>But first, I need you to read my thirty page ~SETTING PRIMER~

>>49771155
Reminder that extensive worldbuilding is an exercise in masturbation, especially if you do it before you even start running a game or writing a book or whatever the fuck you're doing with it. Your players don't give a shit about your deep lore because it's not about them and doesn't fucking matter to the events happening right now.
>But it's fuuuuuuun!
So is masturbation, but most people do not appreciate a pretentious idiot wanking off in their faces.

>his players don't eagerly await his next setting primer

You should maybe get better at writing.

>>49771155
I write up setting primers, but most of the detail is actually for my own benefit, not the player's. It allows me to be consistent with the world I present to players by having a reference.

I provide them to players in case they want to use it, but it's never necessary. That's what Knowledge checks are for.

Y'all can't convince me that making like Robert E. Howard is a bad thing:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0603571.txt

>>49771234
>Your players don't give a shit about your deep lore because it's not about them and doesn't fucking matter to the events happening right now.

That's not true at all, though. While 500 pages of history and lore are often redundant to the game, the contemporary geopolitics of the world, the foundations of local religion, and current events are all things that will directly impact the adventure of the players and the GM needs to invest a bit of time into making all of that grounded.

>>49771360
>When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this 'history' of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness. And I found that by adhering to the 'facts' and spirit of that history, in writing the stories, it was easier to visualize (and therefore to present) him as a real flesh-and-blood character rather than a ready-made product. In writing about him and his adventures in the various kingdoms of his Age, I have never violated the 'facts' or spirit of the 'history' here set down, but have followed the lines of that history as closely as the writer of actual historical-fiction follows the lines of actual history. I have used this 'history' as a guide in all the stories in this series that I have written.

>>49771155
Setting primers have their place. In a game that runs for literal years, people just honestly forget stuff. I have an online game I'm running where I've had to dedicate an entire thread to setting information.
But making people read All That Shit when they're just starting out is a recipe for disaster.

>>49771372
How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life, how often are you aware of it, and also aware of precisely what aspect of it is affecting you right now?

Adventurers do not give a shit who is king of the land or whatever unless they are going to be directly interacting with them. If they do, great, flesh that shit out a little. If they don't, then don't fucking bother, because it doesn't matter.

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>>49771155
I would unironically love this. Seriously, I'm sick of improv games or half- assed answers when I ask about the setting or lore.

So screw you, this fictitious DM sounds awesome.

>>49771425
>How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life

Rarely, but I'm a schmuck sitting at home surfing 4Chan, not an adventurer out doing things that might directly affect those geopolitics.

>>49771155
I don't understand this sentiment one bit. As a player, I fucking hate looking at the GM to tell me if my well-studied character has every heard of X kingdom. I fucking hate not knowing anything about my surroundings in character until the GM puts the game on hold to explain it all to the party.
I wish more GMs would give out detailed setting information that I could read out of game. It would make me feel like my character is actually a sage instead of some jackass that has a conversation with his brain every time he wants to know if he remembers something.

>>49771506
>some jackass that has a conversation with his brain every time he wants to know if he remembers something.

I know this feeling all too well.

It's easy to strike a fair middleground between setting wank and useful player material. You just have to remember that your players are going to fuck up everything.

Setting up dominoes so players can knock them over is the definition of being a good GM.

>>49771425
>How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life
More or less constantly.
>how often are you aware of it
I would say fairly often, especially when it kicks my ass at the gas pump or hurts my job security
>and also aware of precisely what aspect of it is affecting you right now?
Less so, but usually gas and jobs are the prime offenders again.

>>49771155
>Oh yeah, this is actually my first time running this system...
I'm not saying it's their fault -- everyone has to start somewhere. But I am saying they're probably going to be shit
>>49771234
Worldbuilding with games as a goal is good. Setting up conflicts and plothooks for the players is more than masturbation.

But once you get into "what food do they eat?" bullshit, you've already been fapping for far too long.

I like making simple flowcharts of where the players actions might take certain npcs and locations. Not because they can accurately predict all their moves but it makes me interested to see the effects of their actions and not attached to any one conclusion.

>>49771155
Thirty pages is not bad at all, I've got this.

>not gladly accepting a baseline for how the world works so you can properly roleplay in it and interact with it

I mean you are correct there is going way to far with it but having a fairly well fleshed out setting is never a bad thing.

>>49771360
>>49771620
This is hugely less important than you think it is.

There's nothing wrong with all this information existing, but as with everything else, you have to give people a reason to care.

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There are exactly two kinds of people who pick up a game of Pathfinder/D&D and decide to worldbuild a setting:

The first is the kind of smug, self-satisfied, pretentious person who has active disdain for a number of foundational fantasy conventions and thinks that "suberving the tropes" constitutes quality writing. This is where you get all the the eye-rollingly "wacky" settings that people propose instead of the dreaded "generic european fantasy:"
>What if we ran a D&D game with gunpowder weapons in a post-apocalyptic wild west?
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?
>What if the only playable races were gnomes and bugmen, and everyone lives underground, and magic comes from eating mushrooms that grow on the backs of wild elves?

How twee. How wacky. How inteszzzzzzzz....

The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to run someone else's world consistently. They can't put in the effort to memorize the details of Dragonlance or Ravenloft or even Forgotten Realms, so they create their own Forgotten Realms with the serial numbers filed off and the geography mixed up a little bit. They throw another bog-standard fantasy setting on the pile: another laundry list of proper nouns that the players have to re-remember even though the mean the same thing as any other D&D setting.

Either way, it's not a good sign for the quality of your GM, both in the sense of the quality of their game and the quality of their character.

>>49771598
>But once you get into "what food do they eat?" bullshit
What food people eat should take all of 15-20 minutes to consider and condense into an easy to read sheet based on income. Any further detail than that is superfluous.

>>49771641
Why then, is it less important?

>>49771155
That actually sounds super fun.

Are there actually players who don't like this? Why would you play these games if you hate reading so much?

>>49771155
I write them as I go.

The players keep badgering me for more information. I've had to call a couple of sessions early so I can spend the week making shit up for them.

There is, however, a trick to it. Since I've been GMing for 15 years odd now, I re-use shit like motherfucker.
I'm not above running multiple campaigns in the same world, at different points in time.

>>49771662
Man, I'm just happy with my Eastern European-inspired Burning Wheel standard fantasy setting. It gets the job done and strikes a good balance between serious and lighthearted tone-wise.

>>49771663
No, that was superfluous all on its own.

It's completely unimportant to worldbuilding. If you get an awesome idea about food in your setting, then obviously that's good, but that's not what I'm talking about.
>>49771670
You're not going to be inconsistent in any meaningful way. You also don't need a baseline for how the world works in order to roleplay; you should already know the themes/atmosphere and the gist of the game, and the GM will take care of the rest.

If the GM can't take care of the rest, then he's built a shit world.

>>49771155
If I don't have a setting, how are the players gonna pick their homeworlds?
And when they jump into a new system, am I just supposed to throw the same generic space habs with the same monoculture?

>>49771641
They're not saying it's critical, just that they like having that tool in the toolbox.

Also, by just going through the effort of having made it you'll be a lot more likely to remember most of it, anyways. It's sort of an exercise in itself.

>>49771706
>running multiple games in the same setting
This is good, settings get better and better as you have a chance to play them more with different people offering different perspectives and contributing different things

>>49771662
Those are some horrible examples. They're legitimately original, not the shitty "subversions" you're talking about.
>>49771686
Some people like reading stuff that's well written.
>>49771737
He's not complaining about worldbuilding in general.

>>49771757
>They're not saying it's critical
I'm not saying they're saying it's critical.
>by just going through the effort of having made it you'll be a lot more likely to remember most of it, anyways.
Exactly.

>>49771662
Holy fuck, dude.

I've seen people on /tg/ make decent arguments for creating a setting as you go instead of extensively worldbuilding a history for your game, but this is the first time in six years on this board take an active "anti-homebrew settings" stance.

>>49771662
You say this as if the "generic european fantasy" isn't generic for a reason. It's literally standard. European fantasy is the most common setting.
See also how the actual majority of PCs are humans.

There's nothing wrong with shifting some things around in the setting as long as it ends up fun.

>>49771662
>What if we ran a D&D game with gunpowder weapons in a post-apocalyptic wild west?
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?
>What if the only playable races were gnomes and bugmen, and everyone lives underground, and magic comes from eating mushrooms that grow on the backs of wild elves?

okay but all of those sound fun though?

>>49771737
I think he's complaining about setting bloat, or when you just have too much stuff in the setting that it gets pretentious.

Personally, I like to let the players determine a lot of the setting, especially the areas where their characters came from. Players are some of your greatest tools when worldbuilding.

>>49771717
>It's completely unimportant to worldbuilding.
It's helpful when the players ask "Hey, what kind of food and liquor does this bar serve?" and you can answer "Shitty beer, baiju, and peach brandy if you're a rich fuck. Food is fried pork and fish with some rice for a side, or you can go for the roast stuff." It helps immersion and adds a touch of flavor (pun intended), for minimal work. Just don't go full fantasy cookbook and keep it super simple.

>>49771763
Ah, yeah I can see how it'd be a pain if it's poorly written.
Or if the GM expects you to have basically studied it for each session's "pop quiz"
But that's kinda irrelevant to the idea of making a setting compendium. I think it's nice to have reference material if I feel like it.

Although, in truth, the best fun is if the GM makes a huge compendium but doesn't show you things from it until AFTER you've encountered them. Maintains the mystery while keeping a large infrastructure.

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>>49771662
>What if the only playable races were gnomes and bugmen, and everyone lives underground, and magic comes from eating mushrooms that grow on the backs of wild elves?
I-I want to play this setting. Am I a pleb?

>>49771717
Fair enough.

I suppose it's just a matter of personal preference then. I personally like well made worlds and the like.

