I love lore, but I recognise that too much can put players off.  I am currently playing an online game every week or two with six other players and I think the lore is getting out of hand.  Every session our amazingly creative DM does a recap of the lore and it usually takes about 30 minutes.  Bearing in mind we usually play for 3 to 4 hours, this is c.12-16% of the gametime, every session!  That seems too much to me.  Just wanted to know your experiences or advice before I say something to our DM.

How are they doing it?

I mean...the fact that it's too much for you is the very definition of too much...at least for you. However, whether they're being reasonable or not depends on how they're delivering it. Are they just standing up at the beginning of each session, giving a 30 minute lecture on the minutiae of their world? Tomorrow's topic will be...how the Broken Nose Tribe of Goblins came to prefer the colour yellow on their banners? Or is it all relevant, required for your party to progress and delivered in small chunks via books and notes you pick up, parts of conversations as you research things as part of your quest?

Ones is good, the other is really off-putting...and where this experience falls on that spectrum tells you whether it's just you being impatient or they're just lore-dumping on you. I can't tell you which.

Recapping adventures (last time on Chuckles in Cragmaw) I can totally see, but recapping lore?

I'm sorry, isn't lore something that player's are responsible for tracking?

I am missing something here (and probably because I treat lore as background).

As a GM I try and infuse world data into conversations with NPCs or observations by the PCs. Or just put it into a background document that the players can read at their leisure. :-)

And if the DM's talking about their world's background, they're not running the game! :D

Now if, as mentioned above, they're recapping information that's important to the PCs that's not horrible. However, if this is the case and it takes the DM that long, then the story they are weaving is more complicated than the US tax code and should be parsed down. IMO.

Would it be better if your DM wrote out the lore he expects you to know? That way, you can read it up out of the session. [And then I notice that had already been suggested…]

Quote from Harrycanyon >>

As a GM I try and infuse world data into conversations with NPCs or observations by the PCs. Or just put it into a background document that the players can read at their leisure. :-)

And if the DM's talking about their world's background, they're not running the game! :D

Now if, as mentioned above, they're recapping information that's important to the PCs that's not horrible. However, if this is the case and it takes the DM that long, then the story they are weaving is more complicated than the US tax code and should be parsed down. IMO.

Setting documents are a great resource for dropping a lot of background lore for a campaign. I've had several DM's use them, they're very helpful references for general world knowledge and history.

So, my comment earlier may be a bit odd to some folks, given I have massive amounts of lore about my next campaign done and available and I talk about here all the time.

I do not expect my players to read all that lore or even know it -- they only need to know what is important enough to make their character -- the basics, like race, family, homeland, class, etc. There's more than enough lore in those basic things already -- plus the lore is a starting point for a new world -- not an end point. The games are supposed to chang ehte world, reshape it.

I don't lore dump. I hate lore dumping. I will talk about the lore: the Butcher you are selling the rabbits you foraged to will ask ya questions about didja hear 'bout the Mallye caravan? Got hijacked by brigands down near Piddlewich, an' the Baron's men got there late and found only horrorshow and bardwail. No? Well, then, here's yer 4 bits apiece, plus a tad for the borage ya brought along with it.

The lore is there for me, so I can make up crap like I just did and not worry about it conflicting with something else I might make up. Players might dig into it, and that's fine and dandy, but I'll not be making any kind of adventure or such that requires someone to have read all bazillion pages of it just so they know the secret of Eld and their relationship to the Circle of lanterns and why the Circle of Dreams is the central player there after pushing out the Kurgan Syndicate.

Hell, I know that stuff and I don't think I could find it in there. 

IOW, it is really bugging me about the whole "recapping lore" thing -- that sets my small hairs on end and gives me the willies.

Quote from Justinfront >>

I love lore, but I recognise that too much can put players off.  I am currently playing an online game every week or two with six other players and I think the lore is getting out of hand.  Every session our amazingly creative DM does a recap of the lore and it usually takes about 30 minutes.  Bearing in mind we usually play for 3 to 4 hours, this is c.12-16% of the gametime, every session!  That seems too much to me.  Just wanted to know your experiences or advice before I say something to our DM.

 

How does everyone else at the table feel about the DM's lore dumps @ the beginning of every session?

Is it the same lore every time?

Lore is best delivered organically, otherwise there's no point. I'll include a sentence or two when describing a location on the map; just the general stuff people would be expected to know. I have given them some lore about my world's version of of Ostoria, but that's because they've been researching a magic item they found that dates back to it. For the most part, I develop lore so I can either drop it in through NPC conversation, or answer PC questions when it's relevant. All a lore dump will do is stroke your ego and make you think the players know something about your game setting that they more than likely tuned out completely because they don't care.

