A Worldbuilding Aside

There's a Florida proverb that goes, "When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp."

That's what rants are.  In trying to improve a reader's DMing skills, or the game setting they offer the players, or how best to run a role-playing game, it's easy to get caught up in subpoints like, "What's logic got to to with a fantasy world?  It's just make believe!"

I like the proverb very much ... especially since when people explain the proverb, as Wiktionary does, it's totally ignored that draining a swamp produces alligators.  And if you don't fight them off, well ... they eat you.  The proverb doesn't just say that it's easy to lose sight of one's objective.  It ALSO says that the fallout of one's objective creates unforseen, disastrous consequences that MAKE is easy to lose one's objective.  The losing of an objective ISN'T our fault.  It's baked into the objective.

The question of logic and fantasy worlds has to be answered.  We're not going to drain a swamp with our leg in an alligator.  In the long run, if we're going to take up a position, it's not enough to "express" our position.

We have to defend it.

So.  Logic vs. fantasy.   For nine posts I've expressed the position that for the world to have any real depth, it has to be founded in sufficient logic to make the world believable for the players.  If the players let go a hammer in the game world, it's reasonable for them to expect the hammer to fall.  Likewise, because the players are passionately experienced with a gravity force equal to Earth, and with no other example long-standing gravitational force, it stands to reason that whatever fantasy world we invent, that gravity thing's GOT to be familiar.  Otherwise, it's just problems, problems, problems.

Now, a swamp full of alligators can come rush at me with hundreds of examples of things that haven't got to be as exact to the real world as gravity ... and they're right.  Many things don't have to be "logical."  I have beetles the size of houses in my game world.  This is definitely not logical.  Physics just don't work that way.  I could rattle off about a thousand things in my world that fit equally into the "not-logical" category.  I don't hide it, it's right out there, I've systematically organized it into a blog.  But conveniently, when the alligators come at me for, "But Alexis, the game world isn't about logic!" ... these thousand illogical things in my game world are never addressed.  No, what's addressed, are the logical things.

Readers.  Some things have to be logical.  Our players expect it, our players make plans depending on it — and when that's not what they get, the respect our game world gets goes down.

Now.  We can all think of "silly" game worlds, and how much fucking fun they were.  Oh fuck, did we laugh our fucking guts out.  Even I, dear readers, spent hundreds of hours in jack-off game worlds, laughing so hard, I fell on the floor.  Human beings are funny.  Creativity can be fantastically funny.  And D&D, with all it's absurdity, is THE straight-man of games.

Where are those games now?  Gone, of course.  All the people I played those games with?  Quit D&D.  They became insurance salesmen, they became engineers, they got families, they learned to play golf and bring their work home and forget about "childish" things like laughing really hard about ... well ... shit like this:

If ever they thought it was funny ... well, that was fleeting.  Because however funny something is, it's shallow.  It doesn't last.  Three or four years from now, that really funny, funny game world ... it'll be gone.  Or dragging itself over the same ground with different asses in the chairs.

And there are DMs who can do that.  There are people who never get tired of NASCAR.  They never get tired of catcalling women on the street.  They never get tired of laughing at a waiter dropping a tray.  They still watch the Simpsons.  The only thing they get tired of is jokes they don't get.

I'm assuming the people here, reading this blog, aren't those people.  After all, I'm not pouring water into the swamp, making the alligators happy ... I'm draining the swamp.  I'm making arguments that say, if your world's going to better, then — while it can keep a whole lot of illogical stuff — it really needs to increase it's logic.  It needs more logic.  Not total logic.  Just more.

See, logic isn't a black-and-white thing.  We can set the measure.  I'm arguing that climate-plus-flora is something the players expect.  That nations have behaviours.  That available food dictates culture.  That complexity creates rewards that may not seem to matter in the beginning, but will later on.

But I'm doing a little more than that, and I haven't talked about this yet.  It's coming up in bits and pieces from commenters on the worldbuilding posts.

The one person the game world must feel real for is the creator.  If our game worlds don't feel substantive and positively exciting for us, then we'll never get far enough in the construction phase to present anything to our players.  Most of the time, when someone argues that we should have less detail in our game world, this springs from a past experience where they added too much ... so much, in fact, that they began to HATE those details.  The advice to have less detail is desperate to circumvent this, hoping this will make the game flexible and lively ... but less detail just makes something shallow and horrid for different reasons.

On the whole, this is like the person who gets out of a deep, complicated relationship with plenty of responsibilities and expectations ... and argues that "next time," they'll keep it simple and easy — only to invest so little into their relationship that they're quickly looking to upgrade into another relationship where they actually give a shit about something.

There are no easy answers.  An overly complex game can be garbage.  A simple game can be garbage.  The difference between "good" and "garbage" is not complexity.  It's how well a thing is made.  It's the care and consideration taken by the maker.  It's the willingness of sacrificing time and pain to make something right; and then becoming addicted to that sacrifice.

I counsel the readers to make worlds with density and depth because, in the end, YOU will need it to have those things if you expect the world to sustain your interest five or ten years from now.  I'm not saying, "If you don't care about climate, your players won't."

I'm saying, "If you don't care about climate, you won't care at all."

You don't have to believe this.

I'll end with a story from Niels Bohr, as told by Slavoj Zizek:

A friend visited Niels Bohr in a countryside house, and noticed above the entrance door, a horseshoe ... the friend was shocked and addressed Niels Bohr, "My god, I thought you were a scientist; do you believe in this kind of superstitious crap?"

Niels Bohr answered, "No, I"m not crazy."

Then the other guy says, "But why is it there?"

Here, Niels Bohr gave the correct answer ... "I have it there because I was told that it works, even if you don't believe in it."