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

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

The "planned" creative process, for me, is entirely the world. If people get made during that stage, they're not characters--they're window dressing, NPCs.

The characters develop as necessary to the story as the story unfolds. The characters are what the story needs them to be. If you want to tell a certain story, you need to create a character to find that story, and as one evolves, the other will. If you create characters independantly of the story, then you'll find them trying to do inappropriate things and wrecking your story in the process.

[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.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I love worldbuilding myself, so naturally I tend to start with mythology and work inwards.

I wish I knew of a way, though, to make a world that would engender strong characterization. Characters that belong in that world, and no other, while still being strong characters in their own right.

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

I am similar.

Creating the characters within the world, especially in the context of PCs or NPCs who can interact with PCs in a meaningful way, is definitely tough for me.

[jlc.livejournal.com]

There's a large distinction here between writing mode and GM-mode. GM-mode favors worldbuilding in a big way, since you're relying on PCs to step up. Having strong NPCs often hinders that, so it's usually more about having a setting that really kicks for a couple of sessions until everyone has a good feel for the characters involved.

When I'm writing short stories, though, the character is almost always the first thing to come. It's harder to hang stories on settings than it is RPGs.