What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Lanefan]

Alignment in my game is used on the DM side as vague guide to how a creature behaves. I don't have the luxury that the players do of concentrating one just one being, so alignment is invaluable to me. However, alignments just can't capture anywhere near the entire personality of a person, so for the PCs if a player wants to put an alignment down he can, but I don't care about it for game play. I'd much rather have the players roleplay a complex personality than the simple caricature that trying to stay within one alignment creates.

Agreed, though I-as-DM still need to keep a vague track of their alignments so I know who that Lawful-loving weapoin is going to accept and who it's going to painfully reject.

Me, too, except you can add druidic to the mix.

Heh - I'd forgotten they even had one.

 

[Lanefan]

I also don't agree about your 'pacing argument' that there has to be 'trivial stuff' along the way to make the 'good stuff' stand out. There are a lot of ways to produce pacing and rising and falling tension. Cluttering the story with trivia is crude at best IMHO. Notice what both Jackson and Bakshi cut from Fellowship of the Ring, Bombadil.

Yes, and may they both rot in hell for that.

While it is a cool and interesting story in its own right, and JRRT was a great storyteller, so he makes it work, it is still a sidetrack.

I think this might hit one of the underlying differences in our hpilosophies here: I'm firmly of the opinion that if a movie has 8 hours worth of good story to tell then make the damn movie 8 hours long!

People complain that the three LotR movies are too long. I complain that they're not long enough, particularly the first one where so much was skipped.

The Hobbit movies, on the other hand, just didn't have enough story to fill 3 movies...though the extra stuff they put in works quite well IMO.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

No, what I think is that when you put forward an element like "the skeleton of a knight chained to a wall" it is so general that it COULD relate to almost anything. The knight could hold some secret that can be obtained by laying his bones to rest. His bone could be magical. Finding his resting place could earn a reward or garner favor somewhere. One of the characters might see it as a duty to lay him to rest, despite resistance or danger. He could be a relative of a PC and his death require vengeance. He could owe the PCs a debt that he will repay in some future time. I can think of 50 different ways to tie that into various PC agendas. The problem is I can make up INFINITE things like that, drawn from myth, legend, literary sources, my own imagination, player suggestions, etc. I need some filter, some process with which to winnow down the content included in THIS game at THIS time to something manageable so that the game can flow instead of just flailing around from one minor incident to another.

Where I say just throw it all in! Oftentimes I've found that what you call "flailing around from one minor incident to another" (which is what the first few adventures in my campaigns usually consist of) is the genesis of what later grows to be important in the game, be it via player interest or the DM's pre-conceived story or (most commonly) a combination of both.

So hang the flippin' knight on the wall and see what they make of it! Hell, for all that it could have been just some random unlucky bonehead who ended up chained to a wall.

Expressed player interest, campaign or genre focus, etc., all used in Story Now games, can be such a rule. Its a good one because it does mostly guarantee interest in the content.

True - the hung knight could tie in to something they've already thought about...or it could give them something entirely new to think about. Either way, it's good.

 

[darkbard]

True - the hung knight

He heh. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] made a funny.

 

[Maxperson]

But this still makes my point #1, the GM may block these actions on the basis of some GM-established fictional setting parameters which are of no consequence or interest to the player. Now, if the genre simply doesn't admit of 'northern barbarians' as a concept (there could be a couple flavors of these possibly) then its not a possible goal. This speaks more to the advantages of No Myth than anything else, IMHO. Though even in No Myth I could see a general genre "this just isn't part of the milieu" happening. Still, its a problem most identified with established settings. Middle Earth for example has no viking analogs. It could, but it is established cannon that there are none.

The DM is not blocking them, though. By agreeing to play in Darksun, the players have agreed that clerics don't exist, so no blocking is done. I would also think that by agreeing to play in Darksun, that particular theme is of interest to the players.

And to that extent your concept of social contract at the table is consonant with Story Now, and we agree. That is still not a commonly, or certainly at least universally, held position though. I mean, when I discuss with you or other participants, I assume this is a broader discussion than [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s process of play vs AbdulAlhazred's process of play.

I think it is broader, though. The enjoyment of the players should be a universally held position, and killing player ideas the way you are suggesting the DM can do is not fun.

Again, I think this is like point 2, we agree. Still, there are many, probably MOST GMs who play in a fairly 'classic' process who would not agree with this. It certainly raises questions about sandboxes and such things for instance (though I think there are some nuances here too).

I've seen too many DMPCs to think that DMs putting in things for themselves isn't a thing. However, most, if not all of those DMs have gone past doing that. It's sort of an evolution of DMing, with DMs progressing through various phases as they become better and more experienced. I don't know that it's a "classic" position, so much as classic play makes it easier to happen and so you see it more often there.

See, we really agree on a number of things. I still don't really agree with your notion of insisting that the game be a largely continuous narrative filled with lots of extra details that don't relate to anything immediately interesting, nor that skipping such is forcing choices on players. Otherwise we can agree on many things.

