Designing worlds for fun and... well, fun

[Imret]

Well, now that you've all received your free lesson in No No You're Playing The Game Wrong And I Can Tell Because You're Not Doing What I Do, go forth and litter ruins full of monsters and cash slightly in excess of the GDP of a large kingdom all over your map because men with swords need holes in the ground to enter so they can hack up the residents and take all their stuff!
- Disbelieve! Disbelieve!

Ahem. Anyway, leaving that aside, I think a well-built world that functions on its own can provide even greater player satisfaction than a world entirely designed for four people to stomp around and break stuff in. I'd like to take a moment to refer to Turjan's post up there about religious conflicts and pirates and all that jazz; this is, in a nutshell, my adventure hook generation philosophy. Build a world with player input and ask them, more or less, "So what do you want to do tonight?".

Some players are going to want to trek across the countryside, find a deep hole in the ground, and go in there to earn a living. Fine, there are ruins from the last war, ancient temples to forgotten gods, and all manner of openings in the earth. Go find one!

Some players want to rob the houses of the wealthy, flee guards across rooftops, and seize control of the criminal underworld. Fine, there are a dozen large cities with well-established criminal organizations.

Some players want to spread the word of their god in the borderlands - sometimes whether the settlers want to hear it or not. Fine, go out and preach your doctrine!

Yes, this does require a lot of seat of your pants DMing and a willingness to say "Sure, a few days out you come across a half-buried door in a cliff face..." when that section of your map just looks like foothills. So suddenly, they're delving into a dungeon that as yet has no name, no original inhabitants, no map....what do you do? Check the notes, recall that a few miles from here was an important battlefield in the elf/orc wars four hundred years ago - presto, it's an orcish "field command", hewn roughly out of the rock and fitted with crude traps. The orcs lost this battle, so the command was abandoned (with anything too heavy to carry while running left behind), and the population density is low enough in this area it's unlikely anyone's been inside - you have the theme of the treasure within. Monsters? If it's small, maybe it's become a hidden cache for a raiding pack of gnolls, or a bear's winter den, or the new shrine to a minor fiend lord building his power up....if it's bigger, check the local encounter tables and pick something dangerous that needs a lair. Not all encounters should be ones the PC's can win. Or, just for a change of pace, some orcs found it too and are busy carrying out what's left...

And all of this because you have a well-built world to set adventures in. I've always preferred a world that appears to go on without the party's intervention, and they just get wrapped up into its events as they see fit.

But, then again, that's how I play the game and build my worlds. YMMV.

 

[Burrahobbit]

I think there's a lot to be said for many of the types of world building mentioned here: expansive, detailed worlds that have existed long before the PCs and (as long as they don't mess up too badly) will exist long after them; worlds tailor made for the PCs; worlds being made up as you go...

I will say that one of my most satisfying moments as a DM was also one of my first, some years ago; people had come with their characters, no knowledge of the world I had *very* vaguely sketched (nothing much other than the details of the first adventure and the absence of any wacky "hook," and a general understanding that it was in essence the standard 2nd-edition/western Europe/Tolkienesque type feel, though it wouldn't have had to be), no cooperative planning of backgrounds, and yet in a very short time we, entirely off the cuff, had created interesting homelands, legends, and backgrounds that fit what everyone wanted and would have provided all kinds of adventure hooks.

Because of circumstances, it was only an adventure or two, and not a full campaign, but I think we were all impressed with how smoothly a barely existing world could be made to fit the players' and the DM's desires...in this case, at least, the players and their imaginations were the world builder's best friends. So, in answer to the original question about what needs to be in place, I would say, sometimes the answer could be "almost nothing."

But of course there's a lot of *fun* to be had in dreaming up alternate races, strange histories, prophecies, and all the rest...and there's no limit to that other than your imagination and, alas, time.

Anyway, more generally, I second the suggestion made by Woas: the old Dungeoncraft columns by Ray Winninger <sp?> are fantastic.

 

[rounser]

Well, now that you've all received your free lesson in No No You're Playing The Game Wrong And I Can Tell Because You're Not Doing What I Do, go forth and litter ruins full of monsters and cash slightly in excess of the GDP of a large kingdom all over your map because men with swords need holes in the ground to enter so they can hack up the residents and take all their stuff!
- Disbelieve! Disbelieve!

I think I'll take "Gamist Exploring And Killing Things And Taking Their Stuff" over "Boring Wannabe Fantasy Novelist Wish Fulfilment-a-thons" for ten dollars, Johnny.

Build a world with player input and ask them, more or less, "So what do you want to do tonight?".