>>49771155
Too bad nigga, I always go into minute detail and do provide wikis for the worlds I create, because a lot of it is probably going to matter at some point. Players who haven't read at least the background of their chosen home country will have their characters treated as rubes at best and illiterates at worst.

What you gon do bout it?

>>49771851
Yes, because it's not even a setting. What makes gnomes and bugmen interesting, what are the cultural quirks that come with living underground, what about the surface, are the elves ok with their shrooms being harvested or not, are they venerated as bringers of magic or are they regarded as an inferior servant-race?

This is why setting primers are important. Read, niggas!

>>49771864
Not play in your shitty game.

>>49771819
That's improv level. Your world's cultures are going to have a general feel to their food, just as a result of everything else -- something inspired by China will have rice and noodles and shit.
>>49771850
>But that's kinda irrelevant to the idea of making a setting compendium.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that the idea of making a setting compendium is kinda irrelevant to getting people to read a shittily written primer for a shittily written world.
>>49771862
Doubt it.

>>49771864
Not play in your shitty game.

>>49771917
Thank god, I hate players with an entitled attitude like yours. You people forget that the GM is in this for his enjoyment, too, not just to entertain your delusions of grandeur.

And guess what, worldbuilding is fun for most GMs, and they put a lot of work in so you have more shit to fuck up spectacularly! So stop being a big poo-babby and read the fucking primer.

>>49771864
How about having the players come up with at least a part of the lore for their homeland? It makes it easier to remember and helps establish attachment to the setting.

>>49771920
>Doubt it

Doubt what? My own opinion?

>>49771913
Obviously it needs more refinement, but I think it's potentially interesting.

>>49771933
It's nice when it all works out, 'cause I hate GMs with an entitled attitude like yours. You people forget that the player is in this for his enjoyment, too, not just to entertain your delusions of grandeur.

>>49771598
>Setting up conflicts and plothooks for the players is more than masturbation.
Yeah, but if you can't weave that in your storytelling, and need people to read a fuckhuge document instead, your game is weak.
Characterize more, show more, tell less.

>>49771948
Yep. Specifically, that you like well-made worlds.

>>49771933
I hate entitled GMs who think players just HAVE to play in his super original special setting. I bet you put a ton of effort and work into aping real world cultures and tweaking them just a bit. What is it? Viking elves? Japanese dwarves? Maybe the gnomes all talk like they're from Jersey!

Your game doesn't mean shit if no one wants to play in it. Fuck your primer, and fuck you.

>>49771977
That comment was about worldbuilding in general, not primershit.

>>49771973
See, the problem with your fantastic argument is that player is by leaps and bounds the easier job. You literally have to put no work in beyond maybe half a page of backstory. And that's fine, I don't mind that, but I do mind when you roll in and start making demands.

I want the players to have fun, that's why I put so much work in, so stop being a huge child and cooperate with me. If you can't even do that much, well, you're just a terrible player, no two ways about it.

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>>49772000
Nigger what.

>>49772022
>half a page of backstory
So you're a bad player too, huh?

>>49771155
Worldbuilding is fine, but it's all about how you introduce the setting to your players. Remember, a GM is ultimately writing for an audience; the players. A DM's job is to get them engaged and if there's a failure of player engagement it's a failure on the DM's part.

You need to find a way to weave exposition into the narrative. Characterize more, show more, tell less.

Or failing that, find a way for the setting to be as new to the players as it is for their characters. That way they can ask stupid questions like "whose the king of Zibzar again?" in character.

>>49772009
See, that's why I pitch my games before I start them. All the cards on the table, it's my own setting, there's shit you need to read and shit you need to at least somewhat know. Reading's too hard? Well, this game is clearly not for you.

But if you want to play, well, I'm afraid you'll have to sacrifice 20 minutes of your precious time, buckaroo.

>>49771920
I thought we were talking about making setting compendiums, not about forcing your players to read through something?

You could have a newberry winning setting primer and it'd still be shitty to force that on people.

>>49772027
The worlds you like are probably shit.
>>49772038
>find a way for the setting to be as new to the players as it is for their characters
Or, more specifically, just GM your campaigns in such a way that their ignorance isn't a deal.

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>>49772022
>any backstory for players at all outside of a 3 sentence concept and a few figures in the setting
>not defining the rest in play

>>49772033
Nah, just not a big fan of super special snowflake characters. Where do I come from, who do I know, who's my family, what are my dreams and aspirations and why do I adventure, that's all the backstory needs to be, everything else is just, what did you call it, "masturbation". And all that shit fits snugly on half a page for a fresh adventurer, maybe a full page if you start at a higher level.

>>49772048
But why would anyone want to play in your shitty game.

>>49772053
We're talking about forcing your players to read through your shitty setting compendium. It's a combination of building a world full of chaff and then forcing some poor buggers to sit through it.

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>>49772063
>The worlds you like are probably shit
>Projecting based on literally nothing

Good to know you aren't intelligent enough to have a proper discussion.

>>49772093
I don't know, man, gotta ask all those people I've run long and well-liked campaigns for over the past 25+ years. Guess enough people are willing to read a few pages of lore for their hobby, go figure.

>>49772048
But I don't want to play in your retarded game. No, I'm not lazy because I don't want to read the backstory of your setting. The fact that you need a primer to introduce things that ultimately aren't going to matter to me, as a player, is a massive red flag that shows you don't really give a shit about what we do because it won't be part of "muh canon" or could potentially, gasp, interfere with the shitty story you're trying to make.

Go ahead and make your world and shit, but write a fucking book instead, don't run a game.

>>49772083
Yeah, you hate snowflakes so much you just HAVE to write half a fucking page in backstory, right?

Refer to >>49772064.

>>49772018
I thought we were talking about morbid, tasteless, excesses of worldbuilding.
The primer is just the moneyshot.

>>49772139
Weird thing to pick up on, especially since I wrote the word "maybe" before it, so might be less might be more, who the fuck knows, I ain't your boss when it comes to writing your backstory.

>>49772117
Yeah, it's not like I can read the contents of your posts, right?
>>49772119
Yeah, why don't you?

>>49772158
Nice back-pedalling.

>>49772162
Show me when I gave an example that would possibly give your retarded projection any solid standing.

>>49772185
It's clearly a troll or someone upset at something, leave the thread be he's not Interested in actually discussing something.

>>49772136
You must be quite the clairvoyant to know what exactly is going to matter in the campaign. Also, honestly, with your negative attitude towards the hobby I ain't so sure if you should be playing at all, my man.

But dude, if you can't grasp the convenience of having a somewhat fleshed-put setting with available info that precludes players having to ask about all kinds of crap during the game, well, I suppose I can't help you. But I wish you godspeed on your journey to find a campaign that has no setting whatsoever to read up on, but still manages to be an engrossing world with a story that makes sense and carries the proper weight of implied consequence.

Cheers, friend.

>itt, unironic murderhobos who actually enjoy theme park adventures

>>49772136
The point of the primer is that you can CHOOSE which things matter to you as a player. It provides a context so that you can make decisions that have weight.

If you really want to railroad, you say, "here's everything that matters to you and nothing that doesn't".

>>49772185
>>49771862
People usually disagree with people who disagree with them.
>>49772219
>everyone who disagrees with me is a troll

>>49772174
Right you are, mate, I snuck the word "maybe" in there with the 4chan gold pass edit function. What a sneaky lil' bugger I am.

>>49771155
Having a fleshed out world is fine. Expecting the players to know and care about every facet of it isn't.

To use an easy example, lord of the rings. There's a tone of stuff going on in that world, but to most of the fellowship, a lot of it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter exactly what a balrog is, and none of them would know anyway except Gandalf.

At best, you should give your players a brief summary of very basic details their characters should know. More than that and it gets overwhelming. If you worldbuilt correctly, the details you came up with will flow naturally into a story anyway and make the world feel alive. If you don't, it'll feel like an audio tour of a history museum.

>>49772241
>I do not know what back-pedalling is.
>>49772222
Quads choose badly.

>>49772139
One of my players used to routinely write 3 to 4 pages of backstory and proceed to never use the leads I gave her in play from her backstory, instead opting to act as the edgy cool guy and spurning all social interaction.

She matured, but only after a group intervention.

>>49772219
Will do.

Tfw can't have proper discussions anymore because 9/10 times I get bait posters and autists replying nonstop.

>>49771155
Thirty pages isn't even bad, provided:

>It's single sided.
>It's formatted with subheadings and shit, and every page or two covers a distinct topic.
>The writing isn't atrocious.
>There are some rough maps.
>Any (preferably most) of it covers shit that gets used in play.

I'm not much for reading wikis, but if you run the same setting for a few years you can easily accumulate enough material for one. I won't begrudge a guy for keeping notes nor for making them accessible.

>D-didn't you read EVERYTHING?
Never encountered this. It would suck, sure, but does this actually take place?

>>49772273
You can't have a proper discussion because that would require discussion, and that's hard.

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>>49772296

>>49771804
For a session or two, sure.

>>49772273
I mean, the replies started like he had a point so I don't blame you for getting invested but "Every bit of detail is shit let the GM do it all" with no other way possible is a troll or someone who doesn't want to see another person's viewpoint.

>>49772310
When I say "you", I mean (You).

>>49771662

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa~

>>49772238
Where in the absolute fuck do you see any indication of the world building I like, which then would give you a reason to call my preference of world building shit, from
>>49771862

>>49772316
>For a session or two, sure.

The underground gnomes and bugmen eating elf-fungus sounds like it'd only be able to sustain its novelty for a few sessions, but

>What if we ran a D&D game with gunpowder weapons in a post-apocalyptic wild west?
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?

Both could easily be the foundation for an entire setting book. They read as some VERY strong building blocks, honestly. I might even grab the first one.