Players care about their characters, not the minutiae of your world.

Quote from Justinfront >>

I love lore, but I recognise that too much can put players off.  I am currently playing an online game every week or two with six other players and I think the lore is getting out of hand.  Every session our amazingly creative DM does a recap of the lore and it usually takes about 30 minutes.  Bearing in mind we usually play for 3 to 4 hours, this is c.12-16% of the gametime, every session!  That seems too much to me.  Just wanted to know your experiences or advice before I say something to our DM.

Is that 30 minutes of the DM just sitting there talking, or are other players engaged and asking questions to make it take longer?  4 straight hours of lore might be fine if everyone is engaged and having a great time collaborating on the discussion (and at the minimum here, at least the OP is not having a great time), but I'd say that anything more than about 2 minutes of the DM (or any player) monologuing is too much.

It's definitely worth saying something to your DM, and/or talk to other players to gauge how the rest of the party feels as well.  If everyone else enjoys the lore dumps then you might be outnumbered and a bit out of luck, but even then it's totally fair to give the DM feedback on which things they're doing that you wish they'd do more of and things you wouldn't seeing less of, just try to keep it constructive and that discussion can usually go well. 

Quote from Justinfront >>

I love lore, but I recognise that too much can put players off.  I am currently playing an online game every week or two with six other players and I think the lore is getting out of hand.  Every session our amazingly creative DM does a recap of the lore and it usually takes about 30 minutes.  Bearing in mind we usually play for 3 to 4 hours, this is c.12-16% of the gametime, every session!  That seems too much to me.  Just wanted to know your experiences or advice before I say something to our DM.

I think I'd recommend this for all groups. Unless, that is, it's one of those groups that mostly play a tactics game. But .. our group played Princes of the Apocalypse (I think) and keeping track of the sheer enormity of loose ends and unfinished threads and random hints and clues was basically impossible. Our GM quit in frustration of our inability to do so. Now we're halfway through Tomb of Annihilation, and our present GM is much more willing to just tell us what it is we're forgetting. Works better all round.

Quote from Acromos >>

Quote from Justinfront >>

I love lore, but I recognise that too much can put players off.  I am currently playing an online game every week or two with six other players and I think the lore is getting out of hand.  Every session our amazingly creative DM does a recap of the lore and it usually takes about 30 minutes.  Bearing in mind we usually play for 3 to 4 hours, this is c.12-16% of the gametime, every session!  That seems too much to me.  Just wanted to know your experiences or advice before I say something to our DM.

I think I'd recommend this for all groups. Unless, that is, it's one of those groups that mostly play a tactics game. But .. our group played Princes of the Apocalypse (I think) and keeping track of the sheer enormity of loose ends and unfinished threads and random hints and clues was basically impossible. Our GM quit in frustration of our inability to do so. Now we're halfway through Tomb of Annihilation, and our present GM is much more willing to just tell us what it is we're forgetting. Works better all round.

 Yeah, as a DM, expecting the players to remember every little clue you so graciously drop is a recipe for failure. ;-) 

"Wait, you don't remember how 4 sessions ago (read: three months of real time) that Halfling gave you a sidewise glance when you asked about the MacGuffin?"  :-D

If you are having issues with lore, you should speak about it to your DM, as you shouldn't have to remember every little thing ever

Thanks guys. It's really useful to read all your comments. The recap is often useful but it goes on too long. The campaign is wonderfully creative but there's too much to it. It is too complicated. When we can't remember something and ask the DM for a reminder, he often gets us to roll a History check and if we fail then we don't get all the info. It's a shame because it's great when you make a connection, but I'm afraid we give up most of the time because it's just too hard. I guess I'm kind of rehearsing what I'm going to say to him so this is useful thanks. My character is the only one with Intelligence over 12 ( I play a wizard), so I get lots of extra info, which I love and I'm happy to read stuff online, about Eberron ( the campaign setting) but it all gets a bit much. Thanks again

I do not think there is ever to much lore and or background a world can have.

But I do think it should be parsed out in player hand outs.

If you have enough it could be broken up into categories like political, religious, geographic and so on. Each equating somewhat to a characters skill in 5E.

All the characters get a general background hand out about the area. Characters with higher intelligence or such would get more detailed handouts. As they advance in level and travel they would get more and more details.

Hand outs leave it to the players to read at their leisure.
Plus some players will gain information that others should not know about.

I feel that 30m of lore recap on every session is way too much. As others said, lore is background information. It's cool to have, but it's up to the players to keep track of it.

It also really depends on the party. If your party loves lore, then maybe 30m is good. In my experience as a DM, I like dropping pieces of lore here and there, but I never do a recap unless the players ask for it. The only recaps I do are for previous sessions at the end of a session.