World Building: Baby Steps

With the end of my regular D&D game in sight, I have found myself looking at other RPGs on the market to find something interesting to play with my group. We have a lot of options, and decisions are yet to be made, but with the possibility of jumping into the Game Master's chair I got to thinking about how I would tackle creating a new campaign. Obviously the biggest challenge of that is building the world in which the players would live, fight and die (muhaha) in. So with that in mind, I figured I would write a short series of articles about how I go about world building, hopefully help some folks out, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process.

Talk to your players

The first and probably most important thing you should do when building your game world is to sit down with your players and discuss the type of game they want to play. I personally love sandbox worlds where the players are free to go and do pretty much whatever they want; but it's all well and good creating a massive open world, when all the players want to go through an action packed linear story game.

Chances are you'll have a bunch of different opinions from your players as to what kind of game they want to play (unless your extremely lucky), so some kind of compromise will have to be made. As much as GMs like to think of themselves as almighty gods, the truth is we wear the shackles imposed by our players. Sure we could kill them at a whim but if the players don't enjoy the game, there is no game.

So let's look at the two extremes, the sandbox and the linear: The former is an open world where the players are free to go and do what they like, literally forging the story with their actions; The latter is where the GM has a finely tuned and planned out story that they tell each session using the players as characters in their epic tale.  Both have their merits and faults - a sandbox takes much more time and forethought, but gives the players more freedom, while a linear game can take less prep time but the players may feel railroaded if they want to deviate from your story. After talking to your players you will most likely end up with something in the middle of these two approaches.

A good compromise would be to create a large area in which the game will take place. This area could be a city in political turmoil, a war-torn region trying to rebuild, or even a collection of planets. Once the area has been established, write a story that takes place here - think of it as the 'main quest line' in a computer game: a series of adventures surrounding a major conflict in your area that the characters eventually resolve. Next create points of interest in the starting area for your players to discover and explore while they go about the main quest. Throw in distractions along the way and make them do side quests in order to progress the story. This way the players still seem to have a lot of freedom over their actions but still have a tight focus.

For my other articles I will go through creating a world using the above method in much more detail. I hope you found this helpful and come back next time for when I begin to tackle the real stuff.

Next - World Building: Building Blocks >>>

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