What is *worldbuilding* for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I will try again, trying to build on what @Arilyn posted.

If the thing that a person enjoys in RPGing is a sense of being in the GM's world, then why would you explain that in terms of agency? The notion of audience membership seems like a more fruitful starting point.

I enjoy going to movies, and I enjoy listening to music, but I don't explain that pleasure in terms of my agency.

If the purposes of worldbuilding include establishing material for the GM to present to the players, is anyone interested in explaining why that is worthwhile?

If the purpose of worldbuilding is - in metaphorical terms - to give the players stuff to interact with via their PCs, which means - in literal terms - to establish frameworks for declaring actions which then affect the way the GM narrates his/her setting - is anyone interested in explaining why that is worthwhile?

I think the proposition is that someone, a 'GM', provides a box full of toys, the 'sandbox' if you will. The players are then challenged to essentially build whatever sort of castle they want with the pieces parts provided. Its like Lego where you wanted to build the Starship Enterprise, but maybe you got the Castle Set for your birthday!

Honestly, I'm being a little bit silly here, its midnight, but this is clearly the idea, that you have a set of situations and 'things' that make up the world, and the entire activity of the players is in MANIPULATING them, not in 'being told about them'. I think this IS a mistake you make in your explication. The activity of DOING STUFF is what is primary (at least for some players, this is where the old 'WotC player types' thing comes in).

In Story Now, its doing stuff with a focus on your story/conflict and with a goal of character growth and interesting narrative resulting. In 'classic' play the activity is just more concrete and working with a more limited set of elements (maybe, truthfully it might not turn out to be so).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, can you see where I'm coming from? I mean, yes, I get that you don't like games where there's some sort of force/illusionism/railroad (maybe mild forms of these, perhaps) and you consider that to be cutting into your agency. I think I just take a more literalistic and less subjective position on ALL of this stuff. That is, you can declare actions that represent any possible (and some impossible) moves within the present fiction in these games. Wouldn't a GM who would certainly instantly gank your character for doing X, still say you have agency to do X, so you have total agency? That's the problem with this whole line of reasoning IMHO. It leads inevitably to some very perverse results, doesn't it?

I honestly can't see where you are coming from on this specific point. And I think you are being a lot more subjective than you realize. If the problem is your being too literalist. I'd say stop being so literalist. We're talking about gaming at the actual table, and stuff we've seen in live play. I really don't see what point you are trying to make here. If I get instantly ganked for doing something, because the GM doesn't want me to go there, that isn't really agency. Characterizing that as agency (because I literally can always say or do anything I want before the GM decides to rank me) is one of the most specious things I've seen on this thread. The point is there are limits to your agency and a practical limit to what you can declare in a railroaded session or even in a session that isn't fully open. You can't just declare you go north in a game where the GM absolutely wants the party go on the haunted house adventure in the south, if you do, the game starts to collapse. You know this and the GM knows this, so it places a limit on your agency. There is a big difference between a session where there is one adventure planned for the evening, and a session where the players are free to explore the world. I don't know how much clearer I can make this, and I don't know why we keep coming back to this issue where we are trying to explain this, and we keep getting told "Oh that is just roleplaying in 100% of any game".

 

[pemerton]

You aren't in the DM's world. He may have created the part of it that the game is set in, but the world belongs to both the DM and players once play starts, and the resulting story that comes from the DM/Player interactions is a collaboration. Players aren't there to be an audience of any kind.

This may be true of your game. It's clearly not true of everyone though, given some of the posts early in this thread.

The purpose is to establish a setting for the players to play in. It's that simple.

What does to play in mean? It's not like a sandpit or a playground. The actual activity at the table is primarily the speaking of words. Until we drop metaphor for literal descriptions, very little useful analysis is going to follow.

Having a setting to play in is very worthwhile in my opinion.

Again, what does this mean? What actual utterances at the table are you referring to?

I think the proposition is that someone, a 'GM', provides a box full of toys, the 'sandbox' if you will. The players are then challenged to essentially build whatever sort of castle they want with the pieces parts provided.

<snip>

Honestly, I'm being a little bit silly here, its midnight, but this is clearly the idea, that you have a set of situations and 'things' that make up the world, and the entire activity of the players is in MANIPULATING them, not in 'being told about them'. I think this IS a mistake you make in your explication. The activity of DOING STUFF is what is primary (at least for some players, this is where the old 'WotC player types' thing comes in).

This is more metaphor, though. The "toys" and "parts" are purely imaginary, and the "manipulating" is talking. What does the talking look like? Who is allowed to say what? And why? What role do the GM's words play in affecting the players', and vice versa?

In Classical play, world building, whether homebrew or published gives the players a place to adventure in.

Again, this is metaphor. Can you describe this in literal terms?

The GM creates stories, or develops adventure areas and the players explore or work through the story.

OK, so let's talk about this. What's the difference between "players working through a story" and reading a novel?

The question's not rhetorical. Presumably there's a difference. I assume that the second-personality is part of it? Is it all of it? Is there something else going on?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Pemerton, you ask so many questions, and people answer them, but the answers never seem satisfying. The whole thread was a simple question about what world building is for beyond the dungeon. People have given you answers, and you don't seem able or willing to understand them (and keep turning it an argument against world building in the traditional sense (or even mainstream sense) to make an argument for your preferred style of play. This is why these threads never go anywhere and always result in you and the same three posters circling the wagon.

