Many of us are enthusiastic worldbuilders. And many of us worldbuilders also try to make our RPG settings “original”.
Yet there is a danger to making a setting that has too many unique elements. After all, the setting isn’t just for the game master, but also for the players. They need to understand the setting enough to play convincing characters that exist in that world, and act accordingly. And the more setting information they have to absorb to do so, the more difficult it will be to get buy-in from your gaming group.
Personally, I think settings work best when there are a few strong, central unique elements that support strong themes on what the setting - and the campaign - are supposed to be all about, scaffolded by numerous familiar, common tropes from the intended genre (such as science fiction or fantasy). This should help convey the information the players need most effectively.
But I am curious how you see this issue. Do you regard this as a problem at all, and if so how do you approach it?
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by originality and complexity as opposed concepts.
It’s important for players to be able to engage with the content. If you add too much new stuff up front, they’re not likely to retain it. If they can’t retain it, they can’t engage with it. You can drop them in store brand middle earth and they’ll be able to engage. If you drop them in a wholly original setting with winged squid people, eternally young goat poets, and living clothing, that’s a lot to try to integrate all at once.
One of the most disappointing games I ran was Vampire, where the players just didn’t do any reading about the game’s fiction or factions. They didn’t understand what the major NPC players wanted, so they were always lost and confused. After we abandoned that game, I started a new one that was basically Diablo. They did a lot better in that one, in large part because there was no up front details. Yeah yeah fallen kingdom, demon problem, we get it.
I think the real factor is “how much new stuff do they need to learn to engage?”
I play PbtA games, and those specifically tell you not to do too much work beforehand and “play to find out”. As you say, I start with a few core ideas and touchstones. Then, when the players ask a question about the world, I often turn it around on them and say “you tell me. What do you think?” Sometimes I’ll make them roll, sometimes not, but I’ll always incorporate at least some and often all of what they give me. This gives the players more buy-in, I’m not just reading my bullshit to them; and also gives me a lot more jumping off points for later stuff. Way less work for me, players feel a sense of authorship, win-win imo.
For me, as a GM, this can easily mean more stress since I now need to incorporate player ideas into the setting which might not mesh with my own plans.
Worldbuilding is actually one of the elements I don’t particularly enjoy, I’m here to hang out with my friends and tell cool stories. The less effort I have to put in the better from my standpoint. My preference tends towards games with their own settings or settings easily explained with a few touchstones.
My favourite game so far has been in the Dresden files RPG, which is very easy to grasp the setting of even for someone who has never read the books. I set the game in our hometown and scattered a few options for problems around for the players to encounter and just built a story from there. My worldbuilding setup was collaborative presenting aspects of the Dresden universe which I was interested in running and asking what my players were interested in.
I have also run a few Mothership games with great success and very little worldbuilding - you’re basically in the Alien universe where “The Company” owns everything. If you have a common touchstone like the Alien films to give everyone a shared idea of the world it makes it so much easier to set the tone and mood of a game with very little effort on my or the players parts.
Touchstone is fine. It just would not work if some players know a lot more lore than others, especially than the GM.
Depends how collaborative you want to be. How does x work in this universe is something I often ask my players. How do we see this thing or what might that look like. Let’s creation be shared and gives us all common ground to work with. If someone is more familiar with source material than me, great they can help shape things. GM always has veto, “that’s not how it works in this world”. I’m not getting rules lawyered out of a cool plot just because one player has read (or retained) more of the setting than I did.
Is this AI generated? You completely disregarded the premise of the OP just to namedrop a few RPG systems? And why has this any upvotes? I’m confused.
It doesn’t ignore the premise at all.
How does it not ignore it? Where did they talk about originality vs complexity? How did the base question, how to balance the two, or if balancing it is worthwhile at all, get answered or furthered in understanding?
Rude.
I made a genuine comment to start off discussion saying I do basically the opposite of the OP who was asking about world building. Then talked about Worlds I have played in and how those looked.
You said nothing about what OP was talking about. Where in your comment do you talk about how original or complex the worlds are? And how to decide, when you build a world, between wanting to be original and it being too complex? And if any of that is a problem?
But I guess I was rude, yes, for that I am sorry.
Uh well where do I fall on the scale when I have my own setting wiki? >_>
Mid-tier, I’d say. 😉
But a wiki is only a problem if you expect the players to read it all.
@juergen_hubert I think the real balance is between how complex the world is, and how much is exposed to the players at any single moment. Then the players can decide what matters to them. The downside is that most of the work of the DM might be lost if the players don’t explicitly go looking for it.
There is only a problem when your world is not consistent within itself. That means, if the players learn a fact about your world, they must be able to use this fact to predict outcomes of their actions. Otherwise, they might as well be monkeys with a typewriter, i.e. their actions could just as well be random.
But other than that, you are also completely correct that if you have too many things that are different from any established experiences the players could draw from, play also grinds to a halt. Like, let’s say you build a setting that doesn’t run on any physics we know of, there are no 3 directional dimensions, there is no time, etc etc - I don’t know how that would look, but you would basically be asking your players to learn a completely new way to live and make decisions in this space, which is possible, but the simplest thing might require lots of thinking and problem solving.
With that in mind, it’s important to keep most of the inner workings the same as either our current established reality, or some well-known fantasy one.
So long story short, I agree with you, it is important just to have a few things that work differently than “expected”.
However, “expected” can be very different depending on which players you find. So, as always, I think the most important thing is just to have a proper “session zero” or player selection process, where it is discussed how the setting looks and how far away from established norms it is. If everyone agrees to take it very far away from those norms, then you can be more “original”, if not, then you either can’t or need to find different players (and if you can’t find any players, then you probably went too far :p).
