random world vs set world

[Mordante]

A question on how people are playing DnD in s specific setting. I know there are many world settings like:

Forgotten Realms.
Greyhawk
Dragonlance
Eberron
Planescape

I look at these for inspiration some time. But it never occurred to me to actually play in these world. When I GM I just make-up the world as the story progresses. As a player I really don't care about world specifics as long as the adventure is good. However I have heard of DnD groups that expect a world to be like the one they know. That certain religions, specific organizations and countries/cities exist.

How do you feel about this?

[pabelfly]

You mean that organisations like, say, the Catholic Church or countries like England and America exist in the DnD setting? Sounds really easy for real-world baggage and preconceptions to get in the road of the story you want to tell. I'd just keep it purely in the realm of fantasy myself.

[Biggus]

You mean that organisations like, say, the Catholic Church or countries like England and America exist in the DnD setting? Sounds really easy for real-world baggage and preconceptions to get in the road of the story you want to tell. I'd just keep it purely in the realm of fantasy myself.

I assumed he meant "if you're playing in Forgotten Realms (for example), all the main places, gods etc mentioned in FR products will exist there".

@OP:

I'm DMing in FR currently. This was more a pragmatic choice as I needed a setting at short notice so I didn't really have time to develop my own. I did once make my own setting once but I didn't have my notes available at the time.


When I GM I just make-up the world as the story progresses. As a player I really don't care about world specifics as long as the adventure is good.

I'm the exact opposite of this. Whether I'm DMing or playing, a fully realised world helps my sense of immersion. As a player, if we were playing in an established setting but there were going to be major differences from the canonical version, I'd expect the DM to at least tell me. Obviously gaps are deliberately left for DMs to fill in with their own stuff, and minor changes are to be expected, but if important elements of the setting were going to be different I'd want to know in advance, so I didn't build a character around worshipping a god who doesn't exist or something.

The make-the-world-up-as-you-go-along style of DMing is perfectly valid if it suits you, but it's not for me.

[lylsyly]

In our group the 7 of us take turns DMing. We all have worlds we have designed from scratch yet we sometimes do revert to a published setting (do to the previous campaign ending early or such). Creating your own world is the part of the game I actually like the best.

[Mordante]

I assumed he meant "if you're playing in Forgotten Realms (for example), all the main places, gods etc mentioned in FR products will exist there".

@OP:

I'm DMing in FR currently. This was more a pragmatic choice as I needed a setting at short notice so I didn't really have time to develop my own. I did once make my own setting once but I didn't have my notes available at the time.

Exactly. If you play in FR that you use the FR map that a place like the Ice Wind Dale exists and all the major cities.




I'm the exact opposite of this. Whether I'm DMing or playing, a fully realised world helps my sense of immersion. As a player, if we were playing in an established setting but there were going to be major differences from the canonical version, I'd expect the DM to at least tell me. Obviously gaps are deliberately left for DMs to fill in with their own stuff, and minor changes are to be expected, but if important elements of the setting were going to be different I'd want to know in advance, so I didn't build a character around worshipping a god who doesn't exist or something.

The make-the-world-up-as-you-go-along style of DMing is perfectly valid if it suits you, but it's not for me.

Creating a whole world is a lot of work and the players will never visit 90% of it. IMHO a level one character has very little knowledge of the world. You know your own village and maybe the next few villages so but beyond that the world is a blank. Or at least that is how I play. The party I play in also had to retcon the map a few times because of inconsistencies. But these do not hurt the story line.

One of the main reasons why I like the make-the-world-up-as-you-go-along style of DMing is so that the DM knows more than the players. If a player is very familiar with a certain setting and the DM isn't that can lead to issues.

[Saintheart]

I don't have much of a problem with having adventures in the backblocks of established settings, simply because you have more room to move, you can file the serial numbers off the module and have it feel like it belongs in that world, and you don't have to check half a dozen sourcebooks to see whether the players will trip over a level 20 druid or something, i.e. what happens if you try to run an adventure in the populated areas of the Forgotten Realms. It produces a familiar set of flavours without having to stick entirely to the recipe.

Building entire settings is never necessary, and there's a school of thought at least that the story and setting which emerges from the player's on-the-fly decisions is more interesting than the planned-out setting. But these are just different flavours, there isn't really a right or wrong either way.

