When Is Enough?

[Xathan]

While good may be the enemy of great, great is the enemy of done.

A friend of mine said that in regards to a paper she was writing and it got me thinking about settings here on the CBG and in general. There are tons in various states of completion: some 100's of pages long, some 100 words, some anyone could pick up and play, some that would require a ton of work on the part of a DM to run a game in. So I would like to pose this question to you: at what point is a campaign setting complete?

[Nomadic]

While good may be the enemy of great, great is the enemy of done.

A friend of mine said that in regards to a paper she was writing and it got me thinking about settings here on the CBG and in general. There are tons in various states of completion: some 100's of pages long, some 100 words, some anyone could pick up and play, some that would require a ton of work on the part of a DM to run a game in. So I would like to pose this question to you: at what point is a campaign setting complete?

To me it's done when the creator says it is. For some this will be never. For others there's a point they will reach where they can say that enough has been finished that they consider the setting complete.

[Xathan]

While good may be the enemy of great, great is the enemy of done.

A friend of mine said that in regards to a paper she was writing and it got me thinking about settings here on the CBG and in general. There are tons in various states of completion: some 100's of pages long, some 100 words, some anyone could pick up and play, some that would require a ton of work on the part of a DM to run a game in. So I would like to pose this question to you: at what point is a campaign setting complete?

To me it's done when the creator says it is. For some this will be never. For others there's a point they will reach where they can say that enough has been finished that they consider the setting complete.

So which of those would you use to decide when Mare Eternus is done? :P

[Nomadic]

While good may be the enemy of great, great is the enemy of done.

A friend of mine said that in regards to a paper she was writing and it got me thinking about settings here on the CBG and in general. There are tons in various states of completion: some 100's of pages long, some 100 words, some anyone could pick up and play, some that would require a ton of work on the part of a DM to run a game in. So I would like to pose this question to you: at what point is a campaign setting complete?

To me it's done when the creator says it is. For some this will be never. For others there's a point they will reach where they can say that enough has been finished that they consider the setting complete.

So which of those would you use to decide when Mare Eternus is done? :P

For me Mare Eternus will be done when I have the core setting fluff and crunch completed, tested, and formatted into a publishable PDF. This is a ways off, but it is a reachable goal. :D

The bonus is once that's done I can start working on modules for the setting.

[Kalontas]

We're creating worlds. I don't think we can truly safely say they're complete until we have named every nook and cranny and wrote biography for its every inhabitant. Worlds are one of the few things that are never finished - we may finish books about them, or get them to the state of being good enough for publication, but they are never truly complete.

[Kindling]

It depends. A setting that is created, then played in, can be called finished when it's deemed "ready for play"
A setting that is created as it is played in always has the potential for additions.
Players: We go east.
GM: That's off the edge of the map.
Players: Yeah. We go east.

[Steerpike]

I agree with Kalontas.  The answer is never.

But I also agree with Kindling.  Since the answer is never, that means that a world need not be complete to be playable.  How much of a world needs to be finished before play is another question.  I have two games sort of going on on right now.  The Cadaverous Earth has a lot of material (a couple hundred pages), so I can run that as a weekly game.  Sixguns has about 2000 words of material so I can run that in brief, self-contained episodes.

Even though CE is huge, it's not "finished."  Not by a long shot.

[O Senhor Leetz]

I find it's easy to start in smaller places and work out, that way you have a solid base to come back to if (when) you get sidetracked and can begin work again. Building an ENTIRE world with multi-influences is too daunting for me at least.

Start something small, finish something small, then start somethig else, always adding.

[Nomadic]

Players: We go east.
GM: That's off the edge of the map.
Players: Yeah. We go east.

Typical PC logic heh. I love this sort of logic too as it presses you to predict the players and plan accordingly and as a result you flesh out more. For me I feel that fully creating a world isn't possible. My setting takes place in an infinite sized universe, it would by definition take an infinite amount of time for me to complete it. However, it is a project which means that there comes a point where I have to set a cutoff. The point at which I consider it finished, because I would like to publish it someday. Now that's not true for everyone. Someone who is just creating a setting for the fun of it, they can never consider it finished and happily continue on until the day they die.

I think some of this also comes from my gaming philosophy. I feel that the world builders job isn't to answer every single possible question a DM could have. Instead their job is to give the DM enough information to plan out and run games that their players will enjoy. For that reason there will be things that I purposefully never detail as I want the DM to fill those blanks in themselves.

