So a friend of mine has been working on his for 2 years and it still, as far as he is concerned, isn’t ready for putting players in.
Another friend has just started using his after spending 9 months on it.
I spent 6-8 weeks on mine and then got my players creating characters.
Worldbuilding, I understand that some want to get all the detail down and written out, they want to know the history and back story of every nation, define the pantheon and the rulersThats before then actually putting in encounters, monsters and a BBEG but really, how long do you spend on your world before you tell players that yes, now you can play in it?
IMO, once you commit to running a campaign and find players, you should schedule session 0 within the week. That’s how much time you have for world building. Two years!? They could have finished a campaign and be on to the next one. You can build enough world for session 1 in a week. You can build enough world for session 2 in another week, and then some. Gradually you get ahead of the train. If you haven’t decided on the way some huge aspect of the way your world works yet, stall. Run some basic bandit or goblin encounters during the first couple sessions. Let the players acquire some sort of obviously important but apparently useless Macguffin and decide what it’s for later.
If someone spends two years on world building, I don’t believe they really want to play the game. That’s fine. For some people world building is all the fun. Just don’t kid yourself that you’ll ever feel ready to start.
World building for roleplaying games is like painting for wargames.
Some people slap on two or three colours on their minis and go for it. Some people spend an hour or two and get something looking really nice. Some people spend tens of hours on one figure, and then get horrified at the idea of actually using it at the table. "It might get smudged!"
Whatever works for you is right for you. Don't stress.
My first time DMing, the party spent 6 months of real world time in the same forest on their first quest. There is so much time for expanding the world while playing that it is actually counterproductive to try to do it all ahead of time.
Each session provides insight into what the players actually want and value, and that is a massive resource for creating the world as it *should* be. Unless the DM is planning to publish a book, the priority should be on making the sessions fun, not on a personal pet project.
I think "total" world design before the party has even played a few sessions is a waste of time. This is one of the areas I think the present DMG really does gets right where it's advised the players start small with only the locality worked out, and build the world as the game scales up. Really building a whole world and presuming your design, with no prior understanding of the party, is likely going to wind up with literal wide swaths that get completely neglected in favor of small patches the designer actually just put in as an after swath.
Of course, my main game world is a shattered planet flying through "space" comet style where pretty much anything in the game can be found if the parties go to the right fragment, which didn't exist until the game asked for it. Things can also easily disappear or "trail off." It's literally a lost world and there maybe one or two intelligences on it that actually know how everything used to fit together, so there's no need for a comprehensive, or consistent, map.
When you make a mark on a map, you're putting down limits and boundaries, why make paths to places the party may never ever have the smallest interest in going? What if you need something else to keep the game going? The world should be in service of the game and built accordingly, not the other way around.
So if you haven't spent two years designing a game world, but you're actually DMing and your table is having a good time, you're probably doing something right. If the game reaches "the end of the map" and the players want more, you have all the prior play sessions to inform what should go into or appear in the rest of the world. I call that good design.
You can spend a lot of time making a world. You can entirely wing everything and improvise along the way. Some DMs really benefit from spending time making their world by hand, coming up with tons of lore and places and people to interact with. Sometimes, none of that really matters.
The way I see it, players will drive the campaign and world in the ways they want to. I don't want to spend so much time building things that I, as a DM, have the impulse to railroad them to force them to look at all the cool stuff I made. I do a lot of preparation that goes unnoticed or unused, but I generally focus on expanding the things that players actually interact with, which isn't always what I expect them to interact with. There's nothing wrong with doing a lot of work to make a world, but with my preparation to running time ratio, I don't see the point of making distant kingdoms too fleshed out instead of focusing on the next session.
Now, when I'm preparing for a campaign, I usually just focus on the general geopolitics, make the major players and a few leaders, and then worry about the rest in play because the small details will come from working with players to tell a story. Saves me a lot of time daydreaming about the setting I want to run, and helps me get up and running faster.
I'm of the opinion that building anything that the players won't see is a waste of time and energy. When building a world, I usually go with a map, a pantheon, 3-6 big pieces of lore and the idea of what BBE is trying to do that is going to be the PCs call to action. I might go so far as to have the different nations goals. After session 0, I'll put together the starting town and the first 2-3 quests. The rest of the, in one case, 2 year world building process will be done with player interaction.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I'm currently in the process of building my own World / lore / universe and have been doing so for the past year.
