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

[Hussar]

As a theory as to why the game itself, as in books and articles, might emphasize world-building as something fun and interesting to do:

It's key to the hobby that running a game be fun. And I think the allure of world-building is a selling point for brand-new GMs. You want to make GMing something with lots of fun aspects to prep time, because otherwise it can be a daunting job. It's a similar principle to 4e design making things easier on the DM: without enthusiastic people running the game, you have fewer players acquired and retained.

Emphasis on world-building is an approach that encourages new GMs to give it a go. It's dangling a carrot of "hey, neat stuff to play with!", emphasizing the creative aspect to make the task more interesting than simply playing referee. Now, I certainly think there could also be some more discussion of how to plot an adventure, or tools to aid improvisational GMing, but world-building is probably a good inspirational hook to get newcomers to try running a game in the first place.

It's not guaranteed success, mind, but I think it's at least more responsible than dangling the carrot of "YOU HAVE THE POWER! THEY LIVE AND DIE AT YOUR WILL!"

And I can accept that. It certainly appears to be the common wisdom. Between sourcebooks, the DMG, Dungeon, and any number of blogs and whatnot, people put world building at the top of the list for starting a new campaign.

Note, I do not equate a lack of world building with improv GMing. That only becomes equal if you assert that all setting creation comes under the umbrella of world building. I disagree with that definition.

I think that the game would be better served if the section on Creating a Campaign in the DMG was organized differently. Instead of putting World Building at the number one slot, put it down in the third or fourth slot. Here's a bullet list of how I think it should look.

• Number one slot would be sitting down with your players and discussing/brainstorming what you want the next campaign to look like in very rough terms - themes, particular issues, amount of combat, that sort of thing.
• Number 2 Background creation of the PC's. Again, you cannot go too detailed here, but more look at the motivations of the PC's. What do they want to do and how can you mesh that with what you want to do.
• Number 3 Flesh out one beginning adventure and how to lay hooks for subsequent adventures.
• Number 4 Start developing those hooks that the players want to pursue.
• Number 5 Start developing broader level setting elements that might be of use. (world building in other words)

Now, I'm not a professional writer and that shows. I'm sure someone else could make that list look a lot better than what I came up with in 30 seconds. But, I think that gets the gist across.

 

[Aeolius]

...I have no experience with being told "that you can't write anything fantasy or SF unless you've built a massive world/universe and know everything about it".

Knowing everything about it? Where's the fun in that? My NPCs have secrets they have yet to share with me. DMing on the fly is as educational for me as it is for my players. I set the stage, my players perform their improv, and we all learn something from the experience.

 

[Lanefan]

And I can accept that. It certainly appears to be the common wisdom. Between sourcebooks, the DMG, Dungeon, and any number of blogs and whatnot, people put world building at the top of the list for starting a new campaign.

And for what I would suggest is a pretty good reason: unless you as DM are planning on using a pre-gen setting without modification, you need to - at some point - build enough of a world that the campaign has something to sink its teeth into; and the best time to do so is before the campaign begins. Most new (and, IME, some experienced) DMs might not realize this; and while they could run a perfectly good first adventure or two with nothing more than a town and a dungeon, the campaign thereafter is set up to crumble away as soon as it tries to expand its horizons.

Note, I do not equate a lack of world building with improv GMing. That only becomes equal if you assert that all setting creation comes under the umbrella of world building. I disagree with that definition.

Setting creation *is* world building. How can it not be?

I think that the game would be better served if the section on Creating a Campaign in the DMG was organized differently. Instead of putting World Building at the number one slot, put it down in the third or fourth slot. Here's a bullet list of how I think it should look.
[*]Number one slot would be sitting down with your players and discussing/brainstorming what you want the next campaign to look like in very rough terms - themes, particular issues, amount of combat, that sort of thing.

Fair enough, if you have experienced players. If they're all new, however, I'd ignore this step as it's going to be a learn-as-you-go process no matter what.

[*]Number 2 Background creation of the PC's. Again, you cannot go too detailed here, but more look at the motivations of the PC's. What do they want to do and how can you mesh that with what you want to do.

And to do this any justice, the players (and, by extension, you) need...wait for it...a world/setting! Where was I born? Where have I travelled? Where does my race/culture/society live? How did I end up here? This should be Number 5, and can sometimes be done well after the campaign starts.

[*]Number 3 Flesh out one beginning adventure and how to lay hooks for subsequent adventures.

[*]Number 4 Start developing those hooks that the players want to pursue.

[*]Number 5 Start developing broader level setting elements that might be of use. (world building in other words)

Your number 3 should be Number 1 or 2, and setting/world construction should be Number 2 or 1. It is possible to combine the two: if your goal is to run Isle of Dread, it has half a world already included in the module. Come up with a first adventure, drop the puck and go.

