Worldbuilding Is Wonderful. It’s Also Optional.

I had a good response to my last article from Rob Donoghue, who is one of those voices in the RPG space I always pay attention to. Even when I disagree with him, I tend to come away thinking more clearly about what I actually meant. That’s a good thing. The hobby needs more of that.

In response to my post, he said on Bluesky:

This is well intentioned and useful in an unkind frame. There are good points in here on how to COMMUNICATE setting, and they merit consideration, but conflating comms and creation feels like 1996 era GM stereotyping. As a GM: build it however is fun for you, and fuck all guidance otherwise. Also, more generally, be cautious in your assumptions about why people go into detail and what they do with it. Your boring minutiae is probably someone else’s compelling and grounded situation. This is not because of games, it’s because of people. Yes, the decision of what to show is an essential part of GMing, and there is nothing less productive than assuming every player wants to see the same things. Pressure is not the only way to get value out of lore, it’s just the simplest. Anyway, the advice is fine, the framing is just infuriating and unfortunately hits me right in the “the one person not allowed to have fun is the GM” sore spot.

His pushback, as I read it, was that my framing landed too hard. That by saying “most of the world does not matter,” I risked sounding like I was telling GMs not to enjoy worldbuilding, or that the details they care about are automatically useless. He also made a good point that one person’s boring minutiae might be someone else’s compelling, grounded situation.

That’s fair. It’s worth saying clearly: if you love worldbuilding, worldbuild. I myself tend to do a lot of worldbuilding, and a good part of this advice was advice to myself to ease up on the worldbuilding if it’s going to stop me from running a game.

If drawing trade routes, royal genealogies, old wars, currency systems, farming calendars, local religious schisms, and seven hundred years of fictional history brings you joy, go for it. Seriously. That kind of creation can be one of the great pleasures of being a GM. Sometimes the campaign is just the excuse we use to build the world we wanted to build anyway. I’m not here to take that away from anyone. What I’m pushing back against is the idea that you need all of that before you can play.

Because I’ve seen that idea hurt games. I’ve seen GMs burn themselves out before session one because they think they need to build the whole kingdom before the players can visit a village. I’ve seen people spend months writing lore for a campaign that never actually starts. I’ve seen new GMs look at professional settings, published campaign books, decades-old fantasy worlds, and massive online lore wikis, then quietly decide they’re not ready.

That’s the part I want to challenge: Not worldbuilding as play or joy or art. I’m talking about worldbuilding as homework, as obligation, as the thing standing between you and actually running the game. That version can go.

The village matters when the players arrive there. The ruined tower matters when someone climbs it. The old war matters when its consequences show up at the table. The royal bloodline matters when someone with a claim to the throne walks into the scene bleeding, desperate, and hunted.

Until then, it can be a note. It can be a vibe. It can be a name in the margin. It can be nothing at all.

That doesn’t mean it has no value. It means it doesn’t need to be finished. There’s a difference between creation and communication, and Rob is right to call that out. A GM might create a huge amount behind the curtain and only show a fraction of it. That’s a perfectly valid way to run. Some GMs need that unseen structure to feel confident. Some settings feel deeper because the GM knows what lies beyond the horizon, even when the players never go there.

But there’s another truth sitting beside that one: players usually experience the world through pressure, choice, consequence, and emotion. They don’t experience your setting as a document. They experience it as the mayor lying to them, the river flooding at the worst possible moment, the old shrine reacting to the cleric’s prayer, the goblin prisoner recognizing the fighter’s family name.

That’s where the world becomes real. A detail doesn’t need to be massive to matter. It needs to connect.

A tavern keeper with a grudge against the duke is more useful at the table than a thousand years of dynastic history no one interacts with. A road washed out by spring rain can tell the players more about a region than a climate chart. A festival where everyone refuses to speak after sundown says more than three pages of cultural notes, because now the players have to decide what to do when the bells ring and the streets go quiet.

That’s the kind of worldbuilding I’m advocating for. The kind that moves and shows up in play.

And yes, sometimes the deep lore comes first. Sometimes the GM’s private notes are the soil those moments grow from. That’s great. But the soil isn’t the fruit. The players don’t need to eat the whole field. What I want GMs to hear, especially the tired ones, is this: you are allowed to stop. You are allowed to prep only what matters next session. You are allowed to leave blank spaces. You are allowed to discover the world with your players. You are allowed to build outward from the first town, the first dungeon, the first patron, the first terrible decision the party makes. You are allowed to have fun too.

That last part matters, because Rob’s sore spot is real. There’s a strain of GM advice that treats the GM like a service provider whose joy is always secondary to the players’ experience. I don’t want to add to that pile. The GM should absolutely have fun. The GM’s creative energy matters. Their curiosity matters. Their weird little obsessions matter.

But fun and obligation are not the same thing. If the lore is feeding you, keep going. If the lore is crushing you, set it down. The world can be smaller than you think. The campaign can begin before the map is done. Most of the world does not matter yet. And “yet” is doing a lot of work there.