Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[rounser]

Just like in Star Trek where we skip over all that boring travel time between episodes, we can do the same thing in an adventure first campaign.

I suppose it depends if you prefer a campaign where travel is skipped, or where wilderness exploration is a big part of the main event. I like the idea of small wilderness areas that are treated similarly to an outdoors dungeon, a bit like Forest of Doom if you know that Fighting Fantasy book.

For D&D purposes, there's several big problems with wilderness as an adventuring environment in terms of a place to explore as you would a dungeon:

1) It's big. Really big. Way too much to detail at encounter level.
2) There are no discrete areas in the same way a dungeon room or corridor can be assigned a number and detailed, so some sort of compromise like hexes or fudging it (PCs run into the cairn no matter where they travel over the plains) seem to be called for.
3) There are no walls, so you can't channel PCs into areas appropriate for their level, nor make sure they don't go off the map, or completely bypass detailed areas.

The nearest compromise I can seem to make on these points is to make the wilderness small, bounded by rift walls (although an island or plateau is probably a better solution), hexed into discrete areas, and scale the status quo locations to suit the current PC level.

This is all campaign style stuff, but IMO "dungeonesque" wilderness exploration is a megafun, often overlooked way to play the game. Most folks would prefer to skip it as you mentioned above, or run exactly one wandering monster encounter between destinations ala that OOTS parody....probably for the reasons I detailed above.

Are you saying that smaller settings are inherently better?

No, just that it's very easy to run a campaign in a very small area indeed if you want to, because 3E D&D PCs level so darn fast. You might be 1/12th of the way to level 20 after a single dungeon, for instance, which puts the utility of detailing continents in a slightly different perspective when viewed in that light.

 

[Hussar]

No, just that it's very easy to run a campaign in a very small area indeed if you want to, because 3E D&D PCs level so darn fast. You might be 1/12th of the way to level 20 after a single dungeon, for instance, which puts the utility of detailing continents in a slightly different perspective when viewed in that light.

Y'know, that's a very good point. It actually doesn't take that many adventures to run a PC up from 1st to 20th. My WLD campaign only took 8 regions to go to 16th level and that was with an awful lot of death. You could do an entire 1-20 campaign in about 10 adventures easily.

Food for thought.

But, on the point about the 500 square mile campaign, I know that's just a number you tossed out, but, that's really, really small. We're talking a circle with a radius of about 12 miles. Half a days walk It would be very difficult to put challenges in there for 1st level PC's and 20th level PC's.

 

[Raven Crowking]

No, just that it's very easy to run a campaign in a very small area indeed if you want to, because 3E D&D PCs level so darn fast. You might be 1/12th of the way to level 20 after a single dungeon, for instance, which puts the utility of detailing continents in a slightly different perspective when viewed in that light.

I agree with this assessment, and it is one of the reasons that I think this edition tends to lead one rather aggressively into a particular playstyle. Note, however, that not everyone playinging 3.X uses the 3.X XP paradigm. I don't.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

And I agree with this 100%. I have stated repeatedly that there is a huge grey area in the middle of what is absolutely needed and what is completely irrelevant. Realistically, you can't really get away with doing zero world building. You just can't. You have to do some.

What I've been very badly trying to explain is that you can approach it in a different direction. Let the world building elements come out of the adventure, rather than starting with them first. Like Star Trek or pretty much any other long lived series, let the world building elements accrete over time. To continue the analogy, write the Star Trek stories first and then go back and apply any world building that you feel is warranted.

First off, I don't think it is possible to run a game in which world building elements do not accrete over time. No matter how much prep work you do, the players tend to take you on angles that you haven't thought of before, or even ask questions to which there is no prepared answer. So, I would say that allowing details to accrete is mandatory.

Actually, the TV or movie approach is perhaps closer to what I'm getting at. TV or movies don't have the time to spend on large amounts of exposition detailing the history and other world building goodies that we all love. So, in any given episode of Star Trek, you get snippets of world building, but, not a whole lot at once. In a novel, you can just add page count and go into details that aren't terribly necessary, but, lots of people seem to enjoy.

In a TV show, of course, the script tells the actors what to do, so there is a limited degree to which this is possible.

Look at your dino island suggestion again, and take it in light of the Bottom-Up-Top-Down methodology I suggested earlier.

