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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7403987" data-attributes="member: 29398">Some new ideas from 4e hung around for 5e, because they were generally seen as good ideas.&nbsp; Many new ideas from 4e did not hang around for 5e, because they were generally seen as bad ideas.The &quot;gatekeepers&quot; you refer to are filtering by quality and general usefulness, not by recency. <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&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Problem is, when designing a world ahead of time - as in, before the start of play - one has no real way of knowing* what will fall within the story and what will be beyond it until the campaign is over, however long later that may be.&nbsp; I don't necessarily know where the campaign is eventually going to take us before it starts, but I want things to be at least vaguely prepped (even just some scratch notes and a map!) so that no matter where things go I've got something to stand on.This makes RPG worldbuilding vastly different to worldbuilding for a novel, in that with a novel the author is extremely likely to know what parts of the world need to be built to suit the story and thus only needs to build that much; where in an RPG where the PCs are free to wander you end up doing a lot of &quot;just in case they go there&quot; building that may well end up being superfluous in hindsight.* - unless one's campaign consists only of a published hard AP without deviation; not much worldbuilding needed there that the modules won't already give you.Lanefan</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 7403987, member: 29398"] Some new ideas from 4e hung around for 5e, because they were generally seen as good ideas. Many new ideas from 4e did not hang around for 5e, because they were generally seen as bad ideas. The "gatekeepers" you refer to are filtering by quality and general usefulness, not by recency. :) Problem is, when designing a world ahead of time - as in, before the start of play - one has no real way of knowing* what will fall within the story and what will be beyond it until the campaign is over, however long later that may be. I don't necessarily know where the campaign is eventually going to take us before it starts, but I want things to be at least vaguely prepped (even just some scratch notes and a map!) so that no matter where things go I've got something to stand on. This makes RPG worldbuilding vastly different to worldbuilding for a novel, in that with a novel the author is extremely likely to know what parts of the world need to be built to suit the story and thus only needs to build that much; where in an RPG where the PCs are free to wander you end up doing a lot of "just in case they go there" building that may well end up being superfluous in hindsight. * - unless one's campaign consists only of a published hard AP without deviation; not much worldbuilding needed there that the modules won't already give you. Lanefan [/QUOTE]

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