No, I'm presuming you're not crazy. You are however treating it as if there were an independent reality to it.
Yes, I am treating it that way. I feel it necessary to continue explaining that I do not actually think it is real because there are some folks who would pounce upon that idea and spend hours arguing with me about it.
Like the whole "how can you care about realism when there are dragons that breathe fire" argument... *sigh*
But if that later play didn't materialize? Or the DM said there would be further play but was actually lying about it? That's what I don't get. In both cases, the fact of the matter is the same - and it's your decision to treat the game world with any given degree of legitimacy.
It's all about perception, then, at that point. If I think that the game might matter in the future, I might care about it more. But because I have no reason to think that, I find difficulty getting into the game.
I have to ask - why not have several campaign worlds? Wouldn't it be freeing in some ways?
To what end? This is my approach to world design and gaming in general; having multiple settings wouldn't change that.
I think it kinda does matter. By writing it down, you're asserting that the act of writing it has made it semi-permanent.
Hrm. Fair enough.
I don't know that there's a value to keeping consistent to something that has never come up in the game and has never passed your players' minds. I don't see how an edit would destroy the game world's integrity or what have you...
Because
I would know.
There are varying degrees of inconsistencies and edits, such as this. Some are more important than others - and while I would like for there to be no inconsistencies, I am only human, and have only so much time and memory capacity.
It greatly depends on the level of detail surrounding the inconsistency. If Bob had a massive backstory written up, if there were all kinds of things based upon that fact, and then I go and screw it up... well, that's the kind of error I want to avoid. I may cover up the error by in-game reasoning (for instance, if the players heard from some guy that it was Adam in charge, it may in fact still be Bob, and their source was not reliable), depending upon how the information was presented.
If it was just a casual conversation, and I later find out that I was inconsistent with the wiki, the wiki takes precedence.
At what point does an idea in your head become canonical for the world? On the point of imagining it? On the point of writing it down? Can you later change your mind about it and revise?
I don't think canonical status is boolean like that; I imagine it's a lot more of a gradient, insofar as my setting goes. Something written on the wiki, that has a lot of information interacting with it, is pretty much irrefutable canon. Something on the wiki that is just sort of there... I'd like to avoid contradicting it, but if I do, it's not really a big deal.
If something on the wiki contradicts an idea I had, then I work to modify the idea so that it fits. So ideas are less canonical than the wiki, though they may have some amount of canonical status given that I don't put everything I think of on the wiki (my plans for my next game, for instance).
Revising information, that again falls under the "how important and ingrained in the setting is this" idea. If an earlier idea seems to not be working out, or I've had a better one that would be better, my willingness to change it is dependent upon how important the information is. I have revised things, in the past, though as time goes on I do so less and less.
Meanwhile, if I ever got so ambitious I could be writing a book about events in a third part of the same world....
