Wax Banks has been blogging quietly in a corner since 2002 or so. His recent RPG obsession annoys his regular readers.
Here are two worlds.
First, Ptolus, by highly-regarded RPG designer/writer Monte Cook:
Of all large cities in the Empire, Ptolus is probably the least devoted to Lothian, a fact made all the more ironic because this has become the traditional home of the Prince of the Church. Since 657 IA, the heir apparent to the Holy Throne has lived in Ptolus, with the idea that the heir should not live in the same city as the current Emperor of the Church. However, since the sacking of Tarsis by barbarians in 710, the Holy Emperor, Rehoboth, has lived with his son in Ptolus. Although Rehoboth’s stay has been officially declared a “visit,” he has now dwelled in Ptolus for eleven years.
Ptolus has a bishop – a man named Nireus Pard (human male cleric12)—but he does not enjoy the power of most bishops in a city the size of Ptolus. In fact, he has almost no power at all. His traditional roles are filled instead by the Prince of the Church and the archbishop, Adlam Theobold (male human cleric20). And now, with the Holy Emperor himself living in Ptolus, the bishop is virtually ignored, except for issues dealing directly with St.Valien’s Cathedral. And even St. Valien’s prominence comes into question when the temple within the Holy Palace is becoming a more “important” church than the cathedral; when the city’s powerful and influential elite need to visit a Lothianite church for any reason, they go to the Holy Palace more often than St. Valien’s.
In addition to St. Valien’s Cathedral, Ptolus has various satellite churches: St.Gustav’s Chapel at Delver’s Square in Midtown, Daykeeper’s Chapel in Midtown, St. Daris’ Church in the Guildsman District, Church of the Lawgiver in the North Market, Church of Lothian the Redeemer in Oldtown, St. Chausle’s Chapel in the South Market, and the Chapel of St. Thessinain Rivergate. With the temple inside the Holy Palace, that makes nine churches altogether.
Now, Uresia, Grave of Heaven, by highly-regarded RPG designer/writer S. John Ross:
Four gods are now known to have survived the Skyfall. There may be others, too, but there has been no sign of them in over a thousand years. The surviving gods are an odd mix of “unimportant” gods – morally ambiguous and largely unapproachable.
The Primal One: The god of animal urges – want, hunger, instinct, and lust. Some mistake her/him/it for “evil,” but it’s both above and beneath such things. It’s the shadowy essence of the Id, and of unthinking motive impulse. It cares only for its native worshippers, the wild animals. Paradoxically, it’s the secret ruler of a mortal kingdom.
The Sea Dragon: The serpentine goddess of wind and storm at sea, and the protector of the secrets of the deep. A fickle and destructive god, driven by alien motives and fond of drowning anything weak enough to require air to breathe. Villains who attempt to get on her good side end up just as drowned as anyone else. She commands a tiny secret cult of children.
The Arbiters: Their genders and personalities vary according to which culture you ask, but their area of concern is straightforward. They like any contest, as long as it is fair. They have no preference between violence and peace, or between right and wrong, so long as men are competing and striving for a judgment of victory. These cosmic referees inspire most Uresian kingdoms with an obsession for some kind of sport or contest.
The Wine God: In Helt, he is called Tom Beer, a laughing party-animal. In the Volenwood, she is Nysha, Goddess of the Vine, and the patron of the vintners’ art. In Sindra, they call it Golu: The Shadow of Drunkards, a semi-sinister spectre of alcoholism, the dark image that the drunkard can only escape by plunging into darkness. Each representation of a facet of the whole truth, but that the Wine God makes more personal appearances in Helt than anywhere else tells Man something, even if it is only how he prefers to be seen.
Ptolus is one of the best-known examples of RPG worldbuilding: nearly 800 pages of fine-grained information, incorporating (according to Cook’s oft-stated design goal) every aspect of the D&D 3e cosmology, bestiary, ruleset, and customs. It exhaustively describes a single city, Cook’s titular homebrew setting, in the largest RPG supplement ever published.
The less well-known Uresia is just over 100 digest-sized pages of material (including maps, ads, and a generous index) introducing an entire world with a couple thousand years of history.
You just read about 6% of the cosmology/religion information in Ptolus. Then you read 100% of the Uresian cosmology. If you could take only one of those excerpts to your gaming table, which would you choose?
