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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4681176" data-attributes="member: 29398">World design:Ayup. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Once the house rules are in place, it's possible to drop the puck with only 1) a village or home base, 2) an adventure that needs doing, and 3) a very vague idea of greater things such as what the name of the realm is and who's the King this week.  Oh, and the village has to have a tavern. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The sticking point is that the greater world design dictates some of the house rules.  Determining what languages exist (and by extension, what languages the PCs might speak) means determining what cultures exist, and where, inrelation to the PCs' starting point.  Also, unless all the PCs are going to be natives of the starting village (unlikely, as most parties aren't all the same race) you need enough design in place to allow character backgrounds to make sense.For my current campgian, the design process went rules==>world==>rules.Snowflakes:My take on this is "You're a snowflake among countless others.  Go out and make yourself special...or melt."  And yes, there's other adventurers out there.  And powerful non-adventurers, be they retired, types who gained levels slowly in ways other than adventuring (there badly needs to be a mechanism for this; all editions), or whatever.I've an adventure in mind for the not-too-distant future where the party will arrive at the adventure just after a more powerful group went in and got trashed; the PCs go in and (in theory) finish up against weakened opponents...unless they dawdle and give the opponents time to recover, in which case they're in big trouble.Sandbox vs. adventure path:I usually try to have a rough storyboard of the next several adventures each party will hit - it's interesting to, years later, go back and see if my storyboard ended up bearing any resemblance to what they went on and did.  But the storyboard isn't cast in stone, and I've no way of predicting what they'll actually do with a given story or adventure.  Last night, for example, my players quite innocently threw a *severe* monkey wrench into a storyline they don't even know about yet; to the point where I either make major background changes, or reveal far too much far too soon, or kill off a PC without ever telling the player why - all simply through playing their characters in character and doing things I didn't expect.Keep in mind the game has to be fun for the DM too.  The example given earlier where the party would do nothing but trade runs if given the chance might be fun for the players but would bore the crap out of me as DM.Lanefan</blockquote>

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