Quote from: Ravenswing;829787I think it entirely depends on the group.  Some players are interested in history; some aren't.

But a large factor, I feel, is in the kind of histories most gamers -- and gaming products -- produce.  To quote myself from the blog series I linked above, no one cares that Empress Lynessia III was the last monarch of Vallia to personally lead troops in war, winning the battle of Fourth Council Rock against the Avanari 174 years ago; it's enough to say that the empires of Vallia and Avanar are traditional enemies and have a turbulent, heavily militarized border, the last full-scale war being seventeen years ago.  

And that's the problem -- those histories are almost always vast spanning timelines, giving bulletpoints of events over tens of thousands of years.  That's meaningless to the player who doesn't give a damn about background, and worthless to the one who does.  What the one who does wants are bulletpoints from the last twenty years, and very few gaming "historians" bother with that ... when the last twenty years ought to have at least as much attention as the entire rest of recorded history.

It's like with today.  Anyone who claims that the outcome of the Battle of Kadesh or the deliberations of the Council of Constance has a meaningful and direct impact on the background and abilities of a modern-day PC is a moron.  But whether you served in Iraq?  That your PC was raised by hippie rejectionists on a commune?  That your PC lost family in 9/11, or in the Aceh tsunami, or at Fukushima?  Those events matter.  

Work has been a bitch.  Or I would have responded sooner.

It does depend heavily on the game style and the setting.  

But the deeper the threads and underpinning, the more consistent they are.  And read the word 'consistent' with the subtext of 'helping immersion by allowing the characters to be able to count on things staying the same".

I run big, old sandboxes.  And frankly, the access database that contains the history has grow a lot.  But the main, ancient history of the world was written in 1982, and has been extremely relevant, at all sorts of levels, every since.  

Some of the original plotlines/large scale arcs are still going on, 30+ years later.  And the players often can glimpse deeper, hidden mysteries and after years of playing they start to put things together.  

I mean, yes, to a set of players who don't enjoy mysteries, who don'd get excited by long term puzzles, a huge, consistent history is useless.  Likewise to the GM who doesn't want to run that sort of game.

But I get to see players who've played in the campaign for 30+ years put pieces together decades os playtime apart.  And until you've seen it, don't knock it.  For some games, it works.  And is worth the time and effort.

He's talking about starting a new game in a new setting; you're talking about an ongoing game in an established setting with players who have been exploring it for years.

Quote from: Matt;829873He's talking about starting a new game in a new setting; you're talking about an ongoing game in an established setting with players who have been exploring it for years.

(nods)  Yep.  

I agree that in a rich-detail game that's been going on for decades, long-term players care and know a lot about that detail.  The players in my current lead group have been playing in my campaigns since 1985, 1991, 1992, 2003 and 2008 respectively, and they remember a lot of nuances and stuff ... in some cases, things I've forgotten.

But a case in point: just this past Saturday, during the food break, 1985 and 1991 were swapping an old warstory from my game from decades past, in some serious detail, and laughing over the fun they'd had with it.

I glanced over at 2003 and 2008.  Their eyes were glazing over as they ate their pizza, and one was fiddling with her laptop.  The tale had no relevance to their gameplay, and they reacted pretty much the same way any of us do when we have to be a spectator for other people's "Hey, do you remember when we ..."

A lot of campaigns aren't designed to do that nowadays - the DragonLance model of "the Big Damn Heroes on their Big Damn Quest" kind of makes settings disposable.

I'd be a lot more inclined to do heavy background work/etc. for a non-disposable campaign.  Right tool for the right job

Quote from: Ravenswing;829897(nods)  Yep.  

I agree that in a rich-detail game that's been going on for decades, long-term players care and know a lot about that detail.  The players in my current lead group have been playing in my campaigns since 1985, 1991, 1992, 2003 and 2008 respectively, and they remember a lot of nuances and stuff ... in some cases, things I've forgotten.

But a case in point: just this past Saturday, during the food break, 1985 and 1991 were swapping an old warstory from my game from decades past, in some serious detail, and laughing over the fun they'd had with it.

I glanced over at 2003 and 2008.  Their eyes were glazing over as they ate their pizza, and one was fiddling with her laptop.  The tale had no relevance to their gameplay, and they reacted pretty much the same way any of us do when we have to be a spectator for other people's "Hey, do you remember when we ..."

