Capital-L Lore vs actionable info

Something my players did in this week's game made me think. They trekked several days out from their home village, completely of their own accord, to visit a repository of lore (aka a library) and learn about... well, everything. History, people, places - lore stuff.

It set me thinking, because you see a lot of GMs on the internet asking how they can get their players to care about their lore (and how to deliver it without "Lore dumps"). I've long had a pet theory on this, and in my mind this experience confirmed it. It basically amounts to the following principle:

    Action Principle: Players fundamentally care about stuff that affects their actions in the game.

Specifically as regards information, this gives us the principle that players only really care about information that is actionable. And this is a big problem for lore, because the word 'Lore' has effectively evolved into a bespoke game term referring specifically to the information players receive that isn't actionable. With those definitions in place, it's almost tautological that players don't care about Lore - Lore is pretty much defined as the stuff they don't care about.

So that's case closed, right? Make your lore actionable, and the players will care - job done.

Well, not quite. First, it's pretty tricky to make your lore actionable - what does that even mean? The answer is that, as with everything, it's tied up with campaign structure. And that's the more fundamental problem here.

Most campaigns (in fact, probably the vast majority) follow a pretty strictly linear structure, specifically, following a narrative that the GM has prepared. I'm not here to tell you whether that's a good or bad thing. But one thing it does do is strictly delineate Lore. A narrative-focused game like this has very clear expectations (even if they're not always made explicit) about the sorts of things that are supposed to happen. And this is where the definition of Capital-L Lore above emerges from; you have a clear Lore/actionable information divide because it's clear to see which information is pertinent to the narrative in such a way as to make it actionable, and which isn't.

What does the guidebook say about this place again?
Image by Andrew Walter

There's a further problem, which goes even deeper. The GM in a narrative-focused campaign is strongly incentivised to make sure the players have everything they need to complete the challenges in front of them. Otherwise, the game is apt to grind to a halt when they fail a task that's integral to the plot, or spin off in directions they haven't prepared for as the players cast around looking for a solution, having missed the intended one. This incentivises the GM not to leave any pieces of information that could fail to be uncovered - at least, if they're actionable. If you've run a mystery game, for instance, you're probably familiar with the players starting to spin out because they've missed an important clue. What many GMs of narrative-focused games do to avoid this (in both mystery and non-mystery scenarios) is contrive a way for the players to find the clue anyway. Otherwise the game snarls up as the players fail to find the intended progression.

But, as I've argued previously, an important part of guaranteeing player immersion is making it feel as though the world has its own facts that might remain undiscovered if the players fail to find them. So this approach damages the players' engagement by damaging their ability to think of the world as a real place. This is where players learn to be passive and wait for all the pertinent information (i.e.: not Lore, by our definition above) to come to them.

Sandboxes don't have this problem. In a pure sandbox game, information waits for the players to uncover it - which may never happen. The players have to actively search for it because otherwise they end up going in blind. The information they find is useful, but it doesn't necessarily find its way into their hands unless they take an interest, and so they do.

Further, in a pure sandbox, there is no Capital-L Lore/actionable info divide, because any information is potentially actionable. The lore about the wars fought thousands of years ago between the prince's ancestors and the goblins, in a narrative-focused game, is likely to be just fluff (unless the game is specifically focused on finding out about that history, in which case it's not Lore but plot-relevant info). But in a true sandbox, it can rise above being mere fluff, e.g.: if the players decide to make it a rallying cry for a war against the goblins, or decide to investigate where one of the ancestors was buried with their magical sword, or try and find the legendary hidden goblin fortress, etc etc.

In other words, in a pure sandbox, nothing is just lore. All information is potentially actionable.

I've been talking a lot about the "pure" sandbox. But in reality, no game is a pure sandbox. I use the term to mean a game at the far end of the sandbox spectrum, where there are no expectations placed on what sorts of actions are appropriate to the game. But in practical terms, no game is really like this; the purest sandbox you can think of almost certainly involves expectations like "Players should play adventurers looking for wealth and glory by exploring a wild frontier." But having expectations isn't a failing - all games rely on sharing expectations between players and GM to run smoothly (ahem). The pure sandbox is like a theoretical entity that's helpful to talk about, but impossible to observe in the wild.

In reality, all games fall between the two extremes. That is to say, no game is a "pure" narrative game either - all narrative-focused games will provide some freedom for players to approach problems in original ways. And this opens up a crack for good lore to get in, or rather, to erode the line between lore and actionable info. Players will start to actively seek out lore if the GM shows them that a) it can be useful, and b) they can miss it.

My home game is a sandbox, but it has expectations, which I made clear to the players at the start. What makes them interested in the lore is that I've shown them, time and again, that the region they're exploring (and the big dungeon they're exploring within it) is interlaced with all sorts of hidden history, relations and secrets that, when (if) the players find out about them, open up all sorts of opportunities. But you can demonstrate this to players (albeit in perhaps a more constrained way) in a game that has an intended plot progression.

Everything the GM does conditions players' expectations. If you've been one of those GMs who wonders why your players never take an interest in your lore, or never seem to engage with your world like it's a real place that's worth knowing about, think about whether you've been training them to be passive and to discount "fluff" lore, by teaching them that important info will always come to them. Loosening up your expectations for how the scenario has to go works wonders - allow the players to miss things, and allow lore you didn't think of as directly actionable to become so if the players come up with a good enough plan, and they'll soon start to take more of an interest.