Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[Raven Crowking]

And there... I'm not even speaking of winging game after game on-the-go and still make them feel believable and consistant. It is feasible, but I would count the activity of remembering what was played X sessions ago and make what you make up on the fly feel consistant with this past events a process of world-building of its own right. Ergo, you cannot have consistency without world-building.

However, sir, if you are ever in Toronto, I'd be happy to see if you pass my Turing test.

 

[Odhanan]

However, sir, if you are ever in Toronto, I'd be happy to see if you pass my Turing test.

Believe me: whenever we get the occasion, I will feel privileged to oblige!

 

[Imaro]

If the players are not the sort to ask those questions, there is no problem. If all they want is to fight an Necromancer King/hordes of undead, and your world cannot support that, your worldbuilding has made the game less fun.

Whose to say my world can't? No one is saying you can't adjust your world...or GASP discuss what type of campaign you and your players want before the game starts so that the world is designed around the tropes you all want to expore.

Oh yeah and this eliminates most of your argument about my world lessening fun, because it will be built to cater to what each player is looking for in a compromise sort of way.

You know this makes me wonder how an anything goes type of game continues once players begin to conflict on what is fun for them? Don't you have to make a compromise even when trying to do whatever for your players.

 

[rounser]

From reading Hussar and Rounser's posts I get the impression, and excuse me if this is wrong, that you both either run railroad adventures, or can read your players minds. I can't see how you know what will and will not be interacted with in a session of gameplay. It would frustrate me in a session where it went something like this...

You couldn't be further from the mark. I'm all about dangling multiple hooks in front of the PCs, and having multiple prepared adventure areas available which the PCs can choose from...even hex wilderness with stuff they can "stumble across" at encounter level. I use Dungeon adventures as a crutch for this, but they're extensively edited down (there's a lot of stuff you can cut out of these). It's a lot of work, but you can do that if you ditch your precious worldbuilding.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

(Also, I note that the AP isn't done yet, so we don't know how relevant the material is to the final chapter.)

Since many of the adventures contain notes on granting affiliation bonuses for Sasserine organizations, I get the impression that your origens there are meant to remain important to the PCs. I would be unsuprized if to wrap up things (assuming you save the day) you have an opertunity to take highly placed roles back in Sasserine.

 

[Imaro]

You couldn't be further from the mark. I'm all about dangling multiple hooks in front of the PCs, and having multiple prepared adventure areas available which the PCs can choose from...even hex wilderness with stuff they can "stumble across" at encounter level. I use Dungeon adventures as a crutch for this, but they're extensively edited down (there's a lot of stuff you can cut out of these). It's a lot of work, but you can do that if you ditch your precious worldbuilding.

But I can generate just as many hooks and adventure sites through world building, and in creating a cohesive whole for these hooks...aren't you in fact worldbuilding? Or is your campaign world the type where PC's can be exploring a frozen tundra and walk ten feet over into a scorching dessert because it's the adventure that you prepared for tonight?

Open your eyes to the fact that worldbuilding encompasses adventure design in a more holistic fashion. I don't see how designing adventures PC's will never experience is any less wasteful than worldbuilding which was a crux of numerous previous posts by you. Please explain this to me, cause it's looking like in order to have a sandbox game, where players can explore what they want "wasted effort"(your words not mine) is necessary on either end of the spectrum. This in turn means you just prefer a certain way of "wasting your time" in comparison to others.

 

[Celebrim]

You couldn't be further from the mark. I'm all about dangling multiple hooks in front of the PCs, and having multiple prepared adventure areas available which the PCs can choose from...even hex wilderness with stuff they can "stumble across" at encounter level. I use Dungeon adventures as a crutch for this, but they're extensively edited down (there's a lot of stuff you can cut out of these). It's a lot of work, but you can do that if you ditch your precious worldbuilding.

I don't know. It sounds alot like worldbuilding to me. How can I separate mapping out wilderness areas and filling them with detail and ensuring that there are multiple prepared adventure areas from the normal process of world building, which involves mapping out wilderness areas and filling them with detail and ensuring there are are multiple prepared adventure areas?

