Connect Characters and Systems

[MajorKerina]

Some are already doing this, but I often see a lot of topics where people are asking, “How do I build the thing better?” when for me there’s a more critical question first: the things and the people need to be one.

A magic system is not interesting simply because it has seven schools and a color wheel and a book on its tax code.

It becomes interesting the second it gets its hands on a person. Who does it tempt? Who does it exclude? Who does it messily mutilate? Who gets to feel special because of it? Who has to clean up after it? Who can afford its costs? Who gets called dangerous for using it in a way no one else wants to use it? That’s the blood in the rollers.

A lot of writers fall in love with the architecture and then act surprised when nobody wants to live in the house.

Readers get twenty paragraphs on how soul-binding works and not one sharp sentence about what it does to a lonely daughter who can’t bring herself to unbind her mother’s ghost despite the cost to her lifespan and mental health. The details of a rulebook are not the story.

Same with governments, guilds, pantheons, rankings, all of it. Imperial succession rules don’t matter unless it means someone has to marry the wrong person, betray the right person, kill their brother, swallow their pride, or discover they were never going to inherit love no matter what the law said. Administration is only alive when it becomes story pressure.

“Good worldbuilding” is so often mistaken for wiki accumulation. Good worldbuilding is emotional infrastructure. It should produce conflict, longing, irony, constraint, leverage. It should force people into revealing who they are under stress, under desire, under shame. Otherwise it’s just nicely painted drywall.

Even the most detail-interested readers can feel the difference instantly. NPC writing happens when the author cares more about explaining the setting than about letting the setting deform the characters. You get people who speak like lore terminals. They exist to tour you through the museum. Nobody falls in love with that. Nobody mourns that. Nobody stays up late for one more chapter because of that.

Just a few personal thoughts I wanted to share. I see so much ink spilled about am I doing this world or the system or this magic right when it needs to be part and parcel of the narrative and not ornamentation that gets too much attention. Cheers!

 

[KennyCelican]

Just a few personal thoughts I wanted to share. I see so much ink spilled about am I doing this world or the system or this magic right when it needs to be part and parcel of the narrative and not ornamentation that gets too much attention. Cheers!

I think the only time you need to worry about doing things 'right' is when you're in a shared setting, because then, especially if you're borrowing another person's IP, there's some objective measure you're trying to match.

That said, and while I'm in agreement with your general sentiment that character drives engagement, and character is about interaction, not power sets, thus the most important thing about the world is how it affects the characters in the story, there is an additional thing to consider.

The world needs to be internally consistent, or any reader beyond a junior high reading comprehension level will begin losing interest, because without consistency there's no real tension. Everything becomes a deus ex machina.

Which kinda goes back to your original point, because at that point the world isn't deforming the character, the character is deforming the world. Which, for the 'OP MC' archetypes might be part of the fun, but it gets way less interesting if the world is made of cardboard and the MC doesn't care about that (although an OP MC who cares about the world of carboard can have interesting moments of 'I could end this, but that would have consequences I don't want).

 

[LiteraryWho]

Very good point, and a very easy thing to forget about when writing.

I wonder if it's better to start with those questions and work your way down to the world, or if it can work to start with the world and work your way to the characters?

I always do the latter, but I wonder...

Which kinda goes back to your original point, because at that point the world isn't deforming the character, the character is deforming the world. Which, for the 'OP MC' archetypes might be part of the fun, but it gets way less interesting if the world is made of cardboard and the MC doesn't care about that (although an OP MC who cares about the world of carboard can have interesting moments of 'I could end this, but that would have consequences I don't want).

I think the problem with the OP MC and world building is not really the world building, but the OP MC. I'd call it the puffer fish of character archaetypes. Very easy to accidentally make it toxic.

 

[JHarp]

“Good worldbuilding” is so often mistaken for wiki accumulation. Good worldbuilding is emotional infrastructure. It should produce conflict, longing, irony, constraint, leverage. It should force people into revealing who they are under stress, under desire, under shame. Otherwise it’s just nicely painted drywall.

A bit busy to edit my ramble like I usually do for the forums but feel I should chip in slightly.

'Good worldbuilding' is just that, worldbuilding. It can include wiki accumulation along with a whole list of things.
The issue isn't that worldbuilding is some different term, but that people fail to communicate those ideas.

Worldbuilding as a whole category got warped right from the days of Tolkien to mean many things that it hadn't even formalised yet.
For someone whose job it was to deal with languages he did a bad job overall of actually building the language outside of the components that were required in the moments those came up.
Mainly because he wasn't focusing on worldbuilding but writing his mythologically adjacent fantasy novel. People keep misrepresenting this and it harms the whole idea of worldbuilding to a standard that isn't even consistent.

Worldbuilding is planning, and you won't end up with a compelling game or book if you take your dream diary with all the random drawings, annotations and corrections and turn them into media to present as-is.

Worldbuilding as it stands, still cares about all the minor details that make up the world the person is building, the issue is that the distribution of fish in a local area or the balance of trade during a war, doesn't fit the majority of contexts and stories you plan to tell.

No one cares that in my world Magnetite makes up 20% of the worlds iron and Hematite is 32%, or that the metal cost places Magnetite at 6 silver 31 copper in the region I'm currently dealing with for a D&D campaign compared to 5 silver 86 copper for Hematite.
No one cares that I shifted the presence of shellfish higher because of the tech level of the costal cities having a tendency due to their location, setting and culture, to favour shellfish and making that the easiest option for income compared to deep sea fishing.

Worldbuilding isn't meant to be interesting in that regard, it is meant to be building a world, and in many cases learning things in our world that you otherwise wouldn't look into.

When I write stories, do I bother to detail the ratios of metals, the alloying cost and fuels to produce specific alloys which then have specific uses in different types of equipment? No, that isn't how you communicate ideas.
But that is the rookie trap people fall into when they get told a detailed world helps them skip over some thinking steps while telling a story.

Who does it tempt? Who does it exclude? Who does it messily mutilate?

Tl;dr to some extent, worldbuilding is not about narrative pressure generation. That comes after, that is the layer tabletop GMs work at, they build on an existing foundation.

It is a seperate skillset and people keep failing to distinguish the two and harm their own progress. It doesn't hold up in game design, simulation focus, long-form narrative or any tabletop games.

It is about external communication and relevance, which new writers fail at because they are generally enthused about this idea they have; that they already know, which they fail to communicate.

 

[Sylver]

I uhh... hmm gunna be honest, never really saw it that way before. Inter perspective.