Late to the party, as usual, but i ran across this blog post on dungeon building so I thought we could give it a read and discuss!
Have a suggestion of a blog post or article we should look at? Reply below and let me know!
Show Notes:
Stream time: 2022-01-12T18:00:00Z
Let’s try this again!
Stream time: 2022-01-13T18:00:00Z
Hi, I’m new to the Forum. I’m ready to read 10 pages on ancient fish people. 
So let it be written, so let it be done!
Hell Yeah, the fish people who worship the greatest god, a squid-like being. I can write books about this.
And then sell the rights to those books to the highest bidder for a multi-season narrative series.
Here is some DM advice I see a lot. “Only spend time making things your PCs are going to see. Doing more is a waste of time.” I will call this ‘the advice’. It sounds sooo right, but I think this is BAD advice and following it will stop you from becoming a great DM.
But first I’ll admit that there is some wisdom in it. You don’t want to get burnt out spending 80 hours on background material for a 4 hour session, or worse not run the session at all because you think you have to put 80 hours into making up the background.
Ok, on to why you should make up background and history your PCs will never see.
Because if you only know the bare minimum, the things you HAVE to know, you’ll have nothing left to pull improvisation from. Your game might be fine, but it will be flat and reductionist… Things your PC’s can’t see inform and affect things they can see.
If you want to make an engaging world, with NPCs that have understandable psychologies, and events and settings that seem alive and fully realized… the tool that lets you do that is an understanding of the history and background that are outside the view of your players.
Doing this allows you to improvise answers to random PC questions. Sometimes when the PC’s ask you a question that you haven’t prepared an answer for it breaks your players immersion. Is there a glass blower in the town? What subjects are covered in the Baroness’ library?
As you flail around trying to answer these questions it becomes clear the setting is a fiction. The DM is just making it up.
If you have made up history and background beyond what your PCs can see, not only will you be able to easily answer these questions, but your answers will make the world seem more real, not less real.
Let’s look at an example from my current campaign. I needed the setting to have only 1 NPC wizard. This was the thing the players would see, so if I had followed ‘the advice’, that’s all I should make up. Anything else is a waste of time. But instead I came up with the reason there’s only one wizard in the area. In the past a religious uprising killed or ran out all the other wizards. I have no reason to think the PCs will ever see this. Most of the villagers will not talk about it with outsiders for fear of reprisals, and the one wizard left is traumatized and reclusive.
When my players entered the town, one PC asked if there were any wizards in town. No problem as the DM I had prepared the answer to this question. The answer is “just one”. If I had followed ‘the advice’ that’s all I would have known. But because I had made up ‘the history my players would never see’, I knew more. I knew how the townsperson would perceive the question and how he would flavor his answer. He said “Yes, actually. One, in that tower over there. But she hasn’t caused any problems in a long time and will leave you alone”.
I am able to give this random NPC, who I have thought nothing about, a psychology that colors how he answers the question. He said, “Yes actually” because he views the wizards presence as unusual, and frames the rest of his answer as if the presence of a wizard is a problem, a potentially dangerous problem.”
Days later another PC (who is a glass blower) asked if there was a glassblower in town. This time as the DM I haven’t prepped the answer for this. If I had followed ‘the advice’ I could roll a dice, or just say yes. Neither answer makes the world seem more real. But because I made ‘the history my players would never see’ I KNEW the answer even though I had never thought about it. During the religious fervor, craftsmen like glassblowers and paper makers, who the populace associate with wizards (in this world) were also no longer welcome in the area. So when a PC asks “are there any glassblowers”, I could answer “He frowns slightly and shakes his head without making eye contact and says No, no glass blower in town.”
My contention is that if you have history and background your PCs can’t see, it informs the things they can see, making them more real, deep, and engaging. And in this example that is exactly what happened. After the PC asked about glassblowers, another PC pulled him aside and said, “I wouldn’t spread around that you know glassblowing. I don’t think this town likes wizards very much or the people that make their glassware.”
Making ‘history the player could not see’ improvise answers to PC questions and let me inject so much realism into the world that a player understood that the townsperson didn’t like glassblowers without me saying he didn’t like glassblowers, AND the player was able to connect it to the towns dislike of wizards.
When I made up this campaign I had no way of knowing a PC would be a glassblower, or would ask about it. No reason to think about how I would answer the question of if there was a glass blower in town, but because I thought up the ‘history the players wouldn’t see’ I was able not just to give an answer that was consistent with the world but give a deep answer that hinted at a real world the players only ever see the surface of.
Let’s look at the relevant bits of the article:
How the past impacts the present that the characters find themselves exploring matters but the intricate details of a location’s history are largely unnecessary to run an adventure. Backstory is somewhat inevitable when building the location in your mind, but it’s not something that needs to be passed on to the reader. Backstory often detracts from usability, both by taking up space better spent on more accessible details, complicating the layout and by adding information that may make it harder for a Game Master to incorporate the adventure into their game. However, minimalism and the elimination of all history or backstory is as much a poor design decision as too much. (bold mine)
I think the nuance here that is being overlooked is that he’s not saying that all history that isn’t immediately visible is bad but that intricate backstories aren’t particularly useful and can be counter-productive. In fact his view of backstory overall mirrors what you’re saying. In the very next paragraph:
Backstory helps the designer build the location defining what spaces are, how they are used in the present and why they were built. It informs the attitude, relationships and nature of the location’s inhabitants… and can give the players clues about puzzles and obstacles within the location.
