Today we're going to discuss two ways of creating many things: not just games but stories and game worlds. That is, starting top-down, or bottom-up.
Many of the Worlds of Design columns start out “shotgun” (bottom-up) and may not be finished until years after they were started, but there are others that I have drafted from start to finish in one sitting (similar, but not quite, top-down). Can I tell now which ones were done one way, which another? No, because no matter how you get to a draft, there will be revisions and additions, just as there will be for any RPG setting or world.
The Gardner vs. the Architect
Top-down generally means you start with your goal and then figure out how you're going to get there by fleshing out lots of details, often an outline in the case of writing, all at once. When you actually start crafting, you follow the outline closely.Bottom-up means you start with individual pieces and gradually build something up; you may not even know exactly what the goal is until you get near it. George R. R. Martin (Song of Fire and Ice/Game of Thrones) writes that way. Martin calls how he writes the gardening method, and calls top down the architectural method.
The question is, do you start with your objective and work your way down or do you start with individual parts that you think are going to fit into something and work your way up to a whole? The bottom up version can be quite incremental and created over a long period as you add things to it, but you can also get in trouble with contradictions. The top-down method is more organized but requires far more effort initially.
Top-Down
I recall one author, Maxwell Alexander Drake, describing at a Gen Con panel how he spends many months making a detailed outline for a novel, and then follows it exactly as he writes the book. That is an extreme of top-down.There are less extremes of course; writers who start out with an outline may change course as they write, just as game designers may changes rules as they design a game. You will often hear writers speak about how their characters did something the writer didn't expect, and the plot changed accordingly: the character becomes a separate entity to them, plotting their own course and not adhering to the outline.
Bottom-Up
You also have people like Martin who just start writing and go wherever the story takes them, more or less an extreme of bottom-up. You can design games the same way, perhaps more RPGs than board games or video games. This may vary according to your temperament, or may vary with the individual game.I've done this. I've made what I call “shotgun notes” about games (or articles) and sometimes these would turn out to become something useful and sometimes wouldn't; or it might be months or even years later when I went back to those notes and came up with something useful.
A Spectrum of Design
Like most situations with two extremes, people are somewhere in between, and may go to one extreme or the other (or both) in certain cases; as with how I write Worlds of Design.Clearly, the same distinction of method applies to setting and world building (and to adventure creation). Some settings will “just grow”, others will be consciously created in major outline in a short time. Many GMs probably figure out details of a setting as they go along (bottom up, with the extreme being sandbox style play). But others may decide to start from scratch and write down a whole lot of information about the new setting (top down).
Bottom-up design relies heavily on improvisation while top-down design requires significant planning. Bottom-up design was common in early Dungeons & Dragons campaigns because there weren't published worlds to begin with, and the concept of a "milieu" where the adventures took place was developed through play. As the game matured and dungeon masters had time to develop their worlds, more and more-top down design became possible. A GM's comfort level with one or the other largely depends on their creative vision and comfort with the rules. It's a lot easier to develop a setting in real time (bottom-up) when the GM can easily whip up NPCs on the fly, while systems that provide rules for world-building lend themselves better to planning ahead (top-down).
I don't think either method is necessarily “better.” For some, the fun is in the surprises created by bottom-up design; for others, control and narrative can be satisfying as the details are filled in from top-down. The trick is to find what suits you and your players.
Your Turn: When you create a setting or an entire world for RPG, how do you go about it?
