Canon world-building, are you a stickler for details?

So, I play a lot of fandom pbp rpgs. Currently building one, but it's not ready yet.

I was wondering if there are others, like me, who get wrapped up in the nitty gritty of canon world-building. When is a good time to step back, as well?

As much as I want to create an immersive experience for players, sometimes I find world-building is huge time/mind drain. I love detail but I'm just wondering how, if any of you, find a good balance between world-building and playing your own games in turn.

 

I hate when a world doesn't follow it's own rules. Like say a person has set out XYZ as Lore for something. Then, on some other page that references that same lore, there is contradictory information that directly goes against the extensive page on the subject and I'm sitting here like ????? which is correct, please?

 

I think if you are going to create something different than the canon world, there needs to be some information, enough so that people understand how it's different.

 

I absolutely LOVE in depth lore and world building. As far as I'm concerned, do what you have fun with. There are likely other people that enjoy it as well. I've run sites with people who didn't like heavy lore, and sites with people who adored it.

 

Ive heard a lot of people tell me to start small and expand outward, however, I always end up doing the exact opposite. Just seems to give a grander feel to the world when Im able to start big and slowly zoom into the world.

 

I love building a detailed, deep board canon. Especially as the Harry Potter books leave most things in their universe so vague or have logic/realism problems. I have further visioned such vague lore into something solid that can be easily used without contradicting anyone, and heavily adapted some of the lore that in the books or Rowling's vision doesn't quite work.

I did most of it before I even opened the site, which is why it took me weeks to do even though I worked on it for hours nearly every day. But that freed up a lot of time to just playing when it was open. Of course I have kept adding and adapting more lore since and quite actively, but I'm the kind of personality that works on stuff hard at once as in I might dedicate a day or few to just that and not play at all during those days. Then when it's finished I'm free to just play again, though I may need to rest for a few days after such hard work. Of course that's only with major developments, I do quick smaller ones alongside playing.

Sometimes I'm lucky and I get so strong vision of something that it just flows out easily and only needs some refining and thus does not consume my time much or drain me much. That's rare though. Anyway, I've been administrating this rpg for 11 years, I feel like I've found a good balance between lore developmentvand playing. (The original, Finnish version was opened 11 yearsxago and is still active, this english version was opened almost five years ago and is still as active as it can be with just one player innaddition to me.)

 

See i have an AU site which has a sort of "first come" idea behind it. If you come forwards and say character 1 and 2 got togeter and had a baby, thats now the canon. If you say a pokemon is a certain way, eg something like mawile being spilt personaility, it becomes canon.

You can then add, expand and grow on the idea and collab with others to build on it and make it in to something, which i find really cool as a base idea like "happiness means a bond" can become a while huge site wide and site built plot!

 

I have built and played on a lot of Potter sites myself, and I am not one for being overly detailed with canon information. I have myself someone who does it for me! lol He's very into the canon down to the smallest detail and loves writing up all the lore and info. So I let him at it, because it could not interest me less! I just want to play and have fun. lol

 

I could spend my entire life just creating worlds... Like, I love creating characters too, but worlds have so much more to create than characters. The world does have to come first, after all. I guess you could say that I admire Tolkien?

 

Make strictly what is required in the beginning for roleplay. What do you need? You need a place for people to start and begin meeting each other. Then you need something for them to do in that place. It's super simple actually.

Think of it like Runescape, right? OSRS, actual 2007 era, where the tutorial was tutorial island and not whatever it is now. It was a crash course. Demonstrated sorta the setting, get you into it a little, showed you the basic skills that you needed to write. It warmed you up before plopping you in Lumbridge and telling you good luck, but at the same time, the move to Lumbridge was a strategic thing, because it had things you could immediately relate too there to get you started. Simple quests that took maybe a day to complete, but by the end of it you had gotten your groove on, started exploring cool new places, looking through your questbook and map. You were ready to ROCK!

So how do we translate that, a Videogame tutorial, into a Roleplaying Tutorial? Entirely depends on your setting. But, if you go this route the site should have a team of people who know how to run one of these plots, and can be entertaining and fun while doing it. It can consist of one thread, where the person, IN CHARACTER can learn about the world they are about to enter. You can engage them immediately, you can start to create that bond while figuring out the best place for them to go. Then, set them loose. They already understand things from the Tutorial Thread. A tutorial Thread that got them interested in the story, because they got to interact with it on a personal level, which is so much better than just reading words on a screen and expecting to remember it.

 

I enjoy keeping things canon within reason - RPG's by very definition aren't canon. I try and give my players as much canon information to base their posts off as possible but a long as they're not doing anything thats wildly outside of the rules of canon I like to give a lot of latitude.

 

I love in depth world building, but I also think there needs to be enough space for expansion as well. At least when you're writing with other people. I feel like if a member can't contribute to the site's lore, then why are you not just writing a novel at that point, you know? It's supposed to be a collaborative effort.

 

I personally love building at least a Piece of a world. It doesn't have the be the whole thing, but two to three cities? A few adventure hooks and links. That might be all you need.