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Ginny: Your world biomes don't have to hold to any ecologist. My Table: Druid played by ecologist, Bard played by a biologist, Fighter played by a water resource management technician.
A note on travel times: It is entirely realistic for players traveling between major cities to not ever have to camp outside. A major road that runs through arable land would realistically be dotted with small villages with inns no more than a day’s journey apart. Farmers and traveling merchants don’t want to spend a week sleeping in fields any more than the players do. If you use this justification, you can designate on the map highly settled areas where supplies and lodging are inconsequential, and sparsely settled areas where the PCs will need to stock up in advance to traverse. It’s convenient but doesn’t sacrifice realism.
There's a great example in the US of a long river valley with a series of towns almost exactly 10 miles apart. As you said, this is because people can only reasonably walk up to 5 miles to get their goods to market with any sales time before walking home the same 5 miles before sunset. This also conveniently leaves significant settlements about a day's walk (with gear) from each other
Indeed and IF people travel the SAME roads... they move about the same speed... so you'd have like Road-Side shelter or Inns or Cabins than you can go if in need. I do that in my games of WarHammer Fantasy RP. It's a good place to have the players encounter good AND bad guys... but those roads are also relatively safe... cities have patrol to protect trade and to make sure food (among other stuff) reach the cities... a starving city is not a good place to be. But hey maybe the Cabin is already full... what if there is an Arrogant lord acting has if he owm the place. This lord can even be arrogant BUT offering hospitality to the players in HIS cabin... etc. This create great encounter and some of those NPCs will end up having an impact on the team. There might be a guy selling his food THERE for those who didn't plan well... or mercenaries willing to take a job for a price, etc... These small places are the best... You should see those MORE often than monsters. And if you use them often... well your next wandering monster might be encoutered at one of those place... the smell of food attracted savage beast... it had so much potential.
this reminds me of world history, specifically the silk road and trade along the coasts of the indian ocean. there were outputs and places for people to rest along the way on the silk road, and the ports were filled with different cultures and foods and those cities and towns became super history rich. including things like that adds realism and a chance for world-building
For weather, one of the best things my DM ever told me was to look up a part of the real world that's similar geographically then choose a random year and use that area's weather history as the basis for what the weather is like in your in game city, all the homework is done for you at that point, it's realistic and you don't have to roll on any tables to find out what it's going to be like.
When i world build, i have two forms of history. The short hand, which is the bare bones abridged information and key details everyone in the setting would know. The history book, which is the full detailed history as i imagine it. The history book is usually only for me as the dm.
Do you ever write it out to keep it in your head? Honestly, I did this and now I have 100 pages. Mostly because it was fun, I had fun doing it. And sometimes gives me ideas. And makes pulling it up in my head easier when they might discover something.
Don't forget, that another history divide is what the people know and what actually happened. Just because the highest library in the land excepts something as true doesn't make it correct. For a very basic real world example, in ancient Greece 2 theories for the shape of the universe were proposed, one placed the earth at the center and was favored by popular guy Aristotle and was held true until the Renaissance thousands of years later. The "correct" theory placed the sun at the center of the universe. Much later we realized that the sun is a part of a galaxy and i believe it wasn't until the late 1880s that the Andromeda Galaxy was iddentified as not being a satellite nebula of the milky way and finally you get to our modern understanding. Point is that history is just one giant game of telephone through the generations, so whats recorded as fact is going to be different from the absolute truth. (The truth is usually only available through archeology aka dungeon delving in ancient ruins) This one fact can resolve so many plot holes you make and free up your world building. The historical record can just be 1 interpretation, and if it doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny blame Aristotle for rating "thinking about something to find the answer" better than "actually testing the theory and measuring how tall the pyramid is". (No joke, ancient philosophers didn't believe that testing and measuring something was more accurate than debating the theory for why something should be x measurement" (like how many jellybeans are in the jar carnival games, they wouldn't bother to count them at the end)
I've found that when people complain about something being 'unrealistic' they most often mean 'inconsistent'. Versimilitude is important in any setting. This is what people often mean with phases such as "Oh so we have Dragons, talking swords, Vampires and magic, but me climbing a sheer wall of ice is 'unrealistic'." You can have Dragons, haunted swords etc and still have a feeling of realism as long as the fantastical is consistent.
Whenever I worldbuild for anything-games, books, etc-I actually *love* making mistakes and finding ways to integrate them. Maybe a mistake can become a plot point, and the characters can be like "you know, I thought that seemed off, maybe there's something else afoot here!" Mistakes make the world more organic! After all, nothing in our own world has come about by perfect design.
Yeah! Another thing my group really loves is finding our own plot holes and story kinks, and then standing there and asking, "Now why is this here?" And trying to come up with a full-on explanation for things that don't fit. If the person who made the hole can't explain it, the decision usually gets passed to someone else at the table. And we all feel safe about it because our group met in a writing community that tends to attract a pretty specific type of author, so while, say, one person has the approximate angst tolerance of a dandelion meadow and thus will never create answers that cause darkness and suffering, we all have very similar quality standards. I think my favorite example is when my tendency to create large families and love of mapping out family trees for our settings wound up causing a succession crisis when I came back to a project after like two months and realized two noble families were illegally intermarried, because the country has strict laws about how much land and how many titles one person can inherit. However, there are no such laws about *acquiring* land and titles... so when the parents tried to ration the inheritance out to all their kids to prevent it from being broken up unfavorably, the second eldest declared war on all her siblings at once. We coincidentally founded several bands of mercenaries at the same time. This setting has never been used for a campaign but I desperately want to use it someday.
@@ValeOfMuses That sounds awesome! Especially in a campaign setting, that definitely seems like an amazing source of surprise drama and tension. My favorite mistake I've made wasn't nearly so epic, but when making a map of a region, I had 2 town names, one meaning "eastern flood" and on meaning "western sands". And then I promptly put the "west" name in the east of the country, and the "east" name in the west. Didn't realize for a few weeks, and when I did I was like "wait this could be a hilarious canon legend that people talk and joke about all the time". Very small but it still makes me laugh ^^
@@EdgelordInferno Right? My group is about to actually start a new real, actually gonna happen this time we swear campaign, and so far I'm literally the only one from the area (single city plus a megadungeon that's five to six kilometers across... *externally,* individual floors vary from half a kilometer to three hundred) and thus have been doing all of the GM worldbuilding. He's taken my suggestions pretty well so far! I'm waiting for the other characters to turn up and run into Problems with things like evil gods being treated just the same as good ones, including regular festivals. And hearing about their backstories, which have not been collaborated on, aside from Felix having been the product of them roleplaying like last year. We're explicitly never leaving the city so it doesn't "matter", but really, that's the rest of the world they're talking about! I can't wait to meet the holes I can fill.
For long distance travel, I have a suggestion. Once my players started hitting lower middle ranged levels, they had an encounter the Pegasus Repose, which is an inn and tavern run by a djinn named Molgiri. The inn has a toucan mascot named Leslie that wears a sandwich board "advertising" for the inn. Oh, and the inn flies. You stay for a day or two, and Molgiri is able to have the inn take you where you want to go. But he only serves "interesting" clientele.
I like that idea. I introduced a unicorn the party can tame fairly early off, to allow the players the option to do teleportation once per couple of days (usually long enough for the encounter in the town they’re in)
I find adding fantasy ways of fast travelling to be unnecessary as save them for higher levels. There is no time limit in 99% of D&D campaigns. I've been and run some long-term campaigns and I've rarely had any take more than a year or two. If it takes 30 days to get somewhere... fine. You can handwave it -- especially if this is via ship or save areas (which most places are). At low levels in a 3-5 day trip from a town to a larger city, I might narrate a trip in terms of villages, inns, rest stops, people you meet, etc. in say half-day time jumps. The same trip back is just highlighting places they've been to. By mid-levels, 30 days might be broken into week long narration of only major cities, change in terrain, borders, changing language or cultures, etc.
Something I have for my players to be involved with the world building is what I call the “I know a guy” rule. Basically, what it is, is if the party is really stumped/stuck, I will let them create an NPC that they know of that they can get help from. I have final say on whether or not they can come in based on the circumstances, but it gives them a chance to bring something to the world to help them out.
One I'd like to add: Making everything in your world special, so that nothing is actually special. For example, I once played in a homebrew campaign where literally every city in the world was built atop the backs of titan animals. The concept was cool on paper, but this meant that every city we traveled to was like this, and ultimately it took away some of the magic of the concept because all cities were like this. Not to mention the difficulties it created in actually traveling between them because they were always moving. It's important to realise that coming across a magical waterfall that flows up is a very incredible and memorable experience. But if every waterfall is magical and flows up, it's no longer special, it just is.
Alternatively, you can use this. Building every city on the back of a titanic creature and treating it as normal might not make any city feel special, but it can make the world itself feel special. And think about it, if every city is like this, the inhabitants will likely have come up with some way to make traveling between them more practical.
@@jjkthebest You do make a good point, though I would argue that you should still keep most of your world feeling grounded and relatable to give special things more impact. The world will always feel special because of the variety of special things in it that make it unique, like a grand city built atop the back of a dragon turtle. Not every city needs to be built atop the back of a dragon turtle for the world to feel special. The fact the world has even one city like this makes it pretty special to begin with, and then you take all the other world wonders and landmarks into account. Like a waterfall that flows up, a city of giants up in the clouds, a crystal fortress situated inside a giant volcano that erupts blue lava, etc. In most cases, less is more. Players will easily remember the city of Dractora on the back of a dragon turtle. If every city is on the back of some titanic beast, though, it then becomes "wait, was Dractora the city on the back of a dragon turtle or was it the one on top of of the catoblepas? okay then what was Drakarys? Was that the one on the back of an ancient dragon?" And then, you write yourself into a corner. Since there's a city on a flying dragon, do airships exist? If you want as little magitek as possible, perhaps they use teleportation circles? Ah, but then if everyone can teleport to where they need to go, what's the use of sailing ships? Maybe the sailing ships carry cargo? But then how do they get cargo up to the dragon city? it doesn't need to be realistic, but everything should still make sense within the context of your world. Otherwise it still falls apart, and it feels less like a place that actually exists despite the players and more like a theme park ride that's trying too hard to be magical.