Lan-"we built this city - on rock and roll"-efan

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

Setting creation *is* world building. How can it not be?

Setting creation is inherently directed at the PCs and the actions they take. World building can be PC diercted, but doesn't have to be. That is the difference.

And to do this (that is, create character backgrounds) any justice, the players (and, by extension, you) need...wait for it...a world/setting! Where was I born? Where have I travelled? Where does my race/culture/society live? How did I end up here? This should be Number 5, and can sometimes be done well after the campaign starts.

See, this is where the heart of the disagreement is. You do not need a world to create a character background. You do if you want to only choose from things that the DM provides for you. If players are allowed to come up with options, then no pre-established world created by the DM is necessary. Character backgound creates the setting, which becomes part of the world. Players and DM can create this together, usually toward the beginning of a campaign, but definitely not limited to the start of a campaign. The campaign is built around this, and this is why it is setting and not worldbuilding. Because it is PC and story driven.

The crux of the dispute is basically that some people feel that a world should be created, and then characters can be created to inhabit it using choices provided by the DM/worldbuilder, and whatever these characters do becomes a story. This is fine if you are OK with the idea that only the DM can have a say in the initial options, and you want story and themes to emerge from the play within this established world. It inherently places the world in the center of the activity, and not the characters, and shifts a huge amount of the creative power and responsibility to the DM.

Others feel that the story and the characters should be placed at the center of the activity, and the world created around them. Goals are set first, and themes are created around these goals. Characters are created that capture the themes and are capable of fulfilling these goals. These characters are created with backgrounds. These backgrounds are used to help create the setting. The DM then creates a plot outline that will allow the players to accomplish the goal of play. The DM also fills in the setting enough to make the characters, plot, theme, and goals all fit together in a pleasing and consistent way. All setting creation is directed at fulfilling the goals of play by reinforcing theme, allowing characters to deepen, or forwarding the plot. Nothing else is necessary. Anything not directed at fulfilling the goals of play, reinforcing theme, deepening characterization, or forwarding the plot will actually lower the quality of play because it takes time away from the goals of play.

I can already hear people beating the Exploration drum. Yes, there are many people who want to explore a world. In fact, exploration is just one of many possible themes or goals, and the characters can be explorers that experience the plot of exploration. The problem is that this is just one type of theme or goal, and even if this a primary theme or goal or your group, extensive world building outside of playing is still not required for this goal. Exploration can be handled many ways, and extensive preplanned worlds are just the most popular way of pursuing the goal of exploration.

The king of all world builders is Tolkein. I love his stories. The thing is, he spent so much time worldbuilding that some of his writing actually kinda sucked. It was boring, containing histories and lineages that are not at all pertinent to the plot, the characters, or the themes of his works. His goal was world and language creation. These are not very fun for a lot of people. When people who are not nearly as talented at it as he is try to emulate his process, it sucks even more. If they were to stick to addressing the goals of play, reinforcing themes, allowing deep characterization, and forwarding plot, games could be created that are vastly greater in quality than much of what is produced. The most tragic part of this whole scenario is that addressing goals, reinforcing themes, allowing deep characterization, and forwarding plot are all easier and more straightforward than worldbuilding. It is unfortunate that most campaign creation advice ignores these things and sticks to worldbuilding advice.

 

[rounser]

I never claimed that adventure design was a waste of time or unnecessary, what I disagree with is that worldbuilding is an objectively lesser or unimportant part of campaign design. You see in my worldbuilding I think up and give form to the hooks, sites, machinations and plots in an organic as opposed to "scripted" way.

And this is why this conversation with you is pointless until you define what you mean by "worldbuilding". To me, hooks = adventure design, sites populated at encounter level = adventure design, machinations and plots that will actually impact play = campaign arc design. I'm pretty sure that this is why you disagree with Hussar and I - we're not talking about the same thing when we say "worldbuilding". Now please define the scope of the term by answering my KotB questions, because asking whether the Keep (full of unnamed NPCs) is worldbuilding, adventure design etc., you don't have to know the module to answer.

In fact, I'll refresh your memory. The Keep on the Borderlands has about three or four paragraphs of actual macro level worldbuilding, basically saying that chaos has been encroaching on the Realm of Law, which the Keep (a small castle) is on the borderlands of (i.e. the edge of the Realm). The module details the Keep and it's inhabitants, guard posts and shops (but strangely, no NPCs are given names, only referred to by job title), a bit of wilderness with a mad hermit in it and a few other low level encounters, and the Caves of Chaos, a fully detailed dungeon on the map, full of various humanoid tribes and maybe a minotaur. It's a very simple module.

