Lore's Labour's Lost

Like a mutant who has adapted to nuclear-irradiated wasteland and can't actually survive on water that doesn't make a Geiger-counter go nuts, I still go to Twitter. It's terrible, but my gills won't let me leave; I cannot breathe clean air. The RPG discourse du jour is "lore." 

Twitter is bad for lots of reasons, but one reason it's bad is that you can't actually have a full conversation or even define terms with the constrained character count, so you talk around each other and wave your hands and make angry faces. 

But not me! I'm smart and intelligent so I go on my blog to do the same thing, but longer. 

What is lore?

I don't know. Shut up. I've never seen such a simple word get redefined so many times. 

"Lore is history." "Lore is history your characters don't know." "You don't mean lore, you mean datum." 

In the continuum between fluff and crunch, lore is the fluff side. 

Lore is helpful

For GMs, lore helps you create an immersive and coherent game world. You can give the players rich descriptions of environments because you have lots of setting details to weave in. You can adopt the traits of NPCs from different regions, and distinguish them from each other well, using different patterns of speech and notes about their belief systems. (I know an embarrassing amount about Middle-earth, and running games there is very easy for me for that reason.)

It can be helpful to run sandbox games. If you have big setting books for every location in the world, the players can go anywhere and you'll be prepared. "Sure, you can run from the Prince of Chicago and make your way to Seattle. You're going to have to cross through werewolf country to get there, though..."

For players, lore can help can make informed choices. "Well, I know in the lore, the Son of God was a poor carpenter in his mortal form, so I'll look for the simplest cup or a wooden cup out of the big pile of chalices." 

Knowing a lot about the game setting helps remove the gap between player thoughts and character thoughts and actions. You don't break the flow of the game by saying, "What would my character know about orcs in this setting?" If you know the history of the orcs and the Blood Wars, you can act like your character more easily.

Lore can just be interesting! I think that's the appeal to the big lore-heads for settings like Warhammer 40k. Sometimes you hear a tidbit from that setting and you say, "Orcs are psychics, and their group delusion that red cars goes faster means that they actually do? Oh, that's cool." 

There's a joy in the feeling of discovery for players. When the GM knows something, and the players don't, discovering the hidden lore or setting secret can wow the entire table. "Wait, Jack of Knives wasn't a single serial murderer, it's actually a pair of sentient knives who possess people into killing? Oh my God!"

Lore is difficult to communicate

The traditional way that RPGs have communicated their setting history and worldbuilding is through long, boring gazetteers. These make RPGs feel like homework: reading about a fantasy world like you would from a history textbook in grade school. (The older I get, the less I want to do required homework for my game.)

Some games have the expectation that players and GMs both will do a lot of reading about setting details to engage with the game--White Wolf games seem especially prone to this, Houses of the Blooded by John Wick, others. For these games, lore is a barrier to entry.

Relatedly, there can be a disconnect between the players and the GM's understanding of the world. The GM of an Exalted game sets a scene in Whitewall and has a magistrate say "Welcome, Solar Exalts," and one of the players pushes up their glasses and says "UM ackshully, Whitewall is a Realm territory, so our status as Solars should be secret because we're anathema here." The player is right according to the long paragraphs in the setting book. Has the GM changed the setting details or did they act out of ignorance? In either event, the illusion of verisimilitude is broken, the suspension of disbelief evaporates for that player, the game stutters. 

And the fear of creating that feeling drives players away from games with "too much lore." I know people who don't want to play in a Middle-earth game because "What if I get a lore detail wrong and Josh yells at me?" (What if, indeed?)

Compromised solutions

I think RPG designers and players are still noodling on the tension between the fun parts of lore and the challenges it introduces. There's no one-size-fits-all solutions for any RPG problem.

Several games have embraced the idea of an anti-canon or implied setting: there is no history to memorize, only prompts on random tables or implied details about the tone of the game world embedded into the mechanics. A random starting package in character creation gives one player "The last flashlight from the Age of Wonders." What that means for the table is up to the GM and the group to decide. I wrote about this a bit in my post about Dark Souls-esque Worldbuilding. 

His Majesty the Worm doles out little packages of lore in small sections of the book, then tells you to ignore them if you don't like them. For a game that tried to prioritize and incentivize role-playing relationships, I wanted to give players something for them to hold onto--but also wanted to give them the freedom to reject things they didn't like.

My favorite examples of lore embed some setting detail or factoid into something that the players can actually use. One example is embedding them in character mechanics. "Goblins are cursed with bad luck by the god Gowin. It's called buwuk, and it's the worst blessing. You gain 3 buwuk points that you can use to..."

Another example is mechanizing something in the game world that's available to anyone if they know the lore and can do it in-character: the blood of the cockatrice cures petrification, the roar of the lion resurrects the innocent, etc. My favorite example of this is the hidden page of "Secret Rules" in Vain the Sword. If a dutiful player finds this hidden page, they can invoke these truths in the game world; for example: "If someone is dying, they may curse the person who wrongfully afflicted them, and this curse has a chance to come true."

What are your favorite ways to get the benefits of "lore" and avoid its costs?