>>49772331
But I was trying to have a discussion.

Then he started throwing out retarded projections which effectively killed the discussion.

>>49772352
Because it's in disagreement with my post you dongle. I don't deliberately hold incorrect views, and when you reply with "lol I like GOOD worlds" it makes it pretty easy.
>>49772380
>he

>>49771505
When I was in the Air Force, every fucking week.

>>49772398
Huh, that's strange. I wonder what the difference was. Maybe you sat in an office?

>>49772396
So your basis is "My opinion is better his must be shit?"

>>49772355
Eh. Aquatic campaigns are gross, but workable. The post-apoc wild west could work. That poster just provided bad examples. Gimmick settings like "underground gnomes and bugmen eating elf fungus" or "in mah setting humans are the tallest race!" that /tg/ creams its pants over get really old really fast. Theme park isn't bad, theme park is what TTRPGs should be for everyone's enjoyment, not some neckbeard railroading a party through his svirfneblin-only setting based on ancient Azerbaijan to show off a couple alt-history gimmicks he cleverly invented.

>>49771155
My DM made the mistake of thinking this is necessary. I did once too, but then I ran a murderhobo game and everybody had fun instead. And the characters got fleshed out in the first two sessions, so there's actually some roleplaying involved.

>>49772396
...to not consider my views invalidated by your own.
>>49772474
That's how it works. Unless you have opinions that you think are shit, in which case -- why the dicks do you have them?

I think certain things make a good world. He thinks they make a bad world. It seems pretty likely that the things he thinks will make a good world, I will think make a bad world.

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>>49772396
Holy shit man.

Stop.

>>49771234
>most people do not appreciate a pretentious idiot wanking off in their faces.

Unless of course they're a "paid" performer with a set audience... Ring a bell?

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I think that it is important to have a background setting that lets players develop a background for their own characters. Saying that you are running a generic fantasy setting doesn't give them a lot of options, but detailing various cultures, races, orders, and other groups a PC could hail from makes things interesting. I honestly do worldbuilding less because I want to, but because the players want and need it to an extent.

>>49771663
>What food people eat should take all of 15-20 minutes to consider and condense into an easy to read sheet based on income

I actually did that and have it saved somewhere. That was for a /tg/ thread, though, but I didn't see the sense in throwing out a perfectly good snippet of world.

>>49771760
So, getting a group to make history and legends for another group later on ISN'T just being a lazy shit?
Who knew.

>>49771662
>The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to run someone else's world consistently.
Guilty as charged. That, and players can't know more about the fluff than me.
I've read enough books and watched enough movies that I can just throw together generic fantasy elements like lego anyway.
But you are exactly the kind of player who'd get dropped.

>>49771850
>Or if the GM expects you to have basically studied it for each session's "pop quiz"
Oh, fuck no. I would NEVER do that. I'll pop quiz people on their character sheets or class features happily, though, but remembering setting details is encouraged far more subtly.
My current game has ended up as geopolitical intrigue accidentally, so I'm trying to give rewards out for interacting with the setting.
Not even treasure, or XP. Not that I'm even using XP; the characters level up when they've done a bunch of shit and gotten paid. But they get their favourite NPCs returning.

There's nothing better than the group taking a shine to throwaway characters and forcing you to re-use them. One's even ended up s a DMPC of sorts; they needed a healer and they were encouraging someone who'd caught up with them to stay with the party and be useful and stuff.
Fuck spotlight stealing, though. I get my kicks from watching THEM play with the setting.

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>>49771662
>>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?
Yes please.

>>49771425
>How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life

Every single, waking, breathing moment of your pointless, wasted life. Are you shitting me?

>how often are you aware of it
Obviously never, because your surroundings just magically appears out of a vacuum that some archetype wizard farted into.

>>49771425
>How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life,
How often have you seen shitposting about Trump/Clinton/the EU/Russia/China/Der Juden.

>>49772642
Why? What about that setting sounds good to you?

>>49772033
Fuck, man. How much backstory should a level 1 loser have other than
>born here
>raised here
>likes A because B
>hates X because Y(optional)
>potential hook for GM to pull from

>>49772651
>Every single, waking, breathing moment of your pointless, wasted life. Are you shitting me?
This is historically innacurate.
>>49772661
You want a great character idea, and that doesn't have anything to do with backstory.

>>49772656
Absolutely everything. I don't even care if it makes me a pleb, i want to be a sky pirate.

>>49772661
No less than 10 pages. However, it should be a completely mundane, run-of-the-mill backstory about a farmer boy turned fighter, or you're an anime special snowflake.

>>49772677
>Absolutely everything
Bitch this is not conducive to having a decent conversation in this shitshow of a thread. What made it a good setting, and how would you make a similarly good one?

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>>49772656
Not him, but why not? It definitely conjures a more interesting visual, bare minimum. Travel seems fun, I'm personally a fan of player ownership of land and/or ships.

Also creates an interesting dichotomy of "wild vs civilization" beyond just forests and caves.

What makes it so bad?

>>49772676
>This is historically innacurate.

No.
Contemporary is not historical.
Geopolitics impacts anyone actually able to access the internet.

>>49772656
Not the one you're replying to, but
> Magitek
Wierd and wonderful stuff I might get to create
> age of sail
I like tall ships.
> Renaissance inspired cities
Finally, a chance to use all the historical trivia I've filled my head with!

>>49772697
>how would you make a similarly good one
I don't have time to go into that. If this thread's still alive when I get online tomorrow, I will get back to you.

>>49772733
Well in that case I'll be going offline too.

>>49771155
>Be player
>Enjoy fine worldbuilding

You guys just dont have the touch, or the power.

>>49772676
>historically innacurate
I'd disagree because most people care about geopolitics, and have done so for at least the past century. And even then, it's increasing more and more

>>49772697
>Golden Age of Piracy Gulliver meets Robinson Crusoe for rum-fueled aeronautical hi-jinx before diving into the underwater world of captain Nero's New Utopia.

What's not to love?

>>49771662
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?

Nigga thats close to word for word the world I've been brewing for a while.

>>49771662
http://vocaroo.com/i/s1oPIZT8M3GF

>>49771662
This is some nice fresh bait.

>>49771785
Without quests to complain about, they instead complain about homebrewing.

>>49772830
>http://vocaroo.com/i/s1oPIZT8M3GF

Go to bed Wooster, you had one too many.

>Humans only
>Martials only
>Medieval europe only

Is this just a /tg/ thing or is there an entire subculture of grognards who are exclusively just that vanilla?

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>>49771155
Here's the setting I've been working on most recently: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zI3dP0S1vZo2YOYLdHORRcIp4KlakANV2MKVCAUIIx4/edit?usp=sharing. Some features people may find interesting:

>there is a genuine cosmology with implications for actual play
>there are actual religions instead of divine fanclubs
>the setting is decidedly post-feudal but also pre-industrial revolution

>>49772868
It is just a /tg/ thing i think.
Ive never seen someone out their shit taste like that in actual games.

>>49772868
That's stupid if you do it in dungeons and dragons, but a medieval Europe game with a system built without magic seems perfectly fine to me.

>>49772225
underrated comment.

>hurr hburr homebrew settings are bad

kill yourselves

>>49772697
GM who actually homebrewed a flying ship magitech and flying islands here, can confirm shit was dope. It went for 4 years and ended climatically and my players still want to go back for epilogues.

Thinga great about flying island cities:

-No need to bother about maps
-Personal base on a ship that the players can upgrade
-Sky piracy is even better than normal piracy
-Factions can be easily created, the world is cosmopolitan and borders don't really exist so you can throw in all sorts of nation interactions without people wondering why two nations several thousand miles apart would interact
-GIANT GIANT MONSTERS CAN ROAM THE LAND/SEAS and not make cities giant targets. Players can consider taking up becoming monster hunters.
-Sky knights on griffins.

Lots of reasons.

>>49772914
Go write a book

>>49772914
Hey, the shitposters need something to complain about.
Today it seems to be homebrew.

I like worldbuilding, but if you're doing so much of it you need a wiki and expect your players to read a primer, you're doing it wrong.

If your campaign is gonna involve a lot of wandering around, just jot down a few light points about the various communities you expect them to visit - no more than a small paragraph - sharing each one as your players visit each place.

The only situation where you'd need a LOT of worldbuilding is if your campaign is gonna be set in one place, like a single big bustling city, and you want that place to feel alive and distinct. Even then, no need for a primer, just have them be new arrivals.

>>49771662
Spelljammer and Masque of the Red Death already exist

>>49773227
I think /tg/ have just been burned so many times by shitty homebrews made by egotistical, wannabe-novelist GMs that they reflexively reject them.

>>49773294
Nah.
I think it is shitposters shitposting.
There are like three threads up that follow this theme posted at around the same time.

>>49771155
You are now aware that all RPG settings were "just shitty homebrew" before they got published. Getting published is not a guarantee of quality. Just look at Forgotten Realms.

>>49771662
There are exactly two kinds of people who pick up a roleplaying game and decide to use a narrativist system:

The first is the kind of smug, self-satisfied, pretentious person who has active disdain for a number of foundational roleplaying concepts and thinks that "fiction first" constitutes quality mechanics. This is where you get all the the eye-rollingly "innovative" systems that people propose instead of the dreaded gamist d20 game:
>What if we had a roleplaying game where players add objects to a scene?
>What if we had a roleplaying game where players get plot point metacurrency for acting in-character?
>What if instead of one GM, everyone takes turns moving around the table counterclockwise introducing new story elements after the main GM sets the scene?

How twee. How avant-garde. How inteszzzzzzzz....

The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to read a full rulebook. They can't put in the effort to memorize the modifiers in D&D or Shadowrun or even Savage Worlds, so they play their own little system where all the mechanics are abstracted into "the narrative." They throw another shallow storygame onto the pile: another laundry list of "moves" that the players have to re-remember even though
the moves just described things they already did in traditional play.