Yes, the essence of fantasy to me is definitely in keeping the magical, _magical._ Otherwise there's no chance of feeling wonder or delight at these cool things. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you genuinely marveled at the fact we have several thousand large enclosures that can circumnavigate the entire world in a couple days by SOARING THROUGH THE SKY AT THE HEIGHTS IN WHICH MAN ONCE THOUGHT LITERAL HEAVEN ITSELF WAS SEATED..... ....So I tend to prefer semi low magic settings. The rarity of magic/high magic, and general grounding in realism and low tech makes the real differences from our world stand out _so much_ more and makes them _way more fun!_
I mean, this can still work if this nature of your world presents unique challenges, e.g. what if a titan gets sick and collapses, or what if someone tries to murder one (and how would they accomplish that)... or what if one titan goes nuts and stampedes around, destroying its city and threatening others? And how does one arrange a city on the top of a giant *segmented* animal, like a giga-centipede or isopod? Would different districts be constantly grinding against one another, connecting in completely different ways depending on how the creature turns its body? It only gets boring if this fact just becomes background and isn't used in what the players actually experience.
Another advantage of letting your players do some of the world building, is it adds additional diversity. One of your players adding in details you wouldn't have thought to add makes the different locations feel more like distinct cultures
Once again, really good advice. One way to deal with inconsistencies is to run things forward in time or move to a different spot in the same world. If you've run multiple campaigns in the same world, I highly recommend it. That way many choices you regret can disappear into the past. One cool thing you can do if you're running with most of the same PCs is run history a long ways into the future, at least a few hundred years to allow substantial changes and NOT tell your players that it's the same world. Then they'll start noticing similarities as things feel familiar.
My favorite method of destabilizing a world for players is to create a semi-stable alliance between 2 factions that the group accidentally puts in jeopardy. Then half the campaign have them work with one faction learning their culture, politics, and religion. Then have them sent out on a mission where they are captured by the opposing faction where they learn a lot of what they were told was propaganda or more complicated than previously told. The last half of the game is sending them on increasingly more dangerous missions with increased consequences until they have to decide how to resolve the main source of the conflict
"You're not Matt Mercer, dude." One of my friends told me that when I mentioned the detail I wanted to put into the world, and I needed to hear it. I'm a big story guy, and watching how incredibly smoothly Matt's world unfolded made me desperate to give my friends that kind of experience. I made the error of throwing my friends into a pretty major storyline way too quickly, and it sort of curbed the amount of _fun_ I felt we were having. So, in lieu of missing about three players from last session, I decided to kick back and relax a little bit. I gently pushed my friends toward a bounty wall I'd written up, and within a few minutes we were in tears laughing about how difficult they'd found it to catch a single Gnome Rogue (my Dragon Knight player rolled an 11 to grapple, the Gnome rolled a 6... but had a +6 to Acrobatics). Next, they were able to expertly coordinate the capture of a rogue Aaracokra, only to find that she was a child stealing food in tandem with her teenage brother. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: _you_ as the DM are the only one behind the screen, but you're still a player. So let the little things flow. If you're feeling overwhelmed or underprepared, delay the big story stuff! Maybe a storm rolls in that makes travel impossible. Maybe the guild in charge of securing passage to your destination is waiting on approval from the officials of your destination. We can't all be Matt Mercer. Let yourselves breathe, and remember that 99% of the time, your players are there to just have fun. Plus, while your players are RP-ing, it gives you more time to plot the gut-twisting moments that await down the road. >:)
3:39 - “Internal consistency is generally more important than realism.” Thank you. I 100% agree. For that matter, “internal consistency”, aka verisimilitude, is more important than many things, because it defines the laws of your world and maintains believability, even in a world filled with physics & nature-defying elements. Too many people confuse and conflate verisimilitude with hardcore realism. All it is, is as Ginny described it: “internal consistency”
Also, as players it makes it easier to plan and feel free in your world, if it's full of inconsistencies then it might feel very unfair when a player thinks of something great and it doesn't work because of this
a profile of my last world Anetara: 36 towns and cities 521 named buildings 1493 named npcs 63 npc backstories 26 organizations with a name and goal 3 separate big baddies that wanted to take over the world 6 deities with an active hand in the world 1 tarrasque egg never even got around to playing it.
Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was asked how fast a White Star (hero ship) traveled. His answer, "The speed of plot" ie, they travel as fast as the story requires. Sometimes the reality of a world needs to be bent in the name of good storytelling.
The joke about your biomes not needing to hold up to examination by an ecologist damn near killed me because most everyone I play D&D with I met through Facebook bug identification groups. Anyways, the world I'm building has very carefully considered biomes. Lol. But of course, this is indeed the sort of thing that me and my players both really enjoy, given our shared interest in entomology and natural sciences at large. I'm fearful I'm making the same mistake you did of making my cities too distant, but I think I'm going to stick with it and just maybe allow for a fast forward button on traveling if it becomes necessary, as there's a very good chance my table will be the type to really savor and explore the wild places, far from civilization.
U make all these vids on how to fix mistakes but I don’t know how to dm really at all. I’m pretty much self taught cause no one would teach me so can I make a vid about what u need in a campaign that’s definitely underprepared but already started?
“Most of us aren’t playing D&D to recreate real life”. This is why I never play humans when there are other choices. I’m a human all the time, what’s the fun of that?
I've been playing in a homebrew campaign for a few weeks now, and one big mistake our DM made was thinking about the bigger picture almost exclusively. We had a talk with our DM at the end of the last session and let him know we have no real direction at this point, to which he replied he gave us the story beats about gods being missing in action. Bruh, we just hit level FOUR. Not only are we not nearly powerful enough to deal with that, we weren't given any real leads regarding that. Moreover, our backstories have yet to come into play, so there isn't much reason for us to care about the bigger picture. Fortunately, the DM is open to constructive criticism, so we do expect the story to get better going forward. DMs, take note: if you're not good at creating a smaller scale story to hook your players in, their backstories exist for that very reason. Use them to tell the smaller scale story, and tie them into the larger one. Think of it this way: Sam and Dean Winchester did NOT sign up to avert the apocalypse; they were out on a mission of revenge -- as well as "saving people, hunting things: the family business" -- and the apocalypse grew organically from that.
Sorry that I’m a bit late on this one, but do you have any advice on how to do the initial infodump, introducing the players to the world and all that? Because I don’t want to monologue for ages, but at the same time I want to make the players feel comfortable enough with the world that they can create characters in it.
I struggled a lot with having my players hometowns being fleshed out in my mind- especially when they all decided to be on the outskirts of my setting that I've had to restrict them to for story reasons. When I asked my players if they'd help build their hometowns: with as much free reign as they wanted I got done amazing results. I got really lucky to have a party of DMs so they took my offer and ran with it. One of my players made 3 entire cities that their character has lived in(with input from me) because they truly wanted to. Another made 2 cities and a bunch of intricacies about the culture there. Based on input from another character I was able to create a more interesting digital environment in the nobles of the capital city of my game. It was so cool to have that input and collaboration in creating the setting my players were going to be in because it feels so much more like they are a part of the world rather than being dropped into it.
I’ve just started playing and my DM does step 11 They have essentially allowed me to construct an entire plotline as my backstory (starting at 9th level) which didn’t exist at all before in what is ostensibly a very large world they’ve made It’s really nice and makes me feel super involved
I keep trying to take notes on these videos, but at this point I might as well just memorize the whole thing! It's so useful for getting motivation and properly organizing both DM notes and personal worldbuilding ones!
Much as I love a solidly constructed world, I've learned to be wary of a DM who is overly enamoured with worldbuilding... Imho the world exists as a background for the PCs, not the other way around. For the same reason I don't love playing in an established setting that has a stringent "official" timeline already, like Middle Earth or Dune.
One thing me and my friends started doing was the DM letting players draw on the world map and being like "This is my character's home country, it's like this, I lived in this kind of culture" and the DMs always love it because it does SO MUCH work for them and let's them take those ideas and run with it.
When I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, one of my players said several times that something didn't make sense because it wasn't realistic. My response every time was, "Dragons exist."
Here's a little idea: *Hard* political borders. Like, the magical aether of the world is directly tied to the sovereign of the locality. If the king is fire-aspected, the land is a very dry desert. Wind? Extremely flat plains. And there's a dramatic and immediate shift between the environs, as if it *was* one of those color-coded political maps. Magic of the favored type is strengthened, and opposing forces weaked. Wars of conquest make the land..."odd" would probably be a good way to put it. A water/fire boundary dispute might create pockets of near-bottomless lakes with straight sides of sand, an air/earth dispute would give you improbable mesas, or vast caves more akin to subway tunnels than anything natural. If a sovereign dies and the heir is another type? The land shifts overnight, leaving the people to adapt quickly...Which is why that generally doesn't happen, and everything is put into place well in advance...Unless, say, the heirs are being assassinated, and the last living has just been kidnapped by some common rogues who don't know who they have....
So. People are born with magic in 'em. Usually it's a bit of what the parents were, kinda like genetic ancestries. And where one kid might get Fire near-exclusively from Dad and a mix of Air and Water from Mom, the next one might get Dad's little bit of Earth, and *just* Water from Mom. And it's not uncommon for people to perform a ritual to join their magic together, usually for marriage. It'd let both people pull from a larger, (sometimes) more varied pool, but not any more at a time than each could individually. And when you have a kid, your magic drops a little bit, as that's the seed magic for the little one. The more kids, the less magic. (And also, the eight child would have notably less starting magic than the firstborn. It's not a *huge* difference, but it's definitely something that would be noticed.) And people can also go through a ritual to abdicate their magic to someone else. ...Which is what happens to the leaders of their lands. If the leader dies, their magic (and all the magic of the past leaders) gets inherited by the heir. If there's no heir, the Land chooses one (hopefully with primarily the same type as the original). And when someone becomes the leader, whatever smaller percentages of magic they had gets converted into their singular primary type. No splitsies. And if the person has two "primaries" of equal strength it's a 50/50 chance of what the end result would be. It'd also mean that all of their kids are at least 50% of that type, though, which would guarantee a primary type identical to the leader.
OK. Border conflicts and such. If one country were to hire assassins, or start laying actionable plans of war, there'd be an instantaneous border shift, with the most encroachment on the land of the leader with the weakest magic. That's why there are lookout posts a fair distance away from the border, but within sight of it, as an "early warning" system. If a third party were to try to stage a coup, though, that wouldn't be anything notably different. A *successful* assassination, though, would mean that the third party would *become* the new leader, and the land would shift to their type. (And then when the ritual to find the leader was performed, they'd kinda need to answer how they became the leader when the other one died off.) It's possible for countries to join together, as well: One can abdicate their magic to the leader of another, or they can both select the same heir. It's...more difficult to separate a country, though, once joined. It requires the country map to be magically inscribed on the leader, then to cut the leader in two down the line of where they want the countries separated (while magically keeping the leader alive), and then each half killed individually with a separate heir. That's...usually not done, but it historically has when a third party set up a coup in two neighboring realms simultaneously, and was discovered.
Me: Wait, how does Ginny of Christmas Present work? Isn't Ginny Prime the Ginny of the Present? The Video: Sounds like SOMEONE is "overprioritizing reality." Me: I withdraw the questions.
