Lore vs Writing

so I often have people this is the show folks welcome to stream this may be the point where I edit in edit out all the stuff that happened up until now I often have people and this has been true since we started the channel ask me hey I've built this world and I've got all this cool backstory and stuff but my players don't seem to engage with it what do I do and obviously that's not that's not really something I can diagnose because it would take a lot of time for me to like maybe your ideas are just bad that's that's possible not all ideas are equally cool or or have equal merit certainly the stuff I was coming up with when I was 15 20 25 was pretty crap and not I would not have and I knew that at the time by the way you develop skill a lot we develop I'm sorry I got bad words you developed taste a lot faster than you develop skill you know good stuff for bad stuff way way way before you can make good stuff so it's always possible that you've got this the reason your players aren't engaging with your campaign is because the stuff that you've created isn't that engaging and there's nothing for except to do it over and over again that's the nice thing about being a dungeon master running D&D live with four to six other people is you can watch the expressions on their faces and if you're paying attention and if you have empathy you can tell what worked and what didn't work and what landed and what missed and over time you start developing muscles for which ideas are good ones however how do you tell if it's crap it's crap if it doesn't engage people if you read it and you don't like it like that that's the I've read my own books dozens of times if not more my own stuff I read when I send a script for the comic off to Matt and Liam the first thing I do after I send it is I read it again and then the next morning when I wake up I read it again and if the stuff in it doesn't still entertain me if the jokes aren't still funny make me laugh literally laugh out loud then I gotta edit them and rewrite them so that's one way but I think that one of the problems people have is they they are in love with the world building that's one of the reasons we like running Dungeons & Dragons is the one of the hooks one of the things that makes people want to be a DM is seeing all the world building the dungeon aster gets to do that was certainly part of it for me I think another part I'd mentioned this I think in the last dream was I enjoyed that idea of being the guy who knew all the answers and having the adventure having access to the adventure that information was like treasure I like the idea of being that person but certainly seeing my friend John's campaign setting that he was building I was kind of like wow this is neat you get to do all this you get to be j.r.r tolkien and draw all these maps and create all this deep lore you get to be you know george RR martin and create this the history of this world and that's a lot of fun and it's one of the things I think that attracts Dungeon Master's but and this is an important lesson the reason you're hooked on DMing has nothing to do with the reason they are hooked on playing you may really like the world building you may really like the challenge and spending hours at home drawing maps and coming up with names and NPCs and orders of knights and the history of your world you may love that but that has nothing to do with the thing the players have showed up for the players have showed up to roll dice and push let the players want to kick down doors and kill works so the trick is and this is the subject of this video how to take all that nonsense that you've come up with that I think anybody can do anybody can come up with a nonsense the trick is then presenting it in front of players in a dramatic way let's see if I have I missed anything in the chat everyone smile yeah as you know I've got to stop and kind of go and see if anybody's that was a really tough lesson for me to learn the terrible DM says well hopefully you picked that name way back then yeah because remember like your players don't owe you interest in that or the work you did on your world I'm gonna say this again cuz it's important the work you have done on your campaign setting they don't owe you anything for that you did that work for you I know you think you did it for them I disagree you did it for you you did it because it was fun for you to do you didn't need to do it like you can run D&D with just a town and a nearby cave goblins in there go and what's the name of the kingdom what's the name of the world well the name of the gods I don't know use whatever use of God some players have a kind of care right you don't need all that stuff you did it cuz you liked it well that's fine right that's so the per have this deal is not feeling as though the players are in any way obligated to like your stuff you like it that's the hook for you but at the same time recognizing that you're gonna have more fun if you can get them to engage with it and so that's gonna be what we talked about a litte people are asking questions that I don't really have answers to and will sideline this discussion so I'm gonna skip them I apologize if man is ever gonna become famous he needs an R or I agree stand by okay so that's gets kind of the meat of what we're talking about here at work I was the I still am the lead writer at the senior writer the head writer the only writer and a company called Turtle Rock Studios we just a couple years ago produced a big triple a game called evolve one of the things I'm proudest of creatively maybe the thing I am promised done creatively in my life we created an entire universe me and the artists and the designers and that was just a blast and there was a point this is the homework member the homework I assigned if you don't know what we're talking about as far as homework goes hit exclamation point floor or exclamation exclamation what writing I could just say bang bang Laura bang writing and you will get links to the examples here so the process of creating this universe was largely me working with the artists and the artists were coming up with characters and I would interpret those characters through my own lens I was kind of the custodian of the world and I like how 50 people all type it as apparently none of them thinking I don't have to do it somebody else will do it it worked a minute ago I think you folks may have overloaded it ya know there is right there so chosen of nem elects to ask a question that I'm gonna have to skip because it's not it's it's I would derail the conversation so we were building this world and I'm working with the art director who had the UM one of the owners of the company it was very specific ideas of what he wants the world have evolved to be like the box in which he wants it to fit but within that box I was free to do whatever and you know the artist would imagine this character design this character off for instance and the artist working on I thought he was a Space Marine and I was like well no I mean that doesn't make any sense we already have another character who's a Space Marine and that character is how it fits completely different than this one so this character must he can be a Space Marine otherwise they'd be sharing similar at least iconography this guy's got a big lightning gun I think this character is an orbital welder I think he's a he's like a blue-collar and people really like that idea so it was up to now if people hadn't liked that idea I would have thrown it out right I didn't I wasn't I didn't have the power to be a tyrant my ideas had to had to succeed in the marketplace of ideas about what the other developers but generally that's how the game was being produced and there was a point where one of the producers on the game came up to me and said hey we need you to write backgrounds for all the characters in the game for the the playable characters and when you write you find easier to work with someone who to all yourself I find it easy to do it all myself I don't think writing is an inherently collaborative medium so this this producer was asking for war and they were asking for non narrative fiction they wanted to know how old is this character what's their blood type what's their a hair color and eye color where did they go to school where