Playing and Planning

     I love role playing games. I cut my teeth playing Vampire: the Masquerade. I’ve played Earthdawn. My whole week feels off if I don’t get to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe it will surprise you, then, that I never played an RPG as a kid. There were a few students in my school who played them, but I never managed to join their games.

     A friend helped me create a thief for D&D at lunch one day. And yes, thieves aren’t welcome in some gamers' adventuring parties, but I chose thief mostly so I could disable traps. I couldn't imagine what self-respecting adventurer would consider leaving a castle or town without a way to deal with the inevitable traps. I wasn't invited to an actual game and didn’t know how to invite myself, so I thought, "Fine. If I can't get anybody to play, I'll write my own games." (I’ve grown more confident and social since then.)

     So I did. I figured out how the game would work mechanically, and designed settings. I even doodled maps in class. From this grew my love of world building. I began asking the questions: Where do you place cities? (Trade routes and water sources are good places to begin.) How much would it change a game to set it in Rome or Greece? How far can you get without your people learning to write? (No, wait. That was Civilization.)

     World building is a great hobby of mine. It became very useful when I started running games. Knowing, in general, how a city is laid out helps when players have characters being chased through it. Knowing who the important characters in a kingdom are helps when players interact with the nobility or guild leaders. But it has pitfalls, in gaming and writing.

     On the gaming side, you might get so wrapped up in your world that you forget to actually plan the game. You could start a session with nothing for the players to do. Some GMs handle that well; most cannot.

     With books, you might love your world so much you forget to actually write, or neglect a storyline because you can't force it into your world. That issue could actually be an enormous headache.

     I've faced the problem of excessive world building with too little writing. I still face it, sometimes. But I've also realized that if I don't write the stories, that world I worked on will die a quiet death. Nobody will know the tale of Sir Glasswaite if I only ever figure out the names of a few people in his kingdom. I would have to write his story, and get people to read it, for his tragic death to have meaning.

     So I do my best to spend more time writing stories than thinking about them. For example, I invented Sir Glasswaite for this blog entry; I think I will go write him up now. I see a knight, riding his horse by the sea…