Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[I'm A Banana]

t seems to me that the less railroaded the campaign is, the more important pre-game development of the setting (i.e. - worldbuilding) becomes.

I feel this is untrue. Even heavily railroaded games have extensive world development in some cases, detailing the history of Kingdom X (that PC's never learn) and the ecology of Monster Z (which is never relevant to the play). Heck, the original complaint was about worldbuilding in fiction, which is probably one of the harshest railroads there is.

It is also true that worldbuilding becomes railroading at a certain point -- it limits the PC's options in the scenario. They can't go to Thorpton because the Ocean of Sessler is in the way and the shipbuilder's union is on strike so no ships are sailling. They can't be elves because elves don't exist in the world. Etc.

And open-sandbox games can be even better without much worldbuilding or pre-game prep. It makes it so that even if the PC's spend all day shopping at the market, you can inject some drama and tension on the fly, rather than relying on there being some proactive element in the party that night (as a for instance).

So railroading has no inherent effect on worldbuilding.

 

[LostSoul]

Another reason for a strong setting occurs in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=3473742&postcount=11

You don't need a strong setting in order to create characters with backgrounds, motives, and goals. You could create a very character-centered game just by detailing the backgrounds, motives, and goals of the PCs and a few NPCs and leave the setting to be developed in play.

 

[Hussar]

You don't need a strong setting in order to create characters with backgrounds, motives, and goals. You could create a very character-centered game just by detailing the backgrounds, motives, and goals of the PCs and a few NPCs and leave the setting to be developed in play.

I prefer this method myself actually. I'm tired of players handing me three page backstories for a 1st level character. Backstory is what you get looking back on your 7th level character, not first. Unfortunately, I seem to be a minority in this position and I've had DM's flat out tell me to that the character I created was boring because I didn't detail a huge background.

On the whole railroad vs free play issue. Worldbuilding has very little to do with either one really, IMO. Dragonlance had a huge backstory, lots of world building, massive history, and was a locked in railroad from about the second module. The existence of "over there" doesn't preclude railroading, nor does having a pre-made campaign arc necessarily force railroading.

 

[The Shaman]

I guess every setting does to a certain extent. I can't tell a gothic political thriller about vampires in Dark Sun, and a tale of intrigue aboard intercontinental magical mass transit would be slightly out of place in Greyhawk. I'd have trouble talking about Caribbean pirates in Planescape, and a story of a pop star and her entourage facing cutthroat record labels wouldn't work too well coming out of Hyperborea.

Now you're conflating genre elements with plot. Again, you're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

Taking the last one as an example, a troupe of performers at odds with a cruel patron and his henchmen is entirely reasonable for a Conan game, so that plot, with the correct genre trappings, is perfectly at home in the setting.

Now back to the original question: name a published RPG setting that dictates plot, please.

 

[The Shaman]

I'm tired of players handing me three page backstories for a 1st level character. Backstory is what you get looking back on your 7th level character, not first. Unfortunately, I seem to be a minority in this position and I've had DM's flat out tell me to that the character I created was boring because I didn't detail a huge background.

Monday, April 23, 2007, 1834 PDT: Hussar and The Shaman agree on something.

One for the archives, my friends, one for the archives.

 

[Wayside]

Now back to the original question: name a published RPG setting that dictates plot, please.

People have been arguing about metaplot--in Dragonlance, in Forgotten Realms, in the World of Darkness--for as long as I can remember. So there are, at the least, a lot of folks who think that some published RPG settings do in fact dictate plot. These people may not be entirely right, but metaplot does foreclose some options; it is a constraint. A setting can make certain stories impossible, and maybe enable stories that, up to that point, had been possible nowhere else (and that, of course, would be the ultimate justification for world building).

But the thing is, say you disagree with that assumption: all you've done is confirm Harrison's point. If setting really is irrelevant to plot, if the same plot can be reproduced in more or less any setting whatever, then setting, beyond what plot demands, is wasted energy as far as plot is concerned, and subjecting your reader to too much world building would fall under the rubric of "I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn."

 

[LostSoul]

Now back to the original question: name a published RPG setting that dictates plot, please.

You could never do Hamlet in the Forgotten Realms.

edit: Not that that is a bad thing, it's just an example of how the setting can dictate the plot.

 

[Set]

And the thing that "Mr. H" seems to be pointing out is that those who prefer all this detail are great clomping nerds. Which is fine if that's the only audience you're interested in appealing to. And if your players are all happy being great clomping nerds who are in love with your imagination, I'm not sure that the advice to cut down on worldbuilding is really all that relevant.

Yup. The Forgotten Realms would not exist, nor would Eberron (or Greyhawk, or Kara-Tur, or Zakhara, or Krynn, or Sigil, or the Diamond Throne), if we weren't all pretty much great clomping nerds. Harrison can bite me.

