Conveying Setting Information

[bloodtide]

So, what do you do to present the world to the players? Do you infodump? Do you expect them to research? Do you provide a primer? And how does the players' lack of knowledge interact with the (assumed) knowledge of the PC?

In general each player will get a setting primer and a local primer, plus one for their characters race, profession, class, and history. Plus one of "things the player wants to know about". And this works out great for good players that like deep immersion role playing acting out their characters.

Some players won't read anything and don't care. Until it comes up in the game and suddenly they want their character to be an "expert". These clueless players have much harder time in the game...

In general if your a new player in my game, a clueless player, a player that does not care or other types of such players, I as DM do strongly recommend you play a clueless character. Good players that like deep immersion role playing acting out their characters often do this in my game to get a feel for things.

In general, run things much like a typical TV show....where the players, assuming they are good players that like deep immersion role playing acting out their characters and play attention, will get lots of info dumps and exposition from NPCs and the setting in general.

In general, I will show...often extremely and graphically...local things about the settling and add in plenty of descriptions.

In general, I treat the first little while of the game as sort of an introduction. I take things a bit slow on the setting information side. I don't expect players to know everything. And I won't waste time with "gotthca" stuff the players did not know.

Let's say that you decide to run Star Wars (Clone Wars era) for a group that has never, ever seen anything star wars. In your one page primer, what key points do you hit?

Well...as I'm no Star Wars expert. And have never seen, and never will see the silly cartoon 'clone wars' ever...

"It is a time of Galactic Civil War! The Droid Armies of the Separatists against the Clone Armies of the Republic! It's a simple enough War of Succession: the Separatists want to leave the Republic and the Republic will not allow that to happen. Fought on multiple fronts galaxy wide, there is plenty of room for a character to make a name, or some credit coins, for themselves either fighting in the war or doing other things in it's backdrop."

 

[mamba]

What I mean is like say you are playing a treasure hunter/tomb raider/uncharted game in the fantastical modern world, and you put a high premium on player agency in choosing the actual "adventure." We all know about Aztecs and Egyptians and other ancient civilizations, so players can decide they want to raid tombs of the ancient Kmer civilization, or whatever.

what difference does it actually make whether you search for lost Egyptian, Maya, or Khmer cities / treasure?

It changes the location you search in, but other than that…

 

[Kannik]

For a few campaigns I've adopted a two-prong approach that has worked really well.

If the campaign world is an original/new one, I will write up a 1-2 page overview of the world, often presented from (or some portion of it is) some "in-world" source. Sometimes that's a narrative story, sometimes it's from an ancient tome, sometimes it's from a person in the lore. Beyond some basic "hard" world facts, the most important thing for me is to indicate a campaign's tone and flavour, and give a sense of the style of adventuring about to be had. It may also lay the groundwork for why the characters have come together and are working/adventuring together.

The second prong (or only prong, if we're playing in a published campaign world everyone is familiar with) is to create an up to one page long personalized intro for each character. These touch on their history/backstory (as provided by the players) and then tell a story about the past month or three that brings the character right up to the moment at the start of the campaign. This allows me not only to make it personal for each character/player, but also provide a bit more world info that would be useful for that individual player in RPing their character (plus some uncommon knowledge that the character might know), without 'boring' the other players.

The best part I've found about the one-pagers however is that it facilitates dropping into the campaign kind of 'in media res', with the characters/players already invested and interested and smoothing over any awkward first few sessions as everyone finds their feet.

As things progress, for more specific or detailed information in the campaign it gets included in descriptions as we play along, sometimes with me noting that a particular character(s) would know something, or know something more, about this particular thing.

 

[Committed Hero]

In a perfect world I would use Loresheets, which provide character advancement at the same time as investment into chunks of the setting.

Historical gaming can address this issue, depending on how much research the GM is willing to do. Even something like a movie night can provide the baseline for what players need to know.

 

[jdrakeh]

Historically, I've written up a two-page primer. BUT. I've found that nobody reads those, either. So now I just drop in the PCs and let them f-around and find out.

 

[Voadam]

As a player I've gone into a d20 World of Warcraft RPG never having played the online game and just owning the monster book for my d20 games. My strategy for roleplay knowledge was for my jungle troll barbarian in character to not know the greater world and to come upon most things fresh as I came upon them.

 

[Ashley Cartwright]

The discussion around the Cosmere RPG kickstarter got me thinking about how we go about presenting setting information to players who have not, and probably won't, read the books or your primer or anything else. This is especially oriented toward worlds that have unusual or novel settings (Like Roshar in the Stormlight Archives) and you can't simply rely on tropes and assumptions (aka "it's like Earth except where we say it isn't.")

So, what do you do to present the world to the players? Do you infodump? Do you expect them to research? Do you provide a primer? And how does the players' lack of knowledge interact with the (assumed) knowledge of the PC?

The players are as involved in creating the setting as me, so I don't have any more knowledge about it than they do.

 

[Reynard]

The players are as involved in creating the setting as me, so I don't have any more knowledge about it than they do.

This is not the common way to do it, of course.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Historically, I've written up a two-page primer. BUT. I've found that nobody reads those, either. So now I just drop in the PCs and let them f-around and find out.

I don't think this is a bad way to do it. It's more interactive. More interaction, I think, will get the players paying more attention to the world building.

The players are as involved in creating the setting as me, so I don't have any more knowledge about it than they do.

This is how my group did our latest campaign. It's working great. It's how I'll do all them in the future.

 

[Hand of Evil]

It varies based on the level of the characters, but it starts with a map. It is detailed with the parties starting point out to about two days travel in all directions, then starts to become less know until they travel to or talk to NPC. Locally they know towns, rivers, seas, roads, politics, important people but only high-level information on places they have yet to explore.