Worldbuilding

[Brian]

"Worldbuilding" OR "I seen it done before, how hard could it be?"

I set out in this post to ask a question, which I then answer.  But my answer isn't the only one, and I'd like to see some others and possibly gain some perspective on it.

Recently, I had to scrap a campaign I had just started (none of us were comfortable NPCing Sterling's character after he passed away, and I didn't feel it would be right to just write him out of the story; we were also only two sessions in).  This means that my players now want a new game (which is fine by me), but none of them will agree on an established setting.  I don't have a problem with it, but it does require me to come up with a new original gaming world.

I tend to build my gaming worlds by polling the players to find out what they like/want to play in, and then seeing how many disparate elements can be drawn together.  In this case, we're running a 'Miyazaki-themed' campaign.  Kind of a Steamboy-meets-Castle-in-the-Sky scenario ... Steampunk with magic and kids with frightening amounts of gumption (and +8 to climb).

But how do other GMs approach this angle and build their worlds?

[Dracos]

Building a world is a pain.  I know, I've done some, but really, it's a royal pain.  I almost always would prefer a somewhat established setting.  I don't necessarily care about bringing the stuff in but there's a ton of tedious work in mapping out what goes where, getting detailed maps, etc.

When I do do it, I tend to try like my dungeon designs, though I think those have worked better than my world designs.  I get a theme.  Then some tech levels for eyeballing.  Same with magic.  Then I pick a spot and start working outwards from it.  Usually wherever the players start.  There might later be revealed that there is interesting stuff in honolulu, but really, that doesn't need to be worked out if it is far to the west and the players all want to go east.  That way I try and minimalize the work necessary to get a coherent world.  Of course, that leaves me sometimes doing a fair bit on the spot.

Dracos

[thepanda]

Of course, that leaves me sometimes doing a fair bit on the spot.

You speak truth. Games where you're Gming and forming the world on the fly are hard, slow, and generally a pain in the ass. Especially when you're GMing more than two players.

While I don't GM much, I've found limiting the scope of the setting helps tremendously. I personally suck at epic adventure. Even wrwitten down I can't keep all the pieces together. In my case I tend to try for secluded or shut off areas in which I can make up rules for pretty much anything without having to ponder the consequences of those decisions on a larger scale. Islands, lost civilizations, towns nestled between soaring mountain peaks, space stations, or even something as inclosed as a hunted house are ideal for me because of my limitations as a GM.

These also allow me to plan encounters, events, and people pretty well before I run into trouble. The smaller scale allows me to throw a lot of detail around without it biting me later, as well.

People seem less inclined to nitpick unusual things in these settings, as far as my experience shows. As an example...

Say you're running a game with a modern/fantasy setting (with the stipulation that the greater population doesn't know magic exists). Trolls under the Golden Gate Bridge, real vampires and werewolves infesting the modern underworld; that sort of thing. The more fantastic and inhuman the creatures are, the harder it becomes to explain why people don't seem to know they're there. I tend to see "It's magic" as a bit of a copout, honestly. Explaining it, even to yourself, takes a whole lot of effort, and even then there are usually holes that someone is going to try to poke through. Case in point, try explaining away dragons in the above setting. I mean the hulking huge brutes that destroy towns and eat virgins variety, not the shapeshifting-sidhe knockoff kind. How could it stay hidden all this time? If it flies, why doesn't it show up on radar? If it doesn't fly, why doesn't it leave large, easy to follow tracks? What does it eat? Wouldn't athorities stumble on it if people kept going missing around its lair?

And there is always someone who is going to want to point out all of this and more to you. Always.

In a limited setting, however, these things become not simply easier to answer, but also to digest. Take the remote town setting and try the dragon again. How does it stay hidden? Natural barriers to human progression (i.e. uncharted mountains, dense forest, murky swapland) lay nearby the town. THe town isn't important enough to have radar. The tracks might disappear back into the swamp,forest, whatever and  people are too frightened to persue ithem any further. It eats *gasp* large animals living in the area. And people (hince the problem). Maybe the authorities know about the disappearances but cannot follow through for lack of manpower, equipment, and just local superstition.