First you create your initial adventure location (what you would call creating your initial adventure). Then you examine what that location implies, and make outline notes on it (in this case, make a rough map of the island, come up with some other major locations that NPCs and PCs might know about, and roughly one-line a few other villages -- name, rough form of government, maybe name of ruler....there are DM aids you could roll for this stuff out of, taking you 10 minutes at the most). I would also add some qualifiers to the map, personally, from Wildscape, so that I know what hazards (disease, biting insects, tangled undergrowth, quicksand) individual areas might have. This would take about an hour or so to do, but results in a world where the PCs can choose to map the island from a ship.

I, for one, don't think that desiring to map the island from a ship is the same as not buying into the campaign setting. Knowledge is power, and most D&D players IME know this. Divination spells are likely to see use, even at low levels, to gain whatever information is available. Since the players have no means of knowing what is important, and what is not important, to the adventure at hand they tend to want to know all sorts of things that might not be immediately relevant.

Better yet, my mapping the island made me include some shark-haunted reefs on a whim. Now that I am looking at that map, though, I have a great idea for an adventure that takes the PCs to the ruins beneath that reef, discovering exactly why sharks congregate there. So, I write a brief outline of that location. I do the same for several other locations that interested me when doing the map prep.

Now I go back to my initial adventure. I lay hints, seeds, and clues about the locations I've outlined.....something which is impossible if I only focus on the one adventure. These hooks occur organically in play, so that when the PCs finally get to the shark-haunted reef, they have a sense of what it is as well as what they hope to accomplish there. Or they have a sense that the reef is a place to avoid, and their fear of it means that I never develop it beyond an outline.

By the time I'm changing the Volcanic Caverns from outline to adventure location, I might be seeding hints about the world beyond the island, which by this time exists in outline and rough map form.

 

[gizmo33]

Note, however, that not everyone playinging 3.X uses the 3.X XP paradigm. I don't.

I don't either - sounds like a good topic for a poll.

 

[gizmo33]

Hommlet and Orlane are both poster children really for excessive world building. Detailing every inhabitant in the town is really just far too much IMNSHO.

I've actually used alot of that information in the 25 or so years that I've had the module. Maybe not in it's original form, but between Hommlet and it's imitators IMC. I run a simulationist style game - I don't design plots with any sort of firm structure. This means that (although it's rare in my adult years) it was possible that a thief in the party will decide to ransack someone's cottage for some quick cash (for example), and I don't say "hey, you can't do that 'cause it doesn't follow the plot". Or PCs who are about to fight some goblins at the outskirts of town might go to the latest farmhouse to see if the inhabitants have weapons and would be willing to help. Some DMs would just say "um, nobody's home" or "you guys are heroes, you're not supposed to do that". Having sample village households has helped adjucate these things and made me feel comfortable with my imaginary environment.

 

[Ourph]

But, your point is well taken. If the players really decide to abandon the campaign in favour of what they want to do, then there isn't much to recommend this approach.

I'm not sure I would call mapping the coastline of Dino-Island vs. exploring the Dino-related adventures the DM has already set up "abandoning the campaign". There are always going to be campaign-related activities the players embark on that the DM who has spent all of his time developing only adventures hasn't planned out. Whereas the DM who has spent the extra time developing the "extraneous" information about Dino-island generally has some resources at his disposal for when the PCs go off the reservation.

However, IME, it's not too tricky to drop some signposts on the way to nudge players into directions you want to go.

Note, I'm not talking about locking them down onto rails. But, dropping hooks or other bits that entice the players in various directions. Someone called it shepherding rather than railroading.

Railroading/Shepherding is fine for some groups, but for others the distinction may be moot. I think we can both agree that if your preference is to run a true "sandbox" campaign, developing adventures to the exclusion of setting/world isn't the way to go unless you are VERY comfortable improvising setting/world-building during actual play. My personal experience is that most DMs are much more comfortable improvising encounters than they are improvising setting/world elements during the game (primarily because the rulebooks have always provided DMs with tons of tools for on-the-fly encounter development). As a result, it seems to me that spending the majority of pre-game prep time on the element of the game that's easiest to improvise during play is probably a mismanagement of the DM's resources.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not sure if that's fair to say that encounter development on the fly is the easiest to improvise. It might be at very low levels, but, the common complaint in campaigns over about 12th level is the sheer amount of fiddly bits you have to keep track of. While I know I could improvise an encounter with 1d6 dire rats, I don't think I could do the same with 1d6 elite fiendish venomous cryohydras.

