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

[RenleyRenfield]

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.
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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.

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.
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This post brings up interesting points I was thinking about... not aimed at anyone in general, but as an aside to what makes lore matter to players... it also worth noting the way some people can become too hard-lined on lore.

Liking lore from one edition to another and not agreeing with all the changes is fine.

But nothing is worse than that kind of awful person who runs to scream from the hills of changes in lore they don't like. Or changes in lore that they think changes some aspect of the game they overly obsess over. As if their entitled opinion is the only that matters. They have nothing good to say of changes, even ones they would greatly benefit from.

I am not talking about morally or ethically problematic changes.

I am talking about the kinds of changes this person pointed out enjoying in their post. Ones that were made in earnest to make the game better, more fun, and involve a wider array of stories and player ideas.
Moving from oWoD to nWoD = there were good changes to the lore! Some of which greatly changes the games lore.

And with a little effort a player could bring back in older stuff they liked. Players and GMs alter lore often anyway.

It's ok to like old lore, it's ok to like the new lore.
It's ok for there to be changes to the lore.
Games need to evolve, and that means often changing the lore.

I just don't think its good or wise to disparage a game just because it is trying to improve - even if it misses a few spots that people liked. It will always have a lot more it improved on for sure.

Never disparage a game because you don't like the new lore. Other people like those changes, and we should respect that. Just talk about what you loved, find ways to bring it back in, and embrace the new that certainly has more benefits than the old did.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Never disparage a game because you don't like the new lore. Other people like those changes, and we should respect that. Just talk about what you loved, find ways to bring it back in, and embrace the new that certainly has more benefits than the old did.

Tell that to the WoD grognards. I’m sure they’ll take your words into consideration and change their behavior accordingly… not.

My advice is to move on and make your own franchises. We’re already seeing that with the new wave of WoD heartbreakers like Curseborn, Nightborn, Blood Ties, and Harrowed World. I would prefer a WitchCraft or Everlasting revival myself, but we can’t always get what we want.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

Tell that to the WoD grognards. I’m sure they’ll take your words into consideration and change their behavior accordingly… not.

My advice is to move on and make your own franchises. We’re already seeing that with the new wave of WoD heartbreakers like Curseborn, Nightborn, Blood Ties, and Harrowed World. I would prefer a WitchCraft or Everlasting revival myself, but we can’t always get what we want.

Oh, the world HAS very much told grognards of WoD to go stuff it.

When nWoD came out it was so successful, it got two editions, and a metric ton of expansions. ...and the grognards complained... and everyone told them to jog off

When v5 came out it outsold every game system for almost 2 years running. And it had deep changes to the metaplot and lore... and the grognards complained, and still this day the entire community tells them to go stuff it.

Like, big changes, small changes. There is always at least "that one guy who feels entitled to a game" and they go to forums and servers and complain about the changes. These people are often hypocrites anyway, they are ok with gutting and changing game X, but not their precious game Y.

That person is always laughably wrong and in general not welcome.

No. You don't have to create entirely new IP to make a game new edition, that's just wrong. Forgotten Realms, Vampire and Shadowrun all benefit GREATLY by lore changes, retcons, and updates.

New IP, and new worlds are great! We should be doing that. But not because some dodo bird on the internet thinks someone else's product is their precious we can't touch.

Change is good.
Embrace change.

Its super easy to just add back in metaplot and lore you like from any edition of a game, so that's no reason to hold up many other needed changes.

 

[Campbell]

I think the idea that lore is set in stone once set does a harm to our ability to take creative risks and iterate on a game's design. I don't see any reason why we should treat it any differently than we treat mechanics. Obviously, you don't want to change too much at once, but that's true of any new version of a game.

Additionally, I think the idea of having to keep a continuity causes us to do really stuff when we design new versions of existing lore. The sort of convoluted Time of Troubles stuff where we create silly story events instead of just making changes creates additional complexity that does not serve the purpose of the design changes. Better to just make changes you need to make.

As to grognards, I don't think anyone is entitled to having their preferred vision of a thing maintained. Particularly if they have moved themselves from the potential audience for a new version of a thing. Like you cannot sacrifice your game on the altar of people who don't really want anything new.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Though they clearly learned some lessons in the Curseborn lore; its very notable in the way the narrating characters speak about the group "elders".

 

[Cergorach]

For me game lore gives context to the world you play in. Making it more then the nicely painted facade of an old Hollywood film set, it looks nice from a distance, until you one a door you weren't meant to.

