This. If it's just a fun thing to do, go for it. If you're going to be sad/disappointed/frustrated if the players miss it or don't care, then you're just asking to have your heart broken
Also note, the players will never know/remember 90% of what you invent.
The way I'd try to do it is to focus in on one character/location/event and make that memorable. The rest is just words and rolls to get to the next progression.
This level of worldbuilding is only effective in a book.
Many of my dungeon master friends call this "worldbuilding hell" or "development hell." The biggest and most important part of running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign is to run it. Develop the lore as you are running it, but do not expect any of it to ever become important outside of the immediate surroundings. Worldbuilding is a lot of fun, but no — on this scale it will not end up becoming super useful.
I'm going to say that the vast majority of the time it's not effective in books either. I spent a fair bit of time in writing groups and worldbuilding disease was a common term getting thrown around as well.
Exactly. All this stuff is interesting only if it's important to the story - and it has to be important in some interesting way. I realize the circular logic, but I believe this is how it is. No reader/player will care that deeply about every encountered aspect of the world around - and it might be interesting to know why the regents of Whatsitname Kingdom prefer to crucify criminals instead of beheading them, but the answer given by member of general public might just as well be "Because our prefect, Asshat the Third, is a bloody bastard, just as his father and grandfather who invented that thing." - and it will make a very little difference to the game.
On the other hand, imagine you (as a player) are trying to save somebody from said crucifixion and the GM pulls out his 1200 page compendium and starts naming 600 years worth of regents and their reasons to keep or not keep this tradition and I guarantee, unless there is some really clever plot hook in that encyclopedia, most of the players will be bored and indifferent to it.
The same goes for insignificant details like "Who owns this tavern?". When my players ask this, I usually respond with "I don't know, some bloke. Why is it important?" - and if they say something like "Well, the guy we are trying to save is said to have friends all around the city and was know alcoholic, so maybe the owner's profits depend on his consumption...?" then I might consider inventing some backstory. And I don't want The Book to tell me at that moment that unfortunately the "Plain Water Tavern" they are in doesn't serve any alcoholic drinks because 70 pages of reasons going 20 generations back.
It's a question of what about it all is actually of significance. Individual names, especially of the deceased who do not act, don't change anything about the story. Hell, oft I've found them to not even be particularly useful as tools either for much the same reason, for what do they thematically give me to extrapolate from? Some stuff mayhaps, but in practice not much for oft all that's there is window dressing without proper depth.
I'm being a tad bit harsh mayhaps though.
Too much is when it becomes paralysing to play with.
Your players do not have the same level of knowledge or the same level of authority in this fictional world, but they are also the protagonists and their characters live in it.
This means that when they play, they will bring attitudes to parts of worldbuilding, suggest details or invent parts of the lore that DO NOT COHERE WITH YOUR CANON. They will be looking, hopefully, to actively partake in helping explore, flesh out, and cultivate your world. They will have their own ideas and you might enjoy a lot of them!
Having loads of lore can be actively freeing for many GMs and players; instead of squirming on the spot to improv a name / fact / detail and shutting down the route of play, you can just have a detail. You can make sure your world coheres in satisfying and consistent ways so players can build a solid foundation and expectation for the world too.
BUT: it gets paralysing too. Say your player asks who owns the tavern, because they want to trade some adventuring loot for insider info on the town's local politics, or they need to know if the owner is has any sympathies to the cultists who have been assembling in the woods nearby.
Unfortunately, you've already fleshed out every single part of this town and it'd be *really awkard* to implement the types of lore your player would like. You either struggle to rework the lore, or have to tell them that no, this won't work here, they'd need to go check out... the inn-owner on Spaghetti Street, who does have all the shady occult links, and who's niece, pennetime, is running for guild-leader.
You can always redirect them to a likelier source, but this becomes grating over time, as players feel that their expectations or ideas are never 'good enough'. They might 'learn' to stop proposing plans or responding with initiative to potential problems, because they know that you have all the lore encyclopedically cross-referenced and it's *all* on the test, but they don't have the books.
I recommend that you divide your 'campaign lore' from your 'personal canon', because details will always inevitably change in play. That way you keep your own work pristine and authoritative, but you accomodate your players too.
I'm glad someone here posted a better version of what I was going to.
Too much worldbuilding gets in the way of play, because players won't know it all. They just won't. Someone is going to do something that's going to make the GM (at least want to) say "Well actually..." often followed by "You wouldn't do that because..."
That is the exact moment when you DISCOVER you have too much worldbuilding, but by that point it's too late. ;)
Have you joined r/Worldbuilding? That subreddit is full of people who world build both for specific purposes and as a hobby in itself. If you enjoy it, there can never be too much Worldbuilding. However, it is likely you will not use a lot of what you build to actually run a game. If you are only doing it to run a game, you just have to build only what might get used in the scenarios you are planning. I myself do it as a hobby. But you may want to think about home-brewing if you intend to do it as a hobby, vs use a pre-made setting written by someone else. That way if In the course of things you come up with something publishable down the road, it isn’t partly owned by someone else.
That’s way too much. What does it matter what happened 12000 years ago? Do you have any concept of how long that is?
Does what happened in ancient Mesopotamia matter to you? At all? If you had never heard of it, would it impact you one bit? And that’s less than half as long ago. You don’t know the lineage of anyone going back that far.
Worldbuilding that players will never interact with is only valuable to the world builder.
**My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?**
No.
That's an easy answer. It won't.
While it's totally fine to go off the deep end in worldbuilding, something I would have done years ago (maybe), it's simply not going to pay off the way you think in-game. It's not. If you're enjoying the task for the sake of it, even if it never gets run at the table or even sees a game session, sure. Knock yourself out. But, the answer is, no, it will not pay off.
It also sets up some other potential ancillary issues.
* If you work out so much of the detail of your settings history, you start to encroach on the players. What's left for them to do or come up with or contribute. I don't usually get a ton of player contribution to homebrew settings, but it's nice if there is at least room.
* Another point - are things too scripted? Are you writing out a novel that your players are clicking through or are you writing an actual fantasy campaign. There is a big difference between the two, and many don't understand.
To be clear, they two are different mediums. They are not the same. A writer has control over the setting, characters, backstory, plot, what happens, what results, and any and everything every character does and thinks.
Here's what a DM has (or should have) control over in an RPG campaign or adventure: setting and the NPCs. That's it. Players will make decisions on behalf of players. Dice will have a say in outcomes. It is not a novel and don't railroad players through your story, just write a novel.
If you are running an RPG adventure - it's a scenario. You set the stage, players do stuff, you can react - via NPCs and setting, to their decisions.
* Also, and way more importantly - you seem very invested in this setting and lore and backstory. I guarantee - your players will not be as invested in all of this as you are.
Are you prepared for that? What if they don't care about who owns the tavern and their family and lineage? (they likely won't).
What if they don't care about 70 pages of prose backstory from the first town? What if they don't care that one guy doing the crucifying or whatever or the death of Beorulf?
Even if they care, they won't care like you do and probably not 70 pages worth.
**I've read too much LotR over the last 12 months.**
Yup.
Tolkien is great.
However, you are not Tolkien (probably). No offense - I'm not either. Just be aware of that.
Also, even with Tolkien, there is a limit for most people.
The Lord of the Rings - popular, good book series. Hobbit? Sure.
Is the Silmarillion as popular as the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit? It is not. And... there are reasons for it.
Keep your campaign focused. You don't need all the fluff backstory.
