My Life As A Gamer: You Suck At Using Lore In Your Games

Let me tell a truth born of 36 years in gaming: common gamers don't give a fuck about lore.

They don't care because those responsible for communicating relevant information to the player(s) routinely fail to do so, and then get surprised when said player(s) get mad at missing information that suddenly is relevant to their situation. Why? Because they tuned out the GM while he droned on about something instead of properly weaving it into playing the actual game. Why? Because they skipped the cutscene where that got mentioned because it took the player out of the game.

Game designers and game masters alike need to stop interrupting the gameplay experience to infodump. For the gamer, that's a signal to tune out and go do something else. That same signal also applies whenever one player gets monopoly attention in a multiplayer game, so you can't just talk to Bob for more than a few moments before Dick and Jane dip out to get nachos.

No, you have to keep the player(s) engaged from start to finish. You do this by spreading out the lore as the player(s) need it--bite-sized chunks--and build up piece by piece as you go so that they don't have a pile of unconnected trivia, but rather an emerging greater picture as they go. It's as close to storygaming as real gaming gets, in that you're doing intelligence work on-site as you go with little or nothing to start with.

For videogame development, this is very easy to use to your benefit. What it requires is some means for the player(s) to record what they encounter, and bring that record--be it a drawing, an inscription, etc.--to a Sage NPC who then directs the player(s) where they need to go. It's an ancient trope, but it's based on real-world best practices and to this day various spook clubs maintain both in-house and outsourced experts on all sorts of stuff to handle just this sort of thing. You can use lore-based keys to metagame gates to keep the content consumption rate within desired parameters, especially if travel time matters or logistics is properly accounted for.

Tabletop has access to this also, and due to its leaning on liminality there is one other thing you can do by properly employing lore and that's to procedurally-generate brand new content. The TSR editions of D&D lean heavy on this by way of their many random content generation tables, and Classic Traveller is in the same vein. Take something you find to a Sage NPC and run with what you get; the lore directly creates new gameplay content for player(s) to enjoy- something no videogame has yet achieved, no matter how hard they try.

(Which is really sad; all of the components are there, but no one's tried to put it all together yet.)

It's one of the reasons I love reading Jeffro Johnson's AD&D session reports. He gets it, and he's showing by example that--despite protests to the contrary--AD&D is best run with this sort of thing in mind. When I get around to running New Model Colony again, I'll keep his campaign in mind. I'm getting similar vibes from Daddy Warpig's Classic Traveller game.

And it's how to make the most out of what tabletop RPGs are good at: exploiting liminality.

Make your lore relevant to immediate gameplay situations. Make it bite-sized chunks to assimilate. Make it something every player (in multi-player games) pays attention to by not letting (or pushing) one player to deal with it all.

As for RPGs other than these oldest-of-old-school design, another time.

Until then, watch Geek Gab. I'll be in the chat as usual.