The difference between the two is the difference between complication and complexity. The short version of what follows is: ‘Complication will happen on its own. Don’t worry about breadth and scope. Go deep. Don’t add new stuff, connect the old stuff in new ways. Even simple stories can be complex.
The even-shorter version is the title of this post: ‘Worldbuilding is storytelling.’
Plot : Story :: Addition : Multiplication :: Complication : Complexity
Most GMs are driven in part by the desire to make a world as rich and varied and troubling as their dreams. That’s wonderful! Unfortunately, most GMs also confuse ‘rich and varied’ with big and complicated. When you start cooking up your world, you might say, ‘What races are present here?’ And you’ll start listing them. You have a cool name, or a neat image in your mind, and you Just Love Every Single Amazing Idea, and pretty soon you’re trying to differentiate half-dragons and dragon-orcs and draconians and dragonborn and dragonfish and dragonbears and the dreaded Elder Dragons of Dragonstone and who gives a damn!!
Look at Ross’s paragraph on the Sea Dragon: ‘The serpentine goddess of wind and storm at sea … Villains who attempt to get on her good side end up just as drowned as anyone else. She commands a tiny secret cult of children.‘ There’s very little raw data in that paragraph, but that last sentence is a whopper. A secret cult of children?! What? Why would a temperamental, fickle, stubborn, capricious creature appeal to…children…
Aah.
Ross is deploying a simple but powerful method here, one you can learn to emulate without copying his prose style: evocation and interconnection in place of exhaustive detail. Instead of giving you the Sea Dragon’s game stats or enumerating her churches, he’s explained – in just a couple of sentences – what she means, the psychic (dramatic) influence she has, and how she can be understood by the players. It seems like an elliptical or vague passage, but it’s 100% gameable; Ross is subtly instructing you on how to approach the material so as to maintain his vision of the world, but is leaving every bit of detail up to you and your players.
The Boston phone book is a very complete reference text (of a sort), but it’s worthless as worldbuilding. The city can be evoked more compactly: ‘Boston is a city where every single person is welcome, so long as they’re white and rich and already live there.’ That’s playable stuff. Your players don’t need reference material, and most of the time you don’t need it either; roleplaying is storytelling, so your worldbuilding should help you tell stories. Otherwise why do it? To entertain yourself?
An analogy:
Metcalfe’s Law of computer networks goes something like this: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of machines (terminals) in the network. In other words, the value is the number of connections between machines. Makes sense, right? If you’ve got a hundred computers on your network and you add a single machine, you’ve just created a hundred new connections, a hundred new relationships between the masses of data that each machine contains.
Good worldbuilding works that way: each new moving part is as valuable as the network of connections between it and the rest of the world, how it enriches everything else. The thing is, you have to describe the connections yourself. You (or Ross!) could add a dozen new gods to the Uresian pantheon without enriching or deepening the world, but you’re better off cooking up a new world-element that connects in tricksy ways to what else you’ve got. What about a philosophical society at the new-formed College of Sztaad, whose members insist that the true role of the gods is to rule, and so seek to provoke the gods into wrathful/dominant action by e.g. infiltrating worship groups and desecrating temples? What would each god’s worshippers think of such action? You’ve got pretty strong personalities for each god: how do you think they’d treat such a group of college-boy dilettantes?
Maybe that’s not particularly interesting stuff; the point is, instead of describing the various forms of god-worship and so forth, you might be better off leaving that definition for the gaming table, and instead providing yourself and the players with more fertile, internally-tense source material for improvisatory creation.
You can figure out logistics at the table, mostly. But you can shape the meaning and movement of your world in advance. Dorky as this sounds, your methods for doing so are (partly) literary.
Rules, worlds, and roles
AD&D is a complicated game: it’s got a million little subsystems that fit together in modular but not-terribly-logical ways, each with its own odd dicerolls and special criteria and play style. D&D 3e is both complicated and complex: it’s overrun with exceptions and special cases and !@#$#$ prestige classes, but it also runs on a single mechanic: roll d20, add bonuses, higher is better. The complex dynamics of the game (especially in combat) emerge from that simple mechanic, and make for rapidly-multiplying interesting choices at the battlemat. D&D 4e takes this core mechanic and strips away most of the rest of the system: you can explain the game and its rationale in a single page now (4e DMG pg. 42, if you’re curious). It’s a pretty simple game, but the combats are immensely complex: there’s a lot going on, given how streamlined the combat engine is.