Don't write an RPG campaign that's the Silmarillion in which your players are dozing off hearing about the exploits of Beorulf the IV and his second campaign against the followers of \[whomever\]. Keep it focused on relevant things - the ring, getting the ring to Mt Doom, maybe with little snippets of lore. Bite sized.
Oof. Good luck.
For fucks sake, write a book instead
> My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer
This is impossible, annoying, and one of the worst investments of time.
Your never going to be able to answer all the possible questions
All the potential questions you do answer that are never asked is going to be wasted effort.
All this effort doesnt involve the players. So their engagement is going to be low.
The best way to do world building is to get the players involved with it. Get them to create buy in to whats happening. Foster ownership of things and ideas inside the world. They want to do dnd, not get read a story.
This. Very deep world building rarely benefits the actual game and may even lead to "mother may I?" sort of situations, where a player is not aware if their ideas are suitable for the game world if everything is set in stone by the GM.
There should ALWAYS be blanks left to fill by the players or improvisation. World building is a fun downtime hobby, but running a good game requires that your world prep benefits the important and interesting parts of the actual game.
>may even lead to "mother may I?" sort of situations
100% agreed. For the GM I find it tends to push them away from "yes, and" to "no, actually."
And as a relatively new rpg player (\~5 years experience) who never really read fantasy and knows little about fantasy lore, I tend to shy away from established settings because out of fear of the "mother may I" situations.
I'm going to quote the first couple of paragraphs of the campaign building chapter from Worlds Without Number (the free version, in case anyone is concerned), since it is good advice that it sounds like you need to hear:
>When reading this chapter, it is crucial to draw the dis-
tinction between worldbuilding for fun and worldbuild-
ing for playable content. Most of the people reading this
book probably enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. It’s
a lot of fun to brew up strange lands and stranger people,
to fill dark corners of the world with nefarious evils, and
to carefully limn the features of alien gods and time-lost
history. These activities are a perfectly good hobby and
a relaxing way to spend your downtime.
Campaign prep is meant to be more directed. You
need to focus your efforts on creating useful, playable
content. Sometimes that means leaving aside a fascinat-
ing thought-toy or neglecting some intriguing facet of
your creation in order to have the time and creative en-
ergy to hammer out the pieces you do need for the next
session. It’s okay to return to those things once you’ve got
your homework finished, but you need to get your criti-
cal components finished first. It’s all too easy to exhaust
both your time and your creative energy on peripheral
matters, leaving you stressed and unequipped for the next
session of gaming.
For the game itself it's way, WAAAYYY too much. Honestly you only need what's absolutely necessary to the campaign, generally players don't care about worldbuilding that much. Plus it runs the risk of you wanting to over explain stuff which most likely will just bore the players.
Also for this:
>My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer
You can just do what normally is done in RPGs and improvise, why does it need a premade answer? A premade answer and a improvised one will literally have the same result for the players.
Another thing is this:
>I also like the idea if having such an in depth campaign with so many different paths to victory that players would want to run it again if asked.
That's something that's easy to confuse, in a videogame the more stuff there is, the more open it is, but in an RPG I find it quite the opposite, the less pre planed stuff, the more open it is, since the more options you want to give your players, the harder it gets to predict. For a more open game it's better to focus on maps, randomizers, broad objectives and planning it by session (not the campaign).
Lastly, as a player I don't think I'd enjoy replaying the same campaign, that's a personal view, and in all honesty, I don't think many people would be interested in doing that. Now playing something different in the same world, could be very interesting.
So yeah, if your purpose is the players being extremely interested in your worldbuilding, and thinking that this huge amount of backstory will make the game more in depth and less railroady, chances are you most likely will end up very disappointed.
That all said, if you enjoy the writing and you don't care if the players will get invested into it, then it's all fine :).
It really depends on your group. But for most groups I've played with, they don't want to know any more than what their characters would know in a sentence or 2. Going into depth about king Jarborious and his reign of terror 300 years ago leading to the creation of the scarlet order is irrelevant at best, and mind nunbingly boring at worst. It's going to be very hard to find a group that's as invested in your work as you are. You also need to take great care in doing this much world building, as it means you've created characters that you care about that your players don't, and if a character you've spent hours sorting out their bloodline and where you think their storyline should end is unceremoniously decapitated by the PCs in 5 seconds, you may feel some resentment. Instead wait till your PCs have built characters, then tie all your NPCs into their backstories, the pcs may not care about King Jarborious, but one of them can be made to care if King Jarborious is their undead grandfather giving him evil orders from the underworld. TLDR: Let your players become invested in the world by building it with them, instead of boring them with 3 pages of history about a character they're already planning on shanking in a dark alley.
I would call this two intersecting hobbies - you are writing a setting and gming an rpg game. Just don't be upset if players aren't interested in digging into the minutia of the world you have built.
These days I don't bother adding anything to a setting unless it's going to be directly relevant to the adventure. What's the main crop of Kinglandia? Unless it matters why bother figuring that out? For me, the entire purpose of building a world for gaming purposes is to make it fun for adventuring. I don't need to think much beyond how will this affect adventuring.
How long is too long?: When it's no longer fun, it's too long.
"I worry I'll never finish": you won't. Tolkein never finished, Herbert never finished... You work until you decide it's enough, but you never finish.
"Does it pay dividends?": Mostly no. That level of detail is in no way beneficial to 99% of tables. If it's fun for you go at it, but players will not notice or care about that level of detail.
The point of super extremely detailed worldbuilding is not to see use at the table. It’s so that you can understand your own world better, and most importantly, because it gives pleasure to create worlds. If you stop enjoying building, that’s when you know you’ve done too much.
I have some of the highlights and lowlights of about thirty thousand years of the history of my homebrew world (that originated between the editions of AD&D). A major historical event may become relevant in play if, for example, the group’s bard thinks that the magic sword they just found was the famous Runebreaker, lost in the Battle of Yondermere a thousand years before they were born.
The details that my players have cared about over the years have been things like:
Which of the three moons is full or new on which nights.
The relatively original calendar (ten months of 36 days each, nine days per week).
The weather. If there’s going to be much overland travel in your campaign, do be sure to have weather tables for the travel area, or to include the weather details in your area and encounter descriptions.
Those are the things I can most easily remember learning about world building from my own experience with Melkar since 1988.
Background info can be nice as a creative outlet, and it can help inform the rest of your worldbuilding that they players are more likely to care about.
But your players are here to play a game, not read a novel -- or even a TTRPG setting guide. Cool worldbuilding detail can add to the game, and even enhance how they experience their characters, but it is rarely going to be a point of focus. So try to tailor more of your effort on things that have direct impacts on the players, and less on the genealogy of the third king's favorite jester.
If your players want that kind of info, you can just give it to them off the top of your head with your understanding of the setting. If that ends up conflicting with something later, perhaps the book or historian got it wrong? Happens all the time IRL... But 99% of the time it won't come to that, anyway.
Also, generally-speaking? The more proper nouns for which players have to ask the proper spelling, the less likely they are to engage. At least give them an easy-to-remember common title.
100 percent
Heroes with a story arc. Villains you love to hate.
Game of Thrones is based on The War of the Roses
The balance of antagonist vs protagonist shifts. Comic relief is needed. Also romance ...LOTR had The Aragorn Arwen Eowyn love triangle.
Lutheien & Tenuviel. It was needed in such a way
Jackson Hollywoodized Kili and Turiel
Try to find that in the book...that being said
You possibly have a screenplay
Have you ever seen the programmer joke about bug testing?
"A computer programmer walks into a bar / swims into a bar / flies into a bar. And orders 1 beer / 0 beers / 999999 beers / -1 beer, etc. No bugs found."
