I accomplished to have my players attend to an NPC's birthday party through sheer world-building, and I have this as a personal achievement hahah

My bragging fact as a DM was this time when a I killed an NPC my party liked (the plot asked for it) and they paid a f*cking poster depicting the moment as well as the reaction of each of the PCs just because they started to look this character as a close friend as a result from all of the interactions and moments they had. As a DM I was so proud of my PCs, so much so that I rewarded the party with a plant from one of the unburned twigs from the pire of the NPC funeral. The plant have the soul of the NPC in it and they still talk to it planning trips to the NPCs hometown and so on. The next day they flooded our whatsapp group with questions about the culture, the history of his hometown, his familly, all of those things. Characters is indeed world building.

For my favorite game I ever ran, (though a sadly short-lived one) I hade a friend who was a musician who also coincidentally wanted to play a bard. Every week I would write a short poem in medieval verse about some legend to do with the world, and he would write a simple melody and then find a moment to play it for the group in character. This wound up being the most any players have engaged with my lore! Although I wasn't able to convey nearly as much about the world as I could have through wiki articles, it felt more natural because we were presenting the lore in the way that characters in the world would actually learn it. Unfortunately I haven't since had any musical players playing musical characters with whom I can collaborate on full songs like this, but I still write poetry for all of my games, so as to make the lore writing itself part of the diegesis.

i once read an article or forum post in a german roleplay forum many years ago about relationship maps as a base for adventure writing. like that you mostly only build NPCs and factions and their relationships between each other and to the player characters and from there do the heavy lifting for a sandbox like playstyle.... sadly i can't find this original article or post anymore and nobody in the roleplay community talks about relationship maps as a design tool somehow :(

I think your take on this is pretty spot on. Your friends that meet up with you for a session of d&d aren't there to hear you prattle on about the intricacies of the world you've written up in your spare time. It is through their own curiosity that things you want to tell them should leak out. Sure you may have pages of prepwork and a detailed history written down but no one intrinsically cares about that wall of text. It's on the players to make connections for it to matter and it's through the characters they interact with that the the best way is found

100% agree. Whether a standard narrative or an interactive one, the two halves of good storytelling are character agency and world-building. When you're building the world, the races, the factions, the political groups, the clans, the magical houses, etc., the characters you created are examples (or counter examples) of these elements. These dwarves are rugged and strong, but this specific dwarven character is not. Why? By expressing why he is different, you (potentially) express how a whole race in your world functions. When that character makes decisions which are consistent with (or in congruent against) their racial/faction, you have developed the character and their origin. Granted, most of the time these may be statements against a norm (the wine-making dwarves of Nappa). Character is both an expression of and a feedback-loop back into world-building. Empowering a player with this sort of agency can be scary, but that's also were the one-of-a-kind scenes happen that only four/five people in the world will ever experience.

Interesting point of view. Lucky I have never got this issue, I try to make my world as active as possible, there's stuff happening everywhere, I really try to make the world a character itself, with motives and reasons to be. Thanks for sharing, and I love the content so far!

While I really enjoyed this video and found it to be very inspiring, I am a filthy contrarian and therefore have to object on some points: Works of fiction focusing on the world rather than the story have always been around, just perhaps not as wide spread. Frank Herbert very much put his focus on the world of DUNE - quite literally, since the book started out as a ecological examination of a desert (planet) Some people (me included) are more interested in the world of a story, rather than the characters, which is why I find myself enjoying storys with comparatively "bland" or simple characters, but an incredibly immersive world so compelling (a great example of this is Metro:Exodus) While characters are indeed one of the greatest mediums to communicate a world, one shouldn't overlook other aspects the players/readers/viewers are going to come into contact with organically, such laws, culture, landscape, points of interest ect.

This 'worldbuilding at the player level' is why I am really excited for Chris McDowall's new project. Those playbooks in which he states rules about the world are also actionable, meaning that they are interesting to the players (at least in theory, I've yet to try it at the table). I think he did an editorial about mattering that sums it up pretty nicely.

I can't find words to say I agree enough with you on this. I still remember in horror the *bloody booklet* that one DM I had long time ago developed in years of play, almost all the time with just another player a friend of mine. The two would exchange role between master and player continuing the same saga for years (and developing this booklet full of characters). Since I used to live out of town for long periods or even change city for years I wasn't part of all this. When I showed up to stay in town more permanently I asked to play with them once again. It was AWFUL because no matter how much dedication and care I would craft my characters and find interesting motivations the DM would always ignore my efforts and just try to feed me with their styles and visions. At the time my self-esteem was seriously hit by their harsh commentary about my play, inadequacy and inability to conform with their self-proclaimed AWESOME background and play-style. Because rpgs has been truly a big part of my identity and focus. After that I just stopped playing rpgs for years. Ancient local rpg usenet newsgroups probably "saved me" helping me to find new ways to look at games and recontextualize all my rpg experience. I also discovered the rising indie games movement which was totally eye-opening at the time for me. And by the way those "dark" years were just a fraction of my entire rpg history, started out gloriously very young long before all that. But this little sad episode should clearly show that no "good master" can entitle themselves ignoring the expectations and visions of his players through their characters and beyond. So thank you for reminding everybody this absolute truth.

Only partway through the video, but I think as long as the GM has fun doing the world-building [even if it doesn’t involve characters], it has served it’s purpose. The world-building should help the GM understand how the world works and help them get excited about showing the world to the players.

