D&D General "In My General Experience Playing D&D, DMs Care More About Setting Lore Than Players Do" (a poll)

[dave2008]

Unless I'm misunderstanding the question, this is disturbing that so many DMs seem to focus on "their" world than the other participants of the game. These are DMs who should be writing fantasy novels or scripting TV shows and have missed the most important part of the hobby - that it's a social experience with friends.

You are correct, you are misunderstanding the question.

 

[overgeeked]

True or False: "In My General Experience Playing D&D, DMs Care More About Setting Lore Than Players Do"

LOL. True. Players generally don't care at all about the setting. Unless they're a lore hound and like busting the referee's chops. All that "amazing" lore, all those epic lore drops, the players tune them out and wait until something relevant to their characters pops up.

 

[JEB]

IME, players care about setting lore if it directly impacts their activities, and otherwise don't usually give a hoot.

Agreed, generally. Though there have been rare exceptions, players who cared more about specific setting details than we DMs did.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

It’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. Being a player who cares about lore tends to make you want to DM anyway.

 

[Art Waring]

I homebrew my own campaign settings, so yes I often do care more about my setting than players as a whole.

My players primarily care about their characters and the impact of their choices on the world, but only a few have actually shown interest in the world itself beyond their own sphere of influence.

 

[payn]

I certainly don't want to discourage homebrewers from making their own settings, but yeah as a player I'm usually underwhelmed.

 

[Celebrim]

In my experience, it depends very much on the quality of the lore.

Do players geek out on the lore of professional properties like Forgotten Realms or Star Wars or Star Trek? Absolutely they do, sometimes far much more than I the GM does. I'm actually less likely to adhere to canon strictly than some of my players would and do when they GM.

Likewise, do my players really get into my setting lore when it increases their understanding of my games and gives my games more resonance? Yes, they do.

The question sort of presupposes that the reader of a novel or the audience of a TV show cares less about the setting lore than the author, and often times that is demonstrably not the case. The question therefore comes down to "Can a homebrew setting have fans?" and I think the answer to that question is, "Yes."

 

[Yaarel]

A player character is a hero.

A DM character is the setting.

Ideally, the DM is building the setting around the heroes.

This intersection is the lore that matters.

 

[Celebrim]

A DM character is the setting.

Ideally, the DM is building the setting around the heroes.

No. Absolutely not.

"DM character" is a vague term. When I hear it I think of something like "DM PC" which is a whole different concept that a setting. I think it just obfuscates things to refer to a "setting" as a "DM character". Just call it the setting.

But even more than that, the DM is not building the setting around the heroes. Not every story involves the PC's being the chosen one in the sense that you could say Dune is built around Paul where he is the literal center of the setting and everything flows around and through him. Characters exist within settings and they inhabit settings and the usual thing is that the setting does not revolve around the character. Not every character is Harry Potter or Aang the Last Airbender, and in an RPG it is usually a huge mistake to have Harry Potter type characters that the whole setting is revolving around first because RPGs are usually meant to be social games and secondly because in RPGs even protagonists can die and then what are you going to do? In RPGs the story isn't fixed and predetermined. JK Rawlings may have already written out in her head the fate of "The Boy Who Lived" when she penned the first chapter, but in an RPG that's not a lot of fun.

I think you mean to say that ideally the DM builds the story around the PCs, rather than the setting around the heroes. The story is not the same as the setting though, and even then it's not clear that for all formats building the story around the PCs is a good idea. It tends to be a good idea when you have just 1-3 players, but the more players you have the more problematic it tends to become attempting to build the story around the PCs. And lastly, to quibble, since the story is not yet told, we can't say whether the role of the PCs will be heroes. They could be villains, for example. When you have larger groups, it becomes necessary to build the story around The Quest, where The Quest is some motivation that all the characters have agreed to have buy in on. In other words, if you have six players the characters are typically built around the story and not the other way around. For example in Blades in the Dark, The Quest is something like, "We're a gang of smugglers and we're trying to become successful." where as in D&D The Quest might be something like, "Were a band of mercenaries and we are trying to stop an Evil Necromancer."

