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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 9449002" data-attributes="member: 6999616">My players will generally read a short primer. We're all in our fifties or older. I do get irritated with players who won't make any effort to be able to role-play real things that their characters would know. An example is a player who will dig deeply into Egyptology or the KGB, but in a campaign that lasted twelve years, where he played a seventeenth-century naval officer, never saw any point in learning elementary sailing-ship terminology. I wasn't asking him to master the field, just to be able to hold basic conversations in character.  Since I generally run games in alternate histories, with a mission framework, the characters get briefings on the places they'll be going. The trick with those is to keep them short and interesting. A good way to do that is to find some piece of popular understanding about the setting which is wrong, and fit the actual truth into the scenario. For example, in my WWII India game, there was a scenario about someone who stole the quarterly payments to the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan. Before the British took over, the hill tribes made part of their living by institutionalised theft and raiding from the valleys. The British put a stop to that, before discovering that the hills are too barren to support their population. The valley peoples were from the same groups as the hill folk, and had accepted the raiding for centuries; the violence was quite restrained, and there was no destruction, just theft. So the British ended up paying for the hill tribes to buy food from the valleys, which was called "payments for road maintenance and security," though everyone on the ground knew what it was for. The colonists tried to believe it was cheaper than keeping soldiers there to guard the valleys. Theft of these funds was a serious matter for everyone concerned! I'll happily credit the characters with knowing about the basics of the setting, but I do prefer them to think about it a bit, and ask questions.</blockquote>

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