did like that's the background information that you get in a lot of these games and it's all nonsense it's and I said I just said no I'm not doing that I said I'm not gonna write that and the producers like what the artists need that stuff and I'm like well they haven't come to me and asked for it I suspect that's something you've decided they need because maybe you worked on another prod and that's how they did it there but I this is I sit in amongst the artists and we talk all the time about this stuff but if we need something to kind of get people all on the same page you know give me a little while and I'll come up with something and the that producer was like okay fine so did Matt already talk about his arm arm and I completely agree mama meatboy 100% so what I did was and I worked on this for I don't know like a week or so and I was trying to get it done for the Christmas party which I did so during the Christmas party I send out this email I sent the email to the entire team and it was called Val's story it was the first fiction written for evolve up until then anything I actually had a lot of dialogue written and recorded and in the game we had cast actors for the characters and we've been doing a lot of writing and recording and the knowledge of how does this world work who are these characters was all no no it was institutional's all stored in the in the developers heads right it was all you have to sit near Matt or sitting there Phil or some of the artists if you sat near them then you knew what was going on with the world if not go ask them and go talk to them right we had a conference room that we didn't use for the first year and a half of Dale element because it was just expected you would just go talk to people so I write vows story you can read it by typing slash or an exclamation point writing and Val's story is dramatic it is a narrative it is a little short story takes 15 minutes to read it send it to the whole team and in this fiction we see this see ig9 agent and if you read the story you find out what does CI g9 stand for counterintelligence group 9 and you get some idea of what they do and where they're based and who val is and what her job is what does she normally do and she talks to her boss and her boss is giving her an assignment there's some mysterious stuff happening out in the far reaches of the galaxy this is all drama and he charges her with a directive you need to find out what's going on with these monsters but don't let them know that you're a spy because the people who live out on the frontier hub agents like you they're like the they'd be set for life on the bounty they would get for you and she's like well I just have to find some way to get them to trust me and the next two sections of this short story are about how the technique she uses to get these planet gamers to trust her and all of that is all at what a planet tamer is right where this where and when this game is set who the heroes are what the heroes are doing who val is what her goals are who's the leader of the team who's the second command all of that stuff all comes out through the dialog through tension and resolution that is the job of the writer and I argue the dungeon master it is your job not to write the lore anybody could do that and it's largely meaningless the lore that you love so much that you put so much work into is meaningless and no one asterisk no one is gonna care about it unless you can contextualize it dramatically writing is the the writers job is to create drama drama is I can't do the thing with my hand let's see we can tension I can't do it resolution tense tension will the hero's dot dot dot how is this theme gonna resolve what is Val going to do will they accept her onto the team will they sell her out that is writing and to my way of thinking it is the opposite of lore now there are exceptions let's see sorry for the alarm question also I think of the bee's knees I think you are also the wasps nipples Reverend juicebox how do you feel about incorporating player characters into the lore I'm in favor of it for example Jerry Vulcans of Penny Arcade has a C team all interwoven well that's great don't you do the same thing in a critical role you know I think that's a great idea how do we apply drama to a campaign session by session well I'm not sure I'm not I mean apart from so let me finish and maybe I can answer that question I'm not really concerned about applying drama to a can session by session I'm more concerned with trying to give you cyz gaming the tools to take the lure the meaningless you've come up with we've all done I've done it take that meaningless we've all come up with as Dungeon Master's if we're so in love with and find a way to contextualize it dramatically so you can see what I did with vowels story and you can read all of the heroes and well not all of them many heroes have their own story this was a huge hit by the way not every single person in trouble Rock Studios read it but most people did people kid people I didn't know people that had joined Tower Rock Studios only recently came up to me and they were like wow man I read that that was amazing Thanks I enjoyed reading it go write some more programmers that don't have anything to do really with the narrative or the characters or the presentation read it and loved it and became fans of the work moving forward so in one swell foop I had I had written something that if I just done background stuff right if I'd done what the producer had asked some of the artists would have read some of it because they would have felt like they had to write I've got to read this stuff in order to understand who the character is and that would have been unpleasant and that's the trick is keeping your audience whether it's the players in your video game or whether it's the players at your table keeping them engaged and the way you do that is by taking this information this nonsense you know what is the ig9 that kind of stuff and turning into something dramatic now there are times and we had you know 20 characters and I think I wrote eight or nine stories there was a point with one of the characters in somebody's background I think it must've been Lazarus's and this is gonna be an obscure reference if you're not familiar with evolved and one of the characters backstories we talked about how these two characters hide and Lazarus were both veterans of a thing called the mutagen wars and people were like one of the mutagen wars right in their backstory in their backstory in their in their stories we talked about how they're veterans of a thing called the mutagen wars and that the mutagen wars were there were humans on one side and there were mutated humans on the other and that was just a throwaway thing I made up I didn't even know it meant it was now an official part of the lore of the game but I just needed there to be this cool series of conflicts so I came up with some nonsense and threw it out there and like a year later we're going through the process of making new heroes for evolve and my friend Scott wanted to make and I want to make an alien we make an alien character be all sorts of cool ideas try to make an alien character and the art director of the project super super not in favor of that however he's not a tyrant and he's like alright listen I think this is a bad idea but I'm not gonna if you guys come up with something that the team likes then I'll step back and let you guys work your magic or whatever so we're working on this character who would become slim and originally he was gonna be an alleged not uh not a basilisk soldier not a veteran of the mutagen wars but when we showed the concept art which we were quite quite proud of to someone at the publisher the Thurston publisher said because he had read all the stories I'd written was is that a basilisk soldier and we all looked at each other wouldn't it yeah I think is now that you asked that question I think he is and so suddenly I needed to know what were the mutagen wars and I couldn't think of any way to do it other than I couldn't think of you know it's because it's so expose Ettore it's so just blah blah blah I really couldn't think of any way to do it other than to sit down and write the lore and that's the exclamation point Laura link it's what I wrote for who this character