The first time I tried to read the World Tree rulebook, I had the same problem.
Oddly, I think the reason my WT game works is that all of my players have read sythyry. I think about half of them started reading Sythyry because I was going to run the game. The journal is much longer than the rulebook, but it's entertaining and tells a story, which makes it easier to read than a pile of world-building exposition. But you get the world-building information bit by bit as you read the journal, so that by the time you're done the setting doesn't seem that strange any more.
The biggest downside is that, while early Sythyry was low-power, mid-to-current Sythyry involves lots of high-powered individuals, which makes the magic system look like it can do all kinds of great stuff that your PC in a standard-level game will never ever have the skills/money for. :/
Re: Reading Sythyry: That makes sense. If I run a Star Wars campaign vs. a "generic space opera" campaign, the [i]benefit[/i] in doing so is that my players will have a common view of what sorts of things to expect in the Star Wars universe, if they've all seen the movies. It wouldn't work if I had anyone who was totally unfamiliar with Star Wars, and we might run into a few problems if we had very different levels of exposure to some of the "Extended Universe" material.
I COULD simply try to give a new, un-Star-Wars-familiar player a big info-dump on the Star Wars setting, but watching the movies would probably be more fun.
Anyway, this is one reason why I tend to gravitate toward settings where I can sum up what new players might know about the universe by pointing to some familiar genre (e.g., "this is a Wild West former gold-rush boom-town-that's-gone-bust, in the 1860s"). I don't expect the players to be history experts (though Wikipedia and other resources make it awfully easy to look these things up), but to at least have a rough idea of what to expect based on pop-culture representations. (E.g., dusty towns, cowboy hats, stagecoaches, trains, telegraphs, six-shot revolvers ... but NOT beehive haircuts, or '70s polyester shirts with big open collars. Curse those anachronistic '70s cowboy TV shows! ;) )
I might intend to introduce some strange element (ghosts and zombies, "Wild-Wild West" type weird-science steampunk gizmos, alien invaders), but that's something I can introduce over the course of the adventure -- though an individual PC might be "in on" some of the details (a "mad scientist" who has made some of his own gizmos, or a "huckster" who plays at just being an ordinary gambler but is secretly a spellcaster hunting supernatural artifacts). If I were to run another Classic Deadlands campaign, I WOULD NOT bother introducing players to all the weird "alternate history" stuff in that setting that was built up originally over a whole slew of supplements (California broke up and became "The Maze," the South won the Civil War, various foreign powers have laid claim over parts of the continental US, parts of the Dakota Territories are under control of the Sioux Nations, etc.). It's too much to take in all at once, and quite a lot of it might not even be relevant to an adventure that takes place in some dusty old former boomtown with tumbleweed blowing across the street by day and an undead revenant gunslinger haunting Boot Hill at night.
If, however, I ran a game where everyone was already well-versed on the extended Deadlands mythos ... you bet, I'd just run with it as written. In THAT case, it'd be more trouble than it was worth to "undo" all those alternate-history details to get to a common ground with the players.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-01-12 07:44 pm (UTC)Oddly, I think the reason my WT game works is that all of my players have read
The biggest downside is that, while early Sythyry was low-power, mid-to-current Sythyry involves lots of high-powered individuals, which makes the magic system look like it can do all kinds of great stuff that your PC in a standard-level game will never ever have the skills/money for. :/
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Date: 2012-01-13 03:02 am (UTC)That makes sense. If I run a Star Wars campaign vs. a "generic space opera" campaign, the [i]benefit[/i] in doing so is that my players will have a common view of what sorts of things to expect in the Star Wars universe, if they've all seen the movies. It wouldn't work if I had anyone who was totally unfamiliar with Star Wars, and we might run into a few problems if we had very different levels of exposure to some of the "Extended Universe" material.
I COULD simply try to give a new, un-Star-Wars-familiar player a big info-dump on the Star Wars setting, but watching the movies would probably be more fun.
Anyway, this is one reason why I tend to gravitate toward settings where I can sum up what new players might know about the universe by pointing to some familiar genre (e.g., "this is a Wild West former gold-rush boom-town-that's-gone-bust, in the 1860s"). I don't expect the players to be history experts (though Wikipedia and other resources make it awfully easy to look these things up), but to at least have a rough idea of what to expect based on pop-culture representations. (E.g., dusty towns, cowboy hats, stagecoaches, trains, telegraphs, six-shot revolvers ... but NOT beehive haircuts, or '70s polyester shirts with big open collars. Curse those anachronistic '70s cowboy TV shows! ;) )
I might intend to introduce some strange element (ghosts and zombies, "Wild-Wild West" type weird-science steampunk gizmos, alien invaders), but that's something I can introduce over the course of the adventure -- though an individual PC might be "in on" some of the details (a "mad scientist" who has made some of his own gizmos, or a "huckster" who plays at just being an ordinary gambler but is secretly a spellcaster hunting supernatural artifacts). If I were to run another Classic Deadlands campaign, I WOULD NOT bother introducing players to all the weird "alternate history" stuff in that setting that was built up originally over a whole slew of supplements (California broke up and became "The Maze," the South won the Civil War, various foreign powers have laid claim over parts of the continental US, parts of the Dakota Territories are under control of the Sioux Nations, etc.). It's too much to take in all at once, and quite a lot of it might not even be relevant to an adventure that takes place in some dusty old former boomtown with tumbleweed blowing across the street by day and an undead revenant gunslinger haunting Boot Hill at night.
If, however, I ran a game where everyone was already well-versed on the extended Deadlands mythos ... you bet, I'd just run with it as written. In THAT case, it'd be more trouble than it was worth to "undo" all those alternate-history details to get to a common ground with the players.