Quote from: Will;770564But the thing is... in pretty much every case, the players didn't care. Only the immediate scope really mattered to them.

I have found the exact same thing, and when the players go off piste, much of it becomes wasted. MOARN or Make Only As Really Necessary, something Marc Miller wrote about in T5, it is good advice; he's actually peppered good advice through the book, as a GM. It is also the "Lazy GM" theory; which I find thinking of a ton of rough sketch kind of ideas about which way the campaign will go is a better use of time.

If players are engaged and care, they probably would enjoy being involved. So you can kibbitz with them about what 'the lost kingdom of Urz five days travel away' actually means.

If players don't care, they are also not going to care if you kibbitz with different players or make it up just before they walk in.

Quote from: Will;770571If players are engaged and care, they probably would enjoy being involved. So you can kibbitz with them about what 'the lost kingdom of Urz five days travel away' actually means.

If players don't care, they are also not going to care if you kibbitz with different players or make it up just before they walk in.

Also, the length of the campaigns play into this.

QuoteDragonLance: The Setting is decent.

The setting is awesome the modules? Never used them, why would we? Though I would love a S&S setting complete with DCC/Warhammer style magic.

The 'MOARN' rule cited above is one of the deeper insights into good DM world creation, and you can see it expressed in some of the best published settings.

Glorantha has to be on any reasonable person's list of the best settings presented by a company, but if you really pay attention to the way it grew as a game setting it was created one small sandbox at a time, stitched together into a somewhat larger but still modest sandbox. The over-arching world and mythology existed from the beginning but had little direct expression in the setting material. The Dara Hapan empire and Seshnella and so forth existed, but only as brief references. There was no effort to raise the water level on all parts of the world at once; for all practical purposes the 'world' was a place you could ride across in a week or two, and you spent most of your time in places you could ride across in a day or two (Borderlands, Pavis, Big Rubble, Snakepipe Hollow, Shadow's Dance, Griffin Mountain area). And this was more than enough for roughly a decade of setting development (basically, until AH took over with 3E). And I don't remember anyone complaining or feeling like something was missing. I think of this as the commercial example of a really excellent DM- (or gaming group) created setting.

My personal view is that the decline in player-driven setting creation was when the hobby started to slide, in numbers, visibility and quality. Of course all the games that focus on DM-created settings still exist and there will always be a population of people who play this way. But the center of mass of the hobby shifted to large 'synoptic' commercial settings. Those existed in some form from the beginning, but if you were gaming in 1978-80 you know they had relatively little impact; most people were playing in their own settings. This act of creation gave people a real sense of investment and attachment to the game.

I'm not sure what caused the loss of this as the mainstream gaming experience. The business of modern life; the rise of computer games that give you a sort of easy, masturbatory version of roleplaying games, or the industry itself pushing big-setting product. In any event, if I were in charge of the 5E line I would put serious effort into helping gaming groups re-learn this skill, to help re-kindle this level of personal investment in the game. This kind of focus for a 5E DMG could have a huge impact, though I fear we're more likely to get a bunch of rules no one needs and everyone either ignores or complains about.