Slim is a soldier from a series of wars they're called basileus soldiers where they come from what was the war about how many wars were they what were they you know who won and lost and so it was a thing I tried to do it dramatically but it's not dramatic it's very drives very like Silmarillion esque and I felt like I was kind of backed into a corner I felt like I've there's nothing for it nothing to it but to do it and so I didn't deny I didn't you know I didn't follow a rule just for the sake of following the rule I made an exception when it seemed like this is a good time to make an exception and the reason I bring it up is because at least one person on the team loved it my friend Mike read the whole thing and I didn't I didn't peg Mike as being somebody who really had engaged with the world of the fiction up until then but he loved the whole thing he read the entire thing I was I was like oh it was an important point and that's the asterisk and the thing I was talking about earlier is that this the work that you've done your players aren't there for that they're they're there because I want kick down doors and kill works but every once in a while you get a player who really does like the lore and who really does want to read that stuff and that's when you kind of get lucky and it's nice to have that stuff when you need it and sometimes you just gotta you just gotta say well I can't think of a good way to turn this into a dramatic moment I can't think of a way to take these details these world details this lore which generally speaking I don't think should be exposed to the player like running around in Skyrim reading books like I think if I read a book man there are way better ways to do that than by playing a video game text reading text in general in a video game I think is a terrible terrible experience the and one of the reasons I think video games in general gets not so badly for having bad writing or bad dialogue is because the production team wants to spend the budget on writing to explain things to the player they're terrified the player is not gonna understand something and that fear being motivated by fear causes them to take cinematics and do the least cinematic thing possible with them explain things instead but that should not be our goal that should not be our job our job should be to find ways to introduce these ideas dramatically give an example there is a there is a flower in The Lord of the Rings and called Simbu Monet and some of you may recognize it just because we're all nerds here and you've heard the term symbol monnet is a white flower that grows only or always on the graves of the kings of Rodd how do we know that how do we know that it's not because we read The Silmarillion it's not because Aragorn and Allen were just riding through a field and she just points to it and then artlessly without drama says oh look here are those flowers that only grow on the graves of the kings of Rohan it's because in a scene step one it's a scene it's something that happens what's put in front of the players let's imagine as the dee dee game put one of the players two characters right you can see where we're going with this it's gonna be drama my right arm does Marburg drama Aragorn and Theoden Aragorn is trying to convince Theoden to commit his armies right this is Jafra and Sir John French right for God's sake the honor of England is at stake right he's trying to get Theoden to commit his troops to aid Gondor because Aragorn knows that without the Riders of Rohan they're lost they're they they're they're gonna lose this war and thinking it is standing over the grave of his dead son and that's not just a detail by the way especially for watching the movie they do a really good job in the movie really quite a good job of writing and acting because Aragorn demands he puts the issue in front of Theoden and says Gondor needs aid and Theoden wheels on him and confronts him and says where was Gondor when the the east mark fell where was Gondor when this other catastrophe happened where was Gondor win and he stops himself this is a king and kings don't but you know what he was gonna say he doesn't have to say it you know what he was going to say he was gonna say where was Gondor when my son was killed and in this scene talking about his dead son Aragorn trying to get him to stop being a father for a minute and be a king there is symbol money over the grave and he talks about how it grows over the over the graves of the kings of Rome so that's not lor man that's writing that's good writing right Tolkien took some meaningless piece of setting that otherwise we wouldn't care about except you know and that kind of nerdy I just like detail for the sake of detail sense which i think is unhealthy generally speaking and turned it into something dramatic and put it in front of us in a dramatic context welcome to Egypt don't do the hand thing it doesn't help visualization much it hurts you be safe my dude don't tell me what to do so let me give you another example how do you know what the Kessel run is it's not because you read the Encyclopedia Starr right it's not because you were playing the Star Wars MMO and there was a book about runs and you open it up to the chapter Kessel it's because Lucas and I think he's gonna get time we'll be more favorable to him history will be more favorable to him than we have been he his I think storytelling breakthrough was he knew you could just say this stuff and move on man so in again a scene which means it's put in front of us two people you see a pattern two people are arguing so that's drama will the heroes dot dot dot will Luke be able to get Han to lend them his ship they need a fast ship because the Empire is after them and they're trying to escape the Empire's clutches they're on the run that's dramatic and Han says fast ship you never for the Kessel run now it doesn't matter what the Kessel run is let's not get hung up on parsecs or whatever let's not get hung up on the possibility that maybe Han just kind of made that up in the moment to impress Luke because he's Luke's a farm boy how does he know anybody that's not the point the point is that Lucas took this little piece of setting detail the idea of a Kessel run and put it in front of us in a scene with two characters coming into conflict and it's stuck in our minds forever it's stuck there forever because it escalates the conflict fast ship like it did the Kessel run in 9.7 parsecs or whatever and so you don't know what that is but you're like god yeah I need that ship now that's a fast ship now we have to have it if he had been like well I don't know how fast it is really it's it's pretty it smells nice on the inside but I don't know if it's really that fast we've been okay well sorry mr. solo is that your name we'll go talk to somebody else now he escalates the drama by saying oh it's a fast ship alright I did the Kessel run a blonde oh wow so the my submission to you is that we as writers all of us this is a this is not a black-and-white thing it's something that it's something that I have to work out all the time whenever I'm writing something right the critical comic whenever I've got a chapter in the critical role comic then I've got to write something has to happen and I'm just I just don't to write it I just don't to ride it this could be boring is gonna be dull it's because I have not found a way to do it dramatically right we have to up the stakes it has to be lives at stake anyway why is liking detail for the sake of liking detail unhealthy because I think it it I think it's like eating nothing but candy I think that drama is the job of the writer and and detail I think seems like creating the details seems like you're doing the work and it's it's not it's not the work is contextualizing it dramatically that's the hard work so you think to yourself look at all this detail I've come up with and you pat yourself on the back and you say what a good boy I am poor girl but you haven't even really gotten started yet that wasn't important that stuff wasn't important what was important was finding way to contextualize it dramatically speaking of Star Wars chosen of nem LX asks do you think some lore should be left behind the curtain rather than giving an explanation so yes although I'm not sure I would have phrased it that way