Here were my thoughts:
I think for me...
The sort of 'generic' fantasy setting. The sort of world you put together when you want to run an old-style D&D game but you're not really sure about all this politics and realism and such.
Endless plains or grass stretching under the world's slightly alien sky. A scattering of lonely, walled towns in a wide-open wilderness. Isolated little farms where the farmers struggle to survive, and are sometimes wiped out without warning by rampaging monsters or strangely lovecraftian crop diseases. Forests with trees of impossible size. Sometimes stranger places: deserts of glittering silver sand, wastelands covered in strange crystal growths, vast moss-floored mushroom forests in incomprehensibly huge caverns. Dungeons and monuments and ruins dot the landscape. Some from from fallen kingdoms, some the sewers or catacombs of long-abandoned towns, some the towers of wizards. Some just go entirely unexplained; perhaps there's a reason they exist, but it's nothing the players or the locals know.
No real long range communication. Each kingdom or settlement has only barely heard stories of the next one over. Politics and intrigue limited to the occasional monster-disguised-as-a-royal-vizier, or usurping anti-paladin that kills the wise ancient king. And Kings are just people with castles in charge of fielding a military to protect and control the handful of towns in their little corner of the world. Adventurers as a profession. Maybe even the silliness of a Thieves' Guild in some towns.
I can run that kind of thing.
Give me something like Exalted, though, and while I absolutely love the setting, my brain starts to injure itself under the strain of trying to figure out the motives of so ungodly many different factions and events, as well as deciding what else is happening all over the world at any given moment that will have some significant impact.
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