Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Darth Shoju]

So, Wiki is redifining a commonly used term? Wow. I guess wiki isn't a decent source of common thought at all.

As an aside, I think its credibility has been called into question lately. I pretty much only use it to look up geeky stuff (Star Wars, LoTR, Comics, etc). Anything important I generally try to use multiple sources/resources (often including the internet).

 

[LostSoul]

Is this excessive? I think it isn't because, while knowing the details of the Smashfiste and Ostler might be not immediately relevant, it has a lot of adventure potential.

Where's the conflict?

 

[LostSoul]

[Yes it's railroading, but it's railroading with style and it offers a decent illusion of choice. PCs can jump the tracks later by going AWOL or similar.]

It's not railroading if the players have agreed to join the legion before you started playing. That is called buying in to the campaign.

 

[Hussar]

It's already been pointed out that a bad DM can make a mess of any campaign, regardless of whether they start by making an adventure or start with a setting. If we lived in a world where books of generic encounters and books on adventure building outsold settings, would we say "adventure building is bad" if there were DMs running crappy railroaded adventures? I'd certainly hope not.

But, the question that should be asked is why do setting books outsell adventure building books? Or at least, I find that question interesting. Why do we see reams and reams of setting material, far in excess of what you could possibly need and vastly more than adventure material?

Is it because having setting material makes your life as a DM easier? I don't think so really. You can have all the setting guides in the world, but, you still have to sit down and do the work of crafting adventures. Or, could it be that setting guides sell so well because people spend far more time on the easy stuff of daydreaming campaigns than the hard stuff of actually making them?

In the end, you're right Darth Shoju, it doesn't hurt anything usually, to world build. Just as having desert doesn't hurt anything. Although, apparently, there are those here who think that you cannot possibly run a campaign without world building. That crafting a campaign based on adventures rather than setting will result in lockstep railroads or completely bland and flavourless experiences. So, I would say that the world building paradigm has managed to really burrow itself deep into gamer psyche.

Sorry, got off on a tangent.

I was saying that you're right. At the end of the day, so long as the campaign gets made, who cares? My point isn't that world building is bad. I've admitted that. World building isn't bad in the sense of, if you do it, you're doing something wrong. What I'm calling for here is a shift in thinking from the style of Forgotten Realms (and frankly the majority of settings out there) to the style of Freeport or the Adventure Paths.

For me, I'd MUCH rather have twenty or thirty thousand pages of adventure paths, or campaign in a box, than 20000 pages of Forgotten Realms material.

For the homebrewer, just starting a new campaign, perhaps the common wisdom of top down or bottom up isn't the best advice. Maybe. Just maybe. Perhaps, a better approach is to go straight to the work of crafting adventures and then paper over the cracks as needed.

Hey, it doesn't always work either. Look at Dragonlance. There's a campaign setting that saw its genesis in modules. Lockstep modules. But, you could also look at some of the other setting modules, like Cauldron, or Savage Tide, or World's Largest Dungeon, which, while perhaps railroady in places, certainly aren't locking the players to the rails. For the homebrewer, who doesn't have to worry about page count and budgets, he can craft a whole web of adventures, or matrix to use Rounser's word, and then go back and add any scenery that's needed.

When you do world building first, you have to go through and do all that work of crafting the world, which, if you do a good job of it, is a pretty work intensive thing to do. Once you have, say, Fargoth, THEN you have to go back and start making adventures.

My point is to turn it around. Do the adventures first. That way you can save yourself a whole pile of work doing the world building. Heck, if you want, you can simply raid Dungeon magazine, the WOTC site, and various other companies out there and come up with a couple of dozen (or more) interwoven adventures without having to do a lot of work. Then you go back and spackle the walls.

See, if you go the other way, and buy setting material like FR, you're likely not going to use the majority of it in your campaign. You just wind up with so much on the cutting room floor. But modules, you can pick and choose based on a theme. You wind up with a lot less extra.

IMO. Of course.

 

[Darth Shoju]

But, the question that should be asked is why do setting books outsell adventure building books? Or at least, I find that question interesting. Why do we see reams and reams of setting material, far in excess of what you could possibly need and vastly more than adventure material?

Is it because having setting material makes your life as a DM easier? I don't think so really. You can have all the setting guides in the world, but, you still have to sit down and do the work of crafting adventures. Or, could it be that setting guides sell so well because people spend far more time on the easy stuff of daydreaming campaigns than the hard stuff of actually making them?

