The view is sometimes expressed that, when a DM puts too much time and effort into creating his campaign setting, there is a danger that it will "not make for a good game" because there will be too much detail, too much change of the players doing something wrong and out of keeping with the flavour of the world, the DM will be too persnickety about how things work in his precious snowflake setting, etc.
I think this is largely a myth, provided of course that we caveat this with the proviso that you have to assume good faith on the part of the DM; he's not a dickhead. In fact, I think deep worldbuilding is often what elevates a game to the next level of interest, because it gives the players a feeling that their actions are taking place in a wider and bigger context - they can ask the DM questions about the wider world and their own place within it, and receive coherent responses. And they can feel and experience a sense of history, making the setting feel realer, more "lived in".
You only need to read The Lord of the Rings to see how that works. Tolkien doesn't beat the reader over the head with the history of Middle Earth. He's not pedantic - there are no lectures. Instead, as you read the plot hooks you in, and you come across little snippets of information (Aragorn's song about Beren and Luthien, the journey through the ancient realm of Hollin, the barrow wights and their rumours of ancient kingdoms, and so on) which give you a sense of something profoundly ancient and real - it makes you feel as if Middle Earth, and most importantly the characters, are something more than just a figment of the author's imagination. That this feeling is entirely illusory, and that you are aware of that fact, does not make it any less important.
I very much agree (world-building being my main interest in this hobby). I do feel that there's a way to overdo it; "show don't tell" is much more effective for storytelling and is a mantra to live by; I've never seen anyone happy about being handed a syllabus on an upcoming campaign setting, so I only provide as much detail as the players request (or need) for char gen, then use the actual in-play experience to convey the setting through action, events and interaction. I myself tend to shy away from any campaign where the GM hands me homework, so I wouldn't want to subject anyone else to the same issue.
ReplyDeleteSure. I think making players do homework comes under "dickish behaviour" though.
DeleteGood post.
ReplyDeleteMy only real problem with deep worldbuilding is that it can often lead to analysis paralysis not in play but before play. That's always been my problem--I can't stop tinkering with the setting or be satisfied with it, and thus play never begins or shortly dies thereafter.
ReplyDeleteI think it's the best approach to keep tinkering all the time as play goes. That happens inevitably anyway - no plan survives contact with the enemy!
DeleteHear hear!
ReplyDeleteThis would argue for building broad strokes at first behind the scenes and letting the details settle in as needed under the party's feet, which is pretty much what I do. The paralysis comes when you try to work in details for everywhere all at once.
ReplyDeleteYes, at the start you really only need one settlement with a big dungeon nearby and perhaps two hexes mapped in each direction around it. That's the detailed bit. The rest of the world can be broad strokes that get gradually filled in later.
DeleteThe trick is to make the players want to know more than you tell them. For this to work you need to know more than they know.
ReplyDeleteYes. That's nicely put.
Delete100% agreed.
ReplyDeleteI largely agree, but think that issues can creep up in the form of the "infodump" problem. How do you communicate the world info to players without requiring them to study prior to play? Good settings build in ways for players to learn about the setting through play (like the Empire of the Petal Throne "fresh off the boat" method) rather than beforehand.
ReplyDeleteI think the same thing can be said of game mechanics to some degree, but that is a different topic.
I deal with it by a) creating a mood (the NPCs and locations communicate a lot about the way the world works, in an implicit fashion), b) giving information that I think the PCs would know as and when it is necessary during the course of events, and c) just answering the players' questions as and when they arise.
DeleteI agree with the general idea here but in practice, my players WANT me to provide them with detailed world info prior to play.
DeleteMany of the people I currently play with are from the "The Game Is The Setting" era of RPG development. They love reading the tons and tons of pages of background info describing the world they are going to play in.
When I suggest, "Hey, lets make up some Supers characters and play a Supers game", they want to know what KIND of Supers?
Is it Silver Age? Modern? More Marvel or Wildstorm? What organizations exist for me to fight, be part of or that won't like me 'cause I'm a Mutant?