Now you know pretty much all you need to answer those questions.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
Setting creation *is* world building. How can it not be?

Here is where we disagree through this entire thread. PrecociousApprentice says it better than I can, and if I could give him XP I would. Well done that man.

/snip

And to do this any justice, the players (and, by extension, you) need...wait for it...a world/setting! Where was I born? Where have I travelled? Where does my race/culture/society live? How did I end up here? This should be Number 5, and can sometimes be done well after the campaign starts.
Your number 3 should be Number 1 or 2, and setting/world construction should be Number 2 or 1. It is possible to combine the two: if your goal is to run Isle of Dread, it has half a world already included in the module. Come up with a first adventure, drop the puck and go.

See, here is where I disgree. Where was I born? Who cares? Where have I travelled? Not important right now. I'm not interested in the minutia of your character yet. That comes later. Right now, I'm looking at higher level stuff. What interests you? What do you want to do? What are your goals?

That you were born in color animal inn has no bearing on that. Fill in the proper nouns later.

Lan-"we built this city - on rock and roll"-efan

Imaro - a question. You said you need two weeks before you'd feel comfortable running your new campaign. Can I assume you've done a week of work previous to this as well? For the sake of argument, I won't. I'll assume that you can get off the ground in 2 weeks.

Can you estimate how many man hours of work that would be? And, could you estimate what you would get done in that time? Would it be possible for you to give a short bullet list of what elements for you new campaign you would have to complete before you'd feel comfortable running the game?

 

[Kask]

If nothing else Kask, look at the join date. Do you really think I joined and then never gamed for several years after that?

2004? So? Are you saying that's when you started playing?

 

[Barastrondo]

And I can accept that. It certainly appears to be the common wisdom. Between sourcebooks, the DMG, Dungeon, and any number of blogs and whatnot, people put world building at the top of the list for starting a new campaign.

Well, to some extent. I see plenty of other people talking about all kinds of aspects of the game, because people write about what gets them excited about running a game. Some write about recapturing the feel of nostalgic gaming. Some write about plots. Some write about characterization. And many write about world-building.

One of the things about world-building that no doubt makes it so popular is that it's work that can endure from campaign to campaign. For example, let's say a GM has designed a world with, among other things, some notes on a 20-year ongoing war between two nations. If a game directly involving that war crashes and burns, and the players want to do something different elsewhere, the GM can set a new game elsewhere in the world. Maybe the events of the war influence the campaign. Maybe they don't. But the big allure of building large settings is that you don't have to design a new pantheon of gods when you start up a new campaign, or come up with more place names, or the like. The time already invested is still there.

World-building — and here note that I am including the player contributions to an ongoing world, and the events they cause that shape said world — is about legacy. New campaigns set in the same world can enjoy the legacies of campaigns that came before. There's a shared sense of history and background. Done poorly, it can be incestuous or repetitive: done right, it makes a game more plausible because it's familiar. It references good old memories when you find out with other characters what Bigby's been up to, or wind up crossing paths with Prince Thrommel, or finally get to play that paladin of St. Cuthbert you've wanted to do ever since your last mage wound up bickering with the church over in Hardby.

It shouldn't be the only priority. But I think it's easy to understate just how much pleasure both players and GM can take from even a modest amount of world-building that doesn't directly derive from their immediate adventures. It's rather like calling elves vastly overrated: to a given group that's certainly true, but if you look at fantasy gaming overall the utility of elves in getting players to take an interest in an aspect of the game is undeniable.

I think that the game would be better served if the section on Creating a Campaign in the DMG was organized differently. Instead of putting World Building at the number one slot, put it down in the third or fourth slot.

I see your point. I don't fully agree with it, though. Rather, I think adventure creation should be addressed separately from campaign creation. It requires different levels of "zoom", different skill sets to some extent, and different levels of investment. Some people might run brilliant adventures but all-but-ignore campaigns; conversely, I had quite a lot of enjoyable gaming with a GM in college who was very negligent about plotted "adventures" but had a campaign that kept his players immensely busy with politics and social interaction alone. And as I've said before, I don't think the two disciplines are very often in conflict. They scratch different itches; world-building feeds the inspiration that is necessary for the perspiration.

I think of it this way: If the two of them were in direct competition for brainspace, this argument would probably be something like "Why do so many people think world-building is more fun than adventure building?" Instead, we're talking about the utility of world-building, and the argument for less world-building usually focuses down on "utility to what we are doing this exact moment," ruling out potential utility should characters do unpredictable things, or should a campaign implode and a new one begin in the same world, or even just as a mental exercise that gets the DM as pumped to start designing adventures as watching a fantastic blockbuster.

