Big vs. Small scope campaigns

[Necrozius]

By “big” and “small” I mean general scope of your campaign setting and theme. The number of NPCs, Factions, Nations, locales etc.

As I get older I find myself having less energy and willpower to track things outside of the party. I can’t really be bothered anymore to manage dozens of NPC characters, huge metaplots or faction warfare.

I’m really starting to find appeal with smaller scale campaigns where the PCs are more isolated from the world: a crew of space truckers, a gang of outcast teenagers, shipwrecked heroes on the shore of a strange island to explore.

Is there a term for this approach? It isn’t that I find it difficult to manage a complex campaign world, I’m just too lazy nowadays…

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

Closed setting? It's a full setting, but it's one with natural limitations.

 

[Moonglum]

I feel like it has gotten harder and harder over the years for less experienced DM's to figure out how to naturally create and grow a campaign setting; I'm sure it started with the emergence of prefab commercial settings, but the rise of video games and licensed rpg properties probably didn't help either.

I any event, I think the best approach to settings remains the way it was recommended when rpg's first emerged: start with a tight focus on the PC's immediate surroundings, initially shift that tight focus around when they move about during their first few adventures (keeping notes on places and NPCs as you go), and only start to pull out in scale and describe broader settings in detail once you have a feel for the tone and interests of the player's campaign (yes, that was intentional - I think of settings as DM managed, but campaigns as player managed). I also think it is best to never spend more than a half hour to an hour at a time working on some feature of a setting, which makes you add things when your creative juices are fresh and cuts down on the blathering backstories. I strongly feel that extended histories and back stories in rpg settings are about as much fun as listening to other people's dreams (almost always boring, repetitive and incomprehensible!).

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think this very often can amount to a lot of smoke and mirrors. It’s all made up, so the scope within the fiction need not correlate to the scope of play. I think of it as breadth and depth.

A setting can be vast in the sense the world in the fiction….for example, Star Wars covers lightyears worth of space. But that broad expanse of setting is relatively shallow. Planets are almost always single feature locations…desert planet, swamp planet, ice planet, city planet….and the factions are usually pretty minimal. Obviously the amount of material that’s been produced for SW over the years has expanded this, so there are exceptions…but generally, it’s simple. We go to the desert planet, there are water farmers, indigenous tribes, nomadic scavengers, and a crime boss. And so on. We could arguably take almost all the elements of Star Wars and put them on one planet, replacing starships with seafaring ships. It would all “fit” into one world.

Then you can take a setting that consists of a single city, and do a deep dive. So something like Ptolus comes to mind, or maybe Spire. The breadth is pretty narrow in that we’re talking about one city on one world, but there is so much going on in that city. So much to interact with and to do, that it’s hard to think of it as being in some way lesser.

 

[Moonglum]

Another key is to try to never create something for your setting that has no realistic way of directly impacting play at the table. That simple rule will automatically focus your attention and creative energy on the things that matter and avoid the various ways you can spin your wheels.

 

[Kobayashi]

I’m really starting to find appeal with smaller scale campaigns where the PCs are more isolated from the world: a crew of space truckers, a gang of outcast teenagers, shipwrecked heroes on the shore of a strange island to explore.

Is there a term for this approach? It isn’t that I find it difficult to manage a complex campaign world, I’m just too lazy nowadays…

I don't know if there's a term but that's how I do it now as well. The campaign world and factions grow as the characters' adventures go. As a group we got our best sessions this way.

 

[Ravenswing]

I think it happens to most of us. I'm 62 years old now, and I've been doing this for 44 years. I'm vastly more experienced than I was as a teenage GM. I have vastly better rules. So many companies and people have come out with settings, adventures and aids that are of use to us all. I've vastly better tools to work with: computers, printers, Wikipedia, far far better than the clunky cheap Smith-Corona portable I painfully two-fingered in college, bottle of whiteout at my hand. We've vastly better turnaround on our questions: 44 years ago, the best Necrozius could've managed was to put that OP into an Alarums & Excursions or The Wild Hunt zine, and it'd be published next month at the best, and he'd get to read our responses a month or two after that.

