Thread by @JesseHeinig

I guess now a thread about worldbuilding and how it's part of the production of RPGs? Not "how to build a world," but "how RPGs generate worldbuilding in ways that other media often don't and why this matters."

(Relevant to Certain Other Things)

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In a broad-scope RPG like #DnD or Green Ronin's #Threefold or #Shadowrun or the #WoD you have a big world with a lot going on, specifically so that game groups can grab hooks that resonate with them and then build their own game sessions in ways that interest them.

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Some indie RPGs are very narrow in scope—you're climbing a mountain to kill a witch, or writing a journal of a thousand-year-old vampire, and that's all the game does. Big world games instead say "You figure out what your group likes in this world, here are a million hooks."

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This makes the games approachable to a broad audience. There are many, many ways to play #Vampire, and as a result it's a game with a large player base—both because the subject matter is interesting and entertaining, and because you can do a lot with it.

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To make that happen, it's useful for the game to have:

* Strong themes. There are recurring motifs, relatable problems, elements that drive through all aspects of the game. These inform many kinds of play.

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* A broad world. There are a lot of places to go and things to do. You can run the game for multiple groups and each one can have a wildly different experience.

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* A multitude of antagonists. Maybe this week you're fighting orcs and next week you're fighting an arcane conglomerate that uses captive labor to gain market influence in local politics. Maybe your enemy is another vampire, or it's a shadowy conspiracy, or it's yourself.

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To make these, you need to make the world. You have to describe these places, themes, and antagonists. You're doing what movies might consider production design: Creating the entire fiction that holds all of the stories.

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.@mattcolville has written about this sort of thing, like how Blade Runner's production design was hugely detailed because the production was delayed, so the designers had time to go into every detail.

squaremans.com/blade-runner/

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In RPGs, big games make up these entire worlds, and a typical game group might only use a fraction of it. But the whole world is there, and new books and materials come out that fill in corners, add new twists, and make the world feel authentic.

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Production design in RPGs is so robust—and the field so underpaid and so unprotected legally—that RPG designs routinely influence big IPs. Star Wars, for years, leaned heavily on West End Games' RPG creations. White Wolf and Sony famously had a lawsuit over Underworld.

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It's so easy to just steal an RPG's designs to make a movie or TV show that it's happened more than once, always at arms' length, but what game designer has the money to sue a big media studio over something like this?

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For the current iteration of D&D, a huge amount of this worldbuilding is outsourced to the community, in the form of third-party and DM's Guild material. WotC can release a book like Eberron or Spelljammer and then never support it again. The community does the work.

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Business-wise, this is just good sense. Supplements don't sell nearly as well as core books. That's why for so long RPGs would release a rule set, release a bunch of supplements, then reboot with a new edition and do it all over again. The tail drops off over time.

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The community OGL model lets WotC hand off all of the work of creating the world around these D&D settings to other people, and still get paid (since they take a chunk of the money from DM's Guild sales).

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You want to run an Eberron game but you want more details, more adventures? You buy @HellcowKeith's great books on the DM's Guild. You want to play Spelljammer but you want detailed ship combat rules? The community has you covered.

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A large chunk of this material also comes from earlier editions of the game. Matt C. likes to talk about how we're just scrabbling around the ruins of titans. That's certainly true of D&D settings today: We're picking up the pieces of 2nd-3rd edition material.

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In the '90s and '00s, TSR and later WotC (and their licensees) released a massive library of books. Supplements every month, for multiple game lines. There's a wealth of content for Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, everything.

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So now the community picks up those bits and pieces and refurbishes them into 5e content and releases them on DM's Guild, where they're allowed to use some of that material. (Obviously not Dark Sun, or I'd be doing that.)

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But if you... say... destroyed the entire community support base? Discouraged anyone from doing this? Made it so that anyone with a money-making idea deliberately didn't want to do business with you?

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You'd be nuking your entire support structure for worldbuilding from orbit, and then wondering why you're getting ashes instead of paychecks from third-party designers releasing stuff that gives you FREE MONEY.

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And you'd be cementing that your release cadence is about just shoveling out something to make a profit this quarter, that you have no plans to continue official support for things that people really enjoy. Like Netflix! (See how well that's working out for them?)

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And make no mistake: The imprimatur of "official" content carries a lot of weight in nerd-dom (though perhaps less than it used to). What a company counts as "official" matters, and if it says that "officially" there is nothing beyond just a thin sketch to its game worlds...

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... this tells gamers that really, there's not much reason to buy anything about a setting or about a story, is there? Because it will just be an overview and you will never get any other details. So why get invested?

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Now, if your goal is to make a lifestyle brand? To get people REALLY STRONGLY INVESTED in your characters, stories, quotable moments, set pieces, factions, villains, conspiracies, so that they buy merch of everything?

THIS IS THE EXACT WRONG MOVE.

~Fin~