Around the new year I began prepping and plotting for a new fantasy setting that I’ll eventually use in my next RPG campaign. Since then, I’ve been getting closer to the actualization of this new campaign from two directions: I’ve been writing bit by bit, but also the game I’m currently running is getting closer and closer to a conclusion. In seeing how much more I have to write (i.e. a lot), I made the decision to take a break from GMing so I can clear my creative plate and get this game together in a way that I can actually run the thing.

‘Actually run the thing’ has made me stare long and hard, not at my writing so far but at what my desired end product is. When you’re just starting prep for a game, especially when you’re writing an entirely new setting from the ground up, your focus is on what you want to know. What are the answers to the questions that will enable me to actually treat this setting as a world? What do my players need to know to create a character? What is the story I’m going to tell?

That last question is where you start to get into trouble. You need something, mind you, you need to know what sort of archetypes and tropes are going to be employed. But you don’t want a world cast in plaster that’s fully formed and nice to look at. You need patches of loose dirt that your players can drive stakes into, and that metaphor is kind of forced but I’m not changing it.

‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’ quickly shifted to ‘no plan survives contact with your players’ when it came time to apply the axiom to TTRPGs. I’d say it goes further than that, and no established setting provides contact with your players either. If you are building a setting before a game (as opposed to building a setting alongside the game like you do in the DIE RPG and many PbtA games), you are necessarily building a setting where the player’s characters don’t exist (they likely don’t in fact exist at the time of you writing). This means that you have two practical choices when it comes time to create characters for this game; either hand your players a veritable phone book of different clans, connections, and relatives they could have, or let them make it up and just scribble it into the world however it fits. I know there are plenty of gamers that get hardcore with their worldbuilding, but there’s one better choice for the most important world of all, the real one. You always need to balance the time you spend worldbuilding and writing against what material you actually need and which parts of the process you actually find fun. While there are many reasons to recommend Electric Bastionland, the fact that its map-making asks you to draw transit lines means I like it even more than I would otherwise. And yes, you’re goddamn right that this world of mine is going to have maps for its subway and commuter rail system.

But let’s get back to this idea of fruitful voids for a second. There are a couple different things going on here, and some of it just has to do with the nature of setting creation while some is more about gameplay philosophies and trying to square a circle when it comes to what you ‘should’ do with your prep. As far as setting creation goes, you’re always splitting the difference between top-down and bottom-up. Top-down is the big picture, what sort of planet this is, what grand events have happened, who are the gods in this setting if there are any, things like that. There’s a fair amount of top-down material you need just to give a pitch for your campaign, let alone run it, and there are definitely some top-down areas I have not addressed. This is a world of magic and mystery, yes, but I haven’t given religion a second thought and that seems, well, inaccurate. Even if I decide there are no gods, there would still be religion. Clearly still mulling over that one. At the same time, how deep would I need to go? Would I need to define a pantheon, or would I just need to broadly state how theology works and let players throw some ideas at the wall? Both valid, actual answer likely somewhere in the middle.

The bottom-up side is where the fruitful voids come in. A blank page isn’t a fruitful void, but you also don’t want to crowd everything with too much of your own information. My plan is to roughly sketch the starting town for the game, give some information about where it is relative to the rest of the world, what’s been happening in that part of the world, and a sociocultural reason that the party of player-characters is likely to set forth on a grand adventure. I like sharing some of the setting creation, but at the same time there are expectations that need to be met to make this actually fit in as a game. This is one thing that GURPS (the system I will likely run this game in) is very good at, there are easy and clear mechanical toggles that can help you and your players understand what the world is and isn’t. Worldbuilding towards rules-completeness is likely not everyone’s favorite way to do it, but it does work.

The question of gameplay philosophies goes back to old school Usenet simulationism, the OSR, and me deciding once and for all if this playstyle will actually jive with me and my group. I’ve talked at length about the OSR and how I consider their play philosophies (which are adopted piecemeal by virtually everyone except those who write blogposts about the right way to run games) over at Cannibal Halfling, and I keep running into certain challenges with parts of the OSR when it comes to my group: My group hates them. Random character generation is farcical, characters are nothing without backstories and stakes, and this whole ‘player skill’ thing should be saved not only for video games but even then only certain video games. This is why I tend back towards what I call ‘Usenet simulationism’, by the way, because it provides a framework that lets me adopt the parts of the playstyle that I actually care about without having a name like Blorb, which I will never be able to take seriously no matter how good the principles themselves are.

