How much of an data dump do you need?

[Scott Ruggels]

On 9/13/2021 at 4:03 PM, Duke Bushido said:

Exactly.   Dont get get me wrong: its wonderful, at least for those players who are into it, to have lots and lots of stuff.  But I have found that in general, about two pages is all you really _need_ to get started.  The rest of your document or background is a guide for what players will learn as they navigate the world or ask questions.

 

Even the history of your world is ptetty much something you do for you, or to make NPC stories interesting: most players flat don't care how the county lines and country borders got to be where they are, or what family was killed a hundred years ago to install the current royals, or what great battle is responsible for the destruction of the bridge that once existed where the "river pier" sits now, etc.

 

Why?  Because they care only about what the world has become as a result of those things, excepting only where those things specifically relate to their characters (you are all part of a secret society dedicated to restoring the rightful ruler to his throne) or the main thrust of the campaign (it is now time to restore the rightful ruler to his throne).

 

This is not a shortcoming in the players; this is reality.  To this very day, I have no idea who went into battle with Andrew Jackson, and if it wasn't for Little Jimmy Dickens, I probably wouldn't know it was in 1814.  Similarly, I have no idea who surrendered to Washington, or where, or even though I know it was July 4, I have no idea if that was the date of the surrender, the negotiations, or the signing of something.   I know Henry Ford popularized the gasoline engine, but I have no idea who invented it.

 

And on and on.  And you know what?  I dont know because I don't need to know; I live in the world that resulted from those influences, period.  What I deal with on a day to day basis in my life has absolutely nothing to do with any of it.  There is nothing I can do to change that, and nothing I have to do to react to any sort of direct, straight-line-from-Ford-to-me impact.  You can shout 'cars!', but we all know Ford didn't invent them, and assembly lines were on the way anyhow. 

 

Ben Franklin and electricity?  There is So much mythologizing about this subject that it is impossible to know what's true and what's romantic fantasy.

 

Same with religions: give me some local ones, period.  I live in rural Georgia.  I have never met a practicing Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist.  Before the internet, I knew _nothing_ about these religions, and today...  Well, the little bit I know today is less than useless to any non-gaming part of my life.

 

Your players are the same as we are: we know what we have to do to cope with the world around us because we have some small idea of what the world immediately around us is.  We don't really have any practical use foe how it got that way.  The players instinctively understand that there characters don't need to know it, either, and if the players themselves aren't interested in setting time aside to read your fancy world build, they aren't going to.  There are exceptions- myself, Chris, Scott (who may correct it and hand it back to you.  ), etc, but for the most part, your massive full-world detailed build out is for _you_.  The players want just enough to make characters and interact with the locals, then they want to roll some dice.

 

😕

 

 

I would have to disagree slightly with you, as due to my background and interests, I go deep into history, in the fact I took it as an AP course.  I was also a very focused wargamer (M0ostly Napoleonics, and colonial Skirmishing, until I got heavily into WW2). I have a deep inter4est in history.  And due to my family background, I know a fair amount about the nobility of Northern Europe, the UK and Russia, what happened to our Noble line, and why I am now such a strict anti-communist. My YouTube is about 15% dumb humor and animation. 15% technical animation and 3D tips and tricks (learning Blender right now , as I move away from Maya, and other Autodesk products) 20% Popular Culture news, and the rest is History, and current events, which is helped by a knowledge of History. Knowing the history is a bonus in remembering troop dispositions in wargames, and a rough idea. Now I do admit I have forgotten most of my Napoleonic history, and sort of replaced it with WW2, both for interest and part of a side hustle on Second Life making tansk and aircraft for sale, but I cannot say that history is unimportant. (Annoying though, as I will critique anachronisms in films and television endlessly). 

Someone on YouTube said, that once you get into your 40's (and you are male), your interest tend to focus on Grilling and Barbeque, Cars, or History. I fell into History.  Incidentally, Washington accepted the surrender of Lord Cornwallis  at Yorktown, in Seventeen eighty-something. So, how's your grilling?

[Duke Bushido]

On what date?  Was it the 4th, or does the 4th celebrate some after-sifning ceremony, or the pre- formal written surrender when the white flag was being waved over the battlefield?

 

Yes: I like history.  I pointed out that there were several people who do enjoy detailed sourcebooks, and even mentioned you and myself by name.  I didnt mention LL because I suspect everyone here already knows that, and realistically, the vast majority of us are here are GMs; GMs like the background stuff, or we wouldnt be GMs: there is a lot of work, most of which goes unappreciated or not even fully understood.

