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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7330948" data-attributes="member: 82106">I know I'm still a week behind... One of the things I find interesting about the 'typical style' (if there is such a thing) for laying this kind of stuff out, much like you're outlining here, is that it is STILL very much beholden to the archetypal dungeon room key in some respects. For instance I've rarely, make that pretty much never, seen in a product where there were fully elaborated descriptions of the relationships between things. For example a key of this kind might list several family members living together in a house, but what clan do they belong to? Who is their landlord? Do they have protectors, sponsors, debtors, creditors, friends, enemies? I mean, obviously there's only so much you can do in a fairly brief sketchy town plan kind of a thing, but it always seems to me that the social dimension in particular, but also the economic dimension in most cases, is just lost. We may know, as in Gary's Hommlet exactly the contents of every house, but who's going to stand together with whom? What happens when you kill Fred down the street, doesn't he have a brother? A landlord? Someone must inherit his stuff, want to find out who killed him, etc.In some sense, I think this 'classic' type of setting design, when it comes to settlements, is entirely inadequate to the type of play that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] seems to be espousing when he asks about the value of worldbuilding. I would say that in terms of his needs these social/cultural/economic details are MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than the trivia about how many coppers are under Farmer Joe's floorboards and what the probability of finding them is (all of which can and probably should in that kind of play be made up as needed anyway). Its not that nobody ever thinks about this stuff at all, but its weird how you get these detailed maps of buildings but only at best some incredibly vague idea of who owns them, what their allegiances are, etc.</blockquote>

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