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

[DrunkonDuty]

Yes, absolutely! You'll always get more interesting ideas by brain storming with others.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Just to put things into perspective I'm simultaneously running two Daggerheart games right now for two groups with no one else in common - and for those who don't know Daggerheart there are 18 playable ancestries in the core rules, and the world's presented are half a dozen pages of guidelines and a blank map for people to add locations to at the start and going forward.

Two simultaneous campaigns. Five regular players in one, four in the other (plus one guest in each). And we're about fifteen sessions into one campaign and eleven into the other. And between the two campaigns every single regular's ancestry or their culture except one has been deeply important to them and to the campaign. (I can only think of one character between the two campaigns both has mattered for - and the "except one" is a social gamer and deeply invested enough to have created the STL for and 3d printed a model of the party mascot, and not from pre-existing parts). The lore has a huge effect on the campaign not despite but because of how little extraneous lore we started with show much we've been able to build. And I have never got or even seen such investment in their own individual parts of the setting by using something pre-fabricated outside the table and campaign.

And no I'm not a "Service DM". Last night I had three out of four players literally squirming in their seats at different times and two out of four for different events tell me "I should have seen that coming"; all of them had a blast and the most any had played with me before this campaign was a game of Crash Pandas. And I've been able to do that by building on and twisting what the players brought and are deeply invested in because it's theirs as much as mine.

 

[zakael19]

And no I'm not a "Service DM".

I'm not even sure what this is anyway.

Last night I had three out of four players literally squirming in their seats at different times

There's something really fun about a player going "oh heck, your questions and framing took me down a path I hadn't really thought about for my character at all! Time to reflect on what that means for them."

 

[Neonchameleon]

These are things that drive folks like me away from "races" and other such things, magic, classes, monsters, etc etc; too. At the end of the day, everyone is just playing a human. We still haven't given purpose or interconnected reason why any race even exists. Let alone why they come up with human only practices

We still haven't given a reason why RenleyRenfield exists. Or for that matter Neonchameleon. Indeed the only person round here who is in any way essential is @Morrus because without him there would be no ENWorld in its current form. But the simple fact is that we all do exist.

It's not that it takes all sorts, it's simply that there are all sorts. And probably the most conformist culture on the planet has people from salarymen to tattooed Yakuza members to sumo wrestlers, from elegant gothic lolita fashion to harjuku girls.

Things do not need to be needed to exist, they only need to be wanted enough for someone to have made them or even just be things that have happened. And that it might inspire one single one of my players to create and invest in a character more deeply than a narrower range of options would is in and of itself reason enough for it to be an option.

It's that trite shallowness of personhood that makes it non-valuable at its core.

I'm afraid that Jersey Shore and Keeping Up With The Kardashians exist. Any setting that can't handle "the trite shallowness of personhood" is unrealistic and ironically manages to make us less than we are.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But the tradeoff for me as the GM is that I am then committing to making any and all race/heritage representations matter, simply because as a point of emphasis for me, I don't want those things to remain non-purposeful or mere color. It places a burden on me as GM to engage with components of the setting "lore" or "backstory" that build meaning and purpose into the existence of that heritage as part of the fabric of the setting.

Because---whether the player cares or not---that level of integration into the lore is important to me. It needs to make sense, it needs to have a structure and causality.

But doing all of that work has almost never given me anything materially rewarding in play. In my experience, once the player makes their choice of heritage, they give little thought to it beyond the occasional, "Oh, he he, I'm a bird-person, I totally ruffle and pluck my feathers when I'm bored." As noted by @RenleyRenfield, it gets played back in shallow and trite fashion.

I'm sorry to hear that, but ironically the only time I've seen it matters in play for one of the "classic Tolkien races" is with a dwarf who had a miner's conservatism and lack of toleration of mistakes because they'd grown up knowing that it wouldn't just be them but their entire mine Finding Out.

Meanwhile in general the further you get from human IME the more it matters. Tieflings/Infernis and Drow normally have themes of social exile or a seriously dark family. Warforged/Clanks always IME play into something about artificiality. Vampires and other undead are all something. Changelings always matter. Fey matter in ways elves don't

But once again part of my secret is that I let my players do the work. Both my current clank player and my current ribbet player wrote the rules of their own species and culture - and I've upended both by reveals that we're built on the lore they had established. I didn't have to put in the work writing; I just had to give them blank spaces to write in, accept that, and add just a couple of touches of my own.

Meanwhile my loreborn faun could as easily be an elf - but she used her blank space to write in a mixed species culture and that works just as well in different ways, and my faerie noble is more about her noble house and her belief in ideals most pay lip service to. And I think my firebug third year wizarding university student is a halfling but it's the student part that matters.

 

[loverdrive]

I think the lore "actually matters" when the participants can engage with it outside of the game.

It might be through setting the game in an established IP with pages upon pages of wikis, be it Elder Scrolls or Warhammer or Magic, it might be through running the same world for a long time and players having option to just literally talk to all the important characters (or, rather, people of flesh and blood who rolled dice for them)