Rule books and setting bibles: which will players read?

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Agemegos

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While I was thinking about another thread (Setting-specific terms: how much is too much) it occurred to me that many, perhaps most, role-players have a lot more tolerance for reading and learning game systems than for doing the same with setting material.

In D&D we expect players to develop a working knowledge a good-sized chunk of the Players' Handbook, to become familiar with dozens of common monsters, and scores of commonly-encountered abilities and spells. By no means does everyone master the entire PHB, particularly not before starting to play. But on the other hand neither are many potential players send scurrying when they see three large volumes of the D&D basic set, which must be closing in on a million words of text. That might be an extreme of bulk, but then it is also the extreme of popular success.

But I find that when I produce a players' introduction for one of my SF or fantasy settings I start to see some aversion if it is more than one page of text, that I start to lose a significant proportion of potential players between 8,000 and 10,000 words, and that a setting bible of 18,000 words will repel even keen players with abilities in reading and study that got them through graduate school.

Few of my friends are deterred in the slightest by a 200,000-word RPG rules set. Most get mulish at the corners of the mouth when they see 20,000 words of setting bible. Is your experience similar? Do commercial products produce a similar difference in reactions, or do players happily accept big setting books for e.g. Glorantha, Rokugan, and the Forgotten Realms? If there is a difference, what might account for it?
 
Settings are for GMs for the most part and character creation and improvement is for players. Players want to play an RPG and the rules let them do that. The setting intro doesn't help them build their character or improve their character. Some of my players have shown up to character creation without really knowing what the setting even is. They just want to play and to do that they need to know the rules and some will take a pre-gen because they just want to play. I am sure there are exceptions, but really if you are into the setting you likely might want to GM at some point.

I think you would be better off creating a page or two of game related setting info (backgrounds in D&D 5E for example) and giving those out. Especially if they give an extra bonus over what is in the rules. D&D setting books have player facing rules to lure them in and those seem to work well.
 
In my experience, many players are willing to learn the rules piecemeal, as they need them. Only one of my players in each of the two 5E campaigns I’m running know anything more than basic combat options and their own character abilities, for example.

They also tend to learn setting stuff the same way. I’ll give them no more than a 2-minute briefing on the setting at the beginning, but the rest is learned during the game. I dribble it in as it becomes necessary (“as you approach the temple, you note that it has statues of all four aspects of the goddess...”). That kind of thing.

One thing I also do is add a list of gods, a calendar, and a list of NPCs they’ve met to the campaign page on DnD Beyond. Usually that gets them started.
 

Rule books and setting bibles: which will players read?

Neither. Most of my players are casuals and I have to present both rules and setting in succinct, easily digested bites. If exposition goes beyond a couple sentences at a time I will lose them. Most of my players have a vague grasp of the rules and need regular reminders for anything beyond the most basic. It's not a matter of intelligence or education: I count 2 union journeymen, a grad student, and an engineer among my current players. It's a casual versus hardcore thing.

I think playing with casuals for the past 8 years has been a huge benefit to me as a GM. In that time span I have introduced well over a dozen players to RPGs and believe that teaching novices has helped me refine my own skills far more than if I had played with RPG veterans.
 
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My experience has been that the GM was the one who presented the setting and actually learned the rules. Players would pick things up during play but there was never an expectation that they go and read a rulebook, with the exception of Chivalry & Sorcery in which players of magic-users are expected to know the full details.

This is probably one of the reasons why I never got the hang of D&D 3rd edition, in which the expected contents of the DM's Guide were moved to the Player's Handbook.
 
My experience has been that the GM was the one who presented the setting and actually learned the rules. Players would pick things up during play but there was never an expectation that they go and read a rulebook

That is my experience too. And this across years and different groups of players. And it's not just a casual thing. In most of the gaming groups I've been part of there have been plenty of other GMs, each with their own collection of games, and we take turns running stuff. Given how we skip between systems, if I had to buy every game we play I'd quickly run out of storage space.

