Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[buzz]

World building is not verisimilitude and verisimilitude is not world building.

I nominate this for best Quote of the Thread. Nail, head, hit.

 

[edgewaters]

What good is it if I've prepared the Lost Tomb of Ansakor, if the PC's instead want to spend a session jockeying for political position amongst the decadent nobles of Algoth Doure?

First off, detailing the Lost Tomb of Ansakor isn't worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is just what it sounds like - world building.

Second, if you've been playing with the group in question for a while, you should have a good idea of what they plan to go about doing next, and prepare accordingly if you feel that it would be helpful.

The world-building gives a canvas upon whic the PC's are free to paint whatever picture they want.

Well, not really. It's a canvas that's already been painted, usually without any player input. IMO world-building happens during the course of a campaign, if you haven't nailed everything down. There's little room for that if you've already determined everything.

If all you've got is a rough map of the continent and few details, and the players say they want to go and have adventures in a place that's like Roman England, no problem!! You can just create it. But if you've already worked out what's where and detailed it extensively, and you don't have any place like Roman England, you've wasted your time and will have to scrap a whole lot of stuff to make room for it.

A pre-made adveture however seems to have already painted the picture and gives the illusion that the PC's have free will.

Ah! Not so. This is only true of story-driven adventures where the players are assumed to be doing such and such for the story to continue.

If all I have for the night is the Caverns of Maegoth Wold detailed then I've essentially forced the PC's to go into those caverns...If I've built the island of Maegoth Wold then the PC's have way more freedom in what type of adventure they want to pursue, they're motivations, passions, and interests direct what part of the island they explore or interact with instead of what I planned for them to interact with.

I don't really see any difference here. One is wilderness, the other is a dungeon, and they can potentially ignore either and go elsewhere unless you forcibly prevent it.

Likewise if you look at early modules like Keep on the Borderlands or Secret of Bone Hill, the players are free to have the type of adventure they want dictated by whatever their "motivations, passions, and interests" are. They could have an entire adventure without even going to the dungeons, and the module supports it. The dungeon is just there and its probable they will go to it, but hardly necessary; the town is detailed just as well, and they can explore or interact with it as easily as with the dungeon if that's what they want.

This has nothing to do with whether the adventure takes place in a few square miles or in a few thousand square miles, but whether or not it is story-driven. If the DM has already written the story of what the players are going to do, then their freedom is limited.

 

[buzz]

Sci-fi writer M John Harrison tells you why you don't need to spend hours crafting your campaign setting...

Reminds me of a discussion many of us here had a week or two ago. This is also being discussed over on Story Games.

I think Harrison makes a valid point applicable to both writing and RPG'ing, as demonstrated by those citing Baur and Dungeoncraft. And I definitely believe (as I remarked in the first thread above), that a certain amount of the world-detailing we've come to expect in RPGs exists less to serve play and more as a tool to sell sourcebooks. To give an example I used before, I already have more data on Eberron than I could ever conceivably use in play, much less retain in my memory in any useful way... and I haven't even looked at any of the novels yet.

That said... there's definitely a subset of the gaming populace that enjoys pure world building—from both sides of the screen. I've played with people who wanted to know all the details about the masonry used in the bridge our PCs were walking over... and DMs who gladly wanted to tell them.

And the whole phenomena of the setting splat is an outgrowth of hobby publishers' discovery that many gamers enjoy reading—or even simply owning—sourcebooks as much as (or more than) they do actually playing.

So, as an absolute, 100% true piece of RPG advice, Harrison is obviously wrong. However, in general, I think that his sentiment is very applicable, at least in terms of DMs prioritizing their time.

The players need something to do far more than they need something to look at. The amount of time and effort the latter merits will depend on what your group as a whole prioritizes in play.

 

[Reynard]

The players need something to do far more than they need something to look at. The amount of time and effort the latter merits will depend on what your group as a whole prioritizes in play.

I would agree, but with the addition that they also need a place to do those things, both immediate and microcosmic and expansive and macrocosmic.

YMMV, etc...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Why do people here keep on harping on how this comment by Harrison applies to gaming when it never was intended to do so in the first place?

I mean, it's pretty obvious - or at least, it should be - that gaming and writing stories have completely different needs:

In writing a story, everything is controlled by a single person - the author. The story centers on the events surrounding the protagonists. Any world-building which is not creates people, places and things not mentioned or referred to in the story is simply unneccessary. And (and I think that was the main point of Harrison's critique) if you do more world-building than neccessary, you might be tempted to extend the story itself to create pages upon pages of needless exposition.

In creating a game world, events are controlled by multiple persons - the game master and the players. Sure, the game master needs to be familiar with the world, but the players need to be familiar with the basics as well - so that they know what their characters can and cannot do, and what kinds of consequences certain actions will have. They need to know all these so that they can play their characters appropriately.