[Elemental_Elf]

It depends. A setting that is created, then played in, can be called finished when it's deemed "ready for play"
A setting that is created as it is played in always has the potential for additions.
Players: We go east.
GM: That's off the edge of the map.
Players: Yeah. We go east.

Easy - Flip the map around so that what was east, now becomes west.

Suddenly, you have a whole new world to (re)-discover.

[SabrWolf]

I'll throw in my 2-bits here. Steerpike and Kindling have a point: A setting is never completely done. But, more than that, A setting could never be completely done. If you go through and detail every conceivable detail of the history of the world (lost or known) you would not only spend every waking hour of the rest of your life and still never get done but also never get to play the game.

That's not Good Eats.

Worse than the above is that nobody would appreciate the amount of work you'd done by playing it exactly as you wrote it. GM's and players alike would make little changes here and there and, in the long run, it would change the face of the world you worked so hard to create. And why shouldn't they? It might have been your idea, but it's their game that they're playing. I'm not afraid to say that I find minutia in any setting incredibly tedious to read and, largely, annoying or worthless to my personal tabletop games. (no offense to those who like reading/writing/playing with lots of minutia from source material)

To that end, I prefer a setting like Wild Tails (the one Xathan and I are building). I don't think there's a single concrete thing that we've written in that setting so far where we don't explicitly say "You don't have to play this way if you don't want to." It is simply a springboard for fun stories and awesome ideas for people who want to play a game where you are intelligent animals in a world of intelligent animals.

I'll be the first to admit that this makes it a bit more work heavy on the people playing the game. BUT THAT'S WHAT'S FUN ABOUT IT!!! You get to be creative and make up your own fun little facts and tidbits, traditions and celebrations, what kinds of creatures you want to involve or exclude. It's ALL up to the people playing and what they want to do.

I submit that the imaginative potential of Everyone who will Ever play a Wild Tails game (or any game in general) is much MORE than anything that just Xathan or I could come up with on our own.

That's fun. That's what we're here to give in our settings. An avenue for fun. So, I think that a setting is done when you think that it would be fun for others to read and then play.

[Xathan]

I knew this thread would create some very interesting reading for me. (Note: this is why I create half the threads I start).

I'll of course agree that, in truth, a setting is never, every truly done.

There's a lot I want to respond to here, but one thing struck me:

I submit that the imaginative potential of Everyone who will Ever play a Wild Tails game (or any game in general) is much MORE than anything that just Xathan or I could come up with on our own.

I think that's exactly why I'm going to be leaving a decent chunk undefined in my settings. I want to leave spaces where DMs and players can come up with new things and fill them in with their own imaginations with what works best for them and their group. My favorite settings to run in that I didn't create are ones that allow me to add to them, give me that flexibility to be creative within the world I already have.

[Xeviat]

I'm with a few others on this one. I will consider my setting "complete" when I can make a book on par with the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting or Eberron Campaign Setting back in 3/3.5E D&D. It won't be "complete" because I'd want to make supplemental modules, but at least part would be "done".

[SA]

Never. A setting that lives and breathes is necessarily in a state of constant change. If I want my players to feel that they are active players in, and at least partial possessors of that setting (and I most assuredly do), then the actions of the protagonists must be incorporated into the setting and given license to transform it. A campaign setting is incomplete in much the same way that a human life is incomplete.

[Ninja D!]

I saw this post right after it went up and wanted to reply but didn't get to it before now. This is something I've sort of rolled around in my head and have come to some firm conclusions on for myself. I will get to that. First of all, however, I have to address the fact that you are asking two different questions.

In the thread title, you're asking how much content is enough. Then in the topic post, you asked about how much content makes a setting complete.

Enough is when you have a sufficient amount of content to do what you want to do with the world. This may be playing games or writing stories in it. It may also be reasonable content to publish and call a "campaign setting". If you're simply making it for your own amusement, enough is just when you're satisfied with it. That is enough. That's probably a fair amount but it likely lacks true completeness.

Complete goes far beyond enough. Complete is fully realizing a world by detailing pretty much everything. To me, this would look something like the CIA World Fact Book, Wikipedia, and Google Earth combined. The one campaign setting I can think of that came close to this (and the only one) is Forgotten Realms before the 4e changes and that's only if you include all supplements, novels, fan made maps of smaller areas and that sort of thing. I'm not a big fan of that setting but I could call it complete.