How to be ok with players destroying your world
Whatever you do, players will destroy whatever you’ve created.
Every Game Master knows what I’m talking about. You’ve perfectly crafted a location or person in your world only to be killed, destroyed, or worse, completely neglected by your players. Even when the players do not realise it, interacting with the encounter in a certain way that was unforeseen by the Game Master, may lead to rendering the whole building process useless. It’s a phenomenon that we as worldbuilders are unable to control, and you shouldn’t… you should start loving it.
A lot of Game Masters try to guard the storylines and plot they created. But they should never forget that when you play a roleplaying game the storyteller isn’t the only one telling the story. The characters are part of the world, an essential part even, a part that the Game Master is unable to control. This means that a certain level of unpredictability will always be in your worldbuilding.
This is a huge difference with wordbuilding when writing a novel. During the writing process of your novel, you have complete control over the actions of your characters, because they are exactly that… your characters. In a game such as Dungeons and Dragons, you are not the sole creator, and how many hours you put into your storyline and world, players will always find a way to foil your plans. Trying to defend your world from your players therefore equals to limiting them in actions. You should never limit a player’s freedom.
There’s nothing more frustrating about writing a huge bit of lore only to find your players to completely ignore that part of the story. As a worldbuilder and Game Master you should be okay with this. If you really like what you have constructed, you can always make it more prominent in your story, maybe skipping the encounter has repercussions?
Say, for example, you created storyline where an evil necromancer started animating corpses from a local village’s cemetery. The party might ignore the necromancer and move on to the next village, and your work would have been useless… the sad and dramatic backstory you wrote for the necromancer would have been lost forever. But the fact that the party did not engage the necromancer, does not mean his story is over. You might have predicted the party to go after the necromancer, but they didn’t, which means he has the opportunity to progress his plans. He might overtake the village, corrupt its leaders, and wreak havoc on a whole region, eventually crossing the paths of the party once more, stronger, showing the party that their choice of leaving the necromancer to his own devices had repercussions. Every action should have a reaction in your world, and even though the action was not what you expected, as world builder you have the power to create an interesting reaction. This could be potentially more rewarding than the initial plan you had for your creation.
Worldbuilding for roleplaying games means that you will be surprised by the players in your world, but whatever they decide, you have the power to react to it. You should embrace the unpredictability!
