Being able to create lore and characters but not write stories

Does anyone else have the problem in which they can create multiple characters and an entire setting, and plot out a timeline of important past events but aren't quite sure how to actually, you know, write the damn story?! This is my number one fault with my writing. I have pages upon pages of character descriptions and lore, slowly accumulating and being revised over the course of nearly half a decade, but I've yet to write even a single chapter of my story. Anyone else have this problem? Does anyone know how to get out of this rut I'm currently in?

Characters have motivations and desires, personal goals and professional objectives. They want something and so they act to obtain or accomplish it, in a way consistent with their personality, and either supported or obstructed by the world around them, or by other characters in turn.

It might be formulaic, but there's a reason why cookie-cutter adventure, thriller and mystery novels are so ubiquitous - they're basically video game plots. Main character receives mission, strives to accomplish it, encounters obstacles on the way. It's a simple framework, but within that, there are infinite variations, and it's precisely the characters and lore that make the real good works stand out.

Start with writing shorter stuff, be it one-scene-long descriptions of mundane things that you'd usually get as prologues for stories, or one-chapter-long minor tales of minor characters. That way you will have something, and then when you want to write something bigger and can't you can look at it and know that you actually can.

That's how I got through it, at the very least.

A story is the consequence of characters doing things in a place. I second Kazeto's advice overall, but I would make it a bit more open-ended: Just have your characters interact with no particular goal in mind and let a story coalesce.

I have this problem to. I just start writing chapters and conversations.

I can usually develop the general idea for the beginning and end stretch of a story, with plenty of stuff inbetween. My main problem is that I don't really know how to smoothly connect it altogether. So I've done a lot of roleplays and the like to deal, letting others point the direction & then reacting naturally. Course when someone does something really off my hopes (i.e going full 'lol I must be god') I end up being lost again...

I would say, don't worry about it, write what you can and take joy in it. Plot may not be in your disposition. Maybe it's like trying to fit a seven-pointed-star-shaped peg into a five-pointed-star-shaped hole. Or it might be a different kind of story; driven by characters, ideas and settings, not by plot in the traditional sense (Anais Nin, Greer Gilman, Lady Murasaki, Ray Bradbury, Markus Zusak in The Book Thief, Zilpha Keatley Snyder in The Changeling and the Green-Sky Trilogy, or Austin Wright in Islandia).

Also, and I know you didn't say this and you actually want to write stories (so do I, and I can't), but I want to say that imaginary worlds, languages, lore and so forth should be created / discovered in joy and not have to be justified by saying it's for a story (something you could ostensibly sell), thereby proving you weren't either psychotic or a do-nothing layabout.