Hey everyone!

Let's say I advertise a new 5.5e game in a homebrewed world, filled with all the setting, life, hooks, and history to make your head spin. The setting would have NPCs, factions, locations, and a specific hook for players to make their characters around. Nothing unusual here -we all see it from time to time on this medium and know of the horror stories. Now I understand the concept of building the setting around the player, and believe me, there is plenty of space for the players to put their mark on the world, but as a GM, it's a game/story I want to run in a world -I feel- creates the narrative I am looking for. I am just trying to figure out the best way to share this information with perspective players.

I am trying to get some feedback from the community in regards to lore and setting information, what is appropriate, what everyone prefers to see, and how much tolerance everyone has for lore dumps. I have -in the past- put all pertinent information in notice threads within the game, which I feel has worked well, but going forward for a larger setting, I actually have PDFs with the information contained within. Has the community seen something similar? There is a wiki attached to games, and I admittedly never bothered to mess with it- do some find that better for their games?

I guess by extension, what information is most important to you for making characters? I'd imagine some basics to get the creative wheels turning with larger lore available when needed.

What has everyone seen? What are best practices? Things to avoid? Any feedback is welcomed! Thanks in advance!

From past experience, the easier you can make it for the players to look up pertinent information, the better. Dumping setting information in threads in play is nice and organic, but it's hard to look back up when you don't remember exactly where something was first mentioned.

Notice threads, bullet lists, orderly notations things that players can find and look back to without having to skim through threads...that sort of thing works well in my experience. Anything that you expect the PCs to /know/ IC should be as easy as possible for the player to find and reference, because people will forget and need to check back. I'd say that keeping that information in the game proper would be better for that purpose than using the wiki, or external links to PDFs - unless you can allow your players to download the PDFs and have them at their own hands for accessing at their leisure. Or use more than one method, to increase the odds that players will actually have one that works for them.

That said, some people just aren't going to care, and others are going to soak up all of your world-building information like sponges. Be prepared for that, and have a plan in place for dealing with someone who continually "gets it wrong", even if it's just an NPC looking at them and questioning if they've been 'hitting the sauce a little hard before breakfast, eh?' so that it doesn't derail the rest of the game.

The wiki is very useful. You can create a contents page with links to discrete articles, allowing you to arrange and display the information however you see fit. It's very easy to navigate if laid out in an intuitive way, and mostly uses RPoL code with some additional wiki functionality available, making it easy to link related articles to each other. It's probably the most user-friendly way to lay out a lot of information and make it easy for players to find specific items without having to scour a notice thread for half an hour every time they need to look something up.

It's also useful if you want allow players to edit articles, since that's the default setting, but you can set any page to allow edits from you alone.

Agree with SunRuanEr's points.  If you plan to have a lot lore information stored somewhere, I'd suggest sub-dividing that lore out into sections like "Need to Know," "Nice to Know," "Distantly Related but not Critical," "For the Curious," etc.  That way you give your group an easy to access list of what's immediately pertinent to character creation / the story they're presently engaged with, and they can set the pace as to how much they want to read about it.

To that point, whenever possible, I usually try to incorporate lore into the game rather than presenting it in a dump so that it's more engaging and rewarding for players.  Want the players to investigate something central to your story?  Introduce an incomplete, but functional, magic item / macguffin related to that central point, and set the hook that if the object / macguffin were to be completed, it would be more powerful.  This ties engaging with the lore you want to give the players with mechanical benefit.  A magic book missing pages; a ghost with incomplete memories fused to a ring; a wizard tower unable to access its full potential without the original crystals installed in its engine.

And yes, as previously mentioned, people engage with games on multiple levels, so if the expectation is that you'd like your players to be invested in the lore, be up front about it.  Communication is key.

Strongly agree with making stuff easy to find. A wiki would be a great way to organize all your lore.

Unless your players are just here to dungeoncrawl (and nothing wrong with that), most if not all would appreciate (to differing degrees) a rich and well described world brought to life in its lore.

The trick is to make the lore available to be consumed by the players in their own time, in their own way.

For the lore info, I would avoid explicit OOC labels in the wiki like "Things good to know" or "Things you must know" as they relate to lore. Just use informative labels like region/area names (most commonly geographical, can be political if politics is significant in the campaign), city names, people group names, faction names, religion/beliefs, culture, economy/way of life, etc.

To help players quickly create their characters and get into the game, I would include sections that are not specifically lore info (eg: a section describing possible character hooks). Think most players appreciate this.

Depending on how much you want to "spoon feed" your players (no offense meant here but lol), you might include links in specific character hooks to relevant lore sections in your wiki.

I think players should figure out what about the available lore their characters would and wouldn't know. For anything unclear they could always ask the DM if their character would know it. Again excepting dungeoncrawling setups.

And yes I do (subtlely, depending on how "bad" it is) nudge or even penalize players who behave, speak, or otherwise make decisions, that are totally unlike the character backgrounds they purport to hold.

Jumping in to say great feedback so far and thank you for answering. Definitely have to learn the wiki going forward amongst other things.

The only thing that concerns me in this regard is that everything used here seems to become (more or less) public domain.  Something to bear in mind if you're planning to make something that you'd like to publish.

Could you please explain that first sentence? How does it become public domain?

I understand that people might find out etc but that's totally different than saying that whatever is on this forum becomes public domain. Maybe I missed some fine print...?

I believe Hunter may be referring to the fact that what you post on RPoL (or pretty much any other internet site) is available to be seen and thus copied by other users, and you can't rely on the RPoL (or any other website) to enforce your copyright of what you post.  The onus of copyright enforcement is on the creator of the content, not the web host.

It is not public domain (which gives other people the legal right to use/profit from the content) - but some may consider the effects similar, as not many people can/will hire a lawyer to argue copyright for a post on a website.

In point of fact, there is a flag that marks game conent as solely owned by the DM.

Something that RPoL does enforce when it comes to bringing a dead game back to life under soemone else's control, I believe.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense, thank you.