What makes setting lore "actually matter" to the players?

[aramis erak]

Yeah but while there’s a handful of people like you, threads like this wouldn’t exist if this was a common paradigm in the hobby.

It's common enough - outside the D&D sphere, at least. Especially licensed games.

I'd say about half of the players I've run for have had 1 to 4 settings they were into the lore for...but that's largely either 1-2 D&D settings, or 1-4 licensed or deep lore settings (especially Star Wars, Star Trek, SG-1, L5R, Marvel, and DC)...

The thing is, the majority of players overall are D&D only, and that's not most of my player base over the last 34 years. Of the 400+ total players, at least 200 of them had lore fixations. For just D&D AL, of the 30-some different players, about 1/4 were lore fixated on one or more D&D settings... but only 4 were fixated on FR lore. of the 40+ for TSR Retail-Play, only one was lore focused - and he was focused upon Ravenloft, for the Vecna getting sucked into Ravenloft adventure... he was disappointed. Especially since another PC opted to go with Vecna...

Trek games, most of the players have been into the lore, with a few just along for the ride. And that really yanked several of the non-lore into Trek. (CC nee B wasn't a trek fan, but played, then decided to try watching, and got majorly into the lore and series...)
Star Wars, of some 30 players about 1/3 have been lore focused; 1/3 have been casual fans, and 1/3 are along for the ride.
SG1, of the 5p I had, 2 were lore focused, 1 was casual, and 2 were along for the ride. 1 more who couldn't make it was casual. I'd count myself as lore focused there, but only lightly so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As I said earlier, I think you have to assess games that are based on extent fiction or media properties different from games that come with their own lore about how much people will care, or you're going to end up with a fairly distorted picture.

 

[aramis erak]

As I said earlier, I think you have to assess games that are based on extent fiction or media properties different from games that come with their own lore about how much people will care, or you're going to end up with a fairly distorted picture.

certain deep lore settings feel licensed even tho' they're not: L5R, WoD, 7th sea, Traveller. For D&D, all the various ones generated licensed media - but many came to D&D from them, and so they function like licensed settings, especially FR and DL.

 

[Thomas Shey]

certain deep lore settings feel licensed even tho' they're not: L5R, WoD, 7th sea, Traveller. For D&D, all the various ones generated licensed media - but many came to D&D from them, and so they function like licensed settings, especially FR and DL.

I think, though, they still don't have the advantage of people coming to them with interest in the lore already implanted. (Oddly, D&D, at least some of the settings, may be a partial exception to that because people may have read the novels before they ever played the game. I suspect that only applies significantly to the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings, though).

 

[Lanefan]

Then I fire-bombed the planet and killed everyone.

"Wipe them out. All of them." - Palpatine/Sidious.

 

[aramis erak]

I think, though, they still don't have the advantage of people coming to them with interest in the lore already implanted. (Oddly, D&D, at least some of the settings, may be a partial exception to that because people may have read the novels before they ever played the game. I suspect that only applies significantly to the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings, though).

All the ones I mentioned, save 7th Sea, have spawned fiction; most of the Traveller ones were not licensed. (Marc's Agent isn't licensed since he still owned the IP when he released it; Jeff Swycaffer wasn't using the OTU. Chuck Gannon's work is very Traveller inspired - he was, before his success as a novelist, one of the most prolific of MegaTraveller article writers... including several which later became expansion rulebook content.)
L5R 5th intentionally schlepped some decent fiction out the door free - and is one of the few where the in-rulebook fiction is actually readable and useful. I indeed had one player who came to RPGs solely from reading L5R novels.
I'll note that Deadlands has a series of decent novels and may soon join that list.

Note I said Decent, not Good, nor Great. They're readable and informative.

Space 1889 also has fiction, and it's good.

Battletech/Mechwarrior also has some draw from novels.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All the ones I mentioned, save 7th Sea, have spawned fiction;

Spawning fiction and the fiction being widely available are not the same thing.

most of the Traveller ones were not licensed. (Marc's Agent isn't licensed since he still owned the IP when he released it; Jeff Swycaffer wasn't using the OTU. Chuck Gannon's work is very Traveller inspired - he was, before his success as a novelist, one of the most prolific of MegaTraveller article writers... including several which later became expansion rulebook content.)

Traveler is in a weird spot because in a lot of Traveler games, most of the setting lore is largely irrelevant; you need to understand the available technology and campaign type, and possibly the aliens, but you can understand little or nothing about the Imperium and it simply won't matter because it looks so much like a large number of other imperial SF settings. At most you need to understand certain parts of the SF genre, but its a fairly wide-reaching part.

L5R 5th intentionally schlepped some decent fiction out the door free - and is one of the few where the in-rulebook fiction is actually readable and useful. I indeed had one player who came to RPGs solely from reading L5R novels.