For me, it is a pet project that I love doing and which has, I believe, helped me develop a number of skills; mainly relating to writing and map drawing. That having been said, I can accept the fact that players may never enter the world I create - it is a project for me, that is deeply personal and will hopefully one day turn into a campaign setting.
If I was to open up the World I have created for a campaign and advertise it to players as a homebrew World they could explore, then I would do as many have stated within this thread; concentrate on an individual slice / portion of the world and attempt to flesh it as and when.
Having a rough idea of the basics would help and could be tailored based on a session 0;
Technology level?
Magic level?
Deities?
Races + demographics?
Rough idea of the type of world it may be / environment
With the World I am currently creating I have a rough idea of where I could set a campaign based off of the parties wishes; sea-based campaigns, dungeon crawlers, harsh-survival based campaign?
The long and short of it is simple; you will never be able to create a world expansive enough to have fully considered every single move your party make. As such, you will need to improvise, you may well need to honestly say that you will need to go away and contemplate an answer to the questions they have. Attempting to fully consider every move and turn your party may take and come up with expansive lore for everything is, frankly, bonkers. As with a 'normal' campaign let the PCs lead you where they want and build around their movements.
In terms of a BBEG; this could be an individual, a group, an ideology, it could be hidden or overt. Either way, build it around the party. That way it is incredibly easy to build an interconnectiveness (is that even a word!) between the parties actions and the actions of the BBEG, making the campaign feel a lot more personal. It also allows for those 'wacky', 'out-there' actions committed by PCs, enabling you to provide genuine ramifications for choices made.
Personally, to answer your question; "how long do you spend on your world before you tell players that yes, now you can play in it?". My answer would be simple - if they want it, we agree an overall premise in a session 0, then we run it next session. I have so-many tools available as a DM that I can easily 'borrow' from a plethora of sources; whether it be adventures, deities, maps, NPC portraits, game-systems, etc, etc. Everything can be worked in, actions taken in session 1 can come back to haunt them in session 101 (should the campaign last that long). Let the PCs assist with the overall narrative of the campaign, build the World around their narrative.
EDIT: Just thought I'd drop this here... I found a really useful guide to assist with Worldbuilding on Amazon, which I have used myself - '30 Days of Worldbuilding' by A Trevena.
People get really carried away with world building, especially considering the fact that most worldbuilding is more than you need to run a game. The only worldbuilding that your really need is the stuff that facilitates a reasonable amount of verisimilitude (not 100%, that's unnecessary) or that sparks player interest. Now, you don't know exactly what's going to spark player interest so you are going to want to have multiple interesting things about your world for players to discover, BUT if at any time you are delivering crucial information about your world via info-dump, then you will lose the player's interest. Players love to discover things, they absolutely hate being info-dumped.
I'm especially skeptical of the friend taking 2+ years to build a world, because dm's who do that typically have very rigid understandings of their world and what should happen in it, and are more likely to run a railroad-y story where many powerful, significant NPCs do great deeds with complex political ramifications while the players stand around and watch. DM's who put that much time and effort into their world should just write a book, because that's often the better way to tell the story that you envision for your world without annoying your players (though, when writing your book, be careful not to dump too much exposition on your readers early on because readers, like players, do not find info-dumps compelling).
It is often more important to focus on preparing CONTENT than worldbuilding, and you'll find that while you're putting that content together, a lot of worldbuilding will come out through the course of putting together the adventures anyways (how *did* this dungeon get to be so full of loot? Who *is* this enigmatic bandit queen who took over this town? Why *are* these two factions fighting about who should inherit the old king's throne? Etc...)
This isn't to say "don't worldbuild", but rather that you should understand that worldbuilding is not the most important thing you should be doing, and past a certain point, you're just doing it for your own amusement (again, not a bad thing, just temper your expectations and don't be discouraged when players don't engage with every aspect of your world).
This isn't to say "don't worldbuild", but rather that you should understand that worldbuilding is not the most important thing you should be doing, and past a certain point, you're just doing it for your own amusement (again, not a bad thing, just temper your expectations and don't be discouraged when players don't engage with every aspect of your world).
Or worse, yawn at your two years of hard work.
Folks have an "isolated genius" view of world building because they associate that with creativity. Very very few creative types actually produce good stuff by keeping it untested for years and then debut it in "finished product." Writers have trusted editors and readers, artists have similar exhibitions of work in progress, etc. TV and movies people do see rough cuts.