To sum it up, worldbuilding is neccessary for creating and playing in game worlds, and less so for creating good stories and novels. Is there anything else here to argue?

 

[Hussar]

This explains its lack of popularity, and must be the reason why it was voted the best book of the 20th Century.

So now popularity = good? That's a bit of a turnaround for you RC. *Tweak*

I think people are conflating setting with world building. They are not the same thing. Every story requires setting. You have to have somewhere for the plot to happen, even if it's just a bench in a Beckett play. World Building is going beyond what you need for the plot of the story and detailing extraneous details.

Star Wars has been named a couple of times as a World Building story. That's not true. Or, rather, it wasn't true until a bunch of fans got together and started knocking together all sorts of stuff that wasn't in the original stories. Look at SW A New Hope. By the end of the movie, what do we know of Tatooine?

• It's a desert planet and fairly dangerous
• Sandpeople are bad and walk in single file.
• Jawas are scavengers that flog used droids and such
• a bunch of apparently bad people hang out at the same pub in Mos Eisely

That's about it. There's no world building going on there. We don't know the names or background of any character other than the main ones. Everyone else shows up for 15 seconds and never appears again. If Star Wars was about world building, Lucas would have gone on and on about the geneology of Jawas and how they live their day to day lives. Same with Sandpeople. The various species in the Cantina would be named and backgrounds given. Mos Eisely would have a detailed history stretching back a fair ways.

Yes, by the end of six movies, umpteen books and several RPG's, we have a fairly detailed universe. But, the movies weren't about that. All that stuff came later and had very little to actually do with the movies.

Having a rich setting is not necessarily world building. Having a detailed setting isn't really world building. World Building is when you start detailing EVERYTHING. Published campaign settings, if they survive long enough, start to become exercises in world building. Once you get beyond the basics that you need to play in the setting, that's when world building starts.

Naming a town and describing the buildings isn't world building. That's just setting. Keep on the Borderlands isn't world buildiing. Ptolus is world building.

 

[wingsandsword]

Star Wars isn't incredibly popular because of the setting. It was incredibly popular because its a damn good story with special effects that no one had ever seen before.

When I first saw Star Wars as a kid in the late 80's, there were other sci-fi movies that had come out in it's wake. There were flashy movies with cool special effects, there were fine novels and good stories to be told.

However, to the twelve-year-old budding geek I was, one thing that set Star Wars apart was the setting. The movies really did feel like they were taking place in a much bigger universe full of a rich history and that all the characters had their own stories, all the planets they went to had their own histories. Star Wars was more than a movie, it was an entire galaxy, even if we didn't know much about it, it always seemed like there was so much more we'd find out one day.

Maybe that was just excellent storytelling on the part of George Lucas, but most DMs aren't Lucas, or Spielberg, or Tolkien, and if they want to create the illusion of a rich and "lived in" world it's going to take a decent amount of thinking up-front so when PC's ask "what's over there?" or "who's that?" the DM won't shatter that illusion with "I don't know"

It is certainly possible to go far overboard on "worldbuilding" to the point where it harms a game. I've seen it happen, I've seen DM's with elaborate homebrew seeings full of complicated lore and history fleshed out in excruciating detail that he knows by heart, and this becomes a problem when the players are not anywhere near as familiar with this and the DM builds the game assuming they are. However, there are 10,000 pitfalls a DM can run into, and that's one of the less encountered ones and a DM has to go pretty far to reach a point where worldbuilding hurts the game instead of helps it.

 

[Infernal Teddy]

Detailing the microcosm in which the players find themselves is a matter separate from worldbuilding. There's a very important distinction between worldbuilding and detailing a small kingdom.

Somehow, I don'te see the difference. It's just a matter of scale.

 

[Frozen DM]

Tolkien is only one example. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series is a great example of a story that takes place in a world - a world that he created, planned out, and is still planning out. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is another good example. For a Sci-Fi example, just look at Serenity (okay, so it's not a book, but it's still a story) - Joss Whedon put a ton of work into the world that was never seen on television, and may never have been seen. Or Star Wars for that matter... huge world (an entire galaxy) surrounding a "small" story, which is one reason fans have found it so easy to continue to the storyline - they have a context from which to draw upon (even if the subsequent books aren't all that great of literature - the world context is still there, and Star Wars would have sucked without it).

These examples you cite are, in my opinion, perfect points supporting Harrison's argument.

First to address Jordan and Goodkind. I think others have already offered accurate criticisms of their work. The fact is, the "world-building" does little more than pad the books with pointless detail. Both series continue to wander from point A to point B, but have managed to hit points in about 15 different alphabets in the mean time. But I digress, I'm more interested in addressing your other two examples.

