To your taste buds maybe, but I can taste a difference. Just like my gaming buddies used to try to tell me that there's no difference between Schwepps Ginger ale, Seagrams ginger ale and the White Rose brand ginger ale. Ginger ale is my beverage of choice when I'm not drinking oodles of bottled water so I can taste the difference. For that matter I can taste the difference in brands of bottled water as well. We recently moved from one area of Queens NY to another part of Queens and yes the tap water tastes different.
If youre not really inclined to do so then no.
When I was younger and had loads of time on my hands I used to create campaign settings. What I found was that my players could give a crap, they cared about adventuring and what ever it was that they were involved in at the time. All of the history, backstory and what not meant nothing to them. Even when it was something that was slowly revealed over time in was secondary even tertiary to what was going on at the time. It was at that point I realized that with my players and the type of player that I enjoy playing with that detailed background and even a detailed / defined campaign setting was a waste of time.
Right now I'm running the Age of Worms adventure path from Dungeon Magazine. The players are only familiar with the area that they're starting in and the nearby city. World politics mean nothing to them, their only desire is to get out to the crap hole that is Diamond Lake. Right now they are fighting some cultists but as soon as they're done they've expressed a desire to see to go to the nearby Free City.
When they get to the Free City then things will open up for them a little more as far as their exposure to world goes. But unless its relevant to their character or their immediate goals there's no reason to waste my time fleshing that sort of thing out unless one of my players have specifically expressed a desire for this.
Part of my point is this I never said what campaign world we're playing in even though in the adventures it's implied that the world is Greyhawk (and you really only get the implication if you're already familiar with Greyhawk and actually reading the adventure). I haven't said what world, and the players to thier credit DONT CARE. It doesn't make them bad players and I'll take to task any man that says otherwise. They care about what's going on with their PCs and thier immediate surroundings, they care about not getting caught up in the corruption of Diamond Lake and they care about eliminating that cult that may pose a danger to the people that they do care about in Diamond Lake.
World? Honestly, not that important.
