The other day, I kicked off a new series of articles about world building and setting creation with my standard, rambling attempt to define concepts pretty much everybody already understood. And then, as per usual, I claimed to be brilliant because I was the only one who actually wasted time on the definition. In my defense, I’ve been doing this too long to try and learn any new tricks and, besides, I have to fill that content schedule somehow.

Here’s the thing, though. In defining a campaign setting as “all the details necessary to justify the existence of the characters and their adventures,” I discussed a question that just seems to baffle the motherloving hell out of aspiring world-builders and is often met with useless, pedantic non-advice. The question is “how much of this world-building crap do I have to do before I start running my game.” The pedantic non-answer is “start small and build.”

Now, that question – how much of this crap do I have to do – that question isn’t unique to world building and setting creation. It’s actually just a specific flavor of a more general question that GMs – and players – ask about all sorts of things. That’s not the problem though. The problem is that no matter how often they ask the question, they don’t ask it often enough. Players, for example, never seem to ask “how much of this crap do I HAVE TO do” before they start writing a backstory. That’s why I end up with five to ten pages of useless bullcrap to throw out every time someone generates a character. And that’s why GMs e-mail their players 60-page documents of setting detail at the start of every new campaign. And that’s why, whenever I compliment someone’s hand-made map, I have to listen to all this crap about plate tectonics and rain shadows.

Gamers just don’t know when to f$&%ing stop. Because it’s fun to create. If we didn’t think it was fun to create, we wouldn’t be gamers. We’d find a different hobby. It’s fun to write complex backstories for characters, NPCs, villains, and adventure locations. And it’s fun – for a certain sick type of mind that can’t just enjoy a good fantasy – to imbue a world map with realistic physics and geography and s$&%. I mean, I assume that’s fun to some people. I don’t get it myself. If I wanted to deal with that – and don’t get me wrong, I COULD deal with that easily – if I wanted to deal with that s$&%, I wouldn’t run FANTASY games. But whatever.

Here’s the problem, though. All of that lovingly crafted detail that you imbue your personal creations with? You’re the only one who gives a f$&%. Because everyone else at the table is more interested in their personal creations than yours. If they were more interested in passively experiencing the creativity of others, they’d be reading books, not playing role-playing games. And even the people who like reading books can only take so much of that crap.

People who play role-playing games – and that includes GMs – people who play role-playing games are interested in precisely two things. One of them is the crap they – and they alone –create. They couldn’t give a rat’s fig about the garbage creations of others. The other is actually playing the game. And that means making choices and seeing the results. That’s it. Das ist alles.

Does that offend you? Are you one of those sunshine and rainbows and bunny farts GMs who gives advice like “be a fan of the players” and “give everyone a chance to shine” and “pay attention to the people you’re sharing your table with?” Well, guess what? I game in the real world. I’ll tell you what, you leave a hundred-dollar bill on the street with a sign advising people not to take what’s not theirs and I’ll put a hundred-dollar Bill safely in my pocket. Let’s see who has their money longer.

And, no, I don’t give a f$&% if you or your players are the one rare anecdotal exception. Please leave that s$&% out of my comments. I’m giving real advice here.

What’s my point? Well, my point is that GM’s are always asking how much they should prepare and how much they should expect their players to read before the campaign or how much backstory NPCs and adventures should have. And the answer is – as I expounded on to GREAT length in that article about campaign building – the answer is “exactly as much as you and the players to create and run the game.” And how much is that? “Enough to reasonably justify the existence of their characters and their adventures.”

Now, I’m not going to try to answer where “reasonable” ends. Because, practically speaking, I know you’re not going to listen anyway. Because you’re a GM. You’re a creator. You’re an artist. You’re going to create whatever the hell you want to create. Because you love your creations. Fine. I can’t stop you from masturbatory creation. And it’s perfectly natural anyway. But what I can do is tell you not to go all Louis C.K. on your players by making them watch. I want to introduce Angry’s Three Rules for Avoiding Expository Masturbation.

“It’s Exposition, Dear; It Has to Go Somewhere.”

There is this great scene in the best Muppet movie ever made, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper. It’s a brilliant movie for GMs to watch. Actually, most Muppet media is great for GMs. Because it’s all about lampooning narrative structure. Anyway, in that movie, Miss Piggy is talking to the famous fashion designer, Lady Holiday, whose brother, Nicky, is trying to steal her fortune. Unbeknownst to everyone. Apropos of nothing, Lady Holiday suddenly launches into this spiel about how her brother is a useless lay about who bums money off of her and squanders it on gambling and booze and girls and that he’s a terrible person who’d probably steal her every last dime if he could. Miss Piggy says, “why are you telling me all of this?” Lady Holiday, with a dismissive flourish, says, “it’s plot exposition, dear. It has to go somewhere.”

