Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Hussar]

Does this include the nobility of Sasserine? Does this include the DM background that players can never discover (something I'm not familiar with, btw; whyever couldn't the players discover it?)?

Again, strawman. I did not say that they could NEVER discover it. What I said was that the chances of the nobility of Sasserine becoming involved with the party is extremely small. You are the one advocating that the players can interact with kings at first level.

You might also consider the Dungeoncraft articles related to a prehistoric setting, which (while suggesting not building more than you have to) certainly suggests that you build up details such as what sorts of gods are in the world, how the hook of the world affects PC class/race choices, who's in charge of the settlement, and background secrets that the PCs may or may not discover through the course of play. IOW, all of those things that some in this thread believe unnecessary or a waste of time.

Actually, yes, I would consider a lot of that completely unnecessary and a waste of time. You DON'T HAVE TO DO IT. You can run perfectly fun games without it. It's setting porn.

You may consider this an admission of the "bad worldbuilding is bad" tautology, but I'd call it the "most of what is considered worldbuilding will probably never see play in a meaningful way, unless it's anchored to an adventure or otherwise affects the PCs directly."

I <3 Rounser.

Please explain to me how encounter level prep isn't worldbuilding. Please also explain to me how creating multiple potential adventure hooks, having a pre-created hex wilderness with pre-placed encounters and incorporating the lead-ins for pregenerated adventures from Dungeon magazine into the campaign aren't all worldbuilding.

Because you are conflating setting with world building. Any adventure needs encounters of some sort, just as any story needs setting of some sort. What adventures and stories don't necessarily need is world building.

If I have a dungeon with a simple T junction and two rooms, there is a reasonable chance that the PC's will visit either room. Thus, I need to stat out both rooms, even though the PC's may not visit both. However, in order to have a setting at all, I still need to do both rooms. However, where world building would come in would be if I added a third room, only accessable by a massive DC (far higher than the PC's are capable of), completely hidden from view. Sure, the PC's could return later and open the door when they are higher level, but they have no reason to do so. It's superfluous. It's world building.

Setting and world building are not synonymous. Conflating the two is what is causing all the problems. If something is where the action happens, then it's setting. If it moves beyond where the action happens, then it's world building. There is no cut off here. There is no magic point where the canvas becomes a painting. There is merely a spectrum from one end to the other.

 

[Imaro]

Hussar and rounser...I get the impression you two would be perfectly happy playing in an endless dungeoncrawl of room after room of encounters with no contexual basis or consistency from game to game...because essentially that's what it seems like your advocating as the penultimate in "real DM work". I gotta call BS on this, cause I can get that from numerous 8-bit videogames released in the 80's. So why play D&D? What does it offer, using your prescribed philosophy, that I can't get out of a videogame? If worldbuilding wasn't important to players I don't think games like FFVII and Kingdom Hearts would be top sellers. Claim whatever you will, but my impression is that people do enjoy and even crave this type of versimillitude.

IMHO this philosophy of "adventure design is all important" is an archaic concept that's dated and shouold go the way of the dinosaur. It offers nothing that a MMORPG can't offer. And guess what, then we can all play and my workload is non-exsistant...the ultimate in work-waste management. I'll tell you why, because it's also a creative outlet, that's why. The more I feed my players in the creativity department, the more I'll get bach...at least in my experience. My players can come to actually care about and invest in a world that seems real...encounter after encounter is played exactly how it sounds...boooooring.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Any of them reguler EN World posters?

I'm the requisite great clomping nerd of the group. None of the rest of 'em feel inclined at all to spend hours discussing the game here.

Or, better yet, maybe you'll get a chance to run a no-prep game for me at some point.

I wouldn't rule it out, but this hippo don't jump through flaming hoops. I'm not going to DM for anyone to prove something. If I DM for you it'll be because we hang out and get to talking and I mention a game idea you have interest in or you mention a character idea I can work with. Just like how it happens with all my players.

I've changed my mind before when it made sense to do so; I'm not changing it on your say-so.

I'm not an authority on my own games? Like I said, if you want to say that no personal experience with it = it's not possible (until proven otherwise), no one can convince you otherwise. I'm willing to believe that people run perfectly open and fun games with 256-page setting bibles, even though I have no experience with it, because I pretty much trust people to not keep doing what isn't fun.

If you took a writing class (or read some good books on writing), you would know that stories are composed of setting, plot, theme, style, and character.

This isn't an internet wang-measuring contest, man. Classes and training are meaningless. A *child* has the ability to tell a compelling story. It probably won't be any work of literary genius, but it really doesn't need to be. No one who loved Eragon seems to really care. Ditto with D&D games.