The only possible difference is that the world builder worries about things like realistic river drainage, climate, demographics, ecologies and so forth while he's mapping out those features so that the creation will have the appearance of being logical and consistant. I'm assuming that at some level you are taking pains to make those hexes you mention mapping out seem logical and consistant?

If so, then I don't see how you can claim it isn't world building.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Do your players ever loose, do they ever die? Because if you killed my PC with a "character" totally created in the five seconds before battle started, with no real concrete factors except your guesstimation, then I'm through. Your telling a story and tricking the PC's into believing their choices have actual meaning...when in fact the results and consequences of their actions are based upon your whims. IMHO this smacks of writing a novel with the PC's along for the ride

How does "creating an adventure on the fly" yield "railroaded into a novel-writing session" in your head?

Players loose. Players die. It's not a "guestimation" to figure the necromancer king uses ghouls so if you fight the necromancer king you'll fight ghouls, and if the PC's go up against ghouls totally unprepared for the fight, well, it's their funeral (and eventual re-animation) I suppose.

Choices have actual meaning. You choose to pursue the guy in the WANTED poster, you catch him and maybe gain some cred in the local Town Watch. You choose to advance your thieves' guild, you contest the current Underworld King, go against his henchmen, maybe earn some recruits of your own.

Each path flows from the player's choice.

I mean, I can't very well improvise without a participant player out there throwing me a bone. A line, a motive, a goal, a scene, something...

With the simple archetype of "Necromancer King" you've establisehed that both feudalism, undead, a way to become undead, magic concerning the dead, there are "greater" and "lesser" forms of undead, certain undead have intelligence, others are slaves to stronger undead, etc. all exist in this campaign world...that's background and context right there.

True, but the Necromancer King came first and suggested all that. The world didn't tell me I needed X, I told the world I needed X, and adapted it to suit my needs. And it was all created with the needs of my players in my head (because it wouldn't be an issue if no one was interested in challenging a possible necromancer-king). And it all came within about 10 minutes. On the fly.

Which was really my point: you don't need to spend hours worldbuilding.

Another note is that with D&D 3.x's options for variations through multiclassing, numerous base classes, prestige classes, etc. There really aren't "archetypes per say. You can require your players conform to some "archetype by describing what it is they are through these combinations...but again that's background and context.

Which are all secondary considerations to the Archetype. There's no background and context before the archetype exists.

But really, we're talking about something totally different now than we were, namely that you can improvise all of that and have a perfectly good adventure. You don't need background and context before the game begins, so you don't need to spend hours working on an adventure that never gets played. Archetypes don't limit freedom, because they don't need any background to emerge from -- people will understand their basic background because they've seen it a million times before. It's the core of improv, it's the core of oral storytelling, it's the core of the vast majority of my D&D games: Do what you want, I'll make sense of it, feed it back to you. You react to it, feed it back to me.

If the crux of your argument is that I'd have to do as much wasted work if I allowed the PC's to pursue their thieves' guild dreams than to pursue the bad guy on the WANTED poster, making me guilty of "too much worldbuilding" unless I "railroad," your argument's crux is weak and unsupported (because I don't have to do any pre-prep work for either), and everything else is tangential.

That's not verisimilitude...Just a few questions my players would ask to shatter that real quick.

where is this kingdom of undead we've never heard of, and why haven't we heard about a whole kingdom of undead before??

Where do these "endless" bodies come from?

I could go on with the utter lack of belief just creating this on the fly would cause in my players, but I think the point is made.

#1: Far to the south in a land that was buried underground until this recent wave of earthquakes.

#2: How many people do you think died in that earthquake? Or were buried beneath the ground before it? Or died in that ancient empire?

That doesn't shatter anything. The questions just feed the beast. There is no point made. There's quite enough verisimilitude to be had with improvisational role-playing. You've played such games yourself, you say, so you know it to be true. You don't need to spend hours developing a setting for it to be rich, detailed, and realistic.

Nobody describes dessert as "dull".

It's not that complex of an analogy. It's just not what Harrison was saying.

No, it is. "Dull" is dull for the readers, e.g.: harmful to the reading experience. So the desert analogy would be traced to being harmful for the body. As a for instance.

"Why worldbuilding can be bad" =/= "why worldbuilding is bad".

Perhaps you thought it did?

Simple rules of English, old bean: "Why is worldbuidling bad? Worldbuilding is bad because of X."

