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Ideally for everyone. If you sketch out your world and before you complete it, you share some details with the players and solicit any input they may have... if they have none, then it's a non-issue. If they do... if they have preferences, then you're more likely to be able to accommodate them...

Sure, some settings used for telling stories in novels/film/comics/etc. work fine for RPGs. I’m not saying there can’t be some overlap. What I’m saying is that, when you are creating a setting for play (or adapting a ln existing setting for play) there are different considerations. Or there...

Because my only point is that it’s not an uncommon expectation that the things in the PHB will be available to play. You’ve stated your stance. Cool. I’m not arguing what your stance may or may not be.

Well, gospel is hyperbole. I’m just saying that, until told otherwise, when someone talks about D&D, I’m gonna assume the races and classes that appear in the PHB. And plenty of others do, too.

But that could all be changed very simply if you wanted. You could just say “on this world, Drow are not all evil… they are like any other racial group and run the gamut alignment-wise”. Easy. That sounds like about 10 minutes worth of work.

I personally would default to nothing but humans. I don’t find the other heritages or races to be all that interesting, really. They seem more like archetypes than anything. Nothing that can’t really be accomplished with cultural differences. But other people feel differently. So I don’t...

Yes, it may be. But what I've seen is that most often, it's not. Many folks here and many I've discussed with and played with create their own worlds which are not really significantly different from bog-standard D&D except they've eliminated choices that they don't enjoy. No drow, tieflings...

One other point regarding the recent discussion of settings. One of my pet peeves is "original settings" that are nothing more than a different map, deities with different names, and then a list of options that have been removed because the GM doesn't like them. Are some original settings...

I'm talking about all of it. But even if we limit it to just play, I still have a hard time believing that players make more decisions than the DM. I mean... do you typically not use multiple enemies in combat? More NPCs is more decisions. Although individual NPCs don't make as many decisions as...

Yeah, I won’t fully detail a setting without involving the players, and any game I GM will have group character creation. I want collaboration on both.

I would think it’s trivially obvious that the GM makes more decisions than the players. I mean… you’re running an entire world. Each player is running an individual character. I absolutely make more decisions than my players when I run D&D. And I don’t even prep heavily!

Which of the ways that you've designed and made decisions about. The den that you decided exists and will decide what it contains. The ogre you decided exists and decided its behavior. The potion you decided to give them and the obstacle you designed requiring the use of a jump potion. And...

Yeah, we went over so many iterations that could easily get the cook and door scenario to work. What I’ve learned is that if someone is dead set on a conclusion, they’ll ignore or dismiss any argument or evidence to the contrary. Yeah, it’s “nonsensical” only if you start with the...

Oh, I didn’t take offense. I don’t get offended by what’s said on these boards. That doesn’t mean I don’t notice when someone posts some passive aggressive comment.

Nope.

That’s some sweet passive aggression.

Yeah, I don't really follow that. It reads to me as "this one's okay because it closely aligns to my thinking, this one is not because it does not." Okay, fair enough. I'm surprised to hear that given how defensive you tend to be, but I'll keep that in mind! Well, this depends, right? I...

It may be. But it’s also the extreme. People will have different thresholds of what is tolerable before we get to the extreme where we might all agree there’s a problem. Like, for me, I expect my tolerance for the amount of GM authority would be exceeded way before yours. Now, my threshold for...

Isekai is a sub-genre of anime and manga about a character getting transported to a different world. It’s popular in Japan, but can be used to describe works that predate the term… like the John Carter Mars stories, A Connecticut Yankee, the D&D cartoon, and plenty of others. It’s very much...

I don’t think it’s out of the ballpark to interpret the below and the tangent it brought about exactly as @pemerton did. I’d say his take was spot on. I have played plenty of football (whichever kind you prefer) without a ref, and the games I was in never devolved into arguing about offsides.