Rather than "going it alone" for two years and produce something that in the end engages no one but yourself, it's probably better to take a few ideas, see how the players respond and when you land on something that really engages the party, build up from there with your players.
To elaborate on actual creative process vs myths of the singular creative genius, I think the ideal TTRPG works like writers room with DM/GM as show runner. The players are responsible for their characters, but the player can also make suggestions and inclusions into the game world for their and other characters sake. It seems counterintuitive, but this is also why I'm against overwrought pregame back stories, rather keeping the background vague and fleshed out as the game is played.
In fact, and thinking out loud here, the overwrought game world is similar to the overwrought back story, the overwrought backstory pulls focus onto stuff the player is simply making up without earning any of the glory by playing the game, the overwrought game world more often than not forces the players into the role of tourists since while the characters are more often than not supposed to be native to the world, they'll be playing stranger characters in the DM's strange land.
One kind of important concept to understand and most DM's don't want to hear this but I believe it to be 100% true is that, world-building has nothing to do with the players whatsoever. Generally, players are going to give only the most minimal amount of attention to the actual world, easily 99.9% of the world, its lore, its pantheons etc.. is designed for the DM, the players aren't really going to care until you give them a reason to.
The players are only going to care about what you put in front of them and their ability to absorb setting information is going to be absolutely the minimum.
The players are like an interactive movie audience in which their characters are the hero's.
The following is everything you know about Middle Earth before you become a player (aka a member of the interactive audience) in the Fellowship of the Ring story.
You're confusing world-building with infodump prologue. That might be all that you know before session 1, but world-building can be gradually revealed throughout the story, and there is more lore revealed in the course of the Lord of the Rings movies and books.
Tolkien is a really bad example, because he literally did spend decades world building before he started writing the Hobbit, and it turned out really well. But most fantasy writers don't do it that way. And D&D is not writing a book.
Did some building as I started running a campaign a month ago.
Started out as a one shot. With 5 towns and simple lore. Towns populated with taverns, shops and the government.
During that time I mapped the world. The islands, continents, cities and towns. All bare minimum taverns, shops and the like. Plus added in places related to player backstories.
Made a world map, showed the players, told them the main lore of the cities and those related to backstories.
That's it. Didn't write any stories or dungeons or anything outside of the are the players are in at the moment. No need until players decide to go to another area.
So spent like 3 weeks on it all. As players get to a new area or show interested is the point I'll flesh that next area out more having that for the next few sessions.
Agreed that the person is taking too long. So many people overestimate the importance of setting in a story, when it’s just not usually as important as other elements. When you read a book, you keep reading because you have invested in the characters, the plot, or ideally both. But I’ve never heard someone say they kept reading because they really wanted to hear a description of some new city, or are looking forward to a discussion on trade routes. It’s good to have those things, but most of the time you want to know what the character is doing in that city, not so much where they quarried the stone for the walls of it.
That said, it’s tough to criticize much. I’m assuming the person who’s been at it for 2 years has things like a job or school and friends, family and other hobbies. So 2 years could mean they only have an hour or two a week when they actually work on it. And some people write really slowly.
So a friend of mine has been working on his for 2 years and it still, as far as he is concerned, isn’t ready for putting players in.
Another friend has just started using his after spending 9 months on it.
I spent 6-8 weeks on mine and then got my players creating characters.
Worldbuilding, I understand that some want to get all the detail down and written out, they want to know the history and back story of every nation, define the pantheon and the rulersThats before then actually putting in encounters, monsters and a BBEG but really, how long do you spend on your world before you tell players that yes, now you can play in it?
Your buddy is doing it wrong, really wrong. Build a sandbox area for a campaign, that's it. Have dungeons defined, evil plots going on, maybe a way to get a castle. Have enough content set to take them up to level 5 pre-made. Build a plot flowchart to show what NPC's are important and what information should be available for the PC's to pick up on. Players like to feel smart to develop bits about the world. Look at what content you need to build once they get to level 5. Treat the world building as 4 chapters, Chapter 1 = up to level 5 and the rest of the chapters are based on tiers of play. His life will be a lot easier then.
After the party does their part and conquers evil, put what they did in the world, and in the next campaign they can run into them as NPC's, their children or names etc, players like that. The players flesh out the world, the DM builds the skeleton.
The quantity of worldbuilding isn't an issue, it's the focus of it, and letting it get between that world and an actual game! You can have the best, most populated world ever, but if inever sees the tabletop, then it's worthless.
