Writing stuff to describe and bringing to life a fantastic World within which your players can play the game is the most rewarding role of the Game Master. Since ceasing to buy endless “systems” and focusing on rules, shifting from mechanism to thinking about the fantasy itself, I’ve found my games deepening.
It’s easier to commit to creating the World and it’s more fun to experience the player’s (and your own) exploration of that World than it is to constantly pingle with questions around rules. There is no perfect “system” and while funding creators of game rules is enjoyable, it’s essentially unnecessary.
What’s more engaging is to bring to life the World and populate it with characters who are facing situations your players can resolve. Each piece that you add enriches the rest, bringing new facets into view. When the players pick up on some detail, even something small, there is enjoyment to be had in helping them explore it.
Running the game means adjudicating the rules, making judgements at the table, playing the role of characters, and presenting the World to the players. All of this can be enjoyable and rich, of course, but for me the greatest and deepest joy comes from imagining and presenting the World.
I’m focusing more on the World, on imagining and writing the details that I need for the next session. Sometimes I allow myself to explore some area or element in more depth, indulging in the imaginative pleasure of creation… but the main need is to provide what the players will have described to them next session.
Write your world. Describe it: give it texture and sound, smells and flavours, interesting places to explore and curious people to encounter. Put it in front of your players and discover what they choose to do within it. Give them toys to play with, fashioned from the imaginary reality you designed.
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
World-building is definitely one of the big draws to GMing for me. Inventing and describing a world that is consistent and makes sense, and has reasons for the PCs to get involved is a rewarding effort in its own right, leads to more depth at the table, and it also makes session prep and improvising adventures easier. Once I’ve internalized the way the world works, and what the NPCs and powers that be in the world want, and the players start interacting with that and developing their own goals and motivations, the details of adventures start ‘writing themselves’.
The other fun part of campaign prep for me is tweaking and adjusting the rules to support the game I have in mind — curating the character creation options and alternative rules systems that will both mirror the reality of the imagined world, and also realize my vision of the genre and playstyle that I’m looking for.
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Great stuff! Worldbuilding is a subject I sometimes find myself undecided about, and one that very much comes down to the dynamic of the group in question. In a way, I do like it when someone at the table wears “the big hat” and is the final arbiter of the reality of the world. Collaborative worldbuilding at the table can be a lot of fun and very rewarding, but depending on the group at the table and their mood, it can also be a total coin toss. The sense, even if that is a suspension of disbelief, that someone is authoritatively mediating a complete vision of an imagined reality, is reassuring in a weird way.
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