Thinking too big and broad is HUGE for me. I start with the broad stroaks, basic worldbuilding concepts, but than I waste so much time getting carried away. Eventually, session arrives and the immediate story is not nearly as strong because I stopped focusing on the story the party are experiencing. Worldbuilding is there is enhance the story you're telling, but getting carried away with broad concepts can hinder it instead.
D&D Doctor, "Hmmm... the patient is at death's door. I prescribe... a good night's sleep! I will send you my bill. Good day." The Christmas Ghosts are great.
Your late-night haunting ad was clever, but completely missed the boat with me since I only play 3.5 edition. Can't stand 5e. Will be a 3.5 fan for life.
1) Well... also chosing the wrong system in which to represent your world. And by this I would include EVERY systems using levels. Your bartender CANNOT be good at haggling because IF he is... he need levels because he is limited in his progress in ANYTHING by a damned level... but IF you raise his level to raise his haggling... well you also raise EVERYTHING else. Meaning every great merchant is a bad ass. Every innkeeper can pulverize any starting adventurer... unless he can't haggle. So best DM advice I can give HONESTLY : Don't go for ANY systems using level to progress. This is static and illogical. You become better at everything at the same time... and at the same time as everyone else in your team... SERIOUSLY! Exp as a currency will let you create much more diverse characters with strength and weakness THAT YOU CHOSE and they won't be following a BORING template... HENCE all your world inhabitants have MUCH more potential to be great believable characters that are TRULY VARIED. You can be the very best merchant in the world and have NO IDEA how to hold a weapon... THIS makes sense and makes a better world. Also when building world take some times to give some details about customs, diets, etc. What do people here EAT? it's not the same everywhere. What is the town famous for? Most of the time in recent crappy Tabletop RPGs... I mean Tabletop Boardgames with Fantasy looks spitted on them... nearly everything is tweaked toward combat : Spells, Battle maps, combat rules, That makes good ROLL-PLAYING GAMES but VERY BAD ROLE-PLAYING GAMES. The damned approach of we will make the skill list has short and simple as possible... WHLE adding Marvel-like Super Powers to every heros. How many characters cast SPELLS and use SPECIAL power in Lord of the Ring? Oooooh yeah, they are defined by their personality NOT by how many lightning sh!t they can shoot... everyone one they cross haven't dozens of special abilities. But yeah... not good to sell many books if you have few power and unlimited options. No.. no... that wouldn't do... let's make 200 classes with each their stupid mechanic because EVERYONE IS SO SPECIAL. But who am I to recommend anything... just been role-playing for last 36 years.
Not for nothing... THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR VIDEOS!! You are extremely charming and I truly appreciate the info you are giving out. I'm creating a new adventure/world/crazy brain ride currently for my friends and as I am getting back on the RPG wagon as a DM(with a hiatus of about 12 years - children) I need all the help I can get. So again, thank you Ginny. My best buddy directed me to your videos as they are extremely informative and delightful, and I agree.
Watching her videos to see if i can learn something new, agreeing with everything she is saying for the most part. Then she says dont make the world too realistic, and the first thing she mentions is fall damage not increasing past 200 ft as per RAW. My absolute pet peeve of a rule hahaha. Im like if they dont have feather fall or another spell that would stop them from dying at 1000+ ft, they made some bad decisions that should have punishments haha. Featherfall exists to make it possible to not die from that height, that is already unrealistic enough that I dont need to reduce the risk of aerial combat hahahaha
As for mistake 11, I would probably lay out the basics for a hometown for example. What is it's function (fishing town/mining town, etc) and probably the inn. Then the PC that would be from that town can add extra details.
I have a world with history set out, but my players’ backstories influence it heavily. For example, I have an entire kingdom set up just because one of my players lived there in his past. It’s so much more fun for my players to have a play in the world and to have them change it as they want to. For example, they just killed a king so that the princess could become queen
For number 6, it can be tricky because CREATING a stable world is much easier, since everything is logically connected, even if playing in one can be boring. What I would recommend is that you start by creating a stable world, and then break a few things, and see what consequences logically play out. This can even be a string of quests, where one aspect of stability breaks down and gets fixed, but then something else breaks and needs to be addressed.
>Fall damage Imma stop you right there. Being able to survive a 50m fall because there's a cap on fall damage ruins my immersion and thus decreases my fun. Luckily my DMs tend to agree.
I'm interested that you spaced your world out *too much* thinking it was realistic - it's actually one of the big realism-breaking "mistakes" that many D&D world builders commit. Mercer's Exandria is an obvious example, but so is Tolkein's Middle Earth for that matter! Most fantasy worlds, developing over centuries with pre-industrial technology, would feature dozens of medium towns and hundreds of small ones all in relatively close proximity to each other. 50-100 km / 30-60 miles between major towns would be a "realistic" spacing. Of course, if you have unrestricted teleportation as per the PHB spell list, talking "realism" in town spacing - or having things such as maritime trade routes - is a bit of a laugh. I agree with the sentiment that realism / unrealism is not a measure of quality in world building; there are always some things that a person just has to handwave to make things work for the story they want to tell.
Self Employed One Woman Show .. Learn from her, she's made all the mistakes and learnt from them, so you don't have to, and had some really good GM's to learn from (including Matt Coleville who made me a GM) ... Past, Present and Future ghost Ginny will thank you
oh no, I AM the ecologist holding my own world building up to realism standards!! D: lol but for real, having ecological knowledge hugely informs my worldbuilding because it is FUN for me to apply that stuff. Everything I learn directly flows into my worldbuilding brain and then it become an interesting puzzle to create a new world. Just like Tolkien was a linguist with an interest in Old Norse etc., of course he came up with his own fantasy languages! But not everyone is a linguist or an ecologist or a cartographer or whatever. World building should be FUN! And if you find what is fun, then the worldbuilding will flow naturally out of you
Gotta give it to her - she really sells that ad. Oh, and I have not watched the full video, but as a GM I would say make maximum use of weather. Not just storms (yawn) but all types of weather. Actually describe how the player physically feels - and apply bonuses or penalties based on the environment. Another minor but useful tip is ill-fitting armour / robes. So... every few steps you get chaffed. Seriously, when they get that fixed they will be very happy. From a GM point of view - easy credits. And my personal favourite the cat. Invent a cat. A normal, domestic feline. That turns up at the most unexpected times, glances, and buggers off. It never engages, but always survives. You can give the cat a plot line if your players are particularly dumb (it walks over a scroll etc) but I usually just use it for comedic relief. A recurring character that just moves things along when they start to drag.
Players play in a world where their characters are meaningful. Not just oh now you don't have magic because you did t do what a celestial would do. I'm fucking chaotic good. Wtf
My group likes to think of it more reasonable than realistic. Is something particularly realistic? Probably not. But could it theoretically and reasonably happen? Roll the d20
I'm currently running a 3.5 game, where my players got sucked into their characters bodies. Because of this the world is a mix between players world and characters world. The ultimate goal is to find out how and why yhis happened? Whether they fix it and go back or leave it? Yes, I Isekaid them. Lol
Great video! I actually implemented collaborative storytelling with my players this past weekend. Do you have any more tips on having players help build your world with you?
You don't need a world to play D&D. Just create a group story and randomize what you don't imediately know. Join the dots while preparing your sessions. Done. No one cares about your game's world as much as you, instead of "lore dumping", discover the world together.
my personal tip: don't make an "end". no final boss, only unstable forces fighting for their own goals and trying to overcome their limits, players are the judges, the centerpiece which conduct this fighting forces aganist each over and THEIR choices may pave the path to succeed or downfall of ANY force opering in your world. give players power beyond the roll of the dice is what makes players cheer and awe when thinks go in some direction
This is all great advice. If anything, underplan, let your players build the world for you. When players go to a random shop, I've learned to ask, "What is the name of the shop?" Giving up control as a GM and giving more agency to the players is good. It's lazy, and it gives your players the illusion of running the campaign.
Collaborative worldbuilding is actually SO fun. I definitely made 90% of mine by myself, but every player was given the chance to make their own culture or home country. I didn't particularly have a place for tieflings in my setting, for example (they're not my cup of tea), but I chose not to tell anyone that in case someone really wanted to play one. Lo and behold, one player made one and wrote this whole complex system of government and legal stuff to justify why her paladin was in exile and forced to take an oath of redemption. Boom, instantly tieflings were part of my setting and I love their inclusion now. It wouldn't be my setting without them. Make a map but leave blank spaces, friends!
One thing that I wish I knew Not everything in your world should have an answer. There's a storm cloud that forms over this on particular city in this one time of the year...yea you could say it's the gods jousting over that city but it's even better if you say. "The citizens have tried to explore it. Their best mages went into the clouds and all that was heard was the clatter of steel and abruptly ended screams before their lifeless bodies fell to the city floor. No one knows what's in the clouds, and they sure as hell don't want to risk more citizens to find out"
One thing I love about the World of Darkness games is that there's some deliberate inconsistency with lore. Real history is based on a lot of hearsay, poorly remembered details, propaganda, and conflicting opinions, and I think it makes a game all the more real and interesting if NPCs have different and partially conflicting recollections of what happened and why. Instead of info-dumping as a narrator, reveal information through people in the world. Have a couple NPCs get in an argument, about some world event "well, I heard that..." and "No no no! That's not what happened at all, it was...", and "No you're both wrong!" A few good conspiracy theories by common folk can go a long way toward giving the players a compelling mystery to unravel.
Grab some village, town and city maps but don't place them. Use these as the PCs explore or arrive in a new area that you hadn't planned for yet. Also, have a list of names. When I play, I can tell when a DM is strugging coming up with names on the fly. Doing a tiny bit of prep and having a names list for a blank column for where/when they were introduced is a big help. DMs, can email the list of NPCs after each session so everyone has a record and the correct spelling.
