When you make a map - do you think about the little people?

[CaptainJohnHawk]

THW brings up a great point with relevant detail. My friend from highschool is a big D&D fan (thanks to me of course), and has been building a huge world for the past 6 years now. It started as locations, general photos of things, and the story. Now every single location has a building layout, population, countless numbers of side quests and dungeons, temples, etc. Every single location and important plot point has its own song attached, so we can get a feel of each location as we play. It is a ton of fun to play and is incredible open world. That being said, a normal D&D campaign usually has some epic enemies and world threatening characters involved. So even though we could go any where and do anything we wanted to, we still felt very driven to stay on task and play the story missions (so we could save the world ya know?). So even though he had created this mind numbing amount of detail for every thing, we came across maybe 30% of the world and things he created. You could tell he would be a little let down, when we didn't go around each town and talked to random people to trigger these events. It is nice, because you could potentially throw any campaign into that setting, and not have to do that much additional world building.
However, at the end of the day, you play D&D to complete the quest and play the campaign that was built for you. So the amount of detail in a world or settlement should directly relate to the importance and pace of the campaign you have your players in, otherwise they may not encounter all your hard work.

[Wingshaw]

Well this is about the question of worldbuilding competing with storytelling.

There was an article I read once in which the British writer China Miéville quoted someone else along the lines of: 'of the fourteen empires to rise in the Autumn Epoch, only three are relevant to this story.'

Give the reader a taste of the worldbuilding, tease them with it, try and get them intrigued, but withhold that information from them. When you think about it, all the best writers of fantasy do this. Reading Tolkien, for example, you can sense the vast amount of detail that exists but is not included. I think it is a sign of an author respecting his/her audience's intelligence. If writers needed to explain everything to their readers, it would make the reader feel like they do not belong in the world, and so break the immersion. I can only assume the same applies to gamers.

Anyway, it is late here and I'm tired, so that's all for tonight.

THW

[CaptainJohnHawk]

Well this is about the question of worldbuilding competing with storytelling.

There was an article I read once in which the British writer China Miéville quoted someone else along the lines of: 'of the fourteen empires to rise in the Autumn Epoch, only three are relevant to this story.'

Give the reader a taste of the worldbuilding, tease them with it, try and get them intrigued, but withhold that information from them. When you think about it, all the best writers of fantasy do this. Reading Tolkien, for example, you can sense the vast amount of detail that exists but is not included. I think it is a sign of an author respecting his/her audience's intelligence. If writers needed to explain everything to their readers, it would make the reader feel like they do not belong in the world, and so break the immersion. I can only assume the same applies to gamers.

Anyway, it is late here and I'm tired, so that's all for tonight.

THW

I love that quote. I suppose I am getting a little off topic, but I love talking about world building.

[markem]

It is all extremely interesting. :-)

I have read Tolkien many times (probably many more than I'm willing to say!). And I have read many other author's works. So yeah - there are some authors who you just want to strangle because they are highly repetitive. But there are other authors who give excruciating detail - but I love it! Agatha Cristie is one. I remember reading "The Mirror Cracked" and about 3/4 of the book was mainly narrative about each of the people. I loved it. What can I say?

My objective, as a programmer, is to create a program that will keep track of everything. (I think I'll call it something that pokes fun at my attempt.) The real problem is going to be how to keep from gobbling up all memory. It is really a trade off between memory, disk usage, and how long it would take to do everything. Before the hacker attacked I had started work on just being able to keep track of the original 3-book set D&D characters. I was experimenting with the best way to build a character. I'd figured out a way to auto load the character but then got side tracked. Like most programs today - it uses classes and classes that extend pre-existing classes. Still working on it (or rather I will be working on it). Just sitting here I realized that I had already made my routines to save the information but I did not put in how to know which class the information came from. Something I wil have to work on once my system is back up. This is how I want to keep track of everyone. It still won't be able to keep all of the information about NPCs and PCs. Such as "what did they eat that morning? How long did they sleep last night? And so forth. I'm hoping to make it keep track of where they are and where they are going, what they are currently weaing, weapons on them, treasure on them, and things like that.

This is how I am hoping to keep track of everyone in a city (actually my entire world).

[Azélor]

Sim city 4 and Simcity (2013?, the latest) can track the sims in the city. They have different ways of doing it and it's probably not as sophisticated as you would like. In SC2013,Sims disappear when they enter in a building, they become aggregated to the rest of the building's residents. The same thing happen when they enter their workplace, so it's causing a lot of traffic issues because they don't work or live in a specific place. At every shift, sims will quit the job and go to the nearest suitable home. I think they improved the algorithms but that's how it worked originally.

In SC4, I think it was possible to follow the Sims for a very long period of time if desired but I'm not sure if it's possible to follow every sims or if it's limited to a few. It's been too long since I've played, I don't remember. You know where they are, what they are doing and what they are thinking (in general). I had a 4 millions + people in a city plus other people living in the bordering cities.

[markem]

Hmmmm......I played SimCity - but only the very first release. That sounds interesting. :-) Did you know that the city of New York used SimCity once to see if they could improve their usage of Firemen and Police? It was a VERY long time ago but was interesting. :-)

Ok. I've uploaded a couple of maps to my albums. What do I do now? Do I go and post finished maps in the finished maps area? Is there a way to point to the albums? Thank ahead of time for the help. :-)

[Wingshaw]

If you want to share some completed maps, the best thing is to create a finished maps thread for each one.

If you want to receive some critique, start a WIP thread in the appropriate subforum.

If you want to direct people to your album, set up a signature with a link to it (you can do that from the Settings page of your profile).

THW

[markem]

Ok. I think for right now a link is better. Thanks I read the sticky on making links but am unsure if that would point to the album or not. Let me go see if I can find something like another sticky that talks about albums and how to link to them. Thanks again!

Edited: Ok. It was really-really simple to make my sig point at the album. All you have to do is to first go to the albums by clicking on the "More" button, go up to the top of the browser, highlight the HTTP line, copy it, go to your signature and paste it in. That's it. I'm supposing that if I used the BBCode instead of just copy/pasting it - I could set it up like RobA has his set up. But I'm lazy. Actually, I'm really tired. Hacker tried to get into my system again. I decided he must have the password to our router. So I changed it. Its been quiet all day so far. I use a 64 character password. Hoping that keeps them out for a while. :-)