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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3512840" data-attributes="member: 22779">And, really, I think we are actually closer in agreement than it might appear.  I'm all for exactly what you are talking about.  Put big red signs on the adventures that say, "This is important, if they miss this, then add in these things to help you along".  Or something like that.  Particularly in an urban environment where the players can get buried behind the large amount of choices that they have.  And, really, what someone does on their own time is their own business.  You're right, if it's not distracting from the game at hand, who cares how much world building is going on.  But, and I think I've been harping on this, the problem comes when DM's try to justify the amount of work that they've done by making it important in the game.When I said that TheShaman was fine for giving his players the option of visiting 20 different systems,　I certainly meant it.  However, and this is where worldbuilding triumphs over plot, if the DM decides that he's done all this work, so the players bloody well better care about it, then we have a problem.Hey, honestly, I love world building.  I wear my great clodding boots of nerdism with pride.  But, that doesn't stop me from thinking that there are a huge number of fantasy trilogies out there that could be condensed into one or two volumes by stripping out all the extraneous crap that shows off how smart the author is.  Someone mentioned Perdito Street Station and the Khepri.  Very good example.  Great book that could have been a much better read if the character whose history is built up over pages and pages doesn't vanish halfway through the novel only to reappear in the last chapter.We could have done without a lot of the Khepri life cycle stuff.  It was completely extraneous.  It simply padded the pagecount.There's a number of gaming supplements that suffer from the same thing.  We don't need fifteen pages detailing a city when the players are only going to be there for a very, very small amount of time.  Conversely, giving three pages of details of a town where the players will be stationed for almost half the campaign is probably just about right.  Considering that the first module featuring Farshore actually FEATURES Farshore.  Every one of the NPC's detailed has a reasonable chance of interacting with the PC's on some level.  There's almost no extraneous information there.  The terrain, the background, the people, are all necessary for the adventure and the ones following.  To me, that's a pretty decent example of what I'm talking about.  The difference in the spectrum with The Lottery on one end and The Star Trek Enterprise Tech Manual on the other.  There is no real line where setting becomes world building, just like there's no real line where art becomes porn.  We can just point to certain things on the way and say that one is one or the other.  A book which details every room on the Star Ship Enterprise is world building.  It might even be interesting to some people.  But, for me, I would much prefer stories in which the Enterprise is simply the place where the action happens.</blockquote>

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