Something like D&D Forgotten Realms has so much lore, making an imho kinda boring world, still the default setting at our table. No matter where the players go, there's something written about the locale, while still having enough room between those nuggets to do your own thing.

RPGs/settings like (old) World of Darkness and Shadowrun have a BIG metaplot, and that's part of the attraction for many. I remember discussing the 'fluff', folks finding out stuff, speculating, etc. It made to us feel as if that world was 'alive'. It was neat, but in limited doses, I suspect.

Other games/settings are very self contained and honestly do not give the players anything beyond that VERY nicely painted facade. When they walk through a door, the GM better think quick on their feet. I have no problem with that as a GM, but I do think those might be fun side steps from our D&D games, but not long term changes in how we play. Nor is every GM as comfortable with that style of play as I (and others) am. Something like The Spire RPG, Mothership short adventures, Bastionland, etc.

Honestly, the example of x amount of new pled species that someone thought up on a bad schroom trip are far, FAR, less appealing then a well thought out concept. If that requires the use of a couple of strange species, fine. But certain types of creators want to overwhelm you with choice, often VERY exotic choices. As an example, for Shadowrun I really liked the original Human, Orc, Troll, Dwarf, and Human. Today there are more SR species then you can shake a stick at. For World of Darkness, it's the different Vampire Clans, some were added down the line, luckily not that many, and while they had some cool stuff, I always found them 'less'...

For me the problem comes not from the depth of a setting, but how patched on additional content feels. I wasn't a fan of the Half-Orc in D&D 3e PHB, I am even less a fan of the Dragonborne, and all the other fantastic races that 4e added and 5e inherited. I was a big fan of the Humanoid book in 2e, but that was something optional, not core. I LOVE Draconians, but am not a fan of the Dragonborne. A lot of those additions feel (to me) taped on, instead of being integral to the setting.

 

[zarionofarabel]

I got V5 a little while ago and I think the lore changes are great! I also think the system changes are top notch too! I can't wait to run a new VtM game! Weee!

 

[VelvetViolet]

New IP, and new worlds are great! We should be doing that. But not because some dodo bird on the internet thinks someone else's product is their precious we can't touch.

Agree to disagree. I think that’s a completely valid motivation. Paizo did it and to great success. I think grognards should do that instead of complaining and bullying. I never had an issue with WoD lore before its fans bullied me into hating it. If they had left to live in their walled garden, then I wouldn’t’ve cared.

Its super easy to just add back in metaplot and lore you like from any edition of a game, so that's no reason to hold up many other needed changes.

For your personal games, sure. Otherwise, it’s a form of cancelation that kills the community. All of my favorite games have been canceled, the communities dried up, and there’s no one to discuss it with. It’s disheartening.

I’m gonna provide a personal example. I like the canceled 90s game Nephilim. It’s the only game that made me like lore because you play immortals who were personally involved in the lore. It has this elaborate structure of Major Arcana tribes that provides culture for the immortals. Each differs wildly from the next. They’re tied into the historical figure Akhenaton, making an otherwise forgettable historical footnote into a huge occult flashpoint. The game is unfinished so I had to frankenstein stuff together using unpublished material, conversions from the French, and my own interpolation of what I think Chaosium would’ve made had they been better prepared. That includes ditching the thetan angle in favor of making the Nephilim into basically Avatar: The Last Airbender. But I digress.

Anyway, According to some leaks going around, the upcoming second edition is allegedly gonna remove all that in favor of a WitchCraft-esque covenant setup. Among many other extreme changes, like tweaking the thetan angle so they steal bodies from unborn babies. At that point it sounds like a completely different game devoid of what drew me to the original. I have no reason to interact with whatever new fans are brought in because we don’t like any of the same things. If I tell them “hey I like this completely different thing I made with the same name, are you interested in talking about it?” then at best I’m gonna get weird looks.

I’m at the point where I don’t like ttrpgs anymore. I don’t share any interests with the people who make or play ttrpgs anymore. I’m only here because I liked some now forgotten ttrpgs in the past and feel nostalgic about it.

Actually no, I do still occasionally find new games to like such as Night’s Black Agents or StokerVerse, but it’s just not the same. They don’t scratch the itches I want scratched. It’s so frustrating.

