Micro-Blog : Answering Meta-Player Questions as the Game World

Trying to get back in the swing of writing more and figured I'd do a microblog on something that feels a bit like basic advice, but might be helpful to some: When a Player (not PC) asks a question about the world, you can give them the varied unreliable answers the world has to offer instead of answering affirmatively as the GM. What does this mean in practice?

So I've been toying with the idea of running a little pseudo-sci-fi psuedo-FF mouse thing that takes place in an arcology and have been putting out feelers to players. Said players (obviously) had questions about the setting like "are there other talking mammals?" or "how big is the arcology" or "where are all the humans?" and instead of answering those questions directly as the GM and curator of said world, I gave them what knowledge and varying theories they'd be able to reasonably find in-character regardless of what characters they'd end up making. For example:

When asked about other talking mammals I answered what the general common folks knew "There used to be other mammals, but they've been gone for thousands of years. "Wolf" holds about the same weight as "T-Rex." Which obviously begged the question of "what happened to them?" - Instead of telling them the end all be all truth of that history, I said "According to the church these creatures ascended into the afterlife, blessed by their ignorance as sinless creatures. According to top scholars however, the jury is still out. It's clear that other mammals were once in the Arcology thousands of years ago, and both bone records prove what little we know about creatures like "Wolves" and "Otters" - It is also clear these creatures went extinct within a relatively short period of time. Going theories range from the spread of a virus for which mice were the vector, to rapid environmental changes within the arcology that only mice could weather." Now the savvy readers among you will realize that I as the GM didn't really answer shit. All I've done is a bit of world building and dumped a whole new host of questions in my Players' laps. This is intentional. 

By answering these meta-level questions in the context of a varied, flawed and (at times) unreliable world, we both pull focus back to being first-person in the fictional world itself and give Players incredibly gameable bits of lore, questions to tug on and fragments to piece together. I was joking with some of said players before that my game worlds tend to be brimming with mysteries and conspiracies, very obvious and big questions that it's up to the Players to solve. In many ways this is the biggest cornerstone of how I do lore [[See also my Blogpost on crafting gameable Lore]] and this method of information delivery is crucial. Additionally, because these sources are unreliable (in this example a Church and a Scientific Community that hasn't reached consensus), it's up to Players what bits they trust from whom and which factions to go to seeking information (and to suss out why certain factions may intentionally warp the truth).

As an aside: A tangential method that I love using is telling the Players "I don't know the answer to that question, you'd have to ask an archeologist in the world" or similar admission of ignorance. This gives Players a little mini-quest and removes you as the GM another step from being the authority on information (encouraging players to seek answers in the world as opposed to above the table).

I will say this method won't be for everyone - Obviously if you're taking a full writers'-room approach, all the writers in the room should have access to the lore bible. But if, like me, you enjoy campaigns that have a focus on exploration and mystery, I encourage you to give this method a try! ~