For Homebrewers: Changes & Crunch

[el-remmen]

I have been working diligently at developing and detailing an area of Aquerra where my next D&D campaign will take place. It is an area where in past campaigns parties have spent some time and had an adventures or three, and that PCs have hailed from - so there was some detail - but I find as I get older and look at some of that old descriptions of towns, cities, organizations and NPCs that while the nostalgic love is still there, the actual satisfaction with how these things work and what they are called (and the names of NPCs, etc) is not there - so I retcon a lot of stuff that has appeared in campaigns before (using in-game explanations whenever possible) and make changes to things that no player/pc has ever had contact with without a second thought - and well, I am having a heck of a lot of fun, not having it done homebrewing to this extent since around 1999 or so.

Anyway, to all you other homebrewers out there, and I mean the "real" homebrewers - (those who have had one setting for many many years, running multiple campaigns there and enjoying spending time developing and detailing areas and drawing maps and coming up with NPCs even if it is not in preparation for a specific encounter, adventure or even campaign) I have two questions:

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

For my own part (to answer #2), I usually just do notation like "Eärwen the Dusk (W13|N)" - and don't worry about the details if the NPCs stats until it matters (or may matter) - which means Eärwen might end up actually being 10th level or 15th level if I feel I need to make a change - but the level is there as a benchmark in terms of about how powerful she should be - however, things like her connections/relations to other NPCs, her outlook/alignment and her race are all "set in stone" once I write it up. Occasionally, I will make note that NPC X has such-and-such magical item, or might just make an allusion like "has the best collection of spell scrolls in Thricia", which help define the NPC some - but the details of what that means are left open for later development.

 

[Chimera]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

I have used the same world since the early 1980s. I think I'm on my seventh campaign set in this game world. The first was in 4500 CY, then I moved around to different places and cultures, advancing a bit every time to about 4800 CY, which was my fifth campaign.

The for the last one, I went back just before the CY calendar, to a time of legend. The current campaign is set in what will eventually be known as 22 CY, in the same region, just advanced about 23 years from when the last one ended. The former PCs are, for the most part, major players - although I no longer game with those people.

I seldom end up having world spanning campaigns, or if they do happen, the details of various countries tend not to be that important that continuity is an issue.

My current campaign is set in one region. The 'map' is about the size of the western half of the United States, but the actual region we're in is about 40% of that area. Although they may eventually travel outside that region, they aren't going to find much of note, certainly not established nations and the like (based on the era I'm currently set in.)

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

One of my favorite parts of GMing is creating NPCs.

I have a file with, at last count, perhaps 900 named NPCs. Given subfiles (Adventurers, villains, etc), the count goes well over a thousand. Many are not detailed other than "So-and-So, Wizard 9", but a significant portion are more thoroughly detailed - though I tend to skip Skills unless they're really needed or I'm bored.

The "Other Adventurers" and "Current Villains" files are more detailed, including skills (in 70-85% of cases) and magic items. Especially for the ones most likely to be directly involved in the near future.

What I tend to deal with on an 'as-needed' basis are elements of the plot. I find it more useful to make up basic elements and put pieces in motion, but not to worry quite so much about every little detail and how everything fits together until I need to do so. In some cases, this is a great boon - I get time to worry about why So-and-so is hellbent on doing X, eventually coming up with some way to tie it in to Y and Z, without having to resort to half-baked (read: semi-developed) ideas just because "I have to have that down now".

For example (see my Story Hour), the entire pre-gaming write-up (second post) about the worm-hole/gates/rifts from various areas that brought Gorgs (Ogres) and Barbarians from one part of the world, Wu Jen from another and so forth - including allowing one PC to escape to this region. I have no idea what that was all about. No firm plot about who did it or why - just some vague ideas that I might not follow through on. It isn't necessary for me to worry about it until or unless I come up with another adventure or tie-in that requires me to know. THEN I will worry about setting it in stone.

 

[Evilhalfling]

Im still playing in my 1st, 3rd ed world. I could not refit the previous one to 3rd, too many old assumptions were overturned. This world has had 6 different campaigns. The total passage of time as been 8 years in game, so the changes have been realtivly minor between games.
Logic and continuity is a must, but some rules change "off screen" especially if the current players were never exposed to the facts.

For 3.5 we changed to another contient, and after a 3 year break (oddly both in RL and in game) We returned to an older party, adapting them completely to the 3.5 rules.


