Do you prefer the plot or the setting?

[xannoside]

Something that I was musing about in-between re-creating Final Fantasy/SF/video game characters in Soul Calibur IV's custom character mode, aimed at both the RPG playing/hosting crew and the writers:

Which do you prefer to create first, the plot and the characters or the world-building, in as much as they can be separated? The stories or the mythology?

Or to put it a little more abstractly, do you prefer to start with the macro and work inwards, or start with the micro and work outwards?

I muddled around this topic a bit and realized that while I definitely like individual characters and stories (hence my love for BSG), there are few things that I like better than running around on a stage set on a macro-level (hence my love for MMOs, sandbox-games, and Tolkien).

And certainly, while I've run very few table-top game sessions, the most enjoyment I've actually gotten out of the creation process was definitely the worldbuilding.

Comments

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Generally agreed, but not quite what I mean.

The story contains both the critical plot elements and archetypes that make it work on a player level as well as the overarching world setting, and they're not always equally important in establishing a workable "story".

For example, in your old Planeswalking campaign, the world-setting was pretty much central to what made the plot go.

However, in Evan's more recent campaign, the exact relationships of power and setting didn't really matter outside of the players' sphere of interaction because they and their associates were the mechanisms for moving the plot forward.

What if I were to re-iterate my question as "when developing the story, what do you prefer to focus on, the plot archetypes involved, or the setting they occur in?"

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I was actually going more from the perspective of writing a story. As a GM, all I have to work with is the setting. I can demand that players include character elements ("Must love demons") but whether they actually play them is out of my control. How much the setting versus the characters drives the narrative is actually the biggest difference between my Planeswalking campaign and the current one, The Price of Power. I'm trying very hard to let the players (in both of their character guises) drive the narrative flow of the story.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

Right, and table-top play encourages that approach because often the players make their own characters.

Then again, especially for something like Unknown Armies or CoC which thrives on pre-constructed chronicles, the world setting is often unimportant beyond the acknowledgment that something is out there, and the extent to which the characters are affected is dependent on enforced roles integral to the story.