World building during play

[Zejety]

Hi playgrounders,

I hope you can share some input on my thoughts. I am sure that some of you must have tried something similar.

Some words on the situation:
I will soon start to DM a game/campaign of Pathfinder for three players. All players are new to the D20 systems; I only have participated in some very short lived PBPs but lurked these forums for quite some time.
I and one of the players have experience with the German system The Dark Eye (another player has joined as a guest character two). The last player is new to P&P roleplaying but knows what to expect.

The problem:
Nobody of us is familiar with the PF campaign world or any of the D&D settings. Reading up on it enough to portray it consistently is very time consuming and so is building a new world from scratch. We could use The Dark Eye's setting but we are not playing Pathfinder to play in the same world as our other campaign. Also, while I wouldn't describe that setting as low-fantasy, it does not really lend itself to the dungeon crawling treasure hunting experience we expect from PF.

The approach:
I want to try to expand the campaign world during play. Only plan the village and surrounding regions in which the first session will play and prepare new stuff for the sessions in which it is needed or make up stuff on the fly. I can also take player input into account, letting players describe their home towns and possibly even their classes' or orders' roles in the world.
Letting players make up their characters' knowledge and implementing it in the world sounds like a fun plan if I can trust the players not to abuse it (which I do).

I was also thinking about not starting from scratch but investing the first session to build the world and its history on a high level, possibly by investing into Microscope.

The Question:
Does anybody have experience or tips to share on this approach? DO you think this is workable or will it inevitably lead to disaster? What do you have to say about Microscope, if you have ever used it?

[Balain]

I think this should work just fine. If you look at The World of Greyhawk. Which was the original Campaign setting for AD&D. It was pretty much created that exact way. Started off with just a village and expanded as they played.

[Grinner]

Is it doomed to fail? No, I don't think so.

But...the method you propose might give some bizarre results, since nobody gets things completely right the first time around.

Alternatively, have you considered Dawn of Worlds?

[Craft (Cheese)]

Microscope is great. So great, even, that if you decide to play it before beginning the game proper your biggest problem is going to be putting it down!

[Berenger]

I had the problem of a player feeling "screwed over" when I inherited the poorly designed world of another DM and tried to make sense of it by adding background. "I didn't imagine it this way, now my X makes no sense in this world, you make me look silly!" lurked behind every corner. It lead to strife ruining game & ultimatley friendship.

So make sure everyone is cool with a more open approach to his role in the world beforehand.

[Rhynn]

The approach:
I want to try to expand the campaign world during play. Only plan the village and surrounding regions in which the first session will play and prepare new stuff for the sessions in which it is needed or make up stuff on the fly. I can also take player input into account, letting players describe their home towns and possibly even their classes' or orders' roles in the world.
Letting players make up their characters' knowledge and implementing it in the world sounds like a fun plan if I can trust the players not to abuse it (which I do).

This is a great way to build a setting, and it's the way many settings were built.

Start with a map of a small area - whatever size you're comfortable with. Put in several dungeons, adventure locations, and hooks. Have one central settlement for a "base" and maybe an initial dungeon that you can expand at will and that the PCs an adventure in when they don't have anything else to do - you can put all kinds of hooks in the dungeon to take them outside of it.

As you have time, create - perhaps together, as a group - neighboring regions. Expand over time.

The Dwimmermount setting over at Grognardia was created in the way you describe, essentially. The players of the elf and the dwarf created most of their races' descriptions on the fly - ending up with very cool and distinctive takes on both races. (Dwarves adventure in order to pay back their fathers and to create their own child, because dwarves are made by constructing them out of precious metals and gems, then breathing life into them...)

[Gettles]

It depends, it can work very well but if you have players who are the types to nitpick or obsess over small contradictions you might run into trouble. Most people are usually willing to let things slide though.

[Fighter1000]

Wow that is a really cool idea for dwarves, Rhynn.
What about the elves?

[Frozen_Feet]

This is pretty much my default modus operandi. The biggest problems are practical: I hope you have a quick hand in sketching maps and writing down notes!

Random encounter tables and other random generation tools will make your life much easier.

Allowing players to help if they're so inclined is a good idea. For example, letting cleric player come up with is own religion.

I have no experience of Microscope, but from experience, How to host a Dungeon is pretty good for making dungeon-centric settings.

[Eldan]

Everyone is familiar with the broadest clichés of D&D. If you don't have any other ideas, start with those.

In general, I'd recommend outlining a few details (You are in the Empire of X, in the barony of Y. The village you are in lies in the forests of Z and lives mainly of logging) and then adding more as necessary.

Just never be afraid to describe a few more details than necessary when hte situation comes up. Your players need to pay for their drinks? take the opportunity to name the coins. They meet travelling traders? Make up a short tale about their homeland and the situation there.

