"GM why are we being attacked by evil gargoyles in a LG city?"

>I will assume stuff
>I don't care if there is a chance you're on the right
>You are tots that guy and your game sucks
>I just don't like reading shit, just assuming

This is you. You are proving the OP's point. Stop playing RPGs if reading is too much for you.

>Greentext is what actually happened

It's pointless to try and tell players everything, because there's no way to anticipate everything they need to know, and past a certain point they won't even listen anymore.

Instead, what's important is to always have an answer for a question. If players ask "Why is " and x is something their characters would know, having grown up in this world and all, just tell them. And make sure your players know ahead of time that, even if they don't read every page of lore you've typed up, they can just ask for clarification or input or explanation of anything.

I hate Veeky Forums period, yall are a bunch of autistic spergtastic fags who get way too buttangry when people have fun "wrong"

>I'll admit I have a good bit of lore to my settings, but I give it out in doses when the details are relevant so they don't get overwhelmed
>give it out in doses when the details are relevant

Your entire greentext is about you not doing that. Instead, you get irrationally angry.

"I'm joining a Nasuverse game."
"What's a servant?"
"What's an origin?"
"Why is Alexander the Great fighting Jack the Ripper?"
"Why are there TWO Jack the Rippers?"
"Isn't Arthur Pendragon a man?"
"The fuck is Garan no Dou?"
"Why are you telling me to read the wiki?"
"What do you mean I'm not a Magician? I use magic don't I? Wait, There's a difference between Magecraft and Magic? How was I supposed to know?"

Honestly having to read snippits is far better than reading up on the entire setting

there's a good reason for playing a sheltered idiot when you're in a setting you're not familiar with, also gives you decent room to grow as you gradually become more jaded/streetwise

What makes you think he didn't explain it to them when they asked?

Oh, your assumptions.

Just checking.

Not him, but he literally just copied what was said in op

It's okay to say 'I', OP.

"Even though you took a wrong path, you find sanctuary. You enter the City of Holylight after a long day of adventuring. Here's the 101 of the city while you divide up the loot, spend your gold, and plan the downtime."

>later

"As you prowl the roof of a cathedral armed with thief tools, a loud impact announces the arrival of a gargoyle wielding a fuck-off trident, demanding your surrender."
>"ufukkenwotm8?"
"Did you read the handout? It outright says that gargoyles live on the roofs of the churches because "

Sorry, not OP. Just someone seeing people treating someone like shit for trying to be patient.

200 to 300 words is not a whole lot of reading, you know. Except on Veeky Forums where reading is forbidden.

And that's why Edea is the best girl in Bravely Default.

Oh wait, Edea is the person that actually read the setting notes and wrote a backstory that adds a fuckton of possible plot hooks and motivations.

why not just tell the players verbally? Then they can ask relevant questions as well

So the 101 of the city is a note? Even though you're right there, at the table? Why?

What made you think it would be a good idea to stop the game so people can do some light reading?

The thing I don't understand about this scenario is how on the one hand, the OP is proud of his setting's backstory, but on the other hand he's upset and annoyed when an opportunity to explain said backstory presents itself.

>>"GM why are we being attacked by evil gargoyles in a LG city?"
You are on the hunt for a evil geomancer.
>>"GM why does everyone hate this cute girl?"
She is literally the spawn of Satan
>>"GM why are plasma weapons illegal in warfare?"
They cause gruesome wounds that incapacitate, but far too often don't out-right kill the one shot.
>>"GM what evidence is there the moon landing was faked in your setti-"
Hah, good one Bob. But seriously, there isn't any more or less evidence for it than irl.
>>"GM how can this guy identify the owner of a blood splatter from a glance?"
Well, how might the Vampire Sanguimancer be able to do that?

OP, how is that difficult? Or does everything has some super special reasoning behind it so that it is impossible to explain in a sentence or two?

300 words is like an ENTIRE screen of text at 9pt font on a 640x420 screen

This is something I will remember going forward. Thank you.