‘Simple’ is the opposite not of ‘complex’ but of ‘complicated.’ A well-designed game can generate complex play dynamics from simple play actions – think of Go, or Bridge, or Chess, or Laser Tag.
As with rules, so for worlds.
When you’re building your world, keep your core aims in mind, and don’t throw in extra crap just because you can, just because it’s neat-o. Throw in extra crap because it makes the other crap just a little more interesting…brings out nuances in the world’s morality or history or politics that weren’t there yet…lets your players go deeper into their characters and their world.
I don’t wanna pick on Monte Cook too much – Ptolus really is as good as its reputation, and the quoted passage was cherry-picked to make a point – but you don’t need a goddamn itemized list of local churches. You can write that yourself; your players can cook the list up at the table if need be. What you need, and your players need, is meaty story material. So give it to them! Not plot, not logistics…story.
No: ‘The initiation ritual of the Church of Enn involves a two-night stay in the High Chapel, during which the following prayers are performed in strict sequence: the Redwyne Incantation, the Appeal to Kruth, the Intercessory Abnegation, the Invocation of Hashim, the…’
Yes: ‘Initiates to the Ennish priesthood subsume their worldly identities through rituals of self-abnegation, self-refusal, and the emptying-out of the soul. Each initiate “marries” the goddess Enn in a series of declarations and self-offerings, with his relationship to the goddess expressed in frankly sexual terms maddeningly at odds with his expected celibate lifestyle.’
(The Catholic overtones deliberately recall Ptolus‘s Lothian Church, which gives off a Catholic/Church of England vibe on my quick reading.)
Why is the first paragraph too much of a ‘good’ thing? Because even if those prayer names are neat or allusive or what have you, they don’t pinpoint the meaning of the initiation ritual. Why is the second paragraph more useful to players? It gives them a role to play. Which is, after all, the point of the thing.
The best answers produce the best questions
In his (very useful!) book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, playwright David Mamet describes an actor questioning him about a script. ‘You have here that my character was in Germany for several years,’ the actor asks. ‘How many years, exactly?’ Mamet says that the proper answer is, ‘I don’t know,’ not because that information was ‘left out’ of the script, but because the information in the script was put in specifically to aid the actors. The script isn’t a thing in itself, it’s a tool for performance.
If – for whatever personal reasons! – you’ve decided to write down details about your own fantasy world, you might be tempted to focus on the actor’s question, ‘How many years?’ I can understand this impulse: such answers are immensely satisfying for a DM. It’s the autism-spectrum version of playing god: surveying charts and tables and lists and believing, for just a moment, that a world can be contained in such a form. Elves and dragons are less unbelievable than that power fantasy.
Which of these off-the-cuff examples is more playable, more dramatically fertile?
‘The Knights swear loyalty in this life and the next to the Iron Queen, who embodies the terror and purity of battle; each Supplicant, upon entering the Knighthood, is presented with a gold talisman engraved with an image of the Queen and an oath of strength and honour. Some Knights also venerate the protector god Lukaz, who watches over lost children.’
‘The Knights swear loyalty in this life and the next to the Iron Queen, pitiless embodiment of the terror and purity of battle; yet the most frequently-visited shrine in the Knights’ temple in Sutpen honours Lukaz, the weeping god who looks after lost children. Some scholars claim that the Knights approach the Queen as martial leader but moral equal – the Knights see themselves as the embodiment of battle too – and seek Lukaz’s intercession not for their wards and servants, but for themselves.’
The first part of each description suggests a type: the stern holy-protector type with a hint of arrogant battle-addiction. And the bit about the talisman only emphasizes a point already made – a handy detail, reasonable physicalization, but not introducing anything new.
The second paragraph, however, takes a turn at the end, hinting at (OK, just a little) psychological complexity to the Knight ‘type.’ They see themselves as lost children? It seems their self-image isn’t quite so pitilessly martial after all. In a roleplaying game, that bit about Lukaz can provide a player with a thread of built-in dramatic tension, something to explore.
And what do you know about the temple in Sutpen? It contains shrines, but isn’t uniform in its religious presentation – a homebase in which the Knights reveal vulnerability, maybe. How else might such feelings emerge, in backstory or in play? You and your players don’t need to know about the temple to sense the energies that locale liberates in your campaign world. We’ve answered the question of the Knights’ worship practices in two ways – but only one of the answers shoots us off in new dramatic/psychological directions.
