Inconsistency in distances from bottom-up worldbuilding? Willow: "How much further is it? Didn't you say, it's only two days to the town?" Matmardican: "It IS only two days, if you have legs, not short stumps. I'd already be there, if I wasn't dragging a peck along."
Man! I needed to hear that message about the creative value of worldbuilding itself, whether you ever “use” the result or not. Thanks as always for your insight!
Great discussion, loving the intros. I think both types of world building are necessary from the perspective of the GM and the players and each type should inform and feed into the other. Top down creates verisimilitude, it makes the world feel more real for the players (also helping eliminate immersion breaking world/story inconsistencies), But it is not set in stone and can be changed (behind the scenes) to suit the story and player experience. With a more fleshed out world with a map and established factions, players focus on the bottom up world building while at the table because their not distracted trying to orient themselves in an amorphous, inconsistent world (both physically and in terms of the plot). I think it also helps the dungeon master in this way too, knowing enough about your world means at the table you can focus on the bottom up world building rather than stress and fret about world and story inconsistencies. I also believe if you are in a rut when it comes to bottom up story/world specifics then shifting to top down world building can be a fun way to break out of that rut and get your creative juices flowing as you see the story from a meta perspective and creating maps can generate excellent plot ideas and quest hooks which can enhance the specifics at the table.
I'm going to second this comment and add what I was going to say in the same vein. It seems that while the Bottom Up method is more experiential, there remains an actual answer to the question: how far away is the sea? I would ideally like to create a world where the factual answers are known but the experience of the players is that they talk to NPCs who do not have absolute knowledge and dispense information through their own lens which may be flawed. There are real answers out there, which, when creating a world, it seems important to know.
I like to do a bit of both. A general idea for consistency's sake. But I always interact with the players through NPCs in divulging only what the NPCs know. And they never know everything.
As dark and ominous as the rpg mainframe is made out to be in the intro's - i can't help but think that it xontains the mad and merry soul of dm hank. Maybe the rpg mainframe is simply misunderstood?
I tend to do my world building from the middle. I don't start with the cosmos nor with a single individual peasant. I don't define "This is where the mountain is and this is how the mountain looks.", I go with "And thrust onto the world by the Great Hunter's might, the Worldserpent plowed across the lands, piling high the rocks and debris which, in centuries to come, became known as the World Spine Mountains."
From your description, you are a discovery writer! That's awesome, but this would never work for me 😅 I'm definitely an outliner. That doesn't mean I need to know where the players are going, I just need to know a bunch of stuff that's going on nearby so I can pull from my outline and fill in the gaps. Now I can still prep in 30 mins or an hour, but if I just dive in and figure it out as I go without knowing a bit about what's going on in the world my game suffers.
As interesting as the intro or argument against top-down worldbuilding was, your argument for bottom-up fell flat. Not saying bottom-up can't work, but your description of it wasn't particularly flattering.
5:40 Is that not kinda what happened to our real world? God created it and put it on a shelf to gather dust while those who have to live in this world are left to make the best of it?