[Twurps]

Our group has played under 4 different GM's over the last decade (myself included) not one of them has ever used a standard setting.

How the other DM's design their world I don't really know. For me: I design the entire foreseeable map for the campaign in advance, but only the rough outlines. For example: Kingdoms, predominant species in those kingdoms and a rough 'who (dis)likes whom'. Only for the kingdom the party is actually in (or for plot-vital kingdoms) will I have details prepared such as ruler/main nobles. Only for the city they are in and their immediate surroundings will I have Inn's, shops, random encounters, etc. As the story develops and the party travels, I have to add more details for new places.

I like this way of designing for a couple of reasons:
1) It limits the amount of pre start prep-work to something manageable.
2) It gives me the chance to adjust my world a bit to the party's liking. (example: If the party turns out to be really into diplomacy, the problems in the next kingdom can be more diplomacy-ish, or when they mostly enjoy smacking hordes of orcs, the next kingdom has an orc invasion. As long as it doesn't mess up my larger picture, I'm fine with either)
3) I like the fact that I still have world-building to do as the story progresses. Both so I can engage in my hobby whilst it's not play night, and also because it 'forces' me to immerse into my world in prep of play night, which has a positive impact on my DM-ing ability.

[Remuko]

me and the group i primarily played with mostly used made up settings, tho the default assumption was always that (at least) the gods from the players handbook (whom i believe are greyhawk deities?) exist, though others may as well. had a single friend who liked to DM and liked designing world maps and stuff so he went pretty elaborate on his designs.

[Tzardok]

me and the group i primarily played with mostly used made up settings, tho the default assumption was always that (at least) the gods from the players handbook (whom i believe are greyhawk deities?)

Yup, they are. The "standard" pantheon is cherry picked from the Greyhawk pantheon with an eye for usefullness as patrons for adventurers and their enemies.

Most games that I participated in where in self-made settings (one of which has existed and grown for decades and is handed down from GM to GM), but I like the existing settings (especially Ravenloft and Planescape) and am always happy to play in one.

[Zanos]

I run FR but it's not like premade settings just give you everything. It's pretty basic: "Here are the alignments, names, and levels of three or four people in this area that are in notable positions of power, here are some of the problems they have internally and externally, and here is an idea for the geography and nearby monsters." You fill in everything else yourself. It's just a starting point for when you don't have any ideas and don't want to draw a map. Some areas that are thousands of square miles have less than a paragraph describing what's in them in the manuals. It's more open to customization than most people realize. I don't think I've ever really played in FR games that were run by different people that were interchangeable. It's nice not having to relearn the names of every organization, I suppose.

I don't have any particular preference for homebrew vs. premade settings, but I'm an info hound when I play characters and usually take high intelligence and a wide array of knowledge skills. So I'd prefer a setting that's relatively fleshed out so when I ask the DM if I know anything useful, there is actually useful things for my character to know. It's kind of hard to make smart decisions in a sandbox game about what factions to support or jobs to take when the DM hasn't actually thought of any factions, or countries, or NPC relationships, or etc. If an NPC from one nation asks me to go fight a nearby country on their behalf, I'm going to have a pretty long series of questions about the cultures, alignments, and services provided by these rival nations. If I'm an arcane spellcaster in a nation that persecutes arcane spellcasters, I'm going to want to know if this is setting wide thing, or if I can escape persecution by running to another country. Are there countries where arcane spell-casters are privileged(beyond their supernatural powers) rather than persecuted? I've spent more than one session in some games with the party browsing libraries, going through newspaper archives to determine the historical relationship between rival nobility, and the circumstances under which the nation we were operating in was founded.

Making it up as you go is fine if your campaign is linear, but you can't really run a sandbox and simultaneously deprive players of information they need to make decisions.

[Telonius]

. However I have heard of DnD groups that expect a world to be like the one they know. That certain religions, specific organizations and countries/cities exist.

How do you feel about this?

For the real world? I can really only see two ways it works. Either you go the Bright route, where fantasy things and magic are known and integrated into the world's daily life. Or, you take the "urban fantasy" angle. Something like Trese, Neverwhere, or even the Potterverse, where the fantasy world is hidden or apart from the world, but intersecting with it at some points.