I once read an entire handout of mediocre writing at about 5000 words or so prior to joining a game. Worth it? In game it was because that reading let me know shit that everyone else should've known. I knew more about the local Gods than the fucking Cleric and I got multiple perks for being in-character and fitting into the game instead of "Hurr I'm a LE demon worshipper".

Unlike OP, a normal person would be able to answer those and then suggest they read the background lore to prevent further confusion.

>edea

>Edea "let's join up with a person who I think is a black hearted witch and murder my friends and family members" Lee

I'd honestly rather take Amnesiac Fabulous Guy Ringabel or Mary sue vestal Agnes over her.

Airy is best DMPC, however

Last I checked she turned against Ominas Crowe because of his cruelty and stuck with the party because she had committed treason

I know you really want the players to enjoy the thirty pages of useless bullshit you've written out, but it usually is just useless bullshit nobody but you cares about.

It hurts, I know, but fixing yourself and way of doing things usually does.

>Everything is always the GMs fault
>Expecting players to put forth 1/10 of the effort the GM does makes you That Guy
>If a GM handles a situation less than perfectly, he should never be allowed to run a game again

Once again, Veeky Forums proves themselves to be a bunch of entitled little shits. Remember kids, players can do no wrong and GMs must have infinite patience while doing everything to accommodate the players. Players are in no way expected to return the favor.

>shitty GM whines about how players don't know what's going on because he's shitty
>gets called out
>whines at being called out because he is shitty

Thanks for the supporting evidence broski!

>GM has readily available information on setting
>doesn't want to stop and give lengthy descriptions to the one tard that didn't prep
>is shitty

The only shitty thing he did was not telling him "you should know that" and point him at the notes.

If the GM is running the game in a world he himself created, then his burden will be necessarily high. This is a function of his own hubris and not something that can or should be avoided. If he wants his players to enjoy his world, it's going to take a lot of extra work.

The fact that the players aren't interested in the world's lore is indicative of deeper problems.

400 words is the same length as the maximum Veeky Forums post. This thread alone (after stripping out all timestamps, usernames, numbers, "no", filenames, etc) is 1700 words. took me 5 seconds to read and that's 72 words, or 14 words per second. If you can't take less than a literal minute to read something, why the fuck are you playing a tabletop game?

literally every one of those points could have been explained with a single sentence

if you're running an original setting then it's only sensible to have the players play characters that are also unfamiliar with the setting, and if you're that fucking proud of it you should be eager to tell other people about it

OP here, I only made and

>literally every one of those points could have been explained with a single sentence
Which will invariably turn into pic related

Again, we see an example of
>GM must accommodate player too lazy to do what the rest of the group did
>GM did not handle situation as well as they could have (according to someone totally removed from the situation)
>GMs put forth all the effort (not more/most, but all) while players just have to show up
>The GM's fun is a very distant second; he is not a a human engaging in a hobby for fun, he is a biocomputer meant to run the game for the players to their expectations and with perfect judgement calls.

>being so full of yourself that you can't even be bothered to explain what's going on in your game to the players
Don't GM, you're no good at it.

how is explaining and talking about your world not fun for a GM? And of course GMs put more effort into the game than anyone else, it's their fucking game

If the GM was only concerned with the fun of everyone involved, he'd have used an established setting instead of a homebrew. That said, I never actually said this was his fault, only that his workload would be deservedly higher. The fact that his players can't be arsed to read his blog is likely a joint problem that needs to be addressed by actually talking to his players, not by whining about it on a Mongolian eagle-training forum.

Not OP, but no, it's not fun in my experience to bring the game to a halt to fill in a single player on something they would already know if they put forth the effort to read something I put forth the effort to make.

If they don't care about the setting, then they wouldn't be asking questions. If they do care about the setting, they should be willing to read some freaking bullet points. I'm probably making those things for a reason.

so if at any point a player forgets a piece of lore and asks you about it, instead of just telling them in a single sentence you'd be happy to wait while they try to find the one piece of information in the lore you've given them?

There's a big difference between
>Say, what was their ancestors' names again?
and
>Say, what are those ancestors they are talking about?

One is the player forgetting a tidbit.
The other can be as huge as the character forgetting everything he knows about his own race.

