The more I look into tabletop games, the more I find myself wanting to flip through pages rather than flip through rolling tables. The closest I've been to a "tabletop RP" in person were the short-lived afterschool Magic sessions during my sophomore year in high school, and I've only participated in one actual game online (which sadly fell apart). However, when I found out through online discussions and various videos (of which I cannot discount Spoony's mostly-excellent Counter Monkey ramblings), I've started to seek out and look into various systems, whether in local bookstores or online sites (such as DriveThruRPG.com or FATE Core's website), if only for the lore alone.

Stuff like Warhammer 40,000 (which, admittedly, is technically more a miniatures combat game than a roleplaying one) have a ridiculously vast amount of lore that is almost nonexistent in the gameplay itself, while others such as DnD may see GMs using some lore as background for their campaign but generally not much more than that. Usually, however, source books carry a ton of stuff that never makes it into the main campaign, and I usually find that way more interesting than the game itself!

On the flip-side, I've spent countless hours building characters and typing up posts for various RP forums. Most I've been on through the years have struggled with cementing organized play (if they've ever attempted to at all) because of the very flexible nature of individual narratives. Some ideas for settings and characters were just next-to-impossible to incorporate into a structured gameplay system, either because they were inconsistently powerful (both over- and under-powered), or their abilities were absurdly complex and difficult to define without a whole narrative in its own right to describe them... which then no one in their right minds would ever have the time or sanity to sit through and read (ie - members who were not mods who HAD to read through them, or me).

I've seen examples of both ends; I could post links, but that may be considered "cruel and unusual punishment" because of their length/absurdity :P



So here's where I ask, which is more important/interesting to you?

Do you play more for the sake of gameplay, even if it eschews narrative or character motivations?

Or do you lose yourself in the background and details of the worlds you play in, even if it may possibly not fit neatly into a game?


This is purely opinion-based, obviously, so I'm not looking for concrete "answers" - because there aren't any. Personal experiences/stories are definitely welcome!

Well, personally, I seek for a balance of the two.  The story background (or lore, to use your term) creates a consistent framework...I don't feel the a game needs to be slavishly tied to canon, but I feel like the places where canon is set aside should have a plausible extrapolation from canon (for example, I played for years in a Star Wars game where one of the key NPCs was a planetary-scale AI...which we never see in Star Wars.  But the GMs premise for it was that the Empire had been experimenting with automating ships...Star Destroyers and even something as large as the Death Star, building off the way fighter flight operations were enhanced by astromech droids that we did see, often.)  Especially in situations where the setting is a big part of the draw of the game, you want the game to feel similar to its namesake material.  In some games, that's very important...you want Mechwarrior to feel like its Battletech roots, not Star-Trek-gone-manga.

But, at the same time, I feel that very few games have such an encyclopedic write-up of the background that it could be said that there is no way anything beyond the canon material could ever exist in that world.  And if it will make the game more enjoyable for everyone involved to say, "Yeah, there's no canonical basis for that, but we're doing it anyway," then go for it...as long as the game stays internally consistent.  If you allow a certain set of circumstances to give one character magical abilities where he had none before, then anyone else who can create the same circumstances should also be able to get those abilities.  Consistency, more than anything, keeps a game appealing.  If people feel like one player gets all the good breaks (or worse, that they're getting all the bad ones), it kills enthusiasm faster than almost anything else.

I have to generally agree with facemaker. To add something a little extra, though, when playing in canon settings (that is, settings that exist outside of RPG products) I tend to prefer settings that have either a metric ton of setting material (Star Wars), or just enough to allow for a creative GM to extrapolate on and keep the feel of the setting (Fallout). Anything in-between tends to cause lots of "nuh-uh/uh-huh" arguments over what is feasible in the setting, in my experience.

*grin*  My experience is that such arguments are as much a matter of the players/GM involved as they are available source material.  But it does become much easier to maintain the flavor of a story when you've got an abundance of source material.  And when you've barely got any, there's not much flavor to maintain, so it's easier to make it your own without disappointing expectations.

It all boils down to investment. Every GM and Player invests differently into a game, in terms of time and commitment, and this will make a gap in the purpose of the lore. Some GMs my invest a lot of time with backgrounds, histories, political connections, etc. But if the players just want to get to the next battle or treasure hoard, the GM will be disappointed. The opposite is also true, when the player is looking for an overarching plot and there is none. The ideal game is where the level of investment is roughly in the same neighborhood for everyone.

It's like watching a movie about World War II versus reading, say, a history text. I want the movie to be about World War II, to have the trappings and tropes of that, but I don't necessarily want the movie bloated into a miniseries just to include as many interesting facts about World War II as possible.

Warhammer 40k is an instructive example, as I just watched Ultramarines, which I can recommend to anyone who likes the setting, but not to anyone else. It was, I felt, very clearly set in that setting, and those involved clearly drew from a massive quantity of information about it, but little to none of it was explained in the movie. And that worked just fine, for me. When I wanted more information, I googled it. I think, as a stand-alone movie, it could work for most people, though they'd have to get past the fact that it's not a particularly great movie.

This can go wrong, as with, for instance the latest Tron movie, which doesn't make best sense unless the viewer has kept up with all of the additional promotional material which spoke to the backstory. At least for me, the lack of that knowledge, and the attempt to shoe-horn references to in into the movie, made the experience less coherent.

So, in terms of games, I prefer it when I can look at a game and tell that it's "that game" with a specific setting, and I like it when games I'm in are at least a little bit set apart by the uniqueness of the characters and the particular elements of the setting being used. But I don't like it when I have to read a book about someone's character or the setting just to play the game. If I know about the character or the setting because I've already read about them (such as a Star Wars game that assumes I know who Vader is and why there's a Rebellion) then I'm probably fine, but otherwise it's better for all involved if I avoid the game.

So, here is my take.

I like to see a game have a lot of Lore in the build. IE, there are ratmen that are taking over, or goblins that actually use the normal goblin tactics in combat (IE, they don't attack or even fight unless they have no escape or they greatly outnumbering the enemy.

On the other hand, I think it's also important to allow for GM's to have the ability to tweak things to fit their own world. For example, what if Goblin's were the dominate race on the planet. Not because of their innate abilities, but because of the sheer numbers that they were able to put together and just overwhelmed their enemies. That's certainly not lore, but it would make for a very interesting world to play in, where everything is a constant state of having to figure out what you can do without drawing down hordes vaster than anything anyone had ever seen.

Maybe if you just have a designated "Basil Exposition", who the characters can turn to when they realise they have no idea what's going on.
Preferably with a voice you enjoy doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMAbNFptzAA