[U]nless you want to be an amateur novelist, world/adventure creating is a pointless exercise.Now, the poster's intentions were good, and I'm sure he didn't mean that world-building is wrong. But there's something a little off about calling creative effort "pointless", or stating that it is only useful for novelists.
Thoughts?
I haven't read the original thread, so I could be missing something, but it seems to me that by "pointless" he means it's inconducive to gameplay. It may be fun in its own right, but much of world creation (like constructing whole new languages) doesn't improve your typical game and can even get in the way. I'd certainly agree with that, as it's happened to me, even when adapting someone else's setting instead of creating my own from scratch
ReplyDeletePart of what's so great about S&S is that the lack of so much information and taking a micro-approach is actually fitting with genre conventions. Less really is more then, and you don't feel like you're lazy or making compromises for the sake of playability
The context, actually, is a GM asking if he should feel guilty about using a published dungeon instead of writing his own. So the respondent is not talking about overbuilding a world, but stuff as simple as "There are three ghouls in the room." Apparently, it's OK for someone to do the world-building for you.
DeleteIf it had been an admonition to only build what you need, I could get on board with that, since I have promoted that myself.
As playable adventures and worlds are nothing like a novel, this is not true. If you try to be an amateur novelist, stay away from this formats. And vice-versa, if you write an adventure or a world like a novel, they won't be any good.
ReplyDeleteWorldbuilding can work in a novel, so long as it's built to support the story rather than taking priority. A campaign, on the other hand, isn't something you can or should plan out in excruciating detail. The very nature of the medium demands a minimalist approach to world design
DeleteNothing wrong with lots of. World creation for a campaign. Its only a waste of effort if it has little to do with the associated campaign.Prepared as a document to dump in front of a player it'll be a failure. If details are leaked as theyy relate not a second was wasted.
ReplyDeleteIt can still be a waste if the players never interact with it. I once got hung up on a lot of big picture details thinking players may interact with them in the future and I wanted everything to make sense from the get go, but all that work could've easily been for naught (and was, considering I never kicked off the campaign). I've decided that my future campaign will more or less hold larger aspects, such as international politics, in stasis until the players decide to deal with it
DeleteIt's only a waste of effort in as much as a player detailing finer points of a character's back-story that never get brought up in the course of play is pointless.
DeleteIt depends on the kind of campaign that you want to run. Maybe you want to go for a Dragonlance-style Big World Events campaign where your PCs are part of a huge metaplot that they are expected to develop further. With the right kind of players, that can be a blast. I used to do this kind of stuff all the time, and I was a world-building maniac. I built more worlds and planned more metacampaigns than I ever played, and had to deal with the fallout if my players didn't wind up wanting to tell the story that I did. Still, it's not an inherently bad idea.
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