Comments on: Game vs World

By: LordVreeg

LordVreeg — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:59:44 +0000

A good thread post.
I’m still doing what you described first. I created 4 setting early in my gaming career, but then (after practice, it seems) at the end of High School, I started my current game setting.
That was 1984.
I know people and groups and GM’s do what they do for different reasons. Motivation comes from a great many places. But my setting is my Magnum Opus, a story that I wrote the prologues for decades ago, wove the storylines and conflicts, and all the playing has changed it and moved it a long.
I currently see it as a long book, and each character and game is a chapter. And I do not see the game or the world as more important, but as necessary for the other.
But a good, thought-provoking snippet.

By: The Stray

The Stray — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:00:29 +0000

I tried running a few games where Game => World, but we always seem to return to the D&D game where I put the most effort into the world first. I think this is because I find world-building to be the most fun aspect of the game-mastering process for myself. Naturally, part of this is taking character background elements and incorporating them into the world somewhere, which is an interesting challenge.

By: Ravenhawk

Ravenhawk — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:20:24 +0000

I find when I game, I often play with the game as a tool to craft and develop my character. It is usually the individual characters, each with their own developed personalities, motivations and quirks that I take the greatest joy in.
Awhile back in the tabletop game that I was currently playing, I found myself struggling. The game just didn’t seem fun and I couldn’t figure out why. After a couple sessions it occurred to me that my character had lost a focus: They had no personal motivation. While we still had a quest or two to take-on, we were playing a rather open-ended pirate campaign, so I really could send things where I liked, my character didn’t have enough personal motivation or goals of his own besides roboting along the GM’s little mini quests that we’d picked up.
I talked things over with the GM and he said he’d noticed that problem not only with my character, but with some of the others. It was remedied by spending half of a session night on ‘character development.’ He wrote up a questionnaire with the kind of character development questions one normally answers on creation, plus a few specifically on our motivations and goals. We chatted, compared things, and brain-stormed. It was a pleasant experience for all the players and I think it helped us all to get to know our characters a bit better before we returned to gaming.

I may be rambling a bit here, but the point is I agree. There are a few very different ways to approach gaming, that to the outsider look the same, but depending on the way the players likes to play, can lead to very different levels of enjoyment.

By: Reggie

Reggie — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:50:57 +0000

I was doing World => Game. I created a world for myself during High School. In this world took place stories and themes of my own imagination.
When I came in touch with D&D I saw it as the perfect opportunity to share it with others and to expand it by having players go on adventures in my world. It worked quite well actually. Players went their way and according to their actions I got to expand (or explore) my world in more detail. Both sides enjoyed it. Me because I got to explore my mind and the players because they liked how colorful I put down the world because it was in fact, my world. The game became more of an interactive story than about the game mechanics.

Recently however I quit the campaign because creating your own world costs alot of energy and I was done with that. The players now play a pre-made adventure where the world is laid out. A background or carpet for the game. Different style of play, right or wrong? Neither I think. I think the question should be: what are you into?