Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Mallus]

Had this advice come from a more respected author - Terry Goodkind

Are you using the form of respected that really means maligned?

Seriously, not hearing about an author doesn't mean their work is bad, it means you're ignorant of their work. For instance, this weekend I saw the Met rebroadcast of Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky, a work that I was wholly ignorant of. Never read it, didn't know it was a famous opera. That had absolutely no bearing on its quality.

 

[LostSoul]

I think it is good advice for specific types of people, and bad for others.

I don't think there's really much else to say; some people's games will be enhanced by focus on worldbuilding, and other people's games will be the lesser for it.

It's just a matter of taste.

 

[papastebu]

EDIT: Or should we simply say that hard science fiction has more necessity to world build instead of saying science fiction in general? That sounds fine to me.

I would actually say that hard science fiction has less necessity for world-building than any other form of speculative fiction. This is because, generally, hard science is the milieu, rather than the world/galaxy in which events take place.

A great many of Asimov's stories, for example, required little world-building, because he had the science right in his head, and he didn't write about things that people couldn't extrapolate within their sense of disbelief from things that they saw or heard about every day. The readers could basically build the world themselves, and Asimov was free to state "This is the state that the world has arrived at, given what we have today taken to this point." He speculated, for sure, but his framework was already there.

Star wars, on the other hand, is fantastic, and required more explanation, because the force is a fictional speculation based on a real-world speculation. Blasters are not accepted fact, or even extrapolated "fact", based on existing technology. The closest thing, I think, to hard science that exists in Star Wars is the lightsaber, with its ion stream contained by a magnetic field. Even that's a stretch; how come it's not a ball of light on the end of a stick?

Anyway, the point is that if you have less fact to back it up, in a game or a story, then you are going to need to have more things--settings, objects, occurrences, histories, relationships, laws, etc, ad nauseam--in place for the reader/player to look and say, "Oh. That's why that works/happened/looks like that," or whatever.

 

[Woas]

I agree with the OP and the statement provide. The reason is because it basically is saying the same thing that the First Commandment of Dungeon Mastering says:

First Rule of Dungeoncraft: Do Not Force Yourself To Create More Than You Have To.


Yeah... the old Dungeoncraft articles are like my DMing bible so... I agree. Knowing that Jay Farquard is the king of the West Cupcake Kingdom is not necessary if you do not intend for the game to every involve Jay Farquard nor his Kingdom of desserts.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

So this author lacks interest in reading anything that's detailed? Cool. People with short-attention spans need books too, I guess.

I'll sit back here and read books from authors like Tolkein or Lovecraft, who are willing to craft a detailed setting *as part and parcel of establishing mood and theme.*

I'll grant you Tolkien, but Lovecraft didn't spend time on worldbuilding as much as simply referring to names and events of earlier stories of his, as well as those of his pen pals.

The whole "Cthulhu Mythos" was turned into a coherent form only after his death...


Another good example is Terry Pratchett. He started writing his stories without worrying about petty things like geography, and for a long time apparently denied that it was even possible to create maps of the Discworld or Ankh-Morpork. And even when he did admit it, he subcontracted much of the job to someone else. Here the worldbuilding came after the fact.

I maintain that Harrison's words are excellent advice for writers (obviously it isn't for GMs, but those have to act under different circumstances). Tolkien got away with it because he was a freaking professor of literature who knew what he was doing when writing literature himself, but almost all would-be authors lack this background. Thus, the danger is very real that they will get distracted by their world-building so much that they will be unable to write a coherent story, or else feel compelled to add more world building than is useful.

An author who only uses minimal world-building creates his story by thinking: "I want these things to happen to my character - what parts of the world do I have to invent to justify it?"

An author who does the world-building first is in real danger of instead letting the setting drive the growth of the character - and thus introduce all sorts of events that are not useful for the story, explain all sorts of world details that are irrelevant to the story, and so forth.

Quantity does not equal quality when writing stories. Too many authors forget that.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Wow. If I actually cared what M. John Harrison thought about things... anything... this might have some effect on me.

Unfortunately, I don't. So it won't.

Moving on...

Hmm, I have never read his books.

Now I know that there is a reason not to.

The authors that I read do put work into their world building. Some have run classes on the subject. At least one has made a synopsis of one of her classes available online (Patricia C. Wrede). I like it better when I feel that the setting is not some painted cloth over a cheap wooden frame on the back lot of a bad motion picture company.

As has been stated before - crap.

The Auld Grump

 

[FireLance]

Boy, this quote has touched a lot of nerves.

Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but he may be using the word "worldbuilding" in a different sense from many of the previous posters.

His key proposition seems to be: when you are writing, are you telling a story, or describing a world? If you are doing the latter, you're doing it wrong. You're writing an encyclopedia, not a story.

While I think he has a point, I wouldn't say he's completely correct. I think it depends on what genre you're writing, and what your readers want. A short story needs to be tighter and can spare fewer words for details not vital to setting, plot or characterization, for example, while a full length novel has more scope for purely descriptive passages.

What is the parallel to gaming? Well, when you're DMing, are you running an adventure, or describing your campaign setting? How much time do you spend in game talking about elements of your campaign setting that are not relevant to the adventure? If the party is at an inn and orders ale, do you identify the country that the ale is from, tell them where it is, describe its climate and salient features, and give a short run-down if its recent history, even if the PCs are not going to have anything to do with the country in the foreseeable future? And, either way, do your players like it?

