Minimum Necessary Boredom

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September 13, 2018

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.


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29 thoughts on “Minimum Necessary Boredom

  1. While reading through I took issue with exposition always being boring or terrible, but while trying to articulate why is wasn’t, I realized that even the best exposition is always the most boring part of a good story.
    Even with something like GoT, learning about the world was interesting, but it wasn’t as good as anytime something was actually happening.

    For your campaigns and such, do you use documents anymore or just try and get the information as concise enough as possible to be able to say it in one easily memorable paragraph?

    • —at the risk of speaking out of turn—

      The pitch, developed out of the premise agreed on during a Session Zero, is sent to the players, and if the players approve it, they get a long document full of exposition to use when creating characters – a campaign-specific Player’s Handbook, if you will.

      As I understand it, anyhow.

    • In his secret stash for some patreon supporters, you can find the pages and pages of campaign exposition he forced his player’s to read.

      • I wrote this to chide Angry and now I feel guilty. More readers here don’t have access to the secret stash than do.
        So, listen, it’s ok to enjoy world building masturbation. I do. Angry does. It’s ok if you do. That doesn’t mean that the things we like are the best answers for the question “how to run the best games”.
        I haven’t read the “What Lies Below” exposition, but I’ve seen one for Pathfinder; tbe first sentence is “Reading this is optional, I’ll goose you with anything important.”

  2. I have found that exposition can be wedged in to other conversations, but is rarely, during a session, as appreciated when presented as a thing in itself. As an example, while interacting with an NPC or monster or villain, a tidbit comes out. Like the cheese on the hamburger that makes a cheeseburger.
    This is a good article on what sized doses, and when to offer those doses, with the intent of preventing the ‘off’ switch being triggered in the players’ brain.

  3. I find it helpful to ask questions like “Does your character care about the line of succession?” or “Are you interested in knowing more about the lizard folk language?” If the answer is no, you can move along briskly while still hinting there is more depths that can be explored later by interested parties, even between games. I also always try to sign post where my world differs from the printed game materials, like “In most D&D worlds, Drow come from the Underdark, but here they are high elves possessed by dark spirits and can happen anyplace. Everyone still hates and fears them, though, but they are more like a disease than a culture.”

  4. This is great. I also like Sly Flourish’s idea from The Lazy Dungeon Master Second Edition that you can make a list of 20 clues/secrets/facts before each game and drop them in as you go. Seems like an alternative to long boring passages of exposition that keep the pace of the game up, and keep the DM on her toes watching for how to slip in the necessary information as part of the present-tense story.

  5. “People who play role-playing games – and that includes GMs – people who play role-playing games are interested in precisely two things.” Wasn’t there an interesting post a while back about how players want some combination of eight different things?

    And wasn’t one of them (specifically discovery) more or less about seeking exposition?

    • Discovery is not about finding exposition as such but feeling of achievment when you find a hidden object, a piece of lore, a secret passage etc.
      Exposition can be handed out through such discovery but if somebody would recite me 5 minutes long history of dwarven city of Har-Kadast I would probably interrupt him despite being primarly engaged by discovery.
      The way to handle exposition to discovery seeker ould be to break it apart and strew it through the dungeon, it is the act of seeking information that engages me, not the information itself.

  6. I’ve been seeing you complain for years about your player’s long, intensely dull character backstories that they expect you to read, and my question is: where do I find players that actually give enough of a s&#t to write backstories? My sample size is pretty limited, but I have never had a player that showed even the slightest interest in spending even one minute outside the game prepping for the game. I’ve had players treat me like I’m the a&&@#%e for expecting them to know what their spells do after playing the same character for 6+ months. Do I just have garbage friends and I should ditch them for better friends? Or is players putting in the absolute minimum amount of effort possible the standard that all GM’s have to put up with? Is this my fault somehow? I’m open to the possibility, but I don’t think I’m running bad games, a bunch of my players have raved about how much fun they have and always look forward to the next session. It seems like they are just intensely lazy but maybe that is the key difference between a player and a DM.

    (To be clear, I don’t want t read their character backstories, they are always terrible, I just want players who show me they care enough about the game to actually put in some effort creating a backstory)

    • Sounds like your players don’t have any respect for the hard work you do as a GM. If you can accept that though, there is no reason to break a friendship over this. If you aren’t satisfied with the situation, then by all means find a new group, there are people out there who will be invested in the games. Personally I’ve found the best way to get players to respect you and your game is to introduce Muggles to the hobby.

    • I love this post and want to share it with my group. Some of which have been playing for years (FOR YEARS) and still don’t seem to understand how a spell works. YEARS.

      • Seriously, I am going to LOSE MY S&#T if my players try to halt my game one more time to look up which dice to roll for Magic Missile damage or for Healing Word. My new rule is going to be if you can’t memorize (or Heaven forbid, write down on a card) what your spells do, then you don’t get to play a spellcaster. My next group is going to be four Champion Fighters.

        • We play 3.5. After 17 years still have players that can not for the life of them remember how a 5′ step works.

          I have one player who absorbs everything about the world I throw at him. He appreciates my efforts to create detail, and since I know he does, I do all my deep creation for him. One player is kind of middle of the road. One player takes the smallest detail (that is usually the one that doesn’t matter) and over thinks it to death. The final player can’t remember what a 5′ step is, but he is the best character role player in the group. He can’t remember NPC names from hour to hour and it drives me crazy. I try to cater to each of them in my planning.

