Imaro
Legend
Ok, specific criticisms of world building:
It takes away time from the DM that would be better spent on developing adventures. We do not have unlimited time, and much of the world building stuff that goes on has little or nothing to do with the specific adventure that the players are doing.
Not a specific criticism of world-building. Let's be real one can only spend so much time on adventure building (especially if you want to customize the adventures based on the choices of the PC's).sonally speaking one adventure usually lasts my group anywhere from 2-4 sessions.... so that leaves plenty of time for world-building. Your assertion also ignores the subset of world builders who do their work before the campaign takes place leaving plenty of time for adventure building while the campaign is in progress.
If anything this seems to be an issue with time management nd could be an issue if you spend too much time on any one thing while doing camapign/game prep.
[*]Worldbuilding replaces more practical elements in supplements. I mentioned earlier the old Dragon Magazine Ecology of articles. Replacing them with a more here is a page of information and three to four pages of plug and play adventure material is far more useful to a DM.
This presupposes everyone finds the exact same things of practical use. I can only speak for myself but I've founs fiction, setting elewments, stats, pre-built traps/monsters, etc. all useful at some point in time... Do I find some elements more practical for my usage than others? Yeah, sure but I don't pre-suppose everyone creates in the same way and thus what I find useful will be the same for everyone else. When you say worldbuilding could be replaced with more practical elements you're making the pretty broad assertion that worldbuilding isn't useful on a practical level and for many that isn't true... in fact some would find your pre-made, plug and play adventure material useless at a practical level because they customize adventure material for their game and probably prefer inspiration to a pre-set encounter. As an example...I know I never used the pre-madse encounters laid out in the 4e monster manual so for me they weren't useful at all but for others they were probably a godsend.
[*]Worldbuilding and particularly game lore, becomes deeply entrenched and virtually impossible to change. The Great Wheel and attending arguments is a perfect example of this. New ideas become judged, not on their actual value, but on how well they toe the line with what came before.
Eh... I'm not sure how we judge something as subjective as camapign lore on "actual value". It's subjective and people like what they like... and yues if you change what they like to something else you should expect to get pushback. Again not sure this is an actual criticism of worldbuilding since you're effectively saying worldbuilding is bad because some people prefer one world to another... so the solution is to what? Not have any worlds or lore? Huh?
[*]Much of world building is what I called before "Six page treatises on Elven Tea Ceremonies". As more and more world building gets piled on, less and less of anything of actual use at the table gets shoved in.
You mean actual use by you... right? The thing is that someone, somewhere out there is probably making an adventure their group is loving centered around elven tea ceremonies. Let's step back and see what happens when we apply this to anything else... The more and more monsters they create the less and less of anything of actual use at the table gets shoved in... but if just one group is using one of those obscure monsters (or tea ceremonies) to enhance their game how is it a bad thing because you personally choose not to?
[*]DM's sometimes mistake world building for adventure building. The "Tour Des Realms" example that I brought up earlier where the campaign was more about showing off the DM's beautifully wrought urn rather than an actual adventure. ((Note, this probably applies double to fantasy genre novel writers))
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Any criticism that starts of with sometimes isn't a good one, again this isn't a specific criticism of worldbuilding, it's your dislike for a a specific type of campaign (exploration of a world or sandbox). The thing is that there are players who would enjoy this sort of campaign, I mean it's practically what a hexcrawl is and is probably one ofthe primary reason many buy licensed settings. Now if there's nothing exciting in this world they are exploring well that's a problem with the type of world that was built but is not in and of itself a problem of world-building.
How's that for specific criticisms?
2.5 to 3 out of 10 is what I'm rating it.