Strange, because that is the opposite of every D&D game ever.
The story gets written at the table, at which point the world building should have already been mostly created.
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bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 months agoIf I were a JRR Tolkien or Herbert with a universe in my mind, it would be so much more pleasing to make an engine that generates anything from that world that to just write out a few stories from it.
One of the foundational tenets of good writing is that worldbuilding is just masturbatory unless it serves the story. You don’t create a cool world and work your way backward into a story. You create a great story and craft a world around it which supports the story you’re trying to tell. The stories are the thing that have value, not the setting or the lore.
Telling a great story is a completely orthogonal skill to worldbuilding, and it requires creativity, emotion, and authorial intent. Star Wars and Harry Potter are both dogshit at worldbuilding, but they’re both some pretty rad stories. Avatar: the Legend of Korra is set in one of the best fantasy worlds ever created and it was a very mediocre story.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I’m a DM, and I can tell you that as fun as worldbuilding is, no information about your world is real until players learn and remember it. And if you try to loredump ok them, they won’t actually remember stuff.
Worldbuilding is fun, but it’s also masturbatory; it’s only fun for the DM until the game’s story makes it matter for everyone else.
KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I agree with everything you said.
However, fiction world building and game world building are hugely different.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Are games not fiction?
KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
I should have said “literature”.
Womble@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Given that is the opposite of what Tolkien did i think you are overstating your case to say it’s a foundational tenet.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Not the opposite at all. Tolkien didn’t know what the One Ring was when he wrote about Bilbo finding it in the Hobbit.
Womble@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Tolkien spent years creating a fictional world and languages before even deciding to write a novel.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Yeah and my point is that all his worldbuilding was just for his own fun until he actually put in the work of making a story out of it.