(Heck, my players are vastly more experienced, and at life, too. Of my original gaming group, about the only practical experience we had among us is that I was a veteran musician already, my brother and I were experienced auto campers, and one of my players had been raising and riding horses since she was 12. Probably better than most groups where the oldest people were college freshmen, but not by much.)

But set against that?

I never used to GM less than five players, and I was more comfortable with six, and could handle seven. And I've only briefly run as many as five in the last decade, a couple years back, and that was one too many; I've got three now. Back in the mid-80s, I ran four biweekly groups; I've tried to go back to two a couple of times (most recently in 2013), and it's just a little bit too much for me to handle. I'm more nervous about creating detail on the spot than I was. I'm less tolerant of crunch, and am likely to go with simpler fiats than juggling numbers in my head. And my short-term memory is shot; I regularly have to ask people for details of what happened two weeks back. Never mind that I'm in constant and distracting pain, and that I've had tinnitus for five years now, and that's damn distracting as well.

And my game world is just as vast as it ever was. And there are dozens of NPCs, huge metaplots and factional warfare. (Probably not a useful thing, at this stage in my career.)

But I think ... I think the answer is that we're all likely to fill the headspace we have available. I think if I went small scale, I'd be doing the prep work all the same: it'd just be narrower. Every person in the village would have a name, and the dozen key ones would have a backstory. I wouldn't be spending hours making maps of kingdoms or provinces; I'd spend hours on a topo map 10 miles in each direction from the village's market square. I wouldn't be working out the composition of the provincial guard (starting with the command company of the Colonel, the senior Captain, the ADC, three gallopers, four cornicenes, a clerical squad, two mages ...). I'd be working out instead what each of the village's half-dozen militiamen could do and their gear, and likewise what the half-dozen bandits lairing on October Mountain could do and THEIR gear.

Given all that, though: I hope I'm not sounding dismissive when I say, "You do you." We should all be handling the campaigns we can handle, and if those are smaller and less ambitious than when we were younger, more energetic, quicker off the mark, there's nothing wrong with that.

 

[Necrozius]

Thanks Ravenswing , that was an awesome post. I can relate to a lot of what you expressed there.

 

[Vidgrip]

I think the phrase "tightly focused" seems appropriate.

At 58, my attention deficit disorder has only grown worse over time. After creating a setting, I generally only run a game in it for six months before I lose emotional connection with that setting and feel the need to create something new. Since we generally play every other week, that means about 12 sessions of play for a "campaign". I am finally learning to limit the scope of my settings to what players are likely to experience over a dozen sessions. That's about five adventure locations. This can easily fit on one island or in one valley. I need a dozen named npc's (not counting those I must invent on-the-fly) and maybe three factions.

 

[Ravenswing]

Heck, I can even pick out littler things. I used to like to have background music playing. One of the most memorable scenes I ever spun out had the second movement of Daniel Pinkham's Christmas Cantata in the background (here's a clip of the work, start at 3:05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6BtpXQhoY †), and the whole tableau left the players gasping. I made up a 90 minute cassette mixtape of stirring combat tunes, and on the flip side another 90 minutes of light incidental medieval stuff.

And I could do so very much better now, with many gigabytes of music on my computer and the ability to switch at the drop of a mouse button. Except I can't. The more background noise there is, the less any sound makes sense to me at all. I can put my smartphone on speaker, here in the privacy of my study, and I can hear it just fine. Put me outside on the bench at the supermarket, and I can scarcely hear it at all. Can't game with music any more.