Ok. Bear with me. I was visiting my siblings, parents and our dog. Then a world idea struck me like a Purple dragons energy force blast! I make the family home and surrounding area up towards the nearest mountains and forests an alternate reality place. Its the same place, municipality but its entered through a portal. And since I daydreamt about the mountain range due to playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 back in 1997, playing the Rampart faction had Green and Gold dragons nesting in mountains soooo. I imagined the small dark spots in the mountainside as cave dens. Soo back to my world idea. My lore part is that a green and a gold D&D dragon occasionaly fight over controlling their part of the mountain range. Distant roars and sparks of breath weapons can be glimpsed at night. And in real life theres a tour path by a lake near the foot of the mountain, accessed by a long gravel path circling by said lage and around a forest, some marsh inbetween. Both ends in a parking lot. BUT in the fantasy version. Instead of such a large parking lot, theres a tavern. And yes ANY real life tech stuff is gone or replaced by fantasy equalient gadgets, gizmos and such in the alternate fantasy place of my childhood home and surroundings
One of the best world building method i found is what we can found in Kids on Bikes, a ttrpg where we basically play as 80's children like in stranger thing/goonies/ET/Super 8 etc. In fact, at the start of the first session (or during session 0) players decide what their town is called, what is the industry, is it growing or not, what are the landmark or building/shop which are important is the town etc etc all of these questions and the most important part is the rumors section. Each player shares one or two rumors about the town and its surrounding ("the old lady in the creepy mansion is a witch", "the wood is in fact a pathway to a realm of fairies", "Mr Marsh, the Math professor, is in fact an alien from planet X0-AZ21 who wants to conquer earth" etc) As they are rumors, the player don't know if they are real or not but for you, as a GM, it is a real treasure because you can pick whatever you want to be true and make your own story with that and you can twist what they said to not be true but not false either (Maybe the old lady is in fact not a witch but the fairy queen who escape her realm by the portal in the forest when a coup was orchestrated against her by her cousin, Mr Marsh who want to find her and end their life!) With this method, I didn't even prepared any KoB one shot I played! All the stories I played (A creepy mansion with distrubing phenomenon, a Cthulhu cult sacrifice in town, a secret new-nazi base in the underground of the mall, a serial killer mayor who wants revenge for his dog...) were created with some or all rumors my players came with at the table^^ I didn't apply this method to my DnD game yet because I already have 3 DnD campaigns I have to finish, but i think i will use it for my next campagin! Took what the player have in mind is the most rewarding thing for them (especially when they discover that their rumor were true or twited) and a very helpful thing for you because this is the player who feed you for adventure hooks and stories!
I try to make my worlds require as little DMing as possible (partly because I am really REALLY lazy, and I don't really enjoy being in any sort of supervisory role). I build an independent framework of locations and "hub" events, and then have very quick tables to fill in details. Sometimes I roll, sometimes I just pick. Between games, I'll roll out some political events around the world to slightly change the state of the game without their intervention...because life goes on everywhere else whether the players are there or not. I also tend to work things the players accidentally assert, into the world somehow, whenever they don't radically contradict everything, which rarely happens. . I prefer to keep worlds as flexible and independent as possible. I make the world capable of thematically existing WITHOUT the players OR myself, but still responsive to their actions. That way it feels like a living world doing its own thing and that the players merely exist in it, and have to deal with both its whims, and the consequences of their choices. They aren't the center of the universe...but they still could become it. . That said, I'm also pretty fast and loose with player rolls. I rarely make them roll for anything if they've got sound reasoning and their statement/action sounds plausible (or especially enjoyable), and they've got the (close enough) stats for it, of course. I also negotiate...asking them if they're willing to accept some form of compensation (usually inspiration dice or something similar) in exchange for allowing me to force them to fail what they're attempting to do for dramatic effect. Basically, "Let me screw you over now for drama funsies, in exchange for a freebie whenever you want to use it." . I ran a lvl 0 campaign start a few times, and had everyone choose no class. When they went out into the conflict, I would just ask them what they WANT to do, what they wish they were capable of, no matter how outlandish or outside the rules. I'd have them roll an appropriate ability check, and something reasonably similar to their request would occur, or not. I'd keep track of it all and offer some class suggestions to each player, based on those notes, at the end of the session. It frequently results in players choosing classes they hadn't typically considered, and even results in some racial retcons (which I usually allow by hand-waving it) that generate character concepts they'd never have played otherwise. Players tend to care far more about their characters that way...feeling more like they were "grown" than merely built.
#7 it's more historically accurate to have settlements close together. Here in the UK, the Romans built things a day's march apart, because you needed somewhere to stay when travelling. They wouldn't necessarily all be large settlements, but you'd get an inn, a bathhouse most likely, stables etc. This would then attract the native Brits, so you'd have some trading possiblities. Oh, whilst you're doing d&d in a castle, you'll be smack bang in an area dripping in Roman history. Arbea is worth a trip, as is York, if just for a walk down the Shambles.
Great Video. Putting an emphasis on player experience is a much better method of world build than some of the others I've seen. Static worlds are not playable worlds, if you can't handle your PCs doing stuff don't run the game. Your players should be changing the world, for better and worse. I try to think 3 sessions in advance for my irl campaign to avoid too much "endgame" planning. An additional piece of advice: combat should be a bigger part of the world building. "Random Encounters" don't do shit for you unless they're informing your players about the world. Maybe the dudes from Cherry House all are hand to hand fighters that use tricks and cantrips to annoy your players. Maybe everyone on Rock Mountain studies the Halberd or Glaive, so they are all Polearm Masters. Maybe the clerics of Bobiel have access to other spells and wear the same type of robe. Every combat is a chance to tell your players about the world.
Excessive realism... I once needed to map out a warehouse for a scenario. I spent WAY too much time trying to research "how big are medieval warehouses?" -- which admittedly was kind of an interesting rabbit hole -- before I told myself this wasn't the point and mapped out something that would let them have an interesting fight in.
I actually had an example of #10 in my current campaign. There's a region in my game world known as the Feywood (lots of portals to the Feywild). Several NPCs were leery of even getting too close to it, but it was only through firsthand experience that they learned one of its quirks: without a guide, walking into and out of the forest, along the same path and at (as far as they knew) the same speed, took radically different amounts of time. (One hour in, three hours out, if I recall correctly).
Thinking too big is not much of an issue for my game. My players tend to enjoy and explore all that my inns and taverns have to offer. Last session, they spent half the session in an upscale inn and spa after getting paid a fairly large sum, mingling with the locals, causing shenanigans... They have so much fun with the barkeeps and patrons, and it's exciting fleshing out all the characters and information found within. We have silly little hand signals for cooking. It's quite ridiculous in the best way. Instead of Dungeons & Dragons, it could be called Taverns & Breakfast!
Regarding background narrative, Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion as an optional supplement to The Lord of The Rings, building background and underpinnings. Writing a two to three page creation myth or other histories and making that available to the players has some value to establishing pantheons and values of the world.
When I make a mistake in worldbuilding, particularly one involving an element of consistency, that my players spot and question, I will sometimes spin it into a mystery. "You have established that all members of this noble house are redheads...why is the scion that we met on the road dark haired? I may have forgotten that element of the house's description in the moment...but perhaps there is a story to be told about the lost, and cursed, son.
I really enjoy all your D&D videos helping with tips for various items. I was wondering if you could do a video for helping with developing a campaign. I am a big introvert and I want to RP more but I also want to run a campaign that is not published and of my own creation. Every time I work on one, I start getting overwhelmed and quit. I hope to learn more from you as I think you are really great.
I feel the last advic. one of my players is a huge dwarf nerd and his characters is obviusly a dwarf. I thought he was going to make a cool hometown but got a complex sociaty and literaly the most complex city in my game from him
I feel the last advic. one of my players is a huge dwarf nerd and his characters is obviusly a dwarf. I thought he was going to make a cool hometown but got a complex sociaty and literaly the most complex city in my game from him
I have a thing with the "realism" part, when I'm DM i build in some sort of consistency that can be understood as realism, specially I like to be consistent with the cultural and political aspects of my NPCs and locations, I like the same thing with my PCs and here is where the problem starts. My PCs are thought with a pseudo-realistic mindset so when they are encountered by absurd NPCs or PCs they get annoyed and suspicious, some times even acting against the "obviously good-guy NPC" that was created only to send us on our quest because their methods and ideas sound absurd to me and my characters suspects ill of them. In the best cases this brings interesting moments to the table but other times y gets me completely out of my enjoyment when absurd things keep happening I loose immersion and for me that is the most important part of DnD, immersion. I can play many other games without the need of feeling immersion, but DnD there's no point if I cannot loose myself in my character and the world.
> "You're going to change your mind about things." This a lot, especially when the players don't do what you expect. don't plan in high detail everything that is to come, just have a rough sketch you can change on a whim.
A really good example of getting rid of realism is that in the campaign i'm in that it is set in America in 1945 (there's magic, its wierd). We just deleted homophobia and transphobia that would be realistic to the time period. We just all decided that since we're all queer (except one) we should be playing in a world that is accepting to us.
"Your world doesn't need to follow the laws of physics" ....me spending hours upon hours trying to figure out the axis of rotation and how a sun works in a planar world....
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Love the commercial!
Hello Ginny, the first link doesn't work, it brings me to an error page!
Yeah that’s
Ginny: Your world biomes don't have to hold to any ecologist.
My Table: Druid played by ecologist, Bard played by a biologist, Fighter played by a water resource management technician.
I know your comment is super old at this point, but that's actually hilarious
That's when you use Microscope to create the world with your players instead of for them! :D
A note on travel times: It is entirely realistic for players traveling between major cities to not ever have to camp outside. A major road that runs through arable land would realistically be dotted with small villages with inns no more than a day’s journey apart. Farmers and traveling merchants don’t want to spend a week sleeping in fields any more than the players do.
If you use this justification, you can designate on the map highly settled areas where supplies and lodging are inconsequential, and sparsely settled areas where the PCs will need to stock up in advance to traverse. It’s convenient but doesn’t sacrifice realism.
There's a great example in the US of a long river valley with a series of towns almost exactly 10 miles apart. As you said, this is because people can only reasonably walk up to 5 miles to get their goods to market with any sales time before walking home the same 5 miles before sunset. This also conveniently leaves significant settlements about a day's walk (with gear) from each other
Indeed and IF people travel the SAME roads... they move about the same speed... so you'd have like Road-Side shelter or Inns or Cabins than you can go if in need. I do that in my games of WarHammer Fantasy RP. It's a good place to have the players encounter good AND bad guys... but those roads are also relatively safe... cities have patrol to protect trade and to make sure food (among other stuff) reach the cities... a starving city is not a good place to be. But hey maybe the Cabin is already full... what if there is an Arrogant lord acting has if he owm the place. This lord can even be arrogant BUT offering hospitality to the players in HIS cabin... etc. This create great encounter and some of those NPCs will end up having an impact on the team. There might be a guy selling his food THERE for those who didn't plan well... or mercenaries willing to take a job for a price, etc... These small places are the best... You should see those MORE often than monsters. And if you use them often... well your next wandering monster might be encoutered at one of those place... the smell of food attracted savage beast... it had so much potential.
this reminds me of world history, specifically the silk road and trade along the coasts of the indian ocean. there were outputs and places for people to rest along the way on the silk road, and the ports were filled with different cultures and foods and those cities and towns became super history rich. including things like that adds realism and a chance for world-building
This is a really great note to remember
And don't forget encounters on the road! :)
For weather, one of the best things my DM ever told me was to look up a part of the real world that's similar geographically then choose a random year and use that area's weather history as the basis for what the weather is like in your in game city, all the homework is done for you at that point, it's realistic and you don't have to roll on any tables to find out what it's going to be like.