I think that every movie every Star Wars movie after the first we could talk about Star Wars by the way I've got a whole chunk on it every movie after that first movie has been burdened with the responsibility of pretending like everything they were talking about in that first movie was real and they shouldn't do that they should just move on to other stuff you know I liked seeing the Emperor as just a holographic head 30 feet tall that Vader is kneeling to keep that there is no physical representation of that character that is going to be as impressive to me as that don't show me the Senate that's stupid don't show it to me because there's nothing that's gonna live up to my imagination so yeah don't should they're going to they're obviously going to show us the Kessel run but they should not because it's never going to live up to our expectation [Music] so so we should not write lore I mean you got to do what you got to do like if you're if the if I'm saying you don't need to like for instance my friend ray Randy Andy for me the table Studios art before he left for our ArenaNet and yeah and it was a lot of fun but I never really engaged with his world and the reason is because he took my advice and only built enough stuff to get to get running because he watched my videos and he's like if I do it my way being raised way I'm gonna spend months building a world and we're never gonna play so I'm gonna take Matt's advice and sit down and just build a town and the local environs and that kind of stuff and I stand by that advice for new Dungeon Master's with new players but I am NOT I'm neither new dungeon master nor new player so for me it was tough to engage in the world because I didn't I knew I'm old now and I knew that that there wasn't there was no they are there whereas my friend Phil wrote a 36 page setting guide and sent it to all of us complete with the illustrations and stuff completely blown away hooked me on the world made me believe in it in a way I hadn't believed in some other campaigns I worked in but I never read the thing hi skimmed it I read a couple of pages 36 pages i skim through it but I never really read it it wasn't important to me to read it I don't think Phil minded that I had I think probably been happy if I had but for me the hook was this world was real and Phil believed in it that was the important part you only need to write the Lord necessary I think to get your player to trick your players into believing that all this stuff is real ray did not make any secret of the fact that he had only created enough world to get started he talked about it and about how he was taking my advice and and if I had been 15 would have completely worked on me and if he had done 36 pages of it I probably wouldn't read it I would just been happy to know it existed for some Dungeon Master's lore is the hook getting to write beginning to beat I said this at the beginning the video getting to be George Martin getting to be not the Beatles producer the george RR martin getting to be j.r.r tolkien is part of the juice and I love that and it's a lot of it could be a lot of fun it's like painting minis right world building is like painting minis it's something you can spend your weekend doing your music on and at the end of a couple of hours you've produced all this content my point is only this if your player is not engaging with the content I submit to you that it may be because you have failed to present it dramatically you have failed to take these ideas and turn them into details to a conflict happening between characters so how are we doing by the way it's uh we're an hour into this and I feel like we covered a lot of ground I haven't really been I've been talking a lot and so therefore not monitoring chat closely there could be a huge rebellion happening in chat right now and people saying do not listen to him he's an idiot you know Negros asks Negros asks how much is enough prep and unfortunately there's no there's no right answer to that and I would be remiss in my duties if I were to imply that there were different people are going to different players are going to key off different details for instance I could never really get into the Forgotten Realms it never seemed like a real place because I opened up I tried to run it when it came out was a long time ago obviously there was no indication of where the national boundaries like who's in charge here is this a country is this just a region is it a Duchy is it a dukedom who's in charge if an if are there Knights who dispenses justice who do the townspeople complain to how does trade happen there's none of these details existed in that world that hasn't stopped that setting from becoming really popular that's a very personal and idiosyncratic kind of thing I find maps help a world seem real but also don't be don't let that depress you because maps are hard to do if you're not a cartographer that's why I like hex Agra fir because it makes pretty good looking maps and you don't have to be an artist Kay Couric's we are glad you made it let's see so blitzkrieg karma asks what seems like a good question to me in critical role we see Matt he means Matt Mercer painting these are very detailed explanations with pictures of rooms and situations I think to help us visualize that place so do you think these details don't need to be in place to get the same involvement from players absolutely well I think it's hard to say you may have watched more critical role than me I should talk to Liam and ask him about this is Matt providing the kind of the level of detail that he has learned his players need is Matt providing more detail really than they need or have they learned what the right amount of detail is based on having him as there in many cases only dungeon master I don't know I certainly think that he he enjoys like I try to this is people this happened a lot more than those now thank God people seem to have gotten over this comparing he and I maybe because I'm not running a live game right now that might be why but comparing him and I as Dungeon Master's and he DMS like a writer and idea I'm like an actor I don't like a giving players long pre-written descriptions of things I like knowing things this isn't something they teach you in speech debate they teach in forensics is just no whose subject really well because then you can speak on extemporaneously and you will always be more engaging if you're doing it extemporaneously than if you're rehearsed right so don't meet don't try to memorize stuff I don't write out long speeches for my NPC's maybe I'll do a couple of catchphrases I know what this castle looks like maybe I wrote down somewhere but I don't I don't read it from the but he does he often does and especially for a live stream I think the way he does it is better because me doing extemporaneously I'm often kind of in a hurry to get past it I'm often I'm often in a hurry to get it over with and whereas he takes his time and engages his audience and so I think that tends to work well for a bit I think the answer is you need to know your audience and need to know how much detail is enough how much is too much you know and stuff like describing rooms that's not really when we talk about drama that's not really what I'm talking about I don't think [Music] yeah I can sort of tell that orange wolf 99 like that dude has a towel-dry campaign setting and I he I probably like my campaign setting is just gonna be a bunch of stuff for you to rip off here's this order of knights here's here all the different codices right those you've seen the the codex Terra gnosis right there's like at least twelve of those things here's the teeth of the dragon and how they work and their origins and stuff like that here are all the different types of monk titles the massacre Ravens the master of locusts those things are all gonna be in my campaign setting guide but there are could be any Maps I mean that stuff because I think it'd be better for you to just rip off that stuff this but you can tell like this is the cast up that is the juice format his okay for the GM to maim the characters I mean uh in the context you're asking Baird or sure remember that's a fancy game and they can undo that stuff right restoration and greater restoration I would not do it to screw them though that seems