Serenity/Firefly (as wonderful as it is) is hardly a poster-child for "world-building". There is a huge difference between detail-oriented world-building, where every element of the world is defined into the smallest detail, and keeping a consistent tone. Do you really think Joss Whedon really spent hours detailing the political structure of the Alliance? Mapping out every operation and combat theatre of the Unification War? Hell, do you even think he knew the names of the commanding officers in the Battle of Serenity Valley? Hardly. His writers created a world consistent with a specific genre/style, did their best not to contradict established events in the series and, otherwise, would just make stuff up as it came along. I doubt most of the planet's in the series were thought of ahead of time, but each week a new world was needed, so a new one was created. They didn't even keep character names consistent between original story bible and movie. Harrison's criticism is not that authors spend too much time crafting internally consistent stories/settings, but that too much time is spent on minutia that is not relevant to the story at hand.

Same goes for Star Wars. It's a very simple universe("world") with little real depth or detail. Characters are broad archetypes with only enough surface detail to let audiences accept them. The setting and worlds were created in the same manner. Desert-planet, water-planet, jungle-planet, ice-planet. These are hardly detailed setting elements. Again, Lucas created just enough of the world to tell his story. And that's all most authors need to do.

GM's need to do a bit more, granted, but not to the extent some claim is necessary. There is nothing wrong with that, I do it to. I love world-building and creating detailed back-stories for the setting. But I don't believe for a minute that my efforts at world-building have a significant impact on the quality of my game. It's an intellectual exercise nothing more. If your players are visiting a dwarven fortress, it's enough to know the layout, the major NPC's and maybe a few flavour elements. Knowing the names and lineage of every ruler dating back 2000+ years, is a bit much. But this is the type of detail some GM's (and authors) seem to think actually adds to the story. I really don't think it does.

The way I see it, you should craft only what is needed to tell your story. This is the approach I'm taking in the newest campaign I'm putting together. I have the core story, and I'm creating the setting around that. The only races I am using are those that fit the needs of the story. I'm not detailing any elements of the world not directly connected to this story. If the player's ask about something unrelated, I'll make something up, write it down and hope I can keep it consistent later on.

 

[Imaro]

First off, detailing the Lost Tomb of Ansakor isn't worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is just what it sounds like - world building.

Uhm...yeah that's my point. I don't think you understood what I was saying here.

Second, if you've been playing with the group in question for a while, you should have a good idea of what they plan to go about doing next, and prepare accordingly if you feel that it would be helpful.

So what if you haven't been playing for a while...Let's say first adventure out your rogue PC wants to join the Thieve's Guild. What are it's initiation requirements, it's structure, ranks, figures he would be introduced to, location, how do you get into contact with them, they're agenda, etc.

Well, not really. It's a canvas that's already been painted, usually without any player input. IMO world-building happens during the course of a campaign, if you haven't nailed everything down. There's little room for that if you've already determined everything.

This is an assumption, and a bad one at that. It assumes the GM once setting dowm the world will not allow it to be changed...that's a playstyle problem independent of actual worldbuilding. The PC's affect the world through their actions...in the end what's to stop a PC from changing the political structure of a city, a nation...what stops him from making world-level alterations as long as that's what he wants to do. Worldbuilding in and of itself? No.

Ah! Not so. This is only true of story-driven adventures where the players are assumed to be doing such and such for the story to continue.

Ok let's take the Sunless Citadel module, not story driven...all it is is a location(dungeon) and a neighboring town(Oakhurst) the only thing provided for you as far as the town is concerned is background, rumors(some that have nothing to do with the actual adventure) and a stat block. How does this adventure promote anything but going to the dungeon without the GM fleshing out those "world building" details?

I don't really see any difference here. One is wilderness, the other is a dungeon, and they can potentially ignore either and go elsewhere unless you forcibly prevent it.

There's a big difference, you're assuming the island is one vast wilderness, while I'm asssuming it's inhabited with cultures, people, and places that are fleshed out. This allows the PC's anything from social adventures to dungeoncrawls depending on what they want to pursue.

Likewise if you look at early modules like Keep on the Borderlands or Secret of Bone Hill, the players are free to have the type of adventure they want dictated by whatever their "motivations, passions, and interests" are. They could have an entire adventure without even going to the dungeons, and the module supports it. The dungeon is just there and its probable they will go to it, but hardly necessary; the town is detailed just as well, and they can explore or interact with it as easily as with the dungeon if that's what they want.

But in order to have an "adventure" they are confined to the dungeon and area around it. If the world is built they aren't.

This has nothing to do with whether the adventure takes place in a few square miles or in a few thousand square miles, but whether or not it is story-driven. If the DM has already written the story of what the players are going to do, then their freedom is limited.

But what does this have to do with world building...If this was the effect of world building, no adventures, changes, greatness would or could be achieved in our own world. Part of worldbuilding is making the setting dynamic, you're assuming in creating a world one is forced to make it static.