If the DM is letting irrelevant worldbuilding stop the game from starting, then it's too much. For example, if there's a string of towns on a trade route, and the DM has made all the towns and al lrelevant NPC's, plots, dungeons and such on there, and they expect it to take some weeks to get through, then delaying the campaign to start working on a mountain full of dwarven mines is too much!
If the players get through everything before you finish making the next bit, just tel lthem it'll be a couple of weeks for you to put stuff together!
I'm building my world around 2 different games at the moment. The town I'm in now has needed a sewer system inventing, but if I did that for every town in the world, it's likely never going to come up!
I would recommend writing one page of general world background giving major events (the god-war, the dust plague, the cataclysm etc.), anything specific that players need to know for character creation ("gnomes were kicked out of their homeland and all gnomes are refugees" or "genasi in this world are viewed with suspicion" etc.), create a map that indicates a small number of major cities (which the PCs won't start anywhere near) and then work on the adventure, not the world. There is no real benefit to doing more than that.
For my most recent campaign, I spent about 30 minutes on worldbuilding before I began writing the level 1 adventure. My players have been playing weekly games since January. Ask your friend which campaign is more enjoyable for a group of players - one that has had 25 x 5 hour sessions and taken the PCs from level 1-9 with 30 minutes of world building, or the 2 year-planning campaign that nobody has ever played in.
I have stopped mapping out entire systems of dungeons, because I run TOTM except for combat I only map out areas where fighting might happen, everything else I just describe, it has made the number of maps and the size they need to be shrink considerably.
Personally the 6-8 weeks was largely because thats how long it took from the single player who asked me to DM a campaign to actually get her friends sorted and organised ready to go. I had a vision for the opening act of the campaign and the land it was going to happen in in my head.
My friend who has taken now 3 years (my mistake, he has corrected me) insists that if it takes DnD that long to write a campaign book (he worked out a team write a campaign setting in about 9 months) then there is nothing wrong with him taking this time to create a perfect setting. I have almost been tempted to say I will play in his campaign but I know I would be an awful player because my aim would be to try and ignore everything he has spent his time on and force him to make more and more stuff up on the fly.
Happy to see there are a majority who agree with me here :)
I would recommend writing one page of general world background giving major events (the god-war, the dust plague, the cataclysm etc.), anything specific that players need to know for character creation ("gnomes were kicked out of their homeland and all gnomes are refugees" or "genasi in this world are viewed with suspicion" etc.), create a map that indicates a small number of major cities (which the PCs won't start anywhere near) and then work on the adventure, not the world. There is no real benefit to doing more than that.
For my most recent campaign, I spent about 30 minutes on worldbuilding before I began writing the level 1 adventure. My players have been playing weekly games since January. Ask your friend which campaign is more enjoyable for a group of players - one that has had 25 x 5 hour sessions and taken the PCs from level 1-9 with 30 minutes of world building, or the 2 year-planning campaign that nobody has ever played in.
Mine started out as 3-4 bullet points about the starting nation. I then needed to make a map for my own head because geography and location was important to the geopolitics of the continent, but it was not a clear map, really just a bunch of blobs on a page indicating the relationship between nations and where the natural barriers where.
Then I worked out in my head the opening act's bbeg (Aboleth) and created my opening encounters and stories alongside my players then coming to me with choices of race/class etc. That then helped me shape things, where do elves come from (for the elf player), how are half races viewed, how do people in this opening nation see tieflings and as one of my players was playing a satyr sex worker, how rare are the creatures of the fey wild (I decided very rare) and how is that profession viewed, an open acceptance of it as a valid type of work.
That then helps me shape the decisions that affect my players directly and helps them know where they fit in the world.
I will admit I spend most of my spare time thinking about my world, thinking about future possible adventure threads, or coming up with history and lore but I refuse to commit anything to more then a bullet point or 2 until it is absolutely necessary for the story as I have long found that letting these things percolate in my head means that when I have to come up with information on the spot what I create with my players in the moment is far better then anything I might have been considering preemptively.
Heh, I’d say if you spend longer on writing the world setting than your players do playing it, then that’s too much.
In my experience as a DM, 33 years now, (old guy harrumph ing) I’ve found the best home brew campaigns happen when your players help you build the world with their suggestions, support, and character ideas. The rest of it is either logistics or religious groups.