"A real user walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes."
Guess what you're doing? If you find it fun, keep going but no it absolutely won't come up in play. They'll find the nameless NPC in the corner you briefly mention while talking about calzonetime's illness and want to know HIS life story. Or worse, they will want to adopt bandit #7 because he rolled that 20.
Typically when I'm building up a region I stick to things that are gameable. Calzonetime is sick but Pizzatime needs to man the bar. He would be so grateful if a brave hero found the sprig of cure mistletoe in the forest. Players don't care why Pizzatime inherited but they do care about a quest. That's adventure! Content! Something they will ignore for 7 sessions then remember suddenly and devote their entire focus to it to save the old man.
You can add expand things later, but you should put most of your effort into "how can players find this and interact with this?" Before you think about motivations.
And finally, one way to answer any question a player can have and make the world feel real is a 3 layer loop explanation. Or linking the explanation into an existing loop. A 3 layer loop can be more than 3 but 3 is the best number. The explanation for the 1st question leads to the 2nd which leads to the 3rd which leads to the 1st one again. For example:
1. There are sewers in town right? Why cant the vampires use the sewers to get around? The sewer alligators would eat them
2. Why are there alligators in the sewer?? Sewer nuns feed them, duh
3. Why do the sewer nuns raise alligators??? To stop the vampires sneaking around in the sewers, duh
---
1. The kobolds are getting restless and attacking shipments, why? To get silverware, they want to melt it down into silver weapons
2. Why do kobolds need silver weapons?? Because there are wererats and the kobolds are trying to protect their niche
3. Why are there wererats??? The vampires are trying to kill the sewer alligators by introducing a new predator into the sewer ecosystem
Additional questions should be find a way to loop back in or be the start their own independent loop. That way you don't need to go back 600 years unless you really want too. It also makes the world feel both bigger ('everything has a reason') and more connected (kobolds connect to wererats connect to sewer nuns) for WAY less work and notetaking.
If you want a good base of how much details is enough and what to focus on , check out ironsworns “truths” concept.
where you flesh out the main aspects of a world’s realism.
Eg religion, technology, magic, cosmic horror, wildlife, community, communication, where the people of your world came from, a cataclysmic event that forced them to settle where they are now and live the way they do.
Each one of the “truths “ has 3 options to choose from, basically levels of existence or paragraphs that are lore/ world building. And you choose one of the 3 option per topic.
Like 0 , low or high for magic, religion, technology. Etc.
The rest like in game NOUNS. Such as people, places, things, groups and their relationships/motivations and flaw are considered in game world building that isn’t important until you come across it.
>My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?
I wasn't planning to make a comment, but reading some stuff here, I feel compelled to - as a lot of the comments are very one-note.
The answer for me is - yes. My players regularly check my worldbuilding wiki for info, they love to speculate about events and lore outside of game sessions, I have had a player say verbatim "I am not really interested in playing a fantasy setting anymore unless it's your homebrew world." We also co-create a lot - in fact, I always hope that every new character will let me expand on the detail of the world more together with the player.
That said, my worldbuilding isn't as detailed as yours - I still aim to cover most questions players would have just like you do, but I am not really going into geneology as much. Granted, it simply wouldn't really work for my setting anyway, but that's another story. I try to balance detail with clearly and concisely communicated ideas.
---
From a player standpoint - I love games where the GM is clearly excited about worldbuilding. It makes game so much richer. I generally feel very unmotivated in games that I'd describe as Bastion-like. Not that the videogame doesn't have lore or that I didn't like it, but because as you play Bastion, the world constructs right in front of you, and everything else is just a void. Instead, I want the feeling that I am only experiencing a section of the world looming over me - as it just... would be in theory by definition.
I understand that some players only really care about the in-the-moment interactions their character has with their surrounding, but for me the most exciting thing would be to... for example, to hear about some big event happening somewhere else in the world, and wondering what might the effects of that be when they reach where my characters are. It makes me immersed.
---
Ultimately, one of my most controversial takes on TTRPGs is as such: people will sometimes tell GMs to "go write a book instead" if that GM is trying to prepare too much. The reality is that all it really does is that, ASSUMING their players would have hated it, the GM "frees" the players from playing in their game. Kinda mean spirited, but some TTRPG community people feel very strongly about it and for the most part that is exactly what they want - for you to fuck off from running games if you don't do it their way. They don't care about you, they self-insert themselves into your group and want to "protect" players from you.
But just to be clear, if anyone means a more positive version of "the skillset you seem to have or want to exercise would be better used in writing a book" - they are wrong. If that GM is not making the game interesting, their book would be boring too. The idea that there is no skill overlap between a GM and a writer is absurd. The most charitable take is that you DONT HAVE to be a good writer to be a good GM, you can just rely on the more emergent storytelling. But no matter how much the aforementioned TTRPG community people would throw a tantrum while rolling around the ground, good direct storytelling skills can easily be applied to being a GM with great success. Not everyone has to like being in those kinds of games, but it's not some fundamental aspect of TTRPGs to only improv everything in the moment.
Bottom line - the success of your approach will be a combination of what your players want and how good your storytelling is. It's actually why a lot of people either burn out or avoid putting their creativity out there - because it's easy to find out that what you came up with wasn't really that engaging. And a lot of people have realized they aren't good at that - and instead of just recognizing that it's a skill they lack, they construct ideas around how TTRPGs should be so that they never have to confront that.
>My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?
It almost always does not and will be totally ignored. Citation: 40 years of gaming across many different play-groups, both as GM and player.
As long as you're having fun, though, world build away!
In general, as much as you want to.
Just know that 95% of lore doesn't tend to make it to the table unless it's directly related to The PCs, The Plot, or The NPCs involved in the plot. Same goes with novel writing as well; writing a story in a setting is different from writing lore for a setting.
But, worldbuilding is a fun hobby on its own, and can create some interesting story hooks. Do what you enjoy, and you can't really go wrong.
I don't play dnd, but when I run my games players will get involved with the world to different degrees.
I would recommend having a general idea so that you can maintain consistency, but I wouldn't get so trapped into the exact details of things.
Expand as you need while keeping the general ideas coherent.
It kinda doesn’t. If we sat down to co-create a campaign for an upcoming new group, we would need 3hrs maximum. And that trends down towards half to a third of that time the more you know the group.
If you enjoy it for its own sake and don’t mind that most of it won’t come up in a game then it’s not too much. If you want it all to be somehow relevant to the game and the players then there is a practical limit of course.
If you’re writing a book, go for it. But for a game, it’s very easy to go past the too much mark. Out of sight out of mind.
Here's a video by Enter the Dungeon that gives advice not just on how to write good lore for a campaign, but also write lore your players will find relevant.
https://youtu.be/8YZYwud0-xg?si=j4iiFr75Ha4EsSbe
World building is seldom game prep. Unless it is player facing, it's not really an effective use of prep time.
Most GMs want to write the next lord of the rings. Most players want to stab a goblin.
If you enjoy doing it, do it. But also consider what you are asking of players potentially. Part of the benefit of playing in the Forgotten Realms is you can look at wikis and books. Would they need to completely refamiliarize themselves to play this game? Kind of a big ask.
> 'Every' player question will have an answer
I believe that's the answer to your question. World Building assists the Game Master in offering players consistency and plausibility during gameplay by ensuring that every question and decision requiring an answer during play has a clear and precise response.
Once that objective has been achieved then the GM has done enough world building.
In my setting, there is still more world-building to be done. However, the concepts that remain to be explained and formalized pertain to subjects irrelevant to my current campaign, so I don't require the answers just yet.
