Experiences In your opinion, what's your greatest weakness in worldbuilding?

[GraySkyl]

I'm always trying to get better at worldbuilding, so I try to look at the things I'm worse at so I can work on those parts. I thought if I heard about the experiences of others, maybe I can avoid even more pitfalls.

My personal greatest weakness is probably making sure that the parts, I'm personally not interested in, are still engaging, and finding an angle that is interesting, instead of using same old cliches you can find in any other world.
I also tend to get attached to the way my worlds work and sometimes have difficulties allowing it to change during the course of a story/an adventure. A great adventure that changes nothing in the world isn't interesting or engaging (imo) and certainly not impactful.

What are your experiences with difficulties or weaknesses in worldbuilding?

 

[Jannah]

Coming up with names for things. I'm terrible with names. Like, I came up with an entire fictional religious order and their functions, yet I do not have a name for them or the religion. Hell, I don't even have a name for what they're worshipping (I'm not calling it a god because it's not really).

 

[GraySkyl]

Coming up with names for things. I'm terrible with names. Like, I came up with an entire fictional religious order and their functions, yet I do not have a name for them or the religion. Hell, I don't even have a name for what they're worshipping (I'm not calling it a god because it's not really).

I feel your pain! It can grind the whole building to a halt

 

[Jannah]

I feel your pain! It can grind the whole building to a halt

It really does, but fortunately it's not anything I need immediately. I do plenty of worldbuilding but then have zero plot, which also halts everything to a stop.

 

[Solivagante]

Ditto the name thing. Historically, I'd say my biggest weakness has been 'worldbuilder's disease', IE trying to generate too much lore/information, even when it's not important to the story. I'd like to think I've gotten better over time at identifying what sort of information is important to share with others, and what becomes just a giant wall of text for someone checking out a thread. The GM may need to know the history of the last several centuries in the setting, but unless characters are exceptionally long-lived or it directly shapes the starting plot, players probably don't - but they might need to know more about the biomes, religions, and economics to build their characters' personal histories.

...But I do still get distracted chasing causation through the setting, even in directions which don't mean anything for the actual plot.

 

[KAOS]

The pitfall of worldbuilding for me is, even if I spent hours on my lore or setting, it will always conflict with someone's version of the story they want to see.
So when it comes to worldbuilding, I truly hardly do it at all, I'm easy on myself these days. I set it in either modern setting or a fantasy setting which has fluid boundaries. Meaning, like my players can have heavy input. If they give integrity to the story line and characters through their collaboration of sorts. My worlds are always heavily collaborated or based on an already made world.

That is for worldbuilding with roleplay.

With like my own personal writing. My pitfall is remaining organized with my thoughts. I'm a bit everywhere and my worldbuilding doesn't always have a linear creation to it if you know what I mean. It's all over the place.