That’s why I love the Muppet movies.

In RPGs, exposition – as I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed before – is delivering information to the players so they can understand the world and the adventure, and so they can make useful decisions. It might explain a villain’s motivations, for example. Or it might establish an upcoming crisis. Or it might point to an available resource. Or it might warn of a coming obstacle. Exposition is delivering information.

All of that information you’ve created about the world and the NPCs and the gods and kingdoms and cities and races and classes? That’s all a pile of potential exposition. Because that information has to be delivered. Somehow. In an RPG, there’s lots of ways to deliver exposition. You can simply hand your players a document spelling out the history of the world and all of their class options and everything else. You can tell the players what the characters know about a particular city when they arrive there. Or what they know about a monster when they see one. Or you can deliver the exposition more – or less – subtly by actually working it into the game. An NPC might deliver the information, for example. Or the PCs might find a book detailing the important information they need. Or you could simply plant clues that imply the information you want to deliver and let the players figure it out.

Delivery methods aside – for the moment – if any piece of information you create is going to end up in the heads of the players, it’s going to become exposition. And you do NEED to get information into the heads of the players. Things can’t come out of the blue. The players need to understand who the bad guys are and why they are bad. And who their allies might be and how to make them allies. The players need to know what resources are available. And, if they are going to solve problems and mysteries, they need clues and information. And, if they are going to make characters that actually exist in the world, they have to know what the possibilities are and what roles they play in the world. Exposition does have to go somewhere. It’s necessary.

But, here’s the problem with exposition. When exposition is happening, no one is playing the game. When you’re delivering information, the players are listening. They aren’t making choices and playing out the consequences. They are just absorbing information. Yes, even if that information is buried in a conversation with an NPC and the players get to keep asking questions to keep the information coming. Even then, when the actual information is coming, the players aren’t playing the game. They are just listening. And remember that every piece of lovingly crafted, artisanal, bespoke information that you include in the game is only interesting to you. The players don’t care about your acts of creativity because they have their own acts of creativity to love.

In short, exposition is boring. Whatever form it takes. Players do not want to read long documents or listen to long narrations. They want to play the game. If they wanted to passively absorb exposition, they’d read a novel. One of those boring, badly written Tolkien or Dragonlance novels, probably.

Here’s the thing: you will ALWAYS create more information than the players need. Because you’re a GM. That’s what you do. Just like many players will create far more backstory than they need. And that’s fine. Background information helps drive good, consistent decisions. The background information you create about the world and the kingdoms and gods and s$&% will help you write good adventures and figure out what happens when the players f$&% everything up. And, in theory, a PC’s backstory helps the player make consistent decisions about how that character behaves. Except it never does. Because players aren’t good at this s$&%.

Use the Minimum Necessary Boredom

Now, as I said above, I’m not going to tell you how much to create. You’re going to create as much information as you want to create. I can’t stop you. That’s fine. But I do want to give you three rules to help you decide how much of your steaming pile of “creation” to deliver to the players and how much to keep hidden in the privacy of your own bathroom. Or to just flush. And the first – and most important – rule is this: always go for the minimum necessary boredom.

That’s a good rule, right? Why would you want to include any more boredom in your game than you have to? You wouldn’t. So, imagine this. Imagine that there’s a noose around the neck of your game. And, since you ARE the game, that means there’s a noose around your neck. Now, for every single word you speak or write to the players that isn’t adjudicating an action, that noose is going to tighten. Just a tiny little bit. But it’ll add up. If the players aren’t making choices and dealing with the fallout and language comes out of you, that noose is tightening.

Well, that’s how it really does work. That noose is boredom strangling your game to death. And it might as well be around your neck because a GM who runs boring games ceases to be a GM.

How do you avoid being strangled to death? Well, that comes down to two things. First, it’s deciding what actual pieces of information need to come out of your private stash and get handed to the players. And there’s really only one good reason for any piece of information to go to the players. Well, I guess it’s two reasons. It’s a compound reason. There’s a comma and a conjunction. The reason is: “if the players would likely make a different decision or if their chances of success would likely be different if they had the information, then it needs to be shared.”

Now, the thing is, that’s not an objective standard. And if you’re looking for objective standards, you shouldn’t be running games. There’s a reason RPGs are run by human brains and not computers. You know your players and you know what they care about. Some players like moral quandaries and redemption and all of that crap. They will try to redeem Darth Vader the moment they sense any amount of good in him. Some players just like to stomp villains into the ground and don’t care what their villainous excuses are. Whether you’re running a published adventure or your own creation, it’s up to YOU to know whether a piece of information really WOULD have any profound impact on what the players do or whether they succeed. And, if it would, you give them a chance to know it. And if it wouldn’t, you skip that scene.