Not at all, but that's not what's happening here. This isn't someone putting forth the effort and some minor factoid slipping their mind; this is a blatant can't-give-a-fuck entitled player.

And for the record, did the OP ever say if he told them or not? If someone started asking questions, if definitely be thinking to myself "why didn't you read the fucking handout?" regardless if I started expositing or not.

>I'll just assume that by "offering three hundred words of lore" to the players he's excluding them from information that they could easily have at their fingertips.

You want to know how much writing three hundred words is? It's a pathetically small amount of information that most people could parse in five minutes or less, and a role player should be able to read that much very easily.

If a player is going to ignore three-hundred words – over half of which you have read f you bothered to get to the end of this very post of which which you have just read - in favor of slowing the game down for everybody by asking questions answered in less than two paragraphs of information HE ALREADY HAD...maybe you're being the dick here, rather than the GM. This post has two hundred and five words in it, that's nearly all the information the player could have read and gotten all the answers from in the OP's post!

That's pathetic, and you should be ashamed of yourself for advocating the idea that reading two hundred words is unacceptable for a GM to request of his players. It's less than half a fucking page of writing.

"Okay Tolkien, you're saying I found a charred pointy hat floating in a massive underground lake?"
"Well... *recants a fuckton of Fellowship of the Ring and the history of the Balrog of Moria an-*"
"Okay okay okay I get it jesus just write it down somewhere next time. Now can we get back to killing this army of goblins?"

and how exactly would you differentiate these in the situation when a single sentence would fix this either way?

Said no one ever.

Your post comes out to 200 words. Including the quote.

... By using my brain? I know that's a tall order for most players on Veeky Forums, but it's a thing that happens.

>Later
"Who the fuck is Gandalf?"

the difference with that people would join a LotR roleplay because they enjoy the setting, no-one gives a fuck about a GM's special snowflake setting at the start, you have to sell it to the players rather than whining when they don't read your shitty backstory

"Wait, why are you wearing the ring around your neck and not in your finger? Are you an autist Frodo?"

>Fuck RPing, I just wanna kill goblins: the post
Wow. It's rare that you get such a perfect example of shitty entitled players.

My text prog robably counted the spacers. Oh well...the point remains. Its still only 200 and another third makes it 300. That's less than half a page of writing.

But god forbid a player be arsed to read what amounts to a fucking reference handout containing less than half a page of writing. No, that's terrible, he's a bad GM instead.

Reading a thread and playing an RPG are not equivalent activities.

Anyway, my advice is using NPCs effectively. Humans get a lot of their information from interacting with each other, and your brain is generally geared more to retain information acquired from other people, even if it turns out to be useless crap most of the time. In a social experience like a tabletop RPG that works more like a conversation than a choose your own adventure book, having someone to talk to and ask questions (even if you don't actually roleplay it) makes more sense than probably extremely boring lore dumps.

The NPC doesn't even have to have authoritative information on whatever the subject is. It is actually better if they are never authoritative and they provide information based on personal perspective and opinion. Then the players will sometimes have to actually think about it because one dude said something that kind of contradicts what another dudes said and they have to sort out which is more plausible, which makes it easier to remember.

After a while you'll be able to do this without much effort, though it does take some planning to do because you're basically foreshadowing everything at all times from multiple sources while trying to keep these sources from being too overt, though there is no shortage of people on this planet that want to tell everyone they meet what they think about every fucking topic.

The key to doing this is to make sure the players know that they can ask NPCs questions.

Also, handouts are so fucking useful for this. Like you find a dead dude on the side of the road who happened to be carrying a letter from his cousin containing her opinion on something that is happening in the world. As long as it is brief and decently written the players WILL be interested in the special piece of paper from the GM, it will also give them something short-hand to refer to.

"I put on The One Ring"
"Whaddaya mean "Hand over your character sheet"?"

I would like to see the 200-300 words that explain gargoyles in city X, random girl Y, specific military convention N, the faking of the moon landing, and guy Z's special blood analysis ability.

This is going to be some Unabomber shit.

