Worldbuilding 1a: Design

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.

The temperature is -26 C and my guests have cancelled, so there won't be a feast of St. Stephen this year ... so conveniently the window I spoke of last night has opened.  I've worked on the wiki a bit, I've worked out and rested and had a shower; so let's get started.

I'd like this series to be as practical and thorough as possible — an attempt, if the reader will, to outline my entire viewpoint on the matter to date.  Then perhaps I can tidy it up and release it as a book, or perhaps as a replacement for my worldbuilding section in How to Run, should I wish to publish an upgraded version of the latter.

First and foremost, I'd like to express my stand on "overreaching" as it applies to worldbuilding.  I've encountered several cases where this argument is made, counselling would-be designers to refrain from attempting to make too much world.  I don't doubt that many designers DO find themselves pouring hundreds of hours into a project, only to find that most of that effort has been wasted on disinterested players or on a game world that fails to "succeed."  Understand, however, that the diagnosis of "overreach" misunderstands what has actually failed.  It's not that DMs make too much ... it's that designers concentrate on the wrong things; or information that isn't crucial; or on work done according to what seems immediately important in the present.

Worldbuilding is a complex, intricate tangle of needed details that must be made ready with the right amount of attention, in the right order and with a clear, fundamental understanding of what will need to be done in the future.  If we give too much attention to things that don't need it; or we skip around with the order in which things need to be done; or we blissfully pay no attention to how what we're doing today will crucially affect how we'll do things in the future, then YES, we will end up with a ghastly mess.

The key issue is that no agreed-upon order appears to exist.  And that is partly due to a community-wide failure to acknowledge that worldbuilding is a GIGANTIC endeavour ... one for which hundreds of hours is a drop in the bucket.

I mentioned some months ago that I was cleaning duplicate and degenerate files from my computer.  These had been built up over 25 years.  I thought I was being careful.  However, I recently learned that I inadvertantly deleted all the files relating to my mapping of western China last year.  It's all gone.  Including the excel spreadsheets that I used to plot the various cities on the map.  This effort alone consisted of about 150 to 200 hours of work spread over two months.  And now if I want a map of China, I have to do it again.  From this lesson, we should recognize that wasting 100 hours will happen.  Mistakes will be made.  Files will be accidentally deleted; or computers will crash; or we'll make the wrong decisions and have to scratch our efforts and do it again.  There's nothing for it.  This is design.  And until that's understood about the process, a world will never get built.

Let's therefore address the subject of "Order."  As an example, suppose that we are filmmakers arranging to produce the film Shawshank Redemption for the first time.  Yes, we're excited about showing the film before a live audience; yes, we're excited about the awards we'll get.  We're excited to start shooting the picture.  But we can't do any of that on the first day.  On the first day, somebody, somewhere, has to obtain the rights to the Stephen King Novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, so that the script can be written.  As I've explained, the script will take hundreds of hours, and even after it's written, it won't be "done."  It'll be rewritten for the producer, and again during the storyboarding process, and again during filming.  A dozen people or more will change words, lines, plot points and details, shifting and adjusting and adapting the script for the needs of each department involved in making the film.

Once we have a "working script," however, we can prepare today for the things we'll need to do in the future.  We know that, in the future, we'll need a poster of Rita Hayworth.  We'll need a piece of obsidian, and a rock wall to put it under, and a hayfield for the rock wall to be in, so Red can find it.  We'll need a boat that Andy can be working on when Red reaches Zihuatanejo.  We'll need an old 1950s style bus for Red to ride on.  We'll need little rock figurines to go in Andy's window, and a Bible that's cut out for the rock hammer to go into.  We'll need an "Andy" and a "Red" and a "Brooks."  But understand ... while we know we'll need these things, we don't rush around getting them right now, because if we change the script in some way, then we may not actually need a bus.  Or a boat.  Or a Brooks.  We don't know yet.  So we don't work on those things!  We need to work on the things we need to work on first.