I could see it working. I imagine it would be a lot of extra work for the DM, though.


More in general, for random vs planned, it depends on how much backstory you want to put into the world. You don't necessarily need to have a Dragonlance-sized library to back it up, but it is helpful to have at least a bit of world-building. Otherwise things start coming unglued very quickly.

[Quertus]

Huh. This is in the 3e forum. That... is odd. And changes my answer slightly.

IIRC (darn senility), none of the games I played or ran in 3e were in an established a published setting, outside perhaps a cameo visit to said setting (odd when "settings" are doing cameos, eh?).

Occasionally, characters venerated deities not native to the setting they found themselves in... which mostly only mattered to Clerics and their ilk. Being a depowered Cleric isn't exactly balanced, but that doesn't mean it can't be fun (yes, there are people who would choose this on purpose). :smallwink:

[Dalmosh]

In my last campaign, we used a game system called Microscope to generate that broad strokes of our world and its history.

Basically Microscope is a storyboading game where you fractally add periods and events to a narrative that you build from the ground-up, constrained by a starting palette of what the setting will and won't contain. Having my players chip in elements that they wanted to see in the world (I REALLY want orc tribes, but I'm not too keen on other fantasy races.... I want an Annihilation/style magical fall-out wasteland...) let us make something really original to port the general rules into and start playing. We used mostly 3.5 rules with some ported in pathfinder and D&D modern content.

The players had a lot more vested interest in building characters with a sense of place in the world, and a starting desire to do certain things in the world as the PC, and I could flesh out areas in downtime as I needed, with a starting schedule of what to focus on, and what to leave out.

Dawn of Worlds is a similar system but based around collaboratively building geography but I've never used it to make an actual campaign world.

These games are really fun in their own right, and I know a lot of folks who prefer them over pure pen and paper roleplaying,as they lend themselves to shorter time frames with less ongoing commitment.

[Mechalich]

In 3.X D&D the power level of the PCs increases rapidly. As this happens the range across which the characters operate also increases. By level 10, with teleport on-line, the party can range across a thousand miles a day. For a sense of scale, that's the distance from Paris to Warsaw, bypassing the entirety of Germany. It is rather difficult for most GMs to keep up with the world-building demands of such a wide-ranging group (access to the greater multiverse, allowing the PCs to switch between entire realities each adventure, makes it worse). A published setting goes an awful long way in providing a readymade skeleton upon which to organize operations for mid to high level adventurers.

[pabelfly]

In my last campaign, we used a game system called Microscope to generate that broad strokes of our world and its history.

Basically Microscope is a storyboading game where you fractally add periods and events to a narrative that you build from the ground-up, constrained by a starting palette of what the setting will and won't contain. Having my players chip in elements that they wanted to see in the world (I REALLY want orc tribes, but I'm not too keen on other fantasy races.... I want an Annihilation/style magical fall-out wasteland...) let us make something really original to port the general rules into and start playing. We used mostly 3.5 rules with some ported in pathfinder and D&D modern content.

The players had a lot more vested interest in building characters with a sense of place in the world, and a starting desire to do certain things in the world as the PC, and I could flesh out areas in downtime as I needed, with a starting schedule of what to focus on, and what to leave out.

Dawn of Worlds is a similar system but based around collaboratively building geography but I've never used it to make an actual campaign world.

These games are really fun in their own right, and I know a lot of folks who prefer them over pure pen and paper roleplaying,as they lend themselves to shorter time frames with less ongoing commitment.

Thanks for mentioning Microscope, that sounds like a really interesting way to build a setting that my players will be interested in playing and exploring.

[Dalmosh]

I'm not sure if the forum rules allow me to link to commercial content like that, but you should be able to find it by googling Microscope AND worldbuilding. PM me if you can't.

[pabelfly]

I'm not sure if the forum rules allow me to link to commercial content like that, but you should be able to find it by googling Microscope AND worldbuilding. PM me if you can't.

Yeah, I found it. I'll definitely try this when I'm next DMing for the group.

