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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 3480152" data-attributes="member: 926">I enjoy worldbuilding.  My friends who play in my world also enjoy the worldbuilding I have done and the detailed setting I have crafted.I think that adventures should be tailored to fit into the setting they are set in.  An adventure set in the Forgotten Realms should be different than an adventure set in Greyhawk, and an Eberron adventure should be different than a Dark Sun adventure.  I think that adventures that are generic enough to be placed in any setting will be inherently boring because they are so generic and lack the background and history of a setting to anchor them.  I think that PCs should be tailored to fit into a setting and it's cultures and history.  I don't think a setting should be altered to fit the PCs.  Making allowances for special characters is OK, but when every character is an oddball that doesn't fit the setting than the game becomes ridiculous and not enjoyable to me.  Setting is almost a character in it's own right to me; every setting has it's own flavor and style that enriches it, or at least they should, in my opinion.  When a game is set in a featureless world where any idea imaginable is allowed it becomes a chaotic mish-mash that doesn't appeal to me in the least.    I think that building and detailing a world will free a DM from the need to have adventures written in advance, and the very idea of having adventures written in advance is railroading in it's purest form; how do you know what the PCs are going to do and where they are going to be well enough to have adventures pre-planned unless you railroad them onto a set path?  Having a well detailed world allows a DM to let the PCs go where they want and do what they want because every location is already in place and detailed, just waiting for the PCs to go there, while having pre-set adventures means that the PCs MUST be at the location of the adventure, or that the adventure is so generic that it can be placed anywhere (which would mean it is a dull and shallow adventure, to me.)  Look at it this way: which episodes of a TV series, lets say the X-Files, are more interesting; the "setting" episodes, which explored the Conspiracy and the history of Mulder and the aliens, or the "Monster of the Week" episodes, which were one-shot stand-alone episodes that had little to no impact on the story-arc of the series?  Or, even more basically, which shows are more interesting; shows like Lost and Babylon 5, which have an unfolding plot in a detailed setting, or serialized shows like Seinfeld and most of Star Trek,  in which episodes could essentially be viewed in any order and there is little to no plot development throughout the series?     It's entirely a matter of taste which kind you like, but I vastly prefer the shows with a rich background and unfolding plot; the same way I vastly prefer games that integrate with their setting and have a rich an detailed backstory.The blog post was nothing more than a statement of personal preference using snarky language, but it then went on to insult anyone who doesn't follow his personal preference by calling them boring, plodding nerds.  This reduced it to a meaningless rant.  I can just as easily say that anyone who doesn't share my preferences in gaming or fiction is a drooling imbecile, but I wont, because I recognize and respect that different people have different tastes, and there is no objective way to say which is better.  However, I can say that people who call others names for not sharing their personal idiosyncrasies are juvenile.</blockquote>

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