D&D General Does a campaign world need to exist beyond what the characters interact with?

[Yora]

Strictly speaking, a setting always only needs what the PCs interact with.

But interaction is not just what the PCs are acting on, but also what is acting on the PCs. Interactions are constantly happening far beyond the PCs' line of sight. If the players run into and talk with traveling merchants from a distant land, the scene is affected by that distant land. Even if it has no map and the single named city is the one the merchants come from, this interaction with the merchants can be significantly affected by the vague image the GM has of the land.

There does not have to be a lot of detail for anything that exists beyond the boundaries of the current campaign, but if you want to avoid having the campaign feel like taking place in a sealed bubble, there needs to be something that is touching the boundaries.

 

[Umbran]

But interaction is not just what the PCs are acting on, but also what is acting on the PCs. Interactions are constantly happening far beyond the PCs' line of sight. If the players run into and talk with traveling merchants from a distant land, the scene is affected by that distant land.

Interactions may constantly be happening beyond the PCs sight. The scene may be affected by that distant land.

Or, maybe the PCs just ask for the price of a bag of jerky, and they move on.

If you have loads of time on your hands, you certainly can make up lots of setting details. And if that itself is fun for you, go to! Maybe they will be relevant, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll at least be flavor, but maybe they will never come up.

Those "maybes" mean there's a cost to benefit thing going here. How much effort do I put into this, vs how much benefit my game gets from it. Then, compare that to all the other things one might do to improve one's game.

It is to clear to me that loads of setting details not directly related to the PCs action is the best bang for the buck.

 

[Yora]

Which is why efficient worldbuilding is oriented towards a purpose. The idea of big campaign settings that can be anything to everyone and covers whatever style of fantasy you could ask for, like Forgotten Realms in particular, is nice on paper. But you end up with so much mush that is rarely going to be of any use to anyone that it makes finding and remembering the more useful elements more difficult. Not to mention the amount of writing time that is spend on it.
I regularly feel that the best campaign settings are the ones that have a general idea of what kinds of stories are going to take place in them, instead of offering a place to play any kind of story, but being spread thin on useful specifics everywhere.

 

[Xamnam]

The idea of big campaign settings that can be anything to everyone and covers whatever style of fantasy you could ask for, like Forgotten Realms in particular, is nice on paper. But you end up with so much mush that is rarely going to be of any use to anyone that it makes finding and remembering the more useful elements more difficult.

They certainly are a lot easier to use in an age of control+f, PDFs, and wikis than they used to be, though. So, nicer off paper than on paper.

 

[Voadam]

In a lot of discussions on campaign settings or various facets of.D&D "lore" (cough, Halflings, cough), I see folks focusing a lot on the logical or illogical rules of a fantasy world. How could Halflings societies thrive if they don't interact with other cultures? How could the smithy be a dwarf without there existing large dwarven cities? How could the main city survive without extensive farmlands, and how are those farms not constantly raided by monsters?

I'm always surprised by these issues. I've come to realize it conflicts with a central theme of how I create my homebrew campaign rules:

No aspect of the setting exists if the characters are not interacting with it.

So what do you think?

All of these seem like things that players can be interacting with in a game.

Halfling PCs could want to know about their culture, if halflings are Harfoot secret nomads is the PC in an otherwise non-hafling party necessarily a cultural rebel?

Chatting with the dwarven smithy a PC can ask about the nearest dwarven city. They can ask how does an undermountain dwarven city feed its population.

A PC can ask a farmer how much they worry about monster raids or how they deal with them.

D&D is an open-ended type of game, most anything can come up and you cannot really control what the PCs will inquire about.

 

[beancounter]

No, a campaign world doesn't need to exist beyond the characters, but if it's something you enjoy building, there is nothing wrong with that.

 

[Voadam]

So what do you think? How do you run it? Is your campaign setting realized and existing even without character interaction? Or do you only detail what the characters are interested in?