Either way, it's not a good sign for the quality of your GM, both in the sense of the quality of their game and the quality of their character.

>>49772225
>ITT: Amateur wannabe authors think it's absolutely to force their players to listen and pay attention to pages upon pages of accumulated Lore and trivia like it's a goddamn history lecture and act surprised that when their players would rather go to a theme park instead

I'm all for worldbuilding and creativity and imagination and all that jazz, but at some point you gotta realize that it's not just your story. Tabletops are a cooperative game for a reason. Players like to have control over they story too, their characters backstories and where they come from, the kinds of problems their characters would encounter and how they solve them, internal party relations, etc.

Players like Theme park adventures because it gives them a lot of freedom and power. They can be anything from mercenaries to pirate-traders to crusaders or however else they want to spin it. By setting in stone the world and it's characters before the players even get involves, you are placing your narrative in a position of importance and undervalueing the players importance and their agency and ability to influence events. Players Like to have choice. Players don't get into Roleplaying games because they wanna be an actor in your story, they do so to a have and adventure that pertains to them.

To conclude, despite its substantial use in this thread, the best piece of advice is for you DMs who get so into worldbuilding is to write your own damn book.

>>49773701
As a player, this post is pure bullshit. Please worldbuild more, gmms.

>>49773732
Also as a player, this poster is a brown-nosing faggot.

Do continue world-building, but think equally as much on how to get players interested in reading it with out have to resort to DM authority "read it or leave".

>>49773701
>implying theme parks aren't DM fiat festivals where literally everything that goes on is essentially on rails because the DM hasn't planned out anything beyond the first three miles out of the sleepy level 1-3 village of Manureton

>>49773701
I agree with >>49773732

While the players having some agency and say is important, so to is laying a foundation for them to build off of. It's very annoying to come to a session as a player and ask 'what sort of character would fit well with this world?' only to get 'anything you can ever imagine~'

I like worldbuilding details like there being a barbarian tribe in the north that worhips dragons. Just that simple fact added to a world gives quite a few possible character ideas and sets some expectations for characters as a whole.

Don't expect the players to make the entire campaign world for you

>>49772879
What's the little blue kingdom to the left of Behlitz?

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>All these pleb-tier players conflating "worldbuilding" with railroading
>All these pleb-tier GMs getting antsy over worldbuilding stuff the players will never see
>All these pleb-tier plebs who come into a game with a set story

Hexcrawl+Extensive Worldbuilding Master Race reporting in

Fools, my autistic endless worldbuilding means that I have over 400 hexes, each with their own terrain, and over 90 points of interest for my players to go to. Every town, dungeon, abandoned castle, and landmark has a name and a hook.

My players will never be railroaded for LITERALLY the rest of their gaming careers. No matter where they go in this entire fucking landmass, they will find a plot hook I have pre-written and am prepared to turn into a full adventure. If they don't like what the coastal towns have to offer they can spend a few sessions trekking all the way to the other end of the continent - or even to the coasts of surrounding nations - and I will guaranteed have culture, people, and things for them to do. I have interwoven this shit. I have geopolitical maps all mapped out. Every month, I sit down in front of my flowchart and figure out what happens to the world as a result of plots the players foiled and plots that never succeeded.

I have weaponized my autism and I have become a very powerful GM for it. I will always, always be prepared to never, ever railroad you and still give you a realized world.

>>49773821
That's a lake.

Unfortunately this map doesn't do the geography any justice, it's just a handy approximate visual reference to go with the document.

What's also not reflected here is that Ghant and Behlitz are mostly unsettled, themselves.

>>49773852
I love the metamechanics that come with hexcrawls, random encounters, and the like. You are really 'building' a world as you plot everything out. You are doing good anon.

>not creating the setting as a joint exercise with your players
>not using a real time/place/event with a single twist
>not creating a simplistic kernel setting and filling in the details as you play

It's like none of you even GM games.

>>49771670
For the same reason playwrights and film-makers don't bother making entire buildings for their actors to work in. It doesn't improve the dramatic function of the story in any way, and is largely a waste of time and money.

Listen: storytellers are liars, and GMs moreso than most. Creating entire, fully-formed worlds is not our business. Our business is to TELL STORIES, and you could tell a compelling, heart-wrenching story with stick figures on a blank white background. That's because stories are about DRAMA. They are about conflict, about the clash of wants and needs, about human, relatable struggles.

If you nail the drama, no-one will fucking care how weak your worldbuilding is. Meanwhile, no amount of ~deep lore~ will save a drama-less story.

>>49773854
Ah, I just realised that it's the same colour as the Sunlight Sea. Sorry for being an idiot, anon. I wish you luck on your worldbuilding endeavours.

>>49772247
>At best, you should give your players a brief summary of very basic details their characters should know.
This. Keep the knowledge in character.
Joe the blacksmith will low his local lord, and his lord's lord, and the king's name. But he probably hasn't the foggiest about anything more then a week's ride away.

If a character has more knowledge you can set them aside and fill them in.

Anything else is the realm of the relevant knowledge skills(or system equivalent)

>thread about fuck magic, only no magic is fun
>Thread about fuck nonhumans, only humans are fun
>Thread about fuck homebrew, only established settings are fun
This place got so much worse so quickly after we catered to the anti-x crowd

>>49772022
>half a page of backstory.
I can't remember the last time I saw a player put this much effort into a character.

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>>49773940
>every setting is dumbfuck feudalism
>all non-nobles are peasants
>always there is a king
>the world civilization is thousands of years old and always there have been kings and always there will be kings until le industrial steampunk

>>49772064
>Oh, and my character totally lived in [city we're in] before. I get a bonus for that, right?

>>49774251
>Your setting primer is almost entirely an attempt at doing a summary of the politics of the small group of late medieal republics the game is centered on
>It mostly fails at it

>>49773903
>not creating the setting as a joint exercise with your players
I have tried this before and it was one of the worst fucking things I've ever tried in ttrpgs. Trying to get the players to contribute to the world was like pulling teeth and just a terrible experience for everyone involved.

If it works for your group then more power to you. I still believe it could be really good with the right group, but not every group.

>>49774251
He was giving him an example. It's a general guideline.

Take a modern setting, for example. Do you know the name of every major politician on the planet? Then why should the players know the name and motive of every major politician in your setting?

>>49774345
I regularly have my players make their home town, and give them the responsibility to fitting it into the setting while maintaining the power to veto it if I want.

It works fucking great most times.

>>49774251
Yeah, it's not like it took humanity 200.000 years to get where we are today. Oh wait.

>>49774380
10.000 years of that were not spent in the goddamn iron age

I can't believe how many "one true way" faggots are on /tg/.

>>49771506
>I wish more GMs would give out detailed setting information that I could read out of game.
And I wish my players would bother to read the fucking rulebook, let alone the single page setting primer I emailed them two weeks before we started.

>>49774426
there are more every day.
I truly dislike it.

>>49774379
I asked each of my players to come up with one npc for the world, and one location/thing. It could be any npc they wanted: a far off king, friendly merchant, local adventurer, esoteric wizard, whatever and only one was willing to do that. The location/thing was similarly open ended, just a few lines of flavor text and description was all I wanted, and once again only one did it, the same one who made an npc. I told them they were always welcome to contribute more to the world if they had any ideas, just come talk to me about it. They didn't even need to talk to me about it right away, they could've written on the google drive I had set up specifically for them to add stuff to the world.

It was about as easy as I could've made it, and they still did fuckall.

If it works for you great, but some players really are just bad for that kind of play.

>>49774508
Huh, odd.
My players usually go nuts at the chance to actually make a town that follows their personal storyline, or a hidden kingdom that has whatever race they are interested in trying out.

>>49774521
Be sure to appreciate your players then, not everyone is so lucky.

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>>49774508
asking someone to come up with a thing out of the blue will often illicit that kind of response. When my gm and I worked together on stories, it was more taking something already existing aand expanding on it. Why did this happen? Who was affected? how might this affect the current or a future story? We would also spice up 'placeholder' settings as we entered or heard of them (i.e. when they became relevant)

>>49773294
nah. I still love muh homebrew

>>49774380
The vast majority of the history of human civilization consisted of societies more like modern urban civilization than the bizarre post-apocalyptic feudal period. For most of history there was no "peasant" or "subsistence farming" class. There was no king. There was no aristocracy. Society was highly specialized and complex. Only in one part of the world for a few centuries did anything resembling generic fantasy feudalism ever exist, and even at its own time it was regarded as barbarous and anomalous.

"Peasantry" is largely a fiction. Certainly the notion of the "ignorant commoner" is preposterous.

>>49774695
>"Peasantry" is largely a fiction. Certainly the notion of the "ignorant commoner" is preposterous.
t. Filthy Commoner

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>>49774662
Huge-ass chains that are thick enough to walk along are my fucking fetish.

Fucking DS2 and its lush-yet-non-euclidean level design

>>49773659

>thinks that "fiction first" constitutes quality mechanics. This is where you get all the the eye-rollingly "innovative" systems

Totally agree with you here. I'm not completely against systems like Fiasco or Microscope, but I do think that "storygames" are something fundamentally different from RPGs. Stuff like FATE that tries to mix the two genres usually leads to a shitty version of both. Like video games that try to be half-film, half-game.

>The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to read a full rulebook

I'll admit to being this type of GM. I tell my players that I'm a lazy GM. I won't run bullshit like Shadowrun or Pathfinder. But I can put up with D&D 5e or Edge of the Empire, as long as players don't expect me to have every spell/monster/weapon memorized. You don't know the stats of the celestial badger you summoned? We'll make something up, and after the battle you can look up the stats and write it down on the back of your character sheet. You want to reference some obscure Star Wars lore? Give me the important details and I'll figure out a way to make it work. But don't expect me to read all the book and be perfectly consistent with them. This is my universe, and it's hard enough just to stay internally consistent.