Ever watch Lost or The X-Files or Twin Peaks? These are immensely complicated shows built with the trusty dramatic blunt instrument ‘AND THEN.’ There were these people who crashed on an island, and then a polar bear came, and there was a monster, and then Jack had this tattoo, and one of the characters went to a psychic, and then a submarine came, but there was time travel so everything happened in the 1970’s or something, and then a physicist showed up, and it turned out EVERYONE WAS RELATED TO EVERYONE ELSE, and then…
The problem with such shows is that, for all the interesting questions their plots raise, their stories don’t grow in significance when the questions are answered. What’s the deepest truth of the alien-invasion plot on The X-Files?
They’re coming in 2013, apparently. They have a date.
Oh.
A good story – The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Buffy, The Office – will answer its big questions, but the answers end only the plot. The story, meanwhile, lives in the consequences of the answers. As Buffy herself says: ‘The thing about changing the world: once you do it the world’s all different.’ Worldbuilding is storytelling. You do it partly to answer your own questions about your imaginary world – but if all your answers finish with a resounding full stop, what’s left for your players once they’ve uncovered them? (One scary possibility: the incomprehensible second season of Twin Peaks.)
A good piece of worldbuilding ends not with a declarative period but with one of these:
…
Some examples
Useful (recent-ish) examples of RPG worldbuilding/design:
GURPS Horror – Ken Hite is a god and this is the best resource on running a horror campaign, bar none. He’s revising it for GURPS 4e, but the 3rd edition can be gotten used. From here, grab GURPS Cabal, less essential but exciting.
The Day After Ragnarok and Trail of Cthulhu – Ken Hite, as mentioned, is a goddamn god. DAR is a Savage Worlds setting that in just a few dozen pages evokes myth, war, magic, dark portents, and the secret history of the world; it’s even got a couple of offhand sample worldbuilding bits. (His blog’s good too.) Trail, Hite’s reworking of Call of Cthulhu, contains a section on the creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos that gives more than a dozen conflicting/complementary literary possibilities for each creature, rather than stats. No one cares whether Cthulhu can beat up Santa Claus (answer: no one can beat up Santa Claus); you just have to know how to play the dread sleeping beast.
Uresia: Grave of Heaven – I can’t stress this enough, it’s a magnificent little book. The snowmen will break your heart. The D20 edition is probably more useful to most players.
Ptolus – This is the RPG book everyone dreams, at some point, of publishing. Colossal, exhaustive, inspiring, and rational (mostly). Cook’s best stuff is really, really great, and some of it is in here.
Sharn, City of Towers – Eberron is a neat roleplaying world and Sharn is its most impressive bit. Useful detail abounds.
D&D 4e Manual of the Planes – D&D 4e is laughably short on interesting, evocative fluff, but this book, particularly its Feywild/Faerie section, presents a good amount of strong gameable material.
GURPS Goblins – Few RPG books deserve to be hailed as ‘works of genius.’ This is one of them. I won’t tell you anything more.
GURPS Weird War II – OK, I’m a Ken Hite fan. This book overflows with creepy, inspiring details for alternate-WWII campaigns – it’s suggestive rather than exhaustive, a good teaching example.
Expedition to Castle Ravenloft – A D&D 3e reworking of one of the definitive AD&D 1e adventures. A great example of how to build atmosphere using game mechanics. Do yourself a favour and look up the original Ravenloft adventure, I6.
Mouse Guard RPG – This game beat out D&D 4e for the big prize at Origins, and is one of the most evocative pieces of RPG art I’ve ever seen. Wanna see clearly how game design and story feed one another? Look here.
Deadlands Reloaded – Awesome weird-west roleplaying. Just go.
Over the Edge and Mutant City Blues – Two superb games here, one old-ish, one brand new. The first is by Jonathan Tweet with bits from Robin Laws; the second is by Laws himself. Simple mechanics and spectacular worldbuilding. OTE is a complex choice in the context of this post; it contains a huge table describing the relationship of every single organization on Al Amarja to every other, and is swamped with esoterica of the neat-and-copious sort. But it’s also one of the great RPGs ever made, set in an intoxicating modern-fantasy world that works (except when ‘working’ isn’t its goal). MCB is NYPD Blue meets X-Men; if you’re a certain kind of person you read that sentence, shut off your computer, and are driving to a nerd store right now to buy the book. In which case how are you reading this? WEIRD.