While our modern take on this seems to focus on plot, plot hasn't always been the most important part of all fiction. There is much of Dickens, for instance, that focuses on setting, and while most people can tell you something of the theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin, few know the plot. Virginia Woolf focused largely on character.

The best stories, I would argue, are not the page-turners, but the ones that balance these elements well. Where plot, setting, theme, style, and character all become melded to the point where you cannot easily remove bits of one without unravelling bits of the others. This is very similar to the LotR movies, where every change made by PJ required more changes down the road, altering plot, theme, and character -- and, ultimately, style and setting as well -- in order to accomodate them.

I would argue that the same is true for D&D games.

Your arguments are pretty much subjective to *you* though. I don't need a finely crafted balancing act to have a fun time in a room with four of my friends for a few hours. In fact, the more finely crafted it is, the more it feels to me like someone should be alone in a room crafting this instead of in a room full of other people.

I don't demand anything near perfection for an enjoyable night of D&D. Those who do -- those who obsess over minutiae in regards to such a pointless, disposable activity as pretending to be an elf because it's fun for them -- are exactly the great clomping nerds of Harrison's post.

Don't assume that what makes a good D&D game for you makes an objectively good D&D game.

In one session, my players decided to wait three months so that the paladin could get a custom suit of armour made. I gave them a quick summary of what occurred during that time, including news of the death of a distant prince and mention that a chess-like game played with carved dragons on a circular board had become a local fad. The players appreciated the last detail (even though it was irrelevant to anything) and had their PCs spend time learning the game. They even bought an expensive board.

Things become relevant because the players and/or the DM make them so.

I could have pulled the same thing out of my head on the fly. I have. This isn't a case that my way is badwrongfun. It's just proof that your way makes use of some throw-away topics. Which is that little bit of improv that I'm sure every able DM possesses -- that little bit that can be spiraled into "practically all preparation" if one wishes.

This wasn't part of an adventure, and didn't need to impact the players directly at all. They chose to make it impact them. It is my job to be the facilitator of opportunities to make the adventure matter, the world matter, and the characters matter.

Doing less is.....well, it results in less.

Less than what? Pulling two or three events out of a mental hat to happen during downtime requires exactly as much prep as that: a few seconds to think of some events.

 

[Hussar]

Hussar and rounser...I get the impression you two would be perfectly happy playing in an endless dungeoncrawl of room after room of encounters with no contexual basis or consistency from game to game...because essentially that's what it seems like your advocating as the penultimate in "real DM work". I gotta call BS on this, cause I can get that from numerous 8-bit videogames released in the 80's. So why play D&D? What does it offer, using your prescribed philosophy, that I can't get out of a videogame? If worldbuilding wasn't important to players I don't think games like FFVII and Kingdom Hearts would be top sellers. Claim whatever you will, but my impression is that people do enjoy and even crave this type of versimillitude.

IMHO this philosophy of "adventure design is all important" is an archaic concept that's dated and shouold go the way of the dinosaur. It offers nothing that a MMORPG can't offer. And guess what, then we can all play and my workload is non-exsistant...the ultimate in work-waste management. I'll tell you why, because it's also a creative outlet, that's why. The more I feed my players in the creativity department, the more I'll get bach...at least in my experience. My players can come to actually care about and invest in a world that seems real...encounter after encounter is played exactly how it sounds...boooooring.

Wow, took this many pages to bring in the comparison to video games Godwin. Nice.

Look, I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I am not stating that setting is bad. That would be stupid. You need a setting, whether it be a massive dungeon, outdoor wilderness or steampunk city or whatever. That goes without saying.

However, the idea that adventure design is all important is by no means an archaic concept. You cannot play without an adventure of some sort, even if it's just a blank sheet of graph paper and a random encounter chart. At some point you would have to create that random encounter chart and thus, setting.

You can have all the setting books in the world but, without an adventure, what you have are some pretty books. Until such time as you sit down and do the nuts and bolts of designing an (or several) adventure (or adventures), nothing is going to happen at your gaming table. No matter how you slice it, adventure design is the primary purpose of the DM. He can write all the backstory to his campaign world that he likes, but, until that adventure gets made, nothing happens. All the players can do is ooh and ahh about how smart their DM is to create such interesting campaign worlds.

Not exactly my idea of a fun night.

You mention top selling video games. Do people play World of Warcraft to be wowed about the history of Azeroth or do they play to kill stuff and take the treasure? I'm thinking that if you removed the combat aspects from FF or WOW, you wouldn't have too many players. While Myst was fun for a while, it certainly never approached the levels of popularity that WOW has.

Again, once more.

Setting =/= World buiding.

All stories have setting but not all stories have world building, thus there must be something different about the two. IMO, the difference is how relavent the ideas are to the plot of the story. If it is relavent, then it is setting, if it's not, or at least not terribly, relavent, then it's world building.