I'm not a perfect GM, and maybe if I spent 10 hours of research before every session my games might be slightly better. But I'm pretty good at improv, playing NPCs, and listening to my players. I don't expect everyone to enjoy my GMing style, but most people seem to enjoy it well enough: even the mildly-autistic guys who occasionally correct me when I make a mistake.

Obviously the perfect GM would have the entire rulebook memorize, read all the novels, and spend hours preparing every 5-foot-square of every village. All while also being an amazing improviser. But that type of GM is pretty rare, and probably already has a game group that they treat like a full-time job and upload as a weekly podcast.

>>49774275
>as long as it makes sense for your character, (Player).

>>49774695
Sure anon. I see where you're heading, but tell me of a single civilization where they had less farmers than nowadays
protip: you can't, because it's technical progress that lessened the number of workers needed in the fields

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>>49772879
>there are actual religions instead of divine fanclubs

Are you that anon constantly complaining about gods in unrelated threads?

/r/ing worldbuilding roll table.

>>49771234
fpbp

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>>49774859
#triggered

What even is good worldbuilding

>>49775132
what even is life

>>49775132
How I get my players to accept my magical realm with fewer questions.

I struck a balance with making it real simple world and a few types of groups running around. Basically dnd-ese world where the monster population has been going up, particularly undead and fiends. Session one is on Monday and even if don't have a particular reason for the rise in Skellys in the area.Maybe the gods hate humanity? Maybe it's a dickass lich? Who knows?

Players who don't like world building are ones that believe any fictional setting is just a replication of their probably ignorant, probably biased, probably outright wrong ideas of how the "feudal" Europe or other "historically"-based setting was like, or their contemporary attitudes placed into a world that is only superficially unlike ours. To create people who think and act differently, these people need to possess a different history; their cultures and ways of living are the reflection of their historical development.

>>49771155
Literally my game right now, the document was 20 pages. And it's the worst kind as well, just Forgotten Realms reskinand the most interesting part is what some players put in (a guild for adventuring and gambling). I don't have the heart to criticize him in any way, since he has such a low esteem. I am still giving him a chance though, we may be able to have some fun.

I have no idea why but for some reason both my and every other DM I've met seems to refuse to do the ridiculously simple solution of collaborative world building. Give the damn players some input to determine the genre, setting, themes, people, political systems, etc. it's just so much fucking easier when you let your players develop half the fucking world, and they're actually invested in it because it includes elements that are attractive to them. Fuck my life

>>49775950
How could they possibly refuse? As a GM who does collaborative worldbuilding, my players are really invested in the setting and the story.

It's bullshit to exercise total creative control over a setting. It just makes your world only appeal to you unless you have a godlike grasp of what your players want, which most DMs do not have.

>>49775986
Yeah man, half of my last two sessions have just been us shooting the shit about how we want things to work (part of the time was devoted to just nuts and bolts, how the system we're playing works, so that helped)
All i've had for prep so far has been like, 2 paragraphs of direction and a couple NPCs
it's great!

>>49772033

Any amount of backstory a player expects me to read is too much, whenever its half a page or one sentence.

>>49776207
this desu

Your character is what they do during the game, not before it.

>>49776207
As a forever DM, I still expect about half a page unless you're literally a level 1 MHF.

>>49773701
Nah, I like it when there's worldbuilding. Whenever I play a game, I always read the lore so I at least have a knowledge of the world, basic geopolitics, slang, the area in which I'm travelling, etc. Someone hands me a primer, I'm going to think he or she's great.

>>49774355
I expect my characters that I play to know basic geopolitics, local politics, etc at the least unless there's other circumstances (IE playing someone who doesn't care or playing someone who knows in depth). So I like those guides.

>>49771495
Same.

As long as the content is good.

>>49772494
I'd play this tho

>>49771940
Hey, that's what we do!

In the beginning of this year, I was in a bad car accident that put me out of work for about 6 months. During this time, since I suddenly had a vast amount of free time during the day and I can only watch so much netflix, I set about building a campaign for my group of friends and roommates. By the end of it, I had two full continents drawn out, with regions/cities labelled and approximate borders noted. On top of that, I had multiple full color regional maps, and a couple smaller scale 'city' and territory areas mapped out, and had semi-functional multi-page backstories/primers for most of the pertinent areas the group would potentially travel through. Most of the information I had was readily available to any of the party members at anytime (aside from plot points obviously), although I didn't make reading all or any of it a requirement. Why? Mostly because of the crippling sense of self doubt I have about the quality of the work, and a little because, knowing the group, a good 90% of the information would be useless. But I did it anyways, because what the hell, it'd help me be a better DM when it comes to locations and npc motivations. And throwing monsters at the party in a consistent manner as well, it helps to remember where the hobgoblins like to set up shop and which orc tribes are 'taming' wyverns.

>>49773970
It's amazing.
/tg/ is one of the last places I should expect to find philistinism of this magnitude.
Why the fuck would you even play PnP if you can't stand other people using their imagination?

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>>49772550

>>49771819
"What do they eat" is fucking central to any premodern setting. You know how much time people in war plagued iron age societies spend thinking about food? A lot.

They also spend a lot of time fighting over food, fighting how to organize food, and getting killed off as a consequence of changes in food.

You know what they eat in this kingdom? Wet cultivated rice, bananas, yams, and sorghum mostly, which allow for a year round cultivation system, which allowed for a surge in population which brought about a land scarcity problem which is causing the current civil war, fuck you.

>>49774859
There are many of us.

>>49771662
>They can't put in the effort to memorize the details of Dragonlance or Ravenloft or even Forgotten Realms
>they can't put the effort to read and memorize literally THOUSANDS of pages of fluff

>>49772009
>I hate entitled GMs who think players just HAVE to play in his super original special setting.
You're free to walk out of the door any time. None of us will miss you.

>>49780113
>I'm not going to join your game
>Yeah you will!
>No I won't!
>Well feel free to leave my game then!

>>49771234
>Reminder that extensive worldbuilding is an exercise in masturbation, especially if you do it before you even start running a game or writing a book or whatever the fuck you're doing with it
not true in the slightest. it's just a problem of shit narration. The issue isn't that there's 30 or 300 pages of setting notes; the issue is that the GM's going to be a retard and integrate those by just reading off the fucking notes. If the GM is shit at utilizing or creating interactivity in their plot then it'll be shit no matter how much backstory needs to be covered. Retards like you just grab the wrong end of the stick and assume what's being rambled on about is somehow more problematic than the fact that the rambling is happening.

>So years and years ago, I was out on a business lunch in the valley and at one table in the restaurant, there was this big group of movie people. They were the core creative team of a big important movie that was in pre-production at the time. And this big group of people all sat around the director, conversing.

>Now what you have to understand is that all these people struck me as being pretty intelligent. Everything they said was careful, thoughtful and articulate. And they were all giving great logistical advice for the mythos of the film they were making. And so, together, they all started building the logic of this unique movie world, going into extraordinary detail for every bit of brainstorming and evolving all of it into a coherent, interesting place. I swear to you that every bit of forethought and logic was addressed and accounted for...

>The movie was Transformers.

>Which means, of course, that none of it ended up mattering. Because that particular movie seems as if they never talked about the things that actually matter in storytelling.

>>49780218
You're only half right; caring about stuff beyond what is worth including in your campaigns IS masturbation.

Masturbation's fun. There's nothing wrong with it. But other people don't want to see it.

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http://www.theonion.com/article/novelist-has-whole-shitty-world-plotted-out-21193

>>49771155

>thirty pages

FUCKING
LIGHT
WEIGHT
BABIES

If you aren't handing out a minimum of a hundred pages to your players, you ain't fucking trying.

>>49772879
>Kingdom of Talland

Where all the giants live

"In my setting" are the three words that'll get me to stop reading a post completely on this board.

Any other lads with me?

>>49780399
>he doesn't thump players with his doorstoppers if they don't read them
Just make sure you know where to hide the bodies.

>>49780546
Yep, but only because I don't give a shit. It's not a bad thing, just boring as fuck. And that's the point; worlds are dull shitwater unless you make them interesting, and you make them interesting by telling stories. In this case the campaigns.

I've noticed that I subconsciously make sure my campaigns involve outsiders (the players) introduced to a new region, so they can be subtly introduced to the world as they play with it -- without being thwacked on the head with a million pages of King-tier bullshit.

>>49777189
>>49771495
It's a type of game that can work with carefully chosen individuals.

It always work better when players actually have a say in this, have a bit of leeway.

>>49771382
That's all well and good when you're your own dude writing your own stories, but if you're going to be doing collaborative storytelling then surely you should be doing collaborative worldbuilding?

>>49771155
>But first, I need you to read my thirty page ~SETTING PRIMER~
30 pages is not very much.

>You know, so when you play my campaign you can revel in the countless hours of ~WORLDBUILDING~ I did for all of you to marvel at!
Personally, I appreciate the effort some people put into their campaigns.

>If you have any additional questions on stuff you read in my primer, check out my massive fucking autistic ~SETTING WIKI~! That's right, I put together an entire wiki of maps and nations and history for you to read.
That's highly convenient.

>G-guys why are you s-so confused about what a Gal'Darro is? Didn't you read all the worldbuilding I did?
Hold up, lemme wiki it.

>What are some red flags that a GM is probably going to run a shit game?
None of what you've listed. I don't know what your boggle is.

>>49771598
>But once you get into "what food do they eat?" bullshit, you've already been fapping for far too long.

World domination is not an uncommon player goal, and knowing where a kingdom's food supply comes from is important to how they supply an army. It also, incidentally, tells you a lot about what the food dishes at the inn are going to look like.

