Forked from "An Epiphany" thread: Is World Building "Necessary"?

[Ariosto]

"Hear, hear!" to what Lost Soul said.

A number of approaches to "role-playing" and "story-telling" games have over the past 20 years become much more prominent. Their pervasiveness in the D&D community today is particularly striking because in large part they first built up steam as reactions against (not merely to) the pioneering RPG. The "in the family" aspect of clashing views creates a slightly different dynamic than a debate between a D&Der and (e.g.) a Vampire: the Masquerade enthusiast who never saw much point in D&D.


Besides different tastes, there are practical limitations. One reason I have never DMed 3E is that the amount of game-mechanical work it seems to require to meet the expectations of 3E players is too much for the kind of D&D campaign I like to run and the amount of time and energy I would devote to it.

The rules-lightness of older D&D, and the underlying philosophy that informed it, is better suited to my particular needs as a D&D campaign referee.

A handy tip: The best-documented campaign setting available is the real world! Furthermore, the difference between fact and fiction is that the latter "has to be believable." Reality gets away with being stranger and more wonderful than one could imagine.

The "www" makes it easier than ever for a GM to make use of the labor-saving device of actual Earthly cartography, history and so on.

 

[Greg K]

I
I found your example a bit unsatisfying. It seemed to me that the PCs were already in the midst of the plague adventure, and solved the mystery and addressed it. It's not that they went off on something completely unrelated. Did I read that wrong?

The plague had just been something that they had encountered here and there in there travels while trying to help one of the characters discover what happened to his sister and her adventuring party. They never had paid much attention to the plague (except to heal victims) or the areas where they encountered it until discussing things waiting for me. It was also during these discussion that they realized that the only undead they encountered were in the areas where there had been plague outbreaks and that the plague and resulting were moving much closer to their homelands.

 

[Ourph]

Ourph, you can look up railroad maps (or simply what switches are) for yourself.

Oooh zing! Show me one train system where the passengers lay out the rails or control the switches and you might actually have a leg to stand on.

I never asserted "that such an adventure can have only one outcome!"

Majoru said in his second post on the subject that there were multiple ways for the PCs to approach the "save the princess" scenario. So if the original poster said there were multiple avenues of progress and you agree that there are multiple possible outcomes, in what conceivable way would it be considered a railroad (by any definition of that term)?

 

[Hussar]

Some great stuff all around. Keep it up. Although, to be honest, I'm thinking that this railroading tangent has kinda gone off the tracks.

I do not want to claim the OP's quoted texter is railroading without warrant, but it sounds kind of like that is what he wants. How on earth does one "focus on your campaign and not building your world" work without forcing a plot on the players? Roleplaying is just living in that world anyways. Not some preconceived plot ride. But maybe I'm getting it wrong.

This is something that has been repeated a few times and I'd like to address this specifically.

One can most certainly focus on the campaign without any sort of preconceived plot ride. For example, you could start your campaign based on a theme, discuss that theme with the players, then work with the players during character creation in order to craft a campaign that focuses on the goals and themes that the players themselves bring to the table.

That's certainly one way, there are others.

The plague had just been something that they had encountered here and there in there travels while trying to help one of the characters discover what happened to his sister and her adventuring party. They never had paid much attention to the plague (except to heal victims) or the areas where they encountered it until discussing things waiting for me. It was also during these discussion that they realized that the only undead they encountered were in the areas where there had been plague outbreaks and that the plague and resulting were moving much closer to their homelands.

So, if I'm understanding you right, you dangled multiple plot hooks in front of the players, gave them a fair bit of information, had this plague element in your campaign for quite some time, but were completely blindsided when they decided to act on it? Is that correct?

I do assert that when the PCs cannot fail, the "save the princess from the dragon" scenario is a railroad.

Totally agreed. But, I have to ask, what does this point have to do with anything I said? Where did I or anyone else say that the players cannot fail?

What I said in my example was that if the PC's choose to ignore this event, then there are consequences. Sure, the princess might get saved by someone else, or she might get eaten. Both of those are consequences.

I was questioning the point that was brought up that people want to play games where you can abandon any campaign element at any time. If you can, then there are no consequences. There can't be. If there were consequences, then you cannot just abandon story elements without suffering something.

