Why does bottom up world building get no respect?

Its like the lore of the elderscroll games, but rather than being able to spend time hunting and learning all of the lore after you beat the game, you instead get a few hours a week in which you must either choose to lore hunt or play the game, and most people will choose the latter of the former.

True.

If it makes you feel better, I don't really respect world builders in general.

This.
This right here.

That's like saying you don't respect the chef who cooks your food for you. Get the hell out of here ingrate.

Keep writing to yourself. I'm sure one day someone will give a shit why your medieval Europe has potatoes.

Takes too long for something that is likely to not be used to its full potential.

The amount of assumption and baseless speculation in this post is absolutely titanic, and does nothing to refute what you replied to.

You ARE an ingrate.

Only good worldbuilding is shared worldbuilding, anyway.

I wish this wasn't true.

I've always seen bottom-up as being the tool of improvisation, rather than planning. You create enough of the world for players to exist without thinking about what is happening elsewhere unless players ask.

That said, I'm using both. I have the general geography, politics, governments and history down, but I have very little detail on specific cities, so I'll likely take a bottom-up approach next

Instead of answering the question, I'm just gonna try to add something constructive instead.

I ran a fantasy campaign from 1st level through "epic level" (though, we swapped game system twice along the way) over something like four years.

Something reasonably successful that I did was, after the first year or so when people started getting really invested, I made a shared folder that i would put random bits and pieces of lore in, and told the players that they could read it freely, or not at all, at their option, and that the contents of the folder would always count as in-world knowledge for their characters (that they had picked up somewhere in their lives or along the way off-screen.)

The stuff i put in the folder was mostly like the books and documents you would find in morrowind, but also stuff like nursery rhymes, superstitions, and "common hearth knowledge", along with population statistics and other stuff their characters might have a vague idea about.

Two of my players (one in particular) dug it really hard, and the other two mostly just heard about stuff through the others.

Occasionally, if something I had come up with for the "lore library" folder turned out to be central to something they were doing in-game, I would simply point them to something in the folder that I had already made, and then one or two of them would often go "My character knows about this!" and start telling the others about it.

All in all, it enriched my game quite a bit, and in the long run made the world feel much more alive to everyone; not just the two players who were super into it.

Because most people doing "world-building" aren't very skilled at being creative.

It's very easy to start from high concepts and play with them down to individual, ridiculous details, ending up with yet-another kitchen sink, bullshit, boring-ass setting.

What is difficult and takes work is creating a world that tells your story. You start of the individual facts and build around them.

It is the correct way to build a world well, creating something both convincing and engaging.

But on Veeky Forums? Because we're mostly ultra-amateurs without any real talent or experience.

exactly, broad strokes with a fine brush

It top down vs bottom up just a question of scale though?

Bottom up is playable as fuck vs. top down. Especially if you start with things like local maps, relationship maps, and folklore (of which some might be true).

How similar would this be to the idea of including that extra information in a book for the setting of a game? I'm asking because I'm designing a game and a prebuilt setting to go with it, and wondering how to ensure that players will benefit from the contents of the book.

In my personal and most humble opinion the problem is:
>Put your players in a world
>Decide to build it up from the bottom
>But the world needs a map
>The very act of creating maps, territories and those who inhabit it is top down world building

Unless you're playing in a Danmachi-esque world where there's one dungeon in the middle of the only city that matters, you need a map.

Why are you so angry at him? You've obviously failed at making a decent world if he doesn't care.

Effort is meaningless, competence is all that matters

One thing that I tend to do with my settings is to "spiderweb" them. I have my usually plot-centric thing, but then I consider its history. What groups and locations has this thingy interacted with? How did they react? How has that reaction shaped the MacGuffin and the other groups relating to the MacGuffin? The entirety of the campaign is centered around the important thing that my players *have* to confront, but that keystone plot point is held up by all the different locales, factions, and people impacted by The Thing. I toss my stone in the center of the pond and see the ripples in my world. Nothing is completely unimportant, which gives my players incentive to figure out *why* such and such is in so and so condition and want to interact with it, because it all relates back to the Catalyzing MacGuffin Thingy.

