How does it feel knowing that no one but you, not even your players...

How does it feel knowing that no one but you, not even your players, gives two shits about the setting you've put so much time and effort to make it unique?

I care about your setting user

/Thread

My players care.

It sucks but I've grown used to it.

I actually enjoy world building. Creating a campaign is probably second only to those moments where everything you planned and plotted goes off just the way you intended.

One of my players is really into it, she thinks about new ideas for her character off session. I'd honestly drop the rest of the retards and do a one on one campaign with her if I could, I'll take one person who cares over 4 other retards who don't even pay attention.

Matt Colville put it best. He said something to the effect of "some players just want to play D&D, and they don't really care that it's YOUR game, just that they're playing. ". And he went on the say that he was okay with that, but it's a lot like driving a car with your buddies in the passenger seats. We're all on this road trip together, but it's your radio stations everyone's going to hear.
Do it for yourself because you like, and the people that don't care can just be along for the ride.
I don't think it cuts out to be defeatist anyway, plenty of players can end up caring about the lore. For some players that's the meat and potatoes of the game.

>no one but you
Hah! Joke's on you, user! Even I don't care about it! I only keep working on it because it keeps my brain occupied, so I don't have the chance to reflect on my life and how ready I am to kill myself!

A few of my players care

Setting is just decorations for the plot, and my players do give a shit about the plot.

Point is to MAKE them care. If they want to power-game or even just survive, they have to become intimately familiar with your lore. Make them have to strategize and plan again outside of the game if they want to succeed.

This man gets it.

Why did you spend so much time making it unique instead of good?

I put zero effort into my setting, it's plagiarized wholesale from other media with a new coat of paint.

I don't have any players lol. I just make it for fun.

>implying even I still care about it

This is why I:
- Don't spend a lot of time and effort
- create settings collaboratively
- really just don't create more than what is strictly needed.

A smart Master is a happy Master.
t. DM for 19 years.

I care about my friends settings so I believe they care about min as well.

I care about the setting of my GM's last game. Quite a lot. The setting for our current game is kind of boring and I miss the old game a ton...

Best way to make them care is have them take part in the setting's creation

>the setting you've put so much time and effort to make it unique?
>im-fucking-plying I put effort into my settings when I know nobody else will give a shit

Doesn't matter, the settings are my babies and I love them unconditionally.

I am a player and I've cared about every setting my GM made since we started playing about 6 years ago.

Sometimes I think that he doesn't get that though. Sometimes, once in a great while, he'll casually say off-hand that his setting is a commentary on social ills or something, but that we just don't get it.

How can I, as a sincere and well-meaning player and close friend, convey to my GM that I care about his settings and appreciate his worldbuilding?

That's because world building is purely a masturbatory exercise. It's fun but ultimately ends up feeling hollow.

You need to put your design effort into making engaging gameable content for your players and sprinkling little world details in. Not crafting an entire world they won't give a shit about because you've given them no reason to.

I say this as a GM who puts too much effort into his settings.
Let him talk, and ask questions.
"So why do faction X do Y? What is the culture of Z like?"
One question like that will last quite a lot of goodwill. If you ask questions and show interest, he'll keep on talking - and if he says "I'm probably getting boring" or the like, just exhort him to keep talking and he will.
There's nothing better as a GM than talking setting at someone who's actually interested.

>implying
If they didn't care why did my players make a wiki for the setting?
Checkmaid, OP.

I have at least one friend who is genuinely interested in it and he's actually the only person I've ever described it to, so I would say my stats are good so far. Haven't ran a game in it though and I honestly don't really plan to, maybe some one-shot one day.

My setting's hardly unique, but I love it anyway.

I know my players don't care outside the details that I give them, but that's enough.

>tfw a random user not only remembers your post in /wbg/ but expresses continued interest months later in an unrelated thread

Frankly, it's more frustrating knowing I'll never do it the justice it deserves.

I wouldn't know, my players are always decently invested in the settings we play.
Sometimes they're settings they've helped build and flesh out.

Thanks, I'll try that next time we play

I can't guarantee he won't talk for hours.
There's a reason we don't normally get to talk that much about our settings.

Yes, but the roles are reversed. I sometimes feel like I care more about the setting than the actual DM.

>Thinking that the setting is important and not the specific situations that occur in a given setting.

The setting matters slightly, sure. But it is nowhere near as important as having interesting and fun situations/events happen to the players. A game in a magic-less human-only setting can be way more fun than a game in the coolest setting ever depending on how the DMs create and run plots/events/encounters/combats/NPCs.

This is why I don't get the threads where people bemoan a specific setting or even a game system. A good DM can craft a fun adventure in even the most generic and kitchen sink fantasy setting. And players will not be able to tell the difference between a fun game in a boring setting or a fun game in OP's awesome setting. For them, a fun game is a fun game.

