Throw the Dice! Let's GM - Building the Ultimate World

your campaign your world space your bigger picture environment that you've either co-opted from somewhere you are using somebody else's or you are making your own it needs to be a living breathing existing space but how do you handle the burden of creating this thing and then running it how are you supposed to keep track of nation fighting nation and into trade and all it's just too much and it is too much this is what i do hello and welcome to this week's episode of how to be a great gm my name is guy and today we are exploring the topic of your world your your campaign space your world space as i like to call it whether you have used a pre-existing world whether you have bought a setting book or you are creating your own or you are adapting one that has already been in existence it doesn't matter all of them need to have the same attribute the same feeling in terms of they all need to be dynamic they all need to be living and they all need to be reactive how do you do that it's so so incredibly complicated it is really a mammoth task well like i said at the beginning of the video it doesn't have to be it really is about figuring out a step before all of that to understand how to make it do it itself and it's actually a lot simpler than you think it might be so i subscribe to the idea that everybody can be a great gm i think that the skills that we need to have in order to be great gms i don't think they are natural gifts i think they are something that we learn and that we put into practice and by practice i mean practice and practice and practice and practice the more you practice the easier it becomes but if you understand what to practice it becomes even better and that's what this entire series is about so i subscribed to that idea if you subscribe to that idea well you can tell me that by hitting that subscribe button okay i promise no more of those anyway now building a world creating a world is a daunting task and there are so many different aspects that you can look at that you can try and unpack that you can understand it really really does become a a giant space and for those of you that like to have all of this information at your fingertips or to be prompted or to be guided on how to do this or to be shown the way in in in a very easy structure or to navigate your notes and remember what you wrote down and link things and create all kinds of maps and stuff then world anvil who are today's sponsor is this is the website for you to go to worldanville.com they do all of this they do all of this for you they help you create your world space and record your world space and copy your world space and search it and index it and link it and share it and it's just an amazing website for doing all of this so go and check them out having said that world anvil is an amazing space for creating your world in i do believe that we as gm's need to start earlier than just in world creation we need to take a step back and we need to start looking at how do we take this entire thing and how do we make it come alive you can create the most complicated amazing world that you like with political factions and cults and groups and sects and and religious things and god wars and dragon trade and put it all into a giant giant vat and say there is my and your world will be meaningless because there's only one person who knows all that you your players don't know any of that and even if you share it with them they won't read it they won't care they they're they're creating a character because they want to kill dragons what do they care about the third empress's cousin on the fifth who's secretly plotting to take the throne nothing until they meet the empress's third cousin in fifth in line who's plotting to take the throne and she's hired the pcs to then go and kill the empress did you need to have that plan six or seven years before you started playing your game absolutely not the reason is is that we need to create a dynamic space that means we need to create whatever world space we are using that world space needs to have events happening on a regular basis and those events need to have nothing to do with the pcs at all they just happen so the assassination of the empress the pcs don't care they don't give a fig about the history of that house maybe when they walk into the castle you might want to drop one little piece of information that they can see the banners of a thousand years worth of um houses before this one great that's an excellent lineage story yes it's made the world slightly richer that's brilliant but if every single building they walk into has hundreds and hundreds of years worth of history in other words they all become these oh god it's another museum visit i really don't care can i just kill something i know it sounds awfully awfully condescending to say that that's just what our players are after but you want a little bit of flavor and then you want their story to continue because it is their story it's not your discovery channel or history channel exploration of the house of geld it's really not so by creating dynamic events these events you trigger once in a adventure maybe twice between adventures and these are things that are going to create and make your world feel as if they are alive now how do you do that well in my book i have to talk about it because it's there and i wrote it for a reason it is useful in the book it talks about having two different types of world events that are dynamic big major earth-shattering things which should happen once every four or five adventures and then little everyday things that should happen and by having these two various types of event scales happening things start to get interesting but here is the key to this entire thing folks is if you've created your little kingdom and you've got a little castle and you've got a king in there and you haven't developed a huge amount of history or the personality of the king or the princess or anything to do with anything you've just literally got a map and it says castle we know that the castle is going to be someone who's in charge and they're going to have servants and assistants that's all you need to develop you don't need to go further until the players go there you really don't and you can make up that information on the fly and no one will notice as long as once you've made it up you keep it consistent so that's an important part of it but let's say you go okay i want there to be a uh an uh a flood do you have to plan out everything that's gonna happen in that flood before you launch the flood do you need to tell your players to go away so that you can figure out what's gonna happen you really shouldn't because the only person who's going to tell you how and what is going to happen you are going to say there's a giant flood okay use your knowledge use your experience use your research into what floods do and track out the path of this giant flood it's probably going to follow a river unless it's a mudslide flood thing in which case it's coming down a mountain floods very seldom go up mountains or up rivers they usually come down the rivers there is a chance however when a flood does go up a river by the way and that's all to do with tides and things but don't worry about that right now we're just looking at the bigger picture so you trigger your flood you have got no planning whatsoever this is absolutely appropriate