The amount of time and effort needed for a given undertaking can depend in part on the rules set in use. Pre-WotC D&D is extremely "light" relative to more recent games by the name. That's especially true of the original set without the supplements.
What I've seen most often is "inside out" and "outside in" in parallel. The main dungeon and home base get the most preliminary detail, but a good bit of the rest of the world is broadly sketched. That works very well with the traditional assumption that the dungeon is initially to be the focus of exploration -- which was pretty natural when it stood out as one of the distinctive features of the game, the reason it was called Dungeons & Dragons. A dynamic dungeon can be an excellent "little sand box" for casual play, and old D&D sets provided tools for making its creation fairly quick and easy.
For some people, that initial set-up may largely suffice for many sessions of play. There can be plenty of time to flesh out the wider milieu just a bit at a time, staying well ahead of players' explorations.
Reuse of elements is an asset of long-term play in the same world. The kinds and amounts of detail in a traditional campaign tend to be a bit different than in designing "adventure scenarios". The volume written down to describe a given area tends to be less than in a "module" for publication, because so much information can be retained in the designer's memory (to which a reader would not have access) and because modules tend to specify much that would more probably be improvised in play by a DM refereeing his own creation.
An "adventure" write-up typically has more limited replay value than what a "world-builder" produces in the same amount of time. The former focuses more on "encounters" meant to be met but once, the latter more on elements that can interact dynamically over long periods. The former attempts to anticipate and guide players' actions, "zooming in" on detailed descriptions of discrete events, whereas the latter emphasizes a "big picture" of places and ongoing processes.
The Griffin Mountain book for RuneQuest was for my taste an ideal selection of material for getting a campaign underway.
It remains true that D&D by its nature demands more time and effort than, say, Monopoly or Scrabble -- or many board games with heroic-fantasy themes.
What I've seen most often is "inside out" and "outside in" in parallel. The main dungeon and home base get the most preliminary detail, but a good bit of the rest of the world is broadly sketched. That works very well with the traditional assumption that the dungeon is initially to be the focus of exploration -- which was pretty natural when it stood out as one of the distinctive features of the game, the reason it was called Dungeons & Dragons. A dynamic dungeon can be an excellent "little sand box" for casual play, and old D&D sets provided tools for making its creation fairly quick and easy.
For some people, that initial set-up may largely suffice for many sessions of play. There can be plenty of time to flesh out the wider milieu just a bit at a time, staying well ahead of players' explorations.
Reuse of elements is an asset of long-term play in the same world. The kinds and amounts of detail in a traditional campaign tend to be a bit different than in designing "adventure scenarios". The volume written down to describe a given area tends to be less than in a "module" for publication, because so much information can be retained in the designer's memory (to which a reader would not have access) and because modules tend to specify much that would more probably be improvised in play by a DM refereeing his own creation.
An "adventure" write-up typically has more limited replay value than what a "world-builder" produces in the same amount of time. The former focuses more on "encounters" meant to be met but once, the latter more on elements that can interact dynamically over long periods. The former attempts to anticipate and guide players' actions, "zooming in" on detailed descriptions of discrete events, whereas the latter emphasizes a "big picture" of places and ongoing processes.
The Griffin Mountain book for RuneQuest was for my taste an ideal selection of material for getting a campaign underway.
It remains true that D&D by its nature demands more time and effort than, say, Monopoly or Scrabble -- or many board games with heroic-fantasy themes.