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

[zakael19]

And here I was thinking it meant a form of GMing where everything is sung in Wagner-like operatic verse.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The term has shifted over time, then; the point with the epithet thrown toward certain kinds of GMs was that they either completely didn't care about what their players get out of the game, or actively felt like players dying was a virtue. Micah is not in either of those from things he's said; he does feel that the integrity of the setting (in a simulationist fashion) is important and will sometimes lead to PCs dying, but nothing suggests he considers that a virtue when it happens. Its just the price of doing business sometimes.

A usual giveaway is whether people make effort to ensure that its possible to avoid getting chewed up if they play intelligently and carefully (and not setting a stupid high bar to that); the real old-school viking-hats didn't care.

Thank you. That is how I characterize myself as a GM.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

So there's a lot of chat in the thread about player vs. gm, and the player's right to add to lore vs the gm's right to resist other players' input. And it's so heated.

I don't get it. It's not that hard. You just have to talk it out. We're adults, have an adult conversation. (If you're not an adult this an excellent and largely safe way to practice some important adulting skills.)

 

[Lanefan]

Yep. And again, my personal preference now is to just be done with the "pretend theater" of choosing a race/heritage.

"You can choose human as your race. Period, the end."

There's IMO more than enough design space to have a very limited number of PC-playable species that aren't Human and then give clear game-mechanical benefits and penalties to each of those species along with clear, if generalized, write-ups on what makes the culture and overall outlook of those species be what it is. It's then on the players to play to those expectations, of course, but the designers' did their job.

The problem is that the "very limited number" piece got ignored along the way somehow, and between that and overemphasis on game balance they all drifted hard toward being Humans in funny suits.

 

[Lanefan]

And here I was thinking it meant a form of GMing where everything is sung in Wagner-like operatic verse.

Or it describes a GM in whose setting not only are you restricted to playing a Human but that Human has to be Norse.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So there's a lot of chat in the thread about player vs. gm, and the player's right to add to lore vs the gm's right to resist other players' input. And it's so heated.

I don't get it. It's not that hard. You just have to talk it out. We're adults, have an adult conversation. (If you're not an adult this an excellent and largely safe way to practice some important adulting skills.)

I do not mean offense by this, but adults have trouble having adult conversations all the time. I have to say someone who has not seen that phenomenon has been extremely fortunate in the people they've interacted with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's IMO more than enough design space to have a very limited number of PC-playable species that aren't Human and then give clear game-mechanical benefits and penalties to each of those species along with clear, if generalized, write-ups on what makes the culture and overall outlook of those species be what it is. It's then on the players to play to those expectations, of course, but the designers' did their job.

The problem is that the "very limited number" piece got ignored along the way somehow, and between that and overemphasis on game balance they all drifted hard toward being Humans in funny suits.

Well, I'd suggest it got ignored because some people don't agree with it. Once you start seeing nonhuman species as more analogous to ethnicities, well, the world is full of ethnicities, and there have been periods and areas where at least small numbers of a lot of them have intermixed regularly (large parts of the Roman Empire for example).

So, as usual, work with different premises, come up with different conclusions.

 

[dragoner]

So there's a lot of chat in the thread about player vs. gm, and the player's right to add to lore vs the gm's right to resist other players' input. And it's so heated.

I don't get it. It's not that hard. You just have to talk it out. We're adults, have an adult conversation. (If you're not an adult this an excellent and largely safe way to practice some important adulting skills.)

I like to do it organically: rough framework of a setting, and then let the players flesh it out, finish it off; or maybe I'm just lazy.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

It's not lazy, it's proactively seeking stakeholder input.

 

[dragoner]

It's not lazy, it's proactively seeking stakeholder input.

Also entertaining to see where they go with it, I like being surprised.