Comment

Comment on Baldur's Gate 4 Isn't Next For Larian; Something Bigger Is Coming | Spot On | Gamespot

If 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.

source

Sort:hotnew top

Womble@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨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.

source
- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨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.
  
  source
  - Womble@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Tolkien spent years creating a fictional world and languages before even deciding to write a novel.
    
    source
    bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨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.
    
    source
Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨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.
  
  source
KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I agree with everything you said.

However, fiction world building and game world building are hugely different.

source
- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Are games not fiction?
  
  source
  - KingOfSleep@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I should have said “literature”.
    
    source