But, yes, if you want to run a "sandbox" campaign, then the ideas I'm putting forth are certainly not the way to go. Honestly, from my own point of view, I don't think I would enjoy such a campaign. When I've played in that style of campaign, it invariably grinds to a slow, stuttering halt as the party wanders aimlessly from disconnected element to disconnected element. I know that it can be done right. I've just had very bad experience with playing and attempting to run them.

I realize that many people don't follow RAW exactly for xp, but, I did a poll a while back about how fast people leveled and it did appear that most people do follow RAW. Levelling in 2 or 3 sessions most of the time.

Bear with me for a second while I try to organize my own thoughts. I've kinda got three points in mind that need to be connected.

First off, we can be fairly sure that most campaigns only last between 1 and 1.5 years. Numerous polling shows this. While I know there are multiyear campaigns out there, for most of us mere mortals, 18 months seems to be the half life of a campaign.

Secondly, again according to polling I've seen on Enworld, most people shift campaign setting with each new campaign. Most people end an eight month Forgotten Realms camp and move on to a homebrew. When they finish that, they move over to Eberron. After that, maybe Kalamar or whatever. The point is, there is not all that much setting loyalty in many groups.

Thirdly, and this goes back to the xp bit, you can craft a 1st to 20th level campaign in about 8 adventures. By RAW it takes about 20-25 encounters to go up two levels. Assume for a moment that you overbuild on the assumption that the players aren't going to hit every room and we can ballpark about 40 encounters at the high end for a 2 level adventure. 40 encounters is a fairly doable number.

Now, combine all three of those points - an average 1-20 level campaign is only going to last about 18 months and then the players are going to move on to a different setting. Suddenly developing large swaths of setting isn't all that important.

Make 8 adventures plus maybe a half dozen one shots and you have a full, 20 level campaign.

Suddenly, campaign design looks a whole lot easier to me.

First off, I don't think it is possible to run a game in which world building elements do not accrete over time. No matter how much prep work you do, the players tend to take you on angles that you haven't thought of before, or even ask questions to which there is no prepared answer. So, I would say that allowing details to accrete is mandatory.

Agree 100%

Better yet, my mapping the island made me include some shark-haunted reefs on a whim. Now that I am looking at that map, though, I have a great idea for an adventure that takes the PCs to the ruins beneath that reef, discovering exactly why sharks congregate there. So, I write a brief outline of that location. I do the same for several other locations that interested me when doing the map prep.

I guess my point is to instead detail out the shark reef as an adventure and then come up with a way to link that to the adventure before it and after it. Or, make the adventures recursive enough that you could do the adventure after it and come back to Shark Reef.

When I said not buying into the campaign, I was perhaps stating things too strongly. But, think of it this way, the original hook is heading into the jungle to investigate the disappearance of the Chieftain's daughter. The players turn to you and say, "Naw, we want to build a raft and sail around the island." To me, that's not buying in to the campaign.

Now, hopefully, the campaign arc would include more than these simple examples. Hopefully, as I mentioned before, you could make the adventures recursive so you could part of A then part of B, followed by going back to A then off to D, finding D too hard and moving back to C and so on and so forth.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Secondly, again according to polling I've seen on Enworld, most people shift campaign setting with each new campaign. Most people end an eight month Forgotten Realms camp and move on to a homebrew. When they finish that, they move over to Eberron. After that, maybe Kalamar or whatever. The point is, there is not all that much setting loyalty in many groups.

I wonder how much of that point is an artifact of the current edition.

When I said not buying into the campaign, I was perhaps stating things too strongly. But, think of it this way, the original hook is heading into the jungle to investigate the disappearance of the Chieftain's daughter. The players turn to you and say, "Naw, we want to build a raft and sail around the island." To me, that's not buying in to the campaign.

See, to me that's not buying into an adventure hook. Not buying into the campaign is "We want to build a raft and leave the island". I am strongly of the camp that players should have multiple hooks, and multiple possible adventures.

 

[Campbell]

I wonder how much of that point is an artifact of the current edition.

I'm not quite sure how the two could possibly related.