unsportsmanlike I think doing it to add a temporary bit of drama what's your view on balancing saying yes to player ideas and presenting details of your world without having anything going sideways well I don't always say yes I sometimes say no but what I try to do is try to meet people in the middle and say okay this is what you want to do that's weird how about my version of that which is this and then listen to them and see what they think of that because they might like parts of it not like parts of it let's see if we can keep the parts you like it you know it's a kind of be a back and forth and just be open to the idea of of changing stuff over time like if that doesn't work this week let's try to get next week let's see you tread heavily but you speak the truth so welcome Egypt says thy mother mated with a scorpion so I'm trying to think of an example off the top of my head like if I remember correctly y'all you know I mean this is critical roles may be a bad example just because if you haven't watched it then this is just like I'm making something up but you know there was a Colorado who was a mind flayer like a renegade mind flayer that the party enlisted into their scheme to go fight this beholder and that's a great idea because there's this whole Underdark in Matt's world and all these different factions and this famous beholder that they're gonna go fight Govardhan and by creating this character a renegade mind flayer who is probably evil and therefore at best only an ally of convenience the players are always thinking is this character going to betray us but every time she speaks every time she describes something in this world that's it's all lore but now it sounds super dramatic cuz it's coming from this dramatic character this person they need to help them in order to find Kivar in order to get to this beholder but they're never know if they can trust right so whatever and when she talks about stuff she's not just espousing random lore she's talking about the the factions of mind flayers that were responsible for maiming her and all this stuff that is what I mean is you've got this great order of knights for instance you've got this great dwarven I'm doing my best to kind of come up with concrete examples you've got this great dwarven history of this underground Kingdom hey let's meet a dwarf right or let's meet someone who was screwed by those doors and hates them right and who needs the party to help them out it's I think it's not only is it very straightforward to do it's fun to do it's fun to take those parts of your world and say okay now I've done it I've written the lore for it now let's come up with a scene let's crumple the comic let's invent an NPC that the players can meet and ideally like or maybe maybe it like you know that doesn't mean have to be a good guy they can be there could be conflict between them but now the players are gonna be like this is an interesting character maybe he's an enemy maybe she's an ally and were the things they say the lore that they build on that informed their character is going to have a big impact on the players perception of your world they won't even know if you do it right they won't even know that you're dispensing lore that this NPC you've created this a lot of personality and as of this classic conflict in their backstory they won't even realize that all of that is just a trick to introduce your worlds lore to them sorry off-topic have you done that as a Mathari through it yes and that's I'll probably put it on YouTube so anyway Wow so a damage damage ko says lore versus narrative is an example of show don't tell basically yes but no it's kinda the opposite actually did we need to see the the castle run to know what it was no he just mentioned it moved on he just threw it out there and moved on if he had stopped and talked about it we would have all fallen asleep but he didn't it's okay to mention this stuff as long as it's in the context of a dramatic scene so do you have advice for creating a pantheon for your world unfortunately in enigmas prime I get asked this a lot I don't know why obviously there was a problem out there with people feeling as though I guess because maybe one of the things that you're not expected to come up with classes and races you're not expected to come up with backgrounds but you sort of are expected to come up with gods I guess my only advice to you is think about the culture that your characters are adventuring in and create and think about those I took a couple sociology classes super useful in fact I think there's a crash course sociology now which maybe I haven't watched but might be worthwhile to check out think about the mores and folkways of that culture think about what are what things are important to this culture turn those things into gods it's the best advice I can give you don't ask me how to do that I don't know who I just told you okay who how are you feeling that I'm I just I'm more tired than I would be I iced my shoulder it's still swollen I'm doing okay I hope your surgery how do you deal with big info dumps of your character should know about this war but you as a player do not why I said flying into Toronto well sometimes again again this is the this is the lesson is that it's never all one thing or the other as as successful as Val's story was going back to the beginning of this conversation and it was so successful that at one point in a meeting talking about how we're going to open the game evolve like what kind of cutscene are we gonna the one of the owners of the company said let's just film that thing Matt wrote because it was really good he said it was like perfect it was short and punchy and I'm like Chris this thing be ten minutes long we can attend along cinematic in front of our game but didn't seem like was ten minutes long and when you read it it had all the information you need - all packed into it and it was a hit I did lots of those stories however there came a point where I decided I made the edge another call to say I can't think of a good way to do this contextually I just need to begin foe dump so I just wrote it so sometimes in my Dean deed game I'll just be like well you know it turns out I didn't realize it until right now but this this big chunk of my world's backstory is important to your character so I'm just gonna tell it to you all right I'm just gonna get like rip off the band-aid now one of the things I like doing is I like giving the players handouts even even at the table stuff happening extemporaneously I will text the player stuff their character knows rather than tell them because I want the player to tell the rest of the group right I want I want the players the other players to hear how Graves talks about what he just learned mind-reading that work rather than me doing it so ideally I can just hand it out to then go here here's the backstory on this but otherwise you just kind of you know you just got to do it the fact that I don't think it's a good idea doesn't mean that I find it in all ways easily avoidable yeah let's see could we do another build the settings dream that would be fun I think people took the wrong lessons from the collabora stream they fell in love with kelabra which is great it makes me happy and people still use collaborates but what I wanted to do was empower people to do their own world building as opposed to say hey look at this thing we created together let's play games in it so so I hope through the course of the last 45 minutes of battling my advice was useful the takeaway is by all means spend your weekends and after school or after work writing in your notebooks or in Google Docs lots of cool backstory and history for your world do not be surprised though if your players don't seem to care much because they didn't show up to read your backstory they showed up because they want to kick down doors and and kill9 flares and the trick then therefore is to come up with a dramatic ways to introduce these setting details create NPCs that embody them or that reference them and then throw those NPCs into conflict with the players and that will make it memorable it seems like a relatively straightforward way to sum it up which means I think we might be done maybe it was only an hour long what do you folks think have you any advice for anyone who is trying to write