Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6906339" data-attributes="member: 6683613">A lot of good advice so far, but I'd like to echo this in particular. I don't know your group, and they may be different. But my general experience with players has been that if you start out by dropping a large amount of worldbuilding detail on them -- a big list of new races, cultures, places, concepts, and so on -- they're not going to have that assimilated immediately and they're going to gravitate towards familiar stuff. In short: giving them the race options of human, quellick, woodwose, horekh, or myrmidon is a very good way to get a party of humans. They don't know what the heck a &quot;quellick&quot; is, a paragraph or so of description in an introductory handout is unlikely to get them excited about it, and more than a paragraph or so is unlikely to be read.This doesn't mean they're uninterested in the setting, though. The excitement just has to be built up organically over time through engagement with the world. Interacting with a quellick NPC for a while is as effective as reading an introductory handout isn't. Really, this is just the same advice that applies to writers: show, don't tell; avoid exposition dumps. You're telling if you present too much worldbuilding to the players up front. Let them start small and basic, and from that starting point you can show.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 6906339, member: 6683613"] A lot of good advice so far, but I'd like to echo this in particular. I don't know your group, and they may be different. But my general experience with players has been that if you start out by dropping a large amount of worldbuilding detail on them -- a big list of new races, cultures, places, concepts, and so on -- they're not going to have that assimilated immediately and they're going to gravitate towards familiar stuff. In short: giving them the race options of human, quellick, woodwose, horekh, or myrmidon is a very good way to get a party of humans. They don't know what the heck a "quellick" is, a paragraph or so of description in an introductory handout is unlikely to get them excited about it, and more than a paragraph or so is unlikely to be read. This doesn't mean they're uninterested in the setting, though. The excitement just has to be built up organically over time through engagement with the world. Interacting with a quellick NPC for a while is as effective as reading an introductory handout isn't. Really, this is just the same advice that applies to writers: show, don't tell; avoid exposition dumps. You're [I]telling[/I] if you present too much worldbuilding to the players up front. Let them start small and basic, and from that starting point you can [I]show[/I]. [/QUOTE]

Verification