Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[I'm A Banana]

Your talking rules...I'm talking Improv.

It's the same thing: It's pretty rude for a player to tell a DM how they should be running their game. The DM is the judge. I might point out specific issues if I have them, offer suggestions if asked, but I'm not going to tell the DM he's doing it wrong. Rule 0 says he ain't.

We go to hunt down that bandit and he kills my character with some feat he isn't powerful enough to have or because he has way more hit points...or whatever, I as a participant in the game don't have a right to say something? Wow when did D&D become a tyranny?

Sure, point out that "It's surprising that he's doing so little damage, yet he has the STR score for Cleave..." But tell the DM that "He can't do that, he doesn't have the STR for cleave!" is a problem.

But you're talking about rules, I'm talking about Improv.

Wow, we have totally different views on how this thread has gone. What I've seen is a "one true way" about worldbuilding being a "waste of time". Then I've seen those who've found it enhances their game in ways defend against steady attacks against their "method" and it's advantages. Haven't really seen anyone state you have to do worldbuilding, only why they do worldbuilding and why it isn't a waste for them.

My case has, for several pages now, been that Harrison's reasons kind of fall apart because D&D isn't ultimately about crafting good fiction, it's about having fun, and if a great clomping nerd has fun doing way too much worldbuilding, that's fine by me. Hussar seems to take a similar position: Setting porn is an indulgence, not a necessity.

People seem to be saying that it *is* a necessity, and that your campaign suffers verisimilitude and depth and richness if you *don't* indulge in setting porn.

That's something I, at least, very much disagree with.

I believe that it does work just fine, relative to you and your group. I just don't believe that it produces comprable results (in terms of depth, detail, or consistency) relative to anyone actually doing prep work.

EDIT: And really, my belief doesn't affect how your game works one way or another. If you believe that improv isn't improved by prep work, why should you care that I say it is?

I'd be comfortable with that if you weren't wrong, but there's no real good way to show this method online. I mean, you could post a random party of adventurers and I'd post enough material for an initial campaign location and some initial adventures (as I have been giving examples of throughout this thread), but that still doesn't capture the real before-your-eyes evolution of an improv-heavy game. And besides which, shouldn't be necessary if you believe that I am as objective a judge of depth, detail, and consistency as you are. If you don't believe that, that's fine, but at least admit that you're rejecting evidence because you're not sure you can believe the source, rather than claiming somehow that my position is simply objectively false.

 

[Darth Shoju]

Unless the players are keen-eyed critics eager to find a chink in the DMs armor, or great clomping nerds who are only satisfied by setting porn, in which case they're as bad as rules lawyers: "You're playing this game wrong."

If all of the players enjoy "setting porn" and you are trying to force them to enjoy adventures, aren't *you* guilty of telling them that they are playing the game wrong?

 

[Raven Crowking]

If you don't believe that, that's fine, but at least admit that you're rejecting evidence because you're not sure you can believe the source, rather than claiming somehow that my position is simply objectively false.

Show me where I did say that your position is s simply objectively false, and I'll admit that was an error.

Of course, you won't be able to do it, because I didn't say it. I said I find it as believable as I do sasquatch, but I could be wrong about bigfoot, and I could be wrong about you. I also invited you to one day show me I am wrong. You declined.

RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

Why don't we discuss what bad worldbuilding is, why it happens, common pitfalls, etc. That would be more interesting to me than going round-and-round on this same issue.

From now on, I'm simply going to pretend that we all understand worldbuilding = creating setting, even if only for the purposes of this thread, and I am going to limit my posts to dealing with what bad worldbuilding is, why it happens, common pitfalls, etc. Because LostSoul is right, this is going nowhere.

Rounser, when you decide to fill the gap with an encounter presentation/creation thread, please link to it here so that I can be sure to participate.

RC

 

[Darth Shoju]

Where I take issue is when people insist that it must be this way for it to be rich, detailed, believable, and lively -- that you need prep work to have a world worthy of dedication and lifelong study. Whether you do the thinking alone in a room and write it down and do extensive research, or whether you do the thinking in a room full of people and use archetypes and twists and mental names in a hat to formulate whatever background you require, you can create a setting that lives and breathes with all the lungwork one needs.

I have no problem believing that you can improv a session and have your players have fun with that. I have no problem believing that you don't need hours of prep-work to have a fun game. I do have a problem believing that you can improv a setting that is just as deep as someone who has put hours into developing one ahead of time. Now, if that pre-made setting only gets used in a couple of sessions of play and thus never developed further, while you improv a setting up by developing it over many many sessions, then yes, ultimately they could be equivalent (but I'd suspect at some point you'd want to start writing some of the developed stuff down to keep it consistent, unless you have a hell of a memory )

So is a pre-planned setting necessary to have fun at the table? No, but personally I'd find it easier to do some work before-hand than try and improv my way through and still keep it consistent over multiple sessions. But I'm not going to say it is impossible.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If all of the players enjoy "setting porn" and you are trying to force them to enjoy adventures, aren't *you* guilty of telling them that they are playing the game wrong?

Yeah, you are. You're being a bad DM just as the player who demands to play a Warforged Ninja in the 7th Sea when the DM says "no" is being a bad player.