Why worldbuidling is bad: X.

Just by being bad doesn't also mean it's not good, or that the badness can't be avoided. Desert is bad because it rots your teeth, but if you brush after you eat and don't eat much of it, you can avoid rotting your teeth. Worldbuilding is bad because it can get in the way of actual enjoyment, but if you focus on the storytelling and you sublimate worldbuilding for a greater process, you can still enjoy its many fruits.

Reading Comprehension is a good talent to develop.

Since worldbuilding is, by definition, the creation of a deep, rich setting, I would say that it is.

And, sorry, while I champion your right to play whatever type of game you want, I don't accept your say-so as evidence to the contrary.

:shrug: If you can't believe that someone's experiences with this game are that different from your own, I guess I can't convince ya.

However, there is a real difference between something planned and adjusted to meet the needs of planning, and something you are pulling out of your nether regions at the game table. Every game has stuff pulled out the nether regions, but planning ahead of time gives that stuff context and meaning. It isn't created in a vaccuum.

There's no such thing as a complete vacuum, man. There's always inspirational debris floating at the corners of your head.

If a DM is running a game that's as "off the cuff" as you and Kamikaze Midget are describing it appears that he wouldn't be spending much time at either activity.

I think that worldbuilding done during the game is still worldbuilding. Ditto with adventure-building. Where an improvisational game fits in is that it creates things in response to what is going on at the table, rather than before something happens, meaning that "creating something useless" is almost never an issue (because you wouldn't create it until there was a need for it). You're spending time doing it, just not much. I don't bake the cookies before the group tells me what cookies they want, so that way all the cookies get eaten.

And there... I'm not even speaking of winging game after game on-the-go and still make them feel believable and consistent. It is feasible, but I would count the activity of remembering what was played X sessions ago and make what you make up on the fly feel consistent with these past events a process of world-building of its own. Ergo, you cannot have consistency without world-building.

Unless I'm a natural talent at world-building so much so that I never really have had to gain any experience with it before leaping into improving it, all I needed was some lessons on how to create improv, which has to do with archetypes. Consistency happens as long as you adhere to what has come before and the overall conceits of your chosen archetypal figures.

It's a skill, and like any skill, it gets better with practice. But the same is true of DMing in general.

Whose to say my world can't? No one is saying you can't adjust your world...or GASP discuss what type of campaign you and your players want before the game starts so that the world is designed around the tropes you all want to expore.

You could say your world can't, but you're really the only one. So if you want it to, it does, and if you don't, it doesn't. And if you don't, but your players *do*, you've made the game less fun.

Oh yeah and this eliminates most of your argument about my world lessening fun, because it will be built to cater to what each player is looking for in a compromise sort of way.

Right, but that's only true of they tell you what they want before you spend your hours of development. Which works, but not everyone has that kind of prep time. You can do the same thing without hours of development right at the table itself just as easily.

You know this makes me wonder how an anything goes type of game continues once players begin to conflict on what is fun for them? Don't you have to make a compromise even when trying to do whatever for your players.

Same thing that happens in any other D&D game: some people get stage time now, some people get stage time later. The cleric doesn't like skulking around about the theives' guild, but we hit them later that night with a divinely ordained mission or something.

It's not some sort of alien entity from the Far Plane, here. It's just a different way to pretend to be an elf for a few hours: a way that doesn't require me to think about what it's like to be an elf for the days before I get to be an elf.

The game doesn't *need* to be an obsession like that. It can be, if you enjoy it, but it doesn't have to be, if you'd enjoy doing it on the fly more.

 

[Hussar]

So, if I understand you right, you believe that there is no chance that the PCs will ask about, or petition, the powerful of the city within those two adventures?

*snip*

(Also, I note that the AP isn't done yet, so we don't know how relevant the material is to the final chapter.)



Like that map in White Plume Mountain that mentions Dragotha. Utterly useless to the adventure at hand, and never did anyone any good.

Never mind that them modules actually come out and STATE that the PC's will not be returning to Sasserine.

Sure, if you want to make that information relavent, that's fine. But, that's changing what I said. You've moved the goalposts. That information is irrelavent to the setting in which it is presented. If you change the setting - such as running Sasserine until 12th level, that's fine, but, that's NOT what is presented. In other words, you've changed the story to fit your setting.

