Showing the setting to the players through play

[Yora]

Let's say you have a group of new players for a campaign set in a world that most of them know nothing about. And it's a somewhat unsual world like Planescape or Morrowind that you can't simply describe as "just like X (but with Y)".

Giving the players a bunch of pages to read is almost never a good idea. It's homework and players don't like that, especially when they have not been hooked by the campaign yet. Holding long monologs in which you read a bunch of pages to them is just as bad and probably worse.

The best way is probably to have them start knowing nothing and letting them learn things about the world as they are encountering them during play. But knowing what is different from knowing how.
How could you prepare adventures in a way that does not require the players having preexisting knowledge but letting them learn new aspects as they go along?

One method I think is quite promising is to start with adventures that are pretty generic tasks that are instantly understood, but involving new and strange actors and objects. A simple adventure of finding a bandit lair and returning stolen carts is something the players will easily get and are able to do. But the bandits could be a new type of creature and the goods on the carts could be a unique resource of the setting. Feathered lizardmen bandits stealing carts with giant bee eggs intended for the giant flower garden of the high priest of a temple in a distant city would be weird, but the players still grasp what they are supposed to do. That the lizardmen have huge carved and painted poles or what kind of temple has giant flower gardens doesn't matter for now, but it could be something to be explored more deeply later when the players have a better overview of the creatures and countries.

[nedz]

Show, don't tell - obviously.

Used a layered approach: with different aspects of the world. Religion, Commerce, Military, Politics, Myth, etc.

Use conversations not monologues - they are more interesting.

Give incomplete information which raises questions because these provoke thought and answers are boring.

[Slipperychicken]

There is obviously a point at which a GM is either giving his players more information than they need, or isn't communicating in an efficient way. I wouldn't want to give my players much more than a few paragraphs summary unless they want a plot-heavy game. In that case I would expect them to skim a few pages of lore, but probably no more than five.


The way I see it is: If I'm putting dozens of hours into preparing for this game, but they can't be bothered to take fifteen minutes to read a short setting document, then I'm not sure I want to be GMing for them at all. Even the busiest worker-bee can take a moment to read an article that a friend linked to him, so I think refusing to put that time in is a sign of disrespect.


Also, setting documents and other "homework" are not the only ways to communicate this stuff out-of-game. One good way is to talk to your players about the upcoming game, its setting, things you want to explore, and so on. Get them interested so they ask questions, have a conversation going both ways, and that will be much more palatable than a lengthy document.

[BWR]

1. Boxed text.
I know you hate it but if you are going to convey the feeling of a setting through play you will have to spend time describing it. If you leave it up to their imagination it will a) not be the same setting you are trying to show them, and b) often will be bland and boring. You obviously have to tailor the amount of information given in one go to your audience but it is necessary to spend time describing things.

2. NPCs.
NPCs are important to most games that want a bit more than dice rolling and tactics, and the quickest way to get PCs and players into a setting is interaction with others. Their names, they way they talk, the way they act, how NPCs interact with each other etc. are all vital to showing how the setting works.

3. Piece by piece.
Don't try to dump all information at once. That's just hard to swallow and takes time away from actually playing the game. Portion it out and convey what is necessary to know when it is necessary to know it; not more, not before. This does feel a bit video-gamey ("Now I will teach you about walking and running") but it is really the best way to convey information for those who for whatever reason will not /cannot read up on the setting.

[Lorsa]

One problem I have as a player (the rare occasions THAT happen) in a setting I am unfamiliar with is how to make a character. Which means you have to provide some information about the world to the players beforehand, at least so much that is relevant for them to make in-setting believable characters. At the very least, expect to be asked a couple of questions.

I mean, if religion is extremely common in the world, but you don't tell your players that, they may all end up having made atheists, which may become rather strange and not the kind of clash they meant to have. So you really have to give some information about the kind of things in the setting that affects the personality of people growing up in it.

[Martin Greywolf]

Worldbuilding by show don't tell only - well, there are cases where you can do them, and cases where you can't. In general, a thing like this is only possible if the characters themselves are isolated from the world at large at the moment. They could be isolated until now (frontier village), or maybe it's a temporary thing (shipwreck, amnesia), but they have to be isolated none the less. If they aren't, the fact that their position/past/whatever doesn't manifest for several sessions is gonna be a significant plothole.

Even then, there are things your characters would know in all but the weirdest of stories - how (they think) religions and magic work in your world, if there's racism, etc etc. You either infodump players at the start, or you'll have to stop them and tell them what the deal is in the middle of play, most likely both. This is a necessary evil, I suppose - you could handle this a lot better in a book, but you have other authors here that need to be clued in.

The best way is to give the players an infodump and then reinforce points of it as the session goes on. If your world is a big one, give infodump at the start of each adventure.

The interesting part is driving point in during the play. The way to do this is to ideally incorporate the aspects in question directly into the adventure at hand - they don't have to play a major role (not all of them at any rate), as long as they are there.

As an example, I run a game based on 1300's Eastern Europe - I suppose you'd call it Witcher-like, since that's about the only contact with our mythology most of the world had - and I wanted to drive in several points home during the first session. The plot was a basic disappearance investigation followed by an epic chase, nothing too fancy. The things I wanted to drive home were, in no particular order:


magic is real and present, people are no more afraid of it than a sword
nobles have significant status (2 out of 3 PCs are nobles)
magic creatures are a threat to people
there's some religious tension between old faiths and catholic-like religion
mongol-like folks are not as mongol-like as usual
politics are a thing
there are several nationalities in this world


So, for mongol-like guys, the people PCs chased were them, and they had a druid with them as a matter of course, and PCs were actually able to discover her by hiring another druid. Their leader also had a large wolf as a mount, so that takes care of several of hte above points.

As for politics and religion, there was another group of nobles, a brother and sister, who were allied with catholic-like religion, while one of the PCs is an outspoken old faiths advocate, not only did they clash, but the catholic-like nobles were also tied into political angle of the entire adventure (a bit too much to go into detail here). To make matters more interesting, one of these nobles and the old faiths PC have a crush on each other. To add ot religious tension, the catholic-like nobles were there on a mission that helped the kingdom and their religion and were under orders not to reveal what it was - PCs being PCs, they found out.

Status of nobles was easy, the adventure was on the lands of one of the PCs, so everywhere they went, they were greeted politely and given free lodgings.

Magic creatures - well, Drowners, Mudlings and Roarbeast were all mentioned, Mudlings were negotiated with, Drowners were fought and Roarbeast was mentioned but not met, so I tabled it for another session.