I think the idea that lore is set in stone once set does a harm to our ability to take creative risks and iterate on a game's design. I don't see any reason why we should treat it any differently than we treat mechanics. Obviously, you don't want to change too much at once, but that's true of any new version of a game.

Yeah. It becomes a straitjacket that strangles creativity after a while. It’s never relevant to the PCs, but just an excuse for the writers to stroke their own egos. I don’t understand why the fans even like it because it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. If I’m playing a guy who became a vampire five minutes ago, then what should I care that some woman dumped her boyfriend 80,000 years ago? This is why I preferred the loose modular player-focused Vampire: The Requiem continuity over the Vampire: The Masquerade continuity. That said, Requiem did eventually suffer from its own problems because the writers couldn’t seem to decide what they wanted to do with it and ended up running up against various limitations. Bloodlines like Kallisti, Morotrophians and Children of Judas made more sense as emotional vampires instead of being shoehorned into bloodsuckers, they could’ve stood to add more covenants a la WitchCraft, I think they could’ve stood to add some immortal intrigues that spanned time periods, and the clan and bloodline bloat really showed that they needed to overhaul the systems handling that (I’m now critical of the whole concept of clans as a result). I also hate those stupid morality meters and I will die on that hill. Not to mention that I don’t like grimdark anymore after outgrowing my teen angst phase and being kicked around like a soccer ball by life. Ultimately I decided that I preferred WitchCraft or Everlasting instead (among other things you can play crime-fighting angels a la Touched by an Angel), but I only wish those got the same attention and number of supplements.

As to grognards, I don't think anyone is entitled to having their preferred vision of a thing maintained. Particularly if they have moved themselves from the potential audience for a new version of a thing. Like you cannot sacrifice your game on the altar of people who don't really want anything new.

I think a lot of that vitriol would go away if copyright law didn’t prevent fans from forking their own version whenever the copyright holder decided to do another reboot. I think grognards should be allowed to fork their own versions, if only to maintain peace of mind. Like how Paizo made their own D&D clone. It worked out for them.

Like, the root reason I hate WoD is because I was bullied by its fans for liking CoD. They bullied me because they felt entitled and betrayed. But they never bullied me for liking WitchCraft because they don’t feel betrayed by that, so I don’t have the same trauma response.

I think publishers need to toss the idea of canon in the trash and adopt a multiverse model that satisfies everyone. D&D already does this. Fans can publish their own campaign settings whenever they want and build their own communities, like Paizo did. We need more Paizos.

RPGs/settings like (old) World of Darkness and Shadowrun have a BIG metaplot, and that's part of the attraction for many. I remember discussing the 'fluff', folks finding out stuff, speculating, etc. It made to us feel as if that world was 'alive'. It was neat, but in limited doses, I suspect.

I never understood the appeal. These are supposed to be games that you play, not passive media that you passively watch like books or movies, not religions you must obey or be punished. If the information isn’t relevant to PCs and will never come up in play, then it’s just irrelevant self-aggrandizing microfiction. This doesn’t belong in a game, it belongs in a comic book. Those publishers should leave the ttrpg hobby and go into comic books, where they belong. Open up market space for new publishers to write actually player-focused content.

For World of Darkness, it's the different Vampire Clans, some were added down the line, luckily not that many, and while they had some cool stuff, I always found them 'less'...

Yeah. I don’t like it either. I think from a design perspective you should either have 3-5 clans expressing excessively broad archetypes a la Vampire: The Requiem (ignoring bloodline prestige classes here, as well the additional clans added in supplements), ditch the concept entirely like WitchCraft does, or have hundreds like The Everlasting: Book of the Unliving does. I mean, really, what is the purpose of having clans to begin with? I’ve grown weary of the concept because in practice they end up being these weird bioessentialist high school cliques that make fantasy race bioessentialism look tame by comparison. The writers squashed together ancestry, race, culture, class, personality, politics, etc. into these ugly frankenstein mishmashes that I can’t take seriously anymore. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer Nephilim or WitchCraft instead. Instead of your PC’s personality being determined by what vampire turned him, he chooses a secret society to join based on shared interests and goals… like how people behave more or less in real life, but with magic added.

I think it works for antagonists in a vampire hunting game, where they’re just cookie-cutter monsters that don’t have three-dimensional personalities, like Captain Kronos or the Foundling series of urban fantasy books. It falls apart when you try to explore them as if they were actual people.