Inside out world building, like you're talking about, is I find a much more interesting, and useful kind of world building than outside in. If you create this whole big world with eons of history, who cares about anything that has nothing to do with the characters? If your world consist only of a dungeon, and a small town, that's okay! More of the world will reveal itself as the players explore it, and as they tell you what they want to discover and find. It also adds more whimsy and mystery to your setting because your setting can, and does, encompass everything your players want to see. Instead of a premade world which only contains what you had thought to put into it before.

This really made me think differently about how I prep my games, thank you so much! I loved this approach and I’m going to 100% give this a try!

I do tend to take worldbuilding and story writing as two separate activities, but that's more because story is something I do for others while worldbuilding is something I do for me. I only tell what needs to be told and hold on to the rest for a rainy day or to keep from self-contradiction. Do the players need to know that that old ruins the townsfolk won't go near was built as a frontier garrison by the Balunai Empire 2000 years ago? No. But it helps me keep descriptions straight, informs how I lay things out, and helps me put together bits of environmental storytelling

I can already tell there is some *interesting* takes right off the top. Alot of this depends on how you think memetically. One big issue - especially with us westerners - is that we MUCH prefer a linear story model instead of a lateral one, the thing that separates a "worldbuilding" perspective from a "character driven" one. Its what we are use to - we see a world entirely through the eyes of the main character, something double true in a TTRPG environment. Wide vrs. Tall, you might say. Its especially evident in the differences between eastern and western storytelling and media. One takes far more interest in strong character identities, and the other is more concerned about the setting these characters take place in. Its also why people like Tolkien stick out so much as he really seemed to be able to apply both the later and linear perspective to his work (though I think he started out far more in the lateral camp). There are similar holdouts in eastern media as well. A huge method use by the lateral type is they often ignore deep character's for easily identifiable archetype "paper doll" that finds itself in different situations. The linear model has the world erupt around the character "there was once this guy who could lift...". Think of that shonen character that always wins every fight through the power of friendship and they always get 10x stronger after every fight, most of the interest comes from the world that character inhabits and how it tries to cope (deal with) with that monstrosity. Typically, most elements of the world are established early and set the limitations of what can happen. Compare that to, say, a typical pulp fantasy novel and how everything in the world bends around and is related to the character itself; the character is magical, thus almost everything in the world relating to that character is normally magical and is often the driving force of conflict. The important part is the character - if the character is injured, something HAS to exist to deal with that injury. It can get kind of fuzzy when looking at examples - but the biggest feature to think about is weather or not the characters are "paper dolls" (archetypes) or if the world itself is the flexible feature.

That’s exactly how I design my campaigns! A sandbox full of characters with wants. If I have a faction I want to know who the leader is and other important characters within it and I know everything I need to run the faction.

I think every DM should ask "Why am I doing this?" or "What story am I trying to tell, or what situation/theme am I trying to model that can't be played out in a setting that exists?" or "What's my What-If?" before they start worldbuilding. If you can't answer that question - and relatively easily - then you need to realize that you're doing it for yourself, and that you're making things significantly harder for your players to understand. If your world could just be Forgotten Realms or Golarion with a bunch of stuff moved around, then use one of those. If you can answer those questions - then it's not hard to get players to care - because the worldbuilding is integral to the story, and integral to the lives of everyone they run into. If you're trying to ask "What if magic disappeared in a high fantasy setting?" - you don't need tons of lore, or world maps - you need NPCs who used to be casters who are now destitute, or people who were involved in industries that relied on magic. If your worldbuilding doesn't directly effect the players and the game - it doesn't matter. And this is what frustrates me so much about the modern 5e community and the idea that you shouldn't restrict character options - because that makes it very difficult to have the specifics of the world directly affect the characters. The whole world is starving, but the druid can cast goodberry every day. Magic is dead but there's a cleric, wizard, and warlock in the party. Metal is scarce and incredibly valuable, but the 1st level fighter has chainmail. There's a ton of High Fantasy "Default Setting" built into the ruleset - and that hamstrings meaningful worldbuilding.

If I could are another video request Kyle heh, I'd love to see some of your early work before you perfected your process and maybe showcase a "then to now"

I absolutely love the stuff you drew in this video. Where can I find the finished drawings to look at?

I love your line work and art style! and thank you for your thoughts. Very helpful.

Totally agree. The characters in a world tell you about that world. :] Though for Tolkien I'm under the impression that he defiantly thought about the worldbuilding before really doing a solid character story ideas. ~ Adam

I once had a gangbusters worldbuilding idea that was so good that it did pay off, but even that sort of proves Map Crow's point. It was such a gigantic amount of work for the payoff, and my players would have enjoyed the game just as much if I'd put 10% as much work into some good NPC's. So maybe my contribution is that whether or not you agree with the video, big Middle Earth-like worldbuilding is usually a much less efficient investment of a DM's time.

I'd like to know what you think about Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories", because he discusses themes of mythopoeia and argues that worldbuilding in its own right is an art form. Yes, putting characters in the world might be more fun and/or fulfilling for certain people to experience the world, but not everyone is like that.

Kyle, I like your videos.

I F*CKING love this channel👌

My God My God! Is all I can say sir!

The message of this video is too damn underrated.

what kind of pen is he using!! I need one!

As a writer: you are totally correct. Tolkien did not care about world-building. He cared about character. It's why his books read so much better than almost any other fantasy novel ever written.

My stupid brain doesn't care for anything.

the best world building in my opinion is different cultures, religions and personalities according to the place, if it is well done and the players have interest on finding out about different populations the hours of game will increase a lot because of the curiosity to learn, just like in zelda botw, each part of the map has a different culture, people live different from each other, they even cook food diferently, they have their own architeture, that's what keep the player interested on exploring the world