For me, a lot is the lack of desire to reinvent the wheel, but also the fact is that often enough it isn't detailing one world, but a hundred, and that can be a hundred worlds where they are merely a pit stop, but maybe more.

Both.

I usually prefer to make my own setting from the ground up before hand. Either a little or a-lot.

But.

I also like to let one grow on its own and see what I get. The world develops during the adventure.

But.

I also like certain published settings with lots of background and maps and play in them for that reason. Greyhawk being one such.

But.

I also really like blank slate published settings. Gamma World and Star Frontiers are still two of my favorites. As is BX Karameikos for me. Here is the setting. You know about a paragraph of background at best and a map with names and features and not much else. Go fourth and make of it what you will.

in the end I lean heavily to organic growth homebrew and blank slate published.

Homebrew for me. Like others I will pilfer from published settings... I might run something 'like' Star Trek... but with names changed to protect me from the canon-Nazis and bean counters.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;789638Homebrew. The whole point of this entire hobby IMHO is for people to create and share their own stuff.

yep.  Totally agree.

Quote from: Technomancer;789693I feel the same way about those bastards who watch TV shows and claim to be fans but haven't watched all the special edition DVDs with director's commentary and behind the scenes exposition, don't buy all the series guide books, and don't at least make an effort to memorize every minor character who shows up on screen.  

Participating in a hobby merely for entertainment and fun rather than as a work-laden intellectual challenge? What nerve! Not at my table.

What nerve indeed. If your not willing to spend outrageous sums of money and time, to the point it places strain on your private life, how dare you call yourself a fan. Unless you've been made divorced and bankrupt by your entertainment, your just a tourist.

Homebrew.  (Although lately I've been wanting to run a Young Kingdoms game.)

The very term "setting" seems associated with a mindset posing an either/or to which my answer must be "both and neither." I don't run fantasy games bound within preset limits. Does the City of Brass exist, or the Emerald City? Possibly, and in fantasy that's close enough to certainty if only one quests long enough.

The campaign action may go through many places. Some may be fairly faithful representations of worlds of fiction, but since I'm not duplicating a novel even those to some extent depart from the prototypes. At the other extreme, my imagination is hardly creating from pure nothing; it is informed by the ideas of others

Quote from: Phillip;790250The very term "setting" seems associated with a mindset posing an either/or to which my answer must be "both and neither." I don't run fantasy games bound within preset limits. Does the City of Brass exist, or the Emerald City? Possibly, and in fantasy that's close enough to certainty if only one quests long enough.

The campaign action may go through many places. Some may be fairly faithful representations of worlds of fiction, but since I'm not duplicating a novel even those to some extent depart from the prototypes. At the other extreme, my imagination is hardly creating from pure nothing; it is informed by the ideas of others

I guess part of the question is...did you write it, and do the work or not?  Did someone else write 90% and you modified it?  Do you use a canned adventure within your partially homebrewed world?

Because homebrew is so simple to do though I much prefer the lack of effort involved. Read a setting 2 or 3 hours create a setting 4 or 5 minutes. No contest.
You can sit down to play a new campaign talk to the players and get a feel for the game they want and then spin up a quick setting if they like it cool, if it doesn't you can tweak parts of it add something new play down something that doesn't fit.
I ran a campaign that lasted about 2 years which started with a setting called mud and became a divine planar quest visiting multiple worlds. Most of them worked really well one or two were duds (the idea of a massive Gormenghast castle occupied by factions of wizards in perpetual battle sounds awesome but .... )

I like both homebrews and settings, typically in roughly equal amounts overall, though lately I've been doing a bit more homebrewing.  

Of course, some of my "homebrews" end up becoming settings.

Mostly homebrew. I'm not against published settings in theory - and I use a lot of published adventure material. I simply find almost all published RPG settings total crap. Between the typical ratio of 6:1 useless background material to practical game content, and the ubiquity of extruded fantasy product and derivative pablum, I have a tremendously difficult time finding material I can stomach to use.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;789638Homebrew. The whole point of this entire hobby IMHO is for people to create and share their own stuff.

That's a popular sentiment around here, but it effectively confines the hobby to those who have a lot of spare time, and/or for whom RPGs is the main leisure activity in their life.

If you have 2-3 hours a week for gaming activity - including playing, then making up all your own material is not going to be practical. I play D&D once every 3-4 weeks. Usually I can pull together another material in the interim for a 6 hour session. Sometimes I can't. If I eschewed published material altogether, I'd either have to push back the sessions even further out if I was a having a busy week with real life, or clear the deck of all other leisure activities (boardgames, cycling, going out for beers, etc.) in order to devote myself to prepping.

So it's like saying the whole point of music as a hobby is to write and perform your own songs. Aren't people who plunk away on a guitar or piano playing cover songs musicians also?

I may be atypical, but I find that using published material rarely saves me much time.  By the time I've read and grokked the material, and (inevitably) altered it to suit my taste and my game, I could've created something of my own, AND I would know and be able to run it better.  (This may also be affected by the systems I use -- if I was using a much heavier/crunchier system with a lot of overhead to monster and NPC definition, then published adventures might offer move time savings.)

To me, the value in published material isn't really about saving time, it's about injecting ideas that I might not have come up with, or stealing useful bits to use here and there (a map of an inn, a manor house, ship plans, a barrow and its wight, et cetera).

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;790431I may be atypical, but I find that using published material rarely saves me much time.  By the time I've read and grokked the material, and (inevitably) altered it to suit my taste and my game, I could've created something of my own, AND I would know and be able to run it better.  (This may also be affected by the systems I use -- if I was using a much heavier/crunchier system with a lot of overhead to monster and NPC definition, then published adventures might offer move time savings.)

To me, the value in published material isn't really about saving time, it's about injecting ideas that I might not have come up with, or stealing useful bits to use here and there (a map of an inn, a manor house, ship plans, a barrow and its wight, et cetera).

I think micro bits , like a barrow and wight or a tavern might be useful. I used the book of lairs a few times back int eh day, course it had no maps so ... basically nothing you couldn't make up yourself in a few minutes.
But I could see how a thing that you could slot into a game as a 2 hour segment would be good if it had the stuff you needed.

One of my problems with Neverwinter nights was that you had to build everything up front and that is so antithetical to how I play I just couldn't get it to work for me. Having a library of micro modules might be a great way to fix that.

Quote from: Haffrung;790425If you have 2-3 hours a week for gaming activity - including playing, then making up all your own material is not going to be practical. I play D&D once every 3-4 weeks. Usually I can pull together another material in the interim for a 6 hour session. Sometimes I can't. If I eschewed published material altogether, I'd either have to push back the sessions even further out if I was a having a busy week with real life, or clear the deck of all other leisure activities (boardgames, cycling, going out for beers, etc.) in order to devote myself to prepping.

Or you could roll on some random tables?

I dunno, I think I could run a homebrew OD&D game with say a few hours' prep at the start of the campaign, then maybe 30 minutes a week after that. I use published material for inspiration, not as a time saver. It usually takes longer to read it than making my own stuff would. I've been homebrew sandboxing the last few sessions in my Pathfinder campaign and it's been vastly less time consuming than trying to decipher the purple prose of Paizo's Adventure Paths.