 

The greatest portion of Players I have encountered-and again, not all players, but most- are interested onky in what the character is doing right now and- if you are really luck- why he is doing it.

 

I cannot count the number of modules, city books, and world books I have used for multiole campaigns, and none of the background every really comes up.  It rarely goes beyond "let's find out why the adversary is doing what he is doing.  If it goes beyond his parents- sometimes,grandparents, its met with "yeah, okay; I get it: [two-word synopsis of motivation, such as "bad blood," or "border dispute"]; moving on."

 

To reiterate: put it in there; thats fine.  Just know that it niether necessary nor likely to come up in game play.

 

 

 

[DShomshak]

My observation is that a lot of game writers are frustrated novelists who can do the world-building for a novel, but can't actually write story, dialogue and character. Example: Me. Also describes a lot of the writers I dealt when freelancing on Exalted, but then it was my job as developer to keep them on track, producing stuff that might, just might, be useful in a campaign.

 

"I'm sorry, [Name], these three pages you wrote about the Solar Deliberative in the First Age is all freaky cool, but completely irrelevant to what is happening in Wavecrest right now. I'm cutting it."

 

Also, the people who wanted to give long descriptions of the cool, epic stuff that NPCs had done, instead of situations that GMs (excuse me, "Storytellers") could place PCs in right now.

 

I expect there was learning all around.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Scott Ruggels]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

On what date?  Was it the 4th, or does the 4th celebrate some after-sifning ceremony, or the pre- formal written surrender when the white flag was being waved over the battlefield?

 

 I had to look it up, but the Surrender Ceremony was done starting at 2pm, October 19th, 1781. July fourth, a.k.a Independence Day was when the Declaration of Independence was made public.  July 4th 1776.

 

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Yes: I like history.  I pointed out that there were several people who do enjoy detailed sourcebooks, and even mentioned you and myself by name.  I didnt mention LL because I suspect everyone here already knows that, and realistically, the vast majority of us are here are GMs; GMs like the background stuff, or we wouldnt be GMs: there is a lot of work, most of which goes unappreciated or not even fully understood.

 

True, but I GM a lot less than I play these days, because few people know hero, and everyone online is running a D&D 5E campaign. I am (slowly) gearing up to run a Fantasy Hero campaign based on the 3-4th edition rules. Using my old 90's era FH campaign setting.

 

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

The greatest portion of Players I have encountered-and again, not all players, but most- are interested onky in what the character is doing right now and- if you are really luck- why he is doing it.

 

Oddly A few of the players tapped for the FH game, are GMs for other games, and tend to think wider, than the mere players.  But the rest are role players, and regulars for the Saturday game. So they ae interested in enough background to sew their P.C.s into it.

 

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

I cannot count the number of modules, city books, and world books I have used for multiple campaigns, and none of the background every really comes up.  It rarely goes beyond "let's find out why the adversary is doing what he is doing.  If it goes beyond his parents- sometimes, grandparents, its met with "yeah, okay; I get it: [two-word synopsis of motivation, such as "bad blood," or "border dispute"]; moving on."

 

To reiterate: put it in there; thats fine.  Just know that it niether necessary nor likely to come up in game play.

 

 Depends on the players, I'd say.  some have  larger goals, like becoming nobles, and there, you have to know the political landscape.  Others will enjoy travelogue and just wants to know what the plants, animals and geology looks like, as they are taking notes.

[Duke Bushido]

I'd rep that if I wasn't all out.

 

I've put you on the to-do list. 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

16 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I'd rep that if I wasn't all out.

 

I've put you on the to-do list. 

 

 

 

There.

 

You are now on the to-done list. 

 

 

[unclevlad]

In many cases, details equivalent to "name 5 Civil War generals" in the fantasy world don't much matter in advance, so I get where Duke's coming from.  

 

To get started...genre and expectations.  Genre:  fantasy, sci fi, modern tech, modern street-level supers.  Obviously build parameters here too.  Expectations...we'll specify a fantasy setting:

--magic:  common or rare?  How many people can do it all all?  Separately, how many people can do it *seriously*?  What about enchanted items?  If magic is rare, do the common folk accept it or fear it?  For full-time magical practitioners, are their SFX generally narrow or broad?  An elementalist (fire, water, earth, air) is still narrow by comparison to, say, a D&D wizard whose magic can encompass any class of power/effect.

