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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7399792" data-attributes="member: 16814">Heh, that's not a bad point.  I think people are bad at relaying what they find useful in worldbuilding, so they go to examples.In general, worldbuilding is of such varied quality and usefulness as to be almost idiosyncratic.  What works for one person doesn't work for another.  Again, hence why examples seem to be rule rather than less concrete advice.The best advice for worldbuilding I've found yet is adapted from Apocalypse World:  hold on lightly.  That simple advice has done more for my thinking on the matter than anything else I've seen.  It doesn't say don't worldbuild, or don't plan, it just simply says that if you're more interested in staying true to what you've already written, you're going to miss big opportunities for awesome stuff in game.  So, hold onto your plans and your worldbuilding lightly and always be on the look out for the play presenting something better.That said, I find a good bit of use in some worldbuilding.  Just like I give NPCs motivations and desires so that I can present them more authentically, I like to do the same with the world -- give it a purpose and a movement so that it becomes a living part of the game.  I do that better with some forethinking, just because that's how I work best.  I can ad lib in a framework so much better than without, and I find I do better ad libbing something new if I'm doing it via throwing out something I've already considered because there's almost always something similar to work off of and I have some kernel to still build by thoughts on instead of casting about for inspiration.  Still, my worldbuilding is usually big sweeping moments instead of details (my last "big plot" game had a bad guy that had some fully realized motivations, but nothing scripted outside of some loose ideas on how that would play out).  Details, I find, are neat if they serve a purpose.  I rarely do details except to set a theme for description, like describing the way doors are carved with dragon motifs in a dragon cultist complex.  That's just adding dragons so that the players really get that dragons are something these people care a lot about.Ha!  I used examples! I am ironic!Is it?  We don't have established terms to distinguish between Monopoly the boardgame and playing Monopoly the boardgame, or football the rules vs a game of football, or Jeopardy the gameshow vs playing on Jeopardy the gameshow.  I'm not sure there's a strong indication we need a term defined to mean 'playing a<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(n)" title="Thumbs down    (n)"  data-smilie="23"data-shortname="(n)" /> X' rather than just saying 'playing a<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(n)" title="Thumbs down    (n)"  data-smilie="23"data-shortname="(n)" /> X' to differentiate.</blockquote>

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