>>49771686
There is a difference between reading something that is interesting and important, and knowing dwarves in a land you may never visit have a celebration every 4th moon and their war god is gaining more followers than their smith god.

Just because I love to read it does not mean I like to waist my time reading useless crap for hours that is filled with pages and pages of small details that most likely wil never come up.

Guess what? Sometimes the surprise is what is fun especially if your character is not suppose to not know it. I regularly skip reading game fluff I wouldn't know in game. I'm a monk that has been wandering a wasteland. Why the fuck should I know who the current king is, 3 kigdoms over?

Was really fun when my group started a game of Rifts. I chose to play a dragon hatchling that knew nothing of the world. I realy wanted to read lore but I only read the dragon section and what I needed. A lot of fun jumping in not knowing and I could rollplay better.

>>49781137
Wow!

Shit that doesn't matter.

>>49771598
>But once you get into "what food do they eat?"
Guess that comes down to personal preference but I love those little details because they make the world seem alive.

>>49781252
Details don't make a world seem alive, depiction does. Any detail can make the world seem alive if you use it well -- ANY detail. There's too many to prepare for. You can set the world up and introduce those kinds of details as you need them. Setting the world up should focus on the key conflicts that make it interesting, that your players (or readers/whatever) will want to sink their teeth into.

It really doesn't matter what your shitty not!Rome eats. What matters is that you make your shitty not!Rome not shit.

>>49781282
I absolutely disagree and think you're giving out bad advice ("don't make your setting shitty" isn't exactly helpful).

No, putting in little details makes the world feel alive. If someone asked what people eat in my country, I could rattle off quite a few different things. If you can't do the same for a nation in your setting, you really haven't thought it through. It's like, these people got to eat, you know?

One game I played, we looked at a city map and quickly realized there were no homes. The GM hadn't put in any homes in this city because they weren't pertinent to whatever mission he wanted us to go on. It's shit like that that immediately throws me out of a game because it feels like a video game, and not a good one.

So, yeah, if you want your game world to feel like a world and not a game, you need to think about what they eat.

>>49773701
>Players like Theme park adventures because it gives them a lot of freedom and power.

I hate theme park adventures because they provide no freedom or power. I don't want to ride the pirate ride. I want to be a fucking pirate, which means I want my decisions related to pirating to make a difference to how the results turn out, and the GM can't begin to run that if he doesn't have a world fleshed out enough to figure out how they deal with piracy. If he's making things up based on what he thinks is coolest right now, odds are excellent that I will have more or less the exact same adventure whether I choose to be a pirate or raid a dungeon or overthrow an evil kingdom or whatever the fuck. Regardless of what palette I give the GM to work with, he's in the same mood and will produce the same results if all he's doing is generating whatever seems interesting to him this very moment. If my choices aren't going to matter, I would way the Hell rather have a guided tour of a well-prepared world (like your better adventure paths give you) than whatever bullshit the GM is in the mood for right now. It won't be any less linear, but it will have a lot more thought put into it.

>>49773852

This anon knows how to run an awesome goddamn game, but if you don't have the autism for that level of GMing, don't insult the people who actually do put in that effort by pretending you can pull the same quality out of your ass every week for a year. No one can possibly be that good at improv.

Notable exception: Comedy games benefit a lot from improv. If you're running a campaign based on Doc Aquatic's Random Adventure Table, you'll probably want to limit prep to a couple of plot hooks and characters to give things a kick in the pants if they're dragging too much and leave it at that.

>>49773852
I want to play this game.

Another Player Entitlement thread?
>GM puts several hours into the game before you have even started
>Players can't even be bothered to read the player hand book usually

>WHAT? You want ME to put in effort into the campaign? Fuck that shit, here's a character backstory I ripped off from several novels my job is to ROLE PLAY which requires just as much effort as a few hours of preparation before each game and improvising based on the setting rules and backstory in game STAYING IN CHARACTER IS SO HARD I WONDER WHY I EVEN PLAY ITS SO MUCH WORK

>>49781224

If shit that's directly relevant to common player goals doesn't matter, what the Hell *does*?

>mfw i always thought worldbuilding meant putting fun shit in your overworld so the players don't want to kill themselves while trekking to the dungeon

Welp.

Now I want to make a hexcrawl.

>>49773852
Share with us your secrets, oh wise one.

>>49781499
>Now I want to make a hexcrawl.
Same.

>>49772651
> Every single, waking, breathing moment of your pointless, wasted life.

Confirmed for never having taken a history class beyond middle school. It's all the same.

>>49771155
My DM kinda did this, but he only told us stuff we absolutely needed to know for the situation, or non spoiler stuff when we asked questions about it. It's great.

File: map 1 political abridged.png (5MB, 3124x1308px) Image search: [Google]

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I will fully admit that half of my motivation for making custom settings is masturbatory. But I built the world somewhat based on what my players wanted (age of sail, early gunpowder, mercantilism, mediterranean) and I put some twists on it so it didn't just feel like Renaissance Europe with elves.

Sue me.

>>49775950

This so much this.

Anyway, im one of those Gms who make tons of fluff, and like 20% of that fluff never sees the light, but its not for the players, its just the foundation to get the plot to move organically and also makes it easier to avoid railroading because you can always improvise if you know what else is in the world for your players.

>>49781460
This isnt even player entitlement, it is a new brand of shitposting.

Some guy is making threads like this repeatedly, going on about how he hates magic, worldbuilding, and fantasy elements in as bait like a manner as is possible.

>>49781747
...is that Mars?

>>49782228
Nah, I just used the Donjon map generator until it gave me a map i liked.

>>49771662
>>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?
i actually think that sounds nice

>>49781747
I like your map and I don't doubt that you've put in a lot of effort towards your world, but your naming sense leaves a lot to be desired.

Names that work, and are more or less fine
Pesshan
Leonan
Denari

Something close to acceptable
Carnotaland
Falspar
Orivessian

Names that especially don't work
Banice
Torali
Beslam
Santolian

>>49782322
Oh, I'm well aware I suck at naming countries. I don't suppose you have any advice/suggestions?

>>49782340
I'd recommend using county/provincial or town names from the country with the closest linguistic culture as a base. It makes things very natural and authentic.

>reading is bad, mkay?
>creativity is bad, too
>I insist on being spoonfed information about the setting
>seriously, I can't be arsed to spend like 30 MINUTES reading stuff

What are some red flags that OP is probably going to open a shit thread?

File: mapsetting.png (3MB, 2340x1664px) Image search: [Google]

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>tfw you've been doing worldbuilding for your setting based in early colonialism
90% of my worldbuilding is keyed random encounters or describing situations in various areas. I just don't want exploration and whatnot to be boring in this game.

>>49782322
How can you know whether or not the naming thing works without knowing the languages or politics of the area? Especially if these are simply the names that the natives of the area use, rather than the names that a single language uses

Keep in mind that if every nation in Europe was called in English what they are called in their native languages, a map of it would have...

- England
- Na h-Alba
- Cymru
- Éireann
- Portugal
- España
- France
- Deutschland
- Italia
- Polska
- Elláda
- Bŭlgariya
- Rossiya
- Türkiye
- Sverige

Among others.

>>49781367
>If someone asked what people eat in my country, I could rattle off quite a few different things
So? I can do that too. You don't need to sit down and consider this kind of stuff in order to rattle off whatever people eat.

Because my point isn't that irrelevant little details don't make a setting "breathe". My point is that those irrelevant little details don't need to be considered in order for you to include them.

In fact, they probably shouldn't be considered. Because then you're likely to get all hung up about how the grain grows, and how this affects that, and then you end up following a chain of causes and effects that lead to a shit setting. It leads to a shit setting because you haven't been able to come up with the good ideas first (the part of the setting that matters) and then invent irrelevant details subordinate to that.

You can consider this stuff if you want. But it's masturbation. It's unnecessary to the game. You're only doing it 'cause it's fun.
>"don't make your setting shitty" isn't exactly helpful
Here you also jumped right over my point. Your shitty not!Rome is the part of the setting you should focus on, not whatever they eat, see? That's what I was saying.

In your example, the GM should have just drawn a kind of hazy clump of houses, if he really didn't need them (doubtful if he was fully worldbuilding), and then developed it as he needed (which would only be to a very small extent).
>>49781475
It's not directly relevant to common player goals.

See, if it's got an important twist to it -- I don't mean Shymalan style twist, I mean any kind of important quirk which the players must consider -- then of course you should build it. But if it doesn't, you shouldn't, because it also shouldn't be involved with the players.

>>49782402
For the same reason that we don't have that issue in the real world. International diplomacy and cartography are based on one specific linguistic tradition, and although you /could/ make this tradition be something other than English, it complicates the process quite a lot.

You are going to have to be chauvinistic about this process in order to make it workable and certainly to make it playable.

>>49782428
>You're only doing it 'cause it's fun.

Presumably that's why we're playing the game in the first place.

>>49782448
Exactly. You're playing for fun. And that shit's only fun to you.

>>49782428
>It leads to a shit setting because you haven't been able to come up with the good ideas first (the part of the setting that matters) and then invent irrelevant details subordinate to that.

projecting much?

>>49782482
>Probably
>Likely
Insecure much?

>>49782443
The thing is that we only refer to nations the way we do in English due to a very specific linguistic path that English took, and a lot of it is recent and tied to specific events: Ethiopia instead of Abyssinia; Iran instead of Persia, Istanbul, not Constantinople.

Even "Germany" is a relatively recent development; the name for the region in English was "Almany" or "Almains", which would certainly look weird on a map today.

>>49782466
Except this thread is full of people showing that, in fact, it's fun for them, too. How many people thus far have said "I wish I had a GM like that", or similar?

This is normally where I'd post a "stop liking what I don't like" image, but I don't actually have one.

>>49782466
Because you know exactly what's fun for everyone else, right?

