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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 7324053" data-attributes="member: 2656">I disagree, as I think your definition of "world-building" is far too narrow. To me, world-building is an umbrella term that embraces multitudes, any building or creation of elements of a fictional world is potentially "world-building", whether that's architecture, language, history, geography, economics, technology, religion, philosphy etc. People can and have pursued such activities for their own sake long before RPGs. In some cases these works can attract a fan base who become invested in the fictional world. Some of these people may in turn attempt to add detail to the fictional world themselves.Adding depth to a fictional world can involve almost anything, as producing a self-consistent world is vastly difficult. It's impossible to detail everything, which is why viewer buy-in is importantNow, "RPG world-building" is world-building specificially in the context of RPGs, and I think the qualifier is needed precisely because there are many examples of fictional world-building unconnected with RPGs.I left out some of my thoughts on this topic in my last post. An actual model intended to represent a fictional place, well-built, can illustrate a lot to viewers - Architecture of the buildings, settlement design, climate, geography, population, defenses, agriculture, religion, iconography, justice, etc etcOften the creator will add fictional detail to the model, coming up with fictional inhabitants for the buildings, relationships, language, history, etc. The diorama could be frozen in time, expand in a piecemeal fashion with the addition of trees, buildings and other landmarks, or jump ahead in time with major changes.In any case, the urge to create is essential to what I see as "world-building", and it can be a solo pursuit, a collaboration, or involve passive consumers, or secondary contributors.The more variant detail, different to the real world, has gone into a game world setting, the more work that players have to put into to attain a mastery of the setting. A minority of players, such as myself, enjoy reading settings and rulebooks comprehensively to get a feel for the game.As you say, most players don't do that prep work, so a standard way of introducing a world is to create relatively clueless PCs and slowly reveal the world to them in play. This also has the advantage of letting the referee start running the game with limited knowledge of the setting, and learn in play alongside the players. Which brings us to canon and "fidelity to setting". Some players are highly invested in the game running as described in the setting material, others don't sweat the small stuff and are content with a "good-enough" setting, while still others don't care at all about the setting and want the freedom to do whatever they want without being constrained by a setting.To be honest, "Puzzle-solving" always annoyed me from the earliest days, as in it's original presentations it was a test of the player rather than the character, and I found timed puzzles stressful and annoying, especially when in the early days getting them wrong often led to character death. I can see for people who like them they can add an extra element to a module. I particularly disliked the puzzles that involved serious pixel-bitching or depended on local knowledge or slang that wasn't available to us the players.As the idea of roleplaying, separation of player and character and metagaming evolved in RPGs, I gained a second reason to dislike player-facing puzzles. Translating them to pc-facing challenges can often lose the puzzle aspect others can enjoy, and turn the challenge into a mere dice-rolling exercise.In my games I avoid puzzles for these reasons, and prefer to present the players with real decision points, some of which are pre-plotted, others of which are improvised. "Real" in that either failure of the task itself is possible, or that failure can be mitigated by some personal sacrifice by one or more of the PCs.I found searching constantly for traps and secret doors, a necessity in many old school games, a soul-destroying exercise in paranoia, and have a lot less of this in the games I run.While I have voluminous knowledge of the setting I use, I don't go into heavy details on the plans of the PCs antagonists, keeping a hazy overplan of the campaign, but keeping it flexible enough that I can move elements around in reaction to the players actions and events in the gameworld.</blockquote>

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