How much is too much?

[Eko]

As a DM I would love to spend hours creating enthralling histories and lore of my world, but I am worried that nobody will ever read them. People, understandably, don't have tons of time.
As a player, how much background about the world would you be open to reading before the campaign starts? What about during the campaign? Suppose weekly sessions, do you think most players would be in favor of a weekly "lore/background" that would eventually play into the actual game?

As of right now, I've created an 8-page document. 2 of those pages are "rules", so to speak; character options that are made unavailable, some houserules, etc. . The other 6 pages are the histories that shaped the world, in very brief detail. I'd like to add more, but doubt my players would read it.

Discuss times when your GM made too much background content, or when not enough was provided. How does this assist/take away from the character creation process? Other aspects of the game?

My personal feeling is that, the more a player knows of the world in which their character resides, the better the RP will get and the more human-like will its NPCs appear.

[quinron]

Players don't like being forced to read information that's not going to come up; I'd say that's pretty universal. Some players are going to enjoy reading about the world's history in the same way that some people like The Silmarillion or The World of Ice and Fire; leave the histories and lore available to those players if they want them, but don't expect or demand that players come into the game with a great deal of knowledge about the world.

Dole out information in small, manageable doses only when it becomes relevant. The history that shaped the world, for example, isn't really that important to how it operates now; a civil war half a millennium ago, for example, shaped my world, but it doesn't really factor into how the world keeps running nowadays. The economic boom and failure of imperialism that led to the republican government in Silvermount doesn't affect the world's turning; that government isn't even important to the story unless the players get involved with local politics.

As I said, some players will still enjoy your histories and lore, but it's important to recognize them for what they are: GM tools and entertainment. If those things become important in game, great, your efforts didn't go to waste. But if you have fun writing them, then they've served their purpose even if they don't come up; forcing your players to read them is vain and selfish. No offense meant, obviously - I'm still periodically guilty of that vanity and selfishness.

[Gwaednerth]

Write all the lore you want. I'm into worldbuilding 70% for worldbuilding and 30% for the actual gameplay, so I write way more than my players will ever want to know under any circumstances. You just don't tell your players anything that isn't relevant. It's awesome to know that the Southern continent is ruled by King Karnak the Bewildered, but if the entire story takes place in the North, then there's no reason to tell them that. It also means that if, for some reason, they zag rather than zig and run off on some Quixotic caper to the south, you're prepared with a detailed, three dimensional description of King Karnak's empire.

[VoxRationis]

As a player, I ask all kinds of questions of my DM about their setting. I've never had a DM provide more setting detail than I desired. As a DM, I've frequently provided too much detail, however. People mostly want to know things that directly affect how their characters behave and what sort of characters they can build in the first place.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

I just stick to a few bullet points for player reference, plus a more detailed version expanding on those points.
So your 6 pages of fluff? Make it clear what topics are in it (a contents list), and bullet point the key things at the top of each section. You may end up with a couple more pages, but it'll be easier on the brain for the players.

Also: Show, don't tell - make the backstory and setting part of the game.
Have an adventure where the PCs get exposed to the setting: like maybe, putting clues in the different parts of the city, so you get to describe what each district is like and what sort of people they find there.

Lastly, take a look here.
This is a list of 20 questions your players want to know the answers to - these things are more important to the players than the backstory you've got. Yes, your backstory is important, because that's what lets you answer those 20 questions, but it's not what the players care about to start with.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Give your players a bullet-point history/setting guide.

Then give them the password to a Google Doc that you update with lore whenever it comes up in game.

[Potato_Priest]

Discuss times when your GM made too much background content, or when not enough was provided. How does this assist/take away from the character creation process? Other aspects of the game?

My personal feeling is that, the more a player knows of the world in which their character resides, the better the RP will get and the more human-like will its NPCs appear.

It really depends who you are DMing for and what the intent of the adventure is. Some adventures/campaigns are just for fun: trash a few monsters, hang around in a silly fantasy world. I'm guessing that's not your campaign, but it might be the sort of thing your players expect or want. If your players are more the chaotic do-stuff-because-it's-funny types, you should probably not be spending much time on world backstory, because these players are going to want to jump right into your world and start breaking it.

Personally, I really appreciate seeing some good backstory to a world. In fact, it can often be annoying for DMs how I try to learn things about the lives of NPCs that they haven't put much thought into. I agree that for some serious roleplaying, you need to know something about the world you are in. My suggestion is to provide them with access to all the information you would ideally want them to have, perhaps in bullet points, and allow them to read it at their discretion. You should give a brief verbal summary of what you want them to know as well.

[Malfarian]

Divide it up, print it out and have them find it, like journal pages or something, let them think they earned it

[Inchoroi]

Um.

I have just over 900 pages worth of notes right now (and growing daily). I've paired that down to about 300 or so necessary to run the campaign as intended (as of yesterday, 312, but I think it'll grow a little bit as I detail cities and towns more). I'm fine with this amount of work, as its never going to be player facing, and I'll be running at least 6 campaigns from it, that are in various states of completeness, from outline to mostly done. It's intentionally written as an enormous sandbox, so details are my friend.

