S7E11 Bonus After-Show Teaser: The Great Lore Debate

Hello listeners, it's PG, back with the preview of our Patreon exclusive bonus after show, which is a more conversational chat with our guests. We often cut a bit loose here and it is a whole lot of fun. This week, Noah Nelson from No Prasinium joins us for a deep dive into Disney's Galactic Star Cruiser. Ian David dissected the ways in which the marketing team failed to convey both the scope of the experience and accurate pricing models. They also break down some of their favorite parts of the whole Star Cruiser experience, as well as reflecting on some things that they would have changed. In this clip, Noah and David discuss the exposition dump and why writers should prioritize the audience's relationship with the characters first and foremost. I want to rant on lore. I'm curious if you have the same rant on lore that I have. Possibly. Here's what it boils down to for starters. No one cares about your lore. That Bible you made and all that stuff, no one cares about it. But at the start, there's a reason why we call certain things exposition dumps. Suddenly, the characters are just dumping exposition. That just goes in one ear and out the other for 99.5% of the human population. I called a visit from the exposition very. Now you sit there and go like, "But Wikipedia and memory alpha and memory beta and the CP foundation." There's just these giant lore repositories online. You're wrong, Noah Nelson. That's why my players absolutely love when I spend an hour telling them about the history of this box that I made for my D&D campaign. The thing is that they like you. They don't like that box. Or they like Han Solo. They like Chubaka. They like Mr. Spock. They like Captain Kirk. They love characters. They have a relationship, a parasocial relationship with these characters, these people that live in this world. And they want to know more about the world that these people that they have a parasocial relationship with, that is what's going on. If you get people hooked on the characters, if you make them care about the characters, then they will consume your lore endlessly. But at all times, because of how it relates to these people that they care about. And then they may find themselves falling in love with the characters in the lore that never gets to be seen on stage. I very much agree with this. I'll add on to it. I think that the lore Bible that you make is important in the creative process for helping ground all of the different decisions that you make. It gives you kind of causal relationships between the props you build and some of the design and story decisions that you make. And it's useful. But I see lore in the lore Bible as a tool, not as something with any intrinsic value. I don't want this to come across wrong. But I'm going to speak this plainly, because I'm also going to say I've definitely been this guy also. There is this sort of like D&D players approach to story writing that is not writing, where you're just like, okay, well, I have all of these different characters. They're not actually present. No one ever actually mentions them, but they're important because they affected the story. Because none of that stuff matters. If your characters aren't tangible, if they aren't affecting the players or the participants in any meaningful way, they're not characters. They're not in your show. If you have a character who died and no one ever got a chance to meet them, no one ever got a chance to see where they lived, to see what things they liked, to see what impact they had on the world and the people around them. They're not carrying any meaning for that player. Yeah. Someone who's writing that way, what you might find a better way to approach that kind of world building is to think about what role did that character play, what is the social structure that is driving the impact of their impact they made in their life that drives the social structure, right? It might be indicative that you're like, well, all this stuff happened because there was this guy. He lived and died this way. This and this and this is all downstream of that. Okay, you're really interested in the social systems. But no one's going to care about, don't spend eight years writing the backstory for this character that is three degrees of separation away from your players. Think about the social structures that your players are going to live in. The ironing is that, again, things like the Star Wars encyclopedia, things like the Blair Witch dossier that they literally made out of their showbible, the showbible for Blair Witch, all the inflammatory material, all of the secondary stories before the second movie, which they had nothing to do with, that came out in the shadow and around Blair Witch. Most of that was material that they built up to give us backstory stuff to the actors for the actors to know in their brain so they could improvise the movie. And then when Ardison was like, we need more stuff. We want more stuff. They're like, well, we had all this material. We gave it to the actors. Maybe we can do something with it. But because people love those actors, love those characters, we're super invested in it. They wanted to know everything there was. Without that emotional connection, that stuff would have collected dust. I mean, I think lore is good for bonus material. Like you said, after they've made the connection, it's important to have because it is what gives the motivation for the actors. But if there's another thing that I wish escape rooms would stop doing is giving me that exposition before I've even played the game. They're mumbling it. Does any movie or play start that way? Bad ones. Bad ones and also sort of star wars. Listen to the rest of the episode now by becoming a patron today at patreon.com/roomescapeartist and access our library of over 60 bonus after shows.