How important is world building?

How important is world building?

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It depends on your goal as a writer. Your premise may require the audience to understand what the fictional world looks like in order for them to understand what is going on, or the premise may require that the audience care about the people living there. In those situation, world building is important.

Only the immediate world really matters. Grand scope stuff tends to be fluff at best and it gets a little annoying when people call a lack of exposition or attention to things that really don't matter bad writing.

it's pretty important they don't fucking build their worlds around a goddamn bomb

If you want to work as a cartoonist, it doesn't matter at all, just do something wacky and cute. You can always add worldbuilding, but not too much, else you run the risk of becoming COTY

Important enough to keep society from collapsing

The world must be built on top of the story. If your world is not thematically resonant, it's just a child's fantasy. if your world is not based in intensive, time-consuming research on the types of elements and topics you want to use, it's just infantile ramblings. Rule number 1 of fantasy writing is and always will be: NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR WORLD.

A world is a stage. A stage can be beautiful, but it cannot be compelling. It cannot spontaneously ignite the spaces between brains and fill them with momentum. A world is a servant to a story. Never forget that. Too many think they can just throw a bunch of cool elements together and that any of it will mean anything, that they'll be the next Tolkien. Tolkien's worlds were born from the stories in his constructed languages. He understood that languages were living things, and that they reflect the history through which they have passed. To create languages, he had to create stories. Language without story is inert, meaningless. World without story is inert.

If you start with a world instead of a story, your world will be forever hollow. The world must grow around and FROM the things you want to say.

World building and Lore are what writers focus on when they can't think of interesting things for their characters to do.

if you want to create a universe like Dune or LotR then world building pretty much goes hand in hand with storytelling.

If you are writing a Spider-Man short set in New York, depending on what you have to do you can get away with minimal world building.

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>Slice of life
Not at all.

>Comedy "Anything goes" setting and no rules.
Probably better without it.

>Set in "Present world"
Minor.

>Fantasy/Sci Fi.
Extremely Important.

>Hard Sci-Fi or High Fantasy
Vital.

>In all cases
It needs to tie into the direct plot and no one should ever talk about something that should be obvious to the characters as if it were new.

/thread

Anything else is a massive cope by people who will never be successful writers. Research, research, research. If you are unwilling to research for hours and hours, years and years, then fucking give up now. The only way your fiction will be worthwhile and feel "original" is if you learn something about the world that most people don't know, and write a story around it. Any world you create afterwords must evolve from those core thematic elements, not the other way around.

Give me a quick run down of this new vegas settlement
I remember they were really dumb

I disagree, world building is vital to justify all the interesting things you want your characters to be able to do and the challenges they must face. We've seen what happens with recent works where they just assume that the character just being able to "Do things because they're them" is reason enough to explain their actions, and how it fails across the board. Male or female aimed, fantasy or "Real world" setting, without the worldbuilding to lay the foundation of what comes next, there's nothing for the characters to jump off of into situations that are truly interesting.

While this discussion usually edges towards fantasy, that's not what I mean. Take, for instance, The Godfather. Right off the bat they establish the "World" they're living in, which looks like our own but operates quite differently for the characters. Without this unique world setting of the internals of a crime family, most of the big moments would feel disjointed and random, and we can prove it through just looking down the line at similar mobster movies that fell well short because they assumed once people heard "Mobster", that was all the explanation needed. Lore is the respect everyone pays to the Godfather and the implications of how he rose to power, it's not an infodump in the middle of the scene like Charlies Angels cramming in that RBG was an Angel at one point. It's all in the service of making you believe this world is real and has a history, and the characters build from that.

>New Vegas
What the goddamn?

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You are confusing "World Building" with setting.

The fact that harry potter is a massive success and adored by millions punches a huge hole in your funny argument user

The setting and the dramatic question are not world building. I realize that might be confusing because of the verbage, but they're entirely distinct.

Harry Potter is proof of everything I said.

This settlement is from Fallout 3 not New Vegas. The settlements in NV actually cared about providing crops for the villages and establishing trade routes.

Not at all. Neither success or enduring popularity has any correlation with how much time people spend working out the insignificant details of their setting.

But three has trade routes from Canterbury commons. And megaton trades water for food

Not as important as womb ruining.

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wtf is that?

>Give me a quick run down of this new vegas settlement
You dumb shit
>I remember they were really dumb
You double dumb shit

> it gets a little annoying when people call a lack of exposition or attention to things that really don't matter bad writing.
Not as annoying as when something is said to have good writing for for focusing on the fluff especially when the fluff isn't very good or consistent.

This was a very uncomfortable fap.

It depend. A key thing to remember here is that World Building should be use as complement to a story rather than overtake it. You can have the most detail world ever but no one will care if the story is boring and/or the characters in that world are unlikable.

It actually makes sense in context

To marketers it's very, very important. You can sell absolute shit if you tell people it has "good worldbuilding."
Learn how to write and draw, then start coming up with some ideas for the background to your story.

Well ignoring the fact that Megaton is from 3 and not NV
Megaton was created to protect people from the dangers of the Wasteland, it was built by salvaging a nearby airport and it's planes, there's nothing left of the airport, the people needed help from the local religious people to help them but the religion revolved around the nuke and they didn't want to get rid of it so that's why there's a nuke, you have the option to disarm it or blow it up

Only the necessary information should be presented directly to the viewer. Otherwise it should be visual and more subtle. So that those that want to know can pick up on it without the details bogging down the story. Just don't do what manga does and do lore dumping in the first couple chapters before you get a reason to care about anything.

Plenty of good stories are set in the current world or in the past and don’t have extensive world building.

Contrary to all the good advice in this thread though I like world building for the sake of it, it’s not even a fantasy setting or sci-fi really. It does allow different types of stories to amuse myself with when I daydream though.