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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3542237" data-attributes="member: 30001">You guys are always having opinions about what people are thinking that they're not saying.  I think that's a waste of time.  I can see how it's easy to be pedantic in a situation where someone is splitting hairs so fine over distinctions between world and setting.  When I read your definitions literally, I find the distinctions between world-building and setting creation to be insignificant.  When I try to interpret the spirit of what you intend based on your examples, I find your defintions to be misleading at best.So if I write a 600 page setting bible, and I say that I'm actually capable of 1200 pages of detail, then obviously I'm not creating the world in as much detail as possible and so by your definition I'm not world building.  Yet you don't really reference that situation in your examples, instead concluding, based on the 600 page document alone that it's world-building.  IMO if one were to take your definitions seriously, then the document in itself is not enough information to define what's going on.Your definition is extremely unintuitive, I'm not sure how you painted yourself into this corner.  When I'm "fixing my car", am I trying to make my car run as well as possible, or just fixing some problems so it will run?  Who knows, and who cares?  Why does your definition rely on someone's motive, and yet the words used imply nothing other than action.  "World building" intuitively would mean "building a world" - adding all this other stuff about motive you would think would require more precise language.   Do they?  You guys are barely paying attention to what we're saying it seems.You're not really capable of knowing what the "plot" is in a cooperative game like DnD unless you're going to railroad players into YOUR particular plot as a DM.  That's why the issue of railroading keeps coming up.  It's a logical (your protests of being misquoted aside) result of saying that anything that you don't use for the adventure is superfluous - and worse even. A previous poster has already made the case for why you, as a DM, don't really know what elements are going to be used for an adventure.  Therefore you don't really know how to define what you've created, whether it's extraneous or not.  At best there's a "% likelihood" guestimate that you could make.  But if that's the case it hardly seems rational to level accusations of "ego" at people that try to prepare material in order to give their players more choice.   Calling the needs "greater" IMO doesn't do justice to the fundemental differences between novels and DnD.  Then again, one example of a DM that doesn't really see much difference is a railroad DM, which I suppose is the reason that it keeps coming back to that.  All world building, by your definition, is unecessary and extreme, so highlighting an "extreme" within an extreme seems AFAICT to be unecessary and I think it reinforces the confusion with your definition.You're not in a position to label any element as extraneous for someone else's campaign with such confidence and prejudice.  And in "extreme" situations like the shape of windows, why bother?  I don't think such things are representative of most campaign setting supplements.I would say most of the rulebooks are devoted to adventure design, or at least the process of resolving conflict, which takes place within the adventure.  The other things I think you could mean by "adventure design" don't belong in a rulebook IMO.Plus, it's hard to say something universal about adventures.  You got traps, monsters, walls, features, hardnesses of objects, etc.  They can't very well put them together for you - and while I think a sample adventure is cool (and I think there is one of those too!), I don't think it should be the primary content of the core rulebooks.On the other hand it's fairly simple to say something universal about world-building/setting design, as you did so fairly effortlessly, with an implicit assumption that I would agree, regarding the hunting of deer.  The section on "economics" that you reference, for instance, has many bits of information that seem to fit the "usefulness" criteria by your definition.  What can you buy, which NPCs are likely to be found in a given settlement, how much money do they have, what's the base standard of living (helps guage an NPCs reaction to being offered a silver piece) etc.  What kind of game are you running where your players don't buy stuff during some adventures?</blockquote>

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