There's a lot of stuff that matters in setting creation; but some of the most important are the following:

1. First and foremost, a setting has to offer enough information that it feels complete and its easy to get a "feel" for the world, but NOT SO MUCH that there's no room for a GM to personalize it. All of the best game worlds (or the best game worlds in the moment that they were at their best) are worlds where you'd get a lot of detail AND a lot of room, enough that each GM's version of the world would be his own.

2. The setting must have something about it that is particular, that differentiates the setting from "Generic fantasy/scifi/alternatehistory/superhero setting #4368", but must also have stuff that is ARCHETYPAL and immediately relateable to human experience. This is where the "weird for weird's sake" world end up failing.

3. The world must be internally consistent; NOT realistic and sensible in the context of "real life", but a world where the "rules", history, geography, cosmography and political/social/religious structures of the world make sense  within the setting.

4. The world must provide you (The GM and PC group) with something to do in it. The neatest coolest of settings where you read it and think its awesome but end up saying "ok, but what the fuck do I do with it?" is actually a really sucky game setting.  Many game worlds that were created by game designers who are actually frustrated novelists fail on this account; and in general if the first answer to that question is "you can do ANYTHING!", you have failed in your design as well.

RPGPundit

RPGPundit;  very well said.

Melan,
your first post doesn´t say what your second did. Having bad worldbuilding doesn´t invalidate all worldbuilding.

BTW, Trek-o-verse is the opposite of worldbuilding. It´s "What we need for todays adventure" at it´s worst.

EDIT: And I never had the feeling Harnworld was inviting to the would be novelists...

How does all this relate to creating a setting within an existing setting, for example (as I have tried), using something like the second world war as the basis for a setting (say alien invasion). Here the problem has always been theat it's not a relatively static setting: things happened that shaped the ebb and flow of the war. Do you need to recant every detail of the war, it's participants, their hardware, homes and politics?

Quote from: MelanNo, worldbuilding is just a feature of modern fantasy and fan culture, and its cancerous growth is especially typical in 2nd edition AD&D products. In a great number of cases, worldbuilding is the clutter that complicates a design and makes a game product cumbersome, and which invites all the world's failed novellists to ply their trade at the cost of in-game utility. Not even sandbox settings need worldbuilding: the original Wilderlands of High Fantasy is perfectly usable as is - and it is just a bunch of maps and terse location descriptions. Hell, even its modern incarnation is underexposed compared to almost any other commercial setting of the same caliber; it has its assumptions, but not the obsessive, drooling details on things that don't matter.

Worldbuilding is the refuge of our inner Trekkie.

While worldbuilding can be the province of failed novelists, it can also add more to a product. The trick is make a product work on multiple levels. If you read my entries for Wilderlands of High Fantasy they interconnect in many ways. You could ignore them or substitute your own but it is there if you need it. But I didn't do it at the expense of the fundamental purpose of the product which was to provide a ready made sandbox for GM to use for their game.

The thing I didn't do, because of format and space limitation, is make the connections explicit and give further suggestions. When I wrote Badabaskor I but this type of advice and information in.

Rob Conley