Worldbuilding - One of the joys of GM/DMing?

[Teflon Billy]

Snoweel has been banned from the thread for aggressive rudeness across several posts.

Is Wyrmshadow gone too? Becasue man that looked like a 2-way street.

Anyway, on topic, World Building is pretty much my game as a GM. I really enjoy mapping out how trae routes form based on Politics, Geography and relative levels of civilizations.

I've found over the years that I get a lot of enjoyment out of just sitting down, drawing some continents,, adding some mountian ranges, placing appropriate forest and rivers...then going in and adding the Star-Shaped island, the Pyriamids, the Orc Nation, The Viking Raiders etc.

this is my favorite example of a setting that I cooked up in exactly that way...

 

[EATherrian]

I love world building. I still use the world I've run for over 20 years now, and could probably tell you even minor details without looking at my notes. I've been toying with making a new world for 4E, keeping most of the core assumptions in place. Hopefully I'll have something up in the creations forum soon.

 

[Desdichado]

I quite like worldbuilding for its own sake... but I don't indulge in it much, for many of the reasons listed here. The main reason I don't, though, is that my attention span is really short. If I spend months working up a setting, by the time I get that much detail done, I've usually lost interest in it and either want to retool it as something else, or not even use it at all.

I find that what works best for me is worldbuilding at a "macro" level. I like working out interesting twists, broad strokes and whatnot. I believe that I am pretty good at winging details on the fly and remembering them later so that they become consistent. The example you gave, of printing out menus of some inn in some town in some minor section of your world? I'd never do that.

I also believe quite firmly in the Ray Winninger approach, that is; not to develop too much detail too far ahead, because 1) I like the flexibility to be able to react to the PCs actions, and 2) I like the flexibility to be able to integrate whatever new idea has caught my fancy lately.

But I'm not too strict about the Ray Winninger methodology, precisely because I do enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake, so I indulge a bit.