why because the king of the castle or the lord of the castle or the queen or whatever you decide on the moment they have no idea that the flood was coming either so when you just do this giant line of damage through the entire kingdom that cuts the castle off from the entire village and floods half the village the players are going to be in absolute disarray and so should the lord of the castle but what should they be doing they should be reaching out for help they should be asking for advice they don't know what to do they're literally just sitting in their castle next minute my lord there's a flood so by creating these dynamic events that you don't have a plan for you are actually simulating a real world type environment we have all of the manuals written on what to do in the case of a giant catastrophe let's look at the last two years as to how well those manuals helped us so bottom line you need to have a dynamic world you need to have a living world now a living world is a step up from a dynamic world a dynamic world is where things are happening random stuff is happening and life is chaotic which is what it is like a living world is when everything in your world is reacting to it i absolutely hate it when i walk into a village and i have just been with a party and we have slain 30 ogres that were living in a camp nearby and the blacksmith says yeah i'll fix your horseshoes for five silver did you see what we just did do you know the ogres are dead your village is freed from the ogre problem forever because we killed them all because we are murder hope did you see that if the world isn't living if the npcs in your world are not responding to what's going on why are you doing it they are cardboard cutouts literally they are mmo npcs where you could slay the giant dragon that has plagued you for 80 levels and every npc's dialogue changes zero if the world doesn't change if it doesn't acknowledge what the players are doing why are they in there if the game is about the player characters not about your world or the lack thereof so your world needs to be living things need to be adjusted the pcs slew an entire camp of ogres that was threatening to destroy the village you know what we do for people in our own world that save us from people who wanted to destroy us we put up statues we talk about it non-stop well at least until the next news flash when we discover the queen is actually wearing red as opposed to purple lipstick this season and now everyone is trying to get red lipstick because you get my point it's got to be a living space and then finally it has to be reactive the world has to respond to what is going on so the flood that comes through there's no blacksmith in town because well he left his forge was destroyed in the flood he has no funds to make up for it so he's leaving he's just going away to another village to try and work for another blacksmith that's a reactive world that is a world that says this is what's happening now how do we do this how do we how do we make sure that all of this is actually happening by detaching ourselves from the panic of having to run these things and going all right i know i need to trigger an event or two to make my world dynamic so you trigger an event and only answer questions when the players ask them oh my god there's a flood happening is there a bridge nearby well on the map there were no indications of bridges but there should be a whole bunch of bridges because i've got kingdoms all over the place so yes there is a large bridge what happened to that bridge well the bridge probably got washed away if that's more interesting than the bridges standing but in a weakened state maybe that could be more interesting what creates the more interesting answer for your players based on their question do you see what i'm saying the burden of creation is not on you you have set up that there's a flood going on you have set up that there is a castle over there and there's a village over there and the flood has washed through them the players are going to be asking questions they're going to say oh can i go to the tavern oh yeah sure you can go to the tavern you walk into the tavern the barman says hello lads how am i going to help you wrong there's a giant flood outside the barman should not be saying that the barman should be going oh my god um you can have the rooms i don't care the flood seems to be coming through and it's going to wash everything away help me drink all my beer and wash away our fears so we might drown together that is a responsive a reactive npc in a living environment aware of the impending disaster and that is going to feed the players to go yeah actually you're probably right we shouldn't just treat the flood as just another thing that's happening over there we should probably take you so you need to apply those three things to every encounter every character every space that you are creating for your players the more you pre the more you create before you start the more restrictive you are in terms of okay well i've got all of this history for this kingdom so i don't want to destroy it in a volcano but a volcano is far more interesting as a player character then your 300 years worth of family history that's it i that's your cold truth for the week splash ah that was an awful advert sorry um that's the bottom line what makes for a more interesting game rather than preserving what you have created so if you create tons and tons and tons and tons of stuff you're not wanna you're not gonna wanna get rid of it but trust me the more stuff you burn down blow up destroy absolutely annihilate the more entertaining the game it really really is so that is my advice on your world building your world space your campaign you've got the book you've read through the book look at that book and say i'm going to annihilate everything in here so i'm not going to have anything that is precious to me i will use these ideas to have my characters to have my plots but everything is absolutely sacrificable because it makes for better storytelling and that should help lift you out of this fear of going oh i haven't developed the village elder's third son's name don't care we only care when that person dies and it's only if they die right in front of the pcs that we really care if they're just a nameless number 12 million people died there we go that's it so that's hopefully freeing up your mind to step away from panicking and over planning and over preparing and all that kind of craziness step away from that and just enjoy watching the chaos that you open out upon your living dynamic reactive world big thank you to my patrons for supporting this channel and to world anvil for supporting our channel as well through their sponsorships use the code great gm to get a discount when you sign up for a world anvil subscription until next week happy gaming

Channel: How to be a Great GM

Views: 16,333

Keywords: creating the campaign, campaign creator, how to be a great game master, how to gm, great gm, campaign creation, dnd campaign, dnd campaign design, dnd campaign ideas, rpg campaign design, rpg campaign ideas, rpg campaign, role playing campaign, campaign design, fantasy campaign, running the game, game master guide, dungeon master guide, gm tips, dm tips, epic guide to creating campaigns, practical guide to becoming a great gm, world building, rpg world building

Id: g_DGmBqzRsI

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021