My advice would be venture beyond posts by people like Luke Crane, delve into some of the communities that are actively involved in the type of gaming you are trying to understand. Even with posters like me stepping in to try and add some clarity from that point of view, we are just a handful of people and not representative of the whole. You can't understand this stuff by sitting on a mountain from affair and puzzling over terminology. You have to dive in. And if you have this constant wall of skepticism about what other people find engaging or exciting, that you only apply to the other side, but not to your own approach, your not going to make any headway. It just doesn't feel like the purpose here is to truly get answers to the questions you are asking. It feels like this whole thread begins with a conclusion.

 

[Maxperson]

This may be true of your game. It's clearly not true of everyone though, given some of the posts early in this thread.

If a DM truly believes that, it's not a red flag, but a giant flashing red neon sign.

What does to play in mean? It's not like a sandpit or a playground. The actual activity at the table is primarily the speaking of words. Until we drop metaphor for literal descriptions, very little useful analysis is going to follow.

Again, what does this mean? What actual utterances at the table are you referring to.

I don't believe a second that you don't know what I'm talking about. Call it the "shared imagined space" if you want, but we all play inside of it and it requires a setting to accomplish. Worldbuilding is the creation of that setting.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't believe a second that you don't know what I'm talking about. Call it the "shared imagined space" if you want, but we all play inside of it and it requires a setting to accomplish. Worldbuilding is the creation of that setting.

I think the reason people are so reluctant to describe things is because people keep twisting what we say. But just to lend another voice here. What it means literally in play for me, is I create the places, the people, the groups, and the customs, etc. When the players explore the game world they inevitably meet people, develop relationships, conflicts, connections, and produce a history in that environment. All that stuff is fuel going forward. And it is also there to help guide me when I have to invent new content on the fly. Part of my job is to react to what the players are doing and decide how the characters and setting respond. I try to handle the developments through NPCs and groups first, situations second. I try not to think in terms of the outcomes I want. Just to use a simple example, if the players stop investigating a local mystery all of a sudden and go visit Iron Temple Sect to help smooth over a conflict in the region, and murder the Iron Temple Master in his sleep out of the blue, I immediately am going to try to figure out what Iron Temple will do as an organization as soon as they discover the body (or better yet, what Iron Temple Master's son will do since he's the new leader). Now I have to look at who the allies of Iron Temple Sect are, consider the resources available to them, and any local martial heroes they might hire to handle the PCs. This is all a product of interaction between the GM and players. The only difference in our approach from what some of the people are describing here, is players affect the world through their characters, and the GM is mainly building off of world building stuff to carry things on. In this scenario, killing Iron Temple Master in his sleep wasn't something I had expected when the session started. And the players deviated from what I was probably expecting to be the focus of the session. The point is to respect their agency if they don't want to engage the mystery and to use the world building stuff to help handle whatever directions and actions they happen to take (and you can bring that to more dramatic and story focused places if you want, or less---whether your decisions are guided by dramatics, character motivations, physics of the world, story or a blend is entirely a GM preference thing).

 

[Aldarc]

So I guess we weren't just getting limited player agency, but limited GM agency, in a sense...

I guess that adventures never have really registered for me in this conversation since players and GMs alike are conscientiously surrendering part of their agency when playing adventures so adventures strike me as being beside everyone's point.

 

[Arilyn]

Playing in someone's pre-built world and engaging in an adventure is not the same as reading a novel or watching a movie. It's too improvisational. Scripts and novels are, hopefully, carefully crafted. It shows when they are not. I wasn't surprised to discover that Lucas started filming "Phantom Menace" before his script was written.

There can be similarities between rpging and stories, especially if an adventure has been prepared by the GM. This can be very rewarding. I was playing in a Buffy campaign where the GM was very good at crafting Buffy style adventures, and it was a blast. How is this different from watching the show? Well, there was more immersion, we were making decisions which affected the plot, and we were experiencing our own, never before seen stories, with our own characters, in Joss' universe.

There are similarities between classical play and a "choose your own adventure." A living GM, however, is way more complex, and can adjust, add, and rewrite "pages" on the fly. I have gone through a few surprisingly well done "choose your own adventures", but no matter how well created, they can't come even remotely close to the same experience as a classical adventure with a GM.

The world created by the GM is described verbally from written description. It's shared with players, who have more or less agency to add to the world, depending on the GM. Then, if all goes according to plan, the magic happens. The world and the stories come to life in a shared imagination space. Excitement and immersion occurs through conversation and a few (or none) simple props. The world acts as a shared language in a way, a short cut, helping players understand where they are, and what is expected of them I think that's why familiar tropes work best in rpgs. Create a too unfamiliar world, and players feel at a loss. But space opera, fantasy, horror, we can get that right away.

Story Now is a rpg style hoping to create stories too. With the narrativist approach, however, it's not simulating stories, in the way pre-built adventures are. Story Now is creating them at the moment of play, with very minimal world building, and absolutely no preconceived notions of what players might do. It's very immediate, focussed on dramatic moments which come entirely from the player characters drives, foibles, etc. When it goes right, the players can look back and see which threads wove together into a story. This is really neat and surprising. If you are engaging in Story Now, however, the players also have to accept the fact that some sessions are going to have those threads end up in a gnarled mess. Price you pay for greater agency...In these games, I suppose, the characters become the shared language, taking on most of the role of traditional world building. You don't need both.

pemerton's questions did let me think more deeply about these topics. I don't know if he'll feel that I answered him sufficiently, though.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Pemerton, you ask so many questions,

...It's called the Socratic Method, I believe...

pemerton's questions did let me think more deeply about these topics.

...and that's how it works...

 

[Arilyn]

...It's called the Socratic Method, I believe...

...and that's how it works...[/QUOTE

And looked what happened to Socrates