I love all of these settings, and Ed Greenwood and Keith Baker's 'clomping nerdism' keeps me coming back with their details about newspaper events in the City of Towers, or inns of the Realms that my players adventurers might curl up in after a hard day of killing orcs.

So, I've seen some lists of sci-fi / fantasy authors who do extensive world-building;
J.R.R. Tolkein
Peter Hamilton
Raymond Feist (& Janny Wurts, his occasional co-conspirator)
Isaac Asimov
R.A. Salvatore
Tracy Hickman & Margaret Weis
Larry Niven
Timothy Zahn
Robert Jordan (who, IMO, is a rare example of Harrison being right, and author who overuses world-building to the detriment of the story)

I'd love to hear more world-builders that I may have missed in my collection.

And I'd like to see a similar list of sci-fi / fantasy authors who fit Harrison's minimalist story-driven mold.

I wonder if Vernor Vinge might count as such an author? His stories always sit in some fuzzily-defined area and seen to make no sense, with stuff happening pretty much randomly and characters having no apparent background traits or cultural ties. I had considered it to be some sort of trippy drug thing, but it's possible that this is what Harrison would consider a 'triumph of pure storytelling' without any sort of meaningful setting or coherent design.


For gaming purposes, I've heard good things about a Magical Medieval Society, but, frankly, I didn't care for it in the slightest
http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=711

The 2e AD&D World-Builders Guidebook by Richard Baker was pretty neat, and had some great campaign-inspiring ideas.

Stephen Gilletts World-Building is pretty thorough, but not useful, IMO, for a gamer. It's for sci-fi writers who want to get the science right, mostly. Robert L Forward had something of the sort, IIRC, but I really didn't care for it at all.

You don't need a strong setting in order to create characters with backgrounds, motives, and goals. You could create a very character-centered game just by detailing the backgrounds, motives, and goals of the PCs and a few NPCs and leave the setting to be developed in play.

Sure, you *could* do this. But does that make it wrong *not* to do this?

Does it make the GM who simply doesn't improvise on the fly that well, and prefers to have the questions answered *before* they are asked than 'make stuff up' an inadequate GM?

Should he not play D&D, for not being able to meet your standards of instantaneous creativity under pressure?

Who gets to decide who is 'good enough' to GM? Certainly not Harrison. I'd likely hate to game with the man, since I enjoy having characters who are connected to the world that they are playing in. I don't want to play, 'Uh, Bob, the elf. I guess there are elfs somewhere. You have a bow? Okay, elfs like bows. No, I don't know where elfs come from, if they have cities, if you have a family, and it doesn't matter. Just make crap up, like from that Complete Elves Book. Decide that you don't sleep, and you can telepathically bond with life-mates, and that your singing makes human bards weep. I don't care, why should you? Fine, say that elves ride dragons and have space ships and come from the planet Vulcan.'

Looking at the successes of settings with lots of detail (Realms, Eberron), as compared to those which have gone undeveloped (Greyhawk), or of fantasy novelists who engage in world-building (Jordan, Tolkein, Hamilton) versus those who don't (Harrison?), it seems that the market has spoken.

Harrison may be a sad panda that his methodology doesn't seem to be as profitable, but that's one of the problems with fiction. If the reader can't envision and *connect* to the characters, scenes and environment that you are portraying, they aren't going to be affected by your writing. Unlike a GM, a writer can't go back and explain something. If I find all of the characters to be faceless non-entities who seem to have appeared from whole cloth at the beginning of the tale, I'm really not gonna shed any tears for them throughout the story, since the writer himself didn't think they were that interesting. Why should I fill in the blanks he was not interested in writing? I'm not being paid to make the story interesting or the setting rich or the characters compellingly fleshed-out. I'm paying to read it, it should already be interesting!

 

[Hussar]

Yup. The Forgotten Realms would not exist, nor would Eberron (or Greyhawk, or Kara-Tur, or Zakhara, or Krynn, or Sigil, or the Diamond Throne), if we weren't all pretty much great clomping nerds. Harrison can bite me.

I love all of these settings, and Ed Greenwood and Keith Baker's 'clomping nerdism' keeps me coming back with their details about newspaper events in the City of Towers, or inns of the Realms that my players adventurers might curl up in after a hard day of killing orcs.

Yet, how many people complain about how published settings are so over detailed that they cannot fit their own ideas into them? How many people refuse to buy anything from a given setting for exactly that reason? Why do generic modules sell far better than setting modules?

If detailed setting made for better gaming, wouldn't everyone be on board with published settings? Wouldn't generic modules, or gaming books in general take a back seat to setting dependent ones?