I personally lean towards lighter games anyway. If you are running WEG Star Wars or ICONS in a "typical" real world with supers, you don't need a whole lot of system or setting mastery. But back in the day, I remember GM running more complex games like Hero or Gurps on a "Tell me what you do, I'll tell you what to roll" and that worked just fine. Obviously that's more work for the GM, but the way I see it, if the GM didn't want to do the work the could select an simpler system.
 
It depends entirely on the players, the system and the setting in question.
I've had a player ask every time "so which do I roll" for say an attack. But the same player once figured out that the system we were using was the same one underlying the Knights of the Old Republic video game (the D20 system) and immediately became a rules expert, after 1,5 sessions where he couldn't remember that you rolled a D20 to hit things.

The player I have who has the sharpest eye for systems is also the most likely to read through setting books. When I play rather than GM I'll swallow setting stuff like a sponge and ask for more, but if the system is too complex nowadays my eyes just glaze over when trying to read them.

Maybe playing mostly with people who like to GM themselves and were we're often playing each others campaigns makes things different though.
 
Most readers would read the rules, some the setting, a tiny fraction both, and the majority, neither:devil:.
 
My experience sounds like everyone else's. The least a player would invest in the games is just enough to make the kind of archetype they liked most. The most invested would learn all the character creation and player facing rules. The more setting flavor that is slipped into these, the more they'd know starting off.
 
My experience sounds like everyone else's. The least a player would invest in the games is just enough to make the kind of archetype they liked most. The most invested would learn all the character creation and player facing rules. The more setting flavor that is slipped into these, the more they'd know starting off.
That being the case I suppose that you must have a soft spot for games in which the character-generation procedures introduce a basis of information about the setting. Things like character generation based on life paths, or choosing splats that constitute major features of the setting?
 
That being the case I suppose that you must have a soft spot for games in which the character-generation procedures introduce a basis of information about the setting. Things like character generation based on life paths, or choosing splats that constitute major features of the setting?
Well, I certainly do, and I don't think it's an unusual feeling on this board:grin:!
 
That being the case I suppose that you must have a soft spot for games in which the character-generation procedures introduce a basis of information about the setting. Things like character generation based on life paths, or choosing splats that constitute major features of the setting?

I do prefer when a game has characters flavored by the setting in some way. But it's a double edge sword because if it feels forced or shallow, there's no point.

I like horror games and my group is a big fan of Kult with it's Dark Secrets and Disadvantages that impact their characters. They jumped into it head first. It was harder to get them into Gothic Earth (masque of the red death) until several sessions into investigation of the plot and I had spent time presenting the time period and some supernatural elements.
 
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On a more serious note:
- some players will eat up the crunch and scour the internet for meta, looking for ways to twink their PCs (system allowing)
- some players won’t even read that
- some players consume relevant fiction and will read up on the setting. This is a given if you’re using a notorious IP (e.g. Marvel or DC universe, Star Wars, Star Trek) or even some gaming properties with well-established fiction lines (e.g. Forgotten Realms, Warhammer 40,000). They can be trusted to invest on the game and setting, and possibly to mince words and canon-lawyer up your game — gotta take the good with the bad; address and set expectations early on with these guys.
- some players really are GMs at heart and want to riff off your ideas and make your premise song. I like to think of myself as one and suspect most posters here are too.
 
My players won’t read anything. When it comes to setting, I’m fine with that, as I don’t mind introducing it to them in play and just answering any questions they have that their characters should know.

I do get a bit peeved when I keep having to walk them through how the dice system and their characters’ abilities work a half-dozen or more sessions in, however. I don’t expect them to read the whole rule book, I know reading it and really getting it aren’t the same thing and we often learn best by doing, but dealing with collective amnesia at the beginning of every session can be discouraging when I’ve got other GM stuff to worry about.

So while they don’t read either, I do wish they’d read the rules a little bit.
 
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Among my gaming friends, I'm the only one who buys the corebook when being just a player. Everyone else just learns the game while playing. I like knowing the game somewhat before playing. It has also proved useful during character creation. As a GM, I never expect my players to buy or read anything. The only things my friends sometimes buy, for a game, is stuff like specific dice sets.