Not perfect, I'll admit, but it beats  "ZOMG, MAGIK!!!!"

[Brian]

It's an RPG cliche because it works, ThePanda. :)

Hero(es) born in remote mountain village, which lies in a valley with only a single road to exit it.  Starting off small also helps keep your campaign on track, and is great if you're launching a world-spanning epic adventure.  My own setting is basically a series of kingdoms all sealed beneath a magical dome of power (it's underwater, though the PCs won't have discovered this yet).  The kingdoms are large enough to go to war with one-another, but the area is small enough that it can be crossed in two or three weeks (which makes the kindoms relatively small, but also speeds things up as far as intrigue in the game's begining).  Magic is a fact of life for these people, even if they don't understand all of the ancients' intricacies.

Then we throw the PC's into the world, mix things up, eventually let them discover the true nature of their kingdom, and by the time they get outside and breathe real fresh air, they'll know what they're doing.  Either saving the world from an ancient evil, or figuring out how to save their home and preserve it.  I'm kind of cheating by not really defining the 'outside' world yet, but it lets me make a world in a day for my players, and still (since the underwater kingdom is separate from everything else) have the ability to throw the truly bizzare or nasty at them (maybe the surface is an irradiated wasteland and they need to find new plutonium cores to power the Wall's ancient defenses against the encroaching ocean).  Admittedly, this can come across as somewhat half-assed, so I try and put a lot of detail into what's been done.

[Dracos]

Personally, I think the two or three shell model is almost always a good idea.  A small start shell and a larger 'the world is open' shell.

I tend to do this in most of my world designs.  A few town start spot, and then a larger area revealed afterwards.  This, partially, reflects my game history though.

Dracos

[Bjorn]

I've been working on a campaign world called the Free Kingdoms for the forum game of the same name.  While I'm not going to go into everything so as to avoid spoilers, it seems like it might be interesting to resurrect this thread to talk about the process that went into making it.

The basic inspiration was role reversal.  In the "classic" fantasy setting, you have the "races of light" as the dominant forces, with goblinoids and the like hanging around the fringes of civilized society.  I wanted a powerful monster empire which had conquered the squabbling, strife-ridden cultures of the standard races.

The initial conception pivoted on the monster empire.  I decided very early on to base it on imperial China.  It was important the empire not be strictly evil, or just a scaling-up of the standard monster horde.  Imperial China, with its mix of bureaucracy, meritocracy, and divine right gave me the material to work with: not evil, but soulless, a institution of government whose purpose and justification was governing, no more or less.  As an added bonus, I've always like the symmetry of the Chinese bureaucracy and mythology, and borrowing that wholesale gave me the name of my new regime: the Empire Under Heaven, given divine mandate by the gods of the Empire Over Earth.

(This also set a recurring theme in my approach: steal real-world culture as much as possible.  It's a good rule of thumb to borrow and modify rather than try to come up with new from start, just because nothing you can create is going to have as much depth as history.)

It was actually harder to decide on the Empire's race.   My original thought was to use goblins, but I decided I wanted to redefine their role more.  On the spur of the moment, I decided it made sense for small, weaker races to be the magic specialists.  I wanted goblins to be more mysterious and mystical, while the Empire was supposed to be much more practical and military.  Kobolds were discarded; too much of their essential definition boils down to "we're weaker and more pathetic than anyone," and they don't have enough mythology to survive a major role change.  Orcs were the logical choice, but boring as a result.  They're pretty much the go-to standard fantasy villain race.  Ogres or giants would leave me with the question of: how do you stop civilized, cultured, and intelligent physical juggernauts?  In the end, I decided to go with hobgoblins.  In many ways, they fit the role perfectly: they're perfect physical specimens of goblinhood, lawful by nature, and militaristic.  They don't tend to get a lot of play, in my experience, mostly because if you have orcs and goblins, who needs hobgoblins?  That would hopefully give them enough novelty, while staying within my general goal of "the standards redefined."