As an example, I had a player want to make an elven crossbow archer with an affinity for Gnomish creations. Cool, so he makes the character and I ask what would have given his character this desire to mess with Gnomish artifacts? He looks around, shrugs and says “So uhh when his home got burned he ended up with a traveling tinker who was a gnome.”
From that I can get a few things, Gnomes travel as tinkers, Elves were getting homes burned by someone, and he wants Gnomes to be building things. So from that I just made up a culture of Gnomes I called the Tinkergems, traveling repairmen who’s motto is “I can fix it!” Whether it be a broken pot, a leaky roof, or the tears of an orphaned child. The Tinkergems will do their best to make it right.
Also, I made up the Jundl Bands, traveling mercenaries who will work for anyone for the right price and that rumors of murder and worse follow them. The Jundl Band is who killed the elf’s people and it became a later plot point for the party to find the band that killed his people.
This method may not work for everyone, but it works well for me and I feel like it gives the players an investment in the lore of the world.
So a friend of mine has been working on his for 2 years and it still, as far as he is concerned, isn’t ready for putting players in.
Another friend has just started using his after spending 9 months on it.
I spent 6-8 weeks on mine and then got my players creating characters.
Worldbuilding, I understand that some want to get all the detail down and written out, they want to know the history and back story of every nation, define the pantheon and the rulersThats before then actually putting in encounters, monsters and a BBEG but really, how long do you spend on your world before you tell players that yes, now you can play in it?
IMO, once you commit to running a campaign and find players, you should schedule session 0 within the week. That’s how much time you have for world building. Two years!? They could have finished a campaign and be on to the next one. You can build enough world for session 1 in a week. You can build enough world for session 2 in another week, and then some. Gradually you get ahead of the train. If you haven’t decided on the way some huge aspect of the way your world works yet, stall. Run some basic bandit or goblin encounters during the first couple sessions. Let the players acquire some sort of obviously important but apparently useless Macguffin and decide what it’s for later.
If someone spends two years on world building, I don’t believe they really want to play the game. That’s fine. For some people world building is all the fun. Just don’t kid yourself that you’ll ever feel ready to start.
World building for roleplaying games is like painting for wargames.
Some people slap on two or three colours on their minis and go for it. Some people spend an hour or two and get something looking really nice. Some people spend tens of hours on one figure, and then get horrified at the idea of actually using it at the table. "It might get smudged!"
Whatever works for you is right for you. Don't stress.
+1 for Pavillionaire's response.
My first time DMing, the party spent 6 months of real world time in the same forest on their first quest. There is so much time for expanding the world while playing that it is actually counterproductive to try to do it all ahead of time.
Each session provides insight into what the players actually want and value, and that is a massive resource for creating the world as it *should* be. Unless the DM is planning to publish a book, the priority should be on making the sessions fun, not on a personal pet project.
I think "total" world design before the party has even played a few sessions is a waste of time. This is one of the areas I think the present DMG really does gets right where it's advised the players start small with only the locality worked out, and build the world as the game scales up. Really building a whole world and presuming your design, with no prior understanding of the party, is likely going to wind up with literal wide swaths that get completely neglected in favor of small patches the designer actually just put in as an after swath.
Of course, my main game world is a shattered planet flying through "space" comet style where pretty much anything in the game can be found if the parties go to the right fragment, which didn't exist until the game asked for it. Things can also easily disappear or "trail off." It's literally a lost world and there maybe one or two intelligences on it that actually know how everything used to fit together, so there's no need for a comprehensive, or consistent, map.
When you make a mark on a map, you're putting down limits and boundaries, why make paths to places the party may never ever have the smallest interest in going? What if you need something else to keep the game going? The world should be in service of the game and built accordingly, not the other way around.
So if you haven't spent two years designing a game world, but you're actually DMing and your table is having a good time, you're probably doing something right. If the game reaches "the end of the map" and the players want more, you have all the prior play sessions to inform what should go into or appear in the rest of the world. I call that good design.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
You can spend a lot of time making a world. You can entirely wing everything and improvise along the way. Some DMs really benefit from spending time making their world by hand, coming up with tons of lore and places and people to interact with. Sometimes, none of that really matters.
