What makes setting lore "actually matter" to the players?

[DrunkonDuty]

I think that’s the heart of it right there. If I’ve written a whole page worth of lore for something, the actual bit worth communicating to players is probably one to two sentences of what I wrote. The rest was more for me.

I'm also a writer of lore for my own enjoyment. Being able to cherry pick out the relevant bits for players is a talent I'm still dweveloping.

In Game of Thrones, nobody would have cared about the knowledge of Tyrion Lannister being the one who was in charge of rebuilding the sewer system if it was in an info dump in the start of the campaign. It only became important for the episode with the siege and him using the knowledge to sneak into the city.

This brings up letting players add background to their character as the game unfolds. Does it help and make sense if your PC grew up in that city and was a noble or is it a cheat of sorts to declare that your character now knows X.

Nowadays I'm using bennies for players to add these sorts of thing to their characters. But if the character already has an established background with a thing then they can usually add to it without recourse to bennies.

 

[Reynard]

"Simulation" does not necessarily have to map to our reality. Some people even think it meshes okay with genre emulation, but I personally think that's a different beast.

But going down that rabbithole would be a massive side-trip for this thread, I think.

I don't think "sinulation" must necessarily map to "low power." You can do a simulationist super hero game if you care about how powers interact with the world, and certainly many hard sci-fi games like Traveller have a simulationist bend even when talking about FTL drives snd planet wrecking orbital bombardment.

As it relates to D&D, I think people get hung up on what "wizards can do" that breaks "realism." I think that is a failure to understand simulation. You can talk about logical outcomes and naturalistic rules even while discussing powerful and/or ubiquitous magic.