Who gets to decide who is 'good enough' to GM? Certainly not Harrison. I'd likely hate to game with the man, since I enjoy having characters who are connected to the world that they are playing in. I don't want to play, 'Uh, Bob, the elf. I guess there are elfs somewhere. You have a bow? Okay, elfs like bows. No, I don't know where elfs come from, if they have cities, if you have a family, and it doesn't matter. Just make crap up, like from that Complete Elves Book. Decide that you don't sleep, and you can telepathically bond with life-mates, and that your singing makes human bards weep. I don't care, why should you? Fine, say that elves ride dragons and have space ships and come from the planet Vulcan.'

But, that's not what he's saying. Again, adding details to a character isn't world building. Those details are used immedietely in the game. Or in the book.

People are getting all bent out of shape because they think that Harrison is saying that setting should never be developed. That's not it at all. He's taking a fairly stock line, "Too much setting is bad", rephrasing it in a very antagonistic way and people are jumping all over it.

It's perfectly fine to give your elf a bit of backstory. But, if you write up a six page back story to your elf and then NEVER refer to it in game, that's completely wasted effort. I've seen that from player after player. They come to me with backstories and then expect me, as DM, to make the rest of the party care about it. Sorry, not going to happen. If your backstory involves you rescuing your kidnapped sister, then you better start bringing it up in game. The player should be the one to make his backstory relavent, not the DM. If the player can't be bothered to refer to his backstory, then I certainly can't.

And, it works both ways. If the DM details out a six page treatise on Elven tea ceremonies and we never meet an elf, that's wasted effort. Or rather, I, as the player, couldn't care less.

Yes, it's a pretty obvious point. Don't do more work than you have to. It's been stated many times by better designers than me. I refuse to buy setting books anymore for the simple fact that setting books mean more work for me as the DM and, IME, the players couldn't care less.

Right now, I'm playing in an Eberron campaign. It's fun. But, it's not fun because of the setting, it's fun because the adventures are exciting, the DM is great and the other players are good. The DM is good about bringing up enough backstory to lend verisimilitude, but hasn't been bashing our brains out with it.

One complaint I have about the Savage Tide AP, is how much Greyhawk stuff is in it. I know next to nothing about the setting, yet, major elements of the modules assume a certain level of setting knowledge, such as background on the Scarlet Brotherhood. I couldn't care less about them. They don't really feature directly in the modules and they are only really there as an easter egg to Greyhawk fans as far as I can tell. So, I ejected the details and carried on.

Once upon a time, when gaming, our games had almost no setting. Look at Keep on the Borderlands. There's a mini-setting that's skeletal, yet is one of the most enduring modules ever published. Isle of Dread fits in too. Although IoD does present a fair bit about Mystara as well, the actual module doesn't really tie into that at all. Other than some very bare bones details about the natives, that's it.

Is Harrison saying that every story should be like Waiting for Godot? No, of course not. That woudl be stupid. But, every story, and I believe every campaign, should put plot (or adventure if you prefer) far ahead of setting. Introduce enough setting to set your campaign in a place that is "not here", but, don't presume that your players will care about Elven tea ceremonies.

 

[Darth Shoju]

Yet, how many people complain about how published settings are so over detailed that they cannot fit their own ideas into them? How many people refuse to buy anything from a given setting for exactly that reason? Why do generic modules sell far better than setting modules?

I don't know, how many? I know I own far more modules for published settings than I do generic ones. But I'm certainly not going to argue that generic adventures aren't useful.

If detailed setting made for better gaming, wouldn't everyone be on board with published settings? Wouldn't generic modules, or gaming books in general take a back seat to setting dependent ones?

If generic is the way to go, why have there been so many settings published over the years? Maybe it is as much a matter of taste as anything to do with one being better than the other.

People are getting all bent out of shape because they think that Harrison is saying that setting should never be developed. That's not it at all. He's taking a fairly stock line, "Too much setting is bad", rephrasing it in a very antagonistic way and people are jumping all over it.

How much is too much? If the plot/story/adventure was hindered in favour of the setting then I'd say there was too much attention paid to worldbuilding. However, if the story/adventure didn't suffer, then I have a hard time seeing however much worldbuilding was done as bad.

It's perfectly fine to give your elf a bit of backstory. But, if you write up a six page back story to your elf and then NEVER refer to it in game, that's completely wasted effort.

Why? Did it stop the player from making the character somehow? As long as said player rolled up their character correctly and enjoyed writing a long character history, I don't see it as wasted (as long as that player is fine with their history not coming into play if they don't promote it).

I refuse to buy setting books anymore for the simple fact that setting books mean more work for me as the DM and, IME, the players couldn't care less.

Interesting. For me they mean less work. The degree to which the players care is up to the individual I suppose.

I guess largely we agree, I just dislike the liberal use of the term "wasted effort".