Someone left this comment on my last post about a core rule book for a modern version of 4e:
In D&D, you could wind up running into something your character is supposed to know but you don’t, or worse, the other way around, and it would slow down the game or butcher the roleplaying process. (Vecna? Who’s Vecna?)
Fluency in setting meant that D20 Modern was an immediately recognizable game, letting you focus less on the setting and more on the characters and gameplay.
And I’ve got to hand it to the guy who wrote it. He’s absolutely right. I had never given the subject a lot of thought, but fluency is a very big part of what makes a game enjoyable.
Without fluency in the setting, players have a hard time relating to their characters. Their investment in what is going on is limited to what they know and understand. At that point, the game is just a game. The characters become pieces on a game board. Their values and goals are limited to acquiring new magic items, levels, and not dying at the hands of their enemies. Their backgrounds are nothing more than an opportunity to twink out some stats, the NPCs exist just to point them at the bad guy, and the only time anyone gets in character is to spout cheesy one-liners inappropriate for their mental stats.
Without fluency, you lose the “role” portion of the role-playing game. It’s hard to play a character from another fantasy world if you have no clue what that world is like or how your character would act, but how do you establish fluency in your game?
What’s the best way to make your players fluent in your setting if they’ve never played it before? Can the DM just fill in the gaps as you go? Should the DM give recommendations on how the players should react? Are the players expected to do a bit of homework on their characters before choosing a background?
I started Dungeon Mastering with secondhand AD&D materials in 1996 and have run a vast number of D20 campaigns, from cliche' medieval adventures in a kingdom made of Lego bricks to fighting zombies and the mob in the mid 1930s. I try to make the gaming experience as enjoyable, fast-paced, and easy to play as humanly possible. 
Absolutely true! And this happens even within the same game. I have been playing D&D with my old high school teachers for a few months now, and they have always, always, always played in the Forgotten Realms setting. For the past twenty years! These are the same guys who own almost every single FR novel published, have read every FR splatbook across multiple editions, and who know more about that world than they do ours.
Playing with them is exceedingly difficult, because I have no idea how my character is supposed to act or react, in accordance with his region, deity, class and race. Even if I decide to ignore that, and play my own damn character, I’m never as invested as I feel I should be.
My solution to that is to start learning. I have started to learn about the regions, learn about the gods, learn about some of the major events that have happened. And I’ve started to enjoy the game more and more!
This is a major problem for me becuase many, and sometimes all, of my players are not just completely new to the game; but completely new to the setting as well. I can’t just plunk down 1500 pages of FRCS and say “make a character that fits into this setting”.
A simple solution is to start SMALL.. very small. Like.. all the characters are some the village; and you don’t know what’s over that hill and only vaguely whats down river. Maybe thats a bit extreme, but the small the setting the fast people can develop fluency.
BTW — “Game Fluency” i love the term. If I still had a blog, I would blog the hell out of this…
@jonathan I felt the same way when I saw fluency used to describe a player’s familiarity with the setting. For a whole day I was like, “why didn’t I think of that before!?”
While it’s cliche’d, I think starting small is the best method. It helps if the player’s characters have an in-game reason to be clueless and need explanation from NPCs.
The term used for the concept of “fluency” is generally “accessibility.” D&D is actually fairly accessible – that is, as a fantasy setting inspired by Lord of the Rings-style fiction, anyone who has read fiction in turn inspired by LotR will understand most of the tropes used in D&D. 4E has changed that a bit, but it’s still pretty much the same as it has been since Basic.