Worldbuilding vs. Storybuilding in D&D

 I have a confession:

I love worldbuilding.

I get a rush when I figure out a region of my world, when I draw a map and I start filling in place names on that map. When I write the history of the countries in that world, the profound, mythological history of it. My homebrew world for D&D has effectively undergone three separate apocalyptic events, and that's not even counting the massive wars waged against the Angel of Death that happened at the start of the technologically advanced civilization whose apocalyptic fall led to a thousand-year period known as the "Reign of Madness" before any semblance of civilization was able to come back... 20,000 years ago.

How likely is it that any players are going to need to know that entire history to make it through a campaign? Pretty low. At best, they'll realize something's pretty odd about the fact that the name of the capital city of a fallen empire is the same as the Angel of Death's, or they'll wonder why one wasteland in a remote corner of the world seems to be entirely paved in concrete.

One of my goals in future campaigns I run is to really focus on the player characters. I believe it was Brennan Lee Mulligan of Dimension 20 who made the, what now seems obvious, point that stories begin with characters. If you're writing a screenplay or a novel, you don't write out an entire story and then come up with characters to go through it.

D&D is a collaborative storytelling process on top of being a strategy game. When a player comes up with their character, the DM should try to create an adventure that helps that character go through their story.

I think this is one way in which published adventures can give new DMs the wrong lessons. Published adventures, by their nature, have to be a story into which any character can be plugged in. Likewise, video game RPGs have to carve out a route for the story to go. Complaints about the resolution to Mass Effect, for instance, had fair critiques along with unfair ones - there are only so many ways that they could have planned for different endings.

Worldbuilding is one of the great appeals to fantasy and science fiction. Those of us who are drawn to the genre are looking for something that goes beyond rich characters and their arcs. Unfortunately, historically, these genres have often been seen as skimping on these broader literary elements (sometimes fairly, sometimes prejudicially). While I think their numbers have thinned in the past several decades, there are certainly those who instinctively look down on "genre" stories, and assume they'll be garbage.

I will say that "literary fiction," meaning novels and such that are not colored by genre tropes or conventions (though I'd argue that by defining themselves in such a way, they are in fact their own genre) sets itself a more difficult goal. A science fiction story with a really fascinating premise can be a compelling read even with flat characters. But if you're reading a story about a woman struggling to reconcile with her father as he's dying of Alzheimer's (to pick a stereotypical "serious literature" story) you can only achieve greatness through relatively fewer avenues - such as the cleverness of your prose and the compelling complexity of your characters. So, in a way, I can see how those works that manage to be memorable and compelling reads deserve a great deal of praise.

But genre fiction does not rule these factors out. There is nothing preventing you from telling a story about very complex characters with beautiful prose that also happens to take place in a world of zombies and dragons and magic.

Sorry, going a little too much into my "writing blog" mode and less my "games blog" one. How does this relate to D&D?

Well, the simple point stands that you should build a campaign around the characters you have. This, in part, requires an investment by the players. And to be clear: know your audience. There are plenty of people who play D&D more for the strategy game elements - they want to construct a crazy multiclass Gloomstalker/Assassin hybrid who does almost a hundred damage in the first round of combat, and that's their point of engagement.

Actually, a brief tangent: this is one thing that games as an artistic medium have that other media don't. Plenty of art critics have dismissed games as not being art because of their interactive elements, though I suspect that this reason is less of a reason than an excuse to dismiss games as a medium. After all, there's plenty of performance art and theater that involves audience participation. Much as fantasy has its genre tropes as license to explore non-realistic settings and premises, which "literary fiction" does not, games as a medium have an additional axis along which they can be judged as successes or failures of the form.

But, back to the D&D discussion:

Perhaps because I put so much effort into worldbuilding, I consider it, in its own way, a worthwhile artform. But that might just be because I enjoy doing it. I don't regret the gallons of virtual ink that I've spilled fleshing out that world, but the extent to which it will be useful, per se, in running games, is questionable.

There was no way that I was going to start running D&D without creating my own world. The Forgotten Realms and the other established settings are fine, even great, but I want to have my own space to work in.

But I guess, as advice to myself or anyone who has similar proclivities, it's more important for the players to have a good time dealing with the adventure that they've set out on than for them to uncover every tiny detail of your world.

On the other hand, if you, as a DM, you can introduce elements to players to build their adventurers around.