I'd say they sell for both reasons. There certainly are people who get use out of them. There are also people who buy them just to read. But I'd add a third reason that they sell so well: broader appeal. Anytime you are trying to sell a product of any kind, the more specific and focused you make it, the narrower your audience becomes. Like I tried to state earlier, while the APs Paizo released look fun (and personally I want to play them all), if for some reason the adventure isn't to your taste (maybe you don't like the concept behind Cauldron?) then you probably aren't going to buy it. That even goes for campaign settings; the more specific or "gimicky" they are, the more controversial. Look at the storm around Eberron when it came out; it is really only cosmetically different yet it is really hit-or-miss with a lot of people. FR I understand is far more popular and is also more of a generic, kitchen-sink setting. So I'd chalk that up to my third reason: general appeal.

Although, apparently, there are those here who think that you cannot possibly run a campaign without world building. That crafting a campaign based on adventures rather than setting will result in lockstep railroads or completely bland and flavourless experiences.

I would disagree with those people. As KM pointed out, you don't have to prepare diddly to have *fun* at the table.

What I'm calling for here is a shift in thinking from the style of Forgotten Realms (and frankly the majority of settings out there) to the style of Freeport or the Adventure Paths.

For me, I'd MUCH rather have twenty or thirty thousand pages of adventure paths, or campaign in a box, than 20000 pages of Forgotten Realms material.

I'd tend to agree. While I've never read the FRCS all the way through, I sort of got the impression it was made as much to support the novels as it was to support campaigns. I thought the Eberron guide was a step in the right direction though; the whole design and layout of the thing was very conducive to campaign/adventure design. There were plot hooks presented throughout the book; now certainly they weren't fleshed-out encounters but I find adventure hooks more personally useful than encounters-I don't mind creating the encounters myself.

For the homebrewer, just starting a new campaign, perhaps the common wisdom of top down or bottom up isn't the best advice. Maybe. Just maybe. Perhaps, a better approach is to go straight to the work of crafting adventures and then paper over the cracks as needed.

And for homebrewing that is what I do. I'm very much in the Ray Winninger school of homebrewing there (his DMing seminar at Gencon 2k was one of my favourites of the con).

See, if you go the other way, and buy setting material like FR, you're likely not going to use the majority of it in your campaign. You just wind up with so much on the cutting room floor. But modules, you can pick and choose based on a theme. You wind up with a lot less extra.

And I think this is part of the problem; running a setting vs homebrewing are two different animals. I have limited time to create a campaign; if I manage to find the time to homebrew then I don't have the time to detail the types of grasses of the world-I've got to make the adventure(s). Using a campaign setting saves time and gives details that can be useful in adventure and PC creation. The more you use the setting the more value you get out of it. As far as usefulness, as far as I'm concerned, if the book useful after you've used 95% of it then it was useful from the beginning.

As far as setting limiting your options for adventures: I'd say that depends largely on the setting used. I fail to see how using Greyhawk or Kalamar as settings will significantly limit my options as to what adventures I can use. Certainly in some cases I'll need to change things here or there to get some adventures to work, but that seems a reasonable concession considering how much time I've saved by using a published CS and adventure in the first place.

If we are talking about the more specific/gimicky campaign settings (Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Darksun, Midnight, etc) then I'd agree you are limiting your options (and I would also say those settings are sacrificing some appeal by being more specific in focus, as I outlined above). But if the players are on board with it from the beginning (as I assume they would have to be or the game wouldn't happen), then what is the problem? Earlier you gave an example of deciding you wanted to play some naval adventures-isn't that narrowing your options as well? Certainly if the player's aren't enjoying it you can veer into other territory because your setting as a whole is flexible, but wouldn't you have wasted a bunch of work on creating all those naval adventures? Now, the assumption is that your players would be advised up front what type of campaign you were running, so they would want to play your naval adventures and no work would be wasted. On that note, then, couldn't you do the same before picking a published CS or creating a homebrew world with a unique focus? Personally I'd get a feel for how many people wanted to play my dragon-riders of Pern-esque campaign before I put a lot of work into it.

Could we say that communication of expectations up front is more important than whether you start with worldbuilding or adventure then?

 

[Hussar]

Could we say that communication of expectations up front is more important than whether you start with worldbuilding or adventure then?

Couldn't agree more.

I'm not trying to say that this is the be all and end all of campaign design. Far from it. I'm specifically comparing two thing - world buidling vs ... hrm, I'm not sure what you call it. Adventure building? Naw, that's not right. Well, vs whateverthehell I'm trying to talk about.

