D&D 5E Does anyone else suffers from setting paralysis?

Just wanted to see if I'm alone in having a hard time enjoying one setting for a moderate amount without having the urge to change setting over and over again, and if some of you have any solution to this ailment ? I stopped creating my own settings when it became clear that I could not stop myself investing a ridiculous amount of time in it while my players could not care less about my worlds, so I prefer to run published setting. Often time I have a campaign framework in my head, but I cant for the love of me choose in which setting I want to run it:

I wanted to use Ravnica as a setting, but couldnt find a good campaign idea which would use the main strengths of the setting, so I decided to go back to Faerun to run BG 1 as a campaign for a group of friend, but bought Eberron in the meantime. I was like " I should definitely run a campaign in Eberron, such good world building''. I converted Dragon Age 1 scenario to Eberron, was satisfied with it, but then....maybe I would prefer running a slow-paced AiME campaign? Went back and bought the few missing AiME I had not before.

Then....well my players prefer highly heroic action...so back to Faerun, but then I rage quit-ed when I saw one single fact that I hadnt noticed before: not only Gauntlgrym has been found...it has also been reconquered, by a party who was supposed to be dead for a good 100 years....so I snapped: Faerun is now a ''completed, end-game-start-a-new-game +'' setting, there's no stone left un-turned. I have no longer any interest in it, this time! I can ignore realmlore, but if you start ignoring 90% of the lore, it becomes just a map with (lotsa) names on it. Screw this. And would you look at that, they announce Theros, which looks really cool, maybe I'd like to set a campaign in it? Cool I'll look into it! Yeah, victory!

OK....so the next campaign is supposed to be set in Icewind Dale. Damn I loved that region, played the game many times and ran some groups through the questline of the video games a few times. Its the Realms, but its a less covered region, it cant be that bad....right?

A good thing my games are now on pause because of the quarantine: my players are tired of switching campaign based on my whims. In the last month-ish, I went through those setting for a future campaign:
Ravnica
Faerun
Eberron
Faerun
Middle-Earth
Wildmount
Hyrule
Ivalice
Eberron
Ivalice
Faerun (never again, I swear!)
Theros
Faerun (Ok, Icewind Dale may be an exeption...)

How do you DM when you have such a fickle mind!?

I personally don't really care about the settings per se, I care more about the adventures I want to run and then fit the settings to them. When I ran KotS/Thunderspire/Trollhaunt/Demon Queen's for 4E, I ran in Nentir Vale because that's where they were written to be set. When I ran Gates of Firestorm Peak as the foundation of a barbarian campaign I put it in one of the other sections of Nerath because I had the details from the online Dragon Magazine. When I wanted to run Hoard of the Dragon Queen when it came out with 5E, I put it in the Silver Marches because the 3E setting booklet was nice and detailed. Curse of Strahd I ran as-is in Barovia, my Eberron campaigns were based using the Sharn, City of Towers book plus several of the Eberron adventures (The Forgotten Forge, Seekers of the Ashen Crown), and right now I'm running Lost Mines of Phandelver in its Phandalin location because why not?

My next game I'm hoping to run most likely in Theros because I had read through a lot of Odyssey of the Dragonlords and found that adventure very compelling. So again... it's the adventures that are what inspire me and then I set them wherever makes sense plus which helps with ease-of-use.

Just create your own home-brew setting. Start small with an adventure. Don't need to write an encyclopedia to get the dice rolling. Create and fill the regions as you go along using the ideas your players bring to the table or ideas that pop in you head while you DM.

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atanakar said:

Don't need to write an encyclopedia to get the dice rolling.

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That's my problem right there: I cant. Once I start world building, I know I'll spend 100 hours looking at maps, characters images, different pantheon ideas, new races, custom classes, reworking spells etc... I get very anxious with the whole setting thing. I know nobody at my tables cares, but I do, probably too much.

I know I'd like to have my players input when building a setting, even the smallest one. But in reality, if I ask my players in advance to bring one fantasy races they'd like to play, one region/city/places they'd like to visit or one creature/god/NPC they'd like to interact with, I'll get laugh at when they'll all arrive at Session 0 with absolutely nothing, saying ''lol, I had not time for that''. Believe me, that's a classic for me.

I used to make up a whole new setting for every campaign I devised myself and run any published adventures I decided to run in whatever setting they presumed to be default (or again make up a whole new setting if they didn't have a default world to them)... and I too found that players mostly just didn't care what world they were in beyond if it meant some character option they wanted was or wasn't available.

The result for me though ended up being the opposite of what you describe. Now I don't make up new settings and am looking for one that fits well enough to just park there and call it "good enough." So now I run published stuff in whatever it's default setting is, and anything without a default setting or that I am doing the campaign planning on my own I technically don't run at all currently - but will be fitting into the setting I have finally (after years of measuring setting after setting to see what is the "best fit" for me) settled on as 'the one'. I just have to finish my conversion of it (Eberron) because of course the setting I find most appealing and the rules system I find most appealing are owned by different companies.

Sounds like you don't care for any of the published settings. That's why you can't settle on using one.

commandercrud said:

Sounds like you don't care for any of the published settings. That's why you can't settle on using one.

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Probably yeah. If a least I could make up my mind on the aesthetic I wanted for a homebrew setting, that would be a nice start!

I have this problem with all published settings except for ...

• Eberron: It's too interesting for me to lose interest in.
• Greyhawk: Folio version provides enough detail for me to run games there without squashing my creativity with too much detail.

I am lucky that my players become very invested in my homebrew settings (most of the six current games I run) and love to learn more about it through our playing sessions.