Yeah. I think that's probably true of most of us here. Once we get past arguing about all the small things and pet issues, we really have more in common than not.

 

[Maxperson]

HoML does it. The PCs start with X amount of gear (like in 4e, there's a list with associated costs and they get 100sp to spend). From then on their wealth is basically abstract. They might, narratively, find '1000gp', but there's a simple chart that shows what fictional amounts equate to 'trivial', 'significant', and 'great' wealth/expenditure. The basic assumption is that treasures give the PCs 'significant' money, they can achieve significant expenses in the ordinary course of play, possibly with a check required, but not a really difficult one. If the fictional positioning of the game results in a PC becoming separated from his wealth (IE losing all his goods) then he's going to be stuck scraping to make a 'trivial' expense, but normally those are just assumed. 'great' expenses are going to require the characters to pool all their resources, or obtain some unusually rich source of money, and will require difficult checks. Its possible some PC might find this kind of check within his modest reach if, narratively, he's focused on and insured that he acquires wealth as a specific asset (this would probably constitute a major boon in my game, the equivalent of what you gain for going up a level in 4e). It does work. Clearly if the players are going to try to break that system, then the GM will have to push back, but I've never seen that be a real problem in actual games.

The original Marvel Superheroes of the '80s was also like that. You had resources of a specific ranking and you made purchases by rolling on a chart.

 

[Maxperson]

OK, and I posit that one of the 'right' answers to this is 'zero things', and that's usually what I choose. There's no number that is magically 'railroading' or 'not railroading' (which was the original assertion, that Pemerton was railroading). Again, this is an aesthetic choice and an 'authorial' choice, and is perfectly consonant with good DMing! IMHO as you add more such distractions and 'dross' you degrade the focus of the game and it becomes less engaging. Still, you can add some fairly relevant thing, particularly if it is an obstacle or presents a choice (IE challenges the player's agenda/character beliefs).

I agree that 0 can be a right answer. That said, I will again say that I didn't call it railroading because he had 0 things on the way to the giants.

 

[Maxperson]

Agreed, though I-as-DM still need to keep a vague track of their alignments so I know who that Lawful-loving weapoin is going to accept and who it's going to painfully reject.

See, as the DM I can see how they are playing their PC, so I know whether they will be a fit with a particular item or not. I don't need to see it in terms of LG, CE or whatever.

 

[pemerton]

There isn't such a thing as "all the possible", "enough", "not enough", "think of everything", etc. The question doesn't apply. The DM simply places some things that he thinks the players will find interesting. If they do, they engage. If they don't, they pass it by.

The question [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and I are asking pertains to the bolded bit: why?

And the assertion I am adding to that is: you are spending time at the table on something that the GM has injected that - even if in the end the players ignore it - sucks up time at the table on fiction that the GM wants to relate to the players. Hence it is a burden on player agency with respect to the content of the shared fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The DM is not blocking them, though. By agreeing to play in Darksun, the players have agreed that clerics don't exist, so no blocking is done. I would also think that by agreeing to play in Darksun, that particular theme is of interest to the players.

I don't disagree that genre, or in the case of DS a specific milieu that has particular genre conventions that are desired, isn't an OK reason to make certain specific options unavailable. So, yes, if the players agree to play DS and then insist they want to go off to visit the northern barbarians who don't exist in that game and aren't genre appropriate for it, then its on them, not me as GM. But if they're playing in generic fantasy land, which covers MOST D&D campaigns more-or-less, then its a little less clear why that shouldn't be allowed, or that the players ruled it out.

I think it is broader, though. The enjoyment of the players should be a universally held position, and killing player ideas the way you are suggesting the DM can do is not fun.

So, now Story Now techniques are 'killing player ideas'??? Ummmmm? Huh? What? Gotten lost in a maze of posts or something? Sorry, you're not making any sense to me here. The universal position is that players knowledge of what they want is deeper than anyone else's and that their interests should be played to, that's NOT killing their ideas!

I've seen too many DMPCs to think that DMs putting in things for themselves isn't a thing. However, most, if not all of those DMs have gone past doing that. It's sort of an evolution of DMing, with DMs progressing through various phases as they become better and more experienced. I don't know that it's a "classic" position, so much as classic play makes it easier to happen and so you see it more often there.

Yeah, I could imagine a DMPC in Story Now, nothing prevents it, but it seems like it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Certainly not in the fairly distasteful way that most such creatures exist (IE as a sort of Mary Sue and plot enforcer). Anyway, I guess we agree on this one .

Yeah. I think that's probably true of most of us here. Once we get past arguing about all the small things and pet issues, we really have more in common than not.

In a lot of ways, though I think we do GM using fairly diverse strategies. There are common techniques though, and the ultimate goal is the same for the most part.