Having established the big baddie, it was time to start figuring out how the standard races fit into things.  My basic idea required that they have been just recently conquered by the Empire.  My own tastes for a setting are for complicated situations, melancholy and bleak, but ripe for world-shaking acts.  The immediate aftermath of a war would be too angry for me, and if the victory had been more or less total for the Empire there wouldn't really be any opening for change.  I decided to set the war a way back in the past, so that the players would be of a generation that never knew anything but the reality of the Empire.  Rather than being "fight the oppressors," that would make the game about the last, desperate struggle against assimilation. 

In turn, this means there had to be a way out of domination!  The Empire's hold on the area had to be weak in some critical way that would make it possible to achieve independence.  I don't remember what inspired this, but I decided that the standard races would be sitting on top of the bottleneck of the major trade route of the world.  This would give the Empire a reason to invade in the first place, which was important.  Now all that had to happen was that the part of the route that went from the main region to the Empire got closed off, and there would be a "victory condition": drive the Empire back on the other side of the obstruction, and you'd get independence.

This idea, by itself, pretty much defined all the constraints of geography of the area.  There was going to be a trade route with a bottleneck between the player-area and the Empire.  A trade route requires goods on either end.  I didn't want to give the player area any too-valuable a resource, which pretty much required that I create some other area on the far side of the Empire to play Europe to its China a la Silk Road.  This in turn meant I had to isolate the player area from both ends of the trade route, or I'd have to explain why the rich lands hadn't come storming in to help fight the Empire off.  So the players would have to exist in an area boxed in all four sides.

Time to fill in the area.  My basic "victory condition" was such that all the races, united, could throw out the Empire.  So I had to make sure that wasn't an easy option.  All the races had to be very distrustful of each other, and at the same time I wanted to keep redefining roles.

Humans were the easiest.  I decided they were relative newcomers to the area, who'd come in from the Other Empire before that route was closed off.  That gave them a relatively simple role redefinition: they weren't the big dominant race.  I decided that the humans were going to live in a loose collection of city-states, inspired by medieval Italy, each much more concerned with bickering with its neighbours than any global issues.  I called these city-states the Free Kingdoms, which I then promptly decided was ironic and clever enough to apply to use as the setting name in general.

The same logic that had given goblins a role in the world defined halflings.  I wanted them to be wizards, the magic specialists of the Free Kingdoms.  That idea helped me solve the idea of how to isolate the Free Kingdoms from the Empire: magical fallout from the war.  By extension, the halflings were going to be living on top of the actual bottleneck, which meant they would also be heavily involved in trade.  Imagining them as medieval scientists and traders inspired an Arabic feel.

Elves present a problem in any setting.  They're long-lived, magical, knowledgeable, and pretty much perfect, so why don't they rule the world?  The Tolkien-esque "we used to rule the world but our time has past and now we pass into the gentle lands leaving the world in the capable hands of the new races" is poncy bullshit for wankers, and didn't fit the feeling I was aiming for at all.  Why would they just give up empire?  I decided to make them terrified of death.  I stole gleefully from an idea from Larry Niven: the elves would cling to life because they'd know there was nothing for them after death.  No afterlife, no resurrection, just pure oblivion.  I made up some simple guff about hubris and their gods rejecting them to explain that.  For feel, I wanted them to be semi-feral forest dwellers.  They don't really have any good historical counterparts, though I ended up using Gaelic as my model elvish language.

I wanted to make dwarves sad.  Wish I could remember why.  In the end, I used the dwarves to set up the fundamental tension I needed in the Free Kingdoms.  The course of the war, I decided, was that a coalition of all the races had been fighting off the Empire in the halfling lands.  But there was a second route into the Free Kingdoms, through the dwarven mountain home.  The dwarves in their pride and arrogance tried to fight the Empire off without ever telling their allies of the problem, until they eventually collapsed.  The Empire swept through the dwarf lands, and the elves simply gave in without a fight to save their own skins.  The Empire then fell on the humans, keeping them from reinforcing the halflings, who devastated their own homeland fighting them off.  The dwarves would hate everyone because they were kicked out of the mountains, the halflings would blame the humans for not helping them, the humans would blame each other for not fighting hard enough and the dwarves for keeping everything quiet, and everyone would hate the elves for being spineless cowards.

