Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[eayres33]

Overdoing World building is putting out a book on your world's history before putting out the sixth novel in your series...

You win the internet for the day, please pick up your prize at booth 8.

 

[Hussar]

Isle of Dread also has a large-scale hex map in the middle that can be (and IME has been) used as the base setting for an entire campaign; and in that part does more useful and useable worldbuilding than any other early-era module I can think of.

Lan-"the campaign (not mine) I speak of that's based on that map started in 1981 and - now in its third iteration - is still going today"-efan

Fair enough. And, yes, you ARE going to have to develop the setting in order to run a campaign. Of course you are. Whether you do that purely through the DM beforehand, or by the players during play or some combination of both, by the end of the campaign, you're going to have a considerable amount of setting.

Which is fine and dandy. It's in the service to the game. There's a dragon turtle hanging around one of the bays, cool, great. That's, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] calls it, a situation to be dealt with.

But, and this is where the but comes as you probably knew it would, if I go out and detail the history of that dragon turtle, and that history has little or nothing to do with the campaign at hand, THAT'S what I'm calling world building. It's not necessary, probably won't come up in game, and is largely self indulgent. I use this example, because that's precisely what Paizo did when it remade the Isle of Dread for 3e with the Savage Tide AP. In "The Lightless Depths", Dungeon 144, there's a four PAGE writeup of background notes, 8 point, three column, before you even get to the encounter with Emraag. We're talking about somewhere in the neighbourhood of two THOUSAND words detailing background that will most likely take about ten seconds to talk about at the table.

For example, the Adventure Background (for an adventure that mostly revolves around bribing a Dragon Turtle to allow ships to pass), starts with:

Ages ago, the Olman empire spanned vast reaches of the Vohoun Ocean and the continents to either side. Perhaps their greatest achievement was the city of Thanaclan, a masterpiece of lakes and stone zuggurats built high on a remote island's central mesa. They were a wise and powerful people, with abilities far beyond their current descendants.

It goes on this way for about three quarters of the page, at an estimate, about 500 words long. All completely superfluous information that the players will almost certainly never learn and most likely never give the slightest toss about.

THAT'S what I'm talking about when I say world building is a self indulgent waste of time.

 

[pemerton]

I find this an odd take since your other thread on world building and how others play D&D seems to be focused on the exact verbiage that players and GM’s use. A lot of your post/threads seem to revolve around correct and proper language use so this seems off.

I care a lot about the techniques of RPGing, but I don't generally care too much about terminology (provided there is clarity). For instance, a little way upthread I suggested that, at least for the purposes of this thread, there is no interesting difference between "story now" and "no myth".

I'm not really sure what you've got in mind that runs the contrary way.

 

[pemerton]

So in your view worldbuilding - as opposed to setting-building - only starts when you're trying to, say, determine the distance and terrain between the Keep and the Threshold region from B-10 or the Village of Hommlet from T-1? If so, that works too.

Well, as I recently replied to [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION], I don't think of world building in terms of amount. I think of it in terms of method.

The traditional, and in my view far-and-away most common, way of thinking about worldbuilding for RPGing is that the GM does it, often (even typically) in advance of play, and more-or-less independently of the players, and even moreso independently of any particular moment of play. (So maybe the players contribute in session zero, but not afterwards.)

That method of worldbuilding not only establishes a setting - in virtue of doing that, it also establishes a function for that setting and a way that it will be used. (This has been discussed in detail in the other thread.)

There are other ways of establishing setting than this sort of GM-worldbuilding. And of course presenting a situation also establishes some setting (eg that a deceptive evil priest exists). It's these different methods for establishing setting, which give it a different function in play, that I care about.

Ah, but to make that priest complete you'll need to know or determine which deity he's a cleric to; and whether said deity would be cool with him being so deceptive...and the setting/world-building process can spiral outwards from there.

I'm not that interested in who the cleric's god is unless that matters to the situation - I don't think, any time I've ever run the Keep, it's been more than colour. If one of the players wants to try and establish some sort of conflict between priest and god over the priest's lying ways then s/he could do so, but for me it's never come up in play.

In other words, the "spiralling" that you describe has never happened to me. What has happened is attempts to identify who else he has corrupted, how to stop the cult, etc. But that doesn't need to be known in advance of play.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not that interested in who the cleric's god is unless that matters to the situation - I don't think, any time I've ever run the Keep, it's been more than colour. If one of the players wants to try and establish some sort of conflict between priest and god over the priest's lying ways then s/he could do so, but for me it's never come up in play.