For the last two decades throughout a couple of editions I have generally run in a mashup setting including elements from a lot of settings that I enjoy, mostly Ptolus (big henotheistic theocratic empire at civil war) and Golarion (lots of themed kingdoms that I integrate within the Ptolus empire or have outside of it). It is fairly realized with a lot of diverse thematic elements to pull on for any particular campaign or adventure.

I generally like having a solid background in my head to riff off of when things come up in game.

This type of setup has allowed me to run multiple campaigns in different areas of the same setting with widely different themes such as the Freeport Trilogy (pirates and Cthulhu); Monte Cook (Demon plots) and 3.0 D&D modules (planar stuff); and the Reign of Winter (Baba Yaga and Narnia White Witch), Carrion Crown (gothic horror), and Iron Gods (Thundar the Barbarian sci-fi D&D mashup) adventure paths while keeping the setting fairly continuous with common elements I can use in each such as the big church and the civil war world background elements.

I have also run an Oathbound Wildwood campaign fairly out of the book for the setting.

I have also run one shots with most elements completely improvved on the spot with things like the two PC halflings being the resulting two halves of somebody cut in half by a blade trap in a chaos magic dungeon. It was a lot of fun and they have gone really well.

Improvving elements is a lot of fun, but I also really like reading about and thinking about and incorporating setting elements and using them as elements to riff off of when things come up.

 

[Mort]

Both will work.

I prefer to start small, and flesh out as the PCs go. But since I started doing that decades ago - whenever a campaign starts back in my original world, many parts are REALLY flashed out already.

The big danger I've seen to fleshing out a world without PC involvement (lands, kingdoms and people) is making sure the DM can "let go" when the PCs come in and, invariably, break things. I personally find it great fun when the PCs take a wrecking ball to various areas of the world, but I've seen many, many DMs who aren't happy when that happens to "their" creation.

 

[Oofta]

Both will work.

I prefer to start small, and flesh out as the PCs go. But since I started doing that decades ago - whenever a campaign starts back in my original world, many parts are REALLY flashed out already.

The big danger I've seen to fleshing out a world without PC involvement (lands, kingdoms and people) is making sure the DM can "let go" when the PCs come in and, invariably, break things. I personally find it great fun when the PCs take a wrecking ball to various areas of the world, but I've seen many, many DMs who aren't happy when that happens to "their" creation.

With any setting (or adventure or campaign for that matter) I think the DM should always be ready for the PCs to change the world, go off the rails, screw things up. We set the stage, set up conflicts and other actors but we aren't the authors of a story.

I've had people fail and I had to figure out how to figure out what happened next. I've had people turn what was supposed to be a BBEG into an ally. I've had people be far more successful than I expected. I think a DM should learn to roll with the punches because they're going to happen. On the other hand that doesn't necessarily have much to do with campaign world creation, an inflexible DM that can't react to the PC's actions in any campaign are going to hit the same issues.

Of course there's always a session 0 where you discuss this stuff. I'm playing Tomb of Annihilation right now and I knew going in that it would be an old school dungeon crawl. Not my preference, but I accept that I can't just say "F**** this dungeon, I'm going back to the city" and expect to continue the campaign. If the DM wants to limit how much the PCs can change, it should be discussed up front.

 

[Vaalingrade]

There's a number of factors here.

First, how free are the players to range away from the intended core plot?

If they can go anywhere, then there needs to be something there. It's certainly easier if you have a persistent world, but you can also pants it if you're skilled enough.

Second, do you use the world for multiple campaigns?

If so continuity is always a plus. The players can grow a familiarity and that can breed attachment.

I find it fun and a good creative exercise and appreciate when a DM makes the extra effort.

But... it's not mandatory and shouldn't be for someone who wants to just run a basic adventure. And sometimes it can become a detriment when the DM is the one that becomes attached or protective over the setting, unwilling to allow the players to change it in ways they don't like, or using the crafting to enforce their personal will.