Let's think about this logically. Worldbuilding is a spectrum with a shapeless void on one end and a perfectly detailed world on the other. Obviously, we want something closer to the detailed world. But do we want the most perfectly detailed world possible? Practically speaking, it would take years of intensive work to come anywhere close to that, and there does come a point where knowing each NPC's favorite food lacks much of a point. So where is the line? How do we get the perfect balance of worldbuilding to narrative freedom so that we're neither too rigid nor too flexible?
I've done a lot of worldbuilding. As of the writing of this article, there are 59 articles on homebrew setting details from big picture (homebrew rules for magic, gods, and dragons) to very small details (pet culture, home décor, and tattoo art). Were all of these necessary? Absolutely not. I did not need to, for instance, design city flags for all of the major cities in my homebrew setting. These have yet to enter or enrich gameplay, and so they were just an academic experiment, a creative act meant to connect with my world. And that's really the trick--worldbuilding is a way to connect to the world and better understand it, not something that's meant to define the players' experience.
A while back, I played in a campaign that I overall enjoyed. There was this one thing that got in the way of full enjoyment, though, and that was that I always felt like we were on a tour (often guided) of my GM's worldbuilding. His favorite characters, NPCs he'd written stories about for years, were additional party members or vital allies and foes. Our adventures took us across the land, checking out all manner of homebrew locations. It was all very memorable, but I didn't feel like our party was the star of the show. I felt like we were witnesses to a story being told by forces bigger than us. It was not what I would describe as completely fulfilling.
I think that GM let worldbuilding get in the way. I think he spent, as I did, dozens of hours worldbuilding and creating characters and preparing stories, and he got swept up and forgot that we--the party--were supposed to decide the story, that we were the stars of the show. In reality, his NPCs should have been interesting supporting characters. His locations should have been scenes for us to define. But everything was already written when we got there, so it was hard to feel empowered as characters.
The thing is, this is a good GM. His characters, player character and NPC, are interesting and real. His settings are classic fantasy with a brutal twist that's always fun. His storylines put complex questions of good and evil at the feet of the players. It's just this one thing that got in the way for me, and I think the mindset that gripped my GM is a common thing.
The truth is, our job as GMs is not to paint a perfect picture. We could, if we really wanted to, spend five minutes lovingly describing a stretch of hallway every time a party passes through one. We could paint a novel-style portrait of the merchant who will never be interacted with again. These obviously don't help us, though, and they don't help the player.
I have a simple rule: if a bit of worldbuilding naturally comes up, I'll go into it. I've written about burial methods before, and when someone was to be buried in one of the epilogues of my most recent campaign, I referred to that information and had the burial proceed appropriately. In the same campaign, the player characters hopped across different cities and cultures, and I was able to describe changing geography and architecture styles. In epilogues of a recent campaign, each player bought street food in the city they'd chosen as their home base, and I could give them distinctive experiences.
But the thing is, I didn't provide burial methods information at every turn. The geography and architecture of each location was provided as it was relevant (in small bursts as the location is explored), not in one long, nonstop lecture about the appearance of a city. I explained what street food was available when players sought out lunch while exploring their cities, not the second the entered the city. I offered worldbuilding details as necessary, and never more. The star of the show is my players, not my worldbuilding.
And it's not like I'm not proud of my worldbuilding! My guides to clan groups and other organizations revolutionized how I think about my homebrew groups. My guide to clothing forever changed how I imagine my world looking. My guide to parenting style informed how individual people think about family, about authority, and about themselves. My guide to the solar system looked beyond Evanoch and even Izar, the planet it is on, to situation all of this in a larger context. My guide to lasting feelings about a continent-wide war fought over freedom of magic use is full of interesting and useful information that also invites new stories being told. But I cannot start out a campaign by having an NPC run up to the party and shout, "There's some interesting organizations to look into, and clothing styles can tell you a lot about a person, and everybody raises their kids differently here, and the solar system is vast and plentiful, and there was a recent war that people are still pretty upset about. Welcome to Evanoch!" That would be bad for a number of reasons. But if over the course of an entire campaign, they met a few interesting groups and got some interesting examples of fashion and had some conversations about parenting and learned about a distant planet and spoke with a veteran of that war, that gives the impression of a full, rich, living world.