One thing that I do think though is that if your players are so disconnected from the events in your campaign that they can abandon story elements without any notice to do things that are completely surprising to the DM, you have larger issues at the table. If you as the DM have done such a poor job engaging the interests of your players in whatever events are occuring around them, or if the players are just totally uninterested on their own, then there are much larger problems at your table than world building or lack thereof.

I can understand players being creative in solving a problem. That's fine. That's great. But, going back to our Councilor Traitor example, if the players half way through suddenly leave town to explore a tropical island and become pirates, no amount of world building is going to save your game. They are just not buying what you are selling.

This sort of thing has to be worked out a the outset of the campaign. It's all about campaign buy in. Not that the players must march lockstep to the tune of the DM. That's totally not what I'm saying. But, there has to be some agreement within the entire group that the campaign is going operate within certain limits.

Take a non-D&D example. If you're playing a Spycraft game and you are hunting down the enemy agent, and the entire group decides to leave the country to take a vacation in Hawaii, then you have a problem. I realize that this is an extreme example, but, this is what I'm taking from the conversation. That some players want the freedom to completely eject from the campaign and do something completely different at a moments notice.

I think that's very unrealistic.

 

[Ourph]

That some players want the freedom to completely eject from the campaign and do something completely different at a moments notice.

I think that's very unrealistic.

That was essentially my earlier point. I've never encountered a player who would do something that extreme or would feel like the freedom to do something like that made for a better game. I've also never encountered a DM who prepared to the extent that the players could literally eject from the current campaign context and do anything they wanted without the DM having to improvise most of the adventure for that session. I think people are throwing around a lot of theoretical extremes in order to "score points" that have absolutely nothing to do with the way the game actually gets played.

 

[Ariosto]

Ourph, Hussar, et al: You might obviate some huffing and puffing if you bother to read what I actually wrote with an eye to the most straightforward meaning, rather than attributing to me the apparently much more voluminous subtext you have chosen to read between the lines.

The "cannot fail = railroad" observation was directly occasioned by comments from Majoru and Ourph.

 

[Hussar]

That was essentially my earlier point. I've never encountered a player who would do something that extreme or would feel like the freedom to do something like that made for a better game. I've also never encountered a DM who prepared to the extent that the players could literally eject from the current campaign context and do anything they wanted without the DM having to improvise most of the adventure for that session. I think people are throwing around a lot of theoretical extremes in order to "score points" that have absolutely nothing to do with the way the game actually gets played.

Yeah, I think we're on the same page here.

My point, I think (and I might be getting turned around here, which often happens to me in multiple page threads), is that the level of world building you engage in doesn't necessarily equate to greater player freedom.

To use the thieves guild example, what if we go the other way? I've detailed out my city, and it doesn't have a thieves guild. Maybe there's a reason why, maybe not. There doesn't have to be a guild in every single town or city. Maybe there are just a bunch of street gangs with no larger organization. So, when the player says he wants to contact the thieves guild, my answer is now "no" because I know for a fact that there isn't one to talk to.

Again, this doesn't have to happen and maybe it won't. But world building can be every bit as limiting as not world building.

Y'know, I think I can end this discussion fairly easily.

You guys are right. So long as I accept that world building and setting are synonymous then you are 100% right. You must world build in order to run a campaign, since every campaign absolutely requires a setting. If a random encounter table that is geared to a particular location counts as world building, then, hell I can't argue against that. I've got six bloody random encounter tables on the go RIGHT NOW. In all likelyhood the majority of encounters, both combat and non for the foreseeable future in my current campaign will be drawn from random encounter tables.

Now, I don't think that's world building, but, if it satisfies your definition, then fine, it is. I have a nice little sandbox with a number of plotlines all going on and several events that are pretty much unscripted, and other than a map, I have done very little in the way of world building as I understand the term.

Meh, that's the sticking point and I guess it always was. I'll take my idiosyncratic ball and go home.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

The "cannot fail = railroad" observation was directly occasioned by comments from Majoru and Ourph.