Anons are getting hung up on 200 - 300 words for no reason. It was mentioned as a summary of the setting lore.

At no point did OP say that summary was all the preparation required to properly play in his world. Or even that it would cover the instances he highlighted himself.

>Really sell your world to me in-game, instead of just dropping homework in my lap beforehand.
>equal to
>HURR DURR JUS WAN KIL ORC.

This is what some shitty GMs actually believe.

If you ever write that novel you obviously want to write, are you going to include a little pamphlet with background lore readers will have to memorize first?

Guaranteed best seller.

I get being angry at them not reading the summary, but I don't get being angry at them for asking questions about the setting.

"Read the lore" is a bullshit response because they're not there to read, dude.

You provide one of the following:
>"You don't know."
>"It is unknown."
>"NPC might know."
>Exact information (primary/holistic knowledge)
>The gist/partial information (secondary/tertiary knowledge)

For certain groups "you might think" is also appropriate.

Here's the tl;drs which don't go into extensive detail which branches off into several other things relating to it.
>"There is an understanding between the people and the Gargoyles. If the Gargoyles protect the city rooftops from crooks, terrorists, and thieves, they will be left to their own devices. This agreement has been in place for 50 years.
>She's a thief, a coward, and an arsonist who burned a bridge to get away from some wolves. She was unable to be convicted because of her young age but she is still hated and shunned.
>They tend to cause things to burst into flames at long ranges and cause extensive damage through forest fires and cause people to combust. It's a war crime for the same reasons white phosphorus is.
>A terrorist dissatisfied with the expenditure on space travel planted a bomb on the craft and they covered it up to save face.
>He can see the cause of anything provided it happened in the last hour or so.

Yes, I can explain this shit in a sentence or two, but when they start asking further questions or arguing over petty details it derails everything, end result the game doesn't get played when it's game time and not down time.

Why the fuck would a LG city have CHAOTIC FUCKING EVIL GARGOYLES protecting it?

>Why the fuck would a LG city have CHAOTIC FUCKING EVIL GARGOYLES protecting it?
Ask the mayor if you're really that interested. But at the moment don't you have more pressing matters, like trying to escape from the gargoyles chasing your murderhobo ass?

Wonderful, but this isn't a setting summary. This is a list of entirely random facts.

OP mentioned a summary of a few hundred words that was supposed to be all his players really had to read in order to fit into an entire game world.

Unless I've misread the whole thing. Could be that he writes a few hundred words of homework per session, and is now getting miffed that players don't remember their homework from months ago.

Which would be mental.

So GMs have to fucking create the setting, run the setting, handle the players, AND sell them on the setting... But the players don't need to put forth the effort to meet the GM halfway.

For all the slow readers out there, I'll restate it:
>GMs put forth all the effort (not more/most, but all) while players just have to show up
>The GM's fun is a very distant second; he is not a a human engaging in a hobby for fun, he is a biocomputer meant to run the game for the players to their expectations and with perfect judgement calls.

No, actually. You can use an existing setting the players are familiar with, and save yourself two whole tasks.

But then you'd actually need to write that best-selling novel in order to jam your fantasy down people's throats.

But published settings are all horrible.

>Can't be asked to read a handout.
>Able to read and absorb a 250-page campaign manual
Pick one retard.

As opposed to the fucking gold in every GM's head, right? If everyone else could just see his genius, it could all become a multi-million dollar franchise.

So are 99% of original GM special snowflake settings.

Nah, like this.

"Hey, you guys played the Witcher 3 right? It's basically that, but some stuff is going to be more like generic D&D and I'm gonna make up a lot of crap."

i'd assume that in op he explained it even though he wanted to just say "read the lore"

Oh yay, nothing but flavor-of-the-month vidya and movie settings, because otherwise players may have to read something!

Knowledge on existing settings doesn't just come from campaign manuals, you absolute autist.

I know most settings through decent movies, books or games actually sold the setting to me before I ever laid hands on a manual about it.

Not my fault your players don't read.

Also, "it's basically that" is not the same as "it's literally that". You strip everything that isn't the core setting concepts and terminology of whatever you're basing it off and do as much yourself as you think you have time for.

