I dislike codices at least how they are made in modern games, like Bioware games (although the technobabble of Mass Effect was suitable for the setting). Information is often irrelevant to what is happening in the game and is done in encyclopedic format, which is a bad way to tell about the setting. I like characters tell me about the setting, because what characters tell me is opinionated, has meaning in their lives and is flavored by their personalities. I'd rather ask Dhall about Dustmen than read a codex entry about them.
And in many good RPGs, the pacing of the game itself helped a lot with learning about the game. In games like Fallout you start as an outsider and travel between communities, starting with simple people and progressing to more complex communities, bigger cities and more dangerous threats. I like that a lot more.
In Morrowind, I've read books more like part of a challenge from gaming community, to know more what people are discussing. But the keyword system was enough for me and told me most of what I wanted to know about the world. Granted there are some amazing and sick stories to read in TES, but then they do repeat every game and books become not as interesting after you played one game.
As a DM I found that overloading players with information far beyond their adventuring domain, thinking history and countries far away, while is very fun, is not very useful. Truth is, nobody likes excess reading. And before you throw rocks at me, I used to think that the quality of an RPG can be judged by an amount of text it has in it. However, since I expanded a bit on what I play and played more and more games, including those that promised "a lot of text, like good old times", yet turned to be not fun to read, I changed my opinion to less radical one - game only requires enough text to support it themes and characters properly, and it can be handled in different manner (dialogue of PST, funny descriptions in Fallout, item descriptions of Dark Souls, rhymes in Child of Light).
And in many good RPGs, the pacing of the game itself helped a lot with learning about the game. In games like Fallout you start as an outsider and travel between communities, starting with simple people and progressing to more complex communities, bigger cities and more dangerous threats. I like that a lot more.
In Morrowind, I've read books more like part of a challenge from gaming community, to know more what people are discussing. But the keyword system was enough for me and told me most of what I wanted to know about the world. Granted there are some amazing and sick stories to read in TES, but then they do repeat every game and books become not as interesting after you played one game.
As a DM I found that overloading players with information far beyond their adventuring domain, thinking history and countries far away, while is very fun, is not very useful. Truth is, nobody likes excess reading. And before you throw rocks at me, I used to think that the quality of an RPG can be judged by an amount of text it has in it. However, since I expanded a bit on what I play and played more and more games, including those that promised "a lot of text, like good old times", yet turned to be not fun to read, I changed my opinion to less radical one - game only requires enough text to support it themes and characters properly, and it can be handled in different manner (dialogue of PST, funny descriptions in Fallout, item descriptions of Dark Souls, rhymes in Child of Light).
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