Heh, totally opposite to me.
Your world will never matter as much to the players as it does to you. You have a choice to make. Is your world more important to you than your players or not?
For me? An engaging story trumps any amount of scenery every time. Make sure that your campaign is the most important thing you spend time on.
Oh, you're right, the players won't care as much about the world, but having that world background knowledge, I find, greatly improves my ability to improvise at every game session - yes, the entire game session. I do love world building too though, so I probably still over-do it some.
But, just an example, I came up with the creation story (how the world really came to be) and it entirely shaped the rest of the world I created. Now, I've been lucky and have played with the same gaming group for years, so they know the setting and they love the setting, but they've never seen or heard that story, nor will they ever, as it's just something that's not known to many beings left alive at this point - but from that simple act of writing down the "real" creation story, I made the setting and game sessions that they've loved over the past 5 years.
I don't want to put words in someone else's mouth, but when I read alms' post, I agreed because those things are story. The orc army moving out of the hills towards your village? That's a story, right there, waiting to happen.
Both as a player and as a GM, I don't really enjoy sitting down with an entire plot. I think alms is kind of saying the same thing: you sit down with some knowledge of interesting things that are happening in the world and play those our, honestly, in response to the players actions.
It's a really different approach than having an entire story waiting for them. Instead of having a series of encounters to get to the orc boss, who will then reveal the demonic influence or whatever, I just set things in motion and then play them out in response to the players.
I don't really think of that as setting building. I don't come up with a history of that orc tribe, because really, who cares? It's more like story seeding: creating interesting things that are going on that the players can interact with. In particular, setting up those interesting things so they're aimed right at what's important to the characters.
Yeah, you pretty much got my meaning dead-on. If you know the surrounding locale and it's inhabitants like the back of your hand, as I said above, it's so easy to just run a session, winging it the whole time. And, perhaps best of all for some folks, this way, you can never be blamed for railroading the PC's.
Of course, unlike you, I'd have probably written up some history on the orc tribe, maybe even some personal stuff about some of the major players in that tribe - like I said, I can go overboard sometimes, but when I start, the ideas just never seem to stop flowing so, I do what I do, and I do a lot of it while I'm at work... lol
Oh, just thought of another great example:
A war started in the background, just part of the world moving along - but when the players got wind of the rumors of war to the north - they finished up what they were doing, spent all their loot on goods to get them up to the front-lines...
For some reason, they really wanted to fight in a war that particular session and it turned into months of gaming gold.