†: The punchline of that clip was that I took it at random from YouTube just now. And around the 5:45 mark, the montage goes to a photo of Pinkham with the conductor under whom I sang the Cantata in college, and how I got the recording I played at that 1982 gaming session. (Josh Jacobson was the choral director for the outfit my avatar's taken from, and I sang with NUCS at various points between 1977 and 2013.) You just can't make this stuff up.

 

[Picaroon Jack]

As I get older I find myself having less energy and willpower to track things outside of the party. I can’t really be bothered anymore to manage dozens of NPC characters, huge metaplots or faction warfare.

I feel you. I've noticed in a few of the games (Symbaroum & Galaxies in Peril) I've ran recently that come with supporting campaign materials that they are packed with background stuff. The big one I rarely use is factions.

In Symbaroum, I used none of them. The characters are in a dark forest exploring ancient ruins for loot (that is hopefully not too corrupted), they do not care that in the capital there is a riff between the knights of the sun god and the cloistered clerics that serve the queen. the good news is I don't have to use any of it, but it's there for me if I do.

I didn't even use the campaign world of Galaxies in Peril since I had my own. And in that supers game I had about 3 or 4 factions. The one the players were in (the defiant), the one that opposed them (the government), and then 3rd one to bump up against (organized crime).

 

[Necrozius]

Yeah I think that when I finally get a Mythras campaign going, I'll be encouraging Passions that are more personal. If anyone wants to make one tied to a faction, guild, House or whatever, that will be my starting point for worldbuilding.

 

[arjunstc]

After creating a setting, I generally only run a game in it for six months before I lose emotional connection with that setting and feel the need to create something new. Since we generally play every other week, that means about 12 sessions of play for a "campaign". I am finally learning to limit the scope of my settings to what players are likely to experience over a dozen sessions. That's about five adventure locations.

That's my experience these days as well: a typical campaign lasts around 12 sessions, give or take a few.

However, our group has been getting greater ROI by having a few parties in the same game world at the same time period, so we can alter the feel of the campaign but still use the setting knowledge we have all built up, instead of having to learn a whole new world each time we want to do something different.

Specifically, we have an A Team that is higher level that tackles major threats across a larger swathe of the world in a more railroady plot. Then there is B Team, a mid level party in a more free form, sandboxy campaign set around a large city and its environs where the plot develops more organically. Finally, there is C Team, which started at level 1 and the whole campaign was just expeditions to the same megadungeon and interaction with other factions within, over a matter of months.

Each of these require me to detail the world in different scope and depth.

Then in our scifi campaign we use the same setting and same party (with new additions along the way), with the second campaign set 15 years after the first, and the third one year after the second. Again, we get to use the setting knowledge, and see how the setting changed due to the actions of each preceding campaign.

 

[ffilz]

I'm definitely a small scope campaign GM. Now sometimes small scope doesn't mean small geographic scope, but even with a larger geographic scope, play will still focus on the PCs, with wider world stuff being background or not mentioned at all. My RuneQuest Glorantha campaign has ranged from Apple Lane to Alone to Pavis to Condor Crags but the focus has been entirely on the small PC group.

 

[Fenris-77]

I tend toward smaller scope, just to keep the cognitive overhead low, but I do still like a big sweeping canvas sometimes too. For example, I'm starting up a SWON game here on the Pub which is a full star sector with factions and politics and all that stuff, but the game will actually start with the players stuck on a backwater planet with a busted starship they have figure out how to pay for. Start small and work out, that's my plan.

 

[Jenx]

Current Supers Campaign: We've always had important NPCs from the start. The players were the stars of course, but the NPCs could be used to nudge them in certain directions or simply throw a spanner in the works. The campaign seeds started in the early noughties (I think 00 or 01 maybe) on a yahoo groups game where I was a player but fizzled out less than a year later. It'd made a mark though and I remembered/downloaded as many of the details as I could so that I started the campaign up again (as a GM rather than player) eight years later with a couple of the original players I tracked down. In a way I'm glad it's a play by post as there's too much stuff to remember. I downloaded the old forum posts from the (now defunct) old home and set up a new place we could call ours then we've been in every which direction going. Time Travel, Galactic War, Microverse, Deep Space, Underwater, a magical version of Britain, Cosmic entities, Alien invasions you name it, we've probably been there but started with humble beginnings with bank/museum/jewellery heists and the like.