2. I have the bad habit of stating out too many NPCs. Most of the time the stats arn't used, and just give me an idea of what there capabilities are. If I need use them again, I frequently have to update them new levels, only in one or two cases have I changed what I already decided.

 

[Mark Hope]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

I have definitely changed setting elements as my homebrew has progressed. Names and concepts that I thought were cool in 1982 certainly don't seem as cool several years down the line. When it comes to simple stuff like names, for example, I tend to tweak the nomenclature until it sounds more pleasing to my ears. This is explained away in-game as there being differing names for a place or person depending on the dialect or language being used (Jorvik/York, Den Haag/The Hague etc etc).
It's easier for those elements that didn't appear in play, or were only referenced briefly, or were in play with a group that is no longer together. In those cases I just change them wholesale without further ado - nobody will notice or remember anyway.
I do worry obsessively about these things, though. Respect for a setting is one of the key attitudes for ensuring that the setting hangs together and works well in play, imho (a huge topic in my mind, best suited for an entire thread on "treating your gameworld well"). So I mostly try to keep continuity and verisimilitude. One of my rules is that it isn't real until it happens at the table - once something comes up in play, I try pretty hard to keep continuity and ensure that any changes follow accordingly.
As for edition changes, I do try to come up with some rationale for this, and tend to plan ahead as much as possible. Moving from OD&D to AD&D involved a jump of 200 game-years to explain changes in the rules-set. From AD&D1 to AD&D2 I started a new 1st-level campaign in a different area. The old high level AD&D characters were tweaked as needed when we returned to them, but apart from one ranger (whose prime requisites all changed) this was pretty painless. The ranger player moaned a bit but sucked it up like a trooper. For the change to D&D3e, I am setting the new games in a fresh cycle of cosmic history in my homebrew world, so all changes come hand-in-hand with this. No worries in that regard.

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

All of the above .
Generally I make a brief stat note like the one you cite for Eärwen when sketching out an area, and flesh this out in prep-time before the game as the campaign begins to move in that direction. Some areas (particularly those that I know will become campaign staples) get lots of work, often more than the characters will ever see. I enjoy this aspect of DMing immensely, though, so I don't see it as wasted effort. And besides the fun of building cool NPCs, plots and locations "off-camera", I also think that it adds to the greater feel of campaign integrity. Just as actors in the Lord of the Rings movies gained a feeling of greater immersion in the story through prop and set details that were never seen on film, by the same token these added details help me to portray and present the gameworld with greater believability, and give the players a sense of a larger world beyond their own presence and actions.

 

[paradox42]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

The current version is radically different from the first one I started making 20+ years ago, at least in terms of geography and precise differences between the races such as who controls what, population differences, and so forth. However, the core assumptions of the world have never changed, and the current version (in which I'm currently running two high-level 3.5 games, and have previously run four others in 3.5 and 3.0) has remained largely the same since the first 3.0 game started up over five years ago. I based that version of the world on the one I based my 2nd Edition college campaign in, using the same maps and as much as I could port over to the new edition given the changes in game rules.

Since the conversion from 2nd Edition to 3rd, the only significant changes have been additions to the world- usually when I encountered something in a published product that was just too cool to ignore. When that happens, I'll do the usual retconning (rewriting certain ambiguous parts of history, etc.) to shoehorn it in. Fortunately I have a good mind for details and don't often make consistency errors. Usually I find a way to write it into the world without noticeably disturbing existing situations; the hardest thing by far to do this with is core classes like the Warlock and the Ardent (both of which I adopted immediately though no player has tried them yet). It's tough to explain away the prior nonexistence (or at least invisibility) of an entire profession of people.

Of my current players, only one played in the old 2nd Edition game, and he remembers next to nothing about that game except his old character's name and the names of a few very prominent gods and NPCs. When I make a change in the modern game that affects existing characters and players, we all discuss it in game time to decide the best course of action, and none of my players is egotistical enough to try forcing changes (or lack thereof) on the rest of us purely to powergame or the like. I'm probably lucky in that regard. But a few times, we have "grandfathered" in previous abilities that were stripped out by the new edition and other new rules, and on a few occasions when I nerfed a house rule that proved more troublesome in play then it looked at first glance we've all agreed that a PC who was using the old rule should stay the old way.

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

I'm definitely more of a crunch man than a flavor guy, though my players tell me I have a flair for the dramatic and do very good fluff. But for NPCs, for example, I do strongly prefer to have stat blocks of some kind, though I've admittedly become a lot more freeform about this in recent years than when I first started. One thing I did do was write my own character generator utility programs in JScript to help me when running the game; it's capable of rolling up an entire city (with NPCs given complete ability score arrays, class levels though it can't do multiclass, and skill points). That's been an enormous help, even after added races and classes made the original utility obsolete.