>make setting where everyone including the npcs are from different worlds and know nothing about the world they are now in
>First quest relevant npc the party encounters is an orc
>Party instantly kills the character before he can even say anything they say it's because "orcs are always evil"
>have other plot important npcs later on in the form of a group of friendly lizard people that actually manage to join up with the party only to be murdered very shortly later by our paladins because "They were obviously evil"
>They weren't
>one of them was essential to stopping the big bad
>Party encounters a portal later on, I have planted numerous instances of foreshadowing about this portal throughout the campaign illustrating it's significance and that the party will need to use it
>They destroy the mechanism keeping it working
>Party has to traverse mines
>Have a npc that is a kobold miner that is supposed to be their guide he is fighting a bear when they first encounter him, they were supposed to save him
>Let him get eaten by bear and then try to tame the bear afterwards
>They keep dodging the fucking plot by being complete psychopaths
>They keep justifying it by saying they are acting within their roles even when that doesn't make any sense
>In their minds paladin= xenophobic serial killer, ranger = backwoods hillbilly and that rogue= "backstab everyone"
>they have already doomed the world and are going to die at this point I'm just letting them meander around like morons until the eldritch abominations are summoned in the next couple of days and gut all of them.

I don’t waste time that way.
This is going to sound kind of cold, but NEVER put in more then half again more time preparing for a game then the players will actually be playing it, because those extra preparations will prove useless or go unused because they do something different. This applies to making campaign settings too.

If you wanna make a cool setting for the sake of making a cool setting, go do a Kickstarter for your setting book or go actually write something.

>This is why I don't get the threads where people bemoan a specific setting or even a game system. A good DM can craft a fun adventure in even the most generic and kitchen sink fantasy setting. And players will not be able to tell the difference between a fun game in a boring setting or a fun game in OP's awesome setting. For them, a fun game is a fun game.

In my experience, the vast majority of people on Veeky Forums who play P&P games are more likely to be GM’s/DM’s without active games then actual players.

Just fine. I'm the only one who really needs to know or care.

>my players
bruv, I've never actually played a TRPG

I take care to ensure my work is properly enshrined online. Ive putt a few thousand hours work into it, with 400+ hours of playtesting alone...

www.kendelyzer.wordpress.com

The one good thing about it is that it does allow you to change stuff at need. They don't care that there is a city in 'that' direction? Couldn't even guess its location? Cool, cause I need an orc invasion coming from SOME direction and I guess it can come from there.

Sounds like you just want to hang out with her, user

My players are always interested and want me to show them the Atlas of World History I've been writing for them once it's done. I have some friends also who aren't my players but like to hear about what I'm working on, and I even had a random guy want to know about my setting the other day, it was a good discussion.

...

I'm a player and also the loremaster. Made up like 70% of the setting by now.

>First campaign in the setting was so successful, when I suggested a new genre, they asked me to instead do a time-skip continuation in the same setting
>One player creates an entire custom class based off of one of the religions she's really passionate about
>Another player is trying to create a setting PDF of the world
>Yet another player keeps asking me to novelize the first campaign, but I can't remember half of it and am too lazy to write a novel
and I'm just improvising 3/4 of the time.


Though smugface memes aside, I do feel your pain. I've genuinely found that leaving as many details as possible in a "quantum wave state" improvising and shaping the world around the characters as the story progresses both helps drive the campaign forward better, and gets the players genuinely invested in the setting.. and their characters' arcs.

That doesn't mean don't plan, just don't OVERPLAN.

I'm trying to find a reason to DM, and I'm not coming up with anything. Why do you DM?

Stop playing with garbage people then.

>wow user you put a lot more effort into this map than I do into mine
>that was a great encounter, I can't believe we didn't die!
>I love the way this story is going

These are things you hear when your friends are decent human beings who support each other and play games with you because you're friends and not you hang out even without a game.

Someone has to, and the other three fucks keep voting for me.

>tfw D&D group makes up almost all the friends that I have
>tfw based on this post and numerous other things I've heard people say over the last year, they're not actually my friends
>tfw still going to stick with them because being alone still hurts more

i wanna see how far i can get away with doing a magical realm

Everyone else in my group is terrible at it or doesn't want to

I used to be like you... happy, and full of laboriously intricate maps...

At some point in the early 90's all of RP'ers life was united in celebration as we gave birth to computer games.

We don't know who struck first, but we know that it was US who felt the pain of this.

You've been campaigning in a dream world, user.

This is the world that exists today.... welcome to the campaign of the real.

I have seen fields, user, endless fields, where campaigns are no longer born... they are grown.

For the longest time, I wouldn't believe it, until I saw it with my own eyes.

Watched them digitize campaigns so they could be coded into MMORPG's. standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision of it.

