Let's Talk About RPG Worldbuilding

[dragoner]

World-building is ...

... from literature. A large percentage of the users on world building sites are writers and other creatives, such as video/film people; role playing games adopted it from there.

 

[Greg K]

Though that can backfire as well as sometimes players focus on some minor detail you haven't fleshed out and you gotta run with it.

I don't look at it as backfiring. I look at it as opportunity. However, I don't begin with a pre-planned story/adventure path and having the various setting and cultural details worked out helps me to improvise when the players take things in unexpected directions in the middle of a session.

 

[Yora]

There is no need for a detailed world to provide a base for consistent scenes and encounters.

Yes! Exactly!

I was just reading through all the posts from today to check if someone already made the point I wanted to make, and you did.

I would say the main function of worldbuilding is to create situations. And great worldbuilding creates consistent situations.
When we look at other forms of fiction like books, movies, tv shows, and videogames, I think what mostly makes us think "I would love play in that world" really is "I would love to be in that position and deal with this situation in a game". When a world is engaging and captivating, it's because we start to recognize that there are certain rules for how things are happening in this world. And by learning these rules and patterns, we can understand what the protagonists are doing and why they are acting the way they do, and we can anticipate what will happen as result of that.
When the Emperor tells Luke "Let your hate flow!" and we want to shout at Luke to not give in to his anger, we feel engaged because we have learned how the Dark Side of the Force works. The realization that we understand what's going in a situation that makes absolutely no sense to someone who hasn't been innitiated creates a very rewarding experience. Especially when we're in an RPG and we can actually use our new understanding to gain an advantage.

I think great worlbuilding challenges the players with a setting in which events happen according to certain patterns that are not automatically obvious, but which can be recognized and understood by interacting with the world. And the greater the understanding is, the more efficient the PCs can act.

I think the main application of this is to have consistent and understandable patterns for how certain types of people in the setting tend to react to certain things. When players are able to recognize to which faction, culture, or society an NPC belongs, and can make informed predictions for what kind of things will make that NPC happy, proud, agreeable, angry, or hostile. When you have a good guess how you can steer NPCs to perform certain actions. To bribe, scare, or fool them.
This can be done by basing these things on a backstory for whatever group an NPC belongs to, but that backstory can be really very short and simple.

BioWare in their prime had this nailed down. The Mass Effect series has a huge amount of Database entries where you can read up on stuff with additional information, but none of it is necessary to understand the relationships between certain groups. The story that is important is extremely simple.
"Quarians developed artificial intelligence and had to flee their homeworld in a Robot-Revolt, and they've been living on space-ships and in poverty for the last 300 years" is all you need to know to understand everything that happens in the three games revolving around Quarians and Geth. And they really got a lot of mileage out of that one-sentence history. The situation with the Krogan is a bit more complicated, but you get a lot of interesting situations and interactions out of two minutes of backstory. And neither of those two stories involves a single named character, specified location, or a specified timeline.

 

[dragoner]

I would say the main function of worldbuilding is to create situations.

I would say it is needed for anything to happen, could a game be played without a world to act as a background for the characters?

 

[Yora]

I'd say you can't have a campaign or adventures without worldbuilding. I think almost all RPGs come with a good amount of pre-packaged worldbuiling included. (GURPS and Fate being examples of purely mechanics games.)
If GMs don't put work into their own worldbuilding, then they are getting theirs of the shelf. Which is of course a valid way to do it, but when using a generic setting, you also get generic situations.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'd say you can't have a campaign or adventures without worldbuilding. I think almost all RPGs come with a good amount of pre-packaged worldbuiling included. (GURPS and Fate being examples of purely mechanics games.)
If GMs don't put work into their own worldbuilding, then they are getting theirs of the shelf. Which is of course a valid way to do it, but when using a generic setting, you also get generic situations.

This assumes that play is about the setting. Why can't play be about the characters?

I don't need a setting to have a game about the characters.

 

[Yora]

When the game is about characters, those characters still need things to interact with to express themselves.
A campaign which only consists of the PCs in a close off environment might hypothetically be possible, but probably never actually happens.
When you have NPCs with plans and motives, there's worldbuilding involved.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I understand Worldbuilding as a process for creating fictive elements and themes the table gets to explore, this process is a tool and different tools produce different results. The fictive elements are those that pertain to setting and characters (mainly the NPCs, although if you can get your players to choose to engage with your setting materials it can inform their characterization.) Worldbuilding can be finely curated, cohesive and consistent, or it can be any combination of the above, or none of the above. It can be collaborative or not, and both produce valid play experiences that if done well, can't be replicated by the other.

Different players react to worldbuilding in different ways, with 'explorer' or 'discovery' oriented players enjoying the feeling of learning about it and unraveling it like a puzzle, and others enjoying it or resenting it based on how it intersects with how they have fun in the game, and whether they view it as opportunity or obstacle to doing that. Some actors resent the world getting screen time or constraining their backstories, other love it for defining their role and providing a stage and themes for them to interact with, for instance.

Personally, I do it well, so I tend to prefer games that don't view it as something to be discouraged and instead let me enjoy it-- part of the appeal of GMing for me is actually getting to be a designer, which includes the world in which the game takes place. Similarly I don't give much weight to feedback from players that would prefer a loosey goosey setting that can morph to become whatever is necessary in the moment, the consistency and thematic cohesion of my secondary creation (or someone else's) is part of the point for me, and I stop having fun when it isn't present.

 

[dragoner]

When the game is about characters, those characters still need things to interact with to express themselves.
A campaign which only consists of the PCs in a close off environment might hypothetically be possible, but probably never actually happens.
When you have NPCs with plans and motives, there's worldbuilding involved.

I think even in a collaborative process, ie between GM and players, they are still worldbuilding, if just ad hoc.

 

[Ovinomancer]

When the game is about characters, those characters still need things to interact with to express themselves.
A campaign which only consists of the PCs in a close off environment might hypothetically be possible, but probably never actually happens.
When you have NPCs with plans and motives, there's worldbuilding involved.

I disagree. Worldbuilding is not a catchall for fiction creation, it's a specific activity used to create a setting absent the characters. I don't need to know a thing about the PCs to engage in worldbuilding -- look throughout this thread for statements that it's the player's job to align their PCs with the setting. I can, however, create fiction quite easily while engaged in play, and that can, at the end of the day, result in a vibrant world the characters interacted with. However, the difference here is that the fiction is created to engage the characters, which is not how worldbuilding operates.

Look to how FATE works, with collaborative setting that hinges on the characters, for one options. Another is to start with a genre or set of tropes, make characters, and the start play with those characters in a tropy opening scene and then build out from there in play. This requires a system that aides this kind of play, so, yeah, you'd probably get bad results using 5e, for example (which has a strong implied setting and also a complete lack of any system to engage characters in this manner).

And the myth that you can't have a coherent, consistent, and deep game if you don't do worldbuilding ahead of time is just that -- a myth. One that largely rests on the shoulders of trying to do so with systems that fight such play (like D&D) and in play cultures that treat this as bad play and lean on examples of poor execution to prove their point -- as if prep never delivers terrible game experiences.