It's a problem on either side of the screen, but the DM, as authority, has the "buck stops here" command. If they say this guy with a 8 STR can Cleave, well, they're the DM. If it ruins the game for me, I should probably let them know at a good time (e.g.: not during the game) and maybe step up and DM myself if they don't take my advice.

 

[Darth Shoju]

And not a single encounter detailed out of any of that. No stats, nothing written up in a usable form. This isn't adventure design as such, it's just brainstorming ideas with no follow-through.

I'm afraid I don't see that as a problem. As far as I'm concerned, an encounter should be made with your group of PCs in mind. Someone creating an encounter in detail and posting it up is little use to me. Someone coming up with a cool concept/location etc for an encounter is useful, and I have seen threads on those before.

 

[Darth Shoju]

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).

This actually sounds like a great beginning to planning a campaign to me, and a method I've been planning on trying out for my next campaign. However, I will also be doing so in conjunction with a published setting (Kalamar) so I can bring the level of detail and setting-interaction I and my players need. Personally, I can't just get by playing a generic fighter anymore; I need to be a person from somewhere. I enjoy playing my character in the adventure, reacting to people and situations how I think he would; to do so I need some setting information on where he's from and what the places he's going to are like. To do that we need to do a little worldbuilding IMO. I could probably play a more generic game if the adventure is fun, but my long-term enjoyment would suffer I think. YMMV naturally.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Here's an example of bad worldbuilding that is a DM problem: The DM creates a world in which only one adventure is possible; if the players decide not to follow that adventure, there is nothing for them to do. Here is another example: The DM creates a 60-page document of information on the world and tells the players to read it because it is important to the setting; little if anything in the document ever sees play. Third example: The world doesn't make enough sense for the PCs to navigate with any confidence, as when a paladin has his paladinhood revoked for not murdering goblin children, and the DM has never before mentioned this take on "Lawful Good". Final example: The DM tells the players that they are going to play in a Conaneque game; when the players show up characters in hand, the DM tells them there are no humans in the setting, and they should have made wizards.

LostSoul, is there any objection if we start a more productive conversation using these examples?

 

[I'm A Banana]

So is a pre-planned setting necessary to have fun at the table? No, but personally I'd find it easier to do some work before-hand than try and improv my way through and still keep it consistent over multiple sessions. But I'm not going to say it is impossible.

Makes perfect sense to me. You're probably like the majority of DMs that way: a few notes, and away you go.

I do have a problem believing that you can improv a setting that is just as deep as someone who has put hours into developing one ahead of time.

You know all the things you think of before the game?

I think of them at the game.

It takes but a second to have a thought, another 5-10 to express it. Perhaps a minute or two to consider if it would be a good addition and if it contradicts anything that has come before. You write it down before and reference it later. I write it down at the time, and reference it before I think of the next step.

I've just spent a lot of time honing my ability to think consistently and creatively on my feet to the point where creating a world on the fly isn't a problem. Anyone can do it.

Does that make it easier to envision? Or does it actually take people more than a few minutes to think up the concept of a villain or an adventure and reference the book it's in?

Stat work can make it long, but I don't work on stats -- I use them out of books, and I don't care about getting the numbers spot-on, so I can fudge NPC's out of the DMG (though that makes something like the NPC stats from MMIV amazingly useful for me).

Show me where I did say that your position is s simply objectively false, and I'll admit that was an error.

Of course, you won't be able to do it, because I didn't say it. I said I find it as believable as I do sasquatch, but I could be wrong about bigfoot, and I could be wrong about you. I also invited you to one day show me I am wrong. You declined.

Ah, I misspoke. You did say my position is unsupported by actual evidence (like bigfoot), and that you won't believe it without proof. So rather than saying it's totally false, you simply dismissed me as some guy with a fuzzy video, irrelevant to your world.

Regardless, the thrust of that statement is that dismissing my position, reducing it to a level of speculation and bigfoot sightings, is pretty much based on, as far as I can tell, you judging me to not be as good a judge of my own games as I assume every other DM is, simply because it is alien to your experience.

I say it is, you say prove it, I say I shouldn't have to prove it -- I don't ask you to prove that setting bibles don't interfere with adventure design because I assume you know what you're doing -- I assume you can run just as flexible and action-packed an adventure as any improved game. Why should I have to prove that improv doesn't interfere with depth? Why can't you assume I can run just as deep and worldly a setting as any pre-prepped game? Why don't I get the credit of knowing what I'm doing at a game table?

Just because I'm appearing to drive with my legs crossed doesn't mean I'm more likely to get in an accident. Just because it's *different* doesn't mean it's not as good.

I'm more than willing to cede that the style isn't for everyone, and that it certainly is a different experience from mostly pre-prep, but I'm not willing to cede that it's somehow a paler experience by logical necessity. A 250 page setting bible can still lead to great action adventures and flexibility and player impact, if done right. A totally improvised setting can still lead to great setting development and campaign, presence, if done right. I assume most who love pre-prep still give their players the adventure and flexibility they demand. I'm a little insulted that I can't be given the same credit without having to prove myself through some trial.