But after reading over the post, I agree with all of it. 5 of my players have write-access to the Celtrician wiki. Especially for a long campaign, having the Players being an active part is critical. And I still overprep on storyarcs in an obcene, ridiculous, overblown manner…so I must enjoy it. But having the Players help me with specifics of guilds and religions (I had one write up over 10 pages on the Church of the Autumn Harvest) has been one of the nice developments.

I want to put a finer point on something you mentioned.

The first is that players love to invest in what their characters are involved with. So having them create the rituals, holy books, shrinal-particulars of their churches (as above), or similar fine-detail work is tailor-made for their corroboration.

Having them create only the fine details also reduces the loss of ‘behind the curtain’ syndrome. Somehow, when players are involved in major setting design, too much of the ‘scaffolding’ that Scott mentions is revealed, where somehow when they help fill in smaller details that particular phenomena is removed.

My players give me far too much credit. They know from past games that I improv a lot, and yet still ask me things like, “Were there a tribe of dragonborn in the Rustmaze before our party ended up with two dragonborn in it?” Of course there weren’t.

Fang Langford
creator of the Scattershot Role-Playing Game

But this does give me a new perspective. Instead of building everything in the world, I could focus on the things I enjoy: Magic, and a bit of history/cultural stuff. This could leave some of the things I’m not so fond of (Cosmology, demonology, economics) to my players.

But at the moment I have eight pages on magic alone, and I’m way too happy with what I have to give it to the wind!

A drawback to getting them on board is that there’s less of the illusion of a complete world; they know objectively what scaffolding I’ve built from and where I’ve filled in. Despite that, particularly for the action first game style we’re playing, I prefer this style of prep– it’s worked pretty well so far.

I’m torn between doing this and sticking with my “generic Greyhawk” setting that I pretty much automatically pull from memory.

This pleases me.

Thank you.

I have never gotten the players involved to the extent you have, although sometime, I’d like to use the Dawn of World rules to have the player help make a game world.

It is hard to find a happy medium with prep work. Either you do too much or too little it seems. As you mentioned having the players help in someway is a good thing. I think the best advise about GM I can ever give is to listen to what your players say. Many times, they will come up with ideas about motives, plot twists, and other concepts during play that you will never come up with if you sat down and thought about things all day. I don’t think I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve changed things during a game because of a great idea that popped out of a player’s mouth.