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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VikingLegion" data-source="post: 7347238" data-attributes="member: 6794627">I'm not trying to start any trouble here, but isn't that a bit selfish?  You like to homebrew when you're DMing because you control all the lore, but when you play, you want an FR or GH type world for sake of familiarity.  What about what your players want?  Do they want to learn your entire world - the geography, politics, economy, history, secret and not-so-secret societies, pantheon, technology level, any tweaks you've made to the casting system?From the number of posters that responded with "Homebrew" as their answer, how do you go about disseminating this vast amount of information to your players?  Do you produce handbooks of professional or near-professional quality with maps, charts, etc?  Do all of your players want to read hundreds of pages of text to become familiar with your world?  During a session, when your players have a run-in with the Knights of Kardonixx, do they know if these guys are noble, upstanding types, or an order of power-mongering bullies?  Because those kinds of details are really important in the split second they have to decide whether to approach and hail the Knights, or jump off the road into the bushes to hide and/or prepare an ambush.  Or do you "pause" the game in order to give them an exposition dump before resuming the action?As DMs we all have to possess a certain degree of creativity, it's mandatory for the role.  And while I enjoy the process of creation, I'm sure the players at my table (yours may, and probably do, vary) didn't want to have tens of hours of reading assignments to do in between sessions.  And not to be overly harsh, but how many thousands of homebrew worlds across the history of D&D have a frozen, northerly region filled with Scandanavian-like berserk warriors, and a hot, desert region in the south with dudes in turbans, wielding scimitars and calling on djinn to aid them.  Maybe there was a great Cataclysm event in the past of your world that altered the landscape and released a great evil/plague upon the land?  The harsh truth is that probably nobody is ever going to care about the fine nuances of your world like you do, because - thematically - there are only so many ideas to pursue.  So unless you go way out there like Dark Sun did to throw everything about D&D on its head, creating a brand new world from scratch is more an exercise for the DM's fun than for the players.  And if you do have a truly original and interesting theme/concept for your world, you better have amazing design skills (and dedicated players) or your session is just going to confuse more than amaze them.For my part I ran a campaign for many years that was ostensibly Forgotten Realms.  I did this for some of the less experienced players, they knew FR through video games like Baldur's Gate and the like, so it wasn't a completely alien world.  I created several key details, specifically the town they started in, from whole-cloth because I wanted to control all the details there, which was important for the main storyline.  All the players know the "bones" of FR, so if they see a group of Zhents or Cult of the Dragon rummaging around vs. a wandering priest of Lathander, they know the difference and can react accordingly.  It was a comfort level thing for my table.  But yet I didn't find it restricting because they didn't have the level of knowledge where I couldn't make huge alterations of my own.  Lastly, the adventure ended up mostly in planar locations (as I'm a huge Planescape fan), so the FR "skin" was mainly just to get them settled in with an initial framework before the mission had them hopping all about.</blockquote>

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