How do you strike a balance between coming up with new shit as a GM and having an easily recognizable setting? Is it better to change up or model after existing genre tropes, or just make something out of whole cloth? Do people in general prefer "classic" fantasy over whatever I might come up With? Am I wasting my time trying to come up with novel or interesting setting elements, or fleshing out the setting at all beyond what players will be immediately dealing with?
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Don't subvert tropes just to subvert tropes. Go classic with whatever flavor you need to tell the story or make the game fun. If the wood elves need to be beach elves, do it, but if you are doing it just because you're tired of wood elves, you're wasting time on something that's not even important.
What I'm getting at is have purpose for anything out of the ordinary, even if it's not immediately clear to everyone. Do it for fun.
Also mind that reasons like "that's totally badass is why" are sufficient because they add to the fun.
Look, I'm gonna tell you a hard truth that no one on Veeky Forums wants to accept, because they're all so fond of their "super special & unique" homebrew world where everything is different for the sake of being different and every race and culture is played specifically against type just because;
No one gives a fuck. It's stupid.
When you rename "magic" to "aetheria" and you change Elves to "Faerei-borne" or some stupid shit, and make your Orcs cultured, civilized people in top hats, and throw in robots who only exist to sail pirate ships, oh and also the world is just floating islands because why the fuck not, and there's these made-up gods and whatever the fuck else.
No one cares. No one is interested enough to pay attention to any of that. Your players don't want to hear you describe how cool the feral "totally not stereotype" Elves are because you think it's cool. They want to kill monsters and level up. When you start talking, everyone tunes out.
>Am I wasting my time trying to come up with novel or interesting setting elements, or fleshing out the setting at all beyond what players will be immediately dealing with?
Fucking yes. Yes you are wasting your time.
Veeky Forums will clamor to tell you different, but that's specifically because they need to so they can feel like THEY didn't waste THEIR time doing exactly the same thing.
No one cares. The game will be literally exactly the same whether you make up your own "super special" homebrew world with that map you drew in MSPaint for days trying to get the mountains "geographically correct", or whether it's set in Forgotten Realms or some other generic fantasy world.
As both a GM and player, ultimately this is the truth. MOST people simply do not give a fuck, they're just there to roll dice and have fun. There isn't even anything wrong with that.
Bear in mind, in that rant I'm not saying not to do it. You wanna write a shitty homebrew world and re-fluff every fantasy trope into something different just because you're tired of "boring" fantasy? Go for it, I could not care less.
Just please, do not be so retarded as to think that anyone but you cares. Do not make a point of showing players how cool your world is with the plot. Do not make them look at the things you wrote because you're proud of them. They do not care. No one does. Just you.
>When you start talking, everyone tunes out.
Wait, then how do the players ever even get around to killing shit and leveling?
I think half the problem is the part where people think their variations are UBER BRILLIANT. Floating Islands? "Homebrew" religion that's a facelift of an obscure tradition? Flavorful selling points but don't come at me like you're fuckin' Tolkien for lifting Arawate words or some shit for locations.
On the flipside, equally as horrible is "all humans all dungeons no faggy talking" etc. You're also not being the AULD SCHOOLE contrarian bucking a 'degenerating' hobby by making everything blander than a bread sandwich.
OP, put in as much effort as is satisfying for you. No more, no less.
If you're happy the players are happy. So what if they walk right past the cool [thing]? Drop it elsewhere or make another cool [thing].
>Wait, then how do the players ever even get around to killing shit and leveling?
Because it's not hard to pick out the important bits, or just ask "So what are we killing?" at the end.
I think this is true for a whole lot of groups. Mine in particular still doesn't know a damn thing about Greyhawk (they still go, "Who? What is [race]?" when I describe a human having a certain racial feature), despite them having played in the same setting for nearly two years.
However, I'm very intrigued by the homebrew world I'm a player in. I've glossed over a lot of the information and it's pretty interesting.
However, I did only gloss. And I doubt I'll ever take the time to learn the intricacies of it.
I think the best way to do a homebrew setting is to run Dawn of Worlds as session 0. That way, your players feel invested in it. It isn't just some homebrew you spent too much time trying to be "original" or "creative," but rather a group effort. When a player meets the race of cave-dwelling albino pig men he created, it's much more interesting than if you had created them yourself.
I use a setting someone else created. The original work is the story I'm running the PCs through.
I see no reason to do more than make minor tweaks to an existing setting. In fact, I find it more interesting to tweak the story to fit the setting/PCs.
I think it depends. I'd say it is useful, but everything in moderation. Don't expect your players to give a shit if you dump huge amounts of info at one time, but at the same time I I think that having some cool shit (or at least different shit) can catch and keep players interest, at least occasionally. It's also generally better to at least have some idea as to how the world is set up, so you can foreshadow shit or at very least make sure everything kind of makes sense together and not have to waste time making shit up when they go somewhere you weren't expecting
So what's the point of GMing if your players will never give a shit? Veeky Forums shits on people who want to tell a story or do a 'special snowflake' setting, so what fun is a DM supposed to have? Is it really as thankless as it seems?
>Is it really as thankless as it seems?
Yes.
The more "out there" a world is, the more player cooperation is needed. If you're building a D&d setting and don't want to include any of the PhB races, get your players to come up with half of them
Take the elder scrolls approach: make most of the weird shit less obvious. That gives them a chance to absorb the information and acclimate themselves to the changes you've made as opposed to giving it to them right up front and risking alienating them. Full gonzo means that it's a pain trying to figure out the rules of your world, and giant info dumps will generally get mostly forgotten or ignored. At the same time, don't let the fear of having your shit ignored lead you to the opposite extremes. Only faggots like bland, flavorless Tolkien/Gygax/GRRM knockoffs , and no one likes tryhards who think fluff and roleplaying are for pussies
>what fun is a DM supposed to have
Being a human calculator for everyone's game of diablo but with talking and in person.
>what's the point
The point is playing Spot The Autist. Every "Am I the only one" and "Why does everyone else" super-jaded speshul snowflake topic on Veeky Forums is self-evidently posted by some rubber-helmeted hipster who's incapable of lateral thought. These are obviously people who don't play, or they wouldn't ask such monumentally ignorant questions. On balance:
Fantasy trope/ meme/ cliche exists to give a potentially infinite number players a common frame of reference - to get started. Of COURSE GMs add unique people/ places/ things later, as they gauge their players so as to choose the additions that are going to be best accepted and exploited by the party.
That's the "balance."
It's a mistake to throw a load of donut steel in the party's face in the first session, but as soon as the GM learns what the players WANT from a session, the sky's the limit - but a good GM still keeps a deft hand on the throttle when judging how quickly to get there.
That's the bit the "No one cares" Roll Play fatalists ignore.
But what, what about all the people who complain they're tired of cliches, and they'd love to play in a not!Arabia setting or a not!Oceania setting or something like that?
Your audience might be limited, but it's not that it doesn't exist. All the people who pore over the lore of videogames and various settings is proof enough of that.
They never give a shit about your homebrew setting. The only time they really care about the setting is if it's one they like outside of your game.
They usually care about their characters and the adventures you put them through. Though they often don't mention it.
>how do I get people to notice my special snowflake faggot setting?
Kill yourself. No one cares
Fuck off back to your cuck posting forum, human only scum.
Most of this is true but I'm always down to learn the setting's pantheon.
Jesus Christ you sound like an unpleasant fag to play with. If you don't give a shit about the story and the world then why not go jack off to a spreadsheet