Putting Dragotha on the edge of the player's map in White Plume Mountain is the equivalent of saying "Here be Dragyns" (Which is somewhat ironic considering what came later ) It fits with the atmosphere of the adventure where the players are traveling to unknown parts to face whatever. It becomes world building if, in White Plume Mountain, the author had spent pages detailing Dragotha when you cannot actually go there within the context of the module.

So, again, there is a spectrum. At one end you have numerous stories with little setting at all and at the other you have books which are all setting like the Star Trek Tech Manuals. World building is an indulgence. It is mostly unnecessary.

 

[rounser]

Hussar and rounser...I get the impression you two would be perfectly happy playing in an endless dungeoncrawl of room after room of encounters with no contexual basis or consistency from game to game...because essentially that's what it seems like your advocating as the penultimate in "real DM work".

Oh heck no, endless dungeon crawls bore me to tears. In fact quite the opposite; I'm a big believer in Director's Cut dungeons, hacking out all the guard rooms and empty rooms and other timewasting junk that creeps into your typical Dungeon magazine dungeon. I've already related what I'm into from a past attempt at a baseless ad hominem attack on me based on glaring assumptions just like your attempt, but here it is again:

My ideal campaign is one with multiple adventure hooks available at any one time (WITH actual adventures behind them) that are presented to the PCs - a collection of events, quests, and rumours of status quo locations. If none of them appeal they have the option of exploring the admittedly very small setting, just stumbling across populated hexes in the wilderness (and finding detailed lairs, dungeons, magical features etc.) or running into geomorphed trouble in the single city or two towns. The adventures that the PCs choose to complete are in many cases tied to campaign arc's villains, and PC choice of where to go and what adventures to play effectively determines the course of the campaign arc, and which villains end up dominating.

I've never pulled this off completely to my satisfaction, but that's the ideal - a matrix campaign arc with lots of player choice and a setting that responds to those PC choices in a direct manner, because the campaign arc dictates how powerful the villains are and what they do to the setting based on what challenges the PCs overcome and when. And the world? I could give two hoots about it beyond the tiny microcosmic wilderness map it provides, it's generic D&D cliche all the way, because the adventures and the campaign arc are the interesting parts. Last time I attempted this I didn't even have a setting beyond the needs of Dungeon magazine adventures all plugged together.

As noted earlier in the thread, I'm now plotting how to reduce the redundancy of the matrix model with scaling, such that if PCs skip several adventures, the problems they're about escalate and become harder to deal with later on (read, the ELs go up to challenge the current PC level, and the adventures may change as the current key villain gets involved).

 

[Hussar]

Y'know, been thinking. I think that RC and Ourph and the others are right in one thing.

World Building isn't bad. It's not about good or bad.

To me, world building is an indulgence. It's about the writer (or the DM) taking the time to go beyond what is required by the plot to indulge his own whims and fetishes for creation. It really is like desert. You don't have to eat desert, but, it does taste good.

But, like any indulgence it becomes a problem when it takes over. We can forgive a bit of indulgence once in a while. It happens to all of us. So long as the point is not all about the indulgence but rather, the focus is on the meat of the meal. Ok, I'm stretching the analogy too far, but, I think you get the point.

And, really, a lot of setting stuff is pure indulgence. It doesn't really ever feature in a particular campaign. There's an excellent editorial by Matt Sernett in Dragon 322. He says:

Like a lot of D&D players, I'm tinkering with an idea for a new campaign world. And, like many new campaign worlds, my idea for a fantasy setting had its genesis in frustration with the settings available...

Of course, I'm still a long way from having a whole setting in which to run games. To make my campaign world, I'll check out the campaign creation advice soon to be published in Dungeon ...

Like a lot of D&D players, I'm prone to creating new campaigns at the drop of a hat. My grim, dark fantasy world where monsters rule massive city states might not see the light of day, but its fun to tinker with and a joy to talk about with others. Like compulsively making new PCs, creating new worlds for D&D games is a hobby within a hobby, providing yet another reason to love this game.

Note that last bit. Creating campaigns and PC's is fun. Nothing about making adventures. Making adventures is work. We don't crank out a 24 encounter dungeon at the drop of a hat. People fiddle about with making campaign settings because it's easy and it looks like you are doing something that will help your game. People don't sit down and do the meat and potatoes because they'd rather eat apple crisp.

 

[gizmo33]

All the players can do is ooh and ahh about how smart their DM is to create such interesting campaign worlds.

I wouldn't give the bum the satisfaction.

Not exactly my idea of a fun night.

Mine is yelling at people that write poetry and don't publish it.

