Let's Talk About RPG Worldbuilding

[Greg K]

It's certainly not impossible, although I feel this sort of thing gets into diminishing returns fairly quickly and (IMO) matters less than a lot of folks might think. To take Traveller as an example, you could set a sandbox game somewhere in the Third Imperium or generate a sandbox using the process described in How to make a Traveller Sandbox and the players' experience would likely not be materially different.

Taken to extremes, it also tends to act as an attractive nuisance as this sort of setting canon serves better as a topic for pedantic old grogs to witter about online than as material that informs actual campaign play. Several major franchises (Traveller, Glorantha and Tekumel come to mind) have actually gotten a bad reputation on the interwebs as being hostile to new players because of this essentially useless lore and the intimidating antics of the old grogs arguing about it online. I've seen multiple instances of folks posting about wanting to get into a game but being intimidated by these people.

That's not to say it's all useless, but - to take another example from Traveller - CT Supplement 7 (Traders and Gunboats) is a far more useful than Supplement 9 (Fighting Ships). S7 covers a handful of designs that are on a scale relevant to a party of adventurers, and gives background aimed at helping a DM to use them in a game, including deck plans. S9 has a series of one page vignettes on a couple of dozen mostly large capital ships that are way too big to use in most games. It doesn't provide deck plans or (unless you're playing Trillion Credit Squadron) much in the way of useful support for actually using them in a game.

I think setting canon is an area where it's possible to have too much of a good thing and/or put a lot of effort into stuff that isn't terribly useful.

I think it depends upon whether one is using a default or otherwise published setting or doing a homebrew. Generally, the only time that I use an existing setting is if I am running a superhero campaign set in the Marvel or DC universe (in which case, I determine the era which will be between the 70s' to late 80's) or another media property/universe like Angel/Buffy, Firefly, Ghostbusters.
As a general rule, however, I and the people with whom I play do not play in existing settings outside of superhero rpgs (in which case it is Marvel, DC, or some hybrid of the two). Several of my players have no interest in playing in an existing tv/movie universe and several will also not play in a published gaming universe outside of WoD (which I will not run/play).

 

[Aging Bard]

1) Worldbuilding is mostly useful at the campaign level, running a group through many sessions in the same setting. It is less useful otherwise.
2) Worldbuilding is primarily for the GM to create an engaging, consistent setting for their players. Lots of new GM advice says to only prepare what is needed immediately, but I disagree. If a GM has the time, creating many key concepts of their world is very worthwhile, as it forms a base for consistent scenes and encounters. But...
3) That said, worldbuilding must be naturally discovered by players as they play. No lore dumps, no GM soliloquies about their fantastic world. The GM must sit dispassionately until the players discover something, and only relate what they can discover based upon their actions. The players should work for it, and the GM should reward that work with discoveries.
4) If you can manage it, the world should be "alive". Things should happen irrespective of what the players are doing. While some events should be tied to the players, some events should just roll on by themselves. The GM should even create a little calendar of key events. When big things occur, the GM should find a believable way for players to learn about changes.
5) The GM should subtly communicate to the players when they have done something big, when they have changed the natural flow of things. Ideally this should be through NPCs ("you've ruined everything", "wait until my mistress hears of this", etc.) But PCs should understand that they can change the world.

tl;dr: The players should know that things are happening in the world, these things can be discovered, and the players can change things. Their actions matter.

 

[dragoner]

A few more I thought of:

Authenticity is in the Execution. Trying to be too original is counter productive, say for example you have square wheels to be different, and write up a few pages explaining why you have square wheels. It becomes a mockery of the setting and in worst case scenario it gets known as the "Square Wheel" setting.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good. It will never be perfect, and one can spend a 1000 times the effort towards perfection as they did on the first 90% of the setting, and still never get to the point of perfection. Try to do it the best one can, except also know when to say when and stop.

The Sandbox is more an ideal than reality. While it is often upheld as the holy grail of gaming, truth is that between the sandbox and railroad, it is like a number line and most games fall in the middle somewhere. Thus it is good to rough out some paths; with the most rewarding work is often in NPC's, at least for my games.

 

[Fenris-77]

IMO, world building is way easier than people think, so long as they take a design approach. If you're going to build a world instead of taking one that's published, that means you want some thing different. Let's call that X, whatever the heck it is. Maybe you have a handful of things, call them X, Y, and Z that you want to be different, or specific, whatever. The point is that there needs to be a reason for the difference, there needs to be some way in which the actual games you run will be different, or more specific, in some kind of measurable or evocative way. In my case this usually has to so with narrowing the focus of play, I want a specific kind of game with a specific kind of feel. Either way, you need to identify that difference.

The design process would suggest that you start with these new, or different elements, and then ask what does each of these require in order to make sense and to function as I want? From there, you zoom out a little and ask that same question again, what does this setting require to do what I want it to? Once you have your requirements, which can vary in scope dramatically, then you can shade in the rest of the setting with whatever colour and shade you like that will be familiar to the players and not require them to lift to much cognitive load.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Most of the time, I try to give the world just enough detail that the players get the gist of what’s going on. Not necessarily the geopolitics or a deep delve into history, but…solid hints.