Worse yet, they are simply not explorers. I place clues, resources and contacts at their fingertips and they show no interest in pursuing any of it 'in game'. Endlessly frustrating.
World-building is good, but writing novella length histories and world descriptions is wasted effort. Best to have no more high-concept stuff nailed down than you can comfortably fit in your head. The rest of the setting should come from details that the players actually interact with - places, objects, NPCs, descriptions and so on. That ensures that everything you write is actually relevant and useful and the players can learn about the campaign world through play. Let the details paint the larger picture, rather than the other way around.
ReplyDeleteBut surely if you're going to do that convincingly you need to have a reasonably good idea about what's going on with you setting. Otherwise you'll be thrown when players ask questions you don't have a clue how to answer. That will happen sometimes and you can make up stuff on the spot, which is usually good and works for the game, but I don't think it would do for it to happen very often.
DeleteYou need a good enough idea of the setting that you can make judgement calls on things you haven't figured out yet, but I don't think that requires extensive notes. If you frequently have to break from play to look things up when the players ask you a question, surely that's a bad thing as well?
DeletePart of it may be that I prefer the PCs in any developed setting to be fresh off the boat, outland hicks or otherwise ignorant of the campaign world, so that the characters learn at the same time as the players. That limits the awkward questions the players can ask to what they actually find out in character. If you were specifically designing a complex all-inclusive campaign world with all the PCs having their appropriate place in the setting, I guess it would be trickier. That doesn't seem worth the payoff to me, but then, I've never played under MAR Barker or some master worldsmith DM, so who knows?
I generally agree with you, though I am not convinced that a detailed Middle-Earth style of world is actually needed or even a good thing for an RPG. It depends on the tone you want and what your particular players expect and can appreciate. In my own games, the people around the table are too silly by nature to make such worldbuilding worthwhile, and we have much more fun because of the loose and light-hearted nature of the setting. It's a game first, a world second, and that's how it works best for us. In other words, the game is the most important part, and whether or not it makes a good, believable world setting is on the same level of importance as whether or not it makes a good story: It may happen, but nobody cares, or expects it. It's so much more important to all concerned that it builds off what we do in play, which is immersive by default since we all made it happen together.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree with that, but I don't think one thing obviates the other. I put a lot of thought into my campaign setting, primarily because I enjoy doing so, but in play it is pretty fast and loose and nobody takes it hugely seriously. Seems to work fine.
DeleteI tend to be like Barking Alien's players.
ReplyDeleteI love world building and I absolutely love when I have a world with depth and lots of stuff to read before starting. Frankly, to me a world is not worth playing if it has no backstory or depth to it. But that is pretty much me.
I make up pages of backstory for my worlds, and largely most of it goes unused. This comes from giving the players many different directions to go. They have the option of exploring anywhere they want to, but I never obligate them to go anywhere. If this results in material I've written being ignored, so be it. I have gotten better at anticipating what my players will think is most enticing, and they usually go for the adventure options that I had the most fun creating and put the most detail in their creation.
ReplyDeleteYou can also always just ask players where they are going to go next after any particular session. That allows you to detail things very lightly except the things that players decide to interact with.
DeleteWhereas I agree with your thesis, pick someone other than Tolkein to back it. Tolkein would be the WORST possible metaphor for an author that does not beat you over the head with back story. Nevermind Lord of the Rings. Tolkein wrote and spoke obsessively about Middle Earth, including back story and genealogies, and his own freakin' elvish language, because he could not stop adding "depth" to the idea. I cannot believe no one here has even mentioned the Simarillion, much less dozens of other finished and half-finished works in exactly the style and format of a LECTURER.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that he did not do it in Lord of the Rings itself is irrelevant. Tolkein expected his readers to be well versed in the backlog, which is why LOTR is heavily loaded with obscure references to things he wrote about elsewhere!
Choosing him to back your argument is a serious case of not doing the research.