The UKChampions are an NPC group with a three page document of notes. Another NPC group, the Ultrahumans (the most powerful Super Team in the world - the game is somewhere between Pre and Post Crisis power levels) are in disarray at the moment having had their HQ overrun, the President kidnapped, Washington DC (and the White House) trashed and their most powerful member (Silver Sentinel) critically injured and currently recuperating in the heart of the sun. Another powerful member has turned into a villain and is using the window of opportunity to conquer the world. Only the PCs can stop him! Etc. Oh, not to mention the UltraMax prison outbreak where even the PCs (one of whom would batter Superman with a hand tied behind his back) got their asses handed and had to get out the way before they got flattened. We have months, probably years of tracking down all manner of villains to set that right.

Having started with Golden Heroes (about as street level as Supers games get) we're now mixing it with Pre Crisis DC Characters power levels and its fair to say the characters have grown over the 12-13 years or so we've been at it. NPCs who turned up on day one still show up as do characters from the old Golden Heroes campaign on the yahoo groups forum and some from Golden Heroes (DICE has gone, replaced by SMITE and SPRITE and Dawsons' son is a SMITE regional commander. GH fans may recognise some names). No plans to stop but damn, I'm glad I wrote this stuff down. These days I forget where I left my house keys two minutes ago.

Overall, looking back it's proof that play by post can work long term if you have the right players, and the guys who play the game are just brilliant. Would have folded a long time ago if they hadn't stuck with it and we've all dealt with the life ups/downs in between.

 

[Necrozius]

I got burned out from my Monster Island Mythras campaign. Too many NPCs and factions to handle. I think I’ve realized my limit. I can only handle so many characters at once.

So I want to have another go at a Mythras campaign but keep it much smaller in scope (as in smaller cast of NPCs to handle).

Any suggestions on campaign pitches or setups that can still feel like a living, breathing world without 100s of supporting characters?

 

[arjunstc]

Any suggestions on campaign pitches or setups that can still feel like a living, breathing world without 100s of supporting characters?

My own solution is prep. Not specifically prepping for a list of characters, but to think about the setting as a real world environment.

Real/realistic environments means that the socio/political/economic niches that exist in our world must have their counterparts in your game setting. Which means you will find the same types of people being drawn to each niche. So you know what the niche/factions are, you know what type of people there are in each niche/faction, so all you have to do then is to imagine the specific motivations of an NPC when the situation arises that the PCs will run into one of them.

And a list of names. A long list of names.

So you may not necessarily have a food caterer prepped. But when your PCs want to infiltrate into a place and they need a way to get in, they will ask you: who supplies the food to the place?

So you think, well, there must be a steward kind of person for the place, and he can't possibly deal with all the suppliers for the place, so maybe he does it through a middle-man. The steward is maybe... corrupt and skims or takes kickback, which makes his motivations greed and fear of being discovered; or he is loyal and strict, which makes it more challenging for the players.

The middle-man will then either be corrupt and probably bitter if the steward is corrupt, or meticulous and proud of his work if the steward is strict, which makes it easy to bribe in the first case, or to blackmail in the second.

So in my free time I prep by thinking about my setting. What is traded? What are the powerful religious factions in the setting, and how are they organised. Who are the rulers, and how do they come into power and keep power? Which other people must they share their power with to stay in power? And it all has to make sense to you - if you don't believe how things work, neither will your players. And when your players believe that the way things work make sense, they will use the logic of your world to go to places and think of plans you haven't even thought about. And when they get there, you will have believable NPCs waiting for them.

Just need a minute to choose a name from the list...