          Current campaign I decided to NOT do the big expository document. The players all created their characters using some background I provided. The PC are all 18 years old and grew up together. I wrote a short story with their PCs all in kindergarten from the standpoint of their teacher, which set up a lot of the campaign; some history, other NPCs, etc. Only about 2 pages long, and everyone loved it because I used the characterization of their PCs as 6 year olds. THEN, to wet their appetite for the campaign I had a live level-0 short adventure where they were STILL 6 year olds and the town was attacked. This set up the big-bad for the game, and showed that I wasn’t going to hold back when I killed the little brother of one of the players. Emotional investment works SO WELL for plots… 🙂

          Of course, this all works well when you’ve been DMing the same set of players for 25 years and know what they all like.

    • Well, in my 6 years as a GM back in the day, most if not all of my players were like that, at least at my gaming table. Online there was more variety. I say don’t sweat it, as long as they seem to be engaged you shouldn’t worry. In fact, between the player who gives you no backstory and the other who gives you 10 dull pages of Mary Sue fan-fiction(really? you did all of that before LEVEL ONE?!), I found to prefer the former WAY more.
      And the most important question is: does it REALLY matter? I mean, unless you’re running a tailored campaign for certain characters. The Adventure of the Week type of campaign doesn’t need a backstory at all, neither do the different ‘meatball’ types. Even a big ‘spaghetti’ campaign doesn’t *need* one. After all, who cares about Sam’s backstory on The Lord of the Rings? Hell, Tolkien even leaves Aragorn’s mostly out of the novel and only adds it in the Appendix.

      IMHO, backstories only really matter in a long Session Zero campaign with players who REALLY care about that. And the Angry principle applies to players as well: ‘you can always add more’. In fact, most of my campaigns back in the day started with archetype characters and we would add layers as we needed(I always worked with the players on that). Say you’re visiting a PC’s homeland, that’s when backstory actually matters, and you can always work that out when you need it.

    • Not sure being intensely lazy is the key difference between GMs and players. I mostly GM and prep for like one session out of 3. And I’m the one forgetting NPC names from hour to hour. I still enjoy every session and feel invested tho. So I wouldn’t take your players not writing backstories and forgetting their spells damage as them giving zero shit about the game. They juste clearly give zero shit about bookkeeping.

  7. I thought this was going to be an article about how boredom was good and I haven’t been giving myself the minimum necessary boredom to allow creative thought to fulminate in my brain. I’m gad to find out I’ve been doing things right all along by not doing much at all.

    Do you have any suggestions for when one player is actually interested in the pages of backstory I’ve created and asks followup questions in a session, but multiple other players aren’t interested in my steamy expositional dump the first player keeps asking for more of?

    • Probably because the players want to BE their character and live it.

      I mean that is kind of the point of an RPG from the PC side of things. They don’t really want to write out a plot or other characters, they want to be served up a story and characters for their character to react to and ideally be awesome coming out the other end.

        • They don’t ONLY want to create their own stuff. They also want to USE (i.e. make choices with) what they made.

          You’re right, they could just write the whole story themselves. But then they just wind up creating their own solutions to their own problems and that isn’t nearly as satisfying as solving problems someone else came up with.

          • That’s my point though. We’re taking Angry seriously when he said: “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.”
            But you can create choices and see results by yourself; it’s called writing. So if people who exclusively want passive content consumption would just go read, why wouldn’t people who exclusively want to be active content creators and choosers write?

            My whole point is that siloing off everything into “making choices” obfuscates the very thing that’s asserted to be absent. Making choices and observing the results, unless they are purely in your own head, *always* means gathering information. So to say that someone wants to make choices and see the results, but never ever wants to gather information, either means they want to write (where there is no need for reference to anything external), or *their motivations are logically contradictory.*

            You can’t want to make choices and *not* want to gather information. I’m not, even slightly, arguing against the principles Angry shared here. Think about how you present, and why. Be concise. Use the right tool for the job, and don’t overwork it (but do prepare). I’m just saying that there’s a fundamental flaw in the logic of the players so described. Maybe the vast majority of players really do have ironclad and yet incompatible demands. God knows fans of all sorts of other things (games, books, movies, you name it) are fundamentally unpleaseable. But if there is such a logical flaw, addressing it head-on rather than dancing around it might be worthwhile.

            • If it’s in your own head, it’s not an observation. And this thread has missed the point so far, it is on a completely different continent from the point. Because it’s being pedantic rather than practical.

  8. One of the best experiments I’ve tried with exposition was recording all the players’ knowledge skill bonuses and rolling up knowledge checks for each players ahead of time for monsters they would encounter and anything if necessary importance or that I thought they’d ask about. if it was a success I typed up a few sentences on the topic for them, if they fumbled I put some half true stuff. I threw 1-3 red herrings in for each player so they couldn’t look at the list and predict the whole plot for the night and printed off a sheet for each of them. Players really liked it and it removed the boring part of knowledge checks where I ramble about a monster and they just say, “what he said.”

    • That’s genius! It reminds me.of GMs who dont even grab a quick reference sheet of player saves and AC. Nothing makes a better gsme than knowing your PCs!

  9. Yeah, this article certainly strikes hone a bit. I’ve been world building as I’m running in a campaign but I also know that my players won’t care much about any of it.

    Matt Colville basically said the same things in his video addressing this topic. He basically says unless the lore can be written in dramatically, players won’t likely show interest unless they are into lore.

    But more useful yet is Angry’s point on world building not needing to conform to real life. I’ve been over focused on trying to find the size of towns and the distances that farms would be from them… when in reality my players could not care less, they wouldn’t have any idea what is “correct”. And honestly, it’s not like I have ever cared about that stuff either when playing video games.

  10. The answer is already there. If tge info is necessary, and only one player cares, reduce boredom to a minumum.
    If the info isn’t necessary, and the player is just asking out of curiosity, just have a chat outside the game. That way, it won’t interrupt your game, and both of you can go into whatever obscure branch of lore you wish, without other people staring holes into you.

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