Baseline Worldbuilding

Forgive me, but I must post theory.

I want to talk about worldbuilding, cognitive load, and the narrative baseline. Let’s first work to define what the narrative baseline is, and go from there. Every person has a baseline that they are comfortable with, and this baseline comes from a wide variety of sources. Mostly, it comes from your cultural background, your life experience, and the stories you’ve absorbed. When I say stories I mean things of all media—movies, books, television, anime, games, theatre, spoken word poetry, your friend telling you about their wacky antics, etc. Everyone collects stories as they go about their lives. The place you grew up, and the people you were around, also inform your narrative baseline. As someone who grew up in rural middle-of-nowhere Canada, it’s no surprise that my experience is incredibly different from someone who grew up in the heart of Tokyo. If you work as a cyber security professional you’re going to have a different starting position when it comes to a cyberpunk game than someone who works in a warehouse.

So, what is a narrative baseline, really though? It’s the starting point where you can easily understand and grasp fantastical worlds. Hear me out. If you regularly attend (or even run a stall) at a local farmer’s market, your narrative baseline for one of those bog-standard fantasy marketplaces is pretty high. Now, someone else might have never been to an open air market but they read a ton of fantasy, so their baseline is on par with yours.

Both of you understand the fantasy market. If you’re both players and someone else is GMing, when your characters show up at the market, it’s not going to take much explaining (if any at all) to get a feel for how things are going. Nobody is going to be surprised when there are thieves running about, a town guard trying to catch them, merchants shouting deals at you, and big crowds to elbow your way through. The worldbuilding here is so close to everyone’s narrative baseline that the only things you really need to point out are the strange things. The things that go off baseline.

I’ll put that in a bit simpler terms: the further you depart from narrative baseline, the more cognitive load it takes to visualize and understand the world. Now this is a bit deceptive when you take it at face value. You need to also consider the abstract. In our world there aren’t giant bugs that we can tame and fly around on to get places quickly. We don’t have bug taxis. You might think that such a concept in a game is far off of baseline, as we’ve discussed it. Well, not really. We have helicopters. You may have seen an anime or read a fantasy novel where they did have giant bugs to get around on. Maybe you played Morrowind and remember the silt striders that acted as fast travel. They couldn’t fly, but the concept is similar enough that it works. So we can see that the narrative baseline for this isn’t quite that far off for me. Remember, everyone’s baseline is different. Let’s say you brought along your friend—who’s never played an RPG or even read a fantasy book before—to a game in a strange world with the flying bug taxis. Their narrative baseline might just be too far off to conceptualize it. They’re spending mental load to try and understand the setting. One flying bug taxi probably isn’t enough for anyone to say “I don’t understand anything that’s happening!” but when you slam someone with a bunch of concepts and elements far above their baseline, that’s where things start to break down.

Here’s the other thing. The group itself has a communal narrative baseline that is the lowest common denominator of everyone’s baseline. If you play with a bunch of friends that are huge fans of Nausicaä, Dune, and Full Metal Alchemist, that group isn’t going to have much trouble playing in Cloud Empress. If only the GM likes science-fantasy and everyone else is steeped in urban fantasy and itching to play vampires in their hometown, Cloud Empress is going to take some serious work to bring everyone to baseline. This is why I think the whole “bingo card” RPG pitch has become so popular and so effective. If you know you love and understand a, b, and c your brain is going to say “hey d is probably pretty cool too.” There is a whole other can of worms with the bingo card “my RPG is like these pieces of media” concept, but I’m going to challenge my friend Will Jobst to write that piece instead. They have some wisdom to share in that tangent.

This, I think, is a pretty big reason why lots of people don’t enjoy fantasy. Getting thrown into the wide genre of fantasy and science-fiction without the lingua franca of the genre (another way of saying the narrative baseline) can be tough. As you read more and more books in the genre, you raise your baseline.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s a sweet spot. And it’s not toeing the baseline. A lot of our interest in stories (and the worlds they inhabit) come from experiencing something out of our own baseline, but not so far out that we can’t understand it. Being pushed past our baseline is how we expand our understanding and make connections in our head between the various stories (life experience, upbringing, and storytelling) in our lives. The thing is, if you encounter a novel so far out of your baseline that you’re having trouble visualizing the world, you can just sit with it and let it slowly absorb¹. When you’re playing an RPG with friends, that’s going to result in you either asking lots of questions (and perhaps eventually annoying your friends who are already operating along that baseline) or being silent and just disconnecting from the game. Certainly some people are quicker to shift their narrative baseline, but you can stretch further from your baseline the more well-versed in stories you are.

So how is any of this actually useful? Well, it depends. If you’re not creating material for publication or to share with other groups, you only have your own friend’s narrative baseline to worry about. I’ve been gaming with the same group for 10 years, and I think we all have a pretty shared understand of what stories we like. It’s not all the same for everyone, but over the years we’ve honed in on it. And now, slowly, we push it in certain directions. I love science-fantasy, so I push games in that direction, while my other friend loves science-fiction, and our other main GM loves traditional fantasy. We each have our worlds, and we each push the baseline with every new game, every new setting, and every new adventure. We are, as a group, collectively expanding what kind of worlds we can (easily) play in.