Again, mentioning a single word on a map is NOT world building. It's setting. It's creating atmosphere. However, spending pages detailing Dragotha when there is no chance that the players can visit Dragotha within the confines of the adventure is exactly the kind of thing I'm pointing at.

And, frankly, I have little interest in games where the PCs don't get to decide where to go and what to do, either as a player or as a DM. The idea that the DM picks the order of sections of the WLD is anathema to my style of DMing; let the players hear rumours of what is to come, and let them choose thier own course, says I.

And, again, this is not what I said. Detailing elements where the players can go is perfectly fine. It's better than fine actually, it's great. However, detailing elements that are completely extraneous to the adventure is not. So, having the entire WLD to choose from is great. Detailing what exists outside of the WLD when the players cannot interact with it is not.

DM: There are torn and tattered wanted posters for the bandit Grok strewn throughout the town proclaiming a reward and asking that any interested parties speak mith Mayor Feold.

Me(as a rogue): I want to find out who the head of the local thieve's guild is and see if I can join.

Again, non-linear design is NOT world building. It is perfectly reasonable to detail a thieves guild in a town. Particularly if your party contains a thief that might want to join a theive's guild. What is not groovy is detailing each and every member of the thieves guild for the past 100 years, which is what world building is all about. You need a history to world build after all. It isn't enough to simply have your 30 member thieves guild - we need what they've stolen, who they've talked to, what their history is - all dating back to day one when the guild was created.

THAT'S world buiding.

But that's not true. Harrison never said "avoid all worldbuilding." He said that the story must always triumph over worldbuilding. Worldbuilding can be positive, but it must be moderated by the actual need to tell a story. In Harrison's advice to writers, worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding is pointless and narcissistic nerding out.

Which is the point I've been making again and again.

Since worldbuilding is, by definition, the creation of a deep, rich setting, I would say that it is.

No, it isn't. Just saying that it is doesn't make it so. The creation of a deep rich setting is simply setting. We have a perfectly good word - setting. What do we need a new word in world building?

If so, then I don't see how you can claim it isn't world building.

Because world building does not equal creating setting. If I create a setting and the elements are relavent to the adventures within that setting, then that's nothing more than creating setting. A detailed setting sure, but, still just setting. World building is not only creating what is necessary for the plot or the adventure. It's adding in a number of extraneous NPC's that the players will never interact with. It's adding a population of Svirfneblin to the dungeon 400 years ago, who all vanished completely 305 years ago, leaving no trace. It's all the extraneous crap that seeds setting book after setting book.

Do we need the complete history of the ruling families of Sasserine in order to run the adventures? Do we need to know that the harbourmaster lost his older son years ago and his younger one isn't interested in taking the family business? That's what world building is. It's adding in all that extraneous detail that has little or nothing to do with the plot.

The first pages of the original Isle of Dread module included what would later become Mystara. Those countries had absolutely no effect on the module. None. The information was entirely extraneous. That's world building.

Dragon's Monster Ecologies are articles that I've always loved. I really have. But, I love them because I'm a clodding nerd, not because they add anything to the game or the adventures that I run. They are completely unnecessary to run any creature in D&D. I love the articles, I really do. But that doesn't mean that they are a complete indulgence on my part.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hussar, I love you as much as a man can love a digitized message board avatar of another man (so no butt stuff), but I'm going to have to disagree with your definition of worldbuilding.

It seems to me that, as Harrison uses it, worldbuilding *is* the same thing as setting creation.

Which is bad, because it can get in the way of telling a good story.

But it is also good, because it can be used instead to aid the telling of a good story.

So as long as storytelling triumphs over the "great clomping foot," worldbuilding is positive.

IMHO, for D&D, it can be positive even when storytelling *doesn't* triumph, because sometimes us great clomping nerds just like those bits of fantastic trivia.

And a more improvisational style of DMing doesn't allow worldbuilding to get in the way of the game at all, while using it lightly to aid in the telling of a story.

So, again, you don't need to spend hours developing a setting (or building a world) to have a rollicking good campaign that has enough verisimilitude and richness to satisfy anyone...

...anyone who isn't a great, clomping nerd about it anyway.