Character driven play is not inherently superior to story driven play. I get sick of that claim because it's so obviously based solely on theory and not experience. Indeed once you get up to like 8 or 10 participants in the play, character driven play becomes almost impossible and can't be the focus of play because there isn't enough spotlight time for that. I feel like half the indy movement was driven by GMs that only had 1 or 2 players and they were theorizing about the entire span of RPGs based on satisfactory games with just a few participants.

Now I do agree that there is an intersection between the story and the lore that needs to happen. There is no need to info dump a lot of lore into a story that isn't going to inform play, but ironically, it's a lot easier to make that decision when you are the GM running a story based game than it is when you are the GM running a character driven game. Because if it really is a character driven game with the PC setting the goals through backstory and play, you can't know as GM what lore is going to inform play and what hook the player is going to respond to.

 

[Yaarel]

No. Absolutely not.

"DM character" is a vague term. When I hear it I think of something like "DM PC" which is a whole different concept that a setting. I think it just obfuscates things to refer to a "setting" as a "DM character". Just call it the setting.

But even more than that, the DM is not building the setting around the heroes. Not every story involves the PC's being the chosen one in the sense that you could say Dune is built around Paul where he is the literal center of the setting and everything flows around and through him. Characters exist within settings and they inhabit settings and the usual thing is that the setting does not revolve around the character. Not every character is Harry Potter or Aang the Last Airbender, and in an RPG it is usually a huge mistake to have Harry Potter type characters that the whole setting is revolving around first because RPGs are usually meant to be social games and secondly because in RPGs even protagonists can die and then what are you going to do? In RPGs the story isn't fixed and predetermined. JK Rawlings may have already written out in her head the fate of "The Boy Who Lived" when she penned the first chapter, but in an RPG that's not a lot of fun.

I think you mean to say that ideally the DM builds the story around the PCs, rather than the setting around the heroes. The story is not the same as the setting though, and even then it's not clear that for all formats building the story around the PCs is a good idea. It tends to be a good idea when you have just 1-3 players, but the more players you have the more problematic it tends to become attempting to build the story around the PCs. And lastly, to quibble, since the story is not yet told, we can't say whether the role of the PCs will be heroes. They could be villains, for example. When you have larger groups, it becomes necessary to build the story around The Quest, where The Quest is some motivation that all the characters have agreed to have buy in on. In other words, if you have six players the characters are typically built around the story and not the other way around. For example in Blades in the Dark, The Quest is something like, "We're a gang of smugglers and we're trying to become successful." where as in D&D The Quest might be something like, "Were a band of mercenaries and we are trying to stop an Evil Necromancer."

Character driven play is not inherently superior to story driven play. I get sick of that claim because it's so obviously based solely on theory and not experience. Indeed once you get up to like 8 or 10 participants in the play, character driven play becomes almost impossible and can't be the focus of play because there isn't enough spotlight time for that. I feel like half the indy movement was driven by GMs that only had 1 or 2 players and they were theorizing about the entire span of RPGs based on satisfactory games with just a few participants.

Now I do agree that there is an intersection between the story and the lore that needs to happen. There is no need to info dump a lot of lore into a story that isn't going to inform play, but ironically, it's a lot easier to make that decision when you are the GM running a story based game than it is when you are the GM running a character driven game. Because if it really is a character driven game with the PC setting the goals through backstory and play, you can't know as GM what lore is going to inform play and what hook the player is going to respond to.

When an author writes a story, everything the book mentions revolves around the heroes.

That is how it works.

That is how a good DM works.

That is when the players care about the setting.



In a D&D game, there is an interaction, a kind of dialogue between the heroes and the world. The DM chooses how to respond to the heroes. The entire world is the character that the DM plays.