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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3784482" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think that's really a world building question, and is probably at least as broad as the question of what makes a realistic campaign.There are basically two approaches to world building, and neither of them works.  You can either go top down, in which case you'll never have the time to detail anything sufficiently to run adventurers.  Or, you can go bottom up, in which case your world will tend to run off the rails from time to time.   I think the realistic approach to creating realism is 'bottom up' with just enough top down to insure you aren't building things blindly. As for actual play, I know from experience that they can hold up in actual play just fine, but it really depends on the skill and interests of your players how much it is going to profit you.  You need to know what your players want from a game.  Often, in my experience, they don't really know what they like, they just like what they know.  So give them something familiar and dangle enough detail ou there to get some ideas as to what they are going to bite on.  In one of his prologues, Tolkien talks about how the little details he gives of flora, fauna, histories, architecture, anthropology, and so forth prompted fans with a naturalist bent to request more information about the flowers, those with a muscical bent to ask for tunes, and so forth.  He was half amused and half horrified by this taking of his story as some sort of elaborate game, but as a DM I think that's exactly what you want to have happen.The only reason to build anything is because your players are going to interact with it at some point, or at least interact with something that is impacted by it.  There is no reason for a vast cosmology if religion isn't going to play a role in your campaign.  No reason for a detailed history if history doesn't meaningfully impact the way characters interact with the artifacts of that history.  If your players are going to interact with an ancient sword exactly the same as any other sword +1, more than a sentence of history is probably excessive.  I personally like to have the item's age and a minimal description, just in case I need to invent some other details later on the fly, but even that can probably be invented on the fly in most cases.  As a bottom up approach, I tend to start campaigns in areas which are deliberately chosen to be familiar to modern sensibilities in at least some fashion.  They don't need to be fully modern, but they can sample from say a half dozen modernisms if you can figure out what's unique about this places history that's given rise to say plentiful coin, abhorence of slavery, or a somewhat classless society.  Then have your players come to understand that these things are this region's 'hat', and that everywhere else in the world considers them wierd and perhaps a little immoral for it.But there is a level of thoughtful detail that is somewhat removed from world building that I think can benefit your campaign regardless of your characters, and help produce what I feel is a more mature play.  That's things like rolling randomly to determine the days weather, making sure that encounter locations have complex terrains when appropriate, rooms have architectural features and odors and sounds, that people that the characters enter agreements with want written contracts (especially if they are the sort that wants written contracts), that NPC's show evidence of being part of larger bureacracies and societies, and that these larger societies tries to impose themselves on the PC's as societies are wont to do.  I don't think you can go wrong with that sort of light-weight, off the cuff, casual thoughfulness.  It's far better than a world full of 20'x30' rooms with no other feature but a pile of coins, and where every NPC is either Santa Claus, a non-descript shopkeeper, or there to be killed - which is what IME games evolve to if the DM only builds things according to the needs of the game.  Just don't bog the game down in your exposition.  The PC's don't have to encounter every detail you want to put into the game in one session.</blockquote>

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