I'm not sure why I made them Welsh.

This set-up left me with two dispossessed races, though.  Being mopey about their lack of homeland was pretty much fundamental to the dwarven concept, and it didn't really fit with the idea I'd had of halflings.  Instead, I decided that the halflings were already well into a diaspora, with trading enclaves being set up everywhere in the Free Kingdom.  Between that and a fighting retreat, most halflings would survive, and (as spontaneously decided) they'd lived in a desert before, so really hadn't lost much.  Their happiness would come instead from the fact that they'd taught magic to the other races during the course of the war (I needed wizardry to get out somehow, or I'd have a bunch of race-specific classes) and received (as they saw it) precious little help during the war.

When it came time to start drawing maps, I put the Empire in the West, just because the evil empire is always in the East.  The locations of the races were pretty much determined by their role in the war, and I put a road to the Other Empire through a mountain pass that I closed off with a merchant city who'd taken toll gates to their logical extreme.  I decided that seafaring would be very limited, which meant that seas could be treated as reasonable barriers.  I noticed the geography sort of suggested two continental plates slamming into each other and revised things to go with that; that let me make the southern sea very tectonically active and unstable, making it even more impassable.  This left me with lots of nice blank areas in both the Empires to put whatever races/classes/whatever I might need in the future.  Which led me to realized I hadn't put gnomes anywhere.  I put them in as Viking-esque seafarers, just recently coming into the area to fill the former dwarven role as metalworkers and suppliers.  It was also at this point that I regretfully abandoned the idea of human city-states.  It would require just too much time to set up the dozen or score of city states I'd originally considered.  I reduced it to three and gave each their own identity.  The Empire's presence was weak, I decided, and they couldn't rule by straight force-of-arms.  Instead they'd rely on clever politicking.  I set out to create an administrative structure that took the pre-existing government system and emasculated it; the old system was in place, but made to look incompetent and ineffectual, while people would learn to instead turn to the Empire directly to actually get things done.  This gave me the general effect of the city-states; each city had no real reason to listen to the human government.

Now, where to put the players themselves?  Putting them in as bandits would be some pretty major rail-roading.  As guards or soldiers, they'd be hobbled in freedom.  You want them as legitimate-but-independent adventurers, but a militaristic Empire wouldn't smile on that sort of thing easily.  Working with the "hobbled government" approach, I decided that locals would be barred from keeping forces under arms.  The Empire would be over-stretched meeting their military obligations, so instead they'd give permission to people to hire mercenaries.  I originally planned to just limit the restriction to nobles and/or city governments, and then have the governments get around this by selling the rights to roads, markets, areas, etc to private citizens who could then hire troops to do the needed work.  In the end, that was too obvious a loophole, and left obvious risks to the Empire, so I developed it instead into the broker-and-Free Company idea I went with in the end.  So players would come into the setting as hired mercenaries supervised by agents of the Empire, dealing with bandits or monsters rampaging in from the magical wastelands -- the all-important dungeoneering campaign beginnings.  Then I could gradually work in plot hooks dealing with politics/epic threats/whatever.

Along the way I had to do a lot of balancing.  Gnomes had to be a recent introduction to the area, for example, because if seafaring was common the trade route wouldn't be mandatory.  Uskila (the city blocking the pass to the Other Empire) had to have some balance that kept them from swinging in to help fight off the Empire.  The Free Companies had to be present but not too powerful.  The Empire had to be able to maintain its presence, but not able to strengthen its hold.  As I worked on all these problems, I realized that my conception had shifted from "free men fighting off the implacable Empire" to the Free Kingdoms as a historical convergence, where a bunch of different threads were coming together to create a point where the entire course of world affairs could be changed by the actions of a few.  So I revised the world to play up to that strength: filling out the history and current role of the elves, fleshing out both Empires to create more tensions and instabilities, figuring out how extra-planar entities would fit into the whole mess, and a bunch of other things that I'm not prepared to talk about so as to leave my players in the dark. ;)

Summary: when you start trying to make an economy based on the labour standard fit into your world and work, you've spent too much time working on things.