I like this. It's simple, consistent, and may even provoke some stories.
I mean unless you want it to be unrealistic
When i world build, i have two forms of history.
The short hand, which is the bare bones abridged information and key details everyone in the setting would know.
The history book, which is the full detailed history as i imagine it. The history book is usually only for me as the dm.
Do you ever write it out to keep it in your head? Honestly, I did this and now I have 100 pages. Mostly because it was fun, I had fun doing it. And sometimes gives me ideas. And makes pulling it up in my head easier when they might discover something.
@@als3022 i have entire google docs just full of unedited notes that need to be compiled and formatted into a propper document.
Don't forget, that another history divide is what the people know and what actually happened.
Just because the highest library in the land excepts something as true doesn't make it correct.
For a very basic real world example, in ancient Greece 2 theories for the shape of the universe were proposed, one placed the earth at the center and was favored by popular guy Aristotle and was held true until the Renaissance thousands of years later.
The "correct" theory placed the sun at the center of the universe.
Much later we realized that the sun is a part of a galaxy and i believe it wasn't until the late 1880s that the Andromeda Galaxy was iddentified as not being a satellite nebula of the milky way and finally you get to our modern understanding.
Point is that history is just one giant game of telephone through the generations, so whats recorded as fact is going to be different from the absolute truth. (The truth is usually only available through archeology aka dungeon delving in ancient ruins)
This one fact can resolve so many plot holes you make and free up your world building. The historical record can just be 1 interpretation, and if it doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny blame Aristotle for rating "thinking about something to find the answer" better than "actually testing the theory and measuring how tall the pyramid is". (No joke, ancient philosophers didn't believe that testing and measuring something was more accurate than debating the theory for why something should be x measurement" (like how many jellybeans are in the jar carnival games, they wouldn't bother to count them at the end)
The handout to my players: A tourist pamphlet of local fun facts and one big historical event.
My internal campaign notes: The Silmarillion
"This is a game we are playing for fun"
One of the best pieces of advice. Always keep this one thing in mind
I've found that when people complain about something being 'unrealistic' they most often mean 'inconsistent'.
Versimilitude is important in any setting. This is what people often mean with phases such as "Oh so we have Dragons, talking swords, Vampires and magic, but me climbing a sheer wall of ice is 'unrealistic'."
You can have Dragons, haunted swords etc and still have a feeling of realism as long as the fantastical is consistent.
Whenever I worldbuild for anything-games, books, etc-I actually *love* making mistakes and finding ways to integrate them. Maybe a mistake can become a plot point, and the characters can be like "you know, I thought that seemed off, maybe there's something else afoot here!" Mistakes make the world more organic! After all, nothing in our own world has come about by perfect design.
Yeah! Another thing my group really loves is finding our own plot holes and story kinks, and then standing there and asking, "Now why is this here?" And trying to come up with a full-on explanation for things that don't fit.
If the person who made the hole can't explain it, the decision usually gets passed to someone else at the table. And we all feel safe about it because our group met in a writing community that tends to attract a pretty specific type of author, so while, say, one person has the approximate angst tolerance of a dandelion meadow and thus will never create answers that cause darkness and suffering, we all have very similar quality standards.
I think my favorite example is when my tendency to create large families and love of mapping out family trees for our settings wound up causing a succession crisis when I came back to a project after like two months and realized two noble families were illegally intermarried, because the country has strict laws about how much land and how many titles one person can inherit. However, there are no such laws about *acquiring* land and titles... so when the parents tried to ration the inheritance out to all their kids to prevent it from being broken up unfavorably, the second eldest declared war on all her siblings at once.
We coincidentally founded several bands of mercenaries at the same time. This setting has never been used for a campaign but I desperately want to use it someday.
@@ValeOfMuses That sounds awesome! Especially in a campaign setting, that definitely seems like an amazing source of surprise drama and tension.
My favorite mistake I've made wasn't nearly so epic, but when making a map of a region, I had 2 town names, one meaning "eastern flood" and on meaning "western sands". And then I promptly put the "west" name in the east of the country, and the "east" name in the west. Didn't realize for a few weeks, and when I did I was like "wait this could be a hilarious canon legend that people talk and joke about all the time". Very small but it still makes me laugh ^^
@@EdgelordInferno Right? My group is about to actually start a new real, actually gonna happen this time we swear campaign, and so far I'm literally the only one from the area (single city plus a megadungeon that's five to six kilometers across... *externally,* individual floors vary from half a kilometer to three hundred) and thus have been doing all of the GM worldbuilding. He's taken my suggestions pretty well so far!
I'm waiting for the other characters to turn up and run into Problems with things like evil gods being treated just the same as good ones, including regular festivals. And hearing about their backstories, which have not been collaborated on, aside from Felix having been the product of them roleplaying like last year.
We're explicitly never leaving the city so it doesn't "matter", but really, that's the rest of the world they're talking about! I can't wait to meet the holes I can fill.
If you ever hear me say "Yes, that IS strange, isn't it?", then you've just caught me in a worldbuilding error.
Except the world itself, which was created by intelligent design perfectly.
For long distance travel, I have a suggestion.
Once my players started hitting lower middle ranged levels, they had an encounter the Pegasus Repose, which is an inn and tavern run by a djinn named Molgiri. The inn has a toucan mascot named Leslie that wears a sandwich board "advertising" for the inn. Oh, and the inn flies. You stay for a day or two, and Molgiri is able to have the inn take you where you want to go. But he only serves "interesting" clientele.
Reminds me of The Boar's Hat from Seven Deadly Sins... I've used something similar before... Great suggestion
How do I sign up for the official Leslie fan club?
Yes! More interesting inns and taverns are always great ideas
I like that idea. I introduced a unicorn the party can tame fairly early off, to allow the players the option to do teleportation once per couple of days (usually long enough for the encounter in the town they’re in)
I find adding fantasy ways of fast travelling to be unnecessary as save them for higher levels.
There is no time limit in 99% of D&D campaigns. I've been and run some long-term campaigns and I've rarely had any take more than a year or two. If it takes 30 days to get somewhere... fine. You can handwave it -- especially if this is via ship or save areas (which most places are). At low levels in a 3-5 day trip from a town to a larger city, I might narrate a trip in terms of villages, inns, rest stops, people you meet, etc. in say half-day time jumps. The same trip back is just highlighting places they've been to. By mid-levels, 30 days might be broken into week long narration of only major cities, change in terrain, borders, changing language or cultures, etc.
Something I have for my players to be involved with the world building is what I call the “I know a guy” rule. Basically, what it is, is if the party is really stumped/stuck, I will let them create an NPC that they know of that they can get help from. I have final say on whether or not they can come in based on the circumstances, but it gives them a chance to bring something to the world to help them out.
I REALLY like this
@@Piemasta9000 Thank you!
@@h.s.6269 That’s exactly how I use it. So long as it is justifiable and makes sense, I will usually allow them
What! This is so smart. Like phone a friend
One I'd like to add: Making everything in your world special, so that nothing is actually special. For example, I once played in a homebrew campaign where literally every city in the world was built atop the backs of titan animals. The concept was cool on paper, but this meant that every city we traveled to was like this, and ultimately it took away some of the magic of the concept because all cities were like this. Not to mention the difficulties it created in actually traveling between them because they were always moving. It's important to realise that coming across a magical waterfall that flows up is a very incredible and memorable experience. But if every waterfall is magical and flows up, it's no longer special, it just is.
this is a great point. Thanks gor the advice
Alternatively, you can use this. Building every city on the back of a titanic creature and treating it as normal might not make any city feel special, but it can make the world itself feel special. And think about it, if every city is like this, the inhabitants will likely have come up with some way to make traveling between them more practical.
@@jjkthebest You do make a good point, though I would argue that you should still keep most of your world feeling grounded and relatable to give special things more impact. The world will always feel special because of the variety of special things in it that make it unique, like a grand city built atop the back of a dragon turtle.
Not every city needs to be built atop the back of a dragon turtle for the world to feel special. The fact the world has even one city like this makes it pretty special to begin with, and then you take all the other world wonders and landmarks into account. Like a waterfall that flows up, a city of giants up in the clouds, a crystal fortress situated inside a giant volcano that erupts blue lava, etc.
In most cases, less is more. Players will easily remember the city of Dractora on the back of a dragon turtle. If every city is on the back of some titanic beast, though, it then becomes "wait, was Dractora the city on the back of a dragon turtle or was it the one on top of of the catoblepas? okay then what was Drakarys? Was that the one on the back of an ancient dragon?"
And then, you write yourself into a corner. Since there's a city on a flying dragon, do airships exist? If you want as little magitek as possible, perhaps they use teleportation circles? Ah, but then if everyone can teleport to where they need to go, what's the use of sailing ships? Maybe the sailing ships carry cargo? But then how do they get cargo up to the dragon city?
it doesn't need to be realistic, but everything should still make sense within the context of your world. Otherwise it still falls apart, and it feels less like a place that actually exists despite the players and more like a theme park ride that's trying too hard to be magical.
Yes, the essence of fantasy to me is definitely in keeping the magical, _magical._ Otherwise there's no chance of feeling wonder or delight at these cool things. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you genuinely marveled at the fact we have several thousand large enclosures that can circumnavigate the entire world in a couple days by SOARING THROUGH THE SKY AT THE HEIGHTS IN WHICH MAN ONCE THOUGHT LITERAL HEAVEN ITSELF WAS SEATED.....
....So I tend to prefer semi low magic settings. The rarity of magic/high magic, and general grounding in realism and low tech makes the real differences from our world stand out _so much_ more and makes them _way more fun!_
I mean, this can still work if this nature of your world presents unique challenges, e.g. what if a titan gets sick and collapses, or what if someone tries to murder one (and how would they accomplish that)... or what if one titan goes nuts and stampedes around, destroying its city and threatening others? And how does one arrange a city on the top of a giant *segmented* animal, like a giga-centipede or isopod? Would different districts be constantly grinding against one another, connecting in completely different ways depending on how the creature turns its body? It only gets boring if this fact just becomes background and isn't used in what the players actually experience.
Another advantage of letting your players do some of the world building, is it adds additional diversity. One of your players adding in details you wouldn't have thought to add makes the different locations feel more like distinct cultures
Once again, really good advice.
One way to deal with inconsistencies is to run things forward in time or move to a different spot in the same world. If you've run multiple campaigns in the same world, I highly recommend it. That way many choices you regret can disappear into the past.
