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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3465562" data-attributes="member: 22779">I agree with much of what Mallus is saying here.Just a point about world building and Star Trek and Star Wars and other serial stories.  Something to not forget is the sheer volume of material we have to work with.  Between all the incarnations of Star Trek, we have what, 1000+ hours of televison shows and movies?  I'd be surprised if it wasn't close to that.Of course there's a huge amount of detail about the setting.  Even if you only spend 10% of the time developing setting, that still leaves us with over a hundred hours of dedicated world building.  That's a HUGE amount.  It accretes.But, if you move in a bit closer and look at any given episode, you don't see huge amounts of world building.  Most of the episodes have maybe 5 minutes of exposition detailing the background of this or that element and then get back on with the plot.  Take Klingon's as a good example.  It isn't until well into TNG that we see a Klingon death ritual, despite seeing lots of dead Klingons previously.Why then?  Because it fit with the plot of showcasing Worf's character.  If the whole Stovokor (sp) and shouting to the sky thing had been introduced somewhere else, it would have been extraneous.  Is it world building?  Yup.  But, it's world building in service to the plot.Howard has been held up a few times as a world building posterboy.  Yet, that's after the accretion of several short stories (never mind the horde of novels and whatnot that have come after).  Within any given story, you don't see a whole lot of worldbuilding beyond what is needed by the plot.  We don't hear anything about Kush until Conan goes there or meets someone from there.  Again, world building is done in service of the story.I agree with TheShaman that there is no correlation between world building and beating the players over the head with it.  However, there is a correlation between bad DM's beating their player's over the head with their setting.  In other words, developing a setting is fine, so long as it takes a back seat to the game.  When the DM performs a half hour monologue detailing the history of Elven Tea, it's a bad thing.  ((Yeah, wrongbadfun and all that, but, seriously, could you REALLY see a half hour monologue on Elven Tea as a good thing? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ))</blockquote>

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