D&D General How thorough do you like your settings?

[Evilhalfling]

I like world building.
and I really hate the idea that I had to use a source as written, or had to read & remember many pages of text when PCs went to a new location. Especially if there is a good chance that a player has read the material as well, and for example wants to know why the Lord of Daggerford is not the same guy as in the book, and expecting a huge temple of Tymra in the town, when I need it to be Torm (cause that's what the group's priest is). When the Honest answer is " I read the description of the town last week (or last month) and I don't remember it very well, and I don't want to look it up mid-game."

I have occasionally bought setting material, mostly to steal classes/spells/monsters from.
What I would really love is an evocative name and 2-5 paragraphs of text that I can flesh out, sparks to help fire my imagination

Greyhawk Adventures (1st ed) was just about perfect. I have stolen many of the adventuring locations from it over the years.
I have never run the full adventure from the book.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So, I have used Ptolus since 2006. And it is a brick. At the time, it was the largest RPG book ever published and is almost certainly one of the biggest still today.

But even in the city, I don't know what each building is or who lives there, and there are whole neighborhoods that are pretty lightly sketched. In the Dungeon beneath the city, points of interest are detailed, but there's a lot of blank space. And outside the city, there is only the lowest level of detail. Whole countries get less than five sentences of information. (It's not Harn, in other words.)

And to me, that's just about perfect. When I want something pre-written -- who is in the palace of the Emperor of the Church, which captains of the watch are on the take, give me some lore about the dominant religion in the empire -- it's there. But if I want to drop, say, Lost Mines of Phandelver into the setting, which I've done, there are lots of blank areas of the map that I can do so without having to do surgery on the adventure unless I want to.

When I use a pre-written setting or adventure -- and I mostly don't -- I purchased it because it offers something specific I'm interested in. (Ptolus is a renaissance-era city about to fall backwards into a Dark Age, featuring a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire on the verge of a civil war, and a setting that explicitly includes everything in the 3E core books, rather than them having to be shoehorned in. Freeport, which I also own, is a pirate city.) I want it to provide that thing and then get out of the way. Don't give me so much of stuff other than your hook that I have to cut it away to fit it into my game.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Also, re: NPC names

Instead of telling me the name of every character in the region, I'd rather have tables I can use to generate those names myself. That way, they can all feel right and fit together nicely, but I'm not required to remember that the miller's wife is named Anne, and if I get it wrong, I either have to make a note or explain what happened to Anne when I said the wife's name was Bonnie.

So the names can still be bespoke without a DM being required to use each one.

 

[Redwizard007]

If I'm paying for a setting, it needs to be packed full of detail. Now, I might very well scrap 50% of it to drop my own (or other published) material in, but that's a matter of personal preference.

 

[Incenjucar]

I just need rules, hubs, broad maps, major conflict points, and examples, which is part of why things like Dark Sun and Planescape get most of my attention. I don't need granular location details for human settlements, but stuff like the Thri-Kreen of Athas is great.

 

[Tonguez]

I’m interested in fun set peices, interesting relationships, cool NPCs and usable hooks and adventure scenarios. Stuff that I can cut and paste and adapt to my own ideas.

 

[delericho]

Let's engage in a hypothetical...

A new product has been announced. It is a guide to a Kingdom setting. It has a beautiful region map, with dozens of points of interest, and the selling point is they are ALL detailed. Every town has a map and is brimming with premade locals. The various mountains, forests and other biomes come with proper random encounter tables and special encounters. Local monsters, tribes and other people are described. There are several fully stocked dungeons ready to use. There is detailed lore on the local history, nobility and religions. Each area comes with potential adventure hooks. Almost no area of this region is undescribed. You could run an entire campaign with what's in it and never have to create a single thing. The book is huge and reasonably priced, from a company you trust

Would you buy it? Why or why not?

Maybe, but probably not. The thing is, if the work is as detailed as you say then it's great, if it's exactly what I'm looking for. But the odds are that it will fall short in some regard, which means making changes, and the more detailed you get the harder it is to make those changes.

I'm increasingly inclined to think that I want a setting done twice: first do the series of big detailed sourcebooks (which will necessarily include a load of stuff that works and a load of stuff that doesn't work, all muddled together), then do a second digest version that just gathers the "good stuff" - like Eberron in 3e (the detailed version) vs Eberron in 4e or 5e (the highlights).

 

[Voadam]

I have used very few adventures from setting books. Some of the short ones from the 1e/2e Greyhawk Adventures book and a couple one-page cardboard sheet adventures from 2e's From the Ashes and City of Greyhawk.

 

[GuyBoy]

Give me a beautiful map. With interesting place names and varied geographical features and climate.
Give me some well-detailed sites - towns, villages, ruins - and some interesting culture, people and legends to build on. Leave a lot to my own creativity, but also give me some fully realised adventures that I can use, because time is not always my friend. Then I’ll buy.
In fact, just give me Greyhawk, Wilderlands or the Scorpion Age!

Great post btw. Lots of fascinating responses.

