The Prefab Problem

Just from the jump, this is based off personal and anecdotal evidence. Are we good? Good.

One thing that I have heard a lot is that people don’t bother with the default worlds presented in games, they just jump to world building. I get it, I do it too. The big reason is that it’s easier to retain information you thought up yourself, rather than having to read and internalize a bunch of factions, NPCs, and locations.

And this is often touted as normal or even the natural end state of running games. After all, you GM because you have a story you need to get out, and it’s often only possible if the cities are of a certain type, if the landscape exists in a just so way, and the gods are present or absent in a needed way. And I get it. It makes sense.

But I’m starting to think that maybe I should start meeting games at their settings. Yes, Ashtel is a grimy city that could fit in Blades in the Dark that I made up, but is it really different enough from Doskvol to require it’s own whole-ass set of writing? Should I really need the players to access an entirely different document to reference this stuff, when a more fleshed out world of factions and locations already exists? It’s not like these books are concrete either, there are plenty of gaps to fill in.

It probably just comes down to “It’s more fun (and productive feeling) to write than to read”. The time it would take to internalize the book’s contents could be spent on map making or inventing stuff! Fun things! And because you made it you know it! Why would I learn about some stuffy church when I can make my own cool rad church that worships black jack and sex workers.

This might also be part of the reason why people don’t like modules as much. Modules expect or require you to run a game in specific ways, to go through the story of the book, and that might rub people the wrong way. This is on top of those being loaded with NPCs to learn with their own motivations and information and special things they can do for you.

Why does reading feel like more work than creating? That’s always the big thing. It’s just lines on a page that you need to read and understand. You don’t need to futz with a map or look one up, the world map is right there!

I guess that what I could sum it up as huh. Reading feels like work, but making your own lore and shit feels like Creating. It’s the faucet for the ideas to leave your brain. It isn’t work. You never work when doing something you love! Reading is booooooooring. It makes some amount of sense, but it’s something I feel like I need to personally work on. I need to actually read the setting information about games, because that can inform a lot of things. The setting informs the tone the game is going for. And hell, if it sucks I’m sure it’ll give me some sort of jumping off point.

I don’t think I’m alone in that “reading the rules” comes first and foremost when I crack open a new book. When I was working on Questnoir, I had thought about hiring a writer to write several short stories or flavor stuff because I suck at that, and would have just focused on the rules part. And yeah, that’s not uncommon to have different people work on different parts, but my fundamental “don’t care” attitude towards it feels like I don’t really care about the product as a whole. I need to work on reading the flavor of the book too because I wonder exactly how much I’m missing by skipping it entirely.

Really, doing this can lead to doing the “Use D&D for every type of game” thing. Where you don’t match up the campaign to the game’s mechanics, expectations, and tones.

Reading is work, but I think it’s time I should get to it.