Realism vs. Believability

And why modern fantasy worldbuilding isn't doing much for me these days

Recently, my long standing weekly Pathfinder 2nd Edition campaign came to a hiatus due to some real life stuff with my group. While this is unfortunate and means I’m not currently running any games, it has at least given me the chance to reflect on what I have been enjoying and not enjoying with the system and the campaign as a whole.

While mechanically that deserves its own post (that I’ll get to at some point), one of the more frustrating parts of PF2E is how closely the rules are tied to Pathfinder’s house setting of Golarion.

Pathfinder has so many damn setting books it was actually hard to pick an image to go here.

Golarion can best be described as the kitchen sink to end all kitchen sinks. Any sort of standard D&D character you can think of (and quite a few you couldn’t think of) can exist in this world. Want to be a gun toting wild west Kobold? What about a fantasy private detective dog person? Or how about a mystical kung-fu using tiefling from Tian Xia? Golarion tries to imagine a world where all of these things, that are widely tonally different, represent very different levels of technology and magical development, and often totally opposed thematic leanings, can co-exist in one place without any tonal dissonance.

And lately that approach is doing less than nothing for me.

The Disney World Problem

Essentially what this kind of worldbuilding does is treat the game world as something akin to your favorite theme park. When you go to a theme park, it is divided into different thematic areas; here’s the wild west town, the animal kingdom, epcot, etc. These themes are only surface level; they’re aimed at giving you a fun aesthetic and thing to latch on to in the moment. Disney World (or any other theme park) is not meant to give you an experience of a lived in world, more just meant to stimulate the right brain chemicals as you go through it.

Truthfully this doesn’t look too far off from many maps you see in 5E setting books.

This sort of design is fine if you’re making a video game, a medium where there is a finite limit to the level of interactivity you can present to your players. Even in so called immersive sims, games like the original Deus Ex, the immersion and agency offered players is far less than a typical TTRPG.

The Disney World analogy applies perfectly to Golarion; it is a world designed to titillate and excite with constant newness and thematic changes. Look here’s the wild west town where magic is messed up! Look here’s the gothic horror country with vampires and a lich king! Oh now here’s a place where the people worship devils. And over here is a country with highly advanced technology that somehow never leaves the country! These just end up being epcot by a different name, a lazy way to justify having hundreds of very different stories happening in the same shared world. As a result this world is neither believable nor realistic. But I’m not particularly interested in realistic worlds either.

The Realism Problem

Wanting a fantasy world to be “realistic” is a trap I see a lot of folks fall into, especially in the OSR community where people tend to prefer grittier and lower magic settings anyway. There is nothing particularly realistic about a world where magic and monsters exist, and even their mere existence raises uncomfortable questions for how the world differs from the one we know.

Often you will see people try to reference actual medieval history, often quite poorly (did you know that most towns did not in fact have an inn for your fantasy adventuring party to stay at?). Real history is complicated, challenging, and most people playing and running TTRPGs are not experts. This means you wind up with a bunch of folk history and wisdom being passed off as immutable fact and muddying the waters needlessly.

The other thing is that realism often gets in the way of the necessary abstraction needed to make a game *actually* fun. We are still playing a game after all, not doing some weird medieval simulation with our friends.

Believability

This brings us to the important part; making our worlds believable! Believability is different from realism; here we are relying on our players’ natural suspension of disbelief to do some heavy lifting here in terms of the immersion our world offers. We know that they will accept that magic and monsters are real here, that the world is probably home to multiple sentient species, and that there are many other aspects here that are different from our own. We don’t need them to believe that your weather patterns and geographic formations are 100% realistic; what we are looking to do is present the illusion that your world is a real place where people (including their characters) live.

One of the biggest ways you can do this is by introducing change as a result of players’ actions. They dethrone a mad despot and now there’s a power vacuum and a struggle for succession, they make an inspiring speech in the town square and a young man goes off to become an adventurer because of it, they hear about nearby goblin raids but don’t investigate and later hear that villages have been burned down. In a theme park world, the world doesn’t move unless the players do. In a realistic world, the players do not have much agency to change it (much like most of us lack the agency to change our circumstances in real life). We want to present a world where the players have the ability to enact real change, but where their inaction and indifference will still lead to change. This allows us to amp up the “living world” nature of things and center it around the players without requiring them to always interact with it.

We also want to take some time to at least consider why things exist in our world, which means taking a holistic approach to the world design. How do the various political powers interact with each other, who is at conflict and why, how do various towns and settlements eke out livings, and how does the fact that dragons and wizards exist impact all of this? Again, we’re not looking for detailed wind patterns and river flows here; just something that can *feel* real.

Anyway, I hope these musings offer a look into how I’m thinking about worldbuilding going forward!