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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Frozen DM" data-source="post: 3460973" data-attributes="member: 35841">These examples you cite are, in my opinion, perfect points supporting Harrison's argument. First to address Jordan and Goodkind. I think others have already offered accurate criticisms of their work. The fact is, the "world-building" does little more than pad the books with pointless detail. Both series continue to wander from point A to point B, but have managed to hit points in about 15 different alphabets in the mean time. But I digress, I'm more interested in addressing your other two examples. Serenity/Firefly (as wonderful as it is) is hardly a poster-child for "world-building". There is a huge difference between detail-oriented world-building, where every element of the world is defined into the smallest detail, and keeping a consistent tone. Do you really think Joss Whedon really spent hours detailing the political structure of the Alliance? Mapping out every operation and combat theatre of the Unification War? Hell, do you even think he knew the names of the commanding officers in the Battle of Serenity Valley? Hardly. His writers created a world consistent with a specific genre/style, did their best not to contradict established events in the series and, otherwise, would just make stuff up as it came along. I doubt most of the planet's in the series were thought of ahead of time, but each week a new world was needed, so a new one was created. They didn't even keep character names consistent between original story bible and movie. Harrison's criticism is not that authors spend too much time crafting internally consistent stories/settings, but that too much time is spent on minutia that is not relevant to the story at hand.Same goes for Star Wars. It's a very simple universe("world") with little real depth or detail. Characters are broad archetypes with only enough surface detail to let audiences accept them. The setting and worlds were created in the same manner. Desert-planet, water-planet, jungle-planet, ice-planet. These are hardly detailed setting elements. Again, Lucas created just enough of the world to tell his story. And that's all most authors need to do. GM's need to do a bit more, granted, but not to the extent some claim is necessary. There is nothing wrong with that, I do it to. I love world-building and creating detailed back-stories for the setting. But I don't believe for a minute that my efforts at world-building have a significant impact on the quality of my game. It's an intellectual exercise nothing more. If your players are visiting a dwarven fortress, it's enough to know the layout, the major NPC's and maybe a few flavour elements. Knowing the names and lineage of every ruler dating back 2000+ years, is a bit much. But this is the type of detail some GM's (and authors) seem to think actually adds to the story. I really don't think it does. The way I see it, you should craft only what is needed to tell your story. This is the approach I'm taking in the newest campaign I'm putting together. I have the core story, and I'm creating the setting around that. The only races I am using are those that fit the needs of the story. I'm not detailing any elements of the world not directly connected to this story. If the player's ask about something unrelated, I'll make something up, write it down and hope I can keep it consistent later on.</blockquote>

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