Ending up
Now get back to making amazing things! (And lemme know how wrong/handsome/perfect/super-wrong I am in comments.)
Oh, and if you’re Ken Hite or S. John Ross or Monte Cook or some other smart professional cat whose stuff I’m pissing/drooling all over, please understand that ‘having any idea what I’m talking about’ is not something I’ve spent any time focusing on, so I can’t be blamed for not actually doing it.
(And thank you Philippe, for the opportunity to bore such a fine audience.)
Thoroughly great advice, Wax. One of the side effects of this philosophy is it reduces the number of proper names people need to know. Players *hate* proper names.
.-= Cory´s last blog ..House rules: alignment change =-.
I agree. An excellent and insightful post.
Now I need to set aside my autistic world-building tendencies and work on improving…
@Cory – Many players love NPCs to have names because those with names are important NPCs and those without, unimportant.
Great post. I think many of us have tried to create the prefect world in all its detail and most of us have been disappointed with the results. Players generally don’t care.
.-= Chris Tregenza´s last blog ..D&D is Doomed (But Not Just Yet) =-.
Great post. I believe I’ll be checking out your blog now. In the list of Worldbuilding done rihgt, I highly recommend Lacuna by Jared Sorensen and Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies by Chad Underkoffler.
.-= MountZionRyan´s last blog ..“See the Elephant” =-.
What the hell are you talking about “bore” us!
I’ve been DMing for nearly half my life (an event that will be celebrated in about 11 months) and could not agree less on the term “For new DMs”!
Your words are ones of wisdom and you are making me realise a few things, both good and bad, I have done or am doing.
I’m generally not one for world building as much as a “mood builder”. My fluff is mostly there to set a “feel” rather then an actual setting. Settings tend to build themselves. I make that fact clear with my players and they help me out with the creating. I mean, the biggest city of my Heroic Orchestra setting was created by a player’s background story. I’ve also mentionned in a fluff post that a city called Gharamston had really big battleships. It evolved into a military city-state with a douchebag for a lord. Anyhoo.
You who builds worlds, heed the words of this fine storyteller.
Great post ^_^
It’s so easy to let our inner perfectionist push us to perfection in designing a world. When this tendency teams up with our repressed novelist, we sometimes wake up at our computers, the keyboard imprinted onto our face, with a 10 page essay on the Ramifications of the Royal Marriage between Orcovia and Goblinia.
That and 275 extra pages of Gibberish from using the keyboard as a pillow.
So yeah. Go for the highlights, let playing the game fill in the gaps.
Great post!
Good post. Sometime when I build gameworld, I usually us evocative description like you said, I have this vivid flash of something related to what I just created. It’s a good sign that the description was evocative and I usually scribble it down to get it out and then move on, never coming back on it.
I had one such flash that kept nagging me when creating the sunless knight faction for our city within faction. I got fed up with it and wrote their knighting oaths. It’s completely useless in the story building department and it will never feature in the game but I did not want to obsess over it in my head and take away my creative energy. The real problem is when you waste hours on such material.
Dude! Fucking brilliant! A lot of DM’s who create their own worlds (that I’ve run with) don’t understand the “Go Deep” concept – creating complexity vertically over time from a few single starting points instead of trying to map out 1,000 different elements on a flat plane initially.
Brilliant post.
.-= Stormgaard´s last blog ..Red State Update Goes To Comic-Con =-.
Thanks for the kind words, all.
@Chris – I agree, but this is something like ‘redshirt syndrome’ on Star Trek. There’s a great bit of writing advice that appears in a number of forms but boils down to ‘Everybody thinks he’s the hero (even the villain).’ Throwing nameless functionaries into the game as plot elements just serves to teach the PCs (and the players) that they live in a world in which they really are the most important beings.
For me, I don’t care about NPCs’ stats – I’m running a D&D 4e game, my first I confess, and stat blocks are trivial to generate. What’s not trivial is dramatic character. I can spend an hour specifying every aspect of an NPC’s behaviour in numeric terms, or an hour defining an interesting role to play; only one of those hours maps directly to emotional engagement.
