Game World Design Four First Principles

One of the most important things I want to try this time is to think, more profoundly, about what a D&D world really entails in terms of the building blocks of the setting. There are some fundamental mistakes I think many game world designers make when trying to create an interesting world for their games. (I know I’ve made a few of these myself.) If we pause for a moment and consider the influences on the game, the feeling of the standard settings, and the ramifications of the rules themselves, we come up with some pretty surprising and informative departures from what I believe most people think a D&D game setting is really about. I think that most people get these following four critical nuances wrong and that in turn makes for a number of problems when they try to create a setting for the game.

Here then are my observations about the four critical issues that I think most game world designers “get wrong” and which will thus inform my development of a setting where I try to “get it right.”

I’ll expand on each of these later, but below are my main points.

(Note: As I’ve written follow-up articles, I’ve embedded links to them in the headings for each section below. To read more on each idea, just click the link.)

This isn’t a big shocker, but the point here is that trying to tie D&D to even a pseudo-medieval influence is going to create all sorts of problems. The issue is not just with magic but also with the basic character roles and the activities players enjoy. Adventuring groups just aren’t very medieval. Instead, they are – for lack of a better term – “Tolkienian,” and Tolkien wasn’t trying to replicate the medieval world but rather some Ur England of legend. Medieval romances don’t tend to include wizards and priests in adventuring parties and for that matter whole parties of adventurers are relatively rare as well. In many ways, a far better fit would be heroic epic and classical sources. They have monsters, gods, and adventuring parties. What we think of as the medieval elements are really classical elements being transformed into medieval romance. Even just going to early medieval sources helps. Think more Beowulf and less Morte de Arthur.

Europe in much of the later Middle Ages was fairly well settled and even downright cosmopolitan in comparison with the standards of most fantasy games and with the default monster strewn wilderness that is the core D&D experience.Want an example? Perhaps the singularly most iconic module in the game’s history is The Keep on the Borderlands. Nearly everything about this and so many other classic modules screams Western with a capital “W.” Even more problematic is the fact that most modern fantasy is also actually very “Western” in its themes and settings. Many of the frontier wild-land settings evoke the Wild West far more than they do Western Europe. Many game worlds imagine a realm of scattered settlements isolated within a sea of largely untamed wilderness. This may again be a case of Tolkein’s influence and his Middle Earth with its scattered and isolated pockets of civilization.I actually like this fact as I am likewise fascinated by the American West and its geography and frontier spirit. In essence, fantasy tries to have the history of Europe and the geography of the American West. The best game worlds tend to combine these two elements. The D&D world needs both pockets of pseudo-medieval pastoral and peasant-filled principalities and vast wide-open and monster-haunted wilderness.

Sure, medieval romances have occasional magic, but we can’t just pretend that D&D magic is the same thing writ large. The Ebberon setting should have done away with that notion forever. (That’s not a dig; I think what it achieved was genius, though I don’t actually like the world much.) Magic matters, and trying to just play the game of recreating medieval Europe with a tiny bit of magic tacked on isn’t going to work. Magic-users are so much more powerful than anything else that they are going to change the way the world works. The only other option is to have them be prohibitively rare, but then you have no mage universities or temples and such, and it isn’t really D&D anymore.

A good D&D game world has to embrace the magic while still making it feel, well, magical, instead of commonplace. This is somewhat facilitated in the new edition by the relative rarity of significant magical items. Still, it’s a real challenge. Magic has to be present but it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Elves and Dwarves are really just cultural variations written as species differentiation. There are human cultures that are far more different from the pseudo-European standard of most fantasy games than any Elven or Dwarven culture I’ve seen depicted. Still, the very fact that humanity expressly isn’t alone is certainly significant. More importantly, there are a large number of very different races in the standard D&D setting. The cultures of the orcish and goblinoid set alone could conceivably account for a larger mass of sentient beings than most or even all human cultures. That means that there will be a pluralistic and diverse set of cultures present in any coherent game world. And that needs to be reflected in real cultural differentiation. Which is a problem: Humans seem almost boring in a world of such wacky diversity.

That’s unfortunate, because I like humans; I am one after all. I have to figure out why they would still be a significant force in the world I want to create and the de facto dominant race, as they are depicted to be in every edition of the game I can recollect. Additionally, if humanity is to have any real significance and role it has to be special in some way. The new edition gives humans a powerful incentive mechanic by allowing them an across the board stat hike. That makes them the ultimate jacks of all trades. They can be effective as any class more readily than any other race. Humans win because they can do it all, be any class. They have no gaps in their racial portfolio. But the appeal of humanity can also be boosted by recognizing the amazing diversity among human cultures. If D&D isn’t really European, then it would make sense to also explore other cultural models or synthesis of existing cultures that might be applicable as well. In short, humans have to be cool and interesting and they have to include the other races in their dominant culture.

So what does this all mean? It means I need a new set of first principles for my new game world. I have to reconsider what my influences should be and even what mood and tone I should try to create through the design of the game world. I need to  acknowledge and embrace the differences that have made D&D such fun for myself and legions of players and not try to shoehorn the setting into some preconceived notion of what a fantasy game world should be like. In short, I have to respect the game itself and its attendant traditions and try to make a world that embraces the game we all know and love so much. So, how do I do this? I’m going to try to do it by looking at each of those four assumptions I realize were messing up my game world design and creating problems and try to find creative ways to express the ramifications of those principles in my own new creation. †