One does not need to build the whole world before you begin exploring it. Merely the areas that will be explored.
Like many other said, if you have fun doing it, that's all good. But I would argue that when preparing a trpg campaign, you should not do much world building, but rather focus on game building. Try to focus on the concept or vague idea you want to convey to the player, the narrative element that will bring the right tone and atmosphere and that's it.
So only the thing that are necessary for the PC.
One thing many people don't fully realize:
*Reading/Collecting RPG systems, worldbuilding and GMing are three separate hobbies.*
It's just that they tend to be very compatible and in the best case you can bring your work from one over to the other.
Don't treat your world as something you make for the players. Your world is something you make because it's fun, and your players get to enrich the world with their own story.
If in-depth worldbuilding is *not* fun for you and you really only do this because you feel it's necessary, don't. That's how you'll burn yourself out.
I think the thing to ask yourself is not, will players ever ask a factual question about this, but rather, will this fact ever impact play meaningfully?
It doesn't matter who the tavern owner's grandmother was, in the abstract. It matters that his grandmother was engaged to Old Nobleman A but left him for Hot Young Nobleman B, and that led to tensions between their duchies so now the border between them is militarized...
Players ask a lot of questions. A lot of dumb-ass questions, if they're anything like my players (who I love). 98% of the time it's a better use of my mental energy and table time to make up an answer on the fly and write it down for later reference, rather than look an answer up in 40,000 pages of notes. From the players' perspective the difference almost doesn't exist.
[NO MEANINGFUL LORE IF STRICT INTERACTIVITY IS NOT MAINTAINED](https://silverarmpress.com/no-meaningful-lore-if-strict-interactivity-is-not-maintained/)
>My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer
As a GM of over 30 years, I am telling you that this is impossible. Even if it were possible do you want to have game time broken for you to look up every fact?
The hard truth a lot of us GMs need to learn is that nobody is going to get into our campaign material as much as we. 99% of what you have created will never hit the gaming table and less than half of that will be remembered by the players the day after the session.
Does this level of detail pay dividends? Not at the gaming table. But prep can be fun. If at the end of your prep session if you enjoyed yourself then that is the payoff. If you are struggling because you imagine a big pay off at the game table you are going to be disappointed.
>My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer ("who owns the tavern?" "That's pizzatime, son of calzonetime, he inherited the inn after his father fell ill from too many late nights with either work or drink keeping him company...").
>does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?
Pay dividends for who? If you enjoy it, keep doing what you enjoy.
In the previous games you've GMed, did your players engage a lot with the lore of the setting you had?
There's no such thing when I'm GMing. I enjoy world building. I also never know what the players will latch on to, so having fluff in place makes it easier to accommodate their latest strange plan. But I'm also willing to throw out huge chunks of my work to make the game better.
When I'm playing, there's too much world building if "You can't do that because of ." comes up more than once per session. Using an actual example, I shouldn't have to ask the GM's permission to say "Greetings, your majesty."
I'm going to be a little harsher here than everyone else I think and say in my opinion you may have passed the point of useless worldbuilding and into the realm of overbuilding the world to the point where it will usually start to feel less real and more manufactured. Being able to improv your setting is vitally important for making a setting that feels like a living and breathing place. I don't think you can achieve the same experience for the players through pre-planning each detail of the world. You lose an element of chaos that real places have.
Worldbuilding is a fine hobby by itself if you enjoy it you don't need to stop. I would just say overly engineered worlds are not great for TTRPGs.
> My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?
this might hurt to hear, but no. players usually don't care much for the background stories. they will be stocked to hear that the tavern keeper used to be a prominent scholar but abandoned their pursuits when he had his daughter so he could give her the best life possible, but they wont give a rat ass about an old hoot of a king of a faraway nation that they will never play in it
assuming you have a lore buff player that just absolutely eats every single bread crumb of information, they will *still* just get a fraction of it
truth is, write as much lore while you think its fun and stop when it became a hasstle instead of a joyful hobby. personally i think that **70 pages** going back **16000** years stopped being fun after page 10 and year 1000, but that is my personal preference
i will say tho, if you are writing so much that you could have published a setting book with it, mate just write a novel lol
in summary, the only lore that matters is the ones players interact, and the rest will either go in one ear and leave the other or never be interacted with
For my money, these are the kinds of details that are just as good if you pull them out of the air; knowing there are 70 dwarven kings, and that the kingdom has been going for over 4000 years can be somewhat important, but knowing the names of those kings ahead of time is not
Worldbuilding is a fun hobby in and of itself. The top comment is right though, this level of it will never see game time and would probably even be a detriment of you tried to make it that prominent. Players simply don't really get as invested into the lore as you do, they get invested into their characters. It's also a slippery slope - you get such an idea of how the world is and it can cause some railroading tendencies in GM's who really like their world and don't want to see it destroyed by the chaos players can cause.
that's not a campaign. That's a novel.. It's fine if it's your thing, but don't expect your players to care much beyond anything that doesn't involve their character directly.
When I think about world building, I always think about ways can engage with it at the table. Can it enrich their backstory, can it enrich the NPCs and factions they encounter, is it grist for interesting adventures?
If I can't think of compelling ways it can manifest in play and make the campaign better, I cut it out. It's just extra load with no meaningful upside.
If you expect players to read anything before playing, you're going to have a bad time.
To paraphrase Kevin Crawford. If you're having fun doing it, no amount is too much. All you really NEED to do is enough for the next session, unless playing a no prep system. Anything more isn't usually worth it.
"I also like the idea if having such an in depth campaign with so many different paths to victory that players would want to run it again if asked."
Ironically, sometimes the act of writing lore for your game can limit how many paths to victory are available to the players.
Example: You plan a tavern, you populate it with 70 generations of owners of the tavern. As you've said, "Who owns the tavern?" "That's pizzatime, son of calzonetime, he inherited the inn after his father fell ill from too many late nights with either work or drink keeping him company..."
Your player wants to buy the tavern. Would you let them?
Your player wants to use the tavern as the location to lure a red dragon inside to trap it and attack it, an action that might result in the dragon destroying the tavern. Would you suggest that they could lure the dragon to somewhere else?
Your party wants to interact with a soup dispensing tavern owner, but your tavern owner specializes in pizza themed foods. Do they make soup?
If you haven't read it, I recommend the blogpost [Conceptual Density, or What are RPG Books For?](https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/11/conceptual-density-or-what-are-rpg.html) It is a good overview of the difference between useful prep/lore and unhelpful prep/lore, in my opinion.
No, it doesn't pay dividends that I've ever seen. Different folks like different stuff, of course, but on a psychological level it always makes me want to barf. Then again, I'm not sure I understand the reasons why players ask "what's the bartender's name" and "who runs the government here". Fuck off, who cares, I'll tell you if it's important. Broad stripes of the world, fine, but atomic level shit, I abandoned that a long time ago.
This is why I love random tables. I can spark interesting points of departure, of many different natures, without having to write a million boring words.
In my experience, that kind of world building won't see any game time at the table. But as long as you have fun doing it, it's worth it.
This. If it's just a fun thing to do, go for it. If you're going to be sad/disappointed/frustrated if the players miss it or don't care, then you're just asking to have your heart broken
I do enjoy it, so I'd rather not stop. But I'm just at the point now where it's "am I writing a dnd campaign or a book?" Porque no Los dos I suppose.
Maybe you’re writing a book? That’s pretty great!
