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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8997657" data-attributes="member: 29398">Mostly a choice I make, I think; I'd far rather the focus be on what the party does as a whole when they're together as a party - i.e. when they're in the field - rather than on the arc of a specific character.Further, on those occasions where an adventure or two have focused on a single character (e.g. character X is given a quest and the party agree to help out with it), invariably that focus character is the one who dies at the next possible opportunity.  Lesson well learned. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sure, and that's good advice that should also be in the DMG.  But the tools and guidelines for all-in worldbuilding should also be there, as ideally that's what those starting-out DMs will eventually end up wanting to do.It seems so, right?  I've done it this way in the past, and what it ended up being was short-term gain for long-term pain.To start, all you need is an adventure site or two, a town or two, and nearby areas or regions or nations where the different species live (e.g. an Elven land, a Dwarven land, etc.), all reasonably close close enough to the starting point that it makes sense these disparate PCs would meet there.  And so, you might take a few days and bang out a detailed area of a few square miles, a less-detailed area the size of Seattle, and a roughly-sketched-out area about half the size of Washington State; and away you go into the campaign.However - one hopes that eventually the campaign will go long enough and get big enough that the PCs literally start broadening their horizons and exploring to other parts of the setting...which means not only do you then have to come up with those other parts but you also have to find a way to make that initial little bit you started with (half of Wash.) fit in to the bigger picture (all of North America plus the Pacific Ocean).  And that's where it falls down, I've found - that initial little bit ends up standing out like a sore thumb, mostly due to having to shoehorn a lot of a world's elements and cultures into a very small area for reasons of early-days playability and variety. (unless you force all the PCs to be of the same species/culture)And so I learned - via some long-term trial and error - to sketch out a much bigger area up front.  There's still lots of blank areas on the map, even some fairly close to where they started out 15 real-world years ago, but I can provide the sense of a bigger world right from the start, and if-when they go somewhere I've some idea what they'll find when they get there.</blockquote>

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