[Dracos]

Hum.  Very nice post.

I'll admit, I felt, reading the background, like the humans were the dominant race despite all that.  They were disorganized, warlike, citystateish, but it still felt like within the free kingdoms, humans dominated.  I don't think that's a bad thing, but reading this, I'm not sure that was what you were going for?

[Bjorn]

I'll admit, I felt, reading the background, like the humans were the dominant race despite all that.  They were disorganized, warlike, citystateish, but it still felt like within the free kingdoms, humans dominated.  I don't think that's a bad thing, but reading this, I'm not sure that was what you were going for?

I mean to talk about this. 

Yeah, I didn't mean for humans to be the dominant race in the Free Kingdoms, but it didn't work out that way.  That's pretty much a necessary consequence of the fact that I made the nations one-race affairs, and the path I took for the course of the War leading up to the current state.  The elves are marginalized by history, the dwarves and halflings are dispossessed, the gnomes are afterthoughts, and I had to keep hobgoblins a relatively rare presence.  The only nation close to being intact were the humans.

On the other hand, though, I think I did keep to my real goal.  In the Forgotten Realms, for example, humans are everywhere, and the other races are forced to acknowledge human superiority.  In the Free Kingdoms, humans might be the most common, but they're very far from ruling the world.  The hobgoblins are far closer to being in that role, and even within the Free Kingdoms, the halflings (as will hopefully become more apparent as the game goes on) have been and still one of the major players in the political realm.

In the original conception, humans were the underdogs.  They were relative unsophisticates who wandered into an area where they were confronted by magic, metalworking, millions of years of knowledge, and a military machine that utterly surpassed anything they knew.  It's still true by and large, but the Church of St. Turin is a new element I've thrown in the mix that balances things quite a bit.

[Bjorn]

Following up on a conversation with Brian...

For those who haven't read it, Rich Burlew has a set of article's he written on building a campaign setting.  Basically, what he suggests is writing down a list of Standard Assumptions, and then thinking about how to change them to make for an interesting game. 

They're good articles, and I found them useful guides for filling out the detail.  However, I also feel he makes (or at least encourages) a subtle mistake that underlies a lot of bad setting design. Fundamentally, a good campaign setting is about Things To Do, not Places To See.

This is something that the Eberron setting gets. Everything described in the campaign setting is pitched from the perspective of "things you as player/character/DM can do with this." Explore Xen'drik! Uncover the secret of the Mourning! Unravel the Prophecy! Defeat the Quori! Prevent the Next War! Everything is a plot hook first and foremost, and those plot hooks span the whole dramatic range, from simple dungeon crawls through to changing the face of the world for millennia to come.

A lot of setting don't get this. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are prime examples of the focus on Places to See. Lots of description of "This nation does things like X, while this nation does them Y," various NPCs, and famous taverns, but plot hooks tend to stop at "there's this ruin outside town, and lots of goblin raids start in these moorlands over there." The thought process is to design a rich, complete world first, and then figure out plot hooks to go in the world second.

The concept of "listing standard assumptions, then deciding which ones I want to follow" is about Places To See: "What would a world look like where humans weren't the standard race?" You can immediately follow that question up with "What could the player do with this?" to turn it into Things To Do. I started going through Burlew's list of assumption in this way, though, and what struck me is that it's just a bad way to go about it. The problem is that it's not easy to write down a standard list of assumptions of Things PCs Do -- every group is different. A better starting place is the one-sentence pitch. "Lord of the Rings meets Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Maltese Falcon", or "Slavery exists and it is a bad thing," get the core concept right out there. It's easy to see if you've made it about Places To See ("Civilization exists underwater") instead of Things To Do. Since the pitch makes clear what Things Players Will Do, you'll be much more focussed in your design -- and you can easily gauge the interest of your players before you start the design process! Only after you've come up with your pitch should you start with the list of assumptions, designing an interesting and appropriate world that goes around the core concept.