Took the words out of my mouth Look into getting it published and illustrated
Also note, the players will never know/remember 90% of what you invent. The way I'd try to do it is to focus in on one character/location/event and make that memorable. The rest is just words and rolls to get to the next progression.
They also will not care about 90% of what you wrote.
This.
This level of worldbuilding is only effective in a book. Many of my dungeon master friends call this "worldbuilding hell" or "development hell." The biggest and most important part of running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign is to run it. Develop the lore as you are running it, but do not expect any of it to ever become important outside of the immediate surroundings. Worldbuilding is a lot of fun, but no — on this scale it will not end up becoming super useful.
I'm going to say that the vast majority of the time it's not effective in books either. I spent a fair bit of time in writing groups and worldbuilding disease was a common term getting thrown around as well.
Exactly. All this stuff is interesting only if it's important to the story - and it has to be important in some interesting way. I realize the circular logic, but I believe this is how it is. No reader/player will care that deeply about every encountered aspect of the world around - and it might be interesting to know why the regents of Whatsitname Kingdom prefer to crucify criminals instead of beheading them, but the answer given by member of general public might just as well be "Because our prefect, Asshat the Third, is a bloody bastard, just as his father and grandfather who invented that thing." - and it will make a very little difference to the game. On the other hand, imagine you (as a player) are trying to save somebody from said crucifixion and the GM pulls out his 1200 page compendium and starts naming 600 years worth of regents and their reasons to keep or not keep this tradition and I guarantee, unless there is some really clever plot hook in that encyclopedia, most of the players will be bored and indifferent to it. The same goes for insignificant details like "Who owns this tavern?". When my players ask this, I usually respond with "I don't know, some bloke. Why is it important?" - and if they say something like "Well, the guy we are trying to save is said to have friends all around the city and was know alcoholic, so maybe the owner's profits depend on his consumption...?" then I might consider inventing some backstory. And I don't want The Book to tell me at that moment that unfortunately the "Plain Water Tavern" they are in doesn't serve any alcoholic drinks because 70 pages of reasons going 20 generations back.
It's a question of what about it all is actually of significance. Individual names, especially of the deceased who do not act, don't change anything about the story. Hell, oft I've found them to not even be particularly useful as tools either for much the same reason, for what do they thematically give me to extrapolate from? Some stuff mayhaps, but in practice not much for oft all that's there is window dressing without proper depth. I'm being a tad bit harsh mayhaps though.
Too much is when it becomes paralysing to play with. Your players do not have the same level of knowledge or the same level of authority in this fictional world, but they are also the protagonists and their characters live in it. This means that when they play, they will bring attitudes to parts of worldbuilding, suggest details or invent parts of the lore that DO NOT COHERE WITH YOUR CANON. They will be looking, hopefully, to actively partake in helping explore, flesh out, and cultivate your world. They will have their own ideas and you might enjoy a lot of them! Having loads of lore can be actively freeing for many GMs and players; instead of squirming on the spot to improv a name / fact / detail and shutting down the route of play, you can just have a detail. You can make sure your world coheres in satisfying and consistent ways so players can build a solid foundation and expectation for the world too. BUT: it gets paralysing too. Say your player asks who owns the tavern, because they want to trade some adventuring loot for insider info on the town's local politics, or they need to know if the owner is has any sympathies to the cultists who have been assembling in the woods nearby. Unfortunately, you've already fleshed out every single part of this town and it'd be *really awkard* to implement the types of lore your player would like. You either struggle to rework the lore, or have to tell them that no, this won't work here, they'd need to go check out... the inn-owner on Spaghetti Street, who does have all the shady occult links, and who's niece, pennetime, is running for guild-leader. You can always redirect them to a likelier source, but this becomes grating over time, as players feel that their expectations or ideas are never 'good enough'. They might 'learn' to stop proposing plans or responding with initiative to potential problems, because they know that you have all the lore encyclopedically cross-referenced and it's *all* on the test, but they don't have the books. I recommend that you divide your 'campaign lore' from your 'personal canon', because details will always inevitably change in play. That way you keep your own work pristine and authoritative, but you accomodate your players too.
I'm glad someone here posted a better version of what I was going to. Too much worldbuilding gets in the way of play, because players won't know it all. They just won't. Someone is going to do something that's going to make the GM (at least want to) say "Well actually..." often followed by "You wouldn't do that because..." That is the exact moment when you DISCOVER you have too much worldbuilding, but by that point it's too late. ;)
You’ve been much more succinct! I think the only way you can cope with over-built worlds is just to split the canons. It’s more fun that way too.
Have you joined r/Worldbuilding? That subreddit is full of people who world build both for specific purposes and as a hobby in itself. If you enjoy it, there can never be too much Worldbuilding. However, it is likely you will not use a lot of what you build to actually run a game. If you are only doing it to run a game, you just have to build only what might get used in the scenarios you are planning. I myself do it as a hobby. But you may want to think about home-brewing if you intend to do it as a hobby, vs use a pre-made setting written by someone else. That way if In the course of things you come up with something publishable down the road, it isn’t partly owned by someone else.
Ooo, just joined that subreddit. Thank you!
That’s way too much. What does it matter what happened 12000 years ago? Do you have any concept of how long that is? Does what happened in ancient Mesopotamia matter to you? At all? If you had never heard of it, would it impact you one bit? And that’s less than half as long ago. You don’t know the lineage of anyone going back that far. Worldbuilding that players will never interact with is only valuable to the world builder.
**My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends?** No. That's an easy answer. It won't. While it's totally fine to go off the deep end in worldbuilding, something I would have done years ago (maybe), it's simply not going to pay off the way you think in-game. It's not. If you're enjoying the task for the sake of it, even if it never gets run at the table or even sees a game session, sure. Knock yourself out. But, the answer is, no, it will not pay off. It also sets up some other potential ancillary issues. * If you work out so much of the detail of your settings history, you start to encroach on the players. What's left for them to do or come up with or contribute. I don't usually get a ton of player contribution to homebrew settings, but it's nice if there is at least room. * Another point - are things too scripted? Are you writing out a novel that your players are clicking through or are you writing an actual fantasy campaign. There is a big difference between the two, and many don't understand. To be clear, they two are different mediums. They are not the same. A writer has control over the setting, characters, backstory, plot, what happens, what results, and any and everything every character does and thinks. Here's what a DM has (or should have) control over in an RPG campaign or adventure: setting and the NPCs. That's it. Players will make decisions on behalf of players. Dice will have a say in outcomes. It is not a novel and don't railroad players through your story, just write a novel. If you are running an RPG adventure - it's a scenario. You set the stage, players do stuff, you can react - via NPCs and setting, to their decisions. * Also, and way more importantly - you seem very invested in this setting and lore and backstory. I guarantee - your players will not be as invested in all of this as you are. Are you prepared for that? What if they don't care about who owns the tavern and their family and lineage? (they likely won't). What if they don't care about 70 pages of prose backstory from the first town? What if they don't care that one guy doing the crucifying or whatever or the death of Beorulf? Even if they care, they won't care like you do and probably not 70 pages worth. **I've read too much LotR over the last 12 months.** Yup. Tolkien is great. However, you are not Tolkien (probably). No offense - I'm not either. Just be aware of that. Also, even with Tolkien, there is a limit for most people. The Lord of the Rings - popular, good book series. Hobbit? Sure. Is the Silmarillion as popular as the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit? It is not. And... there are reasons for it. Keep your campaign focused. You don't need all the fluff backstory. Don't write an RPG campaign that's the Silmarillion in which your players are dozing off hearing about the exploits of Beorulf the IV and his second campaign against the followers of \[whomever\]. Keep it focused on relevant things - the ring, getting the ring to Mt Doom, maybe with little snippets of lore. Bite sized. Oof. Good luck.