 

[DammitVictor]

I prefer very loose "toolkit" style settings, little more than a genre, subgenre, and a handful of themes. Think of Spelljammer with only sphere/planet creation rules, or Dark Sun replacing all of its cities and Sorcerer-Kings with random tables for generating cities and Sorcerer-Kings.

I'm going to rip out and/or rearrange all of the existing lore to make it fit better with what my players want to explore. The more detailed and seamless it is, the more of the content I'm paying for is just going to end up on the cutting room floor, and the more effort I'm going to have to put into putting it there.

 

[bloodtide]

If I'm going to buy a campaign setting, I want it to be very through and detailed. After all that IS what I am buying. I want there to be tons and tons and tons of stuff for me to use at a glance. Even more so the more complicated inter weaving of everything together.

It's a waste of space to type "High Hill is a big city" and never give any information about it or even a map.

Plus, I KNOW, that no matter how much "detail" a product has...it will barley scratch the surface. For everything they text out, they don't tell you about a hundred other things. And this is on top of whatever bias the writer has, as they might be a "low magic" person and write how the empire only has ONE wizard who only has enough magic power to cast light once a year. And this is on top of any silly, boring, dull or uninteresting things that might make it in too. The city of High Hill covers ten pages, but seven pages are all about the giant rats and the rat king.

So even with a ton a detail, I will always be adding things. But it's nice to have details so A) I don't need to make them up or B) I have things to use that I would not normally make up. If I don't like "knights in shinning armor" it's nice to have a "order of knights" in detail or if I don't like halflings then to have a "Hin Quarter of the city".

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Also, re: NPC names

Instead of telling me the name of every character in the region, I'd rather have tables I can use to generate those names myself. That way, they can all feel right and fit together nicely, but I'm not required to remember that the miller's wife is named Anne, and if I get it wrong, I either have to make a note or explain what happened to Anne when I said the wife's name was Bonnie.

So the names can still be bespoke without a DM being required to use each one.

This, 1000x this

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Let's engage in a hypothetical...

A new product has been announced. It is a guide to a Kingdom setting. It has a beautiful region map, with dozens of points of interest, and the selling point is they are ALL detailed. Every town has a map and is brimming with premade locals. The various mountains, forests and other biomes come with proper random encounter tables and special encounters. Local monsters, tribes and other people are described. There are several fully stocked dungeons ready to use. There is detailed lore on the local history, nobility and religions. Each area comes with potential adventure hooks. Almost no area of this region is undescribed. You could run an entire campaign with what's in it and never have to create a single thing. The book is huge and reasonably priced, from a company you trust

Would you buy it? Why or why not?

---

The reason I ask is to gauge how much value "blank space" is worth. Areas where the DM can go in and paint their own stamp without contradicting established lore. At what point, if any, does detail get in the way of creation. I get there is no one size fits all answer, but I'm looking for at what point does being through become a liability? Or does it not and there is an untapped market for a product that does all the world-building for the DM. After all, APs and setting guides do sell...

If what's written in it is good, I might. But I wouldn't run it 100% canon, other than MAYBE the very first time, just to capitalize on the ease-of-running aspect.

I'm too much of a convert to Dungeon World: "Draw maps, leave blanks." I want a world that everyone--player and GM alike--has to discover through play, rather than it being perfectly nailed down to the letter from the beginning.

Further, I genuinely think that such a detailed setting is going to encourage one of the greater GM ills: Becoming too precious about the plot/story/etc. Being constantly tempted to railroad or employ illusionism or deny players the consequences (good or bad) of their actions. Because YOU can see the diamond perfection that could be, if only the players interact with these things in just the right way. YOU know how deeply satisfying it would be if they befriend group X only to be betrayed later, how much the party will love NPC Y if they just get a chance to meet them and how far they'll go to save (or resurrect!) that NPC, how much fun it will be to romp through location Z twice, once before and once after the <Really Messy Time.>

Thing is, that sort of stuff? That's normally my bread and butter. I LOVE a well-executed, theme-driven, tight story. And that love is exactly why I force myself NOT to do that. Because it would be too easy to slip up. Too easy to make excuses when I have a really really good reason, and once a good reason is enough, that love can very easily make me excuse a merely pretty good reason, etc. Temptation is, of its very nature, a slippery slope, doubly so when you add in the "it's for their own good," Utopia Justifies The Means excuse.

In a certain sense, this is how I feel about Eberron. I would happily run an Eberron game for my friends if they asked me to (once the current campaign wraps...but that's probably not happening for a good while yet.) But I don't think I would run things 100% perfectly on the official line. It leaves much open, the maps have some blanks, but I'm not sure those blanks are quite as large or numerous as I'd want, and I'm not sure they're distributed quite where I'd want either. I also like deities and have already been playing a game where religion is very very much a matter of faith alone rather than "just call up your god for a chat," so I might play with some of the setting concepts (as a campaign theme anyway--a world changing from "no one even knows if the gods are real" to "okay maybe SOME gods are real??? If you believe them and they aren't charlatans or self-deluded???")