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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Troll in the Playground
     
    RedWizardGuy

    Join Date
    Mar 2014

    Default Top Down or Bottom Up?

    These two approaches to making a setting were detailed in the DMG. What are people's thoughts on them? For most of my campaigns, I go top down, sketching out continent or world-scale maps and filling in from there. However, I've toyed with starting in a village and only mapping out what's visible from the tallest building in the village (a church spire or something), and I kind of liked the small-scale, high-detail information that gave me. I can foresee problems occurring with such a setup, however, if the players go off the rails, and it's furthermore much harder coming up with how the elves work in your setting if you have only mapped villages in the middle of a single human kingdom.

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    Everyl's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2013
    Location
    USA
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    Male

    Default Re: Top Down or Bottom Up?

    I've done both, and they both have their advantages and disadvantages for different purposes.

    Bottom-up is good for new GMs and for short games. It's usually faster to get a setting ready to play this way, as you only need to detail the immediately-relevant parts at the outset and can fill in the rest later, as necessary. It's easy to run into problems if you run this style in a long-term game, though, as questions arise that may require retcons to adequately answer. Running into exactly that sort of problem was a very good experience for me as a neophyte GM, though - once you've been tripped up by a gap in the pantheon or a blank spot in the map once or twice, you're a lot less likely to overlook those details in later world-builds.

    Top-down is good for games that will probably run for a long time. If players will be rising to the higher echelons of power, especially in a game like 3.X D&D where they basically become superhero demigods by the end of the core book progression, it really pays to know the setting pretty well in advance. High-level characters in many systems can go globetrotting quite easily, as can anyone with upper-middle-class wealth or greater in a modern day setting. If the DM doesn't know what's across that ocean, how welcoming the denizens of the Outer Planes are to Plane Shifted travelers, or which supernatural shadow-faction controls the turf around the airport in Beijing, they'll have to make it up in a hurry, and that can lead to consistency problems. Knowing what's happening in the setting on a wide scale really helps avoid this, as the GM can at least BS up something consistent.
    I have decided I no longer like my old signature, so from now on, the alphorn-wielding lobster yodeler in my profile pic shall be presented without elaboration.

  3. - Top - End - #3
    Bugbear in the Playground
     
    Feirgon's Avatar

    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    Virginia
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    Male

    Default Re: Top Down or Bottom Up?

    I usually employ a mix of the two.

    Often I will have a fair amount of detail on the current area and culture, but will wait to see where my players want to go to build out. As such, I do create an overall story with at least a rough outline of the outside world and its history.

    In my freeform games, however, I almost entirely go bottom up and let my players world build as they create and play their characters. Even in these games, though, I do give a goal or direction upon which the narrative can be built.

  4. - Top - End - #4
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Santa Barbara, CA
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Top Down or Bottom Up?

    I generally find a mix of the two. A sketch of the top down approach in order to have exotic characters, cultural cues in the local area area etc etc tand then build up a local region bottom up....Balencing these two is done based on what kind of campaign do I expect it to be. How much travel? What kind of themes and moods am I playing with, How big-fish in little pond do I want the players to feel?

  5. - Top - End - #5
    Orc in the Playground
     
    DMwithoutPC's's Avatar

    Join Date
    Nov 2012
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    Male

    Default Re: Top Down or Bottom Up?

    I often start all the way at the bottom. A person or a place that popped into my head and that I want to give a world and a surrounding. but I get drawn to the top almost immedeatly. I can't create a castle, if I don't know what kind of nobillity this country has, and to know what kind of nobility the country has, I have to know which species and people live there. Before i know it, I have created a cosmology and several warring afterlives, before I have finished my castle...
    LGBTA+itP
    I'm dyslectic and English is not my first language, so I'll probably make a few spelling errors.
    the Third god of Ghysa, the Rainbow Prince(ss) (RIP), and None, Master of Shadows, and currently Nature's Sculptor, Nathall

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