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What separates "world-building" from being "banal padding"? How deep do you have to go to constitute good world building, but how much should you restrict it to keep it from overwhelming the plot?

as deep as you need to go for your characters and story to make sense. a children's story about a cute witch based loosely on fairy tales is going to require less intense world building than a dark fantasy epic about a young woman who grows to become a powerful sorceress. just be careful that you don't fall into the trap of using world building as an excuse to put off writing your actual story, and accept that you'll have to make some stuff up on the fly. if something doesn't work you can always fix it in editing.

assuming you're the mod, your players need to be able to envision their characters in the world. imagine you're in the middle of the city you want to build. what do you see? what do you hear? what do you smell? is this a normal amount of foot traffic or is it a holiday?

people don't need to know the brands of things being sold in the stores, but they need to be able to picture themselves in different parts of the world. you definitely need a map of the major cities (or major space stations or mountain ranges or whatever). if i want to talk about my character going from A to B, i should be able to have some idea of how far A is from B and what lies between those two points.

graphics are great for this. if you can get a good detailed picture of some endor-looking forest town for your forest dwellers and fanart from blade runner for your urban nightmare city, then that's less detail you have to provide in text.

it turns into banal padding when you make the world so detailed that nobody is able to interact with it without spending an hour or more reading over the locations pages to make sure they don't make any errors. so long as you're encouraging your players to use their own creativity, all you need is the basic structure of the place. most everybody can imagine what suburban sprawl looks like: just say "it's miles of suburban sprawl and strip malls and palm trees and ugly pastel ranch-style houses" and let your players fill in any other details they like in their threads.

make a general overview of the world but only focus on the things that will actually, you know, affect your characters. so if your world is a medieval world with magic, talk about it being a medieval world ruled by kings and queens and the magic being whatever it is but restrict yourself to only two - three paragraphs. after that devote the rest of the details to flesh out the country/city/kingdom your character is from and the other things they'll make direct contact with. are they a guardsman? talk about the organisations that protect people. are they a priest? talk about the gods and goddesses and the religious beliefs.

i know people get mad and complain about how the world building seems only to revolve around the character/s but there's a fine line of 'fleshing out the entire world' and 'here's a fucking article about a country my character will never go to but heard of'. spare yourself and the reader but focusing on details that will come up in your character's/story's setting at first. if you wanna expand upon later on cool for you but don't kill yourself trying to figure out the economics of gold/silver/bronze dragon shits or something.

in your head, there is no detail too small. every tiny thing you think of, write it down and keep it because you should know everything. you are god.

in terms of your story, only give information the reader needs to know to understand the context of what's happening.

What's more important than the amount of information is how you present it. To use an example from a video game I played a while ago, the characters would frequently just awkwardly randomly stop and spew information at each other like they're tour guides: talking about how significant this flower is to the culture of a town or what this guy does at his job or to say that the train departs every 30 minutes when none of these things are relevant to their conversations or the plot. To other characters who already know all this information. They stopped just short of just turning towards the camera to talk directly to the player. Not only was this useless information no one needed, it was just plain bad writing where the writers just wanted to show off all their ~deep lore~.

There really isn't a such thing as too much world building, in my opinion, but you shouldn't just throw it at people going "look, look how much thought I put into why the country's imperial army wears poofy hats!" Weave in for people to find, but don't just outright tell them that this is your world building. Show it off in your settings and the way people act and react to things. If you do any infodumps, make sure that it is relevant to the characters present and that it's information your audience/players (if we're talking about RP) can use.

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