Learning to Focus On What Matters, specifically in the context of TTRPGS.
Hi. My name is Samantha Adalwulf, and I’m a recovering buildaholic.
Don’t worry, many of us find ourselves drawn in by the siren song of worldbuilding. What’s important is understanding that you have a problem and taking steps to fix it. That’s why I’m here.
What’s the Problem With Worldbuilding?
Nothing! In moderation. But like all good things (water, food, bones) it can be a problem in excess. There’s a trend in certain circles to hyperfixate on worldbuilding, especially among the “Game Master” crowd. I understand this impulse, as you are my people. But as your sponsor, I’m also here to tell you to stop.
Let’s say you spend days detailing an entire city. You agonize over all of the little details, the intricate cogs. You draw and redraw maps, you figure out every single guild, criminal organization, major shopkeeper. You write down every single piece of history you can think of, all of it in handouts. A quest for every major NPCs, all an intricate web of connections, relationships. You’ve watched that one video, you know, where that guy analyzes video game settlements on whether they’d produce enough food or water to survive, so you know for a fact what specific food they eat, produce, import. If a player, for some ungodly reason, asked what somebody’s shit looked like in this place, you have all of the socioeconomic information needed to answer.
Session time comes around, the players stop at a few shops, mess around looking at the lists of goods you made, and then leave. Maybe a combat happens. Session is fine.
So why doesn’t it feel fine?
The Intervention
Because you’re being self-centered.
Don’t take this the wrong way. GMs are players, and us having fun is important. It can be easy to fall into these patterns because some players, especially if you don’t have a regular group and are dealing with the public, can devalue your enjoyment and role in the game. And so you want to claw some of that back when you can.
Building worlds is fun. Figuring out the logistics of things, the little bits and pieces, is a great way to spend time! And you do need to do it. But you don’t need to do it first, or as much as you likely are.
Story comes first. The other players come first.
It takes a special kind of person to enjoy a socioeconomic class, or a historical lecture, or a religious sermon. If you’ve got a group of players who are into that kind of stuff, all power to you, you lucky bastard. For the rest of us, we need to learn to focus on stories.
People love stories. They’re easy to engage with, they draw in interest. The bedrock of your world cannot be the raw logistics of the place. You need a story.
Starting With A Tree: Story First
To help illustrate this, I’m going to talk about Dark Souls. It was going to happen, if it wasn’t such a good example it wouldn’t come up so often.
If you’re like me, your first interaction with the Fromsoft games didn’t come from the games themselves, but from “lore summary” Youtubers. You know the guy. Zelda avatar.
If you’ve seen one of these lore summaries, you know there is a ton of details to be found. Countless NPC connections, lore hidden in descriptions of items, implications, even architecture (check out The Tarnished Archeologist, by the way. It’s not important to the article but he deserves the views).
But, actually playing the game is a different story. In game, dialogue is minimal, focused. Characters explain their situations directly. There’s flair, of course. The stories are while complicated underneath the surface understandable and direct: Fire Fades, Death Holds No Dominion. Don’t you dare go hollow. The Lord of Cinder and his dying age.
This is what you need. This is the antidote to worldbuilding: you need a story. Something active, something interesting. Goblins prowl the woods, hunting children. The megacorp has a squad of gunners looking through the slums for something. Faendal and Sven love the same girl and want you to make the other guy look bad! If there’s no story, no baseline for the players to be interested in, nothing else is going to be interesting to them.
Players don’t give a shit about the inner machinations of your religious order until you introduce them to a friendly priest being gunned after by his superiors. They don’t care about trade routes or regional greetings or the secret lore about the moons until they are given a simple, interesting reason to start.
Worldbuilding is pepper. It’s great! Makes everything taste better. A story with interesting, well thought out details is all the better for it. But stop handing your players a hunk of pepper and saying “eat up.”
-Sami Adalwulf
Strike The Horizon 