And a new campaign won't get to that point unless it is begun correctly.

Quote from: LordVreeg;830077And a new campaign won't get to that point unless it is begun correctly.

And I bet you know the correct way to begin. Possibly the One True Way. I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

That seems unnecessarily antagonistic.

If you look at at Rob C.'s series on creating a sandbox, he doesn't talk about endless detail at the world level. Just broad strokes. After that he says to focus on a relatively small area and sketch the history there.

I would be interested in knowing how much went into Vreeg's campaign before Session 1.

Quote from: Matt;829348I'm of the opinion that writing up "worldwide histories" is a waste of time and effort. Most people are utterly unaware of most history from more than a few generations ago anyway as it has almost no bearing on their current situations. Better to work up details of recent times in the area your game begins, and expand from there as need or as inspired by the course of game play.

Indeed.  OneTRueWayism....

Frankly, Matt, I apologize for not agreeing with you.  Obviously, you have an opinion,and mine is different.

And I am an overprepper and a huge believer in building verisimilitude through consistency.  As well as setting major plotlines in play, at all levels, and building the cosmology and underpinnings of history first, and then going micro scale.   One reason I love using a wiki is that you can keep adding onto the campaign as you play and build.  SO I agree with Matt there.

To Arminus' question, I realized, after building a ton of houserules to D&D and other games, and running a number of settings from '76 to '83, that a system and setting could be made better by matching them up.  Really.  Just using the systems of the day to represent the physics and cosmology of a setting they were not designed for would cause some level of dissonance.

so I drew up the cosmology and sources of magic, and a system to match it.  And the next thing is a drew up a timeline and map.  Then did the lighter histories in that map and timeline.
Then went micro, and made the local fauna and how the local histories worked and more local maps.

And the very first sessions, as per the Sandbox thread, the players went totally rogue in the Bloody Cook incident of 1983, and had to run to Igbar...totally sandboxing off the rails...and all these years later, I keep adding, and Igbar went from a set of notes and a point on the map to the third most developed city in the Cradle of Celtricia.

And here we are in 2015, with me still working heavily in Igbar, and that original timeline and over arching plot grouping written before game one still in place and as part of the whole framework.

But to quantify it, how many pages of notes before the first session?

Quote from: Arminius;830134But to quantify it, how many pages of notes before the first session?

We are going back decades.  So it is not a correct number, but no less than 2 dozen pages of notes.  Or more.

What I'm getting at is: that seems manageable, as Rob's outline provides a divide and conquer method of getting there.

I think for a successful sandbox you do want a sketched-out setting mateial ahead of play; probably at least 6 pages of notes, with an emphasis on player-facing material. I did run a campaign 'Willow Vale' 2008-10 with only about half a page of background notes to start with, it worked ok as a linear mission-of-the-week campaign, but I think might have been a lot stronger with another 5-6 pages up front.

I'm currently running GAZ1 Grand Duchy of Karameikos sandbox, it has about three times as much material as I needed/found useful in its 64 pages (eg most of the adventure ideas won't see much use), but of course Allston didn't know what type of campaign I'd be running. But I am finding that the titbits of history & culture, as well as some* of the NPCs, are very useful.

*Details on the ruling noble houses and the setting's top Clerics, Magic-Users, Fighters & Thieves are very handy. All the Mystara GAZes go crazy on Ambassadors, though. I really don't need 6 pages of Ambassadors!

Quote from: LordVreeg;830077And a new campaign won't get to that point unless it is begun correctly.

Well, look.  I'm an overprepper and verisimilitude fanatic myself.  

But you get a campaign like that not by "beginning correctly," but by creating a campaign to the players' liking.  I've got some of these freakish retention rates by giving those players a campaign with the level of detail they want.  At the same time, I have to accept the probability that a number of the players who fell by the wayside over the years weren't interested in that level of detail.

Quote from: Matt;829348I'm of the opinion that writing up "worldwide histories" is a waste of time and effort. Most people are utterly unaware of most history from more than a few generations ago anyway as it has almost no bearing on their current situations. Better to work up details of recent times in the area your game begins, and expand from there as need or as inspired by the course of game play.

"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.

With history i tend to view it all as potential fodder. There may be something that could seem irrevelant but if I am able to draw on it for something in the game, it has value to me. So I don't mind there being a lot of details that can largely be ignored at first and mined later for artifacts, dungeon backstory, etc.