a setting guide for the first time yes keep Ashland Phil wrote 36 pages but because he knew he could he had a very clear idea of what his world was like I really enjoy playing in Phil's world by the way it's a lot of fun it's most fun I've had playing Dini in a long time because not only does he believe in it and there's a lot to believe in there's a lot of detail that he's come up with and I know he knows it so I don't have to but it's also it's really low magic like we're spell casters I'm a cleric my friend Steve is a sorcerer fan Jerry's a sorcerer none of us have ever seen magic before we are the first people ever to do this as far as we know as far as anybody knows it's awesome it's a lot of fun so Phil did it I think because Phil felt like he had to do it and if we read it then that was a bonus I try to keep my hand outs down to one page one page focus on the stuff the players need to know to not be surprised like Adrian Vaz Lauria which is a region of my campaign setting Orden it is illegal to be a dragon boring because Dragonborn aren't these biological creatures like you know lions and tigers and humans all of the Dragonborn were all made by a the king's wizard and then somebody who served to the king and had those knights all declared outlaws and that creates this great tension well if you're gonna play a dragon born in my world you need to know that otherwise you might not have a good time you might get you might feel ambushed by the setting detail and that's not that's not cool man so I try to put that stuff all the stuff that I'm like well if you're gonna play a dwarf a lot of humans are gonna you know they're gonna judge you because they think all dwarves are slavers that's not true but that's how they that's the cultural stereotype so these are the things that I make sure the players know like what kind of stuff do you need to know in order to make a character and not later on feel ambushed by a setting detail okay what are you reading right now Matt I'm reading a book druid Grif called hero I think it's called hero the life and times of standby don't nobody go nowhere I got the title right the wonders of technology where is my Kindle here we go cider Kindle under a for Amazon hero the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia I read a book earlier this is going to inform the knife politics book called Lawrence in Arabia which was very interesting although not it was it was interesting but not well written I didn't feel kind of dry but hero the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia is super good reads real fast it's fun it's interesting it's dramatic and it's really how I think I'm a big impact on the next politics video okay so I have a question what can I do about my players who don't really want anything that Conrad the duck asks well let me give you a piece of advice I mean obviously I don't know your players mr. duck but I'm gonna do my best uh have you given him the Dungeon Master's card have you let them read the DMS guy to look the treasure therein and see what kind of stuff they key off of right that's a that's something fourth edition did was the only addition of Dean D that put the magic items in the players handbook but I think that's a brilliant idea the players should have access to the to the magic items because it's one of the things that motivates them ultimately if stuff like that doesn't work Mick Conrad the duck that's what the West March was is for man that's that's the West marches as a style of play Ben Robbins came up with because he was tired of his players not wanting anything they just showed up because it was Thursday night we played D&D on Thursday nights and he's like but what do you want to do and they're like I don't know whatever it was okay well when you folks come up with something let me know and that was the only way play ever happened we didn't hold any one that was ER Devore asked how to run a good sandbox I did a video on this there's not a good answer other than have many different pieces of content prepped and ready and then put them in front of the players and don't prefer one over the other and see what what give give different players hooks into different into different officials and then sit back and let them do what they want we're way behind on shadow so do you have any mmm mama meat boy says do you have any dramatic techniques when you don't know what to do sort of like when you know what happens next yeah I have somebody an orc attacks I say roll initiative or I get the player the players start arguing with each other I'm like oh thank god they're arguing with each other that means I can figure out what happens next what software tools do you use to track your setting Laura campaign notes I use Microsoft Word and a very well in index hard drive so if I wanted to I factor I could do it it's not for the fact that my typing is highly restricted I could just you know if I hit the Windows key and type in astral celestial I will get a list of all the documents in which that occurs and I'll go oh that's the one I need could you sing Barrett's privateers again no command performances have you read Sam yes I've read the first like six or seven books and actually I quite liked them I still like them I think there's still a lot of fun but I never had I never really had problems with the fact that Zant is a like a main character of those first couple books as a heavily misogynist kind of Wang rod because it just made me want to kick him out of the story and take his place when I was like 13 14 and I think he did that on purpose frankly so pseudo swag has asked us before and I don't have a good answer so I apologize any tips on how to end a session to keep players interested I find cliffhangers hard to pull off you know I don't know like work at it until they're not there's not a trick there's not a trick to a lot of these things other than doing it over and over again I remember we were playing in Knight below and this is my own custom content for a knight below which is one of the things that makes me wanna kind of do my own version I blow and put all that stuff in there cuz I think it'd be a lot of fun for people to see where they come upon the the blue readout which is a 300 year old fortress which has since subsided from the real world into the world below it's moved from one dimension to another and there are these blue Dragon Knights that have sworn an oath to defend this place and that oath is literally what's keeping them alive the power of that oath is granting them immortality through a somewhat complex process that we don't need to get into and the players don't realize that they're just who these Knights and there's a point where my friend Phil who's ostensibly the leader of the party said to one of the blue dragonflight he said Oh old are you and he asked that question and I said that's a good place to end it the players like Oh what was a cliffhanger he just asked a question but I knew it was a good question and that the answer was gonna be I was gonna do Z so do you you do you do you do session zero as a group to make characters we always do we always make characters together I think it's it should be required making characters by herself is I think unsportsmanlike have you ever written a book based on a D&D campaign setting I'm not in the sense that you mean I don't think do you have any advice for creating details this is the best I can do for you magnificent fat magnificent Oh fat people ask me about word honey name stuff and I think built into that is that they watched some of my stuff and they go back those are cool names how did you do that well first of all go what kind of stuff do you like the name of right like so for instance my first day at work of total Rock Studios my boss Phil said hey one of the thing you could be working on right now one thing you could be working on right now since it wasn't clear exactly what I would be doing right away we don't know what the name of the planet this game takes place on is and it would be nice just instead of calling Planet X and I would look at some of the other stuff they'd come up with and I'm like these ideas are all terrible and Phil agreed and I was like okay and he said something important he goes you know I like a name like Arrakis which is the name of dune by the way