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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3515816" data-attributes="member: 42582">This afternoon I was looking through some notes for my old Greyhawk campaign, setting out an integrated theology for a bunch of Greyhawk deities based loosely on debates between realists and idealists in pre-Twentieth Century metaphysics and philosophy of mind.Is this an example of pointless worldbuilding? None of the players in that campaign was a philosopher, and we never had a cleric PC, so most of this detail never really came out in play. On the other hand, it gave me the basis for presenting the world and its NPCs to my players, and one thing that they enjoyed about the campaign was a degree of depth - both of detail and theme - which allowed them to build plots and plans and relationships of a high degree of complexity.My GMing style at the table is very much to wing the details, joining together locations or vignettes from various modules or campaign settings and letting my players do the work of building a plot. Often, this also invovles converting AD&D or D20 material to Rolemaster on the fly. I find that the time spent worldbuilding supports this sort of play - it gives me the raw material to work from as a GM. And I think that that time is less time, and easier, than adventure design, because it is less technical, and really just involves adapting bits and pieces of history or philosophy that I'm already thinking about to a pre-published set of maps and setting descriptions - Greyhawk, or for our current campaign Kara-Tur (where the behind-the-scenes worldbuilding involves competing interpretations of Buddhist teachings on enlilghtenment and emptiness - I've found it surprisingly easiy to integrate the Cthulhu-esque elements of the Freeport Trilogy, shorn of its railroading, into this previously developed framework for the campaign).A fiinal comment on adventure building: at the moment I'm reading Expedition to the Demon Web Pits. *SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW*One of the authors is Wolfgang Baur, who seems to have a pretty good reputation. But with every page, I'm just amazed by the railroading in this module.  Perhaps I'm out of touch with contemporary adventure design - it's the first Wizards module I've bought for a few years.But I look at what the authors assume players will have their characters do more or less cause the GM says so (through a one-dimensional NPC puppet) and I try to imagine what would happen if I ran this adventure as written, with my group. They would never take the bait, and the adventure would never get off the ground.Hence my hesitation to design adventures, in the sense of sequences of plot for the players to work their way through. I prefer to have a collection of NPCs and settings - and I can buy or download these much more easily than writing my own - and then to let the allies and adversaries for the campaign evolve through play and the players' own choices, and to rely on my sense of the campaign background to guide me in linking it all together as the session actually unfolds.To use some GNS terminology, I think that this produces a type of primarily simulationist play, but with some satisfaction also of the players' narrativist urges, as they have a significant role in determining the way in which thematic content emerges, and their PCs relate to it. (There's quite a bit of gamism there also, but that tends to be confined to character building - which RM supports to a high degree - and to emerge much less during play itself.)</blockquote>

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