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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8845739" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I don't expect them to get invested all at once. I think my job is to help portray the world in such a way that they become invested. I think you can spark their interest in a setting by rattling off some details, but I think actual investment only comes from play... once the players have created characters and then started interacting with the setting in the fiction. I think players are typically going to be more concerned with their characters than with the setting. So if you want them invested, you have to connect those two things. In the campaign of Spire that I wrapped up a couple of months ago, the lore was central to play. However, most of it was determined through play. We started off with the very basics of the setting... the players are all drow revolutionaries living in a city that has been taken over by the high elves. That's the core premise, and so we started with that and then created characters. As we created the characters, we fleshed out a lot of the lore based on the choices they made. One player chose the Knight class, and so we established how his knightly order worked and a few of the other members. These decisions resulted in allies for him, and also enemies and other implications, and influenced the rest of the campaign. This was similar for the other two players. The characters in Spire are meant to be denizens of the city itself, so they're not strangers wandering a strange land. So very often during play, I'd ask the players for answers to questions that came up. Certain class abilities they have also allows them to declare truths about the setting. So the players are actively contributing to the lore and to the setting on a constant basis. The character creation and the player contributions to setting really connect the characters to the setting in tangible ways, and that really invests the players in what's going on.Taking that game into consideration, I think there are two ways to look at it. There's the lore at the high level... like the elevator pitch type lore. It's a good idea for the players to know this stuff ahead of time. It's the kind of stuff that's central to play, and they'll want to be aware of to even decide if they are interested in the game. Then there's the lore that comes up in play. For that, I think it's best to hold on loosely to any ideas you have as GM ahead of time, and see how play goes, and then work it in as needed, with the players contributing liberally.</blockquote>

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