and I was like okay Baracus he likes that okay so I did well I'm suggesting you do I started doing research I was like where does he get in Iraq this from it's because from I'll Rocky's the dancer the idea is that this planet as it moves around its star it causes the star to it cause like the glitters and it's like dancing in the like okay cool so there's a there's it's not that no one now knows that it was originally all Iraqis Arabic it's just they call Arrakis and they don't know what it's from and that started me down the path of coming up with the idea idea that the first colonists here the first people that broke ground was a Chinese corporation and the Chinese name for world a Chinese word for a world is sure Jay and I'm Frandsen that wrong but so what okay so if it's obvious that that's not the point of this or maybe it is and that then the next group were a Russian company who bought it from the Chinese company and eventually an American company buys it from the Russian company and each like the Russians heard the Chinese guys all using this term and just mistook it for the proper name of the world and they thought oh that must be the name of this planet and eventually over the course of a couple of different generations of corporations that got shortened to Shearer and Phil love that he's like that's a cool name didn't even care what my process was the fact that I could explain why it's called that made him happy but more important was the fact that was a cool it sounded cool and people on the team liked it shear yeah that's awesome good job if the process doesn't matter how good your process is if it produces a name people don't like you can't you can't defend the name by saying but my process was so good either it works or it doesn't work we had we had to name the monsters and evolve and that was I mean sort of my job people other people saw it as my job I sort of felt like anybody could if somebody has a really cool idea for the monster name I didn't want to be I didn't want people to feel like only the writer can do this stuff we're just naming monsters what do you guys think well I had access to the text file that the game pulled from and so I would sit there and I would come up with stuff like we had one monster at one point like and the big heavy you know melee fighter guy and I was like what about like the Reaver and so I typed that in and then we played test every day 6 o'clock and now when people play I just made one change it save submit and now when people play they see Reaver come across their screen and I could hear the other people in the team going Reaver what ok but that didn't work let's try out what about the bruiser brawler you know I'm thinking of left4dead because we did left 4 dead left 4 dead names a smoker right stuff like that the Boomer and that stuff didn't work people I could hear them I didn't ask people what they thought I just listened and I was like oh they didn't like that and then I was like well what about like a biblical legendary biblical Greek myth named Goliath I typed in Goliath and I could hear people on Team go Goliath and I was like it worked right I it was trial and error that wasn't um it was like okay what about this oh you like that okay great and over the course of months and years you develop muscles for how to name stuff you know dramatic sense what you say that Shearer is a good example of lore coming out in a dramatic scene well we never explained it in the game don't make that mistake we never that that that then why it's called that you literally cannot find that out by the way playing evolve but it had to have a name so I came up with one blood mark I am glad you I one of the things that makes me happy about priests my first novel is that you can read it in about a day that makes me happy I didn't I wanted to ride it I wanted to write a novel like the piers Anthony's stuff that I read when I was a kid or or like terry pratchett books and Robert B Parker books where you can 350 pages and out and you could read it in a weekend I hope you like the sequel what is your inspiration for new dungeon puzzles I kind of play it by ear it's one of the reasons I people ask me about puzzles all the time and unfortunately I don't have good answers I'm not I'm not a puzzler I sort of that's one of the reasons I like buying adventures is cuz the guy who wrote the adventure already did that book let's see so I feel like we must be yeah that was I'm glad why I said caught that it's one of things I like about having a substitute number of followers is I can make obscure references to stuff and people will get it honey gamer had a long question but I'm not sure I can answer I have a question about how to best incorporate an idea I have for my campaign with the lore of D&D whoa prepositions specifically are there any villains in D&D which would be more suited from a lower point of view who would be used to what oh I don't know like a time travel time travel I mean I oh that's a good question are there any time travel gods probably in gray Hawk gray Hawk has a god that is a cowboy there's a God in gray Hawk that is a grainy television set 2d representation of a 1950's cowboy so who knows any thoughts on Pat Rothfuss --is Kingkiller Chronicle I have never read them so no what are your thoughts like the OSR games like lamentations of the flame princess and labyrinth lord I think those things are cool that's about as far as I'm more interested in adventures in the system so a lot of the adventures I've checked out and would enjoy running but I probably would just run them in 5th edition all right so I think we must be done because we talked about the subject I hope you have to imagine me putting my other hand up and bowing I hope that I was able to take the subject of I had a convert lore into writing and engage your audience remember we all remember what the Kessel run was we didn't have to go do any research there was no handout for it and how to take that stuff that you enjoy doing the kind of painting miniatures version of Dungeons and Dragons world-building the stuff you do on the weekend before we played and try to turn it into something that is dramatically contextualized give these details to characters and put them in front of your players with drama attention I have no idea how to answer that question sage Harrison are you gonna put this up on YouTube uh there's only one way to find out it's after after I've thought about it for a while and maybe watched it back ok so yeah I guess we're done I was thinking about talking doing some do a Star Wars chunk because those new movies even though I really really like 4 so I love force awakens saw it several times in the theater a loved road one saw it several times in the theater both those movies make me really angry man make me really angry but I that was not what we advertised so I do not know the answer to that question Little Billy I do not remember posting your questions cih Harrison multiple times unfortunately is not going to help me come up with an answer so I guess that's gonna have to be it's up in uh almost an hour and a half and I am tired I'm wiped out still recovering from surgery don't know if we'll do a live stream next Saturday we might add um I'm gonna download this one and take a look at it and watch it and maybe put it up tomorrow morning we'll see probably I'll probably put it up tomorrow morning I don't know so that's it I this is going to be somewhat abrupt ending but we should always be thinking writers as Dungeon Master's we should always be thinking of ways to create drama not just handouts but NPCs people people people are the most interesting thing out there and if you can take those bits of setting lore that you've come up with and put them in a character's mouth and make them important to an NPC or what are your PC's then I think you've got a long way toward engaging your audience so that's it we're going to stop and this will probably on youtube if not later tonight early tomorrow morning and maybe I'll see you folks next Saturday night at 6:00 I don't know I'm not sure it depends on whether or not I can come up with anything to talk about thanks for hanging out if I didn't get to your question I apologize peace I have to do a left handed out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 198,884

