By Chris Acuff

I have an idea that will eventually make me famous, might even win a Nobel for it. 

Well, unfortunately someone else already has.

The book Why Nations Fail is about how a society’s institutions are a driving factor for a state’s economic rise and fall. There’s a lot of good work in it that has absolutely nothing to do with TTRPGs, but I find it particularly inspiring, especially from a worldbuilding perspective. 

A story is the interaction between characters, plot, and setting. When you focus on institutions, (or I am going to call it organizations because we want to include less formal bodies of people) it gives you a way to understand and focus on those interactions. 

I also want to say organizations, not just factions, because I want us to think about how the structure of a place impacts the story. If the state your players are in is a Monarchy, how does that impact the rest of the setting? The power of a single leader is quite brittle, how do they manage power outside of their immediate line of sight? Who are their advisors? Is this a feudal society? A theocracy? These differences change our interactions tremendously. 

If it is feudal, as most fantasy worlds are, then in any given place, the real power is the local lord, not the king. How does each lord’s different idiosyncrasies affect their domain? I am hinting at something here, and like before, it is something that has already been done. 

In watching Critical Role’s 4th campaign, one thing I have been particularly impressed with is how the world, which is ruled over by a series of noble families, is impacted by those families in their particular domains. The ways and rules of life are different in understandable ways. The place with talking dog-knights operates differently than the vertical city built on a mountainside with a big castle on top full of temperamental nobles. This is not just good world building, but good organization building, which means it is good character building too.

When the players meet the NPCs in this location, they understand a bit about who they are from the incentives put on them by the world and organizations around them. It sets the tone and helps define what is possible in that moment for the characters. It’s important to not treat all cultures as a monolith, after all there will always be dissenters, rebels, nutjobs and wackadoos, but if you understand your organizations and society, you can already predict how those people are interacting within it. That, plus including the current events- plot- and you have an engine for story. Story just happens, because all the interactions have been framed and can be driven forward by the virtue of the setup. 

This is not to say everything is predestined, far from it, but it does mean things will make sense. There will be a logic to the world that can be felt, something more gestalt and tangible than any one scene can present on its own. 

The word we are looking for is verisimilitude. 

CR campaign 4 has it in spades, and it is the type of thing I strive to build for my stories, by focusing on organizations and how they affect all else around them. 

I have my own little DM’ing secret. I don’t do much planning at all between sessions. I do most of my planning before a game starts. When I build the world, I think deeply about the organizations and settings of different places. I think deeply about the personalities of the important people tied to different areas and what their incentives are based on the organizations operating in the world. Once this is all built, the world exists on its own. It’s a living thing. Even if there were no players I could see a series of events that would come about based purely on who would want to do what where. I don’t have to write a plot out for my characters, and I don’t need to plan many of the small, specific details out, because I will know how the world and the people within would act. I know what kind of shops would be where, what kinds of things a certain society might value more than others, how different factions will react within an organization, and I can improv all of it. 

Now, drop characters with Supreme Agency into that world and let the forces and NPC characters act and react together. Once these things set in motion, there is very little planning for me to do because I already know what the NPCs and organizations want and the means by which they operate. The world is alive, and even as a DM I am more or less watching it. 

It makes for some good stories.