- I feel like I've started to look like a Lisa Frank illustration, which, to be clear, is fantastic. (upbeat music) Hello friends, Ginny Di here and today we are gonna talk worldbuilding in tabletop games, specifically D&D, but a lot of these tips
will probably apply to other systems too. Whether you're homebrewing
and entire world from scratch or just building on an existing one, worldbuilding is a huge undertaking. I mean, even the name sounds intimidating. Just build a world. Yeah, a whole world. It's fine. Just be a God. What's the problem? There are people who are like
the Tolkiens of the world who just take to worldbuilding
really naturally, but not everybody is like, "Hey, I'm gonna invent a
speakable language or two." Some people need a little more guidance. So today we are gonna go
over some common mistakes that DMs make in the worldbuilding process and talk about how to correct them. By fixing these problems, you can make your world easier to DM in and more fun for your players to explore. This turned out to be a big topic so I'm gonna split it into two halves. We will tackle five mistakes this week and another five next week. So if you're not already subscribed, this is a great time to do that. So you don't miss the other
50% of this information. Oh, by the way, pre-orders are now over for my D&D inspired pinup
calendar "Natural '22". But don't panic! The
calendar is still available. This just means that it
is while supplies last so it could sell out any time now, usually sometime in December. They're limited edition, so once they're gone,
they are gone forever. This also means that digital
items are now available, including digital calendars and the PDF version of
my one-shot adventure for fifth edition "Bard Behind Bars". Get it all at GinnyDi.com/calendar. (light upbeat music) I promise all 10 of these tips aren't going to be this basic, but I do feel like it has to be said. You should read the DM's Guide. I don't mean to blow your mind here, but it actually has a
lot of useful guidance for creating your world. If you're building out a settlement like a city or a village,
the DMG has six full pages that walk you through
determining everything from the settlement size and atmosphere to government and currency. If you need some jumping off points or want to generate a
few settlements quickly, there are rolling tables
to lay out the basic. Solely, a quarter of the book is dedicated to creating your world, and if you're skipping it as a baseline source of information, you are doing yourself a disservice. There's so much information
available online that's either derivative of
the information in the DMG or assumes that you already
have that information as a foundation. I think the prevalence of easily digestible,
bite-sized DM advice online makes it weirdly easy
to sleep on the basics. If you haven't done it yet, or if you haven't done it in a while, I would highly recommend
just taking some time to crack open your DMG and make sure that
you're familiar with it. You don't have to follow it all, and I'm definitely not saying that you can't or shouldn't build on it with other resources. Like six pages for settlements is great, but Nord Games' "Spectacular
Settlements" book is gonna give you a lot more information if you really want to dig deeper into that portion of world-building. Think of the DMG as the foundation and you can build on it
however you'd choose. But if you start building
without a foundation, you might run into problems later that could have easily been avoided. (light upbeat music) It's no secret that I
am an organization nerd, I love a good spreadsheet, and I would marry Google
Drive if it were legal in the state of Colorado. But no matter if you're the Evernote type or the paper journal type
or something else entirely, you absolutely must have a system to log and organize your
worldbuilding information. Without a system you'll end
up doing a lot more work for a lot less benefit. You'll prep something,
and then lose track of it, and you have to do it all over again. You'll do some great worldbuilding and then not be able to find
it when you actually need it. Or you'll work something out,
set it aside, forget about it, and then later end up
contradicting yourself. It sucks a lot when a
player asks you a question that you know you have an
answer to but just can't find. Different systems work
for different people, so I'm not gonna tell you how to do it, but I will say it's better
to just pick something and start with it than to avoid
putting a system into place until you find the perfect one. You'll undoubtedly change your mind and learn what kinds of
tools you need over time, and that is okay. Maybe you'll start off sketching
out your ideas on paper and then realize that you want
something more searchable. At which point, you
can make the transition to a digital option. But a transition like
that will be way easier if all of your notes and ideas
are already in one place. Speaking of systems, this feels like as good a time as any to introduce you to today's sponsor, a super flexible customizable software for collecting and organizing all of your worldbuilding information. - Psst! Do you play that dungeon game? - Yeah, I'm a Dungeon
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their world-building without a doubt. There's Wiki-style articles,
timelines, family trees. Your world will be so organized,
game prep will be a breeze. - So it's a worldbuilding software? Like, to keep me organized? - Oh no. It's so much more than that. You can run games in there. Character sheets and stat
blocks, it's all easy to share. And for the low, low
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take 40% off your purchase of any annual membership. (light upbeat music) Okay, I know that I just
recommended the DM's Guide and it literally begins the
creating a campaign section with the subhead "Start small", so it's more than a
little presumptuous for me to name that exact thing as a mistake. And to be clear, you
absolutely want to know about the specific area
and specific events that your players are starting off with. You should definitely have a strong handle on their immediate surroundings
before the game begins. But I think, especially for folks who are stepping outside
of the core D&D world, the start small approach
can sometimes leave you with a world that's lacking
the deep fundamental features that make it feel cohesive and real. Starting with the big picture can make the small picture