Once we have the script, we need the money.  Money pays for the time spent.  Money buys the artists that will make the storyboard that will help nail down everything that someday we're going to need.  When the storyboard is made, it is a SIMPLE representation of what the story will be.  It's an attempt to nail down every shot that's going to happen when the product is being filmed.  That will enable us to make a shot schedule, that will save money by ensuring that we film every bit and piece that goes on in Andy's cell in a few days — and we won't have to go back and redress the set, and ensure continuity, because we forgot to shoot something.

Does that mean the storyboard is "done" when it's done?  I hope you're learning.  Nothing is "done" until it's in the can and it's too late to change it — usually, because it costs too much money to change it.  Those annoying little continuity errors that get people upset?  Yes, people making the film saw them first.  And decided, it was too fucking expensive to fix it.  Sure they could have gone back and reshot the scene.  But someday, the director and crew and actors hope to make some other film ... and spending more money on this one won't meaningfully increase its take at the box office.

So.

We want to make a world.  What have we learned?  Our first ideas must adapt and adjust to our limitations and choices.  Our first steps are to avoid detail!

However disappointed we might be in the rendering, the important details are there.  As a director, we see the final scene in our mind for months, even years, before the cameras as set up.  We convey our vision to the camera operator, who works to make that vision happen; we examine the dailies that night to see if we got what we wanted.  We take the shot in five or six different ways so the editor can use the version that works best with the final product, after a lot of changes have been made.  When the storyboard is made, we might be fairly sure that Morgan Freeman's involved — thus it's a black man by the wall, rather than the Mainelander who's Red in King's original novel (which, yes, I've read, first time in 1980, last time about three years ago).  

The D&D game world has to be addressed in the same manner.  It isn't a matter of starting with a small area and expanding, or a large area and zooming in; it's a matter of needing a bare minimum of detail that permits you to run the event when it comes.  Like the director making stuff up at the last moment, or the actor producing something really unexpected that gets caught on film, as a DM you've got to take the bare bones of whatever you've made in advance and give it flesh and infuse it with life.  Not because you're grabassing your game or doing things "on the fly," but because you wrote down a few key details that you'll remember later how to fill them out when the time comes.

As such, you don't write 500 words describing the tavern; you have a tavern in your head, that corresponds to a memory in your head.  And you write down, "Tavern; like that place in Wisconsin."  There you are.  Prep done.  Move onto the next thing.

We have too much to do.  We cannot blow time meticulously writing down details that can be added later.  Hell, by then, we may think of different details.  Better details.  New details.  We have to grasp that there will be a future, we have to prep for that future ... but we also have to let the future handle some of the load.  Our job is to ensure than when the future comes, that what we've worked on now doesn't compromise what we'll need to work on then.

Consider.  Halfway through making Shawshank Redemption, some executive producer decides Andy needs a love interest.  It doesn't make any sense, but this producer has a lot of money and clout and we won't get a distribution deal if he doesn't get his way.  What'll we do?

The solution is we don't take money from people like this in the first place, no matter how desperate we are or how much money it is.  And we don't become people like this, grabbing at things that sound "nifty" out of the blue, that are bound to wreck everything we've done in the past.  We establish guidelines for what we're ready to do with our game world, and we LIVE by those guidelines.  We have a clear vision of what our world is, how it works, what we want it to do and where to draw the line on ourself.

If we can't do that, then sometime in the future we will wreck everything good about our game world, we'll watch the players desert it, and then we'll write an article for some D&D online magazine about why "overreaching" is what killed our world.

It's not an overreach to take a line drawing of a man at a brick wall and transform it into an emotionally charged shot filled with beauty, intensity and hope.  It's patience.  It's perseverance.  It's seeing a future and moving relentlessly towards it.  As I have done with my own world.  As you can do with yours, provided you're ready to envision more than what you're putting down on paper, so you don't have to put everything down on paper today. 

Put a little of it down and then say to yourself, "Someday, I'll get around to that."  And when you find someday has arrived, you'll marvel at how easy it is to pick that up and fill in the next part.  In future, you'll find yourself understandably confident that when you put something down today, you will pick it up someday.  It won't be wasted, or forgotten.  It will wait there, until its time comes.

Okay.  Go back, read all this again.  We'll get started with getting started with the next post.