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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 7959421" data-attributes="member: 59082">Lots of good advice in your post, including this paragraph, but I disagree with the bolded part. See my post a couple before yours where I differentiate between world-building and campaign setting design. You are, as far as I can tell, taking the approach of "setting design trumps all," which makes sense to a certain point. But I'll re-iterate two points from my longer post:1) World-building is rewarding for its own sake. There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending hours upon hours building the world, even if it never comes into a session. I imagine you wouldn't disagree with this at face value, as long as the DM doesn't neglect the needs of the game, but your post also implies that unless world-building directly impacts the current session, there's no point to it (e.g. "who cares..."). Well, the DM might care, and the players also might care, considering...2) World-building deepens the campaign setting and improves play experience (if done well and not flooded over the players all the time). It brings the setting alive. If the world-building is paper-thin, there's a greater risk that the players will realize that the 'saloon' is just a painted cardboard set-piece with no depth, which breaks immersion. This can partially be ameliorated by skillful DMing, but it doesn't hurt to do some of the work up-front.Again, I'm not saying detail every little corner of the world before beginning. I'm saying, create a detailed starting area with plenty of flavorful hooks, locations, and NPCs to interact with, and continue world-building behind the scenes, to deepen the world.Now if a specific DM doesn't enjoy world-building, you can still take the build-as-you-go approach, or you can do what a lot of folks do, which is use a pre-published setting. I've mostly been a DM over the years, but when I'm a player I'd much rather the DM use a pre-published setting than a paper-thin hombrew that they're creating ad hoc, if those are the only choices. Of course, even better is a homebrew setting that the DM has spent a lot of time on as a passion project.As you say, though, a lot depends upon the specific group of players. Some just want to show up and kill things. Some, like myself, enjoy getting to know the world, discovering lore, history, etc. In the end, there are many ways to go about this, including build-as-you-play. But I do take issue with the attitude of "don't bother world-building unless it shows up in game play." As I've explicated in several posts, there are a variety of good refutations of this perspective. It really comes down to execution.</blockquote>

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