--religion:  complex or simple pantheons?  Are there major factions?  Major animosities, a la, Crusades-era Christianity and Islam?  How much does religion influence daily life?  

--large-scale politics

--races and racial politics, at least the basic info

 

That should be enough to get the outline built, assigning most of the combat points.  Background specifics will probably need more info but I, as a player, won't know what specifics...so asking the GM to know all of them ahead of time is unreasonable.  Some?  Yeah...like, a simple pantheon will probably be fully defined, whereas a complex pantheon, maybe not.

Quick aside...I think my favorite religious setup is Bujold's Five Gods books.  Father (judge, law);  mother (medicine, household);  Son (battle, hunting);  daughter (youth, spring, new life);  and the Bastard (too complex to explain quickly...not an evil god at all, but one that's expiated as much as worshipped).  Belief...almost universal.  Bujold has a very nice funeral ceremony showing the soul of the person has been accepted, which answers a HUGE mission of any religion...what happens after death?  And it's otherwise pretty simple and straightforward, not overly bogged down with excessive trappings of portfolios and whatnot.

[DShomshak]

Ditto on Bujold's World of the Five Gods. I've read lots of second-rate fantasies that have gods in the setting; sometimes active gods. The World of the Five Gods has *religion,* it's real, and it matters. At one point in The Curse of Chalion, the protagonist regrets never having read any theology. He had thought it theoretical and impractical. Wow, so wrong.

 

Dean Shomshak

[L. Marcus]

Ode To A Pebble was Cazaril's masterpiece.

[unclevlad]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Ditto on Bujold's World of the Five Gods. I've read lots of second-rate fantasies that have gods in the setting; sometimes active gods. The World of the Five Gods has *religion,* it's real, and it matters. At one point in The Curse of Chalion, the protagonist regrets never having read any theology. He had thought it theoretical and impractical. Wow, so wrong.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

So which would you want to be...sorcerer, saint, or shaman?

 

(We already know Cancer is secretly the Saint of Idau...)

[L. Marcus]

Oh, if there's a bunch of them about, and the tradition looks to be stable, shaman all the way!

 

Otherwise, no thanks.

[DShomshak]

Oh, sorcerer:

 

* One does not choose to be a saint; one accepts it. I doubt I could surrender my will to the necessary degree.

* Putting the 'fluence on people might be cool, but bleeding is not my idea of fun. Also, I doubt I could perform the necessary sacrifice.

* But having chatty imaginary friends in my head is my normal state. The magic might be fun, too. Especially for dealing with mosquitoes.

 

Though I pity the person who inherited my demon and, with it, a copy of my personality. Having *me* for an imaginary friend would be dire.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Duke Bushido]

On 9/16/2021 at 1:04 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

 So, how's your grilling?

 

 

   

 

Seriously, though:  I have no idea.  "Getting into grilling" means having a budget that allows buying _meat_, and just using it to experiment with!  So....  no idea how my grilling would be, should I try it.  It also means having time to create a fire and get it "just right" for cooking on, which means-- should my grilling actually be awesome-- not eating until midnight or later....

 

 

[archer]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

   

 

Seriously, though:  I have no idea.  "Getting into grilling" means having a budget that allows buying _meat_, and just using it to experiment with!  So....  no idea how my grilling would be, should I try it.  It also means having time to create a fire and get it "just right" for cooking on, which means-- should my grilling actually be awesome-- not eating until midnight or later....

 

 

 

Try an electric smoker rather than a grill. 

 

Load it up with cheap cuts of beef and a couple of whole chickens before you go to work. And get home to a week's worth of perfectly cooked meat.

 

https://www.foodfirefriends.com/smoker-vs-grill/

[Scott Ruggels]

[Edited]  Oops wrong Window.

[Scott Ruggels]

On 9/18/2021 at 3:26 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

   

 

Seriously, though:  I have no idea.  "Getting into grilling" means having a budget that allows buying _meat_, and just using it to experiment with!  So....  no idea how my grilling would be, should I try it.  It also means having time to create a fire and get it "just right" for cooking on, which means-- should my grilling actually be awesome-- not eating until midnight or later....

 

 

 Hmmm, cars, then? I notice you have a nice Pick up.

[Duke Bushido]

Eh; you can't see the dents from that angle.    turns out that no matter what you tell your hired help about the turning radius on a twenty-one foot long truck, they are still going to try to turn it around in a stand of planted pines.   