I certainly would be, both as DM and player; particularly if that cleric's deity is in the same pantheon as any PC clerics' deities - which was the case when I ran it: the evil cleric was to Ares and the party had (among others who came and went) a Demeter cleric, both from the local-to-the-region Greek-based pantheon.

Which also played nicely into my attempts to set Ares up as a long-term quasi-villain much like his role in Xena-Hercules.

 

[pemerton]

I certainly would be, both as DM and player

Well, both times I've run it the priest's god has been Chemosh. But as I say, this is just colour.

 

[billd91]

Fair enough. And, yes, you ARE going to have to develop the setting in order to run a campaign. Of course you are. Whether you do that purely through the DM beforehand, or by the players during play or some combination of both, by the end of the campaign, you're going to have a considerable amount of setting.

Which is fine and dandy. It's in the service to the game. There's a dragon turtle hanging around one of the bays, cool, great. That's, as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] calls it, a situation to be dealt with.

But, and this is where the but comes as you probably knew it would, if I go out and detail the history of that dragon turtle, and that history has little or nothing to do with the campaign at hand, THAT'S what I'm calling world building. It's not necessary, probably won't come up in game, and is largely self indulgent. I use this example, because that's precisely what Paizo did when it remade the Isle of Dread for 3e with the Savage Tide AP. In "The Lightless Depths", Dungeon 144, there's a four PAGE writeup of background notes, 8 point, three column, before you even get to the encounter with Emraag. We're talking about somewhere in the neighbourhood of two THOUSAND words detailing background that will most likely take about ten seconds to talk about at the table.

For example, the Adventure Background (for an adventure that mostly revolves around bribing a Dragon Turtle to allow ships to pass), starts with: <snipped quote>



It goes on this way for about three quarters of the page, at an estimate, about 500 words long. All completely superfluous information that the players will almost certainly never learn and most likely never give the slightest toss about.

Completely superfluous to whom? You, maybe. But don't assume your experience is the same as everyone's or defines the need of, in this case, the publication. Paizo learned fairly early on that not everyone buys adventures to play them or run them. They found that lots of people buy them simply to read them. Sometimes it's just for fun, sometimes I'm sure it sparks creativity that will be used in other campaigns. Published adventures and supplements have multiple demands to fill. And in this case as well, it's part way through a serialized adventure in which they couldn't count on the reader having purchased or read the preceding installments - that certainly expands the need for the backup notes.

Add to all that, this is an encounter significantly above the party's expected level by that point in the campaign. It's pretty difficult to treat it as your basic encounter/sack of hit points. Many of those background notes also serve as advice to a GM, who may not have had to deal with this sort of thing before or often, in handling encounters that could quickly overwhelm the PCs.

 

[Maxperson]

(This is related to my sense, in the RPG context, that "worldbuilding" is generally understood to be something that the GM does as part of the preparation for play.)

I would write that as. Worldbuilding is understood to be something that generally the DM does as part of the preparation for play. I moved the generally, because as part of player backgrounds they will often do a brief write up on the village that they are from. They name it, let me know where in the world it is, give some names of NPCs and what they do, with perhaps some traits. No setting has every village detailed out, so this is not a problem for the players to do and it involves worldbuilding that the DM isn't doing.

 

[Maxperson]

Please show me where I said anything about planet. I think you have me confused with another poster.

So now you're admitting that worldbuilding involves things much smaller in scope, like say a country or city. Awesome!

 

[Maxperson]

Ok, let's lob the ball back here.

Do you see a distinction between the activity being done in creating the setting of something like Keep on the Borderlands and the Village of Hommlet?

Now, if you do see a distinction, which obviously I do, how would you define the distinction? A little world building and a lot of world building? I dunno. I don't know how to define what I see as pretty clearly two very different approaches to adventure and game world design.

Isle of Dread, for example, strongly follows the Keep on the Borderlands model. You have a lost island, with natives that are barely defined, pirates that are given zero background, and a lost temple that has virtually no actual description of its history or its inhabitants.

The difference between those is just a matter of amount. One has more worldbuilding involved in its creation than the other.

So, fair enough, you don't want me to make a distinction between setting and world building, so, how would you define it and I'll use your definitions so I can get to the freaking point instead of wasting time on this semantic drivel.

There is a distinction. Setting is the finished product. Worldbuilding is the process used to get to a setting.