The basic idea behind any notional ‘simulationism’ in a roleplaying game is that the concern of the GM and to some extent the ruleset is to act as a world reacting to events happening in the game. This has absolutely nothing to do with realism, rather just the idea that the game is mediating events based on how they’d go down in the world. In the theoretical GNS framework this is contrasted with games where the concern of the rules and the GM (if there is one) is to mediate the creation of a satisfying or exciting narrative (narrativism) and games where the concern of the rules and GM is to adjudicate and then reward good play (gamism). The problem with all these frameworks is that what generally happened is that they were written by a group who were advancing one specific playstyle and then wrote others (two others in these cases) to try and somewhat subdivide all the people who weren’t playing the same kinds of games as them. As a result the frameworks never really worked, but the Forge theorists were writing a theory of narrativism and the Usenet theorists before them were writing a theory of simulationism.

I like the ideas of simulationism because, if done correctly, it frames up how you should be running a game that allows your players to push against the world and see how the world pushes back. If that sounds vague it’s because it is; when ‘simulationism’ includes everything from basically freeform all the way to GURPS, it’s not defining much. And indeed, mechanics don’t determine play agendas (this was a big thing from Usenet RPG Theory, the emphasis the Threefold Model was about how you play, not what you employ, which would change with later iterations). The OSR is big on minimal mechanics and lots of GM fiat not only because of this whole player engagement versus character engagement question, but also because the OSR is descended from old-school D&D which was unplayable without a lot of GM fiat.

Anyways. What I’m actually trying to get to is a question about how to make these things actually work at the table. What is the procedure of doing bottom-up worldbuilding while trying to have a consistent, reactive world? Simulationism, whether with that name, a dumb new name, or under the auspices of the OSR, uses the example of the ‘quantum ogre’ to explain what they find wrong with how games are run by people other than them (I tried to get a more specific definition, but wouldn’t you know there kind of isn’t one). The idea of the quantum ogre is simple: A hypothetical adventuring party comes to a fork in the road in a place they’ve never been. The GM has prepared one encounter, an ogre. If the party goes down path A, they meet the ogre. If the party goes down path B…they meet the ogre. Now, the reason this is treated with some degree of disdain is that it was a very real suggestion in GMing advice in the 90s and 2000s, and it was advice designed entirely to mitigate the workload imposed on a GM by D&D at the time (AD&D 2e and D&D 3e were both fairly unkind to GMs in terms of encounter design, 5e is similarly bad now). It turns out there are plenty of things wrong with this, mostly about illusion of choice, but it does seem amusing that some ran with this so far in the opposite direction that now we’re supposed to run fully prepped worlds (read: buy their fully prepped world. 375 pages! $40 on Kickstarter! Art that’s probably not AI!). 

So on one hand, I want to run a reactive world that satisfies both my and my players’ sense of verisimilitude. On the other, I don’t derive an income from my TTRPG prep, so I will not exist at the platonic ideal of OSR/simulationist worldbuilding that only exists in blog posts. So it is possible that what I’ll end up doing will be the boring, middle of the road prep that is already described in thoughtful games. Kevin Crawford has good advice on this. Focus on what you’ll need for the next game session, and do more only if you’re having fun. This is good advice to follow.

With that conclusion, it’s clear this is more of a rant than anything else; actually getting back into doing more game prep and trying not to fly by the seat of my pants has reminded me how useless a lot of prep advice is. Prep advice is about how and what to prep, mind, not about what to write, how to design encounters, or anything like that. The act of building a world along with your players is so much more based on social skills than writing skills, and social skills aren’t something you can take for granted in these sorts of hobby spheres. Sorry nerds. But seriously, it’s good to write it out and then remind yourself to relax. Returning to GURPS after over ten years has given me blank page syndrome like whoa, but it’s also reminded me why I ran so much GURPS in the first place and how much I enjoyed it. I do have a lot of prep to do; they aren’t kidding when they say this game is front loaded. But even with that said, I’m glad I’ve pulled myself off the ledge of writing a damn Domesday Book for this thing.