Pre-designed world Vs Starting from scratch

[Shades of Green]

I prefer to build my own world; not only do I like worldbuilding by itself, but I also like to customize my world for my taste and the tastes of my regular players.

 

[Anand]

I had my share of homebrewing, and it's a lot of fun. But now I'm glad I'm using Forgotten Realms, as I don't have much time (and also my players) to develop a campaign world. But, of course, it's my Realms, not RAW Realms!

 

[Animus]

I homebrewed for a long time (~10 years), but Eberron has grown on me. The feel of the setting is what I've been shooting for in my homebrew. Also, there is the time issue for me too. So I use Eberron for the most part, and run my homebrew with my old gang whenever I see them.

 

[Templetroll]

When I started there were more than 12 players and about 8 GMs and we all had homebrews. IT just seemed to be the way to go then. Huge fun, and everyone's world had its own flavor. Now, my wife runs FR and I bounce between my homebrew and Greyhawk.

 

[Cedric]

It's funny how much something that has never happened can impact your decision making process.

For instance, I have never had someone try to correct me or argue logistics, geography or history with me while using a published setting. However...the very fact that it MIGHT happen, keeps me running Homebrew settings exclusively.

In fact, I'm just putting the final touches on a new homebrew setting for my group...we start play on it Saturday.

 

[DonTadow]

Hi, I'm new here so I'm still finding the lay of the land.

I run a number of games in a world I designed from scratch (albeit borrowing heavily from various influences). It's very story based, but this seems to give the combats extra edge - and a couple of years in its going really well.

I've always found both running and playing in the self-developed settings more rewarding, the stories seem to have more depth and the characters get fleshed out more. Where as using the preset realms seems to result in campaigns that lack real involvement.

I was just wondering how many fellow roleplayers start from scratch, and how many prefer working from a pre-designed world (Forgotten Realms Etc.)? What do you find works better in one Vs the other?

I prefer to take a very low key established setting, gut it and add my own elements to it. This way i get the detail for things that i really dont feel like statting (what type of goods are brought into the various ports) but the world feeels very much like mine in the end.

for instance, Chrystaria is an egyptian evolutionary setting. So I took the Hamunaptra, broke the city states up into major cities in the world, rewrote some of the text that made no sense and voila, instant setting with lots of little goodies in it for the players.

My next campaign is going to be ambitious, because it will involve time hopping across the world and 7 or 8 different setting books.

 

[KenSeg]

We have been playing in our homebrew setting for 20 years now. Our DM, Don, tried to use Kalamar maps and used Ebberon for short periods, but we, the players, told him that we much preferred his world that he had created. How is that for an ego boost!

I have always found that the homebrew has allowed for more flexibility. While we have used the same cities and gods over the 20 years, they have been altered from campaign to campaign to fit the DMs specific ideas for that arc. Some of the gods have disappeared while others have joined the pantheon. The shining city of Kern is almost always located across the high mountain pass from the evil Mort, but who is running them changes. Sometimes a Lich council is running Mort and other times another BBEG is in charge.

These places and names are like old friends to us now and I would never want to abandon them.

-KenSeg
gaming since 1978

 

[Technomancer]

I start from scratch because I don't want to take a chance that the players will know more about the setting than me.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I usually use licensed settings (whether formally licensed or homebrewed to match). I generally find my creativity is more fired by looking at something else and extrapolating from it than by trying to do something from scratch. Of course, my interpretation of those settings sometimes diverges a fair bit from the source.

I haven't run a published D&D setting other than Spelljammer in many years. Spelljammer, of course, encompasses pretty much all the others (except its hated rival, Planescape!), so in that sense I've used the published settings for the Realms, Arcana Evolved, Iron Kingdoms, Eberron, Greyhawk, Arcanis, etc. However, all of these have been so altered by being fit into Spelljammer (rather than having Spelljammer fit into them, as the original 2e material did), I'm not sure they count as 'published.'

 

[Desdichado]

For me, running a "canned setting" is actually quite a bit more work than homebrewing. To run Eberron, to use an example, I need to read the Campaign setting book, probably the Races book, probably the Sharn book, and maybe the Five Nations book at a minimum. And not just read them; I mean really know them well enough to get the details right in play, which means studying them like they're my old college textbooks and running the game is a midterm. When I homebrew, on the other hand, I only "create" as much as I need for the next session or two, with a few vague details of what's going on beyond that, and I don't have to know material nearly as well, because hey--if I say something is a certain way, then it is. I've never understood the comments that I've heard for years and years that DMs don't homebrew anymore as they get older because it's more work.

Anyhoo, I also really enjoy homebrewing. I started playing D&D back in the day when homebrewing didn't exist as a word yet, and what we now call homebrewing was just another name for "DMing." One of the reasons I got into D&D in the first place was because I like creating settings. I have no problem ripping off other peoples ideas, but at the very least I need to put them together in a framework that I can call my own.