Because I’ve found that players will often come up with ideas that are as good as or better than my own, and if/when I yoink those ideas, the players feel extra clever and become more engaged.

When I’ve been at my best, I also included some kind of information outlet that gave them insight as to what else was going on in the world. How the other parts were moving,

The best example of that was when I had an Agency newsletter that always included a recap of the party’s last adventure, but also had all kinds of blurbs about other agents’ missions and unusual news (IOW, plot hooks). I posted a printout of the newsletter on the host’s game room corkboard ASAP, and left it up until the next story arc had completed. It absolutely generated a lot of interest in the game, including open speculation about what was going on elsewhere.

…and I just quietly and secretly took notes.

 

[pemerton]

2) Worldbuilding is primarily for the GM to create an engaging, consistent setting for their players. Lots of new GM advice says to only prepare what is needed immediately, but I disagree. If a GM has the time, creating many key concepts of their world is very worthwhile, as it forms a base for consistent scenes and encounters. But...
3) That said, worldbuilding must be naturally discovered by players as they play. No lore dumps, no GM soliloquies about their fantastic world. The GM must sit dispassionately until the players discover something, and only relate what they can discover based upon their actions. The players should work for it, and the GM should reward that work with discoveries.
4) If you can manage it, the world should be "alive". Things should happen irrespective of what the players are doing. While some events should be tied to the players, some events should just roll on by themselves. The GM should even create a little calendar of key events. When big things occur, the GM should find a believable way for players to learn about changes.
5) The GM should subtly communicate to the players when they have done something big, when they have changed the natural flow of things. Ideally this should be through NPCs ("you've ruined everything", "wait until my mistress hears of this", etc.) But PCs should understand that they can change the world.

I look at the role of setting in RPGing very differently.

I don't think that a setting becomes more consistent, or more engaging, in virtue of being prepared, or containing a lot of detail-known-only-to-the-GM. There is no need for a detailed world to provide a base for consistent scenes and encounters. Virtually any two scenes or encounters can be consistent with one another - or to put it another way, there are very few scenes or encounters that are mutually inconsistent or contradictory - and so the setting can be allowed to be whatever one might extrapolate to from what has actually taken place in play. Things happening irrespective of what the PCs are doing can be similarly handled. These can be narrated as consequences in the course of action resolution. Having a list prepared in advance might help from the point of view of being an aide-memoire, but it doesn't need to be framed as a calendar in the style of LotR Appendix B.

The idea that players will work for discovery of the world the GM has built, such that these discoveries are rewards; and that the measure of "something big" is that it changes the natural = GM-pre-authored flow of events; is also very different from how I think of RPGing. I take it as given that the players, via the actions they declare for their PCs, will affect the content of the shared fiction. That seems to me to be the main reason for playing a RPG, and the role of worldbuilding is in facilitation of this. Your framing seems to get the priorities exactly reversed.

 

[pemerton]

I was working on a D&D world trying to come up with a way for each player to feel more connected to the setting. My brilliant solution was to create an organization of some sort based on character class that the PCs would belong to. i.e. If they were a Fighter Battle Master they were members of the Royal Academy of Arms, Eldritch Knights were part of the University, etc., etc. But it was a lot of work and I wasn't sure if any of my players would have been interested so I decided to direct my efforts elsewhere.

I decided on a more elegant solution. If I ever run the campaign I'll have the player come up with some organization for their character to belong to. Make those lazy players do some work!

For this to connect the players to the setting, I think it has to matter, in play, that their PCs belong to these player-invented organisations.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I see the concept of world-building no different to the DM mapping and keying out, sometimes in detail, a dungeon - with the reward being the exploration and the survival of such dungeon.

 

[chaochou]

I've come up with the most succint view on world-building that I can, which is this:

World-building is the appeal to authority of RPGing - a circular process by which a GM both invents the need for such authority and then invokes it to justify their ongoing position as the controller of play.

 

[pemerton]

I see the concept of world-building no different to the DM mapping and keying out, sometimes in detail, a dungeon - with the reward being the exploration and the survival of such dungeon.

The basic function of a dungeon, in classic D&D, is to pose a challenge which the players hope to beat by declaring actions for their PCs. The fundamental measure of winning, or beating the dungeon, is treasure which then yields XP.

This isn't the function of the larger setting even in a lot of D&D play. And that's before we get into more technical matters like the relationship between the fiction of the setting and the processes of action declaration and action resolution - part of the way that dungeons work is by providing "artificially" thin fiction that permits a very particular relationship to emerge between it and play. This relationship can't be established for any remotely verisimilitudinous setting. Even a mediaeval village has too much going on - both in material terms and social terms - to be documented satisfactorily in a dungeon-style key.