Well, not explore the wilderness because there's nothing interesting out there which you're not going to wing, and there's probably nothing interesting in town either because you've only prepared history and politics and the names and machinations of criminal organisations. Now, if the assassin's guild was actually detailed, it might be worth raiding, but it's not.

Yes, this does require a lot of seat of your pants DMing and a willingness to say "Sure, a few days out you come across a half-buried door in a cliff face..." when that section of your map just looks like foothills. So suddenly, they're delving into a dungeon that as yet has no name, no original inhabitants, no map....what do you do?

Wing it, because you've got nothing prepared because you've been too busy doing extraneous worldbuilding. Yeah, I know....you've got plenty of company in that respect, and it's more fun for you as the DM to dream of wars that never were than to actually create something that the PCs can interact with.

they just get wrapped up into its events as they see fit.

I've seen DMs try this in the past, and it always seems to fall apart in practise (maybe your players are the exception, but it sounds a bit theoretical to me). If you don't present the players with adventure hooks of some sort, they generally won't do your work for you to get them involved in your world because they don't find your world nearly as interesting as you do. That's something I've seen time and time again; present company will claim that they're excepted, naturally.

 

[Turjan]

Given that many (if not most) campaigns seem to consist of railroading the PCs through a sequence of adventures of the DM's choosing, perhaps we should call a spade a spade. The adventure path is called that because there's no player choice; there's only one path.

Since when have players begun doing what the DM wants them to do? Do you usually lock them in a dungeon? And who brought the 'adventure path' into this topic?

If you don't like the idea of scripts, perhaps spending less time on "worldbuilding" and more on status quo adventuring sites (which is worldbuilding of a sort, but at a D&D game level) and branching adventure paths that the PCs can choose their path from.

This amounts to a hell of a lot of work, and involves sacrificing a lot of DM control over the game, but it's probably more useful than most worldbuilding in terms of generating player satisfaction.

I think you are construeing opposites that don't really exist. Most games are compromises. You can have extraordinarily detailed locations for your adventures, and this works as long as the players don't do anything unexpected, which, at least in my experience, they love doing. The other extreme, just sitting there at the beginning of the session and asking "What do you want to do?" results in complete handwaiving, which is most probably not satisfactory for both sides of the table, except you aim for comic relief. The best thing is to bring a few reasonably well prepared hooks, NPCs and locations to the table, and it isn't amiss to have some 'emergency' map up one's sleeve, in case the players ignore all presented hooks.

Of course, all this works for "generic" D&D, which is basically settingless. That's why the topic is "Designing worlds for fun..."; it's not necessary, but might deliver one or two good ideas that end up in an actual game .

 

[Reynard]

I think you are construeing opposites that don't really exist. Most games are compromises. You can have extraordinarily detailed locations for your adventures, and this works as long as the players don't do anything unexpected, which, at least in my experience, they love doing. The other extreme, just sitting there at the beginning of the session and asking "What do you want to do?" results in complete handwaiving, which is most probably not satisfactory for both sides of the table, except you aim for comic relief. The best thing is to bring a few reasonably well prepared hooks, NPCs and locations to the table, and it isn't amiss to have some 'emergency' map up one's sleeve, in case the players ignore all presented hooks.

While I'll say that rounsr comes off a little rough around the edges here, i will agree with him to some extent. All the socio-theo-poli-history in the world isn't going to matter one whit when your PCs want to flip up an manhole cover and drop into the sewers and hunt were-rats. Well, that's not entirely true -- if wererats have a place in the world background, it will make the experience more fun and rewarding, but there still needs to be a manhole to flip up and sewers to explore.

If I am reading him right, rounser isn't advocating ignroing history and politics altogether, he's suggesting that the DM is better off spending some of that world building tim preparing sites, organizations and NPCs with which the PCs might actually interact. And, I think, he's saying that the more of that stuff that is out there and pregenerated, the more freedom the PCs will have in exploring the world you have crafted and ultimately the more they will get out of it. I agree.

World-building, including all the background stuff, is fun and rewading and essentially a mini-game in the same way that character optimization/planning is. But, like the other, world building by itself is meaningless; for it to be worthwhile to the game as a whole -- not just to the DM -- it has to be done with an eye toward how it interacts with the other people playing and the other elements of the game.

 

[SpiralBound]

While I don't technically disagree with the underlying premises put forth by rounser I think that the objections are being described in "worst case scenario" terms only. I guess it's easier to be "right" in this "argument" if it's stated that way, but I've yet to see a GM who is as deeply buried in the "wannabe fantasy novelist" syndrome that is being portraying in his posts. Usually, the GMs I've played with do some independent world building to get the basic framework of the setting established, and then build an edventure for the players in it, and then flesh out various details of the setting during play and in between play sessions throughout the length of the campaign. I've yet to see such a black & white set of circumstances as described by rounser. Perhaps he has been the victim of really introverted and inexperienced GMs and this has overly negatively coloured his opinion of the "typical" GM?

