As a GM I like to have some "top-down" material done just because I enjoy writing it. World-building has always been part of the hobby for me. So sometimes there is a 10,000 year timeline.

I am conscious of what is relevant at the table though and will pick out bits of it that affects the actual game. I don't expect the players to care about ancient trade routes and dynasties for their own sake, or to read through pages of material, but it's fun for me and in the long term it often does add to the campaign.

Quote from: RPGPundit;828777Second: I generally start with two levels.  First, the REALLY BIG world-picture.  Then, a very small detailed starting area.
It's the middle-part I leave fuzzy.

This approach has always worked best for me. I need the ground level small view (usually where the players start out, to truly flesh out the details, but that needs to be complimented by a much broader understanding of the setting (or I just feel like I am building in a vacuum).

Quote from: RPGPundit;830652"worldwide history" can be both useless and boring if done wrong.

The way to do it right is to be doing it, first, for the GM's sake and not the players, and second, not for the purpose of useless trivia of irrelevant things but to focus on that which explains why the situation on the ground in the campaign is the way it is now.

Anything from the 'bigger picture' should always be something that enriches the microcosm of where the PCs are actually playing.  If it's irrelevant, or meaningless to that, then it shouldn't be bothered with.

Yes.
For the GM's sake.  And this is ignored.   But important.  No GM should force feed the PCs any info, especially stuff they would not know.  But in a longer game, the slow discovery of consistently created material that actually works together helps build a more playable, intriguing world.
My PCs found a wireframe insect statuette recently, and one of them mentioned it must be Venolvian.  
As a GM, this means I have succeeded in creating a history that is seen more from an IC perspective.

Quote from: LordVreeg;830701Yes.
For the GM's sake.  And this is ignored.   But important.  No GM should force feed the PCs any info, especially stuff they would not know.  But in a longer game, the slow discovery of consistently created material that actually works together helps build a more playable, intriguing world.
My PCs found a wireframe insect statuette recently, and one of them mentioned it must be Venolvian.  
As a GM, this means I have succeeded in creating a history that is seen more from an IC perspective.

Yes, that's the way to do it!

Quote from: The_Shadow;830675As a GM I like to have some "top-down" material done just because I enjoy writing it. World-building has always been part of the hobby for me. So sometimes there is a 10,000 year timeline.

I am conscious of what is relevant at the table though and will pick out bits of it that affects the actual game. I don't expect the players to care about ancient trade routes and dynasties for their own sake, or to read through pages of material, but it's fun for me and in the long term it often does add to the campaign.

Sure -- but you're realizing that.  In like fashion, I do a great lot of worldbuilding stuff the players will never see nor would care about if they did: who the hell gives a damn whether there are 15 25-ton capacity fishing boats in Seahill or 10?

The problem is when that takes away from the stuff the players DO need.  I've seen games with that 10,000 year history, and incomparably ancient BS -- often in surprising and irrelevant detail -- completely dominates: a lot of ICE timelines as a case in point.

By contrast, take Harn.  They, too, have events hundreds of years before ... but there's always at least a full page of events of the last few years, and generally at least a column of the last few months.

Quote from: RPGPundit;828777Second: I generally start with two levels.  First, the REALLY BIG world-picture.  Then, a very small detailed starting area.
It's the middle-part I leave fuzzy.

This is how I design settings when not doing IP stuff for others.

An overall theme or aspect as the basis. Such as post-collapse, low fantasy, exploration frontier, warring nations, environment or whatever. Sometimes playing off several for a basis. If the setting has a cosmology of gods or equivalents then now may be the time to think on how active or not they are in the setting as that can suggest other elements later.

Then I work out a start town of some sort. How big. How old, how active, location in relation to civilization, level of tech expertise. Work out some notable locales in town like shops and NPCs. The level of detail here that I devote depends on wether the PCs are going to be using the town as a permanent base. Or if they are going to leave it and move on. There is no point in hyper detailing everything when all they are going to do is walk out of the tavern, hit up the equipment shop and then hit the road never to return.

The middle, if I am not creating it totally on the fly, I work out some basic topography concepts and if there are any other towns local.

History and such I try to keep to "local knowledge" sorts of things and then add onto as the PCs range out and encounter the world.

Quote from: Ravenswing;830925Sure -- but you're realizing that.  In like fashion, I do a great lot of worldbuilding stuff the players will never see nor would care about if they did: who the hell gives a damn whether there are 15 25-ton capacity fishing boats in Seahill or 10?

The guy trying to make a small and very improvised naval blockade?

Anyways, the point is that this is at least a statistic of something there, in the place, and now.  Which may or may not be hugely relevant, but it is still better than "here's a 4-page essay on some detail of something that happened in the world 80000 years ago that will have no bearing whatsoever to your present game ever but I, the game designer and world-author, felt was too smartly written, by me, to leave out!".

QuoteBy contrast, take Harn.  They, too, have events hundreds of years before ... but there's always at least a full page of events of the last few years, and generally at least a column of the last few months.

This is funny given your boat comments above, because I've always found harn to be one of those settings that is full to the brim of focusing on minutiae without actually focusing on how to adventure or what the fuck is actually interesting about the world.  You get 17 pages on medieval agricultural methods and half a line on the ancient magical teleportation-gates; that's the problem with Harn in a nutshell.

Quote from: RPGPundit;831599This is funny given your boat comments above, because I've always found harn to be one of those settings that is full to the brim of focusing on minutiae without actually focusing on how to adventure or what the fuck is actually interesting about the world.  You get 17 pages on medieval agricultural methods and half a line on the ancient magical teleportation-gates; that's the problem with Harn in a nutshell.