Rating: 4.9339108 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: EJTGc3w93MU

Length: 59min 14sec (3554 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/iceborer]

Post-surgery, Matt talks about the importance of driving drama in D&D and how lore serves your game, but isn't the main course.

From a Saturday evening live Twitch stream.

[u/Callipygian_Superman]

Would have liked to have been there in the chat when someone mentioned making new characters together, and Matt said he feels characters should always be created together at session 0. Then he says that making a character alone is "unsportsmanlike".

To which I was completely bewildered. I would have liked him to expand on that position.

[u/JohnStephenAlbert]

YouTuber Seth Skorkowski described injecting too much lore into a campaign as "Excessive World Building," and listed it as #7 in his Seven Deadly Game Master Sins.

https://youtu.be/NLB8GjRNMFE?t=52

[u/TemplarsBane]

I sort of think after watching this one that he calls lore useless to be provocative. Because everything he is saying is good is also lore.

This should be the difference between useful and useless lore.

Lore floating around in your own mind, lore for the sake of detail is useless. But the name of a flower and the fact that it grows on the tombs of the kind etc is still lore. It is just presented in a way that makes it actually meaningful.

[u/[deleted]]

Matt made some excellent points about not needing to fill in all the blanks on something (i.e. the Kessel Run). As the GM I have detailed answers to the lore questions that may pop up, but knowing that you can just let the players imaginations be what answers the question was a refreshing bit of advice.

[u/Da_BiG_dRuMmEr]

This video is going to help a lot. I've seen all of his videos up to this one (except for the Critical Role finale) and one thing I had been trying to figure out was how much more to have written down. But I learned that instead of writing a novel for my players to play in, I should write a few major events to reference, some local lords, and the environment they play in. I guess I'm still wondering if there is any other pieces of info I will need for the players, or do I already have too much?

[u/The_GoC]

In my world, lore is generally created on demand for each session. So when we go to a town, the lore for that town is written as part of those campaign notes. I've never been at a table when the world-builder had spent more than a couple of hours writing the area's backstory and been able to have fun. In fact, most of my DnD horror stories involve excessive troves of notes on the history of the world. K.I.S.S., KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID! DMing requires flexibility. If you write 800 pages of lore, then you are pigeon holed into those explanations. A good, on the spot DM idea should not be accompanied by internal conflict and a ten minute research expedition into all the DM's ramblings and writings looking for any paradox that might result from inconsistencies with created lore which hasn't even been introduced at the table.

I classify lore into three types: Basics of the Setting, Organic Lore, and Hubristic Lore.

Basics of the Setting is self explanatory. These are the facts of life everyone would and should know. Mostly these are session zero type reveals. Which gods are worshipped, how common magic and technology are, which races are common, climate, and more fall into this group. These are rarely revealed through writing and are generally given to the players up front.

My favorite "Lore" is that which comes from previous campaigns played in the same world. I call that "organic lore". I eat this stuff up, especially if one or more of those players are at the table. Most DM's have references to past characters and in game events show up from time to time. To me, these are the best, and I eat them up. They come across as memories and personal stories rather than fan fiction, and I've seen whole tables on the edge of their seats over it.

I think what Matt is cautioning against, and I could not agree more, is Hubristic Lore. This is written because the World Builder THINKS it is important or just as cool as what the PC's do. He/she thinks the history of seven generations of the servant of... (See, you already stopped caring)... is necessary to appreciate the campaign. This is subtraction by addition. The DM is not the star. The World Builder is not the star. The brooding half demon disposed prince with a thirty page back story who gives quests is not the star. The players are the stars.

[u/igotsmeakabob11]

Do we have the links he posted in Twitch for !lore and !writing?

[u/WitchRolina]

Basically: Writing is what makes a setting interesting. Lore is writing's Skeletal System.