I usually don't read all the stuff in the book intended for GM's though. I find a lot of games, are not very good at describing their settings. They are often boring and full of historical stuff, you as a player don't really need to know. I really liked how 4E D&D setting books were written though. For a 3E example, I also really liked how the Explorer's Handbook for Eberron explained stuff. Every thing from a religion, countries and dragonmarked houses were explained in a one or two page spread.
 
The players in my group won't read rules or setting material that don't relate to their characters.

This is a good thing. It means they aren't bogged down with details that don't matter. It means I can change setting elements without argument. It means they trust me, as referee, to give them the information as we play.

It is also fair, because I won't read more than three bullet point paragraphs of character background.

My players aren't lazy. One maps everything, another takes a staggering amount of notes, the rest do plenty too. A couple write those 30 page character backgrounds, because they enjoy it. They still know to bring me three bullet points.

None of us have the time to read a lot of books just to "get the setting right" or the inclination to know the rules inside out.
 

Rule books and setting bibles: which will players read?

Neither. Most of my players are casuals and I have to present both rules and setting in succinct, easily digested bites. If exposition goes beyond a couple sentences at a time I will lose them. Most of my players have a vague grasp of the rules and need regular reminders for anything beyond the most basic. It's not a matter of intelligence or education: I count 2 union journeymen, a grad student, and an engineer among my current players. It's a casual versus hardcore thing.

I think playing with casuals for the past 8 years has been a huge benefit to me as a GM. In that time span I have introduced well over a dozen players to RPGs and believe that teaching novices has helped me refine my own skills far more than if I had played with RPG veterans.
This!
 
Thanks for your post, Agemegos Agemegos. I’m thinking I’d give the players the bare minimum in setting information in the beginning. It would be just enough for them to understand the genre and make their characters. From there I’d try to reveal the setting through play. I’m inspired thinking of how I’d do that.
 
My experience is that players won't read anything. They may have the books, but they'll typically expect someone else to explain it to them, not read the book themselves.

They MIGHT read a small snippet of a book if they can use it as an advantage for themselves, or a way to fuck over another player or the GM, effectively quote mining. But read a whole book or even a decent length section? LOL!

Most players I knew could barely be asked to keep track of their own character sheets or do their own leveling up paperwork.
 
I've found that it really depends on the game system. Some do require players to master a fair amount of rules to play the game for any length of time, which will probably mean reading the rulebooks. In most of the Ars Magica campaigns I've been involved in, essentially all the players read much of the core rulebook and many bought it. You couldn't play a magus effectively otherwise. But for systems that require less knowledge, players generally read as little as they can before playing the game.
 
Who are you people playing with?
Filthy casuals. :wink:

One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m the only one who thinks about the game between sessions. As an rpg enthusiast and frequent GM, I think about games a good bit. My players just… don’t. For them it’s just a thing they do once a week.
 
I think a lot of people will glaze over too much setting material, and overdoing setting canon can even be offputting. Glorantha, Tekumel and the OTU, for example, are quite notorious for the their groggy old canonmonger demographic, and on more than one occasion I've seen folks claim to be intimidated by that and characterise it as something that puts them off getting into those settings.

There's an anti-pattern in settings that I call mid-level canon. This is stuff like lore and history that sits a couple of levels too abstract to be really meaningful to a party of adventurers. In my view you need just enough high level structure to the setting to hang things off but this gets into diminishing returns pretty quickly, and actually becomes counterproductive if you start overdoing it.
  1. It can be fun to write but a lot of people don't find it fun to read.
  2. It tends to be at best tangentially relevant to stuff the party is actually going to interact with, so it often doesn't get used.
  3. It tends to act as an attractive nuisance by encouraging pedantic old (and not-so-old) grogs to get into tedious arguments about its minutae.
I try to take an approach that I call 'Chekhov's Arsenal'. The idea is to drop clues, rumours, incidents and suchlike into the game ahead of the party getting involved with the actual setting conceits themselves. It allows you to drip feed the setting canon in small, easily digestible chunks and use a show, don't tell type of process.
 
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I can see putting together a little setting info as part of a pitch to sell a group on a game. Or as a “the least you should know” sort of thing. But I wouldn’t want players thinking they know more about the setting than I do.

