D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[CleverNickName]

If you want to write a 400 page gazetteer for your setting...
(then)
...dumping that information on the players and expecting them to care

But why would anyone do that?

There's plenty of middle ground between "Write Hundreds of Pages" and "Why Bother".

 

[Micah Sweet]

But why would anyone do that?

There's plenty of middle ground between "Write Hundreds of Pages" and "Why Bother".

Middle ground tends to be frowned upon in these discussions.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Is this true?

How tight do you think the correlations are among actual human beings, between cosmological and religious beliefs, and modes of behaviour and social organisation?

How tight? I have no idea how to measure the tightness of the idea.

But for me this seems pretty intuitively true. A vast amount of human behavior can be traced back to various beliefs. Many things in America like the emphasis on hard-work, and the various prohibitions and distaste for excess can find roots in Puritan or Protestant ideals. Behavioral norms of politeness to strangers can be traced back to mythological roots.

Now, in the real world, this is a chicken and egg situation. Which came first, the behavior or the myths and legends that taught the behavior and emphasized it was good? Can't say, but Religion and belief are still one of the single most powerful social glues on the planet, so there is certainly a correlation.

And that is going to impact societies. Especially since, religion and spiritual beliefs are one of the few guaranteed differences between our world and the fantasy world (at least for an American Audience going into most generic fantasy). So, for me personally, I need to know what the people believe in. I need to know what they strive for. How do they explain social power disparities and who do they look towards for guidance and comfort, because these things shape how they structure their society.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Ugh, for real. My players always forget that I'm supposed to be having fun too.

Mine don't. But I do have to often remind myself that some of the things I do in world-building are purely for me, not because literally anyone else at the table cares (until suddenly they do).

 

[TwoSix]

But why would anyone do that?

There's plenty of middle ground between "Write Hundreds of Pages" and "Why Bother".

Well, yes, I was (I feel fairly obviously) exaggerating for dramatic purposes.

But some people have said, on other threads, today, that if you don't spend a year working on your setting, why bother? To me, that's a level of effort you do to entertain yourself. And if you enjoy that, great. But to my mind, there's no way that's going to actually improve the play at the table and make everyone have a better time. Unless you actually go to the work of publishing it.

 

[Hussar]

Curious that they said that specifically for the European market. But I'll give your data the benefit of the doubt and accept that it might well be true in North America too.

But still, that's not "since forever." That's a fairly recent trend. And it makes some sense; there does seem to have been a change in way products were designed and presented at some point around there.

Then again, that's also where what partial data on title specific sales we can get tells us that sales started dropping off. Percentage of players and percentage of sales are not the same thing, and as a casual glance at any other entertainment medium will tell you, chasing the ephemeral hip, young, "modern audience" has not exactly been a ringing success.

Well, it's neither here nor there. I hope WotC can find a way to be successful marketing D&D as a "kids game" but only in an academic sense. I have no interest in much of anything D&D is producing lately. Maybe because it's a "kids game", or maybe for a complex web of causes.

Every piece of evidence available such as Dungeon and Dragon magazine reader ages, disagree with you.

 

[Belen]

If you want to write a 400 page gazetteer for your setting, more power to you. If you feel like having that information readily available for you gives you the ability to make more consistent and coherent narration, then I would see it as certainly worthwhile.

But dumping that information on the players and expecting them to care, and also use that information to build characters that fit seamlessly into your game world, is probably not going to work out as well as you would hope.

I always provide the players with a one page character creation document and then a 2 page setting document about the area they are starting out in. I also include a final 2 page document about the local pantheon.

 

[TwoSix]

I always provide the players with a one page character creation document and then a 2 page setting document about the area they are starting out in. I also include a final 2 page document about the local pantheon.

Well, sure, but that's just session zero "Let's get started" info. That's not what anyone means by actual "worldbuilding".

 

[TiQuinn]

Right but... let's take mountains for a second.

Who lives on Mountains? Well, we have Humans, Goliaths, Aarakocra, Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs, Hobgoblins, Derro, Bugbears, Dwarves, Duergar, Drow, various giants, various dragons, firenewts potentially, Harpies, Meazels, Kruthik, Ogres, Peryton, Manticore, Ettin, Yeti, Trolls, Hags, Balhannoth, and Ki-Rin.

And that is just Mountains, and a taste of the things in mountains that are sentient with a language, and not explicitly from another plane of existence.

Yes, the planet is big, but Mountains are a small percentage of that planet, and we have potentially 30 different sentient cultures on any given mountain. Even if you only take a THIRD of them for any particular mountain range... that is still so many.

And then do this again for the forests, and then again for the hills, and then again for the deserts.... it just adds up.

I’m missing something here…are you saying a DM needs to figure out how all of those things fit into an ecology of their game world? Versus use them when they feel the need to use them?

 

[Mecheon]

I’m missing something here…are you saying a DM needs to figure out how all of those things fit into an ecology of their game world? Versus use them when they feel the need to use them?

Moreso if you have all those things running around on mountains, to drag out when appropriate, then you don't really have legs to stand on if you start complaining about people wanting to play a cat-person or fey rabbit (which both date back to 1E. I remember Pooka and their selective invisibility power) and saying its making the world the cantina scene

If you're dragging all those out, your world already is the cantina scene, its just arbitertily denying people playing races at that point.