To me, it's like the difference between keeping a sketchbook and working on paintings. Filling the sketchbook may or may not have anything to do with the painting currently on your easel. Some artists might never sketch anywhere but on the blank canvas. But for other artists, that sketchbook is vital to the process. Take it away, and you aren't necessarily going to find them spending more time in front of the easel, much less ensure you get a better painting out of it. Running games, like visual art, is a creative process. And creative processes are extremely individual things.

 

[Imaro]

Imaro - a question. You said you need two weeks before you'd feel comfortable running your new campaign. Can I assume you've done a week of work previous to this as well? For the sake of argument, I won't. I'll assume that you can get off the ground in 2 weeks.

Can you estimate how many man hours of work that would be? And, could you estimate what you would get done in that time? Would it be possible for you to give a short bullet list of what elements for you new campaign you would have to complete before you'd feel comfortable running the game?

Ok, the 10 things I would want to have completed in two weeks...

NOTE: I am assuming that I have presented a brief summary of Gulmenghast (perhaps a page long) to my players and it is met with approval as a place they want to adventure in...

1. The racial write-ups how they relate to one another, attitudes towards
each other and differences from the generic PHB descriptions... (as an
example in Gulmenghast Shifters, Genasi, and Tieflings are the result of
long-forgotten alchemical and arcane gene-modification of humans with
the essences of beasts, elementals and devils that arose in response to
the invasion of these peoples lands by the Dragonborn Empire thus there
is an ancient enmity between these groups)
2. General descriptions of the 7 wards and The Severed Realms
3. Map of The Pinched Quarter with encounter charts
4. Fleshed out maps of The Quivering Catacombs, Badger Bayham's Brew
and Breakfast, Miss Skifin's General Tradehouse and Emporium, The
Shrouded Bath House, and The Gate Towers (Have no problem stealing
maps off the internet to cut down on work... )
5. General description of the two religious orders in Gulmenghast
6. List of Major NPC's w/stats (mostly re-skinned from MM, again to cut
down work)
7. Macro-level government of city in broad strokes
8. Macro-level political structure of The Pinched Quarter
9. The stats for the Lawbringer's stationed in The Gate Towers
10. 10 secrets; one for each Ward and 3 on a micro-level for The Pinched
Quarter

Now, I have a job, a child and am preparing to get married in September, so I don't have a ton of time... that said I enjoy working on my campaign and I generally devote an hour to an hour and a half before I go to sleep to working on my wiki. So total man hours is somewhere between 7 hours and 20 hours to complete the above... so less than an actual day out of 2 weeks.

Honestly Hussar, I find (and I am assuming here) what you call "adventure" design doesn't take that long unless I choose to do it from scratch without using all the maps, stats, monsters, traps, etc. that are widely available in the books and on the internet. The actual world I'm creating for these adventures to take place in, it's consistency, verisimilitude and logic are things I can't grab pre-made and tweak. I also find that the more fully fleshed out my world is the better informed I am as to the specific tweaks I should make to give it a Gulmenghast feel as opposed to a generic high-fantasy setting 6432577 feel. YMMV and all that of course.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

My "problem" with worldbuilding (quotes because this is a personal thing, not meant to be read as a universal truth) is that my experience is pretty much the exact opposite of what you're describing. I find that in doing a lot of background work I usually wind up doing MORE improv at the table. Part of this is because if I'm doing more background work, it's because I'm trying to run a more sandbox style campaign and the PCs are choosing their own path from scratch rather than choosing from paths that I've given them. That's automatically going to lead to more improvisation.

This is where I've been going with this as well. Given my complete lack of desire to prep before even starting a campaign, no matter how much time I have before I run the first session, I'm unlikely to spend more than an hour or two in real preparation.

If I spend that 2 hours making up the laws of the country, the names of the rulers, the names of all the inns in the city, the descriptions of the insides of all the temples, and so on...I simply won't have any time left in order to think what the actual adventure will be. I'm likely to improvise the plot on the fly. All my battles are going to be thrown together groups of monsters.

But if I spend the time I have thinking about where the PCs are when the game starts, what the plot hook is, who the villain is, what encounters will they come across on the way to saving the day and defeating the villain...then I have what appears to be a lot more prepared and detailed game to my players. I will have a description of the places that the PCs go, and they'll suspect I have descriptions of everywhere. When the truth is, I have descriptions of the 3 locations I expected them to go during the first session. I'll have battle areas that look planned out and monsters that work well together and compliment each other's strengths to make them more interesting to fight.

When I start with worldbuilding, I pretty much always feel like I'm on my heels, trying to keep up with the PCs, hoping I'll be able to come up with some interesting ideas on the fly to keep them interested. I hate the feeling of improvising.