But mostly I agree it’s moot because people can only assimilate so much new information at once, and it takes a great deal of enthusiasm about something to drive that number up. That goes for setting and system both. If there ain’t enough dopamine at the end of that rainbow, they ain’t gonna do it.

And we GM types have to accept that we’re odd sorts who actually enjoy looking at this stuff for its own sake.
 
I'm an optimist, I expect my players to know every bit of exposition I put on the crummy sheet that gets pinned to the wall at the convention.

BTW: Setting aside games with expressly shared setting generation, is there a movement against GMs monopolizing the setting, similar to the “emergent narrative” backlash against GM-prepared plots?
 
I'm an optimist, I expect my players to know every bit of exposition I put on the crummy sheet that gets pinned to the wall at the convention.

BTW: Setting aside games with expressly shared setting generation, is there a movement against GMs monopolizing the setting, similar to the “emergent narrative” backlash against GM-prepared plots?
FATE sort of hints at this in the session zero discussion in the FATE Core rulebook, but I don't think it's a necessary part of the system.
 
It allows you to drip feed the setting canon in small, easily digestible chunks and use a show, don't tell type of process.

A thousand times this.

I prefer to deliver important themes or setting lore through a series of hard hitting and visceral experiences if at all possible. Let's take The Insignificance of Man and Superior Otherworldly Beings. I can rattle off "From shambling man-apes the Snake-Men bred the 13 Races of Man to be sacrifices efficacious for their sorcery," but if I really want to drive home the point that man was little more than lab rats for vastly superior beings, it's better to show them. Something like, I dunno, a Snake Man laboratory housing ancient human skulls filled with still-living brains that psychically assault the party with disturbing genetic memories of monstrous experiments carried out over countless millennia.
 
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I think settings should be written in layers.

Top layer a short summary of the setting, the world as it is known, a brief history of important events etc. A page, at most maybe 2 or 3.

Repeat as above but at lower levels, state / kingdom, city etc. This might include notable individuals and organizations the PC should know about or could be expected to hear about / encounter.

There should be no spoilers in the above as it is for players and GM.

For the GM only info knock yourself out on detail, but organization is important so it is easy for the GM to pick and choose the info as needed / desired.

I think a legitimate concern with too much info is the kind of player who will memorize everything and then try to rules lawyer the GM with setting details. There can be a fine line between giving the GM a lot of material to draw from, and having it perceived as the author telling the GM how to play the game.

A similar issue can occur with historical settings. I like historical games because there is a great depth of information, but there is a point of how much faithfulness to history is required and that will vary by the individual.
 
I think part of this for me, is also how much blank canvas to they leave for me. Maybe due to when I started playing but I like the kind of bland generic Imperium of classic Traveller. There was a frame work you could use but plenty of space to add in a rebel government in a far corner, or unexplored worlds. Greyhawk was the same.
I like Glorantha as a world, but I liked it better in the 80s when it was a well sketched out place but again one with lots of blank space to add your own touches. It may not be a fair statement as I don't have all of the current Glorantha material, but my general impression is it feels to me like they have filled up the map.
 
Runequest 2 was careful to introduce the PCs slowly. As children on the cusp of adulthood in Apple Lane, usually as Sartarite exiles in Pavis in the Pavis/Big Rubble supplements. In Troll Realms, Borderlands and Griffin Mountain, they travelled as strangers into new areas.

RQ3 and Heroquest/Hero Wars had those "What my father told me" 2-page introductions to different cultures. Dorastor had a whole campaign where you were dumped into a hellpit as clueless farmers rather than experienced and fearless Chaos hunters.

On the other hand, RQ3 was also the era of players scouring the Glorantha book and coming out with a Kingdom of War character because they started at 40% in their cultural weapon, rather than the 25% everyone else got. Some people just need a slap though.

I prefer exotic characters to be "earned" by playing humans to learn a new setting first, and I'm wary of players using them as an excuse to play "chaotic stupid".
 