 

I didnt really "get into" anything as I got older.  Riding, writing, and wrenching have been my passions since I was a kid.

 

I have gotten _out_ of a few things as my age advanced: chasing women (I caught one, so....), hair styling (no need anymore), and a thirty-four inch belt (like I said, I caught one.  I can relax a bit now.  )  I have also gotten out of drag racing (too expensive and too much time that I don't have anymore) and out of dirtbike racing (too old and I heal too slow).  I still dabble on a bit of street racing (I know; I know- believe me, I know!  I just finished watching that trial myself).

 

thinking about it, I havent done any leather tanning or bookbinding in a couple of decades, either (I quit because I didn't want to learn and invest in the modern  veggie-based dyes, etc, and the traditional,stuff was getting hard to source in less than industrial quantities).

 

I grew up farming, so there is _zero- chance I want to sink a food plot in my backyard, though I do put in a few tomatoes every year just because they keep telling me you can't grow them around here, and I have both a grapefruit and a fig tree that are hyper-productive, but I think that is because I ignore them as hard as possible.

 

Monte (the across-the-pond neighbor-lady's cat has drug up a couole of buddies, but I am not terribly into that either.

 

looking back at it, i've been pretty fortunate: almost everything,I have ever wanted to do, I did while I  was young enough to do it fully and well.

 

the last couple of years I have worked half-heartedly at rebuilding my Hero Games collection, but really, I have regained everything I ever had (for what it's worth, the third-party magazines are the hardest), so now it's just picking a few things from 5 and 6e that sort of interest me.

 

the only thing I can really pretend is a new interest is the plan I am working on to build a camper I can pull behind the Valkyrie.  Apparently my wife is getting too old to sleep in a hammock tied to the bike and a tree under a tarp hung the same way.  And, in her words, "I want something I can shower in!"

 

i've got something workable that excites me, but I doubt I will ever have time or funds to pull that off, so I am not terribly excited by that, either.

 

crap.

 

I think I might be done living.....!

 

 

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

On 9/20/2021 at 2:42 PM, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

I think I might be done living.....!

 

 

 

 

Ack! don't say that!  But is is fairly clear you do fallinto the gearhead category, So that fits.

[Duke Bushido]

I won't deny that; I've never even made a secret of it, but it's not something I got into as I aged.

 

I paid thirty bucks to a junk yard to buy my first car (a '69 Falcon: the one that was supposed to be the 4-door Mustang until fans got wind of the idea and booed it to death, so the discontinued Falcon got on last year, in spite of the fact that it looked nothing like a Falcon and everything like a 4-door Mustang) when I was 13 and spent two years beating the dents out of it, learning body work from my old man, and rebuilding the motor, rebuilding the wiring harness, etc.  I had it finished and painted when I was 15, got it re-certified as road worthy, and spent a couple of years making it not road worthy again.     I already had been through a couple of motorcycles by then; the car was more just because I wanted to learn how to do those things, and I thought it was a cool-looking car (note: it looked much less cool in metallic brown).

 

Mustang fans are weird: boo the 4-door and the wagon (also released as the Falcon wagon in '69) out of existence; boo the front wheel drive Mustang out of existence (it was released as the Probe), but slap a sporty set of ends on a Pinto and call it the Mustang II?  Yes; please.  the Fox body?  Yes; please.  (though to be fair: the Fox body was probably the single best-handling Mustang ever built before or since).

 

Though as long as we're talking Pintos, here's something I always wanted to try but never got to.  May I present the Ford Pinchero:

 

 

 

 

It's not the best job I've ever seen (this was a really popular conversion for a while), but it's the best picture I could find.  That bumper gap filler is as poorly done as is the bumper.  Not sure why they didn't just keep the original bumper, honestly.  There are other flaws, but still: it's a pretty clean conversion.  Still, given as more and more people these days are dabbling in spanish, he should probably get rid of that custom "Pinchero" sticker. 

 

 

The most fun I ever had with car wrenching was jamming a 460 Ford engine into an AMC Gremlin.  That thing was a hoot. 

 

But motorcycles have always been my thing.  The only reason the Leviathan has seen so many miles is that about ten years ago the kids got too big to fit them both on the bike, so......

 

 

[Tjack]

    To knock this question down to it’s bare bones, to a formula that can be used in any game, any genre, it would be the opposite side of the coin to “garbage in, garbage out.”