The way I see it, players will drive the campaign and world in the ways they want to. I don't want to spend so much time building things that I, as a DM, have the impulse to railroad them to force them to look at all the cool stuff I made. I do a lot of preparation that goes unnoticed or unused, but I generally focus on expanding the things that players actually interact with, which isn't always what I expect them to interact with. There's nothing wrong with doing a lot of work to make a world, but with my preparation to running time ratio, I don't see the point of making distant kingdoms too fleshed out instead of focusing on the next session.
Now, when I'm preparing for a campaign, I usually just focus on the general geopolitics, make the major players and a few leaders, and then worry about the rest in play because the small details will come from working with players to tell a story. Saves me a lot of time daydreaming about the setting I want to run, and helps me get up and running faster.
I'm of the opinion that building anything that the players won't see is a waste of time and energy. When building a world, I usually go with a map, a pantheon, 3-6 big pieces of lore and the idea of what BBE is trying to do that is going to be the PCs call to action. I might go so far as to have the different nations goals. After session 0, I'll put together the starting town and the first 2-3 quests. The rest of the, in one case, 2 year world building process will be done with player interaction.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I'm currently in the process of building my own World / lore / universe and have been doing so for the past year.
For me, it is a pet project that I love doing and which has, I believe, helped me develop a number of skills; mainly relating to writing and map drawing. That having been said, I can accept the fact that players may never enter the world I create - it is a project for me, that is deeply personal and will hopefully one day turn into a campaign setting.
If I was to open up the World I have created for a campaign and advertise it to players as a homebrew World they could explore, then I would do as many have stated within this thread; concentrate on an individual slice / portion of the world and attempt to flesh it as and when.
Having a rough idea of the basics would help and could be tailored based on a session 0;
With the World I am currently creating I have a rough idea of where I could set a campaign based off of the parties wishes; sea-based campaigns, dungeon crawlers, harsh-survival based campaign?
The long and short of it is simple; you will never be able to create a world expansive enough to have fully considered every single move your party make. As such, you will need to improvise, you may well need to honestly say that you will need to go away and contemplate an answer to the questions they have. Attempting to fully consider every move and turn your party may take and come up with expansive lore for everything is, frankly, bonkers. As with a 'normal' campaign let the PCs lead you where they want and build around their movements.
In terms of a BBEG; this could be an individual, a group, an ideology, it could be hidden or overt. Either way, build it around the party. That way it is incredibly easy to build an interconnectiveness (is that even a word!) between the parties actions and the actions of the BBEG, making the campaign feel a lot more personal. It also allows for those 'wacky', 'out-there' actions committed by PCs, enabling you to provide genuine ramifications for choices made.
Personally, to answer your question; "how long do you spend on your world before you tell players that yes, now you can play in it?". My answer would be simple - if they want it, we agree an overall premise in a session 0, then we run it next session. I have so-many tools available as a DM that I can easily 'borrow' from a plethora of sources; whether it be adventures, deities, maps, NPC portraits, game-systems, etc, etc. Everything can be worked in, actions taken in session 1 can come back to haunt them in session 101 (should the campaign last that long). Let the PCs assist with the overall narrative of the campaign, build the World around their narrative.
EDIT: Just thought I'd drop this here... I found a really useful guide to assist with Worldbuilding on Amazon, which I have used myself - '30 Days of Worldbuilding' by A Trevena.
DM - The Call of Strahd (CoS); Feyrealm Campaign, Chapter 0 - Bleak Prospect (BP), Chapter 1 - Destination Unknown (DU)
People get really carried away with world building, especially considering the fact that most worldbuilding is more than you need to run a game. The only worldbuilding that your really need is the stuff that facilitates a reasonable amount of verisimilitude (not 100%, that's unnecessary) or that sparks player interest. Now, you don't know exactly what's going to spark player interest so you are going to want to have multiple interesting things about your world for players to discover, BUT if at any time you are delivering crucial information about your world via info-dump, then you will lose the player's interest. Players love to discover things, they absolutely hate being info-dumped.
I'm especially skeptical of the friend taking 2+ years to build a world, because dm's who do that typically have very rigid understandings of their world and what should happen in it, and are more likely to run a railroad-y story where many powerful, significant NPCs do great deeds with complex political ramifications while the players stand around and watch. DM's who put that much time and effort into their world should just write a book, because that's often the better way to tell the story that you envision for your world without annoying your players (though, when writing your book, be careful not to dump too much exposition on your readers early on because readers, like players, do not find info-dumps compelling).