Beyond deciding what information deserves a place in your game, the other half of using the minimum necessary boredom is figuring out the word count. How much detail do you need. Do you just need to tell the players that Darth Vader is their father and a give them a glimmer of hope, or do you need to make them watch the entire prequel trilogy? This is where the noose analogy really helps. Necessary or not, every word you use tightens the boredom noose. So, use the minimum number of words you need to get the idea across.

Imagine, for example, you’re creating a world in which wizards are feared and persecuted. Wizards have to operate in secret. And so do sorcerers and warlocks and even bards. Well, that’s the sort of thing players need to know before creating their characters. Because it might make some players want to play a wizard much less. And it might make other weird players want to play wizards even more. But, now, how much do you share about that? Why are people so afraid of magic? That needs an explanation, right? Wizards need to understand everything about the ancient Wars of the Magi, right?

No. They need to know the stuff that will affect their decisions. In as few words as possible. “Two centuries ago, a cabal of tyrannical wizards tried to conquer the world and committed many atrocities. As a result of the War of the Magi, all non-divine magic users are feared and persecuted. Any use of arcane magic or any suspected use of arcane magic in front of witnesses will probably get you executed by soldiers or burned alive by a torch-and-pitchfork mob.”

And that’s it. The whole idea has been boiled down to one, essential paragraph. Wizards tried to take over the world. The world now hates wizards. If you use magic in public, people will try to kill you. That’s everything you need to know.

Now, is there more detail you could include? Sure. There might be safe havens for wizards in the world. There might be nations where the whole “burn the witch” thing isn’t true. But those are the exception, not the rule. Meanwhile, there might be players who want more information too. They might want to know how that extends to magic items. Or the inherent magical abilities of certain races. Or they might want to know how subtle spellcasting is and how likely they are to get away with secret spellcasting in town. And that’s why “use the minimum necessary boredom” is just the first rule of three.

You Can Always Add More

There is this old, dirty joke. If dirty jokes offend you, you might want to skip to the next paragraph. But this dirty joke perfectly illustrates Angry’s Second Rule of Avoiding Expository Masturbation. What’s the difference between a lightbulb and a pregnant woman? Give up? You can UN-screw a lightbulb.

If you think again about over-expositing as tightening the noose of boredom that’s going to strangle your game to death, it’s important to understand that there’s no good way to loosen the noose. After all, nooses would be useless if they came loose. Let’s say, for example, that you decided to bury that “wizards are burned at the stake” world detail in three pages of history about the War of the Magi and your players decided that s$&% was too dull to read, there’s nothing you can do to make the War of the Magi interesting again. It’s tainted. It’s done with. You can’t get the players to engage with that information. Which means that you’ve also hidden an important fact about the world from the players under piles of boredom. And any wizard players are going to feel screwed like a lightbulb the first time they cast a spell in the town square and get lynched.

On the other hand, if you just share the briefest explanation in your campaign document about wizard persecution, you can always share more information later. Either because it suddenly becomes relevant in the game or because a player has asked for more details. Maybe there’s a player who’s on the fence about playing a wizard and wants to know some more information. Or maybe the players need a magical solution in the game and now is the time to reveal that there are some known wizard enclaves that the civilized world has been unable to clear and has been pointedly ignoring instead.

You can’t unshare information, but you can always share more information. And that means that you don’t just have to worry about what to share and what to keep private, you also have to worry about when to share it. And that’s why it’s good to start with the biggest, broadest, main ideas. Because you can sprinkle the details over the top when and if they become interesting or relevant.

Now, some GMs worry about that. They worry about sharing some myth or legend right before it’s going to play a major role in the game. Because that seems obvious and formulaic. And so many fictional works do that. You just know that if an episode of some TV show starts with a character recounting a myth, legend, or story about an ancient treasure and some terrible evil; that episode is going to feature the treasure and the evil and the truth about the legend.

Guess what? No one cares. Yes, it is a little obvious. But you know what else it is? NOT BORING!

The point is, you can always share more information. But you can UN-share information. You can’t unstrangle your game.

Punching When You Need to Punch; Goose When You Need to Goose

Angry’s final Rule for Avoiding Expository Masturbation involves the form the exposition takes in the game. See, exposition can take a lot of shapes. The most expository form of exposition is, of course, the campaign document. You know, that big 60-page behemoth that a GM tries to make the players read before they are allowed to create characters. Now, I’ve written a lot of those in my day. And, guess what? They are always bad ideas. Remember how I said that if players wanted to sit an absorb exposition, they’d read a book? Well, that’s exactly what those awful campaign documents are. So are rulebooks, by the way. Rulebooks are exposition. And character backstories? The ones players write? Those are also expository documents. And they suck. They are literally the opposite of playing the game. They are totally non-interactive, and they can’t be read at the game table.