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Years ago, on the forum of one of my local clubs, I once dared suggest that knowing a little bit more about Forgotten Realms (or whatever the setting was) would make their enjoyment of the game better. Boy did that go down like a stomach bug on a cruise ship. Some guys got really angry about it. "I game to have fun not do homework" was the response from one member. However I stand by my point because my personal experiance tells me its true. If I know something about the world I can use that knowledge to improv stuff and help move everything forward. I get a better idea of my PC and what his place in the world is. Its not like you need to even read a book on the settings these days. An hours lazy googling, or a couple of youtube videos, will cover the basics.

My boardgamer/wargamer friend was shocked when I told him that most roleplayers I have gamed with never bothered to read or learn the rules. He couldn't understand how we managed to play!
 
My group tends to be a "gives us the short version pitch," as well. That works out for me because I may or may not deviate from the setting to make the game interesting.

They are not what I'd call casual, but with work, children (or not), significant others, other media they consume (whatever that may be.) Time for gaming is supposed to be for actually playing the game. Not reading hundreds of pages of lore that may not come up in a given campaign we're playing.

Heck, I find a lot of game settings overwritten, I want enough detail to build upon and then go. Which varies a lot depending on the game, and expected tropes of said setting/game.
 
Thing is you need to condense it to a paragraph no more as not everyone will be versed in the setting lore. The system needs to be easy to understand too, such that anyone not versed can pick up bare bones quickly.

Should there be experienced players in the group too, they need yo ensure there is no optimisation on their part.
 
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I thought this would be a poll, then I figured there was none because the answer was obvious: neither. My players might read a system after we start playing to get more familiar with it, but it’s unusual for them to really dig into the rules before we try a system. Settings are even worse. I’m pretty sure no one bothers to read what I write on that unless it’s a conversation we’re having in Slack. I’m going to be unveiling a revision to my homebrew setting this weekend, and I assume they will be getting the elevator pitch version at the start of the session. I’ll have a setting guide (eventually), but I’m doing it for my own enjoyment (of putting it together) than anything else. I have no expectation anyone will read it.
 
Years ago, on the forum of one of my local clubs, I once dared suggest that knowing a little bit more about Forgotten Realms (or whatever the setting was) would make their enjoyment of the game better. Boy did that go down like a stomach bug on a cruise ship. Some guys got really angry about it. "I game to have fun not do homework" was the response from one member. However I stand by my point because my personal experiance tells me its true. If I know something about the world I can use that knowledge to improv stuff and help move everything forward. I get a better idea of my PC and what his place in the world is. Its not like you need to even read a book on the settings these days. An hours lazy googling, or a couple of youtube videos, will cover the basics.

My boardgamer/wargamer friend was shocked when I told him that most roleplayers I have gamed with never bothered to read or learn the rules. He couldn't understand how we managed to play!
I would say it’s not knowing per se that makes the game more enjoyable — it’s knowing and enjoying (i.e. being a fan of) the fluff.

I haven’t been doing much (or any) tabletop gaming these days but my wife and I have been playing Vermintide 2 for the better part of a year, and I am still happy when characters’ dialogue drops bits about current Warhammer Fantasy lore (references about current events in the setting fiction) and was thrilled to see references to WFRP (e.g. the Castle Drachenfels maps).

My Solomon Kane game had a few references to other REH characters and worldbuing that flew over players’ heads. It’s OK, though; they were there for my sake, though it would have been pretty cool if they noticed. Ditto my Day After Ragnarok game, only slanted towards more historical weirdness.
 
My Solomon Kane game had a few references to other REH characters and worldbuing that flew over players’ heads. It’s OK, though; they were there for my sake, though it would have been pretty cool if they noticed. Ditto my Day After Ragnarok game, only slanted towards more historical weirdness.
I like your style dude. I like to pepper my games with references and Easter eggs, most of which go unnoticed but don't mind at all. My current game has call outs to Masters of the Universe but most of the references are missed because I am older than all but one of them. I named the campaign Masters of Carcosa FFS.
 
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I like your style dude. I like to pepper my games with references and Easter eggs, most of which go unnoticed but don't mind at all.

I do the same. And a lot of mine go unnoticed also. I am roughly a decade older than most of my players, which I guess is enough of a gap to have a different set of cultural references.
 
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