To Obsidian: Advice from PnP World Creators (DMs, GMs, Storytellers, etc.)

[septembervirgin]

I would herewith like to summon all parties to creating worlds for book and dice role-playing games. This includes makers of campaign settings, cityscapes, underground structures, planetary systems, civilizations, etc. If you have experience in book and dice role-playing games as a creator, please posit suggestions to Obsidian here!

 

The intent of this topic is not to post ideas you'd like to see in their game so much as systemized or itemized suggestions on the creation of living, breathing worlds. Yes, I realize most of the people will have no professional experience in the craft of commercial world description, but this does not exclude that many intelligent and educated folk actually take interest in private and semi-private mythopoetic structuring of fictive cosmologies.

 

I wish Obsidian fors fortuna in their goodly work! And I wish us all good health in our daily lives!

[nikolokolus]

I trust Obsidian and their collective game design experience.

[rjshae]

Hey, if they ever end up building a modder's toolset then we'll be able to create our own. Until then, I'll be happy to see what they come up with.

Edited September 29, 2012 by rjshae

[Blackstream]

One of the things they did that I'm really interested in is the reward where you can design an npc and they'll put it in the game. Seems innocent enough until you realize there's 200 slots, and 63 of them are taken atm. That means there's gonna be at least 63 npcs in the gameworld all thought up of by 63 different people with their own individual backstories and such, guided a little bit by obsidian writers. The end result should ideally be a much more rich world, I'm hoping, especially if some of those npcs are tied into quests and stuff. It's really a staggering number of characters when you think about it, it's enough to EASILY populate a lesser game entirely.

[nikolokolus]

I'm guessing Obsidian will still retain editorial control over those player made NPCs ... and they damned well should.

[AuroraDragonKaya]

I'm guessing Obsidian will still retain editorial control over those player made NPCs ... and they damned well should.

I think what Blackstream was getting at is that many people contributing means that there will be that many more unique characters. No matter how creative you are, someone will always come up with something you haven't thought of, which is why brainstorming is so awesome. And each of those people is going to put a LOT more time and thought into that single character then the writers would have time for on their own, focusing (reasonably) on the main cast.

Thus, the world will be richer. Nothing to do with editorial control.

 

And... yeah, I hadn't thought of it until Blackstream pointed it out, but that gets me really excited. If only I had thousands of dollars to toss at that.

 

I'd also like to mention that I'd love some sort of access to modding tools, but I'm not sure how easy it would be, as they're using Unity.