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What is *worldbuilding* for?
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7335729" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>OK, so my response to this is that you seem to be doing something pretty close in spirit to what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is doing, though maybe some of the details of procedure of play are different, etc. I don't know for sure. Pemerton may also be more of a 'purist' in terms of making every scene drive directly 'to the action', etc. However, I think if he was to run a game in FR he might well take something like your tack in a general sense, though I think a setting like FR is not ideal for his style of play. I'd say the 4e Nentir Vale is an example of a setting, coupled with 4e lore/cosmology, that is more useful in his kind of a game (because it is much more loosely established and basically free of meta-plot, but has a lot of 'hooks' that could suggest useful narrative elements to meet player interests). </p><p></p><p>I think this leads into what [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] is saying in response to [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION]. Its quite possible to (perhaps incoherently, but life is rarely an exercise in coherency) kind of walk in the various grey zones between some sort of hard sandbox and some kind of entirely free-form joint-authorship play where nothing is pre-established at all. I would note that EVEN PEMERTON hasn't yet hinted at playing that way! Even he pre-generated some planets in Traveller and used Nentir Vale as a starting point for his 4e campaign. </p><p></p><p>I think plenty of us fall in this zone somewhere. I almost always run D&D campaigns in the same consistent campaign world that I established in the 1970's. So there is a MASS of pre-established material, and it runs a gamut of stuff I generated as elements of early sandboxes, later world-building exercises, various dungeon-maze-with-nearby-town locations, as well as material put in place by players in the course of establishing their character's motives, backstory, or even action resolution narrative (mostly in more recent times, but even some of that goes back 20+ years). Players don't generally establish elements that upend that whole world, so in a sense it is a lot like running FR I suppose. OTOH I long ago ceased to endlessly detail things and its quite easy to move to a new blank spot on the map and construct some scenario that meets player expectations there.</p><p></p><p>Truthfully I think that both Pemerton and probably Emerikol, Manbearcat, etc would all manage to find it interesting and fun, both in terms of unearthing all the layers of previous campaign stuff and in making up new stuff to suite their own agendas. In all my decades of running games for people, nobody ever expressed vast dissatisfaction at what happened at the table, and only a small percentage of people, I can almost enumerate them, ever simply dropped out for reasons that seemed to be related to not liking the game (I think all of them were basically super-optimizer competitive types, which I don't frown on but which sometimes just don't mesh with some of my less rules-focused players).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 7335729, member: 82106"] OK, so my response to this is that you seem to be doing something pretty close in spirit to what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is doing, though maybe some of the details of procedure of play are different, etc. I don't know for sure. Pemerton may also be more of a 'purist' in terms of making every scene drive directly 'to the action', etc. However, I think if he was to run a game in FR he might well take something like your tack in a general sense, though I think a setting like FR is not ideal for his style of play. I'd say the 4e Nentir Vale is an example of a setting, coupled with 4e lore/cosmology, that is more useful in his kind of a game (because it is much more loosely established and basically free of meta-plot, but has a lot of 'hooks' that could suggest useful narrative elements to meet player interests). I think this leads into what [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] is saying in response to [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION]. Its quite possible to (perhaps incoherently, but life is rarely an exercise in coherency) kind of walk in the various grey zones between some sort of hard sandbox and some kind of entirely free-form joint-authorship play where nothing is pre-established at all. I would note that EVEN PEMERTON hasn't yet hinted at playing that way! Even he pre-generated some planets in Traveller and used Nentir Vale as a starting point for his 4e campaign. I think plenty of us fall in this zone somewhere. I almost always run D&D campaigns in the same consistent campaign world that I established in the 1970's. So there is a MASS of pre-established material, and it runs a gamut of stuff I generated as elements of early sandboxes, later world-building exercises, various dungeon-maze-with-nearby-town locations, as well as material put in place by players in the course of establishing their character's motives, backstory, or even action resolution narrative (mostly in more recent times, but even some of that goes back 20+ years). Players don't generally establish elements that upend that whole world, so in a sense it is a lot like running FR I suppose. OTOH I long ago ceased to endlessly detail things and its quite easy to move to a new blank spot on the map and construct some scenario that meets player expectations there. Truthfully I think that both Pemerton and probably Emerikol, Manbearcat, etc would all manage to find it interesting and fun, both in terms of unearthing all the layers of previous campaign stuff and in making up new stuff to suite their own agendas. In all my decades of running games for people, nobody ever expressed vast dissatisfaction at what happened at the table, and only a small percentage of people, I can almost enumerate them, ever simply dropped out for reasons that seemed to be related to not liking the game (I think all of them were basically super-optimizer competitive types, which I don't frown on but which sometimes just don't mesh with some of my less rules-focused players). [/QUOTE]
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