 

[SJB]

I’m very much a player, not a GM.

In my experience the players are usually in a fog about factions. They are just trying to stay alive.

We have a great episodic 2300 AD campaign. The star map is vast but we do one single planet mission at a time. The GM skilfully lays trails for us which hint about linkages and galaxy-wide conspiracies but we usually ignore them to get our job done.

I do encourage GMs to keep their lives focused and simple.

 

[AsenRG]

My own solution is prep. Not specifically prepping for a list of characters, but to think about the setting as a real world environment.

Real/realistic environments means that the socio/political/economic niches that exist in our world must have their counterparts in your game setting. Which means you will find the same types of people being drawn to each niche. So you know what the niche/factions are, you know what type of people there are in each niche/faction, so all you have to do then is to imagine the specific motivations of an NPC when the situation arises that the PCs will run into one of them.

And a list of names. A long list of names.

So you may not necessarily have a food caterer prepped. But when your PCs want to infiltrate into a place and they need a way to get in, they will ask you: who supplies the food to the place?

So you think, well, there must be a steward kind of person for the place, and he can't possibly deal with all the suppliers for the place, so maybe he does it through a middle-man. The steward is maybe... corrupt and skims or takes kickback, which makes his motivations greed and fear of being discovered; or he is loyal and strict, which makes it more challenging for the players.

The middle-man will then either be corrupt and probably bitter if the steward is corrupt, or meticulous and proud of his work if the steward is strict, which makes it easy to bribe in the first case, or to blackmail in the second.

So in my free time I prep by thinking about my setting. What is traded? What are the powerful religious factions in the setting, and how are they organised. Who are the rulers, and how do they come into power and keep power? Which other people must they share their power with to stay in power? And it all has to make sense to you - if you don't believe how things work, neither will your players. And when your players believe that the way things work make sense, they will use the logic of your world to go to places and think of plans you haven't even thought about. And when they get there, you will have believable NPCs waiting for them.

Just need a minute to choose a name from the list...

...this is exactly how I've been running games for a long time, coupled with "assign odds at the choices and roll"!

 

[Necrozius]

My own solution is prep. Not specifically prepping for a list of characters, but to think about the setting as a real world environment.

Real/realistic environments means that the socio/political/economic niches that exist in our world must have their counterparts in your game setting. Which means you will find the same types of people being drawn to each niche. So you know what the niche/factions are, you know what type of people there are in each niche/faction, so all you have to do then is to imagine the specific motivations of an NPC when the situation arises that the PCs will run into one of them.

And a list of names. A long list of names.

So you may not necessarily have a food caterer prepped. But when your PCs want to infiltrate into a place and they need a way to get in, they will ask you: who supplies the food to the place?

So you think, well, there must be a steward kind of person for the place, and he can't possibly deal with all the suppliers for the place, so maybe he does it through a middle-man. The steward is maybe... corrupt and skims or takes kickback, which makes his motivations greed and fear of being discovered; or he is loyal and strict, which makes it more challenging for the players.

The middle-man will then either be corrupt and probably bitter if the steward is corrupt, or meticulous and proud of his work if the steward is strict, which makes it easy to bribe in the first case, or to blackmail in the second.

So in my free time I prep by thinking about my setting. What is traded? What are the powerful religious factions in the setting, and how are they organised. Who are the rulers, and how do they come into power and keep power? Which other people must they share their power with to stay in power? And it all has to make sense to you - if you don't believe how things work, neither will your players. And when your players believe that the way things work make sense, they will use the logic of your world to go to places and think of plans you haven't even thought about. And when they get there, you will have believable NPCs waiting for them.

Just need a minute to choose a name from the list...

Great feedback.

Sadly, my primitive brain is STILL intimidated by this.

I think I've found my niche: very narrow, focused campaigns. I simply can't handle it.