That's false in almost every respect; I know that because I have done my research. Tolkien did not himself publish the Silmarilion - it was published posthumously. Though he certainly wanted it to be available to the public at some stage, he was of the opinion that there would not have been a large market for it as it stood (his publishers also impressed this upon him), and that he had to find a way to make his worldbuilding more palatable to readers. That seems to have been a large part of the reason why he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (though not the only reason of course - actually his publishers seem to have pushed him to write a "Hobbit sequel").
DeleteIn any event, the idea that he expected his readers to be versed in his backlog is particularly idiotic: none of it was available until after his death except the bits and pieces in the appendix to the last book, which nobody would have been able to read until they'd finished the story. I mean, duh.
Also, speaking as somebody who has read much of the posthumously published stuff, including the Silmarillion, the Unfinished Tales, the History of Middle Earth series, etc., I think it's a pretty good metaphor for DM worldbuilding - it's stuff he wrote because he loved creating his own world, which had the (intended or otherwise) result that the novels he did publish give a palpable sense of historical depth without being lecturing or pedantic. You can read and enjot his novels without knowing a word of the Silmarillion. Like a player should be able to enjoy being part of a campaign without knowing what's going on behind the veil, so to speak.
DeleteThe Silmarillion's late publishing date does not derive from Tolkein's INTENTION that it be read - but from the realities of the publishing market, which did not think it would sell until after the excessive sales of LOTR in the 70s.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you can argue that Tolkein did not create it and the various so called "unfinished tales," which I have also read, as part of a single intended whole, simply because it was not released to the public that way.
I'm not arguing that. I'm just refuting your argument that Tolkien expected his readers to be familiar with the history of Middle Earth when reading the Lord of the Rings, which would clearly have been absurd since nobody but him and his wife and son had read any of that history when the Lord of the Rings was published.
DeleteBy the way, the story of the Silmarillion's publication is an interesting one - it is almost certain that the version we have now is not the one that the man himself would have wanted published. Christopher Tolkien has done an astounding job with his father's legacy, but as these things often go, as an editor he has likely wielded huge power over the stuff that has come out. I doubt JRR Tolkien would have wanted much of the History of Middle Earth stuff to see the light of day in its current form, for instance - it's interesting to read as a curio if you're a Tolkien nerd, which I suppose I am, but very little of it is of any real quality.
DeleteThat's not true of the Narn i hin Hurin, which was published as The Children of Hurin; I think that's probably the best thing he ever wrote.
I've come to the belief that if it doesn't matter where something is, then those little details can be randomised.
ReplyDeleteIe if your setting is full of details like "the people of this city drink only out of crab shells", then you can pretty much put that detail anywhere near the sea, which means that if you have enough of those details you can just apply one of them to the first town the players get to.
The other kind of prep, and the one I prefer, is where you create these webs of society, overarching themes etc. I think you need a bit of both to make a setting feel substantial, so it is neither a perspex model, nor a jumbled spread of inconsistent details.
Randomness really helps with this too actually, as it forces you to twist things around and make excuses for the tensions it produces.
People can prepare too much if they prepare the wrong way, and I'd say that one of the strengths of a style of preparation is how much of it you can do before you start breaking a game! (Another classic one being how little of it you can do and still have functional game.)
Of course, that ties to the playstyle too; certain things, when prepped, just don't lend themselves to certain kinds of activities in games well, and if your prep adds those things, then you're buggered. Classic examples are certain kinds of strong law and order mechanisms in games where players are assumed to be acting slightly outside society, high level characters who drag the player characters into their wake in heroic games, or strong social censure and reputation in political games.
All of those are things that might seem reasonable to add when you start off, but can easily go wrong. The more inflexible your prep, the harder it'll be to course correct when you find out.
Have you seen http://lotrproject.com/ ?
ReplyDeleteThe family trees are charmingly obsessive, but I think the map is where it really shines.
Also, I can't help worldbuilding. I kinda wish I could, because I like the setting better myself when it's freshly minted. But Tartary is turning into this thing that I have to run.