So I think giving names to NPCs is, or should be, one small aspect of a commitment to fleshing out the world as you would a drama. Imagine you’re writing the NPC for an actor to play, as a role in a script. When the actor shows up to the theatre on the day, what do you give her? Not the stats, not ‘How many years have I been in Germany?’ You give her relationships, motivations – a role.
A role is more important than a name; names are just super-duper handy. 🙂
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
@Yan –
If it helps you build a richer experience for yourself and the PCs, I’d say it’s far from useless – but I think you’re right about writing things down, letting them play out on the page rather than in your head. Even writing is a form of dramatic experience, though a very different form from playing.
Once the stuff is on the page it sets in motion, starts working up against what else is written. (As for games, so for stories.) I’d say the most exciting flashes are the ones that come later, when revising – coming back to a piece of world-material, realizing your brain has done some crazy work while you weren’t paying attention, and writing a version 2.0 that’s a big step forward in density and intensity.
But I’m given to understand v2 can’t happen until v1 does. Hence: write that sucker down.
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
@Wax: I agree completely. World building is an iterative process.
“but you don’t need a goddamn itemized list of local churches. You can write that yourself; your players can cook the list up at the table if need be.”
You have very precisely missed the entire point of Ptolus. Many people want to be able to make that stuff up for themselves. Many others don’t. Ptolus is for those who don’t.
See the Diamond Throne for the opposite approach.
Well Wax just got burned … 🙂
I liked Ptolus precisely because I could open a page and find something that I could use with no preparation. And the way it was built allowed me to throw away the whole Cosmology and Lovecraftian undertone and transplant the whole place with keeping over 90% of the book usable.
Thanks for the kind words! I have a Big Rule when writing Uresia material, then and now: “This is intended to inspire characters and adventures.” That’s all. Any paragraph that isn’t 100% characters-and/or-adventures (even though it doesn’t have to be _literal_ about it, and seldom is) goes bye-byes, or has to fall to its knees begging to be spared from the bloody block.
Characters, and adventures. That’s all.
But, to echo Monte Cook: different goals do make different books. Uresia was my farewell to the industry after a decade of learning its strange lessons, and in many ways a manifesto on how I personally like to game and what I personally love about fantasy gaming in particular (most people don’t notice, and never have reason to notice, that it’s an homage to 1980s stuff like the Greyhawk folio or T1 and even the first FR box). Given more Ptolus-esqe design goals, I would have produced a more Ptolus-esque book. RPG materials are essentially fetishistic porn (some more obviously than others) and we each service different fetishes on different days 🙂
But I’m very glad, of course, to have had Uresia-esque goals, for Uresia, since it’s the book that panders to MY fetishes, and I didn’t always get to do that when working for the industry. I’m still grateful to have had that as my final book before bowing out — and even more grateful that Uresia gets to be reborn as a Cumberland title and stay with me as my day-to-day campaign world and spawn little supplements (each one guaranteed to be more evocative than informative, and all about characters, and adventures).
Oh, and if you’re Ken Hite or S. John Ross or Monte Cook or some other smart professional cat whose stuff I’m pissing/drooling all over, please understand that ‘having any idea what I’m talking about’ is not something I’ve spent any time focusing on, so I can’t be blamed for not actually doing it.
“Having any idea what [you’re] talking about” is the point of writing, especially on a blog as prominent as ChattyDM. Perhaps you should come back when you grow up?
.-= Geek’s Dream Girl´s last blog ..Don’t Care Much About The ENnies? =-.
What is it lately with high-profile community members coming to Blogs and being rude to the blogger? Erik Mona did it to Mishler and now GDG is doing it to Wax. I think it’s really bad form.
Now, GDG may not be an industry professional like Mona, but she’s high profile enough that she shouldn’t (in my opinion) be throwing around statements like “come back when you grow up”, especially in reply to a comment that was clearly intended as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying “this is just my opinion…”
As for whether Wax missed the point of Ptolus or not, I’m not sure (yet) that’s true. This particular post effectively says “focus on the interractions, not the detail”, and as advice for a DM building their own world, that’s excellent advice. Ptolus might do both, but ultimately that’s beside the point.
Wax expressed a preference as to how a world should be constructed. He used Ptolus (or at least one tiny section of that very large book) as a counter-example. It doesn’t matter what Mr Cook’s intentions were when writing the book; the fact remains that Wax prefers a different type of worldbuilding schema.