I tried running DragonHeist from WoTC and gave up because of the intricate network of factions, alliances, betrayals and NPCs who hire NPCs who hire NPCs to do jobs.

 

[arjunstc]

Great feedback.

Sadly, my primitive brain is STILL intimidated by this.

I think I've found my niche: very narrow, focused campaigns. I simply can't handle it.

I tried running DragonHeist from WoTC and gave up because of the intricate network of factions, alliances, betrayals and NPCs who hire NPCs who hire NPCs to do jobs.

I know what you mean. I ran a few modules with multiple factions and NPCs before too, but I never run them "as is". I ask myself what it is that makes the situation interesting: what are the factions' goals, how they come to be in conflict with each other, and what their plans to change the status quo are. One I have that, I mercilessly cut down the number of factions and NPCs, to as few as I can and still retain the central conflict of the module. Some less important NPCs will be dropped altogether, while others will be composited.

If that still intimidates you, then maybe start with baby steps. Add like a faction that works with the main villain of your campaign, but isn't necessarily committed to his cause, and let your players know that such a faction exists, and then leave it up to them.

 

[Ravenswing]

Any suggestions on campaign pitches or setups that can still feel like a living, breathing world without 100s of supporting characters?

Funny thing is, upon reading this, I had something flash into my brain: the 1980s ITC Robin of Sherwood series. It was a gritty, medieval-faithful treatment that proved influential in the Robin Hood oeuvre -- among other things, introducing pagan elements and the premise of a Saracen in the band. But why it struck me was how well that level would fit your needs:

* The geographical area was very narrow -- almost all the stories were within Nottinghamshire. The forest, the town, the one key NPC village.
* The NPC cast was very narrow -- other than the party itself, and the bad guys/victims de jour, the only regularly recurring NPCs were the Sheriff, his corrupt brother the local Abbot, Sir Guy, the forest's shaman/demigod, the headman of the NPC village, and a whacked out elderly prisoner with a pet rat who consistently refuses to be released.

And perhaps that's just how you do it: keep the group in a relatively isolated backwater, give them reasons to stay there, have recurring antagonists who decline to be curbstomped, keep goals relatively modest.

There might also be a mindset thing. One of my current Discord players (who's from Croatia) is a veteran of online gaming, and his observation is that American GMs tend to create much larger settings than European players do. No idea if this factoid indeed is universal, or of any help, but I'm throwing it out there.

 

[S'mon]

American GMs tend to create much larger settings than European players do. No idea if this factoid indeed is universal, or of any help, but I'm throwing it out there.

American settings tend to feel like the 19th century US or Canadian frontier, or even moreso, with maps hundreds or thousands of miles across and 50 miles between villages - I remember boggling at the Vault of Larin Karr map. Eventually I started adjusting map scales to something that felt more plausible. My Faerun (Damara) campaign maps are at 2 miles per hex and cover 80x120 miles, with most play within a 40x60 mile area. Villages need to be at most 10-12 miles apart to be in contact & mutually supporting. In fertile areas villages tend to be more like 2-4 miles apart and you'd need a 1 mile/hex scale to show them all.

 

[S'mon]

A bit of modern Kent, which hasn't changed much since medieval times. A couple miles between villages. In the middle ages there would likely be more forested 'waste' land, needed for firewood.

 

[S'mon]

One of my campaign maps



2 miles/hex, loosely based on west Aberdeenshire around Rhynie:

 

[Teotwawki]

Big vs Small? Iceberg.

As a gm, I have a cosmos of critters, characters, and conflict at the ready, but the focus may never extend beyond a half acre backyard / neighborhood block / parking lot, depending on story and plot needs.

I don't mind playing in someone's Big Scope campaign so long as they understand how to run the Small Scope session. Backstory is pointless if the front plot doesn't propel the game.

 

[Skarg]

Big vs Small? Iceberg.

As a gm, I have a cosmos of critters, characters, and conflict at the ready, but the focus may never extend beyond a half acre backyard / neighborhood block / parking lot, depending on story and plot needs.

