learned (of all places) from reading White Wolf products.  You can have an imaginative campaign world that does not grow blocky and uninteresting when you zoom in.  The key to creating such a world is layering your complexities.  You can have a set of nations, OK--give each one a central theme, a metaphoric purpose, and enough distinguishing traits to spark role-playing interest and some political conflict.  Again, the typical first effort at a campaign world stops here, and this is the appropriate place to stop if the DM wants their world to develop in full cooperation with the player's input.Now focus on the nation where you expect the story to start, and zoom in.  Identify a dozen or two regions, ethnicities, subcultures and movements within that nation that also provide interesting role-playing hooks and potential for interesting conflict.Now focus on the story that you want to tell, and zoom in on elements of the story that are particularly important. Subdivide those elements again, adding a layer of complexity where it matters.  Does it revolve around the inheritance of a throne?  Plot out an extended family tree for three generations, and stat out some of the more important courtiers and their interests.  Does it involve travel across a dangerous wasteland?  Add a layer of complexity to the culture of the natives, rather than making their attitude universal.In physics simulations, this technique is called adaptive gridding.  The beauty of it is that you don't have to do it all ahead of time, and if the players go in an unexpected direction, you don't have much work to do to maintain the level of detail.A single city can be just as satisfying a campaign setting as a whole world.  What matters is whether you have enough complexity at the level of the story to drive the story, motivate the characters, and challenge the players.Anyway, this is the approach that I prefer as a DM.  It allows for symbolically meaningful storytelling, but I don't feel as constrained by it because the themes that I want to work in can be expressed at whatever layer the players happen to find themselves spending the most time.Thanks again for a very informative and thought-provoking post.Ben</blockquote>

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