Yeah, of course the PCs can fail. They have before, even in my games. They've been TPKed by enemies and started a new campaign, for one. I admit to there being very FEW options, in order to keep the campaign manageable by the DM.

I'm with Hussar and Ourph on this one. I doubt that any DM seriously sits down and has enough fully fleshed out plotlines to actually handle a group who switches gears completely mid adventure. Most DMs make up 1, maybe 2 as an alternate and get their players and their PCs to buy into whatever they have planned.

That's kind of why I'm baffled by "world building". I build what I need for the adventure at hand and nothing else. If we are calling setting building and world building the same thing, then I agree with the premise as well.

However, there are a number of people on these boards that I've seen claim that they factor EVERYTHING in their world into what happens in their sandbox. i.e. "Today, the mayor of town X is on his 3rd day of vacation, so he gets up and has breakfast and is killed by the assassin who was waiting for the 3rd day to kill him. Of course, that's 6 Kingdoms over, so the PCs won't know about it yet. Meanwhile, according to my notes, the dragon who lives in cave Y is getting hungry. He'll have to feed. Also, the election in kingdom Y has 2 weeks left before the ballots are counted. Time to roll on the random election event table. Alright, that having been done with, let's move on to the adventure at hand, the PCs are trying to rescue a woman kidnapped by a gang in a back alley. They are searching for the woman when a giant dragon suddenly appears in the sky..."

When, I don't think a random dragon attack adds to the "save the girl" adventure. It seems out of place and random. I like my adventures to be closer to novels. They should seem like they had an intelligent design behind them.

 

[Hussar]

Now, Majoru, I wouldn't quite put it as far as this:

When, I don't think a random dragon attack adds to the "save the girl" adventure. It seems out of place and random. I like my adventures to be closer to novels. They should seem like they had an intelligent design behind them.

This is honestly just bad DMing and is fairly independent of world building. World building doesn't necessitate having completely unrelated events come crashing together. It might, but, I've seen that in campaign driven campaigns as well. Without knowing more about the situation and having a larger understanding of what the DM is attempting to acheive (maybe, for example, the dragon is related somehow to the "save the girl" plot, we don't know at this point, but the DM should).

I don't think I'd go so far as to say that world building results in bad games. Actually, I wouldn't say that at all. It might, it might not, that's completely up to the DM.

My take is that world building should not be seen as a requirement for campaign design. That, in the same way that world building doesn't have to result in completely random events popping up all over the place, lack of world building doesn't mean that you are lockstep railroading the players.

Again, this whole thing got started on the wrong foot because I was trying to be funny and it didn't work at all.

I think that DM's, particularly new DM's would be much better served by being given advice to the effect that you should spend most of your effort, particularly your initial effort to get your campaign together, on the campaign itself - plot(s), theme(s), and those elements which are most likely to come into play that are related to plot and theme.

That you can create great campaigns while world building first has never been a question for me. Of course you can. Hell, Ed Greenwood is living proof of that. But, for the rest of us mere mortals who perhaps are not as gifted, telling us that we should be building a world first, before we even start considering what story or adventures we want to engage in, is, in my opinion, too difficult.

I'd much rather focus advice on how to manage a campaign, how to get it started, keep it going and see it to the end, than spend rather large amounts of time telling people how to create fantasy worlds.

I am absolutely in awe of people who do create these huge intricate worlds. Fargoth, for example, is the result of god knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of man hours of work. That's damn impressive. But, in the end, to me it's a ship in a bottle. It's the model train set. It's the Death Star made of Lego. Very, very impressive, wonderful work, but, ultimately just something that you look at.

Now, I realize that there are different opinions out there. And, regardless of my over the top statements earlier, I can certainly appreciate the work and effort that goes into them. I'm simply trying to say that there might, maybe, be a better way.

 

[Ariosto]

"That's just bad" in place of "that's not what I like" is pretty contentious.

Funny thing is, some D&Ders happen to like the classic game. Encounters that have nothing to do with a "story" are part of the game. When you turn your preference into a put-down, some folks might think it nice if you were to go off and find a game you actually like instead of hanging around with one (and players thereof) you feel obliged to insult.

If you express your likes and dislikes as merely what they are, you'll probably get a friendlier response.