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Let's Talk About RPG Worldbuilding
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<blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8325329" data-attributes="member: 70468"><p>I think it’s important to understand your purpose for worldbuilding and stick to it. If you’re worldbuilding for a campaign, and you end up doing it for its own sake, you can end up with material that’s not actually useful in play. That was the problem in v1 of my homebrew setting (currently working out v3).</p><p></p><p>When I first started working on my setting, I thought I had to detail how everything works. I thought I would do something “different” and have a setting that was built out as a function world. I spent a lot of time figuring out how various elements worked. There were a number of different polities, and it was cool. Except that we wanted to do an exploration-based game, and if there are no unexplored spaces, there’s not much to explore.</p><p></p><p>In v2 of my setting, I rectified that by reframing the setting as being perpetually in decline after a war long ago. There were frontier areas to explore, and that’s where we spent a lot of time playing. However, the setting was very vaguely specified. Even though there were a number of major polities, they had little influence on what was happening. It was basically a blank slate campaign with some fluff regarding the playable species. What should have been a source of adventures ended up leaving me having to wing everything, and the local politics ended up underspecified and unimportant. Even though my players had some interest in them, I wasn’t able to meet that need.</p><p></p><p>For v3 of my setting, I’m following the campaign creation procedure in Worlds Without Number. Kevin Crawford reminds you frequently to design your setting for playability first. If it’s not a potential source of hooks, you can do that if it’s fun, but it’s not going to be useful, and you should focus on generating content that is useful. Even though we had an existing setting, I treated it as a retcon, but it’s more like a reboot. Some of the basic parameters are similar, but the details are often very different.</p><p></p><p>The end result is a setting where there are spaces for PCs to go explore, but there are larger actors who are pursuing their own interests. Since I’m trying to pursue a Right to Dream agenda, I want to make sure the world continues to move once set into motion. The setting I have now combined with the tools WWN provides for content creation and maintaining dynamism will let me do that.</p><p></p><p>I’d like to think I’ve done something right when upon showing my players the map in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/worlds-without-number-general-thread.680245/post-8310590" target="_blank">this post</a> and explaining the setting, they point to the fallen capital, and say, “we want to loot that.” They’ve already started working on their plans for that, which has become the group’s aspiration for the game. I also like that if we made new characters somewhere else, we could just pick up and start following what happens with them.</p><p></p><p></p><p>I’m our forever D&D-like DM, so my experience with other settings is pretty limited. When we do Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 or Scum and Villainy, someone else is the one doing it. Consequently, I don’t know enough to say whether I have a favorite. My least favorite setting material are the gazetteer format that’s popular in D&D settings. A lot of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting stuff I have tends to be in that format. You’ll get a lot of information on history and cities and stuff, but only a fraction of the book is dedicated to content for adventure hooks. I don’t like building the setting during play. We tried that with Dungeon World, and it was too gonzo. Since it was mainly about establishing the current context, it wasn’t much of a source of adventure hooks.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="kenada, post: 8325329, member: 70468"] I think it’s important to understand your purpose for worldbuilding and stick to it. If you’re worldbuilding for a campaign, and you end up doing it for its own sake, you can end up with material that’s not actually useful in play. That was the problem in v1 of my homebrew setting (currently working out v3). When I first started working on my setting, I thought I had to detail how everything works. I thought I would do something “different” and have a setting that was built out as a function world. I spent a lot of time figuring out how various elements worked. There were a number of different polities, and it was cool. Except that we wanted to do an exploration-based game, and if there are no unexplored spaces, there’s not much to explore. In v2 of my setting, I rectified that by reframing the setting as being perpetually in decline after a war long ago. There were frontier areas to explore, and that’s where we spent a lot of time playing. However, the setting was very vaguely specified. Even though there were a number of major polities, they had little influence on what was happening. It was basically a blank slate campaign with some fluff regarding the playable species. What should have been a source of adventures ended up leaving me having to wing everything, and the local politics ended up underspecified and unimportant. Even though my players had some interest in them, I wasn’t able to meet that need. For v3 of my setting, I’m following the campaign creation procedure in Worlds Without Number. Kevin Crawford reminds you frequently to design your setting for playability first. If it’s not a potential source of hooks, you can do that if it’s fun, but it’s not going to be useful, and you should focus on generating content that is useful. Even though we had an existing setting, I treated it as a retcon, but it’s more like a reboot. Some of the basic parameters are similar, but the details are often very different. The end result is a setting where there are spaces for PCs to go explore, but there are larger actors who are pursuing their own interests. Since I’m trying to pursue a Right to Dream agenda, I want to make sure the world continues to move once set into motion. The setting I have now combined with the tools WWN provides for content creation and maintaining dynamism will let me do that. I’d like to think I’ve done something right when upon showing my players the map in [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/worlds-without-number-general-thread.680245/post-8310590']this post[/URL] and explaining the setting, they point to the fallen capital, and say, “we want to loot that.” They’ve already started working on their plans for that, which has become the group’s aspiration for the game. I also like that if we made new characters somewhere else, we could just pick up and start following what happens with them. I’m our forever D&D-like DM, so my experience with other settings is pretty limited. When we do Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2020 or Scum and Villainy, someone else is the one doing it. Consequently, I don’t know enough to say whether I have a favorite. My least favorite setting material are the gazetteer format that’s popular in D&D settings. A lot of the Pathfinder Campaign Setting stuff I have tends to be in that format. You’ll get a lot of information on history and cities and stuff, but only a fraction of the book is dedicated to content for adventure hooks. I don’t like building the setting during play. We tried that with Dungeon World, and it was too gonzo. Since it was mainly about establishing the current context, it wasn’t much of a source of adventure hooks. [/QUOTE]
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