Since I know /tg/ essentially despises all campaign settings

I personally prefer huge, but shallow settings. They give me as a GM a ton of cool stuff to expand upon and ideas to develop, while not being rigid and requiring me to read hundreds of pages of bad Silmarillion.

>>51458118
Only if it's an economic focused setting. I've learned that you don't need more than about a page to two pages for a setting, then notes for the first two adventures to start running the game, and you worldbuild as you go along.

It's actually easier because you can just give your players those two pages, and then they'll know everything you do about the setting, plus what you spoonfeed them stuff that would be considered common knowledge as you go along.

Then you can take the setting wherever you wish. Right now I'm running a Science-Fantasy campaign using FFG Star Wars, then using Wal-Mart Apocalypse as one of the worlds, which may be a testament more towards the flexibility of the genre and the system than the setting, but still.

>>51458118
Mostly I just describe food, rape and heraldry for hours on end then kill a few PCs off every few sessions to generate drama with minimal effort.

>>51458118

I go into just enough detail so that anything which would be relevant to the players is available to them right off the bat. I try avoiding "mysterious distant continent" tropes because I know that's an alluring prospect to players and an easy way to derail things. Everything they could want is immediately around them.

I generally don't go too far into details like the world's geopolitical history or which bad guy did what and when. Most of that shit is unnecessary, and rarely will the players find themselves in a position to learn about it.

I also go in knowing some things might change, or down the line I might have a great idea for a place the players haven't arrived in.

>>51458118
>Do you flesh out the tax policy of every kingdom?
Jesus Christ no.

If you're defining a setting there's two ways to go:
1. A light smattering of details: Hallmark is the capital of the Empire of Krang. John the Deathless is the Lich Lord of the Iron Wastes. Rudy runs Hallmark's Underdown, where the criminals congregate. The Empire of Krang is at war with the Republic of Two Trees. Two Trees is ruled from Peacevale, an ancient elven tree city.

2. Go whole hog. Provide maps and statistics and key NPCs and discuss things like the average speed of horses and wagons, ships and airships, etc.

A lot of people try to chart a course between those two extremes and it always ends up sad.

Think about the D&D settings that are popular; chocked to the gills full of setting information, right? I mean you know the name of the daughter of the lady of Silverymoon from sourcebooks. No REASON to, mind you, but you do.

On the flipside, wide-open 2-paragraph settings let GMs and players fill in whatever details they actually want to grapple with.

>>51458222
Are you me?
Same here.
Give me the skeleton and let me decide how the flesh and meat look like.
Tell me the city and what it is used for and the major factions and NPCs in it. Let me fill in the rest.
A few hints and tips won't hurt though.

>>51458118
>Do you flesh out the tax policy of every kingdom?
Never would I ever. Unless I was running some kind of governance simulator. I have no idea how you'd make that engaging though.

Anything outside of the main gameplay loop is kept vague, no point in writing shit the players will likely never interact with. Everything else is just detailed enough to give a good sense of it while leaving plenty of room for the GM to fill in the blanks.

I don't know tax policies so no.
If I did I would though. No one but me would ever know it, but I'd still flesh it out and plot out how they aided in triggering civil wars.

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>>51461031
>players just waltz along, minding their own business, massacring orcs and plowing through dungeons
>suddenly one day the IRS is at the gates, demanding back a huge amount of taxes

>>51461031
If I was autistic enough, I would love to plot out the intricate social, political, and economic events and trends that progressed in the world around the players, shaping the world around them, and then at the end of the campaign, give the players an abridged "history" of the greater world around them and let them see behind the scenes to see how and why events occurred.

actually my dad's campaign world did have a tax on stuff moving in an out... I guess that's technically a tariff. But we had to pay 50 gold to bring in our thousands of gold worth of gems, even though we said we weren't planning to sell them. After that we started skipping the roads near the border. It was fun.

>>51458118

I'm in an econ field, so I can wing it on tax policy and my players won't know any better.

On other stuff, there's considerable planning, but you have to be able to extemporize because players will always bring up the one thing you didn't think of.

Truthfully, most feudal systems have very similar tax policies. Taxes tend to be high (too high even by modern standards, usually, see Laffer Curve for why that's bad), tariffs tend to be high as well. That's when they're not outright confiscatory. You can't really have a complex tax regime because you have limited bookkeeping / enforcement resources and there's rampant cheating.

For other stuff, if you're familiar with history (ie read a few good serious general-audience histories) then you usually have one or more prototypes in your mind when you deal with a particular nation. So for your pic related, Braavos is a melange of several related commerce-driven cities (Carthage and Venice come immediately to mind), so if a player throws a curveball at you, you can draw something out of your recollection of one of your sources.

In depth adds detail and makes it easier to cook up other details on the fly by helping you better visualize each part of your world more clearly. The problem is that if you over-think things, A) it takes time away from prepping the actual game, and B) it can tie you down because you feel like you can't answer a question without drawing from 4 pages of notes and pre-fab history. Prepping is bad for your game if it inhibits your ability to improvise.

>>51458118
I tend to go way overboard in writing worlds, which is why I often prefer to grab established settings and just twist them a bit to suit my needs to avoid that particular trap.

Alas, the times I fall for it, I ain't stopping until I got dozens of pages of written history, multiple maps, descriptions of creatures, cultures, flora and fauna, and perhaps a language or two.

Currently writing on another one, 60 pages and many more to go, 3 unfinished maps, a half-finished language and a million more ideas of what needs to fit into the setting somewhere.
And the game it's for hasn't even started yet.

I have a problem.

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>>51458118
>Implying my roadless libertarian paradise has taxes