 

[Set]

If the author was a little more talented, I suspect we wouldn't be seeing people arguing that he was complimenting Tolkein, etc. with terms like 'clomping nerdism.'

There are authors, that, IMO, prove his point. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time I've listed as an example. Too much detail. Not enough plot advancement. Characters seem to be retarded (not meant as in brain-damaged, meant in the literal definition, as of 'held back, unable to advance.') and are often abandoned for many hundreds of pages, or even *thousands of pages.* To pick another author that I like, who has gone, IMO, over to the dark side, Neal Stephenson. Too much background color, to the point of it detracting from an otherwise compelling story. (Unlike say, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, who use too much local historical color / sociopolitical techno-porn to pad out an otherwise deadly-dull narrative, but that's not a problem with an overdeveloped world, so much as a frustrating tendency to explain everything to the reader as if he was four years old and just moved on from reading Spot and the Big Red Ball.)

There are other authors that, equally IMO, refute his point. I'll skip Tolkein and go straight into David Brin and Peter Hamilton and Raymond Feist and Fred Saberhagen and Larry Niven and Greg Egan. All present richly detailed worlds, without losing the thread of the narrative, or risking having the setting eclipse the characters.

Various examples of setting eclipsing characters or plot or action, all IMO;

Star Trek: the Motion Picture (the cast stands around and stares at the pretty SFX)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (so... deadly.... dull... Yes, the darn ships are blinking in musical scales. Yes, the pretty colored lights are probably hypnotic and enthralling to small paralyzed rodents. Get the hell over it already.)

Rendezvous with Rama (It's a big damn ship! Somebody do something before my brain explodes!)
Much of Isaac Asimov's work (perhaps I'm not being fair. I never could finish anything he's written. Perhaps the last 30 pages of every one of his books contains an amazing revelation that would have changed my life, but I never could get there.)

The only time I want the *entire narrative* to involve the unveiling of a new world is if there are dinosaurs involved, or it's a Harryhausen film involving Sinbad. But the author didn't impugn the *entire narrative* being about the world-building reveal. The mere *act* of world-building, even if it is never overused in the narrative, he maligns and considers a sign of some sort of psychological disorder, which makes me wonder what he thinks of God...

 

[ThoughtBubble]

I just have a quick question for all you world ad-hockers, what do you do if your players go off on a tangent. I personally like for my worlds to be consistent and to a point(cause it is still fantasy) logical. Has your ad-hocing ever led to a situation where you didn't remember something you alluded to, or later wanted to change your mind about? IMHO I find this disconcerting as a player or as a GM. My players have asked for information and went about doing things in ways I would've never pictured and my worldbilding has always allowed me enough info to make it work. On a side note isn't keeping track of all these side notes on things that don't exist extra effort as well?

As for changing things once you've built your world...who says you can't? If this was true no one would houserule and change published settings, but it's done all the time. At least with the world built it gives you more ways to see a coherent way to implement the changes you want to make. I really think some people on this thread are equating world-building with rigid, uncompromising GM and they're not the same. A Gm can be just as rigid and uncompromising with any aspect of his game and they're two seperate issues.

I'm not quite an Ad-hocker, but my world building has become less and less strignet as time passes. Adding things on the fly has put me in a few positions where, suddenly, I'm countering something I said before. Usually my players call me on it, at which point, we adjust and move on.

Me: So, the general says: "I don't know what you're talking about."
Player: Wait a sec, we contacted him about the rebellion last session!
Me: Really, what'd you say?
Player: We said...(brief explanation follows)
Me: Oh, right. "Your message arrived in a timely fashion..."

However, as time passes, that doesn't happen so much. Almost everything we're doing now is small, fast and relevant. Most of it is so darn cool that it doesn't fall off the radar, we're too busy grabbing it and running. I put the effort that I used to put into building a world into building a coocoon of cool events involving the players.

The caution is much more so that worldbuilding can constrain and destroy creativity and feedback instead of enable it. Badly done worldbuilding gives the author (DM) a big list of why things coudn't possibly happen and ways to say no to the player. Really, you're a small fry because Elminster or Drizzt would have taken care of all of the problems anyway.

The caution is that building a world may take away from the fun parts of the game. Make sure your world supports the game you want to play. Make sure your world supports interesting situations to play through, and plenty of room for conflict. If your world building supports good game building, you're on the right track.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Can't it be both?

I mean, I have a hell of a whole lot of fun developing and detailing Aquerra, and would probably continue to do it (or some other world) even if I stopped playing D&D.

However, as part of that process I am developing the immediate area around the PCs and getting inspired for further detail and variation depending on what the PCs do and the ideas the player's bring to the table.

I think it can be both. But most of the heavily world-built games I've played in ran into one of three problems:
1) There were setting elements that the players couldn't possibly know about that were insermountably preventing our success. These weren't really shared, but just sort of popped up as a given fact that we should have known. "Oh yeah, everyone knows Gimmin the Deamon slayer has eyes that see absolute truth."
2) The DM was so invested in the world he couldn't bear to let us change any of it. And we also had to hear tons about it.
3) The world was, frankly, kind of innapropriate to the game (who cares about local crops when you're in flying ships battling dragon hordes).

It sounds like you avoid all of this by taking note of the players, their characters and the immediate situation.