We should try a different approach to worldbuilding

The other day I saw a tweet that kicked up a bit of a stink in the TTRPG twitter-verse. I won't link to the tweet, as I think it best not to give them the attention, but it was along the lines of: “no-one cares about your homebrew, it’s impressive, but we don’t care.”

This tweet breaks the first rule of being a human: “Don’t be a dick”, but I think underneath the nastiness, there is a point to be made. What I think the tweet is trying to say is that players aren’t playing DnD in order to explore the rich fantasy world you as the DM have created for them, they’re playing DnD to play as the character that they have made, and tell the story that you at the table will tell together, even if that story is how the characters went to a dungeon, killed a bunch of things, looted all the treasure and then went home again.

It’s not so much that the players don’t care about your homebrew. The response to the tweet indicates that many many people care about even the homebrew of random people whose games they will never get to play in. People think that spending lots of time inventing socio-political structures, cultures and histories is cool. It is cool. It’s what Tolkien spent years doing, it’s what Gygax and all his successors who write for DnD do.

But I think there is a point to be made about the interaction between your homebrew world and the DnD game that takes place within that homebrew world. I think the frustration that the tweeter in question is getting at is when players feel like the DM is shoehorning the cool stuff they made up about the setting to the games when it’s not relevant to the story, simply because they feel that they went to all the effort of writing this stuff, so it should come up.

This is an understandable instinct. You spent a lot of time on that homebrew and think it’s really cool that your world works in this way. You’re probably right. You want to share this with the people who should be the most passionate about the world you made, because they’re the ones who are experiencing it. If they’re reasonable people who have a shred of decency and sense of wonder, they will at worst humour you and at best actively engage with this lore and use it to inform their view of the game they’re playing. If they don’t do that, maybe they shouldn’t be at your table. You’re the DM after all, you’re doing the hardest job at the table, you deserve praise and affirmation.

All this being said, there is a time and a place to deploy information about the complex history of the world, or the way in which these two social groups interact, or the fact that elves in your world only live to about 200, rather than the 700 the PHB says, because that’s just dumb. Ok, the last one is mine. This is a fact about my world that I made up because I decided that DnD elves were not different enough from humans for the fact that they live so long to make sense, and I didn’t want for events of the past 700 years to be within their lifespans, as I didn’t want historical events relevant to the plot to be within living memory.

But I didn’t tell the players that. None of my players are elves. If they had been I would have discussed it with that player and maybe mentioned it to the whole group if it came up. I didn’t tell the players because it wasn’t relevant. It didn’t matter to the story that elves live for around 200 years. Until it did. Until they met a group of elves who had heard about the elves of the mythological past who did live for hundreds of years and wanted to return to that long lost golden age. The players cared about my homebrew at this point, because it mattered to what they were experiencing at the table at that moment. It helped to make sense of the story that they were trying to piece together. It mattered to them.

This is the thing about your homebrew. It might matter to you because you are passionate about the world you are creating, and that’s great, but the players are not making that world. They make their characters and are telling the story of how those characters interact with your world. That world only matters to them, when they get to participate in it. If your homebrew is relevant to the story, then the players will care, because they care about the story.

I think we can take this a step further, however. It’s awesome that so many people are so passionate about making a homebrew world, but I think we as DMs miss an opportunity when we sit down to create a world on our own. It might be fun, but you will inevitably spend lots of time either creating stuff that your players will never see, or shoehorn your homebrew into the games so that someone sees the cool world you made. I’ve done both.

So why not just get the players involved in the first place?

No matter how creative you as an individual are, the combined imagination of you plus your 3-6 players is likely to make something better than you can make on your own. It may not be quite so coherent or as fleshed out, but it will be much more memorable to your players. They are much more likely to care about your homebrew when it’s their homebrew too.

I think in order to do this, we as DMs have to change the way we think about the game. This touches on some of the themes I have already written about, but I think it bears repeating. A lot of people think they need to come to the table with their world and even the story already created, ready to drop the players in. Maybe this is why people like playing in official DnD settings, because the leg-work is already done, but I think we should start with a totally different jumping-off point.

Let’s start with nothing.

Bring nothing to the table in the first session. No plot hook, no characters, nothing. This is going to have to be a session zero, because let’s face it, you need to plan something to actually play DnD, but come to session zero with nothing and after you’ve laid some ground rules (safety tools, setting expectations for players behaviour, scheduling etc.), start talking about the game you want to play together.

Work with your players to establish the setting they want to play a game in. Talk about the style of world they would like to see. Is it classic fantasy? A mixture of magic and technology? Low magic? Talk about the kind of genre they want to play. Will the game be combat heavy? More focused on mystery-solving? Or maybe more about the relationships between characters and NPCs? Work with the players to build the world.

If you players decide that they want to play a certain lineage or race, then let them design the history and culture of that race or lineage. If they are a cleric or a paladin, let them create their god. If they’re a Warlock, let them create their patron. The rules of DnD exist in the world that they’re designed for, but they’re flexible enough that they can be reskinned or adapted to fit the setting that you want to play.

The role of the DM in worldbuilding then changes so that it is less about making the whole thing, and more about curating and organising the ideas that your players have, asking questions to deepen the lore, spotting inconsistencies and ironing them out. And of course, coming up with plot hooks and story ideas. These can be outsourced to the players too, getting their ideas for what sort of story you might tell together, but you do as a DM have to step in and run a story that makes sense!

You don’t have to leave this to session zero either. Throughout play, when there are opportunities for elements of lore to seep into the story, turn it around on the players and ask them what they think the lore of the world is. Let them tell you about the lore as you discover it during play. This won’t always work. Sometimes you need to know ahead of time what is going on, but the gaps you leave in the world you make are as important as the things you create, as they allow the players into the creative process of being a DM.

Of course, you don’t have to just do this for a new campaign. You can do this for the campaign you are running at the moment. Relax a little about having to have all the answers at your fingertips and let the players engage with the world by contributing to the lore. I think it takes a little time for players and DMs to get used to this concept, but give it a try. You might find that your players surprise you with some cool stuff. And they may even start to care about your homebrew world.

Just kidding, we already care about your homebrew world. It’s awesome!