Too much lore kills the lore ...

If a too big amount of rules can be detrimental to a game, so can be a too big amount of lore.

Before you go any-further, keep in mind that my criticism only apply if you go by the book. If your go to method is usually to do whatever the fuck you want as a GM, well you're not wrong, it's not like I'm your mom or something.

You see I have grown tired of all the lore heavy games such as oWoD, CofD or L5A for the following reasons :

• The first problem is that unless you manage to have your players at least one or two times a week to play, it's not even worth bothering to read the game.The main point of such game is to explore this big universe, like you would explore a big sandbox, but the sheer size of said sandbox makes it impossible to have short campaigns because there's so much information for both the GM and the players to assimilate. Also you'd better not have a hiatus in your campaign or all you have learned will be lost and probably no one will remember what the fuck was the campaign about in the first place. In other words if you already struggle to plan your games, don't bother.

• The second problem is that such games will oftenly put unecessary layers of complication on the plot, the most guilty of this problem would probably be WoD. You see it usually goes like this : there is a conflict between multiple factions (Camarilla VS Sabbat, Chaos VS Everyone Else etc) but wait ... said factions are usually divided into multiple "clans" with different goals. But wait! The clans have conflits going on inside of them which divides them and splits them into multiple "subclans". But wait! Major character X who was part of clan Z betrayed his kind for clan S but it was actually a ruse so he never betrayed clan Z ... until it is revelead that he was actually a Double Reverse Quadruple Agent working for the evil faction, even if it was previously stated before that he was impossible to corrupt now he totally is for plot convienience. In other words authors commit way too often the sin of uncecessary complicated plot with retarded plot twists just for the sake of it.

• The Third problem is that when you make a campaign, it's easily 95% of the game's lore that usueless. If 95% of the lore is useless then one might assume that he can just ignore it but WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!The lore of a game must be seen as a whole, you can't just ignore a massive amount of the book and just take what fancies you because every parts of the lore is usually interconnected. You might start a campaign with partial information about the lore only to find out that you whole campaign is now irrelevant by regards of the lore because of an information you weren't aware of but now you're fucked since your campaign already started.

• The fourth problem is that the bigger a lore is, the more restricve it is. An easy way to spot a game that has too much lore is when you realize that a substantial amount of your campaign ideas will be hard to realize if not impossible in the lore of said universe. I mean hell, If a GM bothers to read your fucking lore it's to give a kick to their creativity, not to have their creativity murdered in cold blood. A campaign that's usually impossible in the lore of such games is when players want to create their own faction from the ground up, unless you build some adamantium-rate plot armor they will usually be oblitarated if you go by the book because they will make of every important characters and ennemy, and even if they manage to build their faction it will end up in something along the lines of world war 3.

• The fifth problem is that when you play with players who already know the lore of such games, they will often go out of their way to tell you how wrong you are and how you understand nothing to the game and how "no X isn't the leader of Y" or "No W city can't be under P's control because it's already a part of V". In other words they'll try to GM themselves.