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>>51192475
Enough to get myself hyped for the game and want to choke the life out of players if they ditch the game.

>>51192475
More than players put in their characters.
So arbitrary small amount but not quite zero.

As much as the campaign benefits from.

I've run high-narrative and fairly linear campaigns where I prepare characters months in advance and choose theme music for enounters, I've run post-apoc games where we roll up the setting as a group on the day with 0 prep.

>>51192475
Way, way too much. I'm writing what more or less amount to encyclopedia articles for each race, each one exceeding ten pages. And that's just biology and psychology--cultures, which don't necessarily follow racial lines--each get their own article as well.

>>51192625
to simplify things I usually make cultures and religions follow racial/ethnic lines

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>>51192475
I'm trying to build up a wiki for the setting, so I suppose it's fairly substantial.

Do people normally organize their more elaborate settings via wiki or other note-compiling devices, like Zim/Evernote/Laverna?

>>51192687
I use Google Docs

>>51192687
How are you building a wiki?

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>>51192832
GDocs has been decent for group sharing and edits.
How are you keeping the documents themselves organized?
I found it tough to keep information in hierarchies.

>>51192990
Obsidian Portal and Wikia both offer solid foundations for stylized page-based organization (with lots of article linking for easier reading). Obsidian Portal is much more specialized for TTRPG purposes and thus harder to customize but easier to manage things like maps and character [sheets!].

>>51192475
fairly large amount of it, whenever I have free time I build it up in my head, what kind of civilizations exist, why do they exist?, what do they do?, how do they do it ? etc etc. however tends to bite me in the ass when teh people I play with tend to not keep to the schedule and the game sorta dies, and I just have all this work I did go down the drain. the worlds make for good books though if I had the damn time

>>51193137
I nest folders and try to add the most descriptive titles I can so,
Culture > Religions > Religion > Sects
And then I'll make a document callled "beliefs" and organize it that way.

>>51192475

Put as much as you enjoy doing into it, no more. If it starts to feel like a chore, you've put too much work into it, stop already.
Be aware that players may never see most of what you did, so if you're not feeling it, skip it, and just wing that shit.
Take this advice to heart and then if something happens and the group falls apart, at least you had fun when you were building stuff, right?

>>51193238
Best advice

almost none. I draw a moderate size map (landmass about 1/4 the size of the US) and populate with a bunch of places of interest that I name on the spot. Then I write 50 word descriptions of what each place is. I only bother going in depth if the players are within travel distance of any of the points of interest

>>51192475
Depends on which players I will have and how long I expect the game to run.
At the very least, I try to iron out internal inconsistency.

>>51192475
A lot of effort, worldbuilding is a side hobby for me

>>51192475
Enough to have it be playable.

Basically a rough map and a decent idea of general climate, various points of interest, kingdoms, cities, factions, cultures, religions and stuff. No need to write a bible, just enough to have a decent idea of what you're trying to convey - this can be anywhere from a couple bullet points to a couple paragraphs.
I just do enough to have a good idea of things like what monsters live where, who loves/hates each other and why, and various problems which the group could solve or exacerbate.
More detail is put into anything related to a quest - whether it follows whatever main story arc there is, or if its related to any kind of plot hook/miscellaneous side quest.

If the players are never going to see or interact with a particular thing or place in the setting, then it doesn't really matter.
Its also important to allow players to influence the setting. To the average player, it can get quite frustrating if they have to ask "Would this be okay in the setting?" before every single thing they do, or write into their backstory. If the player says their character is from a tribe of man-eating elves from the desert, then that tribe now exists in the world, even if they didn't previously.

I think worldbuilding for games is a different kind of worldbuilding. You need to be fluid and accommodate for the PCs.
Worldbuilding as a hobby is fine, but depending on what sort of game you're looking to run, the things in worlds built for the hobby can often be too rigid and set-in-stone to play games in.

I don't have to work too hard to maintain a consistency of head-canon, so I only flesh out what's necessary for my characters to have a pre-knowledge of, and then add stuff as necessary.

>>51192475
Too much on things that will likely never be relevant, like the afterlife, the ancient history that completely reshaped it and caused it to get cracked and split up into multiple parts, and the horrifying eldritch abomination that the afterlife getting fractured created.

>>51192475
On paper effort, writing things down? No.

I think about the settings that I run during downtime, a lot of thinking. I think through random shit like how the town guard would react to something the party's recently done, or what taverns would greet the group as they entered.

I often focus more on characters than on setting, maybe that's incorrect. But I'm a better actor than a writer, so I focus on what I'm good at.

Well, I started creating this world when I was about, nine? Ten?

So, I've got fifteen years-ish of worldbuilding behind me. Of course, most of the last few years work has been to salvage and edit what I did during my teen years.

Ugh, dark lords are never a good idea. Not when thought up by angsty teens.

To answer your question more directly, a player wanted to know more information about a noblewoman last session, so now I'm creating the countries entire geo-political climate with as much detail as possible.

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>>51192475
>How much effort do you put into worldbuilding for your games?
Way more effort than my players put in to actually reading what I've given them

Just about zero. I show up with some random tables for NPC names and towns, come up with history of places on the fly and make it up as I go. No one complains.

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>>51192475

Lots.

Short stories, lists of NPC's, little wood-crafted props, custom bad guys and monsters...lots.

>>51201553
Same here. I also add anything interesting I see on tv or reddit.

>>51192475
>How much effort do you put into worldbuilding for your games?- 21 posts and 3 image replies shown.
I host roleplaying sessions to improve on my world-building, as it turns out some other players poking holes and lifting every stone up really forces you to flash out things or reconsider things you might have never thought off. But ultimately, it's always the world building alone that matters to me much more than the roleplaying to begin with.

>>51192475
> Early years
A LOT. Pages and pages of worlbuilding, maps, adventure hooks planned out.

> Nowadays
Barely fucking anything. The world's like a movie set; nothing's set in stone until the PCs interact with it, and even then it's a backdrop.
All the background work from my early years is recycled, tweaked a bit, repainted, and re-used. I run multiple games in the same setting, multiple groups, I re-use plots and quests, and let players do worldbuilding without telling them that it wasn't that way until they had the idea and I thought it'd fit well.
Literally the minimum amount of work possible, because I don't have time to write out pages and pages of fluff when I have to work full-time and manage a gaming habit.
But I DO do most of my worldbuilding while at work, occasionally stopping work entirely to note something down on my phone. I'll write my holidays off as 'research trips' just because I visit a museum or two, to justify having fun and indulging muh autism.

>>51201526
This. Bunch of feral, ungrateful heathens.