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

[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?

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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???")