Worldbuilding overkill?

I just listened to the Sons of Kryos episode #34, where their "Good Sentence" was "Hey, I've got a good idea for a campaign." Much of the focus was on introducing an idea to the players and letting them have a hand in deciding what the whole thing is about.

And that got me thinking about traditional worldbuilding and the trend in modern indie games to do almost no worldbuilding at all, sometimes creating the entire setting on the fly during play. Compared to traditional roleplaying, as I've seen it at least, in which a GM might spend years, or at least a couple months, preparing a campaign, it's quite a contrast. I remember putting off starting my Miramer campaign because, after two years of development, I still didn't enough detail worked out to be comfortable running it.

This makes me think about some GM advice in [[http://www.crngames.com/the_shadow_of_yesterday/|The Shadow of Yesterday]], which I'll paraphrase… when you've got something really cool, don't save it until later, show it as soon as possible.

And this is based on an idea that I've gleaned from various sources: Anything that doesn't affect play doesn't matter.

It's something I have to focus on more. I don't think quickly on my feet and I like to have a lot of structure under me to fall back on. But I realize I have spent a lot of time not playing a campaign I wanted to run because I "wasn't ready." And then when we did finally get to play, much of my preparation never saw the light of day.

There's something to be said about not spending so much time in prep. I just need to figure out how to run a game without wanting so much background material available.