It's almost counter-intuitive. To give the impression of a rich world, you don't want to lead with all of your worldbuilding. You could, but then there would be no story, no combat, no time to characterize the player characters, and no room to relax or be silly. It would be all worldbuilding, all the time. So obviously, we need more of a balance. Some room for story and combat and characterization and silliness. But how much? The answer is also counter-intuitive: it's response, not action.
Tabletop games are built on improvisation: I say one thing to establish a scene/story, and you say something that validates it and adds to it, and I do the same until we've told a little tale or made people laugh or whatever or goal was. In tabletop games, the players say one thing (an action, for instance), and the GM responds (a consequence, an NPC action, etc). Worldbuilding falls under this umbrella. Anything you do or say as the GM constitutes your time adding to the game. If you spend ten minutes describing worldbuilding, you need a balance of time to do other things, or you risk loredumping, the exhausting experience of having your GM give you loads of worldbuilding information with little actual gameplay. (It happens to the best of us, but never stop trying to keep that balance.)
So treat your worldbuilding details as improvisation additions. If a party adds that they are going to a market area, offer some street food as an option. If a party is in a room with a telescope and an eager astronomer, offer them a glimpse of the stars. If a player character opens up about their parents, let the NPC with complicated feelings commiserate with them. But these are responses. The street food vendor being unavoidable is unnecessary, as is the astronomy lesson. The "parents raised me wrong" speech is only something you should do if the player is into it.
Think of worldbuilding this way: the point is not to put a bunch of interesting things out there to show the players. The point is to have interesting things ready for when (or if) the players go looking for them. To be honest, there are worldbuilding details I developed over a decade ago that have never come up. There are worldbuilding details I should have developed over a decade ago that I only got to recently. It's an imprecise science, truly more of an art. What will be useful to you will vary. If your world is more narrow, you will have an easier time covering every base. If, like me, you have a very broad world in order to capture more possibilities, worldbuilding will be about breadth too (hence my worldbuilding articles here picking a broad topic and exploring it across every group--the best organized way to cover all bases). But the point isn't to describe every detail. The point is to have something interesting ready to go.
I'll go back to the example of the burial. It was in the epilogue of a character named Brokk, and it was very striking to Brokk and his player. In this moment in the game, Brokk had just become a Cleric of Nerull, a knight of the balance of life and death, and he had chanced upon the dead body of a woman in a halfling burial ground. Brokk struggled to know what to do next--he was new to being a champion of death and had no instructions, and he hesitated to do anything drastic in the middle of a major city. Before he could decide on an action, a few people came in and set to preparing the woman's body for traditional halfling burial: burning. Brokk knew that he couldn't heal this woman, who he sensed had died before her time, if she was burned, so he acted quickly and raised her from the dead. Spooked, the man preparing the burning ritual left in a hurry, and Brokk gently sent the now-conscious woman on her way.
Readers, I am a good improviser, but I am not a good enough improviser to come up with "burning" as the most distressing thing that could be waiting around the corner for this woman. Brokk and his player were dismayed. It was a powerful moment, and because I had to pause to confirm halflings burn corpses, it felt official and more objective, so the obstacle it imposed was valid like the rules are. And think about it this way: if the goal is to create memorable worldbuilding details, in what other way would the knowledge that halflings burn their dead be more memorable for this player?
The knowledge of halfling burial was imparted at a time that it mattered--when the player cared about it--and that made it a good worldbuilding detail for what we needed. You could have tomes of details about every town in a massive world, and if you read them off, your gamers would be bored to tears. We're not here to hear a dramatic reading of the Silmarillion. We want to be a part of a story and have fun together. Some worldbuilding helps that. Too much chokes it. If you want to not get weighed down by worldbuilding, you have to chose to offer it more sparingly and trust that a detail at the right time does more than twenty details offered freely.
That's all for now. Coming soon: reflections on the campaign of a lifetime, a guide to the planes, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!
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