Hussar
Legend
Well, I was speaking to Hussar about balancing fluff and crunch, and how one is meaningless without the other. He made a comment about designing encounters, and said something along the lines of “there’s a refuse pit....so I’ll have an Otyugh”. So my comment was about why he knew to use an Otyugh, a creature that I don’t believe has any mythological origin, and is purely a creation of D&D (I could of course be wrong, but I don’t think I am).
He knew because the creature was designed to explain where all the refuse and waste from dungeon denizens went. It’s a living toilet. That is its place in the fictional world. So yes, I’d call this worldbuilding. Not of the kind the GM or the players engage in as part of play, but of the kind a specific GM (likely Gygax, but maybe Arneson of Kuntz or one of the other OG crew) came up with to explain how his world worked.
Hussar would prefer this type of material be kept to a minimum. And that’s fine, that’s his preference. But much of it is inseperable from the game. The lore...or fluff or worldbuilding....is what goves context to things. This is why it’s so prevalent in game books, and why it’s not likely to go away.
See, that's the point I keep trying to make though and this is why we keep talking past each other. An Otyugh is a trash monster isn't world building IMO. It's simply stating what the thing is. Obviously you need that much. That's just basic setting stuff that every story must have. World building would be going beyond that. A several page treatise on the life cycle of an Otyugh such as this: On the Ecology of the Otyugh or a 15 minute video description:
[video=youtube_share;-1Wa_w4G0Pw]https://youtu.be/-1Wa_w4G0Pw[/video]
That's what I consider to be world building.