One cool thing you can do if you're running with most of the same PCs is run history a long ways into the future, at least a few hundred years to allow substantial changes and NOT tell your players that it's the same world. Then they'll start noticing similarities as things feel familiar.
My favorite method of destabilizing a world for players is to create a semi-stable alliance between 2 factions that the group accidentally puts in jeopardy. Then half the campaign have them work with one faction learning their culture, politics, and religion. Then have them sent out on a mission where they are captured by the opposing faction where they learn a lot of what they were told was propaganda or more complicated than previously told. The last half of the game is sending them on increasingly more dangerous missions with increased consequences until they have to decide how to resolve the main source of the conflict
"You're not Matt Mercer, dude."
One of my friends told me that when I mentioned the detail I wanted to put into the world, and I needed to hear it. I'm a big story guy, and watching how incredibly smoothly Matt's world unfolded made me desperate to give my friends that kind of experience. I made the error of throwing my friends into a pretty major storyline way too quickly, and it sort of curbed the amount of _fun_ I felt we were having. So, in lieu of missing about three players from last session, I decided to kick back and relax a little bit. I gently pushed my friends toward a bounty wall I'd written up, and within a few minutes we were in tears laughing about how difficult they'd found it to catch a single Gnome Rogue (my Dragon Knight player rolled an 11 to grapple, the Gnome rolled a 6... but had a +6 to Acrobatics). Next, they were able to expertly coordinate the capture of a rogue Aaracokra, only to find that she was a child stealing food in tandem with her teenage brother.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: _you_ as the DM are the only one behind the screen, but you're still a player. So let the little things flow. If you're feeling overwhelmed or underprepared, delay the big story stuff! Maybe a storm rolls in that makes travel impossible. Maybe the guild in charge of securing passage to your destination is waiting on approval from the officials of your destination. We can't all be Matt Mercer. Let yourselves breathe, and remember that 99% of the time, your players are there to just have fun.
Plus, while your players are RP-ing, it gives you more time to plot the gut-twisting moments that await down the road. >:)
@Josef Z
…oops - Josef, great advice! Thanks for taking the time to articulate it so well 👍🏻
I usually struggle to do any prep while my players are rping. Because im usually so engrosed I dont think about it
@@Piemasta9000 For sure! That last part was more of a joke than anything :) player RP moments can be a lot of fun!
@@chuck-n-debtaylor7553 Not a problem! Thanks for the kind words :)
3:39 - “Internal consistency is generally more important than realism.”
Thank you. I 100% agree. For that matter, “internal consistency”, aka verisimilitude, is more important than many things, because it defines the laws of your world and maintains believability, even in a world filled with physics & nature-defying elements.
Too many people confuse and conflate verisimilitude with hardcore realism. All it is, is as Ginny described it: “internal consistency”
Verisimilitude > plausibility > veracity
And, as with art, style is the way of unifying it all into its own unique and memorable package
Also, as players it makes it easier to plan and feel free in your world, if it's full of inconsistencies then it might feel very unfair when a player thinks of something great and it doesn't work because of this
It's better than _infernal_ consistency: "burn it all down!"
Idk if this has been touched on, but...
You're not the computer running a video game as a GM. You're not Skyrim.exe.
a profile of my last world Anetara:
36 towns and cities
521 named buildings
1493 named npcs
63 npc backstories
26 organizations with a name and goal
3 separate big baddies that wanted to take over the world
6 deities with an active hand in the world
1 tarrasque egg
never even got around to playing it.
Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was asked how fast a White Star (hero ship) traveled. His answer, "The speed of plot" ie, they travel as fast as the story requires. Sometimes the reality of a world needs to be bent in the name of good storytelling.
Ginny, you contradict many things you said in part 1, *if you've been threatened, blink thrice in your next video's intro!*
The joke about your biomes not needing to hold up to examination by an ecologist damn near killed me because most everyone I play D&D with I met through Facebook bug identification groups. Anyways, the world I'm building has very carefully considered biomes. Lol.
But of course, this is indeed the sort of thing that me and my players both really enjoy, given our shared interest in entomology and natural sciences at large. I'm fearful I'm making the same mistake you did of making my cities too distant, but I think I'm going to stick with it and just maybe allow for a fast forward button on traveling if it becomes necessary, as there's a very good chance my table will be the type to really savor and explore the wild places, far from civilization.
U make all these vids on how to fix mistakes but I don’t know how to dm really at all. I’m pretty much self taught cause no one would teach me so can I make a vid about what u need in a campaign that’s definitely underprepared but already started?
“Most of us aren’t playing D&D to recreate real life”. This is why I never play humans when there are other choices. I’m a human all the time, what’s the fun of that?
I've been playing in a homebrew campaign for a few weeks now, and one big mistake our DM made was thinking about the bigger picture almost exclusively. We had a talk with our DM at the end of the last session and let him know we have no real direction at this point, to which he replied he gave us the story beats about gods being missing in action. Bruh, we just hit level FOUR. Not only are we not nearly powerful enough to deal with that, we weren't given any real leads regarding that. Moreover, our backstories have yet to come into play, so there isn't much reason for us to care about the bigger picture.
Fortunately, the DM is open to constructive criticism, so we do expect the story to get better going forward. DMs, take note: if you're not good at creating a smaller scale story to hook your players in, their backstories exist for that very reason. Use them to tell the smaller scale story, and tie them into the larger one. Think of it this way: Sam and Dean Winchester did NOT sign up to avert the apocalypse; they were out on a mission of revenge -- as well as "saving people, hunting things: the family business" -- and the apocalypse grew organically from that.
Sorry that I’m a bit late on this one, but do you have any advice on how to do the initial infodump, introducing the players to the world and all that? Because I don’t want to monologue for ages, but at the same time I want to make the players feel comfortable enough with the world that they can create characters in it.
Props to you for doing the whole ad spot promo piece in the spoooookkkkkyyyyy voice haha
This is why I run my campaigns in Middle Earth. I have Tolkien's world memorized and then I just bend the rules to make it D&D lol
I struggled a lot with having my players hometowns being fleshed out in my mind- especially when they all decided to be on the outskirts of my setting that I've had to restrict them to for story reasons. When I asked my players if they'd help build their hometowns: with as much free reign as they wanted I got done amazing results. I got really lucky to have a party of DMs so they took my offer and ran with it. One of my players made 3 entire cities that their character has lived in(with input from me) because they truly wanted to. Another made 2 cities and a bunch of intricacies about the culture there. Based on input from another character I was able to create a more interesting digital environment in the nobles of the capital city of my game. It was so cool to have that input and collaboration in creating the setting my players were going to be in because it feels so much more like they are a part of the world rather than being dropped into it.
I’ve just started playing and my DM does step 11
They have essentially allowed me to construct an entire plotline as my backstory (starting at 9th level) which didn’t exist at all before in what is ostensibly a very large world they’ve made
It’s really nice and makes me feel super involved
Good for you!
These adds are evolving into Sam Riegel's "Try Not To Laugh Challenge". :D
Also, of course, really great advices.
I keep trying to take notes on these videos, but at this point I might as well just memorize the whole thing! It's so useful for getting motivation and properly organizing both DM notes and personal worldbuilding ones!
Ginny: I thinks it's inevitable.....
Me: WHERE!!! Oh no! But I followed the contract!!!
Much as I love a solidly constructed world, I've learned to be wary of a DM who is overly enamoured with worldbuilding... Imho the world exists as a background for the PCs, not the other way around. For the same reason I don't love playing in an established setting that has a stringent "official" timeline already, like Middle Earth or Dune.
The Mint Cupcake cosplay is just as good in the sequel
One thing me and my friends started doing was the DM letting players draw on the world map and being like "This is my character's home country, it's like this, I lived in this kind of culture" and the DMs always love it because it does SO MUCH work for them and let's them take those ideas and run with it.
Altyazı için teşekkürler 🎉
When I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, one of my players said several times that something didn't make sense because it wasn't realistic. My response every time was, "Dragons exist."
Here's a little idea:
*Hard* political borders. Like, the magical aether of the world is directly tied to the sovereign of the locality.
If the king is fire-aspected, the land is a very dry desert. Wind? Extremely flat plains.
And there's a dramatic and immediate shift between the environs, as if it *was* one of those color-coded political maps.
Magic of the favored type is strengthened, and opposing forces weaked.
Wars of conquest make the land..."odd" would probably be a good way to put it. A water/fire boundary dispute might create pockets of near-bottomless lakes with straight sides of sand, an air/earth dispute would give you improbable mesas, or vast caves more akin to subway tunnels than anything natural.
If a sovereign dies and the heir is another type? The land shifts overnight, leaving the people to adapt quickly...Which is why that generally doesn't happen, and everything is put into place well in advance...Unless, say, the heirs are being assassinated, and the last living has just been kidnapped by some common rogues who don't know who they have....
So. People are born with magic in 'em. Usually it's a bit of what the parents were, kinda like genetic ancestries. And where one kid might get Fire near-exclusively from Dad and a mix of Air and Water from Mom, the next one might get Dad's little bit of Earth, and *just* Water from Mom. And it's not uncommon for people to perform a ritual to join their magic together, usually for marriage. It'd let both people pull from a larger, (sometimes) more varied pool, but not any more at a time than each could individually. And when you have a kid, your magic drops a little bit, as that's the seed magic for the little one. The more kids, the less magic. (And also, the eight child would have notably less starting magic than the firstborn. It's not a *huge* difference, but it's definitely something that would be noticed.) And people can also go through a ritual to abdicate their magic to someone else.
...Which is what happens to the leaders of their lands. If the leader dies, their magic (and all the magic of the past leaders) gets inherited by the heir. If there's no heir, the Land chooses one (hopefully with primarily the same type as the original). And when someone becomes the leader, whatever smaller percentages of magic they had gets converted into their singular primary type. No splitsies. And if the person has two "primaries" of equal strength it's a 50/50 chance of what the end result would be. It'd also mean that all of their kids are at least 50% of that type, though, which would guarantee a primary type identical to the leader.
OK. Border conflicts and such.
If one country were to hire assassins, or start laying actionable plans of war, there'd be an instantaneous border shift, with the most encroachment on the land of the leader with the weakest magic. That's why there are lookout posts a fair distance away from the border, but within sight of it, as an "early warning" system.
If a third party were to try to stage a coup, though, that wouldn't be anything notably different. A *successful* assassination, though, would mean that the third party would *become* the new leader, and the land would shift to their type. (And then when the ritual to find the leader was performed, they'd kinda need to answer how they became the leader when the other one died off.)
It's possible for countries to join together, as well: One can abdicate their magic to the leader of another, or they can both select the same heir.