>>49782496
Right, but you don't need to concern yourself with that because you're going to be presenting the information about your world to a modern English speaking audience and thus your concerns should not be about what looks weird to an 18th century man but what looks weird to a 21st century man.

That's why I'd advise looking at places in the real world today and basing your fictional places on them, because those places that exist today have already undergone linguistic evolution to be appropriate for modern peoples.

Now if you really want to get deep into your worldbuilding with archaic and/or fictional language and you want to create a weird and unfamiliar landscape suited to another era, then by all means, feel free.

>>49782552
But using obviously "foreign" names on a map (relative to wherever the players start) is a quick and easy way to let players know that the people and culture there are going to be different from wherever they've started.

>>49782603
Well I think that the "foreignness" of a place should be evident in its name relative to modern English understanding.

For instance, I think most players should be able to easily identify the likely cultural differences between Ak-Bulak, Cao Bang, Altenburg, and Salon-de-Provence.

>>49782603
The problem of most "obviously foreign" names is that people just slam together vaguely fantasy sounding names. FR and whatnot are good examples of how slamming random foreign names can go bad.
If you want to have "foreign" names, it's best to base them in real world languages. That way the place names of one culture are obviously different than the place names of another culture.

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6KB, 192x132px

>>49782496
>Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Nice.

>>49782513
Do you notice how they all said "I WISH I had a GM like that"? Do you want to guess why that is? Beyond contrarianism, which probably accounts for at least half of them.

I've seen the worldbuilding threads. No one cares about other people's worlds.
>>49782534
Pretty much.

>>49782322
>names that especially don´t work

>Banice
What about Venice?

>Torali
Morales

>Beslam
Vietnam

>Santolian
Santa Fe, Singapur

You can´t say a name doesn´t work if you don´t know anything about the place it´s naming. Anything can be a valid name.

>>49784160
...well, I mean, that honestly was a thing up until the early 20th century, despite it having been Istanbul since the 1450s.

Which is actually a great battle to read about, by the way, the fall of Constantinople, the final fall of the Roman Empire. Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Emperor, even got badass last words:

"The city is fallen, and I am still alive."

Then he tore off his imperial ornaments so as to let nothing distinguish him from any other soldier and led his remaining soldiers into a last charge where he was killed.

>>49784199
>Santolian
>Santa Fe, Singapur

Usually transliterated as Singapore, actually.

Mind, Santolian could also just be a contraction of something like "San Tolian", in the vein of San Marino, San Francisco, San Diego, etc.

>>49784522
Or just straight-up Saint Olian.

>>49779125
That was weak as shit what the fuck are you talking about

>>49784585
He's one of those memers who jumps at every little chance to shove out his 9gag-tier shits.

>>49771662
>What we ran a D&D game set in a magiteck age of sail, where the whole world is covered in water and boats can fly to Renaissance-inspired cities floating on sky islands?
So like Skies of Arcadia?

My original settings usually involve the players exploring some new place so they have a reason to be dipshits.

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It should be obvious that there's a happy medium here. I say it should be obvious because there are plenty of autists that frequent /tg/ and only think in extremes.

Few people want to have to study and read a novel before beginning a campaign. It's great that you took the time to create a detailed world but don't shove it down people's throats from the get go.

Why not simply reveal things as the players progress in the game and start inquiring about them? They probably don't need to know the entire history of the royal dynasty at the start of the game but they might be curious about this further on down the line, in which case it's good to be prepared.

>>49785329
Thank you for repeating what many people have already said.

>>49785346
Only three posts in this thread have not done that.

>>49785346
>implying I'm going to read through 270 posts before I reply

>>49785620
Why would you reply to stuff if you don't even want to read it?

That's like playing in a GM's game after refusing to read his shitty primer.

>>49785649
I'm replying to the OP.

>>49780308
Who the fuck are you quoting?
For all that eavesdropping asshole knew, they could have been talking about another movie that they had in the works.

>>49785649
>implying OP is still here
>implying OP cares what you think
>implying you're not just the 109th fish wriggling on his hook

>>49784168
Actually there is a thread on worldbuilding up right now that people are demanding more dumps of.

You may have to accept that your dislike of worldbuilding is both very niche and kind of uneducated.

>>49772749
>>49772733

The world's stuck in an ice age, and has been for centuries. However, it is now thawing. Rapidly. That's not natural. The players are a team of investigators sent to find out WHY, and put a stop to it.

> How
Stick together a few cool/interesting things. Add magical shenanigans and a way for the players to be sent off to interact with everything. Shake well, simmer for a few hours, and then expose it to player interaction.

>>49785849
There isn't.

>Not sending in the players completely blind short of the basic setting, and campaign style.
>Not having the party start out with magical amnesia caused by a magehunt gone south.
>Not slowly introducing the world building in a fluid, natural manner conducive to player as the characters relearn and remember the world around them.

The party all meets at a bear. You don't know why the bear is dead, or who these other people are, except that you feel comfortable with them, in the very least in a professional sense. One of you is holding a bloodied human ear.

>>49785896
>lolsorandom
>literal amnesia
Still right though.

>>49785849
Just stop replying to this retard, please.

>>49786057
wow butthurt

>>49771804
I'd certainly play the first two, or at the very least give them a decent shot.

>>49780059
I like this.

>>49771804
>>49772316
>>49772355
>>49772494
Fucking Christ, shitty little one-sentence pitches don't matter for shit, either way. All of those examples has potential, but it's only potential, and it's a potential that they ultimately share with most other non-autistic pitches. Even if these ones are probably easier to work with than something really boring.

I wouldn't be totally opposed, since I'm fucking sick of my group using default D&D setting fluff for everything

>>49780059
This is exactly what I meant, thank you anon. All this stuff:
>They also spend a lot of time fighting over food, fighting how to organize food, and getting killed off as a consequence of changes in food.
Has nothing to do with what they eat. To put it another way: you decide that you want them to fight, or to die, and then you use food to accomplish this. What they eat is decided to help you achieve this, not because it's innately important.

You want a civil war, you want a disaffected extremist class for the players to fuck with or get fucked by, you want to talk about the grim darkness of plague and famine -- so you use the food. But you don't go turbotard and just think: "what do they EAT?"

>>49771155
>Every time a GM tries to add 'clever' logic puzzles.
>Every time the GM says you failed the quest because you didn't fallow the NPCs instructions to the letter
>Every time you go an entire 3 hour session without encountering an enemy because the GM wants your party to flesh out the story and do research in town by talking to NPCs the entire time.
>When the GM refuses to remind you what that convoluted and complex thing you were told by random NPC 3 weeks ago was because if you forgot it then your character forgot it and you should of wrote it down.

>>49774695
That is just a deliberate lie.

In every period of history prior to the modern age urban populations have required a larger rural population to support them. And why are you pretending kings and/or aristocracies are not the norm for most of civilised history?

>>49786195
So if you ever need to sit back and think "what do they eat", you don't need to sit back and think "what do they eat". That requires one of two things: the first is that you have already made the people, in which case whatever you decide they eat will have no effect, because they are already made. You're just working out what further supports their situation, and for no apparent reason. You've already worked out enough support.

The second is worse: you decided what your people would eat before deciding what you actually wanted them to do, which means -- surprise -- they won't do what you want them to do. Everything is your tool to build an interesting world. "I want my world to do X; what could Y people eat to accomplish this?", not "well Y people eat rice, so what does that do to my world?". Obviously this doesn't apply to worlds whose whole purpose is to work that kind of thing out, for the worldbuilder's enjoyment -- but if that's not masturbation, I don't know what is.

Sage for masturbation.

>>49786615
>Every time you go an entire 3 hour session without encountering an enemy because the GM wants your party to flesh out the story and do research in town by talking to NPCs the entire time.

What's the matter, can't handle actual roleplaying?

>>49786615
>should of
You're mum should of killed you in the womb.

I love worldbuilding, but I also try to run games that everybody can get involved in. My personal method for it is a "Get what you give" approach to the lore of setting.


Taking food for example, since we're talking about it. In a setting I wrote, all of the inhabitants hate nature, because even the most basic edible plants are a bitch and a half to deal with. Which means they all need to be different. Which means the food needs to be different.

That said, when somebody goes in to a tavern, they get Bread and Beer. If they decide to for some reason examine the Bread, they'll discover it's actually a flaky, porous red substance not highly similar to traditional bread that is more appropriately known as Crobb- But I don't mention any of that unless the information is sought out, because for the purposes of a story, if it's a food that serves the function of bread, there's not point in not just calling it Bread. Same with Castles, Knights, Samurai, Whatever- I use a word that will summon the general aesthetic and purpose of the subject, and if they want to find out all of the little differences, they can start asking questions.

>>49773659
>The second is the kind of person who's too lazy to read a full rulebook. They can't put in the effort to memorize the modifiers in D&D or Shadowrun or even Savage Worlds, so they play their own little system where all the mechanics are abstracted into "the narrative." They throw another shallow storygame onto the pile: another laundry list of "moves" that the players have to re-remember even though
>the moves just described things they already did in traditional play.

I hate those types with a passion.

I know the rule book, I know what my character is capable of. That is why I chose these moves, built him this way, etc.

Then to have a GM come in with his homebrewed off by 1 shit for no reason other than lazyness just destroys any fun I was having.

>>49786057
That is actually pretty wise, the guy cant even spot the worldbuilding thread

>>49771155
>someone puts effort into a fantasy world so it can be immersive and not a dime a dozen knockoff
>they're having fun the wrong way
>STOP HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY REEEEEE!

/tg/ you're being autistic cunts.
In other news at 8: water still wet.


>>49771425
>How often do "contemporary geopolitics" impact your daily life,
With Hillary Clinton complaining about far dark reaches of the internet and the alt right and racist frog memes?
Every 6 hours or so.

Apart from that during a time of crisis like this one? Every few days.