come into focus more easily. For example, let's say that in your world, dragons are attracted
to the scent of magic and they feed on spell casters
to build their own power. This one large scale world-building choice will trickle down in a million
different day-to-day ways. For example, any magical institution needs to be heavily dragon-proofed. Magic users might not even be permitted to live in close proximity
to metropolitan areas just due to the risk. Maybe spell casters have
developed charms or spells that will disguise the scent of magic. Casters who want to travel
will need powerful escorts. That might mean tons
of work for adventurers willing to work as bodyguards. Or it might mean that
there are regular caravans that travel common routes
with a huge armed guard. Perhaps you have arcane scouts
who travel from town to town with a caged pseudodragon
sniffing for children who are starting to display
inherent arcane power so they can take those
children away for training or extort their parents for protection. Maybe your big bad has
allied with a dragon and is kidnapping spellcasters to feed it, slowly building its power. That's just a few minutes of spitballing, but imagine how much more interesting that starter town is going to be now that you have a ready source of work for your adventurers baked
in conflict between groups, motivations that will
inform all kinds of NPCs, and quest hooks for both
small and large plots. Now, when you create that starter city, you have so many potential
starting points for it, and your world is going to
feel truly complex and unique from the very first session. Maybe your players start
in a heavily guarded refuge for spellcasters. Maybe they start in a city
that was recently terrorized by a dragon hunting a powerful wizard. This can really help give your
starting location some flavor that immediately hooks your players into the things that
make your world special. (light upbeat music) We all have heroes when it
comes to fantasy worlds; the authors of our favorite books, directors of our favorite movies, and even other DMs that we look up to. But while I think it's great
to have good influences, it's also super important to figure out what parts of world-building you like instead of just trying to
mimic someone else's style. For example, Matt Mercer clearly
loves political intrigue. Watching him DM, observing his worlds, you can tell that he
is seriously passionate about developing these
sprawling continents with tons of history and culture. When I started my own homebrew campaign, I wanted to capture some of the magic that I was seeing on
screen in Critical Role. As a result, I tried to create a world the way that Matt Mercer creates a world, and y'all, turns out I do not love that. I do not even like that. I realized now that what I wanted to match was Critical Role's depth,
commitment, and emotionality, not the actual flavor of the world. If I were to launch another
homebrew campaign right now, I would pick something that I felt genuinely excited to create like a Feywild setting with fairy courts or a magic school setting or something that echoes
the feeling of old folklore. I'd pick something that
I can envision in my head and feel excited about. Along those same lines, I would pick a scale that I
feel more comfortable with. Remember, your world doesn't
have to be a literal world. Your whole campaign could
take place on one continent, in one kingdom, or even in one city. If you feel overwhelmed by the thought of inventing an entire world from scratch then don't do that. You can always scale a small world up if that ends up feeling right. You're allowed to communicate
with your players above table about the limits. You don't have to let them buy an airship and drop in on a continent
that you've only barely named. It is totally okay to say, "Hey, this campaign is gonna
take place in this one area." Especially if setting that boundary means that you can make that area
really well-developed and rich. Worldbuilding takes a
lot of time and energy. So the least we can do for ourselves is make sure that we're
building something that we enjoy on a scale that we can manage. (light upbeat music) You'll see a lot of DM advice in general, that advices against over-planning. People will warn you about
players derailing you, skipping over entire cities,
and ignoring your key NPCs. They'll say, "Don't plan too much, just be prepared to improvise." And I'm not trying to say
that I don't understand how frustrating that is. It's sucks to work
really hard on something that your players sidestep or ignore. But I think this extremely common advice can quickly turn into a slippery
slope of under planning. I have no doubt that your
players will skip something that you've intricately planned, but they won't skip everything
you've intricately planned. If you rely too heavily on
improvising your worldbuilding, you're building your
world on inconsistencies, cliches and tropes, half-baked
ideas, and gut reactions. Let's take this improv
thing back to its roots. If you see an actual
improv troupe perform, there are setups, because
without them, it's no fun. If you just put two
people on stage together and say, "Be funny," even very good, very funny performers would likely struggle a little. But when you say, "Bob,
you're an elephant. Fran, you're grocery store cashier," then you're going to get away funnier and more cohesive skit. It's the same premise when
you're improvising in D&D. Yes, you can improvise some great stuff, but the better your framework, the easier it'll be to
do good improv within it. So yes, you should be aware that players will go off the rails; and yes, you should be
prepared to improvise. But don't let that stop
you from doing the work of having at least a
foundational understanding of how everything in your world works so you aren't left floundering
when players defy the odds and actually do exactly what
you would have expected. That's where we're gonna end it today. But next week, we are gonna go over five more common worldbuilding mistakes that you might be making in your D&D game. I know nearly everybody uses YouTube by just letting the homepage
algorithm do its thing now. But if you wanna make extra sure that you don't miss the followup, especially as we enter the holiday season where everything is busy and weird, you should make sure
that you are subscribed, because a whopping 45% of
you aren't, on average. And we're there. Right? We're totally there.
