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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3515525" data-attributes="member: 22779">Wow, took this many pages to bring in the comparison to video games Godwin.  Nice.  Look, I've said it before, but I'll say it again.  I am not stating that setting is bad.  That would be stupid.  You need a setting, whether it be a massive dungeon, outdoor wilderness or steampunk city or whatever.  That goes without saying.  However, the idea that adventure design is all important is by no means an archaic concept.  You cannot play without an adventure of some sort, even if it's just a blank sheet of graph paper and a random encounter chart.  At some point you would have to create that random encounter chart and thus, setting.  You can have all the setting books in the world but, without an adventure, what you have are some pretty books.  Until such time as you sit down and do the nuts and bolts of designing an (or several) adventure (or adventures), nothing is going to happen at your gaming table.  No matter how you slice it, adventure design is the primary purpose of the DM.  He can write all the backstory to his campaign world that he likes, but, until that adventure gets made, nothing happens.  All the players can do is ooh and ahh about how smart their DM is to create such interesting campaign worlds.Not exactly my idea of a fun night.You mention top selling video games.  Do people play World of Warcraft to be wowed about the history of Azeroth or do they play to kill stuff and take the treasure?  I'm thinking that if you removed the combat aspects from FF or WOW, you wouldn't have too many players.  While Myst was fun for a while, it certainly never approached the levels of popularity that WOW has.Again, once more.Setting =/= World buiding.All stories have setting but not all stories have world building, thus there must be something different about the two.  IMO, the difference is how relavent the ideas are to the plot of the story.  If it is relavent, then it is setting, if it's not, or at least not terribly, relavent, then it's world building.Putting Dragotha on the edge of the player's map in White Plume Mountain is the equivalent of saying "Here be Dragyns" (Which is somewhat ironic considering what came later <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )  It fits with the atmosphere of the adventure where the players are traveling to unknown parts to face whatever.  It becomes world building if, in White Plume Mountain, the author had spent pages detailing Dragotha when you cannot actually go there within the context of the module.So, again, there is a spectrum.  At one end you have numerous stories with little setting at all and at the other you have books which are all setting like the Star Trek Tech Manuals.  World building is an indulgence.  It is mostly unnecessary.</blockquote>

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