It keeps your notes for you and functions as a digital planner. Please ignore my crappy law school notes.Įvernote is a note-taking and task management app that’s pretty standard fare among notetaking apps. Worldbuilding covers everything a world can contain whether it be climate, geography, religion, culture, race, and, if you’re writing a fantasy setting, magic. For example, in a world where your character is born in a culture that lives in a place that never experiences harsh weather and has fertile land, that character might be more carefree and easy-going compared to someone who comes from a place where life is hard and their culture promotes “tougher” mindsets. The conditions set by a world also shape what characters become. Well-built worlds feel like they always existed before the main characters were born and will continue to exist long after the story ends. Worldbuilding is the process of creating a fictional world in a way that makes it thrum with life and plausibly deniability. In Genshin Impact, which I’m obviously obsessed with, worldbuilding comes in the form of wall carvings, ruined temples, and even a region’s cuisine. Sometimes, worldbuilding isn’t as obvious as things that are said and done in a setting. In RPGs like The Witcher, you see worldbuilding in the way the Church of Eternal Fire and the Witch hunters treat witchers, elves, and other non-human races. In League of Legends, you see a lot of worldbuilding tidbits in the fine text that gets reflected in voice lines when characters hint at a deeper lore. No matter what game it is, you’ll notice that it has a setting that shapes the way the characters think, feel, behave, and interact. It doesn’t have to be an open-world RPG, even an MMO or a MOBA. So what’s worldbuilding anyway? Well, think about the last time you played a video game.
What’s Worldbuilding and Do I Really Have to Do It? Worldbuilding goes a long way toward getting players emotionally invested and curious about the world their character exists in. A well-built fictional world has the potential to transport players - or readers, if you’re a novelist - into your setting.
Immersion is a little more tricky when you don’t have that extra visual component. It’s (arguably) easier to create an immersive experience when you can actually physically show people what the fantasy world they’re playing in is like. The game pioneered the whole idea of fantasy games where players are divided into classes and races, something that would boom in popularity later with Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.īut the thing is, the paper and pen format of Dungeons and Dragons meant that you couldn’t exactly just plop your players in a virtual world and let them figure it out from there. But anyway, D&D is still a big deal and when you say tabletop roleplaying game, you bet most people are thinking about this Wizards of the Coast IP.ĭungeons and Dragons began in 1974 when it was created by Gary Gygax and David Arneson. Well, aside from Japan where they like Call of Cthulhu more. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular roleplaying game on the market.