I'm not sure you get it.  Harn is FOR the players who find such things important.  There are plenty enough games out there for players who don't give a damn about minutiae; I don't see anything wrong with ONE published game designed for the players who do.

Quote from: Ravenswing;831633I'm not sure you get it.  Harn is FOR the players who find such things important.  There are plenty enough games out there for players who don't give a damn about minutiae; I don't see anything wrong with ONE published game designed for the players who do.

I don't either, but I also don't see it as a paragon of "background trivia being focused on action".

Quote from: RPGPundit;831971I don't either, but I also don't see it as a paragon of "background trivia being focused on action".

It's not.
It's more world building for world building's sake.  I fall into this category all the time.  It's a long term approach that is only for a certain category; a demographic that has one major setting they work on for decades.  It does not apply to most games or GMs.

Quote from: LordVreeg;831991It's not.
It's more world building for world building's sake.  I fall into this category all the time.  It's a long term approach that is only for a certain category; a demographic that has one major setting they work on for decades.  It does not apply to most games or GMs.

Harn is useful in my experience for a certain kind of player as well. A lot of players won't ask probing questions about the history or cultural details, but if you have players like that, this kind of information can be handy. It can also be handy from the GM point of view for assigning occupations to NPCs, knowing where they fit into their environment.

Harn isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it is just one way to build a campaign setting, not The Way (and a lot of time with Medieval Demographics people can sometimes become overly rigid in their thinking or think that medieval demographics apply to all cultures in all times----I can see Harn might play into that). For me Harn was something I came to appreciate when another player started showing me the material and some of the modules. I honestly probably would have ignored it and it just would have been another one of those games I recognize because I've seen it on the shelf at the hobby store but never seriously considered reading it. What I liked about it was they could create an engaging adventure over something as simple as a bushel of rye. And the dungeons were must more down to earth and simple, yet still had a lot of little things going on to engage players. I also liked that as a GM you could dip into the well of material, ignore what you don't need at the time, but extract what inspires you at the moment. The downside of it is there is this huge backlog of reading to go through if you want to master the setting. For a lot of folks, their time will be better spent building their own detailed campaign world rather than working to understand Harn. But I have to admit I really like reading the Harn material now that I've developed a soft spot for it.

With history in RPG settings, I can enjoy games that take a lighter approach (because they are easier to run off the bat and leave more room for the GM to create his own material) but I also like running things that go a bit deep and stray into the four page essay thing. With the later, the key is to approach it knowing you can ignore as much of the material as you want. If you don't find it helpful, just skip it. But what I've found is you often go back and look at it more closely and it find elements you can draw on in play (whether it is material the players find when they ask about those books on the library shelves or as a background for the dungeon). It is only really an issue if you have a canon lawyer in the group or something. That can definitely cause problems.

Simpler histories can be just as rich though in play. I used to run Ravenloft and the history sections are really simplistic in the early material. But you honestly didn't need much more than the timeline to run it. The setting was pretty simple too. It was a broad overview with a few areas fleshed out, but you just knew looking at it that the GM was expected to fill in a lot of the blanks as needed. They gave you just enough to inspire but not so much that you were a slave to the material.

I think where folks run into issues is when they think the approach that works for them is the ultimate in world building. GMs are just too varied for that to be true. Some GMs want stuff that is easy to find and read in play. Some prefer sitting with material between adventures and soaking it up. Some prefer a mix.

That's exactly why I said it was not for most games or Gms.  Not because it is bad.  But because it really fits a certain demographic.

One of the main problems isn't about what one puts in their world - it's about how one presents it. As people have mentioned, all too often (particularly in computer games) a game/GM will dump ancient history details on players, many of which are irrelevant to the current plot, and which couldn't be absorbed by the players who just arrived in the setting. In that case, it does more harm than good.

But if has been said, there are details and history which the GM has made up for his own sake, because he's interested or it helps him figure out how the world works, it can lead to inspiration for more content, and to content that's more interesting because of interrelationships. If the GM can learn to only describe the details when they're immediately relevant, then they don't get in the way. If the GM just describes what the characters see and know, but the reasons for it make sense, then the players may actually get interested in exploring and discovering those things, or not, and the background then can become immersive.

Personally, after the first year or two I was running my own world, I really wanted to know and understand for myself how and why things worked in my worlds, and to understand how it had gotten that way. And so did my players. Of course, many of the things I put in my worlds in the first few years were pretty challenging to come up with reasons for. Tip: If the players haven't been there yet, maybe the river than flows from one sea to another is a mapmaker's error, and the Forest of Nude Albino Psychic Hobbits is just a rumor started in a tavern.

Mind you, two of my games have/will-have both extensive past and future chronologies:  Arrows of Indra did it, and Dark Albion will do it.  I think for certain style of games there's nothing wrong with having those for a resource.

In fact, I think that its a lot more useful, in some ways, to have a detailed set of things that COULD happen in the future of the setting than to have a bunch of things that did happen in the distant past of the setting.

Quote from: RPGPundit;833952In fact, I think that its a lot more useful, in some ways, to have a detailed set of things that COULD happen in the future of the setting than to have a bunch of things that did happen in the distant past of the setting.

I'd agree with that.  I strongly feel that these timelines that obsess over events several thousand years ago are useless -- what, are any of us affected in the least direct degree by the events of the Third Dynasty, the Xia Dynasty or the Old Assyrian Kingdom?

Knowing how a designer envisions things going in the immediate future, even if I disagree (I would have had the Tsolyani civil war turn out differently, myself), that's of great use.