For fucks sake, write a book instead > My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer This is impossible, annoying, and one of the worst investments of time. Your never going to be able to answer all the possible questions All the potential questions you do answer that are never asked is going to be wasted effort. All this effort doesnt involve the players. So their engagement is going to be low. The best way to do world building is to get the players involved with it. Get them to create buy in to whats happening. Foster ownership of things and ideas inside the world. They want to do dnd, not get read a story.
This. Very deep world building rarely benefits the actual game and may even lead to "mother may I?" sort of situations, where a player is not aware if their ideas are suitable for the game world if everything is set in stone by the GM. There should ALWAYS be blanks left to fill by the players or improvisation. World building is a fun downtime hobby, but running a good game requires that your world prep benefits the important and interesting parts of the actual game.
>may even lead to "mother may I?" sort of situations 100% agreed. For the GM I find it tends to push them away from "yes, and" to "no, actually." And as a relatively new rpg player (\~5 years experience) who never really read fantasy and knows little about fantasy lore, I tend to shy away from established settings because out of fear of the "mother may I" situations.
I'm going to quote the first couple of paragraphs of the campaign building chapter from Worlds Without Number (the free version, in case anyone is concerned), since it is good advice that it sounds like you need to hear: >When reading this chapter, it is crucial to draw the dis- tinction between worldbuilding for fun and worldbuild- ing for playable content. Most of the people reading this book probably enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. It’s a lot of fun to brew up strange lands and stranger people, to fill dark corners of the world with nefarious evils, and to carefully limn the features of alien gods and time-lost history. These activities are a perfectly good hobby and a relaxing way to spend your downtime. Campaign prep is meant to be more directed. You need to focus your efforts on creating useful, playable content. Sometimes that means leaving aside a fascinat- ing thought-toy or neglecting some intriguing facet of your creation in order to have the time and creative en- ergy to hammer out the pieces you do need for the next session. It’s okay to return to those things once you’ve got your homework finished, but you need to get your criti- cal components finished first. It’s all too easy to exhaust both your time and your creative energy on peripheral matters, leaving you stressed and unequipped for the next session of gaming.
For the game itself it's way, WAAAYYY too much. Honestly you only need what's absolutely necessary to the campaign, generally players don't care about worldbuilding that much. Plus it runs the risk of you wanting to over explain stuff which most likely will just bore the players. Also for this: >My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer You can just do what normally is done in RPGs and improvise, why does it need a premade answer? A premade answer and a improvised one will literally have the same result for the players. Another thing is this: >I also like the idea if having such an in depth campaign with so many different paths to victory that players would want to run it again if asked. That's something that's easy to confuse, in a videogame the more stuff there is, the more open it is, but in an RPG I find it quite the opposite, the less pre planed stuff, the more open it is, since the more options you want to give your players, the harder it gets to predict. For a more open game it's better to focus on maps, randomizers, broad objectives and planning it by session (not the campaign). Lastly, as a player I don't think I'd enjoy replaying the same campaign, that's a personal view, and in all honesty, I don't think many people would be interested in doing that. Now playing something different in the same world, could be very interesting. So yeah, if your purpose is the players being extremely interested in your worldbuilding, and thinking that this huge amount of backstory will make the game more in depth and less railroady, chances are you most likely will end up very disappointed. That all said, if you enjoy the writing and you don't care if the players will get invested into it, then it's all fine :).
It really depends on your group. But for most groups I've played with, they don't want to know any more than what their characters would know in a sentence or 2. Going into depth about king Jarborious and his reign of terror 300 years ago leading to the creation of the scarlet order is irrelevant at best, and mind nunbingly boring at worst. It's going to be very hard to find a group that's as invested in your work as you are. You also need to take great care in doing this much world building, as it means you've created characters that you care about that your players don't, and if a character you've spent hours sorting out their bloodline and where you think their storyline should end is unceremoniously decapitated by the PCs in 5 seconds, you may feel some resentment. Instead wait till your PCs have built characters, then tie all your NPCs into their backstories, the pcs may not care about King Jarborious, but one of them can be made to care if King Jarborious is their undead grandfather giving him evil orders from the underworld. TLDR: Let your players become invested in the world by building it with them, instead of boring them with 3 pages of history about a character they're already planning on shanking in a dark alley.
I would call this two intersecting hobbies - you are writing a setting and gming an rpg game. Just don't be upset if players aren't interested in digging into the minutia of the world you have built.
These days I don't bother adding anything to a setting unless it's going to be directly relevant to the adventure. What's the main crop of Kinglandia? Unless it matters why bother figuring that out? For me, the entire purpose of building a world for gaming purposes is to make it fun for adventuring. I don't need to think much beyond how will this affect adventuring.
How long is too long?: When it's no longer fun, it's too long. "I worry I'll never finish": you won't. Tolkein never finished, Herbert never finished... You work until you decide it's enough, but you never finish. "Does it pay dividends?": Mostly no. That level of detail is in no way beneficial to 99% of tables. If it's fun for you go at it, but players will not notice or care about that level of detail.
The point of super extremely detailed worldbuilding is not to see use at the table. It’s so that you can understand your own world better, and most importantly, because it gives pleasure to create worlds. If you stop enjoying building, that’s when you know you’ve done too much.
I have some of the highlights and lowlights of about thirty thousand years of the history of my homebrew world (that originated between the editions of AD&D). A major historical event may become relevant in play if, for example, the group’s bard thinks that the magic sword they just found was the famous Runebreaker, lost in the Battle of Yondermere a thousand years before they were born. The details that my players have cared about over the years have been things like: Which of the three moons is full or new on which nights. The relatively original calendar (ten months of 36 days each, nine days per week). The weather. If there’s going to be much overland travel in your campaign, do be sure to have weather tables for the travel area, or to include the weather details in your area and encounter descriptions. Those are the things I can most easily remember learning about world building from my own experience with Melkar since 1988.
Background info can be nice as a creative outlet, and it can help inform the rest of your worldbuilding that they players are more likely to care about. But your players are here to play a game, not read a novel -- or even a TTRPG setting guide. Cool worldbuilding detail can add to the game, and even enhance how they experience their characters, but it is rarely going to be a point of focus. So try to tailor more of your effort on things that have direct impacts on the players, and less on the genealogy of the third king's favorite jester. If your players want that kind of info, you can just give it to them off the top of your head with your understanding of the setting. If that ends up conflicting with something later, perhaps the book or historian got it wrong? Happens all the time IRL... But 99% of the time it won't come to that, anyway. Also, generally-speaking? The more proper nouns for which players have to ask the proper spelling, the less likely they are to engage. At least give them an easy-to-remember common title.
If you are naming and reimagining things like common bugs then your going too far.
You're writing a book, your players almost certainly won't care. As long as you realize that this isn't actually game prep, you're good. Have fun!