So, what's the difference between Top- Down and Bottom- Up design? I see the terms thrown around a lot, but don't really understand what they mean.

Top-down is where you start with the big picture and work down. So say you want a game that's in fantasy post-apocalypse Australia where everyone are monstergirl variants of the local wildlife who fight each other with mecha gauntlets. You'd start with that idea and then trickle down into smaller and smaller details, like how would cities look like, where are they getting food from, who maintains the mecha gauntlets, etc.

Bottom-up would be starting with small details, usually at a more local level and going up from there. So you'd maybe start off with a small village, then move up to the surrounding countryside while making connections between these individual points until they become a cohesive whole.

Both have strengths and weaknesses, and both can border on masturbation if you do them incorrectly and focus on details that probably won't affect your story/game sessions.

/thread

In the context of actual games, it's because you're relying on the players staying in the bounds of the already created area and not heading for maximum off-the-rails-ville. Or at the very least, not choosing "going to Bigtown three countries over and making it large" as their character's motivation. Having everything focused on the bottom doesn't help when you need more of the top level to know where the shit Bigtown, Some Other Country is and stuff.

If you wanted to do something similar with that section, you would have to give it a foreword that says something similar to what I told my players.
That is,
- It's optional reading material
- The stuff that's in that section is something most characters in the world might have become acquainted with at some point during their lives, and if a player does read it, their character knows it, and using it isn't metagaming.

If that's a bit too permissive for you (let's say, if some of the lore you put in there was a bit overly metaphysical or obscure), then you could perhaps try a less elegant solution where you put a lore skill check DC or something on each bit of information, and explain in the foreword that the players are allowed are allowed ask for a roll to see if their characters know those bits of lore.

Godspeed.

Because most people do it wrong. It quickly turns into railroading, and cramming info down players throats that they don't really want.
Plus it's flawed, you can't go one or the other. You need to go top-down to a point, like say large world map, and all the towns, then bottom up to decide what sort of relations the locations and towns will have.

Remember the point of world building is to make everything seem natural, logical, and not forced. It's not to write a fucking lore-book you expect every player to read, or be punished for not knowing some small mundane detail you slipped in as a "clue".

Bottom up world building is fine. If you are trying to make a campaign setting. From a story standpoint it is pointless. If something does not directly tie in to the story that the GM and the players are telling then it is useless information and should be discarded. That being said, history, culture, etc. can all add to the overall feel of your living world which will in turn have the players more engaged (unless they are murderhobos). If your players are on one continent that is fairly cut off from a neighboring one, don't build the other continent in detail until they plan to make a trek there.

TLDR; It is a constant of storytelling that you only show what is important, and for that reason bottom up world building should be left for making campaign settings and not used in regular table top play.

I write in-universe books. I put them in google docs, and I let party members buy books at stores and give them the code to read. Partially for fun between breaks and work, and partially as a coping mechanism for the shit in work.

I have something like 200 for my setting. Most around 50-60 pages, short stories or 'history scrolls' mostly.

Autism.

could you post one? I'm curious
or at least a couple pages

Middle Out Masterrace

I do top down and bottom up simultaneously.

Usually leads to a weak center but that's the portion I'm better at improvising at if needed

Or he likes writing? Would you shit on a GM who draws the pictures the players see? Or one who actually plays songs when a bard plays at the tavern? Writing's fun, dude.

>>The very act of creating maps, territories and those who inhabit it is top down world building
Not using map generators similar to Dwarf Fortress one with simplified tectonics generation? You are a peasant!

Though some things do need too much work to do bottom up to be done in a reasonable timeframe.

While countries and spread of civilisations can be done you can't do the same for all the other creatures inhabiting the world and need to just throw them into matching biomes.

>The very act of creating maps, territories and those who inhabit it is top down world building

Not necessarily.

You can start out saying "I want the players to start in this kind of village, fighting goblins in the adjacent forest," then scale up from there - OK we're done with goblins, they're going one tier up and visiting the count so we need maybe a map of the county, but not necessarily one of the whole country yet, etc./

The map is a tiny region of the world, surrounded on all sides by labels that say "the last fellow who went this way got et by wolves."

>The "world map" is just a tiny village with "hic sunt leones" written all around it