These days I typically use it as a starting point, just for inspiration rather than taking the stats as complete and finished. And really, it isn't often one needs stats for a bartender or smith in any case, beyond a couple of skill modifiers that are just as easy to make up on the fly.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I create a broad overview, then detail a large region, then its nations, then the game area - each with progressive increases in detail.

I also create a general time-line - what will happen unless something unforseen (i.e. player driven) occurs. Borders change, rulers die or retire and are replaced, and occassionaly something gets invented, be it a new spell or an improved method for boring cannon barrels.

The king of a nation might only get a quick note such as 'King Rowan III, Ari 8, Ftr 2, LN, 1612 - 1624, dies after long illness, prone to defense rather than aggressive', while the local baron would be more likely to get a full write up, simply because the players are more likely to meet him in the flesh.

Every so often there is a disaster, war, or after the year 1630 supernatural event. (The year that magic returned to the setting.)

The period from 1618-1680 are the most detailed at the present time.

The Auld Grump

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

I'm part of a game group that has been active (on and off) since about 1985. The three core members (myself among them) each take turns running the 1Ed/2Ed Greyhawk/FR/Homebrew fusion campaign world, and have PCs ranging from 1st level to 30th.

For the most part, we keep track of continuity, so changes are permanent.

However, we've been talking about a reboot to 3.x. It will mean some PCs get SIGNIFICANT makeovers, so there is a real discussion about what we're going to do with the game world.

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

We do a mix. Some stuff we just do on the fly, other stuff gets fully statted out.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

Yes, once I put up a setting, it stays pretty rigid - unless a bunch of time goes by (like a decade or something) But for the most part the "setting" is rigid and if there are changes they are changes that make sense. Most of my players are that much into making the game make sense, so if I didn't it would really detract from the enjoyment of the game with my group.

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

For the most part, I have general notes like names, notorius deeds, etc. Every once and a while if the PCs take interest in an NPC or their backstory I stat them out completely - but then again I love character generation - so that is a happy day for me!

 

[Rothe]

....

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

...

I've been using the same campaign setting that was solidified about 1982-83 with a world map and such. I've certainly changed many things over the years. Continuity and logic is always followed with the relization that humans can somtimes act very illogically. Over the years it has been more a matter of adding logic as I've gotten older and more experienced in the ways of the world, so to speak. I won't change aspects that players have directly relied on or have impacted their history. I've never been much for large amounts of game mechanics related crunch when it comes to explaining the world. I'm much more along the qualitative lines of a: Prince V, a hardy noble, beloved of the people strong and arm and charasmatic, a skill administrator and schrewd tactician, the people of the realm feel safe knowing he will inherit he throne. Level x Fighter. The last bit being the only game mechanic bit I might have used in the past.

 

[an_idol_mind]

1) How much do you change about your setting as the years go on? Do you care/worry about the continuity and logic of those changes? Does it matter more if your regular players are used to some aspect of the setting? Does it matter if a change in rules/edition is precipitating this?

I run my game like a comic book, in that I use retcons occasionally. Basically, I assume things in previous campaigns to be fair game for changes, as long as they aren't too major, like the death of a villain or the rise of a new fiefdom. I have yet to have anyone really notice or complain about the minor changes.

2) How much crunch do you put in your development of an area? Do you create stat blocks? Do you just allude to someone's power/ability and fill it in as needed later? Or do you just ignore that facet and deal with it as needed?

For my own part (to answer #2), I usually just do notation like "Eärwen the Dusk (W13|N)" - and don't worry about the details if the NPCs stats until it matters (or may matter) - which means Eärwen might end up actually being 10th level or 15th level if I feel I need to make a change - but the level is there as a benchmark in terms of about how powerful she should be - however, things like her connections/relations to other NPCs, her outlook/alignment and her race are all "set in stone" once I write it up. Occasionally, I will make note that NPC X has such-and-such magical item, or might just make an allusion like "has the best collection of spell scrolls in Thricia", which help define the NPC some - but the details of what that means are left open for later development.

I do it pretty much like you. I've had too many games where planned major NPCs have been killed in one meeting to bother writing full stats out until I know they're going to be important. I also tend to tweak stats between sessions, provided that it doesn't contradict what's already happened. Many an NPC that has suuposed to be a one-use character has gone on to become quite important to the setting.