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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThirdWizard" data-source="post: 3459910" data-attributes="member: 12037">World building is not verisimilitude and verisimilitude is not world building.You can have one without the other in both directions. This is true of D&D and this is even more true of fiction. A writer can make allusions to things that don't even exist in his mind as fleshed out concepts and still create provocative fiction. You can tease readers with far away places and concepts all the while creating a very real "living and breathing" world, without ever actually writing out anything about those far away places or societies or anything else you mention in your writing.Why? Because no one is going to call you on it in fiction, because they can't. They aren't there. If you create a scene with your hero visiting an alien bar where he notes some aliens trying to pedal something called "worm sand" because he wouldn't go near it after what it did to a friend of his, you don't have to know what it did, who the aliens are, or what his friend's name is. And, if you aren't going to mention it in your work, why detail it at all? It adds verisimilitude without work. That's always a good thing.Later, if you find it would be beneficial to the story, you can go back and expand on it. I'm of the school of thought that says it is better to not have it defined for this exact purpose. What would be best for the story, I think, is often not what you originally created, because now you can tailor it to a specific plot thread that might not have even existed when you originally created it. I do this all the time in D&D. I create lots of things that are just throw away at the time, but keep them in mind for the future. When I find something that fits, I weave it back into the adventure and it looks like I had that planned all along. For example, I recently had an NPC that the PCs work with often dissapear, no one knowing where he went, though he said something about important business. I had no idea why he was gone. I just knew that at some point in the future, I would find a place for him to jump back into the story dramatically. And, now I have.You can do this for all kinds of setting elements. Just because there's an NPC who the PCs interact with from a distant country doesn't mean you have to define things about that country, and it certainly doesn't mean you should design anything about the country from a writing perspective (as opposed to D&D). You can note some oddities about him and move on. When the PCs finally go visit the country, then you can expand on it, but there's little reason to do so before then. That goes triple or quadruple for writing.</blockquote>

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