[King of Nowhere]

it would feel wrong for me to use a standard setting. using a world someone else created is sort of like using someone else's underwear; it feels unfomfortable for reasons I cannot define.

from what I gather reading forums, it's not like those worlds are doing any better job in consistency than my own homebrew world; in fact, they often do a much poorer job, because in my homebrew world I can define what exhists and what doesn't. Why nobody in forgotten realms has broken the economy with walls of iron, or with fabricate traps? why nobody got infinite wishes combos, despite multiple published modules implying those are possible?
In my homebrew world, there is a sort of energy conservation principle on magic that makes all those exploits unworkable. And I don't run into any risk of having a player showing up at a table with a published book explaining how somebody got a wish for free and they want to do the same...

ultimately, while coming up with a world of my own is more work, it lets me do stuff that i personally find a lot more interesting than your "standard generic fantasy that's got to appeal to a wider base because we need to sell it" format.

[PhoenixPhyre]

it would feel wrong for me to use a standard setting. using a world someone else created is sort of like using someone else's underwear; it feels unfomfortable for reasons I cannot define.

from what I gather reading forums, it's not like those worlds are doing any better job in consistency than my own homebrew world; in fact, they often do a much poorer job, because in my homebrew world I can define what exhists and what doesn't. Why nobody in forgotten realms has broken the economy with walls of iron, or with fabricate traps? why nobody got infinite wishes combos, despite multiple published modules implying those are possible?
In my homebrew world, there is a sort of energy conservation principle on magic that makes all those exploits unworkable. And I don't run into any risk of having a player showing up at a table with a published book explaining how somebody got a wish for free and they want to do the same...

ultimately, while coming up with a world of my own is more work, it lets me do stuff that i personally find a lot more interesting than your "standard generic fantasy that's got to appeal to a wider base because we need to sell it" format.

I play 5e, but I completely agree with this. Especially that second sentence.

I run a long-standing, living world. Started with 4e, then got blown up and timeskipped to 5e. Currently in the 15th and 16th party to have adventured in it, each one leaving behind elements (and the retired adventurers as NPCs).

For me, one of the biggest draws is being able to define my own metaphysics. I detest the Great Wheel and Planescape (don't stone me!) on an aesthetic level. And baked-in cosmological alignment bugs me for a number of reasons. Thankfully 5e makes it easy to strip out. Instead, I differentiate things like demons, devils, and angels based on their role in the universal economy (power source, duties, etc). Demons bind and consume souls; devils and angels are literally the same "species", but angels have sworn themselves to protect the outer boundaries and police the universe, while devils are the messengers/etc for the mortal world. And yes, I know that "angel" means "messenger". When devils are sent by gods, they take on angelic guise. The "fearsome" forms are shells created for them to inhabit by the summoning spells. In their native habitat, they look, well, like anything they want to (being made out of less concrete/condensed stuff than that of the mortal plane). Etc.

[Yahzi Coyote]

How do you feel about this?
If you're me, you write rules for generating worlds, nations, and encounters, then write a program to use those rules.

You can get it here: Sandbox World Generator (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217951/Sandbox-World-Generator).

Admittedly, 150,000 words and 30,000 lines of code might not be everyone's solution. :smallbiggrin:

[Mordante]

If you're me, you write rules for generating worlds, nations, and encounters, then write a program to use those rules.

You can get it here: Sandbox World Generator (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/217951/Sandbox-World-Generator).

Admittedly, 150,000 words and 30,000 lines of code might not be everyone's solution. :smallbiggrin:

I couldn't write one line of code, even if my life depended on it. Long time ago we had some Boolean Algebra, with lots of truth tables. That was basic knowledge required for coding. I learned enough back then to know that coding isn't my thing.

[Elkad]

I used Greyhawk for time. 40 years ago anyway. By a decade later I was still using the map, but a lot of lore had changed.

Modules/campaigns since then have been dropped into blank spots in my own world at times, but the world(s) themselves are my own.

And don't feel guilty about it. Borrow published bits as you want and stick them in anywhere

Want a hilarious example?
Look at the Deeds of Paksennarion books (specifically the town of Brewersbridge in the 2nd book). Compare it to T1 - Village of Homlett.
It's the same town. Same evil guy with a warhorse as an intro encounter. Same druid grove. Moathouse bandit encounter/dungeon (with the village NPC illusionist tagging along with the party) is mighty similar. And a whole swath of other bits.