When you look at world building and D&D though, you start to realize how ingrained it has become. There's what? Three Four chapters in the DMG specifically devoted to campaign building, but only one on adventure building. Dungeon and Dragon had hundreds of pages of advice for either top down or bottom up campaign creation, but, honestly, I can't think of a regular column that discussed adventure design.

The only regular column on adventure design that I can think of is Wolgang Buar's on the WOTC board and that's very, very recent.

 

[JustinA]

So, Wiki is redifining a commonly used term? Wow. I guess wiki isn't a decent source of common thought at all.

Unless you've recently edited Wiki to match your whack-job definition of world-building as "setting creation that won't be used in an RPG session", then you're just lying through your teeth here.

And if you have edited Wiki to say that, then we're just dealing with another variety of intellectual dishonesty here.

But, the question that should be asked is why do setting books outsell adventure building books? Or at least, I find that question interesting. Why do we see reams and reams of setting material, far in excess of what you could possibly need and vastly more than adventure material?

The value of the material.

A fairly simplistic evaluation of the value of RPG supplement is:

(1) The amount of material from the book you will use.
(2) How often you will use it.

You will commonly use a setting to run many adventures. You will typically only use an adventure once.

Everything else being equal in terms of the products' quality and cost, I will use the setting material more often and it will, therefore, be more valuable to me.

Is it because having setting material makes your life as a DM easier? I don't think so really. You can have all the setting guides in the world, but, you still have to sit down and do the work of crafting adventures.

Your conclusion here is completely fallacious.

If I need to spend X amount of time crafting a setting and Y amount of time crafting an adventure, then my total prep time is X + Y.

If I, instead, purchase the setting material then my prep time is merely Y.

Clearly, purchasing the setting material DOES make my life as a DM easier.

Although, apparently, there are those here who think that you cannot possibly run a campaign without world building. That crafting a campaign based on adventures rather than setting will result in lockstep railroads or completely bland and flavourless experiences.

Uhh... No. It doesn't really matter how often you repeat this absolutely absurd assertion, it doesn't make it any more true.

 

[Rothe]

For the homebrewer, just starting a new campaign, perhaps the common wisdom of top down or bottom up isn't the best advice. Maybe. Just maybe. Perhaps, a better approach is to go straight to the work of crafting adventures and then paper over the cracks as needed.

I think you just stated how it was done in "the beginning." I recall folks often started with an adventure+village. A few more adventures were added, questions were raised about the wider world or players went off on a lark. All of a sudden a world, or at least the framework of one, was needed.

When you do world building first, you have to go through and do all that work of crafting the world, which, if you do a good job of it, is a pretty work intensive thing to do. Once you have, say, Fargoth, THEN you have to go back and start making adventures.

Well it's not that bad if you design the world so you can readily plop in the adventures you have. You also don't need to do all parts at the same level of detail, in fact I'd counsel against it. My own adventures also tend to be 2 pages per level, one a map with copiuos notes on it plus another page or so listing treasure and info for me to remember. Afterall, it's not for publication.

I find a world very useful for DMing on the fly. Even if you haven't written anything down, you have an idea of what lies in each direction and how various factions and ecologies interact. Having thought ahead it makes it much easier to come up with things on the fly that are consistent with what has come before, not unbalancing, and lead to the kinds of adventures your players like. I'm sure there are those out there who can do this off the cuff, not so for me.

Just my one little post to get this perpetual thread to 1000 posts.

 

[Faraer]

Mike Harrison isn't a 'sci-fi' writer in the sense of someone who writes stories set in the future with spaceships and rayguns; he uses some of the tools and approaches of science fiction. Much of his work is set in contemporary Earth, and he doesn't go in for long novel series. Otherwise, his advice, which works very well for him, would be different.

Similarly, if you're running a single average-length D&D campaign, or writing a short story or single novel, working out a few thousand words on rural architecture isn't the best use of time. If you're world-building for your own 30-year in-depth campaign, potentially thousands of other people's campaigns, and a fiction line running well into the millions of worlds, and you enjoy world-building for its own sake and find it beautiful, a few thousand words on rural architecture (the places where most of your world's characters live much of their lives) is just the basics.

 

[rounser]

Unless you've recently edited Wiki to match your whack-job definition of world-building as "setting creation that won't be used in an RPG session", then you're just lying through your teeth here.

No he's not. It's just that you don't understand the meaning of a subset and a superset.