It's...more difficult to separate a country, though, once joined. It requires the country map to be magically inscribed on the leader, then to cut the leader in two down the line of where they want the countries separated (while magically keeping the leader alive), and then each half killed individually with a separate heir. That's...usually not done, but it historically has when a third party set up a coup in two neighboring realms simultaneously, and was discovered.
ah, another wonderful weDInesday
... ok I'll go home
(... or wednesDI)
Me: Wait, how does Ginny of Christmas Present work? Isn't Ginny Prime the Ginny of the Present?
The Video: Sounds like SOMEONE is "overprioritizing reality."
Me: I withdraw the questions.
Thinking too big and broad is HUGE for me. I start with the broad stroaks, basic worldbuilding concepts, but than I waste so much time getting carried away.
Eventually, session arrives and the immediate story is not nearly as strong because I stopped focusing on the story the party are experiencing. Worldbuilding is there is enhance the story you're telling, but getting carried away with broad concepts can hinder it instead.
Oh! Hey crispy :-)
Found your channel a month or two ago, and I’ve binged almost all of your videos since.
Thanks for all of the great content :-D
@@rhat4047 Of course! Thanks for watching
It's the DMs job to know all the background information of the world. The players just have to know what's relevant to them.
D&D Doctor, "Hmmm... the patient is at death's door. I prescribe... a good night's sleep! I will send you my bill. Good day."
The Christmas Ghosts are great.
City distance. Solved in my homebrew by ship travel.
Your late-night haunting ad was clever, but completely missed the boat with me since I only play 3.5 edition. Can't stand 5e. Will be a 3.5 fan for life.
My solution for my current world, where the cities tend to be far apart: magical trains!
1) Well... also chosing the wrong system in which to represent your world. And by this I would include EVERY systems using levels. Your bartender CANNOT be good at haggling because IF he is... he need levels because he is limited in his progress in ANYTHING by a damned level... but IF you raise his level to raise his haggling... well you also raise EVERYTHING else. Meaning every great merchant is a bad ass. Every innkeeper can pulverize any starting adventurer... unless he can't haggle. So best DM advice I can give HONESTLY : Don't go for ANY systems using level to progress. This is static and illogical. You become better at everything at the same time... and at the same time as everyone else in your team... SERIOUSLY! Exp as a currency will let you create much more diverse characters with strength and weakness THAT YOU CHOSE and they won't be following a BORING template... HENCE all your world inhabitants have MUCH more potential to be great believable characters that are TRULY VARIED. You can be the very best merchant in the world and have NO IDEA how to hold a weapon... THIS makes sense and makes a better world. Also when building world take some times to give some details about customs, diets, etc. What do people here EAT? it's not the same everywhere. What is the town famous for? Most of the time in recent crappy Tabletop RPGs... I mean Tabletop Boardgames with Fantasy looks spitted on them... nearly everything is tweaked toward combat : Spells, Battle maps, combat rules, That makes good ROLL-PLAYING GAMES but VERY BAD ROLE-PLAYING GAMES. The damned approach of we will make the skill list has short and simple as possible... WHLE adding Marvel-like Super Powers to every heros. How many characters cast SPELLS and use SPECIAL power in Lord of the Ring? Oooooh yeah, they are defined by their personality NOT by how many lightning sh!t they can shoot... everyone one they cross haven't dozens of special abilities. But yeah... not good to sell many books if you have few power and unlimited options. No.. no... that wouldn't do... let's make 200 classes with each their stupid mechanic because EVERYONE IS SO SPECIAL. But who am I to recommend anything... just been role-playing for last 36 years.
Not for nothing... THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR VIDEOS!! You are extremely charming and I truly appreciate the info you are giving out. I'm creating a new adventure/world/crazy brain ride currently for my friends and as I am getting back on the RPG wagon as a DM(with a hiatus of about 12 years - children) I need all the help I can get. So again, thank you Ginny. My best buddy directed me to your videos as they are extremely informative and delightful, and I agree.
As someone who is currently world building for my campaign, I'm glad I've never watched CR. I don't want to model my campaign based on Matt's.
I have to admit, I found the ad amusing. Multiple Ginnys is a terrifying concept... In a good way...
Watching her videos to see if i can learn something new, agreeing with everything she is saying for the most part. Then she says dont make the world too realistic, and the first thing she mentions is fall damage not increasing past 200 ft as per RAW. My absolute pet peeve of a rule hahaha. Im like if they dont have feather fall or another spell that would stop them from dying at 1000+ ft, they made some bad decisions that should have punishments haha. Featherfall exists to make it possible to not die from that height, that is already unrealistic enough that I dont need to reduce the risk of aerial combat hahahaha
Your videos came in at the perfect timing, I'm actually worldbuilding for a campaing atm xD
As for mistake 11, I would probably lay out the basics for a hometown for example.
What is it's function (fishing town/mining town, etc) and probably the inn. Then the PC that would be from that town can add extra details.
"...unless that's fun for you." LMFAO :-)
She should give creative writing of RUclips ads seminars to *almost* all of the RUclipsrs
Even experienced DMs can benefit from this vidéo, thank you Ginny, good job *save the video*
Nothing like a hot cup of "here's how you suck" in the afternoon.
Jokes aside, love me some worldbuilding discussions. It's pretty cool.
I have a world with history set out, but my players’ backstories influence it heavily. For example, I have an entire kingdom set up just because one of my players lived there in his past. It’s so much more fun for my players to have a play in the world and to have them change it as they want to. For example, they just killed a king so that the princess could become queen
For number 6, it can be tricky because CREATING a stable world is much easier, since everything is logically connected, even if playing in one can be boring. What I would recommend is that you start by creating a stable world, and then break a few things, and see what consequences logically play out. This can even be a string of quests, where one aspect of stability breaks down and gets fixed, but then something else breaks and needs to be addressed.
>Fall damage
Imma stop you right there. Being able to survive a 50m fall because there's a cap on fall damage ruins my immersion and thus decreases my fun.
Luckily my DMs tend to agree.
I'm interested that you spaced your world out *too much* thinking it was realistic - it's actually one of the big realism-breaking "mistakes" that many D&D world builders commit. Mercer's Exandria is an obvious example, but so is Tolkein's Middle Earth for that matter!
Most fantasy worlds, developing over centuries with pre-industrial technology, would feature dozens of medium towns and hundreds of small ones all in relatively close proximity to each other. 50-100 km / 30-60 miles between major towns would be a "realistic" spacing.
Of course, if you have unrestricted teleportation as per the PHB spell list, talking "realism" in town spacing - or having things such as maritime trade routes - is a bit of a laugh. I agree with the sentiment that realism / unrealism is not a measure of quality in world building; there are always some things that a person just has to handwave to make things work for the story they want to tell.
Self Employed One Woman Show .. Learn from her, she's made all the mistakes and learnt from them, so you don't have to, and had some really good GM's to learn from (including Matt Coleville who made me a GM) ... Past, Present and Future ghost Ginny will thank you
oh no, I AM the ecologist holding my own world building up to realism standards!! D:
lol but for real, having ecological knowledge hugely informs my worldbuilding because it is FUN for me to apply that stuff. Everything I learn directly flows into my worldbuilding brain and then it become an interesting puzzle to create a new world. Just like Tolkien was a linguist with an interest in Old Norse etc., of course he came up with his own fantasy languages! But not everyone is a linguist or an ecologist or a cartographer or whatever. World building should be FUN! And if you find what is fun, then the worldbuilding will flow naturally out of you
Gotta give it to her - she really sells that ad. Oh, and I have not watched the full video, but as a GM I would say make maximum use of weather. Not just storms (yawn) but all types of weather. Actually describe how the player physically feels - and apply bonuses or penalties based on the environment. Another minor but useful tip is ill-fitting armour / robes. So... every few steps you get chaffed. Seriously, when they get that fixed they will be very happy. From a GM point of view - easy credits. And my personal favourite the cat. Invent a cat. A normal, domestic feline. That turns up at the most unexpected times, glances, and buggers off. It never engages, but always survives. You can give the cat a plot line if your players are particularly dumb (it walks over a scroll etc) but I usually just use it for comedic relief. A recurring character that just moves things along when they start to drag.
Players play in a world where their characters are meaningful. Not just oh now you don't have magic because you did t do what a celestial would do. I'm fucking chaotic good. Wtf
My group likes to think of it more reasonable than realistic. Is something particularly realistic? Probably not. But could it theoretically and reasonably happen? Roll the d20
I'm currently running a 3.5 game, where my players got sucked into their characters bodies. Because of this the world is a mix between players world and characters world. The ultimate goal is to find out how and why yhis happened? Whether they fix it and go back or leave it?
Yes, I Isekaid them. Lol
I enjoy building a stable world, then kicking 3 pieces out of the jenga tower and watching everything trying to adjust.
Now my primary problem is that I don't have anyone to share my world with. So I just enjoy building the world for my self
Great video! I actually implemented collaborative storytelling with my players this past weekend. Do you have any more tips on having players help build your world with you?
You don't need a world to play D&D. Just create a group story and randomize what you don't imediately know. Join the dots while preparing your sessions. Done. No one cares about your game's world as much as you, instead of "lore dumping", discover the world together.
my personal tip: don't make an "end". no final boss, only unstable forces fighting for their own goals and trying to overcome their limits, players are the judges, the centerpiece which conduct this fighting forces aganist each over and THEIR choices may pave the path to succeed or downfall of ANY force opering in your world. give players power beyond the roll of the dice is what makes players cheer and awe when thinks go in some direction
This is all great advice. If anything, underplan, let your players build the world for you. When players go to a random shop, I've learned to ask, "What is the name of the shop?"
Giving up control as a GM and giving more agency to the players is good. It's lazy, and it gives your players the illusion of running the campaign.
Collaborative worldbuilding is actually SO fun. I definitely made 90% of mine by myself, but every player was given the chance to make their own culture or home country. I didn't particularly have a place for tieflings in my setting, for example (they're not my cup of tea), but I chose not to tell anyone that in case someone really wanted to play one. Lo and behold, one player made one and wrote this whole complex system of government and legal stuff to justify why her paladin was in exile and forced to take an oath of redemption. Boom, instantly tieflings were part of my setting and I love their inclusion now. It wouldn't be my setting without them. Make a map but leave blank spaces, friends!
One thing that I wish I knew
Not everything in your world should have an answer. There's a storm cloud that forms over this on particular city in this one time of the year...yea you could say it's the gods jousting over that city but it's even better if you say.