I'll accept this was all true, but I've got to say until you mentioned it I didn't even know it existed. That doesn't make me think the majority of people playing the game have ever seen it before they played, either.

I'll note that Deadlands has a series of decent novels and may soon join that list.

Note I said Decent, not Good, nor Great. They're readable and informative.

Space 1889 also has fiction, and it's good.

Battletech/Mechwarrior also has some draw from novels.

Doesn't matter how good any of it is if people haven't seen it before they started playing, though. And a lot of game fiction is easy to go below the radar. I gave a pass to some D&D fiction because it was so commonly found in bookstores at one time.

 

[aramis erak]

Doesn't matter how good any of it is if people haven't seen it before they started playing, though. And a lot of game fiction is easy to go below the radar. I gave a pass to some D&D fiction because it was so commonly found in bookstores at one time.

Deadlands, L5R, and Castle Falkenstein have all had people come to the game from the fiction. I've had people looking for games because they read the fiction.

CF, I never saw them in game stores... only at B&N. And then a player gifted me with 3 of them.
The L5R fiction for 5E was much hyped and predated the beta. I had 2 players who asked at the store about L5R show up while I was running.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Deadlands, L5R, and Castle Falkenstein have all had people come to the game from the fiction. I've had people looking for games because they read the fiction.

CF, I never saw them in game stores... only at B&N. And then a player gifted me with 3 of them.
The L5R fiction for 5E was much hyped and predated the beta. I had 2 players who asked at the store about L5R show up while I was running.

To be blunt, all this proves is someone read the game fiction there before hitting the game. But I roll to disbelieve that's the common case with most of those. I'm not sure I even think its common with the D&D fiction, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt there.

 

[VelvetViolet]

I generally despise lore as irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction. That's one of the reasons why I dislike World of Darkness and preferred other games like C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness, and Nephilim.

I adore WitchCraft for its broad flexible setting that more or less reflects how urban fantasy fiction was written, without all the weirdo baggage that I disliked about World of Darkness. The factions were driven by actual ideologies rather than shallow clique nonsense like "basement dwelling chud vampire" or "sneaky werewolf." The Unisystem rules and unified worldbuilding made crossover play easy. For example, the "ferals" (totemic shapeshifters) could emulate the Talbot stereotype who transforms involuntarily under the full moon or a Werewolf: The Forsaken-esque Sumerian spiritual warrior that protected the balance between the mundane and magical worlds (this was written a few years before Forsaken released, eerily enough). It would be great if the game wasn't canceled for decades and the fandom dried up.

I thought Chronicles was pretty neat, even though I didn't agree with every creative decision. It wasn't WitchCraft, but it had its charms. The bloodlines, the factions, the bestiaries, the historical eras, all of it sounded neat to me. I particularly loved Hunter: The Vigil and Changeling: The Lost for their broad and flexible settings with lots of factions, powers, creatures, etc. What ruined it for me were the haters. I got viciously cyberbullied for liking it in the 2000s and early 2010s by World of Darkness fans, not to mention a bizarre fixation among the CoD fans for masochistic mechanics I despised (the morality meters are fundamentally stupid and I will die on that hill, and also I just don't like grimdark settings anymore after outgrowing my teen angst phase), which ultimately led to me just leaving the hobby because I couldn't deal with the vitriol. To this day, they still trot out fake statistics like "nWoD flopped" when the ICv2 indicates it was a huge financial success for five years straight and popular enough that it got second editions in the 2010s under a different publisher.

By contrast, I found my myself drawn to Nephilim for opposite reasons. That game has a lot of lore, especially in the original French version. Usually I dislike lore for being irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction, and to be fair a lot of the French lore seems to be exactly that, but I fell in love with the US version because it made that lore personally relevant to PCs through its past life mechanics. The PCs could be personally involved in historical intrigues, flashback to events, and engage with the legacy of their past actions. Unfortunately, the BRP mechanics were a horrible fit for this, especially since Chaosium took the messy French 1st edition rulebook as a loose foundation before just making stuff up and changing their minds mid-development and releasing supplements with new mechanics that overruled the core rules. It's this whole thing. (The French version trudged along and got lots of rules refinements, eventually abandoning BRP in the 2000s third edition in favor of a roll under d20 mechanic, with the fourth and fifth editions making up new systems due to the rights being resold multiple times. It took the French version until the 2020 fifth edition to make past lives easy to manage and possible to recall during play. It does this by simply treating past lives as skills, replacing a conventional skill system.) Also, the PCs are body snatching thetans; that allegedly rubbed players badly because it was morally repugnant... I don't understand why they would care when other games let you play puppy-eating vampires, but whatever. Anyway, poor design aside, it has thus far been the only game that made me actually like lore.