Really all the players are carrying in is shared knowledge of basic expectation, which is entirely the point of something like writing out a campaign setting overview. Since you have already established that it won't be a 1-for-1 copy they won't be uncomfortable when it deviates a little from their preconceptions of how the setting works. The easiest way to do that is set it somewhere away from where the primary story of the source material takes place.

I don't actually do this anymore because I'm pretty good at running a game from scratch now without having to write much down, but you and OP might want to consider trying it for a short campaign or something.

I usually just make a setting wiki or a small series of youtube videos to go over little things everyone should know. Bonus points on the youtube videos if you use a goofy text to speech voice.

It's ass regardless, so I'll run my own shit. Why shell out for someone else's snowflake setting that has no room for player or GM freedom because everything's written out?

I have a new player in a game, and he asks questions like these. Do you know what I do?

I fucking answer them. They're so fucking easy to answer.

You sound like a bad GM.

The best part of all this autistic arguing is none of it really happened, it infuriates me and makes me happy at the same time, what a strange feeling.

Please don't respond to me telling me how it did, I dont care about the lies, we get it, your "players" are retards, nowgo post in your "why pathfinder is shit" thread.

If you can't be bothered to post what you actually wrote, why are you expecting your players to memorize all of it

>I don't like it, so it didn't happen
>Assumptions: The post

If you can't be arsed to tell the difference between gnomes and halflings, at the minimum from a mechanical perspective, I've got some leftover rope you might need.

I refuse to believe some can have their head this far up their own ass.

I always forget which is which, so I just conflate them when I make a homebrew setting. Their flavor differences are mostly just a personality shift anyway.

I sympathize with you, but please understand that DMing should not mainly be viewed as an outlet for your literary ambitions, and stories should focus on what happens during the sessions and on the players, not onwhat's in your giant tolkienesque setting mythos or history.

I love going full autism on worldbuilding, and it's a big hobby of mine, but I also have the wisdom score to realize that at the end of the day, if the worldbuilding doesn't really add much to the sessions other than endless trivia the players have to learn, there's not much point to it.

The ideal situation is having a group and a DM that cooperate and talk about what themes and things they'd like in the world, and then explore it together, and try to make at least some things up as they go along rather than having it all in a notebook somewhere that they have to cram like homework.

The problem in your scenario isn't what you think it is, the problem is that there's a disconnect between what you and your players want. If they would be happier with bog standard forgotten realms or generic fantasy place #596233 then do that, or find players who are on the same page as you. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's about expectations and preference.

Your 100%correct, but you forget that is the point of the thread, too purposefully forget this fact, and proceed to piss everyone off while others knowingly,or unknowingly feed the troll and only make things worse by acting like this is the norm in some insane world and not their own isolated autistic world.

Because you're free to change whatever you don't like, and players are already familiar with setting X because they've seen the movies, read the books, or played the games?

It's not that strange.

I still have trouble parsing this.
>'ll admit I have a good bit of lore to my settings, but I give it out in So far, so good.

>Yet I've always got one or two players who don't read it and they think that I'm just pulling random crap out of my ass when it's an established fact and has been for weeks or even months.
Alright, there's something they're supposed to remember for months. Getting more demanding.

>It's rarely more than 200-300 words in summary (though going into extreme detail is when it gets retarded)
Why use 'rarely' here? It implies there are multiple summaries, some of which might be longer than 300 words.
Does OP run games in multiple homebrew settings, each with its own summary?
Or is there a single setting, and does OP provide a steady stream of short summaries? If so, how many summaries does 'weeks or even months' entail? Is everyone expected to remember everything?

Questions, questions.

Nobody said that except you, noob casual

Not that I'm pro catalogue of shitty post-it notes but 500 words is one page double spaced. It's not much at all. In fact it leads me to believe that OP's lore read something like "holy city is holy, oh and there's bad guys which I can't be arsed to explain".

I'm getting the feeling more that there was a 300 word description for many different settings, and these questions were for separate ones.

That is a lot more info to read if the keep switching, and a lot fewer questions to ask overall.