I don't mind playing in someone's Big Scope campaign so long as they understand how to run the Small Scope session. Backstory is pointless if the front plot doesn't propel the game.

Yes, quite.

I like to have at least a continent or two, at least partly developed. And I usually like to set many games in the same homebrew campaigns I've been working on for years or decades. But the scope of play of each game is mainly focused on whatever's going on around the PCs, and their current interests.

 

[Fenris-77]

I like big scope, but I find that even in well designed and well run campaigns it can fall flat. There can be so much to come to grips with, setting-wise, that the players get a little lost in the welter of events, names, and factions. That's not to say it's impossible, or even hard particularly, just that I think there's a higher risk of something between failure and meh. These days I prefer a smaller starting sandbox that I can design to the nines surrounded by a lot of blank space and evocative bits that I can enlarge as needed depending on how things go.

 

[arjunstc]

I like to have at least a continent or two, at least partly developed. And I usually like to set many games in the same homebrew campaigns I've been working on for years or decades. But the scope of play of each game is mainly focused on whatever's going on around the PCs, and their current interests.

I need those continents, even if the PCs never travel to them. That's where exotic goods come from. That's how merchants make money, why cities exist, and how kings and dukes amass wealth from taxation, and how they afford those exotic goods.

 

[Ravenswing]

I need those continents, even if the PCs never travel to them. That's where exotic goods come from. That's how merchants make money, why cities exist, and how kings and dukes amass wealth from taxation, and how they afford those exotic goods.

... and legends, and tales from afar, and rumors of war, etc etc.

Beyond which, look. I haven't been at this for the better part of a half century just because I aspire to be a humble entertainment utility for people. I do it for ME. I enjoy creating things. I like worldbuilding. It's been a fascinating solitaire game to me for a long time now, and I expect to keep tinkering until the day I croak. Take (say) the Proconian seaboard in the southwest of my world, where I have the bounds and borders of two kingdoms, one equivalent to a grand duchy, and eighteen smaller realms, a political map, a magical map, and seven pages of writeup on its cities, population, trade goods, number of mages, leading temples and other such minutiae.

No PC has ever been there, in 45 years-worth. Possibly none ever will. (The one exception being the PC who is the Grand Master of her regional mages' chantry, and who has potluck dinners for her colleagues, who arrive via Gate. The Grand Master of the Proconian regional chantry is an occasional attendee, and is one of those who plan to return the hospitality and host a dinner himself.) This doesn't bother me.

 

[Moonglum]

One of my campaign maps

View attachment 58558

2 miles/hex, loosely based on west Aberdeenshire around Rhynie:

View attachment 58560

Your scale and approach here reminds me a lot of the Arden map set for 1E Chivalry and Sorcery - possibly my favorite and most frequently used gaming supplement ever. I must have used it to represent the details of quasi-medieval-european campaign settings dozens of times for many different games, from original C&S to D&D to TFT to Pendragon to home-brew fantasy heart breakers.

 

[Dyrnwyn]

American settings tend to feel like the 19th century US or Canadian frontier, or even moreso, with maps hundreds or thousands of miles across and 50 miles between villages - I remember boggling at the Vault of Larin Karr map. Eventually I started adjusting map scales to something that felt more plausible. My Faerun (Damara) campaign maps are at 2 miles per hex and cover 80x120 miles, with most play within a 40x60 mile area. Villages need to be at most 10-12 miles apart to be in contact & mutually supporting. In fertile areas villages tend to be more like 2-4 miles apart and you'd need a 1 mile/hex scale to show them all.

I think a lot of that is people basing the geography of a setting on what they know. Where I live, once you get out of the major cities and their suburbs, 5-15 miles between small towns and villages is common, and there are a few parts of the state where one could travel fifty miles or more in a straight line and not encounter anything more than a cabin or two and a dirt logging road. But this is in the Upper Midwest of the United States (i.e. where D&D was created). On the East Coast, for example, the distances are much smaller between settlements, largely due to when they were established.