To use an analogy, it’s valid to express an opinion that a banana shouldn’t be blue. It’s completely irrelevant to that opinion that the grower (or even the purchaser) of the banana wanted it to be blue.
Yikes! Some ruffled feathers here. But I really don’t see why.
The point of the article is clear: advice to NEW GM’s on how to write-up their campaign worlds.
More to the point… don’t worry about fleshing everything out. Stick to simple bullet points that will get reactions from the players. Things that will make them ask questions like “what is that all about??” or “how does this work?” Things that will inspire the players, along with the GM, to investigate or come up with solutions to their questions. As a result, the bullet point material will become more and more fleshed out in areas of interest of the entire playing group.
The alternative is for the GM to spend hours and hours writing game world information that ultimately might not even spark any interest at all among the gaming group. That’s a lot of work to put into something that just goes unnoticed, don’t you think?
Keep it simple. Stick to bullet points. Flesh out the bullet points as interest demands. Don’t worry about the bullet points that get no comments (not yet anyhow). As time permits, look into reworking those bullet points, if necessary (it could be that the material is dead on, and that is why no questions are raised about it).
All in all, I think its a great approach. It gets the players more involved. It gets the perspective of 4, 5, or more people raising questions, commenting, and adding to the material… instead of just one person alone (the GM) doing it.
Please, please, recalibrate your irony meter.
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
@Monte sez:
Oh come off it. I wouldn’t have read and enjoyed and gladly
stolenrepurposed material from Ptolus if I hadn’t understood this.But for GMs working up their own worlds, I do believe that Ptolus isn’t the right worldbuilding model – they’re (we’re) better off emulating less exhaustive or reference-form works. (I’d say, however, that the Ptolus adventures are superb examples of their form(s). To each their own, as you and Señor Ross say.)
One of the topics on which I agree with the ‘old school renaissance’ boys club is that the tendency to obsessively detail FRPG worlds poorly serves the dramatic/narrative side of roleplaying. Hence my (honestly not mean-spirited, though on rereading perhaps too snide) aside about the autism spectrum: the hyper-rational manifestations of so many GM imaginations can get in the way of the social-improvisation aspects of RPGs. What’s often a virtue in published materials can be counterproductive in a homebrew setting.
It would seem, in other words, that we may or may not agree in principle, but you feel I’ve criticized Ptolus for not trying to be something other than it is. That wasn’t my intention.
But with respect, I think your in-passing category error – eliding the difference between what a gaming group needs at the table and what certain GMs want at their writing desks – is as big a deal as my complaints. A wag might point out that that difference is at the heart of this post…
I look forward to it!
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
Hmm…it occurs to me that I emphasize the rationality of Ptolus in my brief bibliography, but that could be interpreted as a backhanded compliment in the context of the post. To clarify: I mean that Ptolus (which really isn’t the focus of this post) goes to admirable lengths to rationalize and justify the generic requirements of D&D’s power fantasies.
Well, this has been a swell afternoon.
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
@Wax: I knew you could defend yourself man! I’m however disgustingly jealous that you managed to get comments from 2 esteemed RPG designers with one post. I think I’ll drive down your place next fall with a bottle of Rye so I can learn your Writing-fu secrets.
@GDG and other chivalrous souls: Let’s all step back from the Nuclear flame war button and take a hefty puff of the Joint of harmony. We’re all pals here.
You are in all seriousness more than welcome – Boston is rubbish this time of year, you’ll love it. Though I can sum up what I know of writing-fu at the moment: voluble dilettantism draws a crowd.
Check! ;v)
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
“‘old school renaissance’ boys club”
Ha! You forgot “fatbeards” too! 😉 Although from what @theprincesswife says, she likes being part of the old farts organization. It’s the beard, man…
In all seriousness – that’s exactly what I try to provide in my settings – enough skeleton so that I can start hanging the meat and skin when I need it.
.-= Chgowiz´s last blog ..The One Page Dungeon Contest PDFs =-.
Excellent post! I’d like to comment on one, tiny piece of it:
“It’s the autism-spectrum version of playing god: surveying charts and tables and lists and believing, for just a moment, that a world can be contained in such a form.”
As someone diagnosed with Asperger’s, I find this not at all offensive. It is *exactly* the reason I believe so many people touched by autism play RPGs. It makes a world — maybe not this one, but *a* world — understandable. Understanding the world around me is not something I’m used to in my daily life.
