Worst Experiences with "Group World Building" and why they failed.

[Deadkitten]

So the DM that I frequently play under has been wanting to make a "Group Sandbox" world in which everyone gets to have a say in how the world is made and each gets to make their own nations for the setting.

Unfortunately, he has tried to get this off the ground on three separate occasions and has become so disillusioned with our group that he has come close to losing any desire to DM ever.

So I have been wondering if the problem our group has been having is a common and if anyone would like to vent out their frustrations on "group worldbuilding".

Also, if you think you can identify where it went wrong. It would help tremendously to share.

[The Grue]

Well, none of us were there so I doubt we'd get very far identifying what went wrong.

If you shared some specific anecdotes, I'm certain the Playgrounders would be able to offer insight.

[Nifft]

The only times it's been frustrating were when we did some group world-building, and then the GM went away and re-wrote huge chunks of what we'd decided in favor of (IMHO) more generic, less interesting tropes.

[Darth Ultron]

In the distant past I've tried to do group world building with the delusional idea that ''all players are equal'' and ''the DM is just a player''. It never worked out.

The vast majority of players simply can't handle things like world building or homebrewing.

The biggest problem was simply the power levels. While some players are reasonable, most are not. For an easy example just take a kingdom of dragonriders. The reasonable player would put in lots of drawbacks so the kingdom was not all powerful, like for example, limiting the true dragon riders to a handful and having the rest ride lesser dragon types. Not so the unreasonable player: there dragon kingdom has 10,000 adult dragons with riders....

Another problem is a lot of players don't really get common sense. Like above, if you had a kingdom of 10,000 dragons...what would they eat and drink? That is a lot to consider. And even simple things like ''towns are bulit by water sources escapes'' them.

And a lot of players are just jerks. Give them a tiny bit of freedom and they go nuts. They make a half dragon, half drow awakened ooze kingdom or something like that.

[Deadkitten]

Well, none of us were there so I doubt we'd get very far identifying what went wrong.

If you shared some specific anecdotes, I'm certain the Playgrounders would be able to offer insight.

I will see about that when I get off work.
Honestly I posted this on a whim while I was on break.

Edit:

Alrighty lets see...

We have one member of our group who, tried to make a nation of blood sacrificing Aztec lizardfolk who were Lawful Good. He also would repeatedly add in anything uniqe to someone else's nation to his. For instance, he tried to add in a floating city after someone else wanted one.

Another member of our group has the problem of obsessively focusing on minor details of his nation while ignoring critical elements to how it can function. He would also take offense to any criticism laid against his ideas. For instance, he wanted to make a clockwork city of warforged tht waz quickly engulfing the land around it and got upset when he was told that surrounding nations would see such a thing as a severe threat to them.

Another member seem like all he does is make a nation that suits the back story of a character idea he wants to play, and then he will develop it to the point that his back story is playable and then barely give details that don't relate to his characters back story. He also seems to stop caring once he gets his nation the way he wants it.

Another player kinda tends to be very fetishy or tropey and always tries to make nations of sexy nymps or tibbit psions. Stuff the rest of the group tends to find just plain silly. He has finally drifted away from that as of late

We have another player that if someone DMs her nation and gets one minor detail wrong she rage-quits the game saying ,"you aren't portraying my nation right, you ruined it" She also criticizes the fetishy player incessantly to the point that I think D&D might be ruined for him.

We also have a hardcore optimizer who can constantly rationalize how his nation would be able to deal with any other nation or threat. The only weakness or flay of his nation was self imposed.

[The Grue]

I will see about that when I get off work.
Honestly I posted this on a whim while I was on break.

Edit:

Alrighty lets see...

We have one member of our group who, tried to make a nation of blood sacrificing Aztec lizardfolk who were Lawful Good. He also would repeatedly add in anything uniqe to someone else's nation to his. For instance, he tried to add in a floating city after someone else wanted one.

Another member of our group has the problem of obsessively focusing on minor details of his nation while ignoring critical elements to how it can function. He would also take offense to any criticism laid against his ideas. For instance, he wanted to make a clockwork city of warforged tht waz quickly engulfing the land around it and got upset when he was told that surrounding nations would see such a thing as a severe threat to them.

Another member seem like all he does is make a nation that suits the back story of a character idea he wants to play, and then he will develop it to the point that his back story is playable and then barely give details that don't relate to his characters back story. He also seems to stop caring once he gets his nation the way he wants it.

Another player kinda tends to be very fetishy or tropey and always tries to make nations of sexy nymps or tibbit psions. Stuff the rest of the group tends to find just plain silly. He has finally drifted away from that as of late

We have another player that if someone DMs her nation and gets one minor detail wrong she rage-quits the game saying ,"you aren't portraying my nation right, you ruined it" She also criticizes the fetishy player incessantly to the point that I think D&D might be ruined for him.

We also have a hardcore optimizer who can constantly rationalize how his nation would be able to deal with any other nation or threat. The only weakness or flay of his nation was self imposed.

Okay, well right away I can see that a lot of the problems your playgroup has is that players are under the impression that they each own "their" nation. That means it's not a collaborative world-building thing, it's a competition where everybody has a nation.

If you could get away from that mentality, if you could get your players to divorce themselves from the idea that the nation their character is from is "their" nation, I think that would be a good first step.

[Saintheart]

Have you considered trying the group out on a session or two of Microscope? (http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/)

Might be a way to get them out of the competitive aspect of worldbuilding and more into creating a world to actually play in...

[Seto]

Maybe try switching ? Like, "you're not allowed to play a character from the nation you created, you must choose another one. However, a part of the adventure might be run in this nation."

This should avoid powerful-without-drawbacks nations, and xenophobic mass-murdering nations. But honestly, most of the problems seem to come from the players themselves. I don't know if the group is fine otherwise and world-building is the only problematic case ; but people unable to accept any criticism (like the clockwork guy) or dishing it out in excessive amounts and generally prone to anger (like the rage-quitting girl) don't sound like they create a safe, enjoyable atmosphere to play in...

[Agahnim]

As The Grue said, each player building his own nation is an extremely dubious way of attempting group worldbuilding.
Maybe you could have one player dealing with gods/cosmology/general world properties, another player making a quick geography and arrangement of nations, and another crudely detailing the society of the various kingdoms ?
Better yet, rather than dividing tasks right from the beginning - which can lead to each player trying to draw attention to his own special-snowflake part - you might want to have everyone brainstorming around a table about each topic, and then only have each person manage the specifics of the part they like.

[crunchykoolaid]

I had a small group of two friends and my self try something like this once.

Instead of world-building, however, we each made characters based on a randomly drawn figure from our bag of DnD statuettes. We ended up with a Raptoran fighter, an Arctic Goblin Thug, and an Elf Druid. We drew straws for who DMed first, and the other two randomly picked a character. We switched DMs and characters every 30 minutes, and we agreed that whatever facts the current DM decided on about the world were set in stone. After a few hours, we had an entire campaign going about rabid animals overrunning a city deep in the jungle, without ever discussing between each other what direction we wanted the story to go in.

I guess my point is, the best mindset to be in for these things is to accept the others' decisions before your own.