Topics of conversation, overall feeling of relaxedness, and reasons to invest or not invest in things, and considering where to move whether to buy land, etc.
I imagine it would impact you even more if you were among the most powerful people in the world as adventurers tend to be.

>how often are you aware of it
Literally any time i switch on the radio, the television, talk to intelligent people, or something reminds me of a topic like that. And it would be even more frequent for people rubbing shoulders with liches and kings.

>and also aware of precisely what aspect of it is affecting you right now?
How the fuck can people live so ignorantly?
How can you stand not being aware of what the forces are that are shaping your life? Are you just that content with being a mindless cog in the machine?
Why are you even playing adventure games if you don't care about literally anything but your average day to day life?

>>49771155
>>But first, I need you to read my thirty page ~SETTING PRIMER~
2-6 pages, and the latter end is pushing it
>>You know, so when you play my campaign you can revel in the countless hours of ~WORLDBUILDING~ I did for all of you to marvel at!
Pain the landscape and let the players make the happy little trees or they will have no fun
>>If you have any additional questions on stuff you read in my primer, check out my massive fucking autistic ~SETTING WIKI~! That's right, I put together an entire wiki of maps and nations and history for you to read.
You are the wiki. If they ask, you answer or make up something on the stuff you dingleberry
>>G-guys why are you s-so confused about what a Gal'Darro is? Didn't you read all the worldbuilding I did?
If they didn't read you didn't make it interesting

>>49773852
>All these pleb-tier GMs getting antsy over worldbuilding stuff the players will never see

I once had a GM literally break down, ie she started crying, because we completely ignored so many of her story lines so we must hate her. She was 23ffs...

>>49786890
>he thinks he's not in a worldbuilding thread
Psshh, whatever kid.

>>49773903
I actually dislike gms that turn the campaign into a what would you like to do next guys episodic thing where the game is obviously designed inbetween sessions based on the feedback from the previous sessions.

It pulls you out of the game and destroys any of the realness it could of had.

>>49786892
Having a persecution complex isn't being affected

>>49773903
That sounds pretty horrible.

>>49786954
>a persecution complex
What exactly are you talking about?

>>49786892
You sound pretty spooked.

Politics doesn't affect your life. You're not in a machine, because there is no machine. Or, if there is, it is literally God-tier.

>>49771940
Hard-core Director Stance!

>>49787029
>Politics doesn't affect your life. You're not in a machine, because there is no machine.
AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH
Have you actually read the leaked hillary emails?
Have you actually read the news or looked into a history book recently?
There's a reason her main supporter Soros is a persona non grata in the UK and estonia and some eastern asian country.
People are affecting your lives on a global scale and profit controls the world through a small cabal of powerful people.
Have you switched on the news recently?

Jesus christ man the world is literally going to shit, and you're saying it isn't because you're still comfy.
Just.... just read the news. Look at how polarized news outlets have become as each shows their true colors this election. Look at what is happening in the European union internally, look at what is happening in german inner politics, look at how the entire world is experiencing a massive and scary shift to the populist far right, because of the failings of the liberal left and their utter incapability to address serious issues and corruption. The EU, the largest and longest lasting union that ever existed in europe historically is falling apart.

>>49787117
You've managed to show absolutely no ways in which politics affects your or my life.

The world's pretty great, but that doesn't have much to do with politics either.

I've been considering making a continent, putting 4 equal civilizations on it, giving control of each civilization to each one of my players, and then rolling for random events in each nation. There would be 10-20 rounds, players are allowed to invade others or fortify themselves or get aid from other planes or whatever.

This gives them a stake in the backstory and educates them on the lore of the world all at once. Then they start in one of those nations with some plothook, transition into sandbox.

Would players just be bored by this?

>>49787168
Nah.
Anyone who actually plays games wouldbe, at worst, neutral towards it.

Guys like the op dont get to ever play games because they are incredibly opinionated, picky, and unable to deal with social situations.

>>49787135
>The world's pretty great
The world is less stable than at any point since the cold war.
And it's got to do with economics. And if you don't see how politics and economics are interconnected you should seriously get an education.

I have demonstrated how there is a machine. How there is a big machinery all working together.
If you live your entire life as a mere wage-slave you will not leave much behind, and most likely not accomplish much, but that exactly is the ideal consumer for the current establishment.
People actually involved in the political process and people actually having a say in what goes on is not good for the economic interest groups that lobby politicians, because that means they'll have to spend more money trying to sway the public opinion to a side that will make them benefit more.

>>49787202
>he said, while being incredibly opinionated, picky, and unable to deal with social situations
I bet you get to play loads of games ;)

>>49787232
You seem to have poor reading comprehension, anon, as there was not enough content in that post to draw any of those conclusions.

>>49787249
The quote pretty neatly shows it. But it's okay. Many people find it hard to distinguish between facts and their own opinions.

>>49787272
You seem upset that you drew erroneous conclusions from not enough data.
I suggest you chill out some time, and meditate on how people may have tastes other than yours.

>>49787319
>he still manages to project
not gonna lie, this is p impressive

>>49787319
>and meditate on how people may have tastes other than yours.
vs.
>>49787202
>Anyone who actually plays games wouldbe, at worst, neutral towards it
>Guys like the op dont get to ever play games because they are incredibly opinionated, picky, and unable to deal with social situations.
Huh...

>>49787327
You seem to be unable to disengage from this conversation due to your growing embarrasment.
Would you like me to disengage for you?

>>49787347
So you want to disengage?

>>49787343
Those dont conflict, anon.

>>49787135
You really only need like, a couple paragraphs to describe the overall political situation of the setting.
it only comes into play if the players become nobles, start a warband or something like that. I mainly only need political stuff for if the players are businessmen/smugglers and there's political things affecting business.
Things like peasant unrest due to lords switching to a rent situation or laws affecting import/export with cities trying to corner an areas production.

Most of the ways politics affects players are on a regional and local level. For that, you just need enough flesh that adding things in is logical in the setting rather than feeling arbitrary.

Good worldbuilding really only needs enough detail for the GM to improv off of or flesh out later if the players decide to hang around in one area for a while.

>>49787343
That all seems accurate.
Op is self admittedly incredibly picky, and opinionated. He also demonstrates inability to deal with social problems, as a dm making too much content for him is easily solved through conversation.

>>49787367
Of course they do.
>>49787402
That doesn't conflict with my post, anon.

>>49787416
>Nuh uh
Ah, i see your strategy.
I counter with
>Yeah huh
As per ancient tradition in unsubstantiated arguments.

>>49787217
>And if you don't see how politics and economics are interconnected you should seriously get an education.
You still think politics drives economics?

What a pleb. Everyone knows it's the other way around.
>>49787399
Anon I literally only run political games, that doesn't mean I think your average dude is much affected by politics.

>>49787443
A tradition you started?

Or is >>49787367 substantiated?

You broke the chain before it even grew.

>>49787450
Your average dude isn't going to be too terribly affected which is why a game about random adventurers doesn't need super deep geopolitics.
Besides that, local and regional politics are fuckloads more important to a game than things that happen 1000 miles away ime.

>>49787450
>You still think politics drives economics?
>What a pleb. Everyone knows it's the other way around.
It's an intertwined relationship.
In states of institutionalized corruption like the European Union as it was established, and the USA with it's lobbying and corporate backed campaigns, economic interests influence politics, to influence the economy in a way that is beneficial for them.
In less corrupt states, political decisions can change the investment environment for different branches of the economy, and can raise or lower consumption, while economic difficulties for the populace will sway them to vote for different parties, and certain interest groups will either create an unfavorable political climate for politics that they don't like in the media, or will outright impose sanctions on them through bodies like the IMF.

As you can see economy and politics are interconnected.
Both influence everyday life.

>>49787523
>It's an intertwined relationship.
No, it pretty much comes down to economics.

They're not influencing the economy, they're influencing their place within it. Big difference.

The main exception is war profiteering/banana islands/that kind of thing.

A big issue is that GM's don't prioritize what's important when they worldbuild. In a game about adventurers, dungeons and monsters are more important than what people eat. In a game about traveling merchants, economics are more important than battles that happened 500 years ago.

Worldbuilding should focus around the fact that there are players in the game. Plot hooks and situations are the most important part of a setting.

File: marxismleninismisascience.jpg (32KB, 477x424px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 477x424px

>>49787523
It's almost like the superstructure of politics/culture and the base of economic production are self reinforcing structures.

>>49787550
>The main exception is war profiteering/banana islands/that kind of thing.
There are some exceptions if you look at europe.
Finland, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and France and to a lesser extent Britain, made political decisions that went in the face of the economic interests dominating the rest of europe's political climate.
Brexit was a political decision, and if you think the main economic influence groups wanted it i'd be very surprised. The same goes for a lot of the social laws that germany has. Granted they are now just as corrupt as the US but that was not true 20 years ago.

>>49787573
Nah m8, my OSR players really want to know what kind of bread they're buying. That feeling, when you stuff your setting with uninspired shit that has absolutely no interest to anyone -- it just makes the world breathe, you know?

>>49787599
M'Leninist.

Before you return to Reddit, please drop by /leftypol/ so you can see why your own kind laugh at you.

>>49787599
You must notice that i didn't say anything about culture there and also not about economic production.
And yes, Marx had some nice ideas, but actually being a Marxist would be like trying to build a business based on warp drive technology based on a few theoretical studies and experiment where people might probably have observed a similar effect for real.

But yes, politics and economy influence your life, so knowing these things about a setting is important.
Plus it's also important for making good and fitting characters, because if you're going to play in a campaign where everyone is downtrodden pretty much but still live a happy life, because being downtrodden is still all in all pretty good in a high magic world with free magic, and then you try to play a gritty street urchin whose grittynes is based solely on the fact they're downtrodden.... then you won't fit into the campaign.