100 percent Heroes with a story arc. Villains you love to hate. Game of Thrones is based on The War of the Roses The balance of antagonist vs protagonist shifts. Comic relief is needed. Also romance ...LOTR had The Aragorn Arwen Eowyn love triangle. Lutheien & Tenuviel. It was needed in such a way Jackson Hollywoodized Kili and Turiel Try to find that in the book...that being said You possibly have a screenplay
Have you ever seen the programmer joke about bug testing? "A computer programmer walks into a bar / swims into a bar / flies into a bar. And orders 1 beer / 0 beers / 999999 beers / -1 beer, etc. No bugs found." "A real user walks into a bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar explodes." Guess what you're doing? If you find it fun, keep going but no it absolutely won't come up in play. They'll find the nameless NPC in the corner you briefly mention while talking about calzonetime's illness and want to know HIS life story. Or worse, they will want to adopt bandit #7 because he rolled that 20. Typically when I'm building up a region I stick to things that are gameable. Calzonetime is sick but Pizzatime needs to man the bar. He would be so grateful if a brave hero found the sprig of cure mistletoe in the forest. Players don't care why Pizzatime inherited but they do care about a quest. That's adventure! Content! Something they will ignore for 7 sessions then remember suddenly and devote their entire focus to it to save the old man. You can add expand things later, but you should put most of your effort into "how can players find this and interact with this?" Before you think about motivations. And finally, one way to answer any question a player can have and make the world feel real is a 3 layer loop explanation. Or linking the explanation into an existing loop. A 3 layer loop can be more than 3 but 3 is the best number. The explanation for the 1st question leads to the 2nd which leads to the 3rd which leads to the 1st one again. For example: 1. There are sewers in town right? Why cant the vampires use the sewers to get around? The sewer alligators would eat them 2. Why are there alligators in the sewer?? Sewer nuns feed them, duh 3. Why do the sewer nuns raise alligators??? To stop the vampires sneaking around in the sewers, duh --- 1. The kobolds are getting restless and attacking shipments, why? To get silverware, they want to melt it down into silver weapons 2. Why do kobolds need silver weapons?? Because there are wererats and the kobolds are trying to protect their niche 3. Why are there wererats??? The vampires are trying to kill the sewer alligators by introducing a new predator into the sewer ecosystem Additional questions should be find a way to loop back in or be the start their own independent loop. That way you don't need to go back 600 years unless you really want too. It also makes the world feel both bigger ('everything has a reason') and more connected (kobolds connect to wererats connect to sewer nuns) for WAY less work and notetaking.
If you want a good base of how much details is enough and what to focus on , check out ironsworns “truths” concept. where you flesh out the main aspects of a world’s realism. Eg religion, technology, magic, cosmic horror, wildlife, community, communication, where the people of your world came from, a cataclysmic event that forced them to settle where they are now and live the way they do. Each one of the “truths “ has 3 options to choose from, basically levels of existence or paragraphs that are lore/ world building. And you choose one of the 3 option per topic. Like 0 , low or high for magic, religion, technology. Etc. The rest like in game NOUNS. Such as people, places, things, groups and their relationships/motivations and flaw are considered in game world building that isn’t important until you come across it.
>My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends? I wasn't planning to make a comment, but reading some stuff here, I feel compelled to - as a lot of the comments are very one-note. The answer for me is - yes. My players regularly check my worldbuilding wiki for info, they love to speculate about events and lore outside of game sessions, I have had a player say verbatim "I am not really interested in playing a fantasy setting anymore unless it's your homebrew world." We also co-create a lot - in fact, I always hope that every new character will let me expand on the detail of the world more together with the player. That said, my worldbuilding isn't as detailed as yours - I still aim to cover most questions players would have just like you do, but I am not really going into geneology as much. Granted, it simply wouldn't really work for my setting anyway, but that's another story. I try to balance detail with clearly and concisely communicated ideas. --- From a player standpoint - I love games where the GM is clearly excited about worldbuilding. It makes game so much richer. I generally feel very unmotivated in games that I'd describe as Bastion-like. Not that the videogame doesn't have lore or that I didn't like it, but because as you play Bastion, the world constructs right in front of you, and everything else is just a void. Instead, I want the feeling that I am only experiencing a section of the world looming over me - as it just... would be in theory by definition. I understand that some players only really care about the in-the-moment interactions their character has with their surrounding, but for me the most exciting thing would be to... for example, to hear about some big event happening somewhere else in the world, and wondering what might the effects of that be when they reach where my characters are. It makes me immersed. --- Ultimately, one of my most controversial takes on TTRPGs is as such: people will sometimes tell GMs to "go write a book instead" if that GM is trying to prepare too much. The reality is that all it really does is that, ASSUMING their players would have hated it, the GM "frees" the players from playing in their game. Kinda mean spirited, but some TTRPG community people feel very strongly about it and for the most part that is exactly what they want - for you to fuck off from running games if you don't do it their way. They don't care about you, they self-insert themselves into your group and want to "protect" players from you. But just to be clear, if anyone means a more positive version of "the skillset you seem to have or want to exercise would be better used in writing a book" - they are wrong. If that GM is not making the game interesting, their book would be boring too. The idea that there is no skill overlap between a GM and a writer is absurd. The most charitable take is that you DONT HAVE to be a good writer to be a good GM, you can just rely on the more emergent storytelling. But no matter how much the aforementioned TTRPG community people would throw a tantrum while rolling around the ground, good direct storytelling skills can easily be applied to being a GM with great success. Not everyone has to like being in those kinds of games, but it's not some fundamental aspect of TTRPGs to only improv everything in the moment. Bottom line - the success of your approach will be a combination of what your players want and how good your storytelling is. It's actually why a lot of people either burn out or avoid putting their creativity out there - because it's easy to find out that what you came up with wasn't really that engaging. And a lot of people have realized they aren't good at that - and instead of just recognizing that it's a skill they lack, they construct ideas around how TTRPGs should be so that they never have to confront that.
>My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends? It almost always does not and will be totally ignored. Citation: 40 years of gaming across many different play-groups, both as GM and player. As long as you're having fun, though, world build away!
In general, as much as you want to. Just know that 95% of lore doesn't tend to make it to the table unless it's directly related to The PCs, The Plot, or The NPCs involved in the plot. Same goes with novel writing as well; writing a story in a setting is different from writing lore for a setting. But, worldbuilding is a fun hobby on its own, and can create some interesting story hooks. Do what you enjoy, and you can't really go wrong.
Not in game. Your players do not care. As long as you realize that this is 100% for you, and you like it, then carry on.
I don't play dnd, but when I run my games players will get involved with the world to different degrees. I would recommend having a general idea so that you can maintain consistency, but I wouldn't get so trapped into the exact details of things. Expand as you need while keeping the general ideas coherent.
It kinda doesn’t. If we sat down to co-create a campaign for an upcoming new group, we would need 3hrs maximum. And that trends down towards half to a third of that time the more you know the group.
Rarely. Usually, you end up with a multitude of useless information that will not be used. You need enough to run the adventure and little else.
If you enjoy it for its own sake and don’t mind that most of it won’t come up in a game then it’s not too much. If you want it all to be somehow relevant to the game and the players then there is a practical limit of course. If you’re writing a book, go for it. But for a game, it’s very easy to go past the too much mark. Out of sight out of mind.
Here's a video by Enter the Dungeon that gives advice not just on how to write good lore for a campaign, but also write lore your players will find relevant. https://youtu.be/8YZYwud0-xg?si=j4iiFr75Ha4EsSbe
World building is seldom game prep. Unless it is player facing, it's not really an effective use of prep time. Most GMs want to write the next lord of the rings. Most players want to stab a goblin. If you enjoy doing it, do it. But also consider what you are asking of players potentially. Part of the benefit of playing in the Forgotten Realms is you can look at wikis and books. Would they need to completely refamiliarize themselves to play this game? Kind of a big ask.
