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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7323801" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, in the OP and a few posts that followed it, I tried to make clear what I mean by worldbuilding - namely, establishing setting information in advance of play.Telling the players "Imagine an 18th century salon" doesn't, on its face, sound like an instance of that. It sounds like it's happening in the course of actual play, and is inviting them to draw upon some commonly understood tropes and references. It's not that different fromm saying "The NPC is wearing a long-sleeved dress and carrying a cutlass."Well, obviously you can mean by "worldbuilding" whatever you want (within the parameters of meaningful conversation in Enlgish), but in the OP and subsequent posts I tried to explain what I had in mind.Saying, "Let's play Marvel Heroic" isn't worldbuilding - it's pitching a game. And when we're discussing how to introduce NIghcrawler into the situation (it was already established that Bobby and War Machine were in DC), and Nightcrawler's player suggests "I phone Bobby, telling him I'm coming to see him in DC, and suggest we meet in a bar" that's not worldbuiling either, in the sense of the GM establishing setting elements in advance. The player (who doesn't read comics) has read Nightcrawler's sheet, sees that he's a roguish romantic type, and so naturally suggests an outing to a bar.I have never heard of B.A.D. except in the context of some "datafile" descriptions in the back of my copy of MHRP Civil War. When the players decided they were going to a bar, I flipped through the (several) pages of characters at the back of the book, noticed Asp (she comes early in the alphabetical listing) as someone who might be suitable for meeting in a bar, and then threw in the other B.A.D. characters that are referenced in Asp's description.As far as relying on my (rather sketchy) knowledge of DC - the Washington Monument, the Capitol Dome (which also came up in the game), and the Smithsonian aren't elements of any worldbuilding. They're actual places which some of the players (not me) have visited, and which we all have some basic familiarity with from images on TV and in movies. They're in the same category as [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION]'s reference to 18th century France.In what way? Showing someone (the player) a map with a little village on it called Five Oak isn't "leveragign the vast work" of anything. It's leveraging a single map and place name. There's no description of any powerful recluse wizards in the GH City boxed set description of Five Oak.Would the players generally have access to all that information - the distance, the weather patterns, the frequency of encounter, etc?If they do, then it creates a puzzle of a sort, provided the parameters and possibilities aren't so complex and open-ended that trying to optimise a response is impossible.If the players don't know that stuff, so it's really just a tool for the GM telling them some stuff about what happens to the players' characters, then it seems maybe like a device for the GM to keep his/her storytelling consistent (similar to how REH wrote himself an essay on "The Hyborian Age" to help him manage the backstory for his Conan stories).I like Night's Dark Terror because it has some very nice vignettes - the river attack; the goblin assault; the little dungeon under the hillock; the island with the statue the elves want back. It also has a good evil organisation - the Iron Ring.I think the stuff with the Hutakaans is not very interesting, and in my game the "ancient civilisation" I used was minotaurs (drawing on elements of H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth).When I used the module, I made a lot of the backstory known to the players. So the player of the cleric of Kord knew that there was an evil organisation of Bane-ites called The Iron Ring. The player of the dwarf, who already established elements of backstory about dwarven culture/civilisation, knew that before the dwarves the minotaurs lived in and under the mountains, and tutored the dwarves in many arts (this "dependent" status of the dwarves, elaborating both on ideas the player had come up with and the idea of dwarves as slaves of the giants, was a recurrent theme for most of Heroic tier; at Paragon tier the dwarf PC broke out of it through a series of events, and it ceased to be a part of the game). And I told the players that their PCs had to have some reason to be ready to fight goblins - and at least one of them, who had played the module 20-something years ago, knew why this was (not to mention the cover somewhat giving it away!).For the whole of our 30-level 4e game, the mortal world has never expanded beyond the inside cover map of the module (the underdark is beneath the mountains) - and the only two (above ground) cities the PCs have interacted with have been Kelven and Threshold (which has combined stuff from B10 with stuff from the 3E module Speaker in Dreams with stuff from the Dungeon module Heathen). That map, with mountains, swamps, hills, plains, forests, cities, ruins, etc, is another thing I like about the module.So what was it all for? The setting established a way of contextualising, for our particular game, the broader historical/cosmological backstory in the 4e PHB; gave a sense of place for events to unfold in; and gave us some NPCs and organisations as elements of our game. The only bit that was interestingly secret from the PCs was Golthar: at first he was just a yellow-robed mage who was referred to by other NPCs as the PCs interacted with them; then a figure they saw flying away from the goblin/hobgoblin ruined city base before they assaulted it; and then when they arrrived in Threshold, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">they learned that</a> (under the name Paldemar) he was the advisor to the Baron. (I can't recall when I made up that last bit; probably a couple of weeks before running that session, as part of the prep for it.)Personally, I find in RPGing that there is a big difference between using setting material to establish a common ground among the game participants, and as part of the fleshing out of character details; and using it as an element in adjudication of action resolution. Ie these are very different answers to the questio "What is worldbuilding for?"</blockquote>

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