      The more history, details, background, illustrations, whatever you can provide will get your players to create more interesting, more varied, more detailed characters.  There’s no way to know what will get two neurons rubbing together in a players brain and create a spark that will light up your game.

    It doesn’t have to be a dry history and timeline that you wrote but instead refer your players to the books, TV shows and movies that inspired you to create that world and run that game.  Put on your Professor Harold Hill straw hat (or the guy who sold the monorail to Springfield) and get them fired up. The more excitement you can generate to them is the more fun you’ll all have in the game.

     If you’ve ever seen the movie L.A. Confidential remember the opening sequence with the postcards and newspaper photos of Los Angeles in the early ‘50’s.   How it brought you into that world ?  That was all taken from the pitch meeting presentation the would be Producers of the movie did for the studio exec’s to try and get funding for the project. It was such a success that it became the entryway for the audience as well.   This is what you have to do for your players 

  It’s an axiom in the military that “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”  The same thing holds here. The more you give the player, the more you will get from the player. 

[assault]

An option I have considered is to use the prologue from Romeo and Juliet as a starting point.

 

It would need a bit of expansion to help the players locate their characters within the framework, but the atmospheric work would be more or less done.

 

You don't have to mention terms like Guelph or Ghibelline in order to milk them for further setting ideas.

 

Venice might be a more fruitful inspiration than Verona. It had an empire that could get the PCs traipsing all over a Mediterranean sized area and beyond.

 

Anyway, the players can start with a relatively familiar concept - Shakespearean Europe - and work from there. If they come up with Dwarves, well, good on them.

[Greywind]

6 hours ago, Tjack said:

    To knock this question down to it’s bare bones, to a formula that can be used in any game, any genre, it would be the opposite side of the coin to “garbage in, garbage out.”

      The more history, details, background, illustrations, whatever you can provide will get your players to create more interesting, more varied, more detailed characters.  There’s no way to know what will get two neurons rubbing together in a players brain and create a spark that will light up your game.

    It doesn’t have to be a dry history and timeline that you wrote but instead refer your players to the books, TV shows and movies that inspired you to create that world and run that game.  Put on your Professor Harold Hill straw hat (or the guy who sold the monorail to Springfield) and get them fired up. The more excitement you can generate to them is the more fun you’ll all have in the game.

     If you’ve ever seen the movie L.A. Confidential remember the opening sequence with the postcards and newspaper photos of Los Angeles in the early ‘50’s.   How it brought you into that world ?  That was all taken from the pitch meeting presentation the would be Producers of the movie did for the studio exec’s to try and get funding for the project. It was such a success that it became the entryway for the audience as well.   This is what you have to do for your players 

  It’s an axiom in the military that “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”  The same thing holds here. The more you give the player, the more you will get from the player. 

 

Not necessarily true. The players want to play, yes, but not all the players want to take the time to work up a backstory.

I had one player give me a lot to work with at one end of the spectrum. At the other I had a player that had a character sheet that just listed abilities. Others fell in the middle. "Why is so much about his character?" "When are you going to start giving me stuff I can work with for your character?"

[Spence]

I really hate using a mobile.

My dissertation on the topic said it posted.

Really it did. 

But no.

Nothing.

[Duke Bushido]

I guess I do this backwards, too.

 

Generally, when creating a new campaign, I think about the very few things I would like to see in that world, define the genre, and a few very loose requirements and two or three "big things" that I will pretend are not negotiable right up until they are negotiated.

 

Then I focus on the sorts of characters the players are interested in, feel them out for motivations, possible backstories, etc.

 

And then I get down to work--  I have a tendency to build my worlds such that the characters they want to play will logically inhabit them.  Even then, they aren't built whole-cloth.  As the characters evolve, so, too, does the world in which they exist-- again, so that such characters could logically exist in them.  

 

Even as I write this, I can't think of a single campaign that didn't start out as two locations, four location names, and a crudely drawn map of the section of the current location in which the characters are standing.

 

 

 

Honestly, until the internet, I had never seen anyone who didn't.

 

 

[Scott Ruggels]

I actually have portions of the old Campaign up online. I just can't find the entirety, as I have moved a few times since it was shut down in 1999. I think I know where chunks of it may be, but they were published in APAzines like "The Wild Hunt" and "Alarums & Excursions". I just have to dig in my shed, I guess. Once I do find it all, I plan on running a game in that world on TableTop Simulator.