Gaming systems, not necessarily the worlds they go with, are my primary point of latching-on-with-way-too-much-energy. If I find a RPG world I love (FFG Midnight FTW) I can easily slip into creative-without-numbers mode, and then get as detailed as I can. Not as detailed as I *should*, perhaps…
@Glacials: I’m incredibly interested about the link between various forms of autism and Role Playing games. I do not know enough about it to write a post about it but I’ve noticed that many RPG gamers present autistic traits.
And for the record, I’m among those that think that Autism is not a mental condition, but may possibly be a phenotype (trait) of a genetic off-shot of Homo Sapiens.
@ChattyDM: On the boards I frequent, I do try to get conversations started about autism/Asperger’s. My favorite PC game’s developer board, d20radio.com, a few others. I’ve met a few other aspie gamers, PC and RPG, but not a lot. I know we’re out there at least in the RPG realm because the stereotypical RPG gamer matches many autistic traits. Otaku probably fall into the same category.
Then again, where would we be without ? I especially like the person who invented the wheel. Circles are nifty. 🙂
I don’t believe autism is a mental condition, and I’m not sure about a genetic offshoot, but I do believe that it is a neurological phenomenon. That is, regardless of how much the brain affects the mind and the mind affects the brain, there are concrete differences in brain structure from an early age. It is not curable, nor do I believe that most people with what I call “functional autism” wish to be cured. “Functional” in this case means “able to function in society”, as opposed to people who cannot effectively communicate. I have little experience with what the general public calls autism, just Asperger’s Syndrome (a.k.a high functioning autism).
For those reading along at home, please note that I am not passing judgment or saying that anything about Asperger’s/functional autism is bad. I’m stating facts and observations, regardless of how the rest of society judges those traits. The “gamer funk” is one such stereotype and I believe it stems from a simple lack of awareness of that particular social norm. I myself lack much of that awareness, but I can comprehend more than some so I consider myself very lucky. If I were to not understand the cause and repercussions of gamer funktitude — just one of many, many concepts a human being must absorb to function in human society? I’d be quite funky.
@Glacialis: Thanks for sharing. Let’s not derail the thread further. I’ll mark this subject as a future post where I’ll share my experiences and gut feelings on social awareness and gaming. High Functioning Autism will likely come up again then.
Very interesting!
@ChattyDM: I wouldn’t call it a /complete/ derailment, since the argument between detail and summarizing it without losing meaning is pretty darn relevant. 😉 But I agree, ’tis for the future.
I don’t know if this thread will spark to life again later, but I’m willing to let this interesting tangent-discussion serve as a springboard for later conversation. I’d suggest, though, that many people who fall somewhere on the high-functioning side of the autism spectrum are aware of e.g. bathing norms, and reject them consciously out of a blend of disbelief/misunderstanding and instinctive tribal signaling. i.e. ‘We’re the ones with more to do than shower today,’ that sort of thing.
Robin Laws has some smart things to say about this in his ‘See Pg XX’ columns, particularly in the context of control-freak behaviour and his Dying Earth RPG’s persuasion mechanics. Which is the same thing as saying Laws discusses this topic somewhere; far as I’m concerned, the man’s an unimpeachable authority on GM practice and theory.
OK, tangent off!
.-= Wax Banks´s last blog ..Worldbuilding is storytelling: complication, complexity, and micronarratives. =-.
Wow! Fantastic post. My next two steps will be to check out your blog and then go check out Uresia. I’m curious about S. John Ross’s history. I didn’t realize he had deliberately left gaming as a producer.
Another factor is that it is much easier to just come up with details and way harder to write the kind of tight, focused, character and story driven ideas that make the examples you shared so evocative. It’s hard to do, which is why it doesn’t get done that often. But as a goal, is an excellent. Makes me feel like doing some worldbuilding on my own.
And I really don’t understand GamerGeekGirl’s aggressive comment. That coda was clearly a little expression of humility from someone who clearly respects the people he cited in his post, to the point that he doesn’t feel worthy of being compared to them. Bizarre reaction by gamergeekgirl, just bizarre.
.-= walkerp´s last blog ..Board statistics =-.
i love worldbuilding, i know people have a lot of great ideas for new worlds and i love to read novels just for the new worlds.