Looking at Worldbuilding and Game Tips for the Forgotten Realms
It's probably the second biggest complaint about modern D&D Sourcebooks.
People don't know how to run these games. Aside from a Dungeon Master's Guide and a lot of must-have information written out, there's often very little information included that says "Hey, this is how you should be running this encounter", or "Hey, this is how to integrate this into your setting".
The first biggest issue that many people have is that the Forgotten Realms, the setting of the majority of 5E adventure supplements, is an extremely vanilla setting. We'll unpack that in another blog post, as that could be a topic on its own, but let me summarize by saying 'They're not exactly wrong'. All you need to do is to look at the map of Toril to realize there's a massive amount to the world, and that can be intimidating to new GMs and DMs.
The second biggest issue people have is the lack of content on how to play the game. This is somewhat intentional, but it also is a reasonable problem.
Back when D&D first landed on tables, there was a small culture that surrounded how to play the game. It was obvious from the rules, and you learned from your DM quickly how to play that game. The game could theoretically be played in multiple styles, but there was a specific style of play that was most relevant to people at the time. That culture of play was communicated clearly in every adventure and every table. It also likely helped that there were fewer tables at the time, but I digress.
Now in 5e, you have a completely different social dynamic added to it. The standard game has been designed to be able to be handled by children (most of the 5e products have 12+ on them, at least from the U.S.). You also have groups like Critical Role playing publically with a role-playing, story focussed game, while others have created custom rule-sets to replicate the "hardcore" nature of earlier editions. New tables rely a lot less heavily on experience to start-up games, and the system is designed by Wizards of the Coast to allow for multiple methods of play.
Because you have a much larger spread of people, attention levels, an play-styles, it makes sense to design the game to be more at the behest of the DM, instead of subscribing to a particular style of play. Due to this underlining drive, 5e supplements often lack box text describing how events should play out. Instead, there's some light background given, and DMs have to piece everything else together based on the ques given.
Allowing versatility and accessibility for a system is good in terms of business and good in terms of inclusivity. However, the fundamental problem becomes a lack of guidance on how to approach written content in order to run and incorporate it into your campaign. There's very little guidance on the intent behind the design, and there's no advice on worldbuilding for DMs looking to lift the content from Forgotten Realms and move it into their own homebrew settings. Wizards may call some of the vagueness "leaving it up to interpretation", but in these terms, I think its an opportunity missed.
“The fundamental problem becomes a lack of guidance on how to approach written content in order to run and incorporate it to your campaign."
So, what are we gonna do about it? I think some in-depth work is in order.
I'm going to be reading through the D&D Adventure books, as well as looking at some of the other supplements available, and doing the work of digesting their content for an understanding of design and intent. We'll then have a discussion here about how to go about interpreting the design of the encounters and story of the game to fit in your own campaigns, and how to get creative with running your sessions.
In order to do this, we'll look at some of the following:
Theme & Concept: In theater, a theme is “the moral of the story”, or what the core idea that drives the story. A concept is what twists the theme into something unique. It could be a setting, character quirks, moral implications, and a whole lot of other things. These elements can also be found when we look at these supplements.
Implied Narrative: Besides what is given to us outright via descriptions, we’ll look into how design and subtle worldbuilding impacts the story being presented.
Intent: There is, of course, RAW and RAI (Rules as Written and Rules as Intended), but we'll look at what the creators of the game may have been expecting to happen based on the design.
Worldbuilding: As part of this series, I'll be writing this section specifically for Worldcraft Club. Whenever we talk about this subject on this blog, I'll be sure to link the discussion here, so that you can easily access it. You can check out the content we're already working on here.
Let's get building and cracking this egg.
I'm looking forward to diving into this topic further. Won't you join me?
Be sure to subscribe to my blog here, and give me a follow on Twitter while you're at it.