It is often more important to focus on preparing CONTENT than worldbuilding, and you'll find that while you're putting that content together, a lot of worldbuilding will come out through the course of putting together the adventures anyways (how *did* this dungeon get to be so full of loot? Who *is* this enigmatic bandit queen who took over this town? Why *are* these two factions fighting about who should inherit the old king's throne? Etc...)
This isn't to say "don't worldbuild", but rather that you should understand that worldbuilding is not the most important thing you should be doing, and past a certain point, you're just doing it for your own amusement (again, not a bad thing, just temper your expectations and don't be discouraged when players don't engage with every aspect of your world).
Or worse, yawn at your two years of hard work.
Folks have an "isolated genius" view of world building because they associate that with creativity. Very very few creative types actually produce good stuff by keeping it untested for years and then debut it in "finished product." Writers have trusted editors and readers, artists have similar exhibitions of work in progress, etc. TV and movies people do see rough cuts.
Rather than "going it alone" for two years and produce something that in the end engages no one but yourself, it's probably better to take a few ideas, see how the players respond and when you land on something that really engages the party, build up from there with your players.
To elaborate on actual creative process vs myths of the singular creative genius, I think the ideal TTRPG works like writers room with DM/GM as show runner. The players are responsible for their characters, but the player can also make suggestions and inclusions into the game world for their and other characters sake. It seems counterintuitive, but this is also why I'm against overwrought pregame back stories, rather keeping the background vague and fleshed out as the game is played.
In fact, and thinking out loud here, the overwrought game world is similar to the overwrought back story, the overwrought backstory pulls focus onto stuff the player is simply making up without earning any of the glory by playing the game, the overwrought game world more often than not forces the players into the role of tourists since while the characters are more often than not supposed to be native to the world, they'll be playing stranger characters in the DM's strange land.
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You're confusing world-building with infodump prologue. That might be all that you know before session 1, but world-building can be gradually revealed throughout the story, and there is more lore revealed in the course of the Lord of the Rings movies and books.
Tolkien is a really bad example, because he literally did spend decades world building before he started writing the Hobbit, and it turned out really well. But most fantasy writers don't do it that way. And D&D is not writing a book.
2+ years building a world? Oh man, he is Not Prepared for how little his players are going to care.
Did some building as I started running a campaign a month ago.
Started out as a one shot. With 5 towns and simple lore. Towns populated with taverns, shops and the government.
During that time I mapped the world. The islands, continents, cities and towns. All bare minimum taverns, shops and the like. Plus added in places related to player backstories.
Made a world map, showed the players, told them the main lore of the cities and those related to backstories.
That's it. Didn't write any stories or dungeons or anything outside of the are the players are in at the moment. No need until players decide to go to another area.
So spent like 3 weeks on it all. As players get to a new area or show interested is the point I'll flesh that next area out more having that for the next few sessions.
Agreed that the person is taking too long. So many people overestimate the importance of setting in a story, when it’s just not usually as important as other elements.
When you read a book, you keep reading because you have invested in the characters, the plot, or ideally both. But I’ve never heard someone say they kept reading because they really wanted to hear a description of some new city, or are looking forward to a discussion on trade routes. It’s good to have those things, but most of the time you want to know what the character is doing in that city, not so much where they quarried the stone for the walls of it.
That said, it’s tough to criticize much. I’m assuming the person who’s been at it for 2 years has things like a job or school and friends, family and other hobbies. So 2 years could mean they only have an hour or two a week when they actually work on it. And some people write really slowly.
Your buddy is doing it wrong, really wrong. Build a sandbox area for a campaign, that's it. Have dungeons defined, evil plots going on, maybe a way to get a castle. Have enough content set to take them up to level 5 pre-made. Build a plot flowchart to show what NPC's are important and what information should be available for the PC's to pick up on. Players like to feel smart to develop bits about the world. Look at what content you need to build once they get to level 5. Treat the world building as 4 chapters, Chapter 1 = up to level 5 and the rest of the chapters are based on tiers of play. His life will be a lot easier then.
After the party does their part and conquers evil, put what they did in the world, and in the next campaign they can run into them as NPC's, their children or names etc, players like that. The players flesh out the world, the DM builds the skeleton.
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The quantity of worldbuilding isn't an issue, it's the focus of it, and letting it get between that world and an actual game! You can have the best, most populated world ever, but if inever sees the tabletop, then it's worthless.