Thoughts?

[Anastasia]

Oooh, I really wanna reply to this tonight. I'm posting purely to remind myself since I'm too busy this moment.

[Bjorn]

Expanding a little further on this, following up from a discussion about this elsewhere...  There are actually three types of settings:  Places to See, Things To Do, and A Thing To Do.

A great example of a Thing To Do setting is Dragonlance.  "Evil dragons are screwing over the world, stop them!"  is a great Thing To Do, and (as I recall) the original modules were actually pretty good.  This is exactly what you want in a campaign.  Players know what they're doing, there's no confusion over the aims of the campaign, and you have a nice simple chain from killing draconians to killing dragonlords to getting up in Takhisis' face.

But later, Dragonlance was a terrible setting.  Why?  Because the Thing To Do was over, and what was left was a bunch of Places to See.  The setting had been designed around that one primary conflict, and when it vanished there really wasn't anything to take up the slack.  This isn't to say you couldn't create good stories out of the material, but just like in the Forgotten Realms, you had to work at it.  The obvious "this is what the players could be doing" aspect that Thing(s) To Do gives you just weren't present.

So when you're designing a setting, it's important to ask yourself what longevity you're aiming for.  If this is for a single campaign, then a Thing To Do setting is good.  More than that, it's perfect: no distractions, no questions, no wasted design effort.  But if you want the setting to outlast a single campaign, then you need Things To Do.  That's no trivial undertaking, because you need to make your Things To Do independent: the players finishing one of those Things can't take away too many of the other Things.

[Anastasia]

What I think needs to be said is that things to see vs things to do is also a matter of game focus. Something like Forgotten Realms is great if you want to pick up an established world and let the PCs take a swing at whatever they please. On the other hand, something to do is way more focused, bringing an expectation of what the campaign should hit on.

This isn't really a good way of saying what I mean, but I've been struggling to articulate my thoughts on this.

[Dracos]

Actually, I've generally found forgotten realms both difficult for DMs and for players in my observation.

It's strongest advantage is that is extremely well known and lots and lots of things have been documented.  But I've seen more than one DM stammer at getting a foothold into it.

ex: I'll add some examples through here, prolly using dragonlance.

I think, and its a simple thing to say, that best setting descriptions include (In order of importance):
1)One or more clear things to do. - DL: There's a war of the lance with evil taking over the world everywhere.
2)An isolated area in which PCs can play and grow. DL- Welcome to Otik's tavern and surrounding town which is a tiny spot irrelevant to the grand setting with a set of preacher villians around.
3)Things to fight.  D&D has 5+ books filled cover to cover with enemies.  Many settings have zero pre-set.  DL-Here there be Draconians.  Also Dragons and Death Knights.
4)Setting.  Places to See with Personality.  The personality being the most important part.  Having a cool map is really not part of this.  Having a town where elves are a dominant military and snooty bitches is.  Having a rave/party city of demons is.  Regions are terrible, Cities or districts are good. - DL- Here's Silvanos, home of the Sylvenstri elves and a horrific phantom filled monstrousity.
5)Places for the game to grow to.  Forgotten realms does THIS better than anywhere.  There's all sorts of layers to unpeal into larger and larger realms.  DL- Welcome to Ansalon.
6)And I yammer forgetfully.

[Bjorn]

What I think needs to be said is that things to see vs things to do is also a matter of game focus. Something like Forgotten Realms is great if you want to pick up an established world and let the PCs take a swing at whatever they please. On the other hand, something to do is way more focused, bringing an expectation of what the campaign should hit on.

This is why I'm distinguishing Things To Do from Thing To Do.  A Thing To Do campaign is focused, exactly like you say.  But my argument is that a Place To See campaign is actually terrible even for sandbox campaigns, because they lack the single most critical thing: a starting place.