You can do a lot of world building just with rumours.

[Jay R]

Each player should write a character backstory.

Be sure to mine the PC's backstory for ideas.

[Rhynn]

Wow that is a really cool idea for dwarves, Rhynn.
What about the elves?

The elves didn't have anything as strikingly odd, IIRC; they were subtler, with a general disregard for "ephemerals" (creatures, like humans, who live less than a hundredth of their usual lifespan), some interesting takes on religion and gods (one of the grand mysteries of the setting, explored almost entirely through dungeon crawling!), etc.

[Autolykos]

Does anybody have experience or tips to share on this approach? DO you think this is workable or will it inevitably lead to disaster?

We did exactly that in a game of Midgard, and it worked out just fine. For quite a while the town didn't even have a name (we called it "Absolut Normale Stadt" - "Absolutely Normal Town" at first). The first tasks explored the surrounding, with the GM making stuff up as we went (we rotated GMs, so everyone had a turn at filling in the blank areas on the map), like protecting the nearby villages of Schafhausen and Kuhdorf from bandit raids and a necromancer who thought he could start his career in our backwater place without much opposition. Later on, the players would also travel to far away places, where we basically adapted the same system (but we didn't switch GMs when away from home, so these regions were more consistent).
I always wanted to reuse that approach for a pen&paper version of Dwarf Fortress, but sadly I'm the only one in our group who thinks DF is a great game.

[elliott20]

this is how most of the d20 games in our group are ran, actually.

One campaign had a particularly interesting take on this. Before the campaign started, we each got to draw a tarot card, pregnant with meaning. And at the right moment, the player can choose to play the tarot card to add a piece of lore / myth / fact about the setting that is relevant to the card somehow.

i.e. death often signifies rebirth as well, so one player played the card when their characters met another major NPC. Our first thought was he's secretly an undead but the player actually corrected us and said that the NPC is actually someone who has changed his ways from the past, and has a past that is unspeakable. The irony here is that the NPC at this point has been the big good of the campaign, and by playing that card it really changed the tenor of his background / story. He actually went from being incredibly helpful to being downright sinister when the player did that.

It was awesome. But the GM later told me he had to drop a lot of the backstory he wrote for him to accommodate. So I guess the lesson for him here was to keep the characters simple so that we can add more as we go.

[Jay R]

I tend to build a very limited overall structure first, with no details. There's a kingdom at war with the Crumple-Horned Snorkacks. The PCs begin by dealing with the aftermath of a small battle, and the course of the war, the politics and lands of the kingdom, and all the rest, can grow from that.

[kyoryu]

What you're proposing is almost certainly the way that Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk were developed.

It's also the way that a campaign world that I know of that lasted 30+ years (may still be going) was developed.

(The reason that I say that Greyhawk/FR were developed the same way is that I can see the same "patterns" in them as I saw in the long-term campaign that I was a part of)

[GungHo]

This is the way a lot of settings are developed. Even those of us who overbuild worlds run the characters through a few adventures to see what people are going to respond well to before fleshing everything out. Saves you a lot of work if everyone is gonna hate their characters.

[Zejety]

Thanks for the input everybody.
Looks like we will use either Dawn of Worlds or Microscope to screate the (high level) world and then work out the details from where are party is headed during the actual campaign.

Any comments on the two and which ione you would prefer for the task at hand?
I have read the rules for Dawn of Worlds and a let's play of it and some reviews on Microscope and both seem like interesting and fun tools.

[Craft (Cheese)]

Thanks for the input everybody.
Looks like we will use either Dawn of Worlds or Microscope to screate the (high level) world and then work out the details from where are party is headed during the actual campaign.

Any comments on the two and which ione you would prefer for the task at hand?
I have read the rules for Dawn of Worlds and a let's play of it and some reviews on Microscope and both seem like interesting and fun tools.

Well, they're very different tools: Dawn of Worlds works like a simulation that functions through player incentives by having them play a grand strategy game, rather than through formulas and random seeds; It's bottom-up. Microscope, on the other hand, is more focused on ideas and is top-down: You start with the big ideas, then jump around in the timeline to fill in the details.

The real difference between them isn't so much in the type of campaign world that results, but rather in the way the worlds are built. Which one is better really depends on what worldbuilding style you prefer. Personally, I prefer Microscope, but that's just my opinion. If you're not sure, try both!

[Knaight]

Microscope is great. So great, even, that if you decide to play it before beginning the game proper your biggest problem is going to be putting it down!

I'm just going to second this. Microscope is a fantastic game.

[Leon]

We have been progressively building the world our group plays Dungeon World in very successfully. It started with the core idea of a river centric country and went from there.
End of each session the GM asks us to add a fact about the world. This builds further and adds some diverse things in.