I've written a Player's Guide for my players, that's about 120 pages. I love lore, and I love having lots of information, as both a player and DM. However, I've written the Player's Guide in a way that, just to make characters, they only have to read 5 pages, which contains Character Hooks, which is how I get my players involved in the world when the game starts.

Each Hook contains a short little blurb, some hints about what the campaign entails, as well as page references to important information that they'd want to know if they go with those Character Hooks. So, if I didn't screw it up, they only have to read a few pages to make characters that are game-ready. However, if they want to, there's a lot of lore and hints available in the Player's Guide--even the "Cover" I made for the Player's Guide is a hint.

Yes, I'm an evil DM.

[Mechalich]

This answer is actually quite heavily dependent upon what type of game you are playing, and certain specific aspects. The biggest ones are communication and transportation capabilities. The most developed these are, the more information you need - because the campaign can expand to greater area and because more factors are capable of influencing other factors at one time.

Consider a zero magic medieval simulation game: communication and transportation technologies are severely limited. A message can move no faster than a carrier pigeon (for very short messages) or post-horse system (for longer messages) can manage, with some wiggle room for nautical couriers of high speed in specific contexts. Large armies have to walk, or maybe ride and even a super-fast cavalry flying squadron of steppe warriors can make maybe fifty miles per day (over open ground or on a road). Things happen slowly as a result and major political moves and wars unfold over a period of months of years. In such a scenario you really only need to deal with an immediate region and its neighbors, because the characters are unlikely to leave the initial region and if they do the GM has plenty of time to prepare for a voyage across the sea or whatever because there will be a significant journeying interlude. Out of region events might have an impact on a campaign but it would be rare for them to be felt directly or to intercede often.

Contrast this with a high magic fantasy world like the Forgotten Realms. Starting from a fairly low level characters can send messages to just about anywhere in the world, receive active intelligence through scrying and other means, and move about at high rates through flight or teleportation. It is entirely possible for a party of adventures to jump around the realms at lightning speed having all sorts of encounters with parties interested in the big scheme du jour - and this regularly happens in FR novels dealing with higher level characters - meaning that the entire continent/world needs to be detailed sufficiently to handle this kind of thing at a moments notice. Science fiction and space fantasy settings have this problem even worse. Characters in Star Wars games are capable of visiting multiple planets in a single day, and of having nearly instantaneous communication across millions of worlds.

In order to get a handle on this its important to decide how big your entire setting is, what a functional region is within that, and how many regions you have and how much detail each region needs. For example, when building Resvier I determined that the entire functional setting was an area roughly the size of France and that the functional region within that was a sub-section about the size of a traditional French province (many of which were nation states in their own right in the middle ages) and provided an overview and a certain number of points of interest for each one. The Forgotten Realms, which is much bigger, has a setting the size of a continent and its functional region is the nation state (ex. Cormyr) or nation-state sized divided regions (ex. Vilhon Reach) and it details each of those. Of course it later drilled in deeper and provided lots of information on much smaller areas, down to individual cities, but such supplementary information is primarily used for regionally focused campaigns.

Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that the majority of information is not necessary for the players - it's used by the GM, generally as a self-reference. Which is very important - seat-of-the-pants GMing does not lead to consistent world building. If you intend to have a consistent world you're going to have a lot of material that never actually shows up in game - in the same way that people who write fantasy novels have a giant pile of data that never makes it into the books (and tend to get published in cash-grab supplements full of pretty pictures like The World of Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time).

In terms of how much world-building is necessary then, the question is actually, how much background do you need to create a world that is consistent enough to be believable according to the needs of your players. That can vary by a lot.

[Knaight]

There are two different questions here. One is how much to make, one is how much to immediately present to the players. I'm all for making arbitrarily large amounts of stuff, and while I'm not a plan heavy GM or one who sticks to individual settings long term I do have a couple of settings that I come back to every so often that have some writing. I'm fond of encyclopedia formats, where you can just write up an article on a particular thing you think is interesting whenever, tie it into other things, and move on - and that format is well suited to gradually building up a lot of writing. If you use something like Wikia, that also can make a whole bunch that is player facing but optional, and that's another case where you can just keep making it indefinitely without issue.

When it comes to handouts though? A map and one page of text per session is about as much as I can justify. With very specific groups, a bit more is doable. Expecting players to read and remember a dozen pages before the game starts just isn't realistic.

[Alcore]

As a player beginning I would only want to know a few simple things;

Locations a race can commonly be found at.
The general conditions of said locations.
The recent history that has shape said location in the last generation.

Finally I would want to know if it is alright to add greater detail to the chosen location in my backstory.


If your enjoying your work it is by no means a waste. As others have said; the players will do what they want. Leave your world off to the side, they'll read it when they want too.