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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8302800" data-attributes="member: 18">My experience as a player is that it varies absolutely freakin' hugely.It can be anything from "Ooooh this is mysterious and fascinating!" to the point where I'm really wanting to know more, to "Okay fine w/e let's kill stuff".Two things which make people care more in my experience as a player are:1) The setting has some kind of central mystery/big premise to it.2) The setting actually has stuff for PCs themselves to engage with and influence - i.e. it's not "too big" for the PCs to be significant.A good example of a D&D setting where I, as a player, cared about the setting would be Dark Sun - there's the mystery of how exactly this happened and what exactly is going on, and the game is clearly set up so you're on the way to being one of the movers-and-shakers.Two things which make people care much less about a setting in my experience as a player are:3) Generic fantasy. Especially if it's generic fantasy with some hilariously minor twist that thinks its a big deal.4) The power structures of the setting are basically hostile/unattainable to the PCs. This is true of the Forgotten Realms, for example - most of it is set up with very static power-structures, most of which are simply hostile to adventurers unless they're directly useful to them, and indeed Greenwood himself basically had to detail a new area to give people a place where the PCs might actually get in charge fairly recently.The biggest killer in caring about the game world? The DM doesn't care. If the DM doesn't care, I definitely don't care.However my overall experience is different to yours. 30+ years of DMing and playing, and I'd definitely say it does matter what setting we play in, unless we're just playing in some rando generic fantasy setting which doesn't want/expect the PCs to gain much power, which would very much include the FR, Dragonlance, Wildemount, some implementations of Greyhawk and so on. In that case it doesn't matter a great deal, and any engagement with the world will be down to the DM creating elaborate plots to engage us with it.This was actually a very helpful thread because I hadn't been thinking about his but I am writing up a new campaign setting ATM and I will ensure I make it engaging on these terms.</blockquote>

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