Also, authors like Tolkien didn't help here either -- some of his distances are pretty long with a lot of nothing in between towns and cities.

 

[Skarg]

I need those continents, even if the PCs never travel to them. That's where exotic goods come from. That's how merchants make money, why cities exist, and how kings and dukes amass wealth from taxation, and how they afford those exotic goods.

Yes, quite!

The more of a world I've developed, the more I understand it, and the easier (in general) I find it to run a game in that gameworld, because then things make sense and are known to me, and I feel like I understand the big picture, where the power struggles are, who the big players are, etc.

If/when I try to run without having developed enough of the world, I find myself wondering about those things, not knowing, and inventing things on the fly, which may increase the chances that I'll make a mess of the logic of the game situation, and/or just not be as grounded when running the game.

Also, to me, making things up on the fly, tends to cheapen the experience the players get of discovering things in the game, and being able to count on their being an actual at-least-somewhat-self-consistent-and-logical game situation for them to engage with. I like players to be able to enter an actual pre-existing game world and discover and interact with what's there. When the GM is just conjuring things during play, that's not there, and if the GM isn't great at doing that, it can be much more like playing in a dream (or nightmare) than a world with any consistent material to it.

 

[Skarg]

... and legends, and tales from afar, and rumors of war, etc etc.

Beyond which, look. I haven't been at this for the better part of a half century just because I aspire to be a humble entertainment utility for people. I do it for ME. I enjoy creating things. I like worldbuilding. It's been a fascinating solitaire game to me for a long time now, and I expect to keep tinkering until the day I croak. Take (say) the Proconian seaboard in the southwest of my world, where I have the bounds and borders of two kingdoms, one equivalent to a grand duchy, and eighteen smaller realms, a political map, a magical map, and seven pages of writeup on its cities, population, trade goods, number of mages, leading temples and other such minutiae.

No PC has ever been there, in 45 years-worth. Possibly none ever will. (The one exception being the PC who is the Grand Master of her regional mages' chantry, and who has potluck dinners for her colleagues, who arrive via Gate. The Grand Master of the Proconian regional chantry is an occasional attendee, and is one of those who plan to return the hospitality and host a dinner himself.) This doesn't bother me.

Yup, all this type of thing, too.

 

[Telok]

I like a wide setting with atmosphere & blank spots, but not much detail. Detail is for filling in as needed, but the big setting gives me ideas and a sense of how wider things should work. The blank spots are for me to drop in anything that the adventure needs and doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

At the PC actions level I like to base maps & stuff off real life bits. Adjusted to fit/need of course. Often because there's stuff in RL that nobody (self included) thinks to include in most adventures. It's not just a "toilets in the dungeon" thing, there's been stuff that just falls apart as soon as you go anywhere but "kick in door, murder all, loot, leave".

But at both scales it annoys me to have to ass pull everthing on the spot and sometimes end up with even worse logic fails or muddles. It also helps to have outlines prewritten as a memory jogger to help me remember when doing my post session notes.

Edit: oh, for plots/factions I stole the doom clocks idea. I just have a couple sheets, do a couple downtime dice rolls, figure what rumors/news they generate. Names, personalities, other stuff, I don't track or have unless the players are directly interacting with it. Once they leave it that stuff goes in a 1-2 page "stuff the characters remember" summary. Which is as much for me as for the players.

 

[The Convenient Skill]

I generally prefer small scale settings, again here in Dorset (and pretty much across all of West Europe - and probably much further), the villages are an easy stroll from each other. Market towns every 10 miles or so.

Even if we go conceptual rather than geographic I prefer small scale games. Personal goals, lower stakes. That doesn't mean there can't be lots of factions but I find reincorporation, which means keeping numbers smaller, adds to the game.