Again, Eberron is my favourite example of how this is done right.  There's no shortage of things to do in Eberron, but you don't have to do any of them.  There's no guarantee that what the PCs do will be anything listed in the book, and that's great.  But what is true, in my experience, is that you can hand the setting to any player and they will find something that makes them say, "Man, I'd love to be in a game where we did that!"

On the other hand, I agree with Dracos: FR is really dangerous for sandbox-style play.  You're relying on your players and you, between you, to invent something to do.  When that works?  Fantastic.  But if you're struggling, FR gives you nothing to work with, while Eberron throws out suggestion after suggestion.  Why are your guys adventuring?  What low-level politics could you be involved in?  What are the world-shaking issues?  How can you make a big wad of cash?  A Places To See setting makes you figure this out; a Things To Do setting simply tells you, "Well, you could try this."

A more subtle place to see the difference is read interviews with the respective designers.  Everything I've ever read with Ed Greenwood gets across how much he loves the Forgotten Realms.  It's a wonderful thing to him, he adores every part of it, and he wants to share it with all of us.  Keith Baker, on the other hand, never talks about how wonderful Breland is, or how fascinating Vol is as a character.  What he's passionate about is how players interact with Eberron.  It's the difference in attitude between sculpting in marble and engineering a car.  Both things might be beautiful, but one is meant to be admired from a distance, while the other leaves you thinking, "Man, I can't wait to get my hands on that!"

EDIT:  The thing is, a good game is one in which the players Do Things, and a bad campaign is one in which they See Things.  The point of a good setting is to enable this.  Now, for a lot of things players can do, the setting just doesn't matter.  If you want to go on a dungeon delve, you can drop Undermountain or the Temple of Elemental Evil, and the setting doesn't matter, because the entirety of player interaction with it will be, "Where can I buy a potion of healing?"  But if you want to move beyond that to have the players interacting with the setting, a Places To See setting is no help.

[Anastasia]

Coming back to this!

I've been struggling to articulate why I disagree with Bjorn's(And the places to see vs things to do bit) argument for awhile. I can't ever quite hit it, it's like trying to play mental whack-a-mole. Something's wrong but it doesn't lead to productive thoughts, only misses and frustration. I think that there's a basic quibble with Bjorn's assertions that prevent a meaningful discussion. In other words, pedantic bullshit ahead as I get into that.

On the other hand, I agree with Dracos: FR is really dangerous for sandbox-style play.  You're relying on your players and you, between you, to invent something to do.  When that works?  Fantastic.  But if you're struggling, FR gives you nothing to work with, while Eberron throws out suggestion after suggestion.

It's this that clicks the problem into focus. I think that any good setting, but it's very nature, should inspire you to have things to do. You don't need it forced onto you or the entire setting composed of thinly veiled plot hooks. A deep setting with a proper history provides you the material to work with and make your own creation as you see fit. It's building clay. Forgotten Realms does this, the world's packed with fascinating things to work with. There's an entire spectrum of nations, cultures and styles to choose from. Sit down and think about it a bit and the ideas come flowing.

Eberron skips that step. The assumption is that you need this done for you. Everything is presented to be taken and used immediately. Certainly there's some room in the margins for your own expansion, but the clay's already been worked into a shape before you got there. Sure, it's nice if you run completely dry on ideas. So what? I'd like to assert that any decent DM -should- be reasonably creative enough to take a setting, read it, look at it and come out with ideas to work with. Being a DM is a creative exercise, if you can't manage that you're missing the most important tool there is to be a DM.

I don't want my ideas made by someone else and presented to me in a neat pile. I want the world given to me and shown so I can dream and make things out of it. Part of a good campaign world is making it your own. No one runs Forgotten Realms the same, or Dark Sun or Dragonlance. However, a good setting gives you the canvas to paint on to make your own design, not deciding what you should paint for you.

This is why I struggled with a reply for so long. I was operating under basic assumptions Bjorn laid out in the debate, ones it turns out I disagree with.

Or something like that. This made sense at 3 AM.