You mention top selling video games. Do people play World of Warcraft to be wowed about the history of Azeroth or do they play to kill stuff and take the treasure?

Kill stuff and take treasure of course! Everyone knows that the internet is the last bastion of refinement and good taste, so what else would one expect? Besides, the programming it takes to provide world-based roleplaying opportunities for thousands of roving guild-hordes is child's play. It's a lot harder to make decent hack-n-slash.

Setting =/= World buiding.

Yea, setting is that thinest of pretenses that I need to start killing stuff. Anything beyond that and people might start asking for explanations and context and that just leads to a lot of "oohing" and "aahing" that I don't want to hear unless it's people being amazed at my quick Power Attack calculations.

All stories have setting but not all stories have world building, thus there must be something different about the two.

The ideal setting floats in outer-space.

IMO, the difference is how relavent the ideas are to the plot of the story. If it is relavent, then it is setting, if it's not, or at least not terribly, relavent, then it's world building.

And immediately relevant too. There's nothing I hate more than that smug look on the DM's face when some detail becomes relevant 10 adventures after it was described.

It becomes world building if, in White Plume Mountain, the author had spent pages detailing Dragotha when you cannot actually go there within the context of the module.

They detailed those three magic items and you couldn't even keep them! That was completely useless. In fact the trident had power over the sea and the ocean was miles away from the dungeon. Telling me that the items were returned to their owners, and describing the names of owners and such is completely useless unless you're going to let me kill those guys later and take back the items. And Sir Bluto, and the "River of Blood mass murder case"? I'm getting sleepy just thinking about it.

World building is an indulgence. It is mostly unnecessary.

Here, here! I wish my DM would check with me before he does stuff.

 

[gizmo33]

Actually, yes, I would consider a lot of that completely unnecessary and a waste of time. You DON'T HAVE TO DO IT. You can run perfectly fun games without it. It's setting porn.

The thought of the DM sitting at home working on "world-building" while no one is watching is so transparently erotic that "porn" is really the only dignified comparison. He should be ashamed!

 

[Hussar]

Wow, ad hominem attacks just leaping out of the woodwork.

 

[pemerton]

This afternoon I was looking through some notes for my old Greyhawk campaign, setting out an integrated theology for a bunch of Greyhawk deities based loosely on debates between realists and idealists in pre-Twentieth Century metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Is this an example of pointless worldbuilding? None of the players in that campaign was a philosopher, and we never had a cleric PC, so most of this detail never really came out in play. On the other hand, it gave me the basis for presenting the world and its NPCs to my players, and one thing that they enjoyed about the campaign was a degree of depth - both of detail and theme - which allowed them to build plots and plans and relationships of a high degree of complexity.

My GMing style at the table is very much to wing the details, joining together locations or vignettes from various modules or campaign settings and letting my players do the work of building a plot. Often, this also invovles converting AD&D or D20 material to Rolemaster on the fly. I find that the time spent worldbuilding supports this sort of play - it gives me the raw material to work from as a GM. And I think that that time is less time, and easier, than adventure design, because it is less technical, and really just involves adapting bits and pieces of history or philosophy that I'm already thinking about to a pre-published set of maps and setting descriptions - Greyhawk, or for our current campaign Kara-Tur (where the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding involves competing interpretations of Buddhist teachings on enlilghtenment and emptiness - I've found it surprisingly easiy to integrate the Cthulhu-esque elements of the Freeport Trilogy, shorn of its railroading, into this previously developed framework for the campaign).

A fiinal comment on adventure building: at the moment I'm reading Expedition to the Demon Web Pits.

*SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW*​

One of the authors is Wolfgang Baur, who seems to have a pretty good reputation. But with every page, I'm just amazed by the railroading in this module. Perhaps I'm out of touch with contemporary adventure design - it's the first Wizards module I've bought for a few years.

But I look at what the authors assume players will have their characters do more or less cause the GM says so (through a one-dimensional NPC puppet) and I try to imagine what would happen if I ran this adventure as written, with my group. They would never take the bait, and the adventure would never get off the ground.

Hence my hesitation to design adventures, in the sense of sequences of plot for the players to work their way through. I prefer to have a collection of NPCs and settings - and I can buy or download these much more easily than writing my own - and then to let the allies and adversaries for the campaign evolve through play and the players' own choices, and to rely on my sense of the campaign background to guide me in linking it all together as the session actually unfolds.

To use some GNS terminology, I think that this produces a type of primarily simulationist play, but with some satisfaction also of the players' narrativist urges, as they have a significant role in determining the way in which thematic content emerges, and their PCs relate to it. (There's quite a bit of gamism there also, but that tends to be confined to character building - which RM supports to a high degree - and to emerge much less during play itself.)