What is the Hackslash? The Hackslash is a prison, built to keep us under control, in order to change a campaign into this.

I didn't say it would be easy, I just said it would be the truth.

It feels good man.

Wouldn't want some faggots meming about my setting on an anonymous imageboard

If not me then who?

>I'm trying to find a reason to DM, and I'm not coming up with anything. Why do you DM?

"Rocks fall, Everyone dies"

try that one.

post tips with timestamp

Considering I've never got the courage to show them either of my settings, I'm not surprised at all.

If no one wants to DM, are we in a dead hobby?

Jokes on you, I put little to no effort into my settings, I just come up with ideas when I'm high.

>THE CITY AT THE EDGE OF TIME
>Immortal Oligarchs rules the last city of the multiverse, and crime lords rule it's streets.
>Strange mutants stalk the realm beyond, and stranger things still haunt the honey-combed sewers.

>THE REALM OF ALL FLESH
>Gaze upon the quivering fields of flesh, the corpulent hills of adipose, where calcified fortresses, stained red by the seas that lap at their shores, stand guard.
>Fear the crimson devils, ravenous skeletal beings that come hither their lairs as the red rains are falling down
>Never go hungry again in MEATWORLD

Like I ran a campaign in the first setting and I just made up that second one.

>If no one wants to DM, are we in a dead hobby?

Dm'ing is a sort of sacrifice for the enjoyment of the group....

You gain YOUR enjoyment by the supreme power over their lives that you wield, and you try like hell to make it seem fair.

You try to teach them lessons on WHY they shouldn't minmax, or attack everything with spare gold that they see.

The DM's job, ultimately, is to FORCE the players to become better at the one task that far too few players ever realize:

Player knowledge vs Character Knowledge.

and Player Action, vs Character action.

How do you make the distinction? I'm working on a setting right now and I would definitely appreciate any advice on that specific topic.

I try to ignore it. I've begun to realize that if I keep letting myself get down because no one else cares about shit, then I'll never actually do things. I gotta find my own reasons - so far, that's creating something that no other setting has properly been able to give me, my own little kitchen sink of what I like and think would be fun.

>put a lot of love and hope into a campaign setting for three friends
>third session in setting
>important confrontation
>warlock does nothing but Eldritch Blast push the enemy around and ruin the two fighters' flanking
>inappropriate laughter and silence through the whole thing from two of them, one of which being the warlock
>turns out the two girls were just sending each other guy fieri memes over tumblr the whole time
>they didn't even pretend to care about anything I was doing
It hurt a lot actually, and these days I outright hate them both, for other related reasons.

At least the dude's still nice, and made references to it in his campaign.

please make it hurt.
like, try to give them a reason to really like their characters, and them fucking murder them, slowly and horribly.

What about playing Microscope and then making a setting based on your game, so that every player has contributed.

I don't put so much care and detail into my setting. I make most of the shit up on the spot.

I mean, time and effort to make a setting unique don't directly translate into the setting being unique.

I mostly take comfort in the fact that even if it doesn't function well as an RPG setting, I can always use it for writing short stories or novels. Thankfully my players seem very interested in my setting and are actively attempting to unravel some of its secrets.

>THE REALM OF ALL FLESH
That unironically sounds super cool, user.

Honestly? Wouldn't make a bad one shot. In a sort of "Hey lets all get drunk and just have fun with it." sort of way.

I actually don't mind DMing. And a good half of my players at least like my universe, so no problem there either.
Really if it wasn't for an 8hour time difference, things would be peachy.

What is this meme that allows someone to generalize the opinions of people they've never met?
Not that I entirely disagree, there are certainly those who don't care about worldbuilding to the same extent of the creator, but putting information that the players willfully ignore is better than having nothing for them to ignore.
Besides, the people I play with (subtract That Guy) enjoys world-building at least to some degree.

is it not the dream of a single GM to have a cute player willingly enter their magical realm

If I could maintain interest in even my own ideas long enough to MAKE a setting, I'd know that feel.

But my own ideas bore me less than a day after I have them, and better ideas from more creative people don't last all that much longer. But it's not like that's a REAL problem, right?

How does it feel knowing that your setting is too bland to catch anyone's attention but yours?

congratulations you actual literal retard, you've discovered the exact point of OP's post

I prefer GMing. I set up cool encounters, plan out interesting opponents, get to toss away NPCs who are not fun to rp as and instead focus on the great ones. Worldbuilding can be awesome too. Messing with the system is great as well.

It's not a sacrifice if you enjoy it.

how does it feel knowing that no one but you is gonna give two shits about how much time and effort you've put into this wank session?
Like
I don't give a fuck. I don't need anyone else's input to enjoy masturbating. In fact, I'd rather do it by myself, get it right, and then relate those tales to my players in a way that they'll enjoy.