"The citizens have tried to explore it. Their best mages went into the clouds and all that was heard was the clatter of steel and abruptly ended screams before their lifeless bodies fell to the city floor. No one knows what's in the clouds, and they sure as hell don't want to risk more citizens to find out"
One thing I love about the World of Darkness games is that there's some deliberate inconsistency with lore. Real history is based on a lot of hearsay, poorly remembered details, propaganda, and conflicting opinions, and I think it makes a game all the more real and interesting if NPCs have different and partially conflicting recollections of what happened and why. Instead of info-dumping as a narrator, reveal information through people in the world. Have a couple NPCs get in an argument, about some world event "well, I heard that..." and "No no no! That's not what happened at all, it was...", and "No you're both wrong!" A few good conspiracy theories by common folk can go a long way toward giving the players a compelling mystery to unravel.
Grab some village, town and city maps but don't place them. Use these as the PCs explore or arrive in a new area that you hadn't planned for yet.
Also, have a list of names. When I play, I can tell when a DM is strugging coming up with names on the fly. Doing a tiny bit of prep and having a names list for a blank column for where/when they were introduced is a big help. DMs, can email the list of NPCs after each session so everyone has a record and the correct spelling.
How do you track what your player's enemies are doing what NPC and groups are doing to keep your world from static but not over whelm the work you do
Ok. Bear with me. I was visiting my siblings, parents and our dog. Then a world idea struck me like a Purple dragons energy force blast! I make the family home and surrounding area up towards the nearest mountains and forests an alternate reality place. Its the same place, municipality but its entered through a portal. And since I daydreamt about the mountain range due to playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 back in 1997, playing the Rampart faction had Green and Gold dragons nesting in mountains soooo. I imagined the small dark spots in the mountainside as cave dens. Soo back to my world idea. My lore part is that a green and a gold D&D dragon occasionaly fight over controlling their part of the mountain range. Distant roars and sparks of breath weapons can be glimpsed at night. And in real life theres a tour path by a lake near the foot of the mountain, accessed by a long gravel path circling by said lage and around a forest, some marsh inbetween. Both ends in a parking lot. BUT in the fantasy version. Instead of such a large parking lot, theres a tavern. And yes ANY real life tech stuff is gone or replaced by fantasy equalient gadgets, gizmos and such in the alternate fantasy place of my childhood home and surroundings
One of the best world building method i found is what we can found in Kids on Bikes, a ttrpg where we basically play as 80's children like in stranger thing/goonies/ET/Super 8 etc.
In fact, at the start of the first session (or during session 0) players decide what their town is called, what is the industry, is it growing or not, what are the landmark or building/shop which are important is the town etc etc all of these questions and the most important part is the rumors section. Each player shares one or two rumors about the town and its surrounding ("the old lady in the creepy mansion is a witch", "the wood is in fact a pathway to a realm of fairies", "Mr Marsh, the Math professor, is in fact an alien from planet X0-AZ21 who wants to conquer earth" etc)
As they are rumors, the player don't know if they are real or not but for you, as a GM, it is a real treasure because you can pick whatever you want to be true and make your own story with that and you can twist what they said to not be true but not false either (Maybe the old lady is in fact not a witch but the fairy queen who escape her realm by the portal in the forest when a coup was orchestrated against her by her cousin, Mr Marsh who want to find her and end their life!)
With this method, I didn't even prepared any KoB one shot I played! All the stories I played (A creepy mansion with distrubing phenomenon, a Cthulhu cult sacrifice in town, a secret new-nazi base in the underground of the mall, a serial killer mayor who wants revenge for his dog...) were created with some or all rumors my players came with at the table^^
I didn't apply this method to my DnD game yet because I already have 3 DnD campaigns I have to finish, but i think i will use it for my next campagin!
Took what the player have in mind is the most rewarding thing for them (especially when they discover that their rumor were true or twited) and a very helpful thing for you because this is the player who feed you for adventure hooks and stories!
I'm a middle school teacher in Boulder. All teachers should have to watch this video series. You could teach education courses. Thanks! 🤜💥🤛
I try to make my worlds require as little DMing as possible (partly because I am really REALLY lazy, and I don't really enjoy being in any sort of supervisory role). I build an independent framework of locations and "hub" events, and then have very quick tables to fill in details. Sometimes I roll, sometimes I just pick. Between games, I'll roll out some political events around the world to slightly change the state of the game without their intervention...because life goes on everywhere else whether the players are there or not. I also tend to work things the players accidentally assert, into the world somehow, whenever they don't radically contradict everything, which rarely happens.
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I prefer to keep worlds as flexible and independent as possible. I make the world capable of thematically existing WITHOUT the players OR myself, but still responsive to their actions. That way it feels like a living world doing its own thing and that the players merely exist in it, and have to deal with both its whims, and the consequences of their choices. They aren't the center of the universe...but they still could become it.
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That said, I'm also pretty fast and loose with player rolls. I rarely make them roll for anything if they've got sound reasoning and their statement/action sounds plausible (or especially enjoyable), and they've got the (close enough) stats for it, of course. I also negotiate...asking them if they're willing to accept some form of compensation (usually inspiration dice or something similar) in exchange for allowing me to force them to fail what they're attempting to do for dramatic effect. Basically, "Let me screw you over now for drama funsies, in exchange for a freebie whenever you want to use it."
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I ran a lvl 0 campaign start a few times, and had everyone choose no class. When they went out into the conflict, I would just ask them what they WANT to do, what they wish they were capable of, no matter how outlandish or outside the rules. I'd have them roll an appropriate ability check, and something reasonably similar to their request would occur, or not. I'd keep track of it all and offer some class suggestions to each player, based on those notes, at the end of the session. It frequently results in players choosing classes they hadn't typically considered, and even results in some racial retcons (which I usually allow by hand-waving it) that generate character concepts they'd never have played otherwise. Players tend to care far more about their characters that way...feeling more like they were "grown" than merely built.
#7 it's more historically accurate to have settlements close together. Here in the UK, the Romans built things a day's march apart, because you needed somewhere to stay when travelling. They wouldn't necessarily all be large settlements, but you'd get an inn, a bathhouse most likely, stables etc. This would then attract the native Brits, so you'd have some trading possiblities.
Oh, whilst you're doing d&d in a castle, you'll be smack bang in an area dripping in Roman history. Arbea is worth a trip, as is York, if just for a walk down the Shambles.
Great Video. Putting an emphasis on player experience is a much better method of world build than some of the others I've seen. Static worlds are not playable worlds, if you can't handle your PCs doing stuff don't run the game. Your players should be changing the world, for better and worse. I try to think 3 sessions in advance for my irl campaign to avoid too much "endgame" planning.
An additional piece of advice: combat should be a bigger part of the world building. "Random Encounters" don't do shit for you unless they're informing your players about the world. Maybe the dudes from Cherry House all are hand to hand fighters that use tricks and cantrips to annoy your players. Maybe everyone on Rock Mountain studies the Halberd or Glaive, so they are all Polearm Masters. Maybe the clerics of Bobiel have access to other spells and wear the same type of robe. Every combat is a chance to tell your players about the world.
I have nothing to add, so I just want to say 7:03.
Thank you, got a good chuckle out of it
Excessive realism... I once needed to map out a warehouse for a scenario. I spent WAY too much time trying to research "how big are medieval warehouses?" -- which admittedly was kind of an interesting rabbit hole -- before I told myself this wasn't the point and mapped out something that would let them have an interesting fight in.
I actually had an example of #10 in my current campaign. There's a region in my game world known as the Feywood (lots of portals to the Feywild). Several NPCs were leery of even getting too close to it, but it was only through firsthand experience that they learned one of its quirks: without a guide, walking into and out of the forest, along the same path and at (as far as they knew) the same speed, took radically different amounts of time. (One hour in, three hours out, if I recall correctly).
Thinking too big is not much of an issue for my game. My players tend to enjoy and explore all that my inns and taverns have to offer. Last session, they spent half the session in an upscale inn and spa after getting paid a fairly large sum, mingling with the locals, causing shenanigans... They have so much fun with the barkeeps and patrons, and it's exciting fleshing out all the characters and information found within. We have silly little hand signals for cooking. It's quite ridiculous in the best way. Instead of Dungeons & Dragons, it could be called Taverns & Breakfast!
Regarding background narrative, Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion as an optional supplement to The Lord of The Rings, building background and underpinnings. Writing a two to three page creation myth or other histories and making that available to the players has some value to establishing pantheons and values of the world.
Regarding presents… I will be more than happy to accept cookies 🍪
When I make a mistake in worldbuilding, particularly one involving an element of consistency, that my players spot and question, I will sometimes spin it into a mystery. "You have established that all members of this noble house are redheads...why is the scion that we met on the road dark haired? I may have forgotten that element of the house's description in the moment...but perhaps there is a story to be told about the lost, and cursed, son.
I really enjoy all your D&D videos helping with tips for various items. I was wondering if you could do a video for helping with developing a campaign. I am a big introvert and I want to RP more but I also want to run a campaign that is not published and of my own creation. Every time I work on one, I start getting overwhelmed and quit. I hope to learn more from you as I think you are really great.
I feel the last advic. one of my players is a huge dwarf nerd and his characters is obviusly a dwarf. I thought he was going to make a cool hometown but got a complex sociaty and literaly the most complex city in my game from him
I feel the last advic. one of my players is a huge dwarf nerd and his characters is obviusly a dwarf. I thought he was going to make a cool hometown but got a complex sociaty and literaly the most complex city in my game from him
I have a thing with the "realism" part, when I'm DM i build in some sort of consistency that can be understood as realism, specially I like to be consistent with the cultural and political aspects of my NPCs and locations, I like the same thing with my PCs and here is where the problem starts. My PCs are thought with a pseudo-realistic mindset so when they are encountered by absurd NPCs or PCs they get annoyed and suspicious, some times even acting against the "obviously good-guy NPC" that was created only to send us on our quest because their methods and ideas sound absurd to me and my characters suspects ill of them. In the best cases this brings interesting moments to the table but other times y gets me completely out of my enjoyment when absurd things keep happening I loose immersion and for me that is the most important part of DnD, immersion. I can play many other games without the need of feeling immersion, but DnD there's no point if I cannot loose myself in my character and the world.
> "You're going to change your mind about things."
This a lot, especially when the players don't do what you expect. don't plan in high detail everything that is to come, just have a rough sketch you can change on a whim.
Could you post super basic video on how world anvil works my brain. Is weird and I'm overwhelmed with options
A really good example of getting rid of realism is that in the campaign i'm in that it is set in America in 1945 (there's magic, its wierd). We just deleted homophobia and transphobia that would be realistic to the time period. We just all decided that since we're all queer (except one) we should be playing in a world that is accepting to us.
Ginny, you’re great, and your ads hilarious (and relevant)! Keep it up 😃
"Your world doesn't need to follow the laws of physics"
....me spending hours upon hours trying to figure out the axis of rotation and how a sun works in a planar world....