# Detail

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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More detail makes for more persuasiveness. There are two caveats: Detail should be non-contradictory, and it should be at a consistent level. Contradictions usually only arise when two different designers working on disjoint parts of the virtual world independently specify content that clashes; this problem is almost always easy to fix. Inconsistent levels of detail are another matter, though. They arise because designers focus on one feature without following through the implications. For example, it may be possible to fell a tree to expose a hollow core that you can climb down through, but not be possible to fell any other trees, even saplings. Players would accept the same level of depth throughout (that is, no fellable trees) but if one tree can be chopped down and others can’t, they’re reminded that they’re in a virtual world. Furthermore, it’s an incomplete one (from their point of view) because felling trees isn’t fully implemented. Better you can fell no trees than just one.

Detail in the virtual world is in terms of both depth and breadth. This means lots of things working in lots of ways, arranged together in an integrated fashion. Initially, everything in the virtual world should make sense. Alchemists making fire bombs wouldn’t live in crowded areas, loggers would have their depot next to a river, forest creatures wouldn’t all be carnivores. If players come across something out of place, it’s either out of place for a reason (“This tower is miles from civilization, how did they build it? Unless…”) or it’s because some player did it.

Critical to this is the sense that the virtual world has a past—that it was fully functioning before players came along. Most virtual worlds have a backstory to explain how and why things came to be the way they are. This serves two purposes: to introduce gameplay concepts that wouldn’t make sense otherwise; to set the context so that newbies know in advance what kind of world they’re entering (it may even attract some of them, especially if it’s a big license).

Backstory isn’t history, though. You may assert that in the time before the coming of the humans, elves, and dwarfs roamed the lands, but that doesn’t tell you which parts of the land they stalk now, and why that makes sense. A handy tip is to run a board game simulation [^129] of the virtual world’s history that can provide the necessary explanations. Use what the simulation implies in the virtual world: Why this area has a sizeable minority population of dwarfs; why that area has ancient reptilian monuments; why in those areas the humans speak Elvish. It all adds to the veracity of the detail that will enable players to buy into the world.

Detail is important. Having greater detail is one reason that textual virtual worlds can be more immersive than graphical ones.


[^129]: Just choose some existing board game that you think will work and use your own map. Half a day playing Diplomacy is fine if it gives you concrete reasons for why the elves ended up scattered to the four winds and the dwarfs remained stuck in their mountain redoubt.