So it really comes down to how well you know your group. This is a problem you can encounter when you use collaborative worldbuilding games. If you don’t have a firm shared narrative baseline all it takes is one suggestion or turn to skew the world out of the realm of easy understanding. Some worldbuilding games, like Arium, make you list off inspirational stories as a foundation before you do any worldbuilding, and I think this can help.

There isn’t, unfortunately, any easy or quick way to build and understand the baseline. The only thing that works (for a home group) is trial and error. And I think conversations about this can really help a group out. You and three of your friends might have no problem visualizing faster-than-light ships and artificial gravity created from thrust, but if one of your other friends doesn’t touch science-fiction, it helps to know these things.

If you’re writing settings for publication or to share with other people, you really only have a singular course of action. You can only write towards your own narrative baseline (it’s literally impossible to do otherwise, because you don’t know about the concepts and elements out of your own baseline). But what you can do is consider the general baseline of your expected audience. The further you push from this, the more difficult it will be for your material to be picked up by a GM and easily run.

Keep in mind that you can also create elements below the communal baseline. If you write an adventure for a science-fiction game, but you have a low understanding of that genre, the audience you’re creating for is going to have a much higher baseline than you. Your work will seem juvenile and likely quite boring. It will be clear to anyone steeped in the genre that you’re a newcomer, treading on old ground. The more versed in a genre you are, the easier it is for you to experiment with the communal baseline of it. Writing your first fantasy adventure as a bunch of orcs in a hole waiting for the adventurers to come and kill them is not going to be a knock-it-out-of-the-park hit.² When you understand a genre deeply, you can deconstruct and reconstruct it to fit your vision.

But our baselines don’t just come from the stories we love but from our experiences lived. You can use these things to push the baseline of your art in novel and exciting ways. If you read a lot of exploration fiction, your baseline for that kind of thing is pretty high. But if you’re a park ranger, you’re going to have a completely different understanding of travelling in a forest than someone who only reads about it. You can leverage this to create an adventure in a way that seems trivial and well-understood by you, but can push the baseline of those running and playing the adventure in exciting directions that make it feel special. What I’m saying: utilize every aspect of your baseline when you’re writing. Don’t just pull from stories and fiction. Pull from your own experiences, your culture, your occupation, your hobbies outside of games, and every other well of inspiration in your life.

The above diagram might serve to help understand a communal baseline. This is the averaged baseline that everyone looking at your game or adventure might have, and the circles represent elements of the piece of art you’re creating.

The orange elements, below baseline, are things that your audience deeply understands. A typical fantasy adventure with an open air market. They’re able to easily grasp what this means, but they’re also a little bit bored by it. You adventure might need that market, so you’ve included it, but it’s not doing anything special. You don’t dedicate much of your writing to this market because you know that’s unnecessary.

The red element is so far below baseline that it’s actually detrimental. It signifies to your audience that you don’t have a firm grasp on the genre you’re creating for. The barkeep asks you to go hunt the rats in his basement. There is nothing special about the rats. Too many red elements and your adventure or game is going to be boring.

The green elements, slightly above baseline, is where you’re demonstrating your understanding of the genre you’re writing for. They’re recognizable, but you’ve pushed on them a bit. You’ve leveraged your own understanding of your culture, experiences, and genre familiarity to bring something new to the table. Some people reading the game or adventure might put these things right on or even slightly below baseline, but to most people, they’ll be fresh and exciting.

The yellow element is far above baseline. This is something that a lot of the people reading your adventure or game have never experienced before. They might not have any sort of reference for it. It might confuse them and their players, and you might need to spend a lot of words explaining it in a way that allows everyone to clearly grasp it. These aren’t necessarily bad things, but having too many elements far above baseline is going to add friction to understanding. It’ll be harder to run the game or adventure.

Having proficiency with the genre you’re working in means that you can bring in these elements and understand how they’re going to slot in with the communal baseline of anyone running your games and adventures. There isn’t really a science to this sort of thing, or some general procedure you can use to create works of art. The only thing you have is your intuition and your own baseline. One thing you can do is to read and absorb the other games and adventures in the space you like to work in. Take an analytical eye to them. Look for ways that they’ve pushed beyond your baseline and analyze that. Look for ways where they didn’t even rise to the genre’s communal baseline and think about how you’d do it differently. Pull out old work you’ve done and look at it from the perspective of communal baseline understanding, and see if you’d do it differently. If you’re really digging deep, highlight parts that you think are below the baseline and parts that are beyond it. Think about how you’d place them on the diagram, and then think about how you could move them further or closer to baseline.

This isn’t something you do on the first draft. For your first draft, you need to focus on creating. Analyzing this sort of stuff is for revision.

Here’s the real kicker: if you’ve done a lot of this kind of self-analysis and created a lot of art, this post itself might be far below your baseline. If you’ve never thought about this kind of stuff, it might be far above. Hopefully, it’s somewhere in the green.

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