 

[Reynard]

While I don't technically disagree with the underlying premises put forth by rounser I think that the objections are being described in "worst case scenario" terms only. I guess it's easier to be "right" in this "argument" if it's stated that way, but I've yet to see a GM who is as deeply buried in the "wannabe fantasy novelist" syndrome that is being portraying in his posts. Usually, the GMs I've played with do some independent world building to get the basic framework of the setting established, and then build an edventure for the players in it, and then flesh out various details of the setting during play and in between play sessions throughout the length of the campaign. I've yet to see such a black & white set of circumstances as described by rounser. Perhaps he has been the victim of really introverted and inexperienced GMs and this has overly negatively coloured his opinion of the "typical" GM?

This is pretty much how I do it. I always intend to create a dozen different adventure sites, ranging wildly in challenge rating and general nature, to allow the PCs to enjoy 'sandbox mode'. But other stuff (life, work, posting on mesage boards) seems to get in the way and I go back to the "one adventure at a time; detail a little more of the world" model.

 

[SWBaxter]

He's preoccupied with creating a world map, which I don't think is essential - I feel that all he really needs is a map of the area in which the campaign will begin.

Well, what's essential varies from DM to DM, group to group, and setting to setting. For me personally to get a world to a playable state, I need a regular group that's willing to give me an idea of what they want to do (rather than just say "here we are, entertain us") and a big idea of my own to make the world distinctive. Absent those, I might as well just use Greyhawk or Wilderlands or whatever, why reinvent the wheel?

Given that I have both of those, what the players enjoy will have a big influence on how I go about developing the world - some players really enjoy learning about history and visiting strange lands and cultures, so if I've got a few players like that in my group then I'm definitely going to start with a map and work out some history before moving to the small scale stuff. Others like plausible D&D societies, which means that I'd better work more on rules-type stuff and how it intereacts with the game world. Still others are more locally oriented and for them the overall picture isn't that important so long as I have a rich micro-setting with lots of plot hooks.

Here are some of my thoughts:
1. What races are present, and do they differ from those in the PHB/MM?
2. What are the relations like between the races?
3. How prevalent is magic?
4. What level of technology has been reached by the dominant civilization(s)?

Those are all questions worth answering, but how you get there is a unique process. There ain't no one true way.

 

[Turjan]

While I'll say that rounsr comes off a little rough around the edges here, i will agree with him to some extent. All the socio-theo-poli-history in the world isn't going to matter one whit when your PCs want to flip up an manhole cover and drop into the sewers and hunt were-rats. Well, that's not entirely true -- if wererats have a place in the world background, it will make the experience more fun and rewarding, but there still needs to be a manhole to flip up and sewers to explore.

Well, I don't think anyone here in this thread propagated that players are interested in the "socio-theo-poli-history" of any homebrew world. This is also true for published settings, except when players read some novel series related to the setting, which carries some information over. That's why I wanted to make a clear distinction between world-building, which is, as the title of the thread implies, just for [personal] fun, and adventure-planning, which has a direct impact on the game and should be done with care so that everyone has fun. The world-building part makes sure that everything fits together, but it shouldn't be obtrusive. I don't bore any of my players with socio-historical treatises; they might get a sentence or two if they ask "Why does my elf have to wear a disguise when he enters this city?". This might provoke an "aha", but that's about as far as it goes.

If I am reading him right, rounser isn't advocating ignroing history and politics altogether, he's suggesting that the DM is better off spending some of that world building tim preparing sites, organizations and NPCs with which the PCs might actually interact. And, I think, he's saying that the more of that stuff that is out there and pregenerated, the more freedom the PCs will have in exploring the world you have crafted and ultimately the more they will get out of it. I agree.

You think he says a DM should be prepared when he comes to the table, and the better prepared he is the better the game will be? That's a truly revolutionary revelation !

World-building, including all the background stuff, is fun and rewading and essentially a mini-game in the same way that character optimization/planning is. But, like the other, world building by itself is meaningless; for it to be worthwhile to the game as a whole -- not just to the DM -- it has to be done with an eye toward how it interacts with the other people playing and the other elements of the game.

If you read my posts carefully, you will discover that I'm saying the exact same thing . Our original differences were about worlds as one trick ponies opposed to others that offer more diversity; I advocate the latter .

 

[rounser]

While I'll say that rounsr comes off a little rough around the edges here,

I apologise for that - was posting when stressed out (which is no excuse really, shouldn't vent my spleen in that manner). Forgot my manners.