I don’t think the author really disagrees with your point.
About your campaign example (with is awesome, by the way), I think you’re conflating, a bit the method of determining a history with its existence. In your story, you mention that the world wouldn’t have felt real if you had randomly determined whether a glassblower was present or not. I disagree with this. Your statement comes from your knowledge, as a referee, that you randomly rolled for an answer. From the players side of the screen, they don’t know how you arrived at your answer, only that one exists and, given the existing lore, it makes sense. Whether behind the scenes, it was an answer based on a fifty page campaign story bible or a set of random tables ultimately doesn’t matter.
Its true I have somewhat straw-maned the author in order to (unsuccessfully) make my view point stand out more.
So, great idea! Lets look at the text! If you’ll forgive a cheap rhetorical trick I’ll take the same passage you quoted but bold my own sections…
How the past impacts the present that the characters find themselves exploring matters but the intricate details of a location’s history are largely unnecessary to run an adventure. Backstory is somewhat inevitable when building the location in your mind, but it’s not something that needs to be passed on to the reader. Backstory often detracts from usability , both by taking up space better spent on more accessible details, complicating the layout and by adding information that may make it harder for a Game Master to incorporate the adventure into their game. However, minimalism and the elimination of all history or backstory is as much a poor design decision as too much. ( bold mine )
the auther isn’t saying “NO BACKGROUND EVER!” But see all the negative language connected to the idea of backstory/history? “unnecessary”, “detracts”, “Harder for a GM”. I’d say what the author communicates in this paragraph is that making up backstory/history is the price you have to pay in order to make what matters, the things your PCs will actually see.
Instead, I think you should embrace background/history as your primary vehicle for making a deep, fulfilling adventure.
Keeping in mind I understand my viewpoint only works when making material for your own table, and the author is talking about making things for other GMs to use. I’ll sum up the author’s view as, if you are going to do 10 pages of prep, make as little backstory/history as possible, say 1 page. And make 9 pages of concrete notes you can directly use in game.
My advice would be to make 8 pages of background/history (much of which your players will never see) and 2 pages of concrete notes you can directly use in game. In my experience you’ll be able to leverage those 8 pages of background into the equivalent of 20 or 30 pages of concrete notes because if you know the background you can improvise the concrete stuff better then if you had made it up ahead of time without thinking much about background.
Should I give another long winded example? Of course I should. Let’s imagine my players are going into catacombs in the town from my fist example, I have no prep for this location.
But I know that there are sign of torches being used in the past but not recently. I know the town used torches not candles because there is a bog nearby where pitch could be gathered cheaply. I know that there hasn’t been torches down here recently. The town is in an economic down turn because it can no longer access the bog. I also know the newer sections of the crypts are decorated with a basilisk motif (not other cultural appropriate symbology) because a few generations ago a hero killed a basilisk and the event has become a cultural touchstone for the town. In fact several of the bodies from that time aren’t dusty bones, but statues turned to stone by that basilisk.
Statues interned instead of bodies after a basilisk attack is a great piece of nonsense that makes it look like you have spent hours and hours filling every corner of your world with realistic detail but I just made it up while writing this reply. I didn’t have to write the things my players would see ahead of time, because I knew the background they wouldn’t see.
And I just want to make clear the blog in question is great. 9/10. Maybe better, maybe its the perfect blog. 95% great advice with one flaw that has made me talk about it endlessly.
More great stuff from your game!
My only response is that I don’t think this sort of backstory is the backstory the blog is referring to! All the stuff you mentioned is absolutely visible and discoverable and can be interacted with by the party. Notice that the details are all very visible, descriptive, and accessible to the party: the relationship between the bog and the town, torches vs candles, basilisk design motifs, petrified bodies vs mouldering bones. I would not characterize any of these with the negative language that you bolded from the blog text.
You were also able to communicate all these details to me in short order and, in fact, with a little rearranging and editing, if we were going to integrate them into descriptions and settings of places, we absolutely could. If I were going to add your town and this dungeon to my setting, I have pertinent details that I could build off of and use for my own imagination but things I probably don’t need (where the basilisk slaying hero was from or their childhood, etc.) aren’t obscuring the important stuff and taking up space.
I think the overall point might be that you, as the author, might come up with all kinds of information over pages and pages in research and development, but your final product should be a distillation down to essential, useful information as much as possible, while still maintaining some character of place and your own style, of course.
Great convo!
I think we are really narrowing in on the truth.
Being more generous to the author, If you read his blog post carefully you would end up with a philosophy of GMing very close to what I am espousing. We both might have the same idea of how things should be done ideally. But he seems to be warning against one extreme, and I’m warning against the other.
The author of the blog warns against having so much background we can’t access the things we need when we need them. Fair point.
But I’m more worried about GMs ignoring background in favor of making up more details the party directly interacts with. A huge specificity of details that don’t interconnect or point to unseen causes will be missing a spark of verisimilitude.
When seeing a GM overwhelmed with the idea of making their story, I think the author would say, “Don’t worry, concentrate on making the usable player facing things you’ll need in the adventure. Forget about the 1000 years of history the million other things going on in the world.”
and I’d say, “Don’t worry, concentrate on understanding the background, history, and situation the players are in. Forget about trying to make up every detail your players are going to see, you can make up the details as you go—understand the things that cause the details.
Both will make the GM feel more confident and help them actually run the game. I just think my advice is better : )
And thanks for all the reply, I always love talking deeply about RPG theory!