Slightly less expository exposition involves direct narration. This is where you – as the GM – tell the players important information about something in the game. But you’re speaking directly as the GM. Because you’re telling the players things their characters know. Or should know. Or you’re summarizing stuff the characters might have learned off screen. Like, in a research scene you skipped because it would be boring as hell to play out.

All exposition hurts. It’s all bad. But that sort of direct, expository exposition is the most painful of all. It’s like punching your players in the face with boredom. Or punching your game.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some very subtle forms of exposition. The subtlest form of exposition is to take a piece of information, grind it up into tiny details, and sprinkle those details throughout your game. For example, if you want to convey the wizard-burning policy in a particular town because of the mage war, you might begin by describing the remains of a recent bonfire – complete with human bones – on the side of the road as the players come into town. Maybe there’s a broken wizard staff thrust into the ground or a tattered pointy hat. Something that says, “a wizard was executed here.” Later, maybe the party has an encounter with a villager who is suspicious of a perfectly innocuous event and warns the party that if they are using magic, they’ll be punished. And then, the heroes come upon a memorial to a heroic founder of the town who died in the War of the Magi.

You don’t even have to explain “the War of the Magi” at all. That’s the sort of name you can just drop. It’s kind of like how, in the first few Star Wars movies – the good ones – they mentioned the Clone Wars a few times. They never explained them. But they didn’t have to. They were wars. Clones were involved. And Obi Wan served under Bail Organa. And, given the scope of the Star Wars universe, they were probably big conflicts. Clone Wars was said with he same weight as World War II. Context will fill in the gaps.

Now, don’t fool yourself. This exposition hurts too. You’re still interrupting your game. Yes, you’re interrupting with scenes that actually have some interaction involved. But they are still scenes that don’t advance the plot of the current adventure. It’s still just exposition. It’s still just sharing non-interactive information. It’s just sneakier. It’s like walking you’re standing next to someone and having a perfectly nice conversation and then, suddenly, you snake your hand around behind the person and pinch their a$&. Pinching their a$& with boredom.

You have to know when to punch and when to goose. That’s what pinching someone’s a$& is called if you somehow don’t know. Goosing them. It might seem like goosing is always preferable. It’s subtle and sneaky. It’s less violent than a punch. And you get to touch someone’s a$&, which could be a positive thing. Depending on the a$&. The problem with goosing someone is that, well, it’s generally viewed as a practical joke. So, the person might just laugh it off. There’s no mistaking the feeling behind a punch. And sometimes you don’t manage to get a good pinch. You just sort of miss. A punch can miss too, but even a missed punch is unmistakable.

Okay… this metaphor is breaking down a little.

What I’m trying to say is that punching your players with exposition is obvious. There’s no missing it. There’s no risk of miscommunicating. You remember that test I mentioned about how information that would affect the players’ choices or their chances of success is information worth conveying. Well, the bigger the effect, the more important it is to get that information across with no mistakes or miscommunications. That wizard-burning thing? It has to be conveyed VERY CLEARLY before character generation. Because it will play a major role in the players’ choices to play wizards or allow wizards in their parties. You can’t be subtle there. You have to spell it out. But, if the wizard burning thing is confined to one town in the campaign and will affect one adventure? Well, it’s not as big a deal. At most, it will just create an extra scene in the adventure where the wizard gets to fireball a torch-and-pitchfork mob. Ironically proving the mob right about that whole “wizards are evil” thing.

Just because information might change the players’ choices or their chances of success, that doesn’t mean it can’t also be optional. Part of the game is allowing the players to explore and discover what they will. And if they don’t find all of the information they need, well, choices still need to be made. They will have to muddle through. It’s a balancing act. The bigger the choice – or the bigger the consequences – the less optional any information affecting that choice should be.

Goosing is a great way to convey optional information and reward attentive players. It’s also a great way to share extra details about anything you’ve already punched the players with. That War of the Magi might be once sentence in your campaign book. But, during the course of play, you can keep goosing the players with specific details about it. How it started, what some of its consequences were, how various races and civilizations were affected, and so on.

In fact, that’s a great way to cut down the length of your campaign document. First, you take out everything except the biggest, most important ideas. The punches. All the little stuff you edited out? You keep all of that aside and you goose the players with it as they explore the world and play the game.

And that’s really just another way to make sure you’re using the minimum necessary boredom in your game.