Based on the trackbacks on his post, I wasn’t the only one who had an emotional reaction to what he said. I still find it odd that it provoked such an emotional response, though.

If you use twenty pages of worldbuilding notes to inform – at *most* – a page’s worth of description in your novel, your world is going to look interesting and exotic. If you just copy-paste those twenty pages bang into the middle of your novel, it’s going to look tedious. And ideally, *reading the story* should give us enough detail about your world that we need without having to wade through paragraphs of exposition.

As far as *games* go, that’s different: many players will want to know as much about your world as is OOC possible and IC justifiable, especially in that particular brand of “simulationism” which entails the PCs touring the GM’s lovingly-crafted world. There, worldbuilding is very important indeed. But Harrison wasn’t talking about games.

I do appreciate having the fussy world details in some situations, however (some players need that, no judgment), and that’s why I buy pre-packaged scenarios, without caring too much what the system is as long as the genre fits. Then I just gouge them out and insert them if necessary when I play.

I care deeply that the emotional relationships in the game feel ‘real’, as well as the feelings evoked by objects/places, but I don’t care so much about the ‘realness’ of the world objectively. Maybe that’s just a different kind of world building, though.

The benefit of all this world is that your game or story feels more like it takes place in a real, living place, and not on an artificial stage. You end up with mysteries that flow naturally out of your setup. NPCs will be reacting to things the PCs have no reason to know about. Players can tell if your world ends at the kingdom’s borders and it dampens the immersion.

This is one of the weaknesses of games that are made up on the fly; the universe pretty much exists solely in response to the characters actions, and it can show. Without sitting back and intentionally crafting context without significance to the players, a living world is hard to create.

Like most things it’s best done in moderation. Too much world building can be a time sink that takes away from more productive campaign work. You also risk getting too caught up in “your” world, overlooking the need to keep the game focused on the PCs.

Minor Qualification: That idea game from Dungeoncraft when Ray Winniger was writing it. Monthe may have kept the idea in the later columns. The point is solid, though.

On the larger topic, I look at it this way. When you write a non-fiction essay or report or such, there are several stages in the process (if you know what you are doing):

1. Discovery – using a variety of methods to discover all the stuff you want to include. Brainstorming is the most well-known discovery method, but there are others–including “The Topics” from Aristotle.

2. Rough draft – turn all the discovered stuff into something roughly resembling the final product.

3. Editing for unity/completeness – making sure you cut the extraneous stuff and didn’t forget anything.

4. Editing for coherence and clarity – getting everything in the right spot, tweaking the word choice, and thinking about paragraph structure.

5. Editing for spelling and grammar, followed by final, overall proofing.

6. Layout.

Of course, in a product intended to be sold, you’ll often have experts working on certain steps. To the extent that you are doing something creative, you’ll short-circuit certain steps at times. (Try using brainstorming for a poetry sometime; not much there. ) However, for the parts that you do yourself, a key ingredient is knowing when to cut something out, abandon the process (because this material just isn’t working), and so forth.

That said, I find world-building to be highly productive if one approaches is as non-fiction writing. *Sometimes*, the value in world building is the discovery process itself. You make a note about some obscure but interesting fact in the world, include it with other organized notes, and you’ve wrung everything useful there is to wring out of that nugget–until such times as the players run with. Other times, you take something all the way through the process and publish it. Most stuff loses its usefullness early rather than late.

It’s true that you should only produce what you need. Trick is, you don’t really know what you need until you start producing. If it were that easy, we’d all have sat down and wrote A+ term papers in high school without breaking a sweat.

So for me, the key to useful world building is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to be very aware that usefulness should be constantly evaluated as you work.

Even if worldbuilding is pointless for writing fiction (which it isn’t), it may not be pointless for other purposes. Roleplaying, in particular, usually depends upon a shared world.

-Kerry

I recently discovered cooperative worldbuilding when testdriving Burning Empires with my players. It was thrilling, and also kept the effort very focused. We don’t have any unnecessary detail and nobody had to study the world before the game. I think I’m adopting it to many other games from now on.

For me there’s a great desire to do worldbuilding, as this is also why I really geek out over something like the Marvel or DC Universes. Reading about characters and ideas woven over seventy years until you have thousands of stories that all combine together to form some kind of cohesive whole. There are those stories which are outside of the ‘official cannon’ but are still enjoyed – like What If? because they play on the whole vibe of the setting. It’s like improvisational jazz.

Getting back to gaming, worldbuilding is a seductive exercise, but if you can’t bring it back to “fun” for the players, it serves no purpose except to fill the empty spaces in the GM’s life.

For what it’s worth, Dune’s probably my favorite science-fiction universe, and also quite heavy on the world building. Given that a large number of science fiction stories could be said to begin with, “What if X?” it seems to me that the process of figuring out how X changes the world (ie, “world-building”) is pretty much at the core of science-fiction.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Fantasy, probably ironically, seems to place less importance (as a genre) on “world-building” activities. Most fantasy worlds I’ve seen don’t have any sort of interesting objective or theme to explore, they’re just rehashes of Tolkein’s world with a few changes here and there. Macro-level things (Elves are aloof, Dwarves are gruff, people use swords, live in hamlets and castles, etc.) are pretty much going to be the same and you don’t really need to spend any effort on bothering to explain it.