It also unfortunately betrays some really gross bioessentialist biases on the part of fans. I’ve listened to hairsplitting discussions about how “you should play your character this way because of their clan” and it just sounds really gross. Imagine if they were talking about a person from a real ethnic group to see what I mean.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Agree to disagree. I think that’s a completely valid motivation. Paizo did it and to great success. I think grognards should do that instead of complaining and bullying. I never had an issue with WoD lore before its fans bullied me into hating it. If they had left to live in their walled garden, then I wouldn’t’ve cared.


For your personal games, sure. Otherwise, it’s a form of cancelation that kills the community. All of my favorite games have been canceled, the communities dried up, and there’s no one to discuss it with. It’s disheartening.

I’m gonna provide a personal example. I like the canceled 90s game Nephilim. It’s the only game that made me like lore because you play immortals who were personally involved in the lore. It has this elaborate structure of Major Arcana tribes that provides culture for the immortals. Each differs wildly from the next. They’re tied into the historical figure Akhenaton, making an otherwise forgettable historical footnote into a huge occult flashpoint. The game is unfinished so I had to frankenstein stuff together using unpublished material, conversions from the French, and my own interpolation of what I think Chaosium would’ve made had they been better prepared. That includes ditching the thetan angle in favor of making the Nephilim into basically Avatar: The Last Airbender. But I digress.

Anyway, According to some leaks going around, the upcoming second edition is allegedly gonna remove all that in favor of a WitchCraft-esque covenant setup. Among many other extreme changes, like tweaking the thetan angle so they steal bodies from unborn babies. At that point it sounds like a completely different game devoid of what drew me to the original. I have no reason to interact with whatever new fans are brought in because we don’t like any of the same things. If I tell them “hey I like this completely different thing I made with the same name, are you interested in talking about it?” then at best I’m gonna get weird looks.

I’m at the point where I don’t like ttrpgs anymore. I don’t share any interests with the people who make or play ttrpgs anymore. I’m only here because I liked some now forgotten ttrpgs in the past and feel nostalgic about it.

Actually no, I do still occasionally find new games to like such as Night’s Black Agents or StokerVerse, but it’s just not the same. They don’t scratch the itches I want scratched. It’s so frustrating.


Yeah. It becomes a straitjacket that strangles creativity after a while. It’s never relevant to the PCs, but just an excuse for the writers to stroke their own egos. I don’t understand why the fans even like it because it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. If I’m playing a guy who became a vampire five minutes ago, then what should I care that some woman dumped her boyfriend 80,000 years ago? This is why I preferred the loose modular player-focused Vampire: The Requiem continuity over the Vampire: The Masquerade continuity. That said, Requiem did eventually suffer from its own problems because the writers couldn’t seem to decide what they wanted to do with it and ended up running up against various limitations. Bloodlines like Kallisti, Morotrophians and Children of Judas made more sense as emotional vampires instead of being shoehorned into bloodsuckers, they could’ve stood to add more covenants a la WitchCraft, I think they could’ve stood to add some immortal intrigues that spanned time periods, and the clan and bloodline bloat really showed that they needed to overhaul the systems handling that (I’m now critical of the whole concept of clans as a result). I also hate those stupid morality meters and I will die on that hill. Not to mention that I don’t like grimdark anymore after outgrowing my teen angst phase and being kicked around like a soccer ball by life. Ultimately I decided that I preferred WitchCraft or Everlasting instead (among other things you can play crime-fighting angels a la Touched by an Angel), but I only wish those got the same attention and number of supplements.


I think a lot of that vitriol would go away if copyright law didn’t prevent fans from forking their own version whenever the copyright holder decided to do another reboot. I think grognards should be allowed to fork their own versions, if only to maintain peace of mind. Like how Paizo made their own D&D clone. It worked out for them.

Like, the root reason I hate WoD is because I was bullied by its fans for liking CoD. They bullied me because they felt entitled and betrayed. But they never bullied me for liking WitchCraft because they don’t feel betrayed by that, so I don’t have the same trauma response.

I think publishers need to toss the idea of canon in the trash and adopt a multiverse model that satisfies everyone. D&D already does this.

You think D&D's current lore satisfies everyone?

And I notice you talk a lot about players and PCs. How do you feel about GMs? Do their interests and preferences matter in your estimation? I've run many games in settings where the lore matters quite a bit to me, almost certainly more than it mattered to the players. Should I leave the hobby and write comic books too?

 

[dragoner]

The lore police have been alerted.