RPG Worldbuilding is World Modelling

 

    I just finished the book Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil. It took me year to read it and it was the most informative book I've ever read. It comprehensively traces the history of energy usage throughout human history. The book also made me a much better GM.

Mosts GMs are familiar with worldbuilding as the stockpiling of lore and backstory, as an exercise of mapping and building a fictional world and populating it with non-player characters and monsters and treasures with which to surprise and challenge and hopefully entertain the players. I'm not saying it isn't those things but I do think worldbuilding is something more.

The RPG world is the shared fictional enviroment the GM and players inhabit together during play. In traditional play the GM makes up the facts of the world and communicates those to the players through play. Some GMs are better at communicating those details than others, some have more complex worlds some simpler, some realities are highly fantastic, others darker, grittier or simply more mundane. It isn't necessary to make your own world at all- there are hundreds you can crib from, many even freely available online. I don't think it's particularly important how you get your world as a GM, but the world itself is vital. Without a world, the players can't make any meaningful decisions because there is nothing to react to, no resources to employ and no goals that players can work toward. Alright, so build a dungeon. Unfortunately, a world consisting only of a dungeon is scarcely better than nothing at all. It lack context and the poor player trapped inside lack alternatives.

Traditionally, worldbuilding is often used to describe the creation of facts: "Here is a thing, this is its name, it looks like so, it has x number of hitpoints, etc." This is fine as far as it goes but creating things with which to inhabit a world the easy part. It is how those raw materials are connected and how they relate to each other that breathes life into the game setting. All too often we see worlds with highly fantastic features but characters in the world seem to lack any awareness, thoughts or behaviors that reflect these facts. 

For example, in a setting where magical resurrection exists how much does it cost to do resurrection? Why don't normal folk simply live forever, let alone monarchs and the wealthy? How does this fact affect views on religion, gods and the afterlife? There could be any number of answers to this question 

This is where world modelling comes in. The game master must be able to represent the world inside their heads in order to properly adjudicate the outcomes of player actions. Players model the world too when they make decisions. To the extent that the world follows discoverable, consistent, communicable patterns the players are empowered to make meaningful choices. This means the GM must make an effort to know the answers. When the players reach an unanswerable question or a random, unconnected fact they have sailed off the edge of the world past the limits of their ability to affect their situation.

Some readers will surely protest that it is impossible to know all of the possible facts of an imaginary world and this is true. 

To these protestations I have several answers: 

First, learn more because your world model craves data. Real-world knowledge has the advantageous property of a plausible relationship with truth. Vaclav Smil undoubtedly has a far richer understanding of history and can build a more robust world model than I can but after reading his book I have a much better sense of the energetic imperatives of various historical periods and the tools they employed to achieve their needs. I know how much more effective a Roman watermill would have been versus a mule-powered rotary mill versus a hand mill versus a mortar and pestle and how that technology would have changed the patterns of daily life (2-3 hours of additional daily labor!). Keeping a mule would require more land and food and probably an outbuilding and a breeder. Adding all of these things to the world gives the players so many levers to pull at a finer grain of detail than would have previously been possible.

Second, abductive reasoning is your friend. You don't need to plan out how everything relates to every other setting element. You do have to be able to come up with plausible explanations retroactively. Explaining (or at least knowing) why things are the way is an essential worldbuilding skill. Abductive reasoning is particularly useful when determining how different characters relate to each other. One truism is that people know each other and they have opinions on nearly everything. When players ask an NPC for information, instead of conspicuous ignorance, you can give several competing versions of events figure out the truth later.

Finally, not all worldbuilding information needs to be public- it merely needs to be plausible and discoverable. People tend to default to either reality or genre tropes when modelling a game world. You should indicate which to anticipate, but you don't need to spend too much time theorycrafting setting elements that match player expectations. As a corollary, the further a setting element is from player expectation the more important it is to develop a detailed understanding of its inner workings.

World modelling is not only important for judging game outcomes and for allowing a wide array of possible actions, it also brings depth. With knowledge of cultural mores and taboos, religious ideas, metaphysical models I can better project desires, goals, thoughts and behaviors onto my fictional world's denizens. The more detail you can incorporate the better because it enables a richer array of possibilities for the players. This is of particular value if one of your goals is to transport the players to truly new and strange milieus.

I am not a computer. I do not have infinite time, nor cognitive resources to adequately model an entire world, especially one smashed together with elements of fantasy, history and game design. But one doesn't have to be perfect in order to aspire to be better. You don't see basketball coaches telling children not to practice simply because they will never be the next Michael Jordan or Lebron James. I will continue attempting the infinite task of modelling worlds within my head because it is fun it helps me understand the real world and it does make for a better game.