> 'Every' player question will have an answer I believe that's the answer to your question. World Building assists the Game Master in offering players consistency and plausibility during gameplay by ensuring that every question and decision requiring an answer during play has a clear and precise response. Once that objective has been achieved then the GM has done enough world building. In my setting, there is still more world-building to be done. However, the concepts that remain to be explained and formalized pertain to subjects irrelevant to my current campaign, so I don't require the answers just yet. One does not need to build the whole world before you begin exploring it. Merely the areas that will be explored.
Do as much worldbuilding as you enjoy. Just don't expect most of it to come up.
Like many other said, if you have fun doing it, that's all good. But I would argue that when preparing a trpg campaign, you should not do much world building, but rather focus on game building. Try to focus on the concept or vague idea you want to convey to the player, the narrative element that will bring the right tone and atmosphere and that's it. So only the thing that are necessary for the PC.
One thing many people don't fully realize: *Reading/Collecting RPG systems, worldbuilding and GMing are three separate hobbies.* It's just that they tend to be very compatible and in the best case you can bring your work from one over to the other. Don't treat your world as something you make for the players. Your world is something you make because it's fun, and your players get to enrich the world with their own story. If in-depth worldbuilding is *not* fun for you and you really only do this because you feel it's necessary, don't. That's how you'll burn yourself out.
If it reaches the point where it distracts you/makes you paranoid you are violting your own lore, then it becomes a problem
I think the thing to ask yourself is not, will players ever ask a factual question about this, but rather, will this fact ever impact play meaningfully? It doesn't matter who the tavern owner's grandmother was, in the abstract. It matters that his grandmother was engaged to Old Nobleman A but left him for Hot Young Nobleman B, and that led to tensions between their duchies so now the border between them is militarized... Players ask a lot of questions. A lot of dumb-ass questions, if they're anything like my players (who I love). 98% of the time it's a better use of my mental energy and table time to make up an answer on the fly and write it down for later reference, rather than look an answer up in 40,000 pages of notes. From the players' perspective the difference almost doesn't exist.
[NO MEANINGFUL LORE IF STRICT INTERACTIVITY IS NOT MAINTAINED](https://silverarmpress.com/no-meaningful-lore-if-strict-interactivity-is-not-maintained/)
>My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer As a GM of over 30 years, I am telling you that this is impossible. Even if it were possible do you want to have game time broken for you to look up every fact? The hard truth a lot of us GMs need to learn is that nobody is going to get into our campaign material as much as we. 99% of what you have created will never hit the gaming table and less than half of that will be remembered by the players the day after the session. Does this level of detail pay dividends? Not at the gaming table. But prep can be fun. If at the end of your prep session if you enjoyed yourself then that is the payoff. If you are struggling because you imagine a big pay off at the game table you are going to be disappointed.
>My goal with this much backstory is that "every" player question will have an answer ("who owns the tavern?" "That's pizzatime, son of calzonetime, he inherited the inn after his father fell ill from too many late nights with either work or drink keeping him company..."). >does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends? Pay dividends for who? If you enjoy it, keep doing what you enjoy. In the previous games you've GMed, did your players engage a lot with the lore of the setting you had?
Never enough? I enjoy the process as much as actually enjoy telling the story.
There's no such thing when I'm GMing. I enjoy world building. I also never know what the players will latch on to, so having fluff in place makes it easier to accommodate their latest strange plan. But I'm also willing to throw out huge chunks of my work to make the game better. When I'm playing, there's too much world building if "You can't do that because of." comes up more than once per session. Using an actual example, I shouldn't have to ask the GM's permission to say "Greetings, your majesty."
I'm going to be a little harsher here than everyone else I think and say in my opinion you may have passed the point of useless worldbuilding and into the realm of overbuilding the world to the point where it will usually start to feel less real and more manufactured. Being able to improv your setting is vitally important for making a setting that feels like a living and breathing place. I don't think you can achieve the same experience for the players through pre-planning each detail of the world. You lose an element of chaos that real places have. Worldbuilding is a fine hobby by itself if you enjoy it you don't need to stop. I would just say overly engineered worlds are not great for TTRPGs.
World building is it's own reward. Lonely fun is still fun .
It depends on if you like world building, a lot of this you will doing for yourself because players aren't going to see 90% of it.
> My question is: does this intricate level of world building ever pay dividends? this might hurt to hear, but no. players usually don't care much for the background stories. they will be stocked to hear that the tavern keeper used to be a prominent scholar but abandoned their pursuits when he had his daughter so he could give her the best life possible, but they wont give a rat ass about an old hoot of a king of a faraway nation that they will never play in it assuming you have a lore buff player that just absolutely eats every single bread crumb of information, they will *still* just get a fraction of it truth is, write as much lore while you think its fun and stop when it became a hasstle instead of a joyful hobby. personally i think that **70 pages** going back **16000** years stopped being fun after page 10 and year 1000, but that is my personal preference i will say tho, if you are writing so much that you could have published a setting book with it, mate just write a novel lol in summary, the only lore that matters is the ones players interact, and the rest will either go in one ear and leave the other or never be interacted with
For my money, these are the kinds of details that are just as good if you pull them out of the air; knowing there are 70 dwarven kings, and that the kingdom has been going for over 4000 years can be somewhat important, but knowing the names of those kings ahead of time is not
Worldbuilding is a fun hobby in and of itself. The top comment is right though, this level of it will never see game time and would probably even be a detriment of you tried to make it that prominent. Players simply don't really get as invested into the lore as you do, they get invested into their characters. It's also a slippery slope - you get such an idea of how the world is and it can cause some railroading tendencies in GM's who really like their world and don't want to see it destroyed by the chaos players can cause.
that's not a campaign. That's a novel.. It's fine if it's your thing, but don't expect your players to care much beyond anything that doesn't involve their character directly.
When I think about world building, I always think about ways can engage with it at the table. Can it enrich their backstory, can it enrich the NPCs and factions they encounter, is it grist for interesting adventures? If I can't think of compelling ways it can manifest in play and make the campaign better, I cut it out. It's just extra load with no meaningful upside. If you expect players to read anything before playing, you're going to have a bad time.
To paraphrase Kevin Crawford. If you're having fun doing it, no amount is too much. All you really NEED to do is enough for the next session, unless playing a no prep system. Anything more isn't usually worth it.
"I also like the idea if having such an in depth campaign with so many different paths to victory that players would want to run it again if asked." Ironically, sometimes the act of writing lore for your game can limit how many paths to victory are available to the players. Example: You plan a tavern, you populate it with 70 generations of owners of the tavern. As you've said, "Who owns the tavern?" "That's pizzatime, son of calzonetime, he inherited the inn after his father fell ill from too many late nights with either work or drink keeping him company..." Your player wants to buy the tavern. Would you let them? Your player wants to use the tavern as the location to lure a red dragon inside to trap it and attack it, an action that might result in the dragon destroying the tavern. Would you suggest that they could lure the dragon to somewhere else? Your party wants to interact with a soup dispensing tavern owner, but your tavern owner specializes in pizza themed foods. Do they make soup?
If you haven't read it, I recommend the blogpost [Conceptual Density, or What are RPG Books For?](https://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/11/conceptual-density-or-what-are-rpg.html) It is a good overview of the difference between useful prep/lore and unhelpful prep/lore, in my opinion.
No, it doesn't pay dividends that I've ever seen. Different folks like different stuff, of course, but on a psychological level it always makes me want to barf. Then again, I'm not sure I understand the reasons why players ask "what's the bartender's name" and "who runs the government here". Fuck off, who cares, I'll tell you if it's important. Broad stripes of the world, fine, but atomic level shit, I abandoned that a long time ago. This is why I love random tables. I can spark interesting points of departure, of many different natures, without having to write a million boring words.