If the DM is letting irrelevant worldbuilding stop the game from starting, then it's too much. For example, if there's a string of towns on a trade route, and the DM has made all the towns and al lrelevant NPC's, plots, dungeons and such on there, and they expect it to take some weeks to get through, then delaying the campaign to start working on a mountain full of dwarven mines is too much!
If the players get through everything before you finish making the next bit, just tel lthem it'll be a couple of weeks for you to put stuff together!
I'm building my world around 2 different games at the moment. The town I'm in now has needed a sewer system inventing, but if I did that for every town in the world, it's likely never going to come up!
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I would recommend writing one page of general world background giving major events (the god-war, the dust plague, the cataclysm etc.), anything specific that players need to know for character creation ("gnomes were kicked out of their homeland and all gnomes are refugees" or "genasi in this world are viewed with suspicion" etc.), create a map that indicates a small number of major cities (which the PCs won't start anywhere near) and then work on the adventure, not the world. There is no real benefit to doing more than that.
For my most recent campaign, I spent about 30 minutes on worldbuilding before I began writing the level 1 adventure. My players have been playing weekly games since January. Ask your friend which campaign is more enjoyable for a group of players - one that has had 25 x 5 hour sessions and taken the PCs from level 1-9 with 30 minutes of world building, or the 2 year-planning campaign that nobody has ever played in.
I have stopped mapping out entire systems of dungeons, because I run TOTM except for combat I only map out areas where fighting might happen, everything else I just describe, it has made the number of maps and the size they need to be shrink considerably.
Personally the 6-8 weeks was largely because thats how long it took from the single player who asked me to DM a campaign to actually get her friends sorted and organised ready to go. I had a vision for the opening act of the campaign and the land it was going to happen in in my head.
My friend who has taken now 3 years (my mistake, he has corrected me) insists that if it takes DnD that long to write a campaign book (he worked out a team write a campaign setting in about 9 months) then there is nothing wrong with him taking this time to create a perfect setting. I have almost been tempted to say I will play in his campaign but I know I would be an awful player because my aim would be to try and ignore everything he has spent his time on and force him to make more and more stuff up on the fly.
Happy to see there are a majority who agree with me here :)
Mine started out as 3-4 bullet points about the starting nation. I then needed to make a map for my own head because geography and location was important to the geopolitics of the continent, but it was not a clear map, really just a bunch of blobs on a page indicating the relationship between nations and where the natural barriers where.
Then I worked out in my head the opening act's bbeg (Aboleth) and created my opening encounters and stories alongside my players then coming to me with choices of race/class etc. That then helped me shape things, where do elves come from (for the elf player), how are half races viewed, how do people in this opening nation see tieflings and as one of my players was playing a satyr sex worker, how rare are the creatures of the fey wild (I decided very rare) and how is that profession viewed, an open acceptance of it as a valid type of work.
That then helps me shape the decisions that affect my players directly and helps them know where they fit in the world.
I will admit I spend most of my spare time thinking about my world, thinking about future possible adventure threads, or coming up with history and lore but I refuse to commit anything to more then a bullet point or 2 until it is absolutely necessary for the story as I have long found that letting these things percolate in my head means that when I have to come up with information on the spot what I create with my players in the moment is far better then anything I might have been considering preemptively.
Heh, I’d say if you spend longer on writing the world setting than your players do playing it, then that’s too much.
In my experience as a DM, 33 years now, (old guy harrumph ing) I’ve found the best home brew campaigns happen when your players help you build the world with their suggestions, support, and character ideas. The rest of it is either logistics or religious groups.
As an example, I had a player want to make an elven crossbow archer with an affinity for Gnomish creations. Cool, so he makes the character and I ask what would have given his character this desire to mess with Gnomish artifacts? He looks around, shrugs and says “So uhh when his home got burned he ended up with a traveling tinker who was a gnome.”
From that I can get a few things, Gnomes travel as tinkers, Elves were getting homes burned by someone, and he wants Gnomes to be building things. So from that I just made up a culture of Gnomes I called the Tinkergems, traveling repairmen who’s motto is “I can fix it!” Whether it be a broken pot, a leaky roof, or the tears of an orphaned child. The Tinkergems will do their best to make it right.
Also, I made up the Jundl Bands, traveling mercenaries who will work for anyone for the right price and that rumors of murder and worse follow them. The Jundl Band is who killed the elf’s people and it became a later plot point for the party to find the band that killed his people.
This method may not work for everyone, but it works well for me and I feel like it gives the players an investment in the lore of the world.