Making a world with your gaming group

[CavemanDan]

An open question to everyone: have you ever done collaborative world-building with your gaming group that you've then had adventures in?

Although I think it's really fun to make a world and then present it for your friends to explore, I've wondered what would happen if you got everybody involved so that they'd feel more invested in the setting.

Have you used simple rule sets to give some structure to how you made your world together? Did you take some underlining themes and ideas from your players and then make a world from that? Did you devote a whole session or even a mini-campaign into creating your setting? Was the result fun and interesting to play in or was it a hodge-podge of conflicting ideas that didn't glue together at all (for the last time, NO! You can NOT make a race of drunk, incontinent penguin-men!)?

So, feel free to share your experiences and thoughts.

[Edenbeast]

We did this several times. The players create a character and give it a background including hometown, surrounding area, their family and other people they know and like or don't like. Stuff to do around the area, etc. What I do advice you, as you already point out, is to avoid weird things, or conflicting ideas. You need to have a general idea of the setting, maybe even have some sort of framework to fit it all in. It also helps to have a big city, and then ask the players how far walking and in which direction their home is. I remember one GM creating a map from our descriptions, and then returning us a modified map showing your pc's known world. It's very rewarding to pass through your hometown and meet your family and friends, and then explore those ruins that you never dared to enter. Obviously the players only need to describe a ruin or dark cave, but not plan it, to avoid metagaming like "oh I know where the treasure is." To stimulate creativity PC's are rewarded one or two traits (Pathfinder) based on their background.

[jqavins]

I've been a player in a long running game where the DM did that, to little success. He had a large map and a lot of material, then invited players to add to it, filling in the empty parts of the map, making up snipets of history, etc. The only problem was that he had done such a good job to start with that there was very little need for anyone else to add to it, so we all mostly just played in the world he gave us. (The world is Narth (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/narth.shtml), by Robert M. Schroeck.) This world had been going for a good five years before I joined, which was after all the original players were gone. More have come and gone since. It's still officially going on almost thirty years after I've joined, but I don't think we've actually played in close to ten.

Anyway, since I joined I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one who's made contributions, and I've only done two. Once when I was running a one-off adventure for an entirely different group of players and decided it was convenient to have a setting to plug it into, so I set it in Narth; the next time I saw Bob we figured where on the map it fit and I gave hime all my relevant notes. The next time was when I decided to give Bob a treat and let him play in his own world; I took his and everybody's favorite NPC shopkeeper, gave him stats and a background as a retired adventurer with an unfinished quest, and presented a clue that could get him a step closer to completing it. (The shopkeeper is an elf, so the quest may take centuries. He's trying to find and assemble the scattered pieces of his King Arthur-like grandfather's legendary sword.) He rounded up his friends - the regular party - and off we all went.

OK, enough of my wonderfulness. The real point is that, in Bob's case, the collaborative world building mostly didn't work, but didn't cause any trouble either.

[Tragak]

The group I DM'd for was AMAZING at this :smallsmile:

I ran the first half a dozen or so sessions more traditionally (DM creates the setting and NPCs, players only influence the world through their PCs), but this was about the same time I started learning about collaborative world-building, so I talked with the rest of the group and we decided to give that a try.

I already had an entire world worth of ideas that I planned to fall back on when nobody else had anything to add, but every session somebody would come up with something cool: an NPC, a MacGuffin, a location, an event… For as long as we were a group together, we never stopped doing that.

The campaign ultimately ended in a climax that we have since dubbed "Total Eclipse of the Heartless" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18173475&postcount=8), and that finale would never have happened if I had claimed sole authority over the game world.

When we started a sequel campaign with new PCs in different parts of the same world, we started collaborating on the setting from the get-go, and by now we all had a lot more practice collaborating than we'd had when we started in the first campaign.

A lot of DMs on the Wizards of the Coast forums worry that players will "ruin" the game with collaborative world-building ("If you let them control the world, they will just decide to automatically win everything and they won't be challenged, you need to protect them from themselves!") but I can promise that players who truly love the game itself - as opposed to those who tolerate the game because they love "winning" at the end - will make the game harder on themselves than you could possibly have made it for them.

[Alent]

My group did this in an interesting way over the course of a few years.

We had an eight or nine month long "Evil campaign" which ended up being more or less our single most successful campaign, because we pretended to be varying shades of neutral, that eventually culminated in the good gods blowing up the material plane when they deemed it lost because we had almost finished conquering it. When that ended, we started a campaign on our first draft of Exile and played that for a while.

While adventuring on Exile, we learned that our Evil Campaign characters had ascended to godhood and had been trapped in orbit around exile, and had been there for several hundred years. Over the next dozen sessions we had brief half-hour Q&As where we as the evil campaign characters slowly began shaping our own planes to our specifications and each created life to inhabit them, defining that 100~200 year history. Somewhere along the way we ended up discovering we had rivals and decided for protection to merge our planes into one huge plane, and constantly made small tweaks while sending missionaries to Exile.

Eventually, the plot of Exile annoyed our party leader because he didn't like where it was going, so he declared we were going to have a full session as our gods battling our rivals for Exile, and his archlich/sorceress ended up resorting to plan B: She used epic spells to kidnapTeleport all of it's inhabitants along with a small chunk of exile itself, and destroyed the rest. This sadly ended the Exile campaign, but every campaign for several years after that featured us playing as people from exile on the world our evil campaign god characters had created.

From then on out the world basically just kept growing. We had created all the non-human races, nations, politics, etc. when we thought we WOULDN'T be playing in them, so once we were playing in the world it was really wild. Between campaigns we'd tweak and change it, but once the next campaign started it was pretty set, and the DM was pretty good about treating it as a simulation of what we'd made, set a generation after the previous campaign. Divine interventions were outlawed, but occasionally we could "change the game" mid campaign by doing neutral things like changing geography or creating new concepts. One of us added a necropolis faction that ended up featuring heavily in one campaign, I introduced a fuel source that could power magical devices from exile (That no longer worked because fuel reasons), and so on.

For the most part, it worked amazingly because the DM is a simulationist and would go through and calculate the results of each generation's actions and working out what would happen as a result of all the actors in the world.

The only thing we never fully worked out was what to call the world. The votes were split between Solum and Shadow Moses. We ended up having Solum be bad fantasy latin for Shadow Moses and alternate between both by region.