#Metagaming

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Imagine if baseline D&D character tactical competence were gated as metagaming the way other things were.

"It's a loud and chaotic battle and they're shooting arrows at you, I don't think you'd notice that the rogue who was trying to flank the enemy formation just got ganked. I'm not letting you cast Healing Word on them without a perception roll."

[oldschoolfrp]

Metagaming's MicroGames delivered a ton of replay value in little plastic bags (back cover ad from The Space Gamer 14, Nov-Dec 1977)

[prokopetz]

is there a ttrpg that explicitly asks you to take metagaming into account?

The term "metagaming" doesn't mean any one thing. Metagaming is simply any way of engaging with the fiction that departs from what a particular game deems appropriate.

For example, one game may expect players to make decisions for their characters purely on the basis of in-character knowledge, with as little reference to the mechanics as possible; while another may expect players to adopt the stance of a narrator telling a story about their characters, and permit players to take mechanically significant actions which don't correspond to any particular in-character activity.

What's deemed to constitute metagaming in the former game will not be the same as what's deemed to constitute metagaming in the latter.

In this sense, it's impossible for a game to "take metagaming into account"; anything a game explicitly expects you to do is, by definition, something that game deems appropriate, and metagaming is the act of engaging inappropriately.

That said, there are games that play with the idea of where the boundaries between the game and the metagame lie. The gold standard is probably Dr. Jenna Moran's Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, a game that cross-breeds a tabletop RPG with a modified Nomic and divides the traditional responsibilities of the GM up among the various player roles: Fatalists have authority over the setting's lore; Theurgists over the mechanics of play; and Wishers over the social contract of the table. Since the question "what is metagaming?" is a function of the latter, Wishers can literally roll dice to determine whether or not something another player just did is metagaming.

[vintagerpg]

I bought this because of Denis Loubet’s excellent cover. Look at it! So good, so smooth, so warm. What is it? Something damn strange: Dragons of Underearth (1982). But what’s that? Steve Jackson’s Fantasy Trip, sort of.

The Fantasy Trip is great, a lean and mean point-buy RPG focused on tactical combat that began life as too microgames, Melee and Wizard. Based on the success of those games, in 1980 Metagaming had Jackson design a more advanced game, a full-fledged RPG consisting of three books and an adventure (Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, In the Labyrinth and an adventure, Tollenkar’s Lair). All those things were supposed to be in one box set, but got released separately, seemingly because it was cheaper to do it sans box. That, and other difficulties, led to Jackson bailing on the company and the game. After that, The Fantasy Trip gets even more confusing, with a series of supplements coming out that were advertised as being compatible with both versions of the game, or lacked any compatibility information at all. Many of them, like Dragons of the Underearth, came packed, infuriatingly considering the history of the game, in boxes. Unsurprisingly, Metagaming shuttered in 1983.

This thing is appealing in a lot of ways. The box is small and reminds me of a videogame box. The art is good. The tokens are sharp as hell. But it is just a watered-down version of Fantasy Trip. Or rather, the previous box, Lords of Underearth, was a watered-down version. This is technically an advanced watered-down version. Dear god.

[forestshadow-wolf]

Metagame 141 where the cod games are in the cod universe

Soap posts tiktoks of ghost and everyone thinks he's just a really accurate cospayer

[cleric-posting]

Gather round followers. We're going to have one last meal together.

[flowergardeninthewall]

After that convo I have to remind myself mostly that ooc fit did say he's not going anywhere, now am I convinced he's gonna get his ass kidnapped and or in major MAJOR fucking trouble when he's away for those two weeks? Absolutely.

Is he going to die? I think it's going to be close, but I think he's gonna pull through

[jadagul]

@discoursedrome This thread is already too long so I know from experience I'm going to wuss out of having a good discussion on it due to the sheer Bigness, but I can't resist hashing it out about this stuff! Okay, a little bit:

This is basically the rules-as-physics argument, right, where you can deduce the rules from observation? It's not really related to narrative mechanics, it's the same phenomenon as "can my character deduce the exact success probabilities from repeated trials" or "can my character develop a quantum theory of survivability by experimenting on his own hit points". There's going to be a huge gap between the rules and the game setting as soon as the rules involve numbers! The normal answer to this is that these mechanics are heuristics designed to manage play and are rarely consistent or visible enough that it would be plausible for a character to infer them from experience. And if it's implausible then it smells like metagaming and you'd be justified in just not having the rule work that way in that case -- it turns out this moment works like all those other moments in your life that weren't engaging directly with the game mechanics! But I would agree that there's a lot of pressure to metagame when the stakes are very high, and it's often wise for a designer to avoid conflicts of interest there.

To extend the analogy, would you argue that it's implausible for characters in a novel not to become genre-savvy simply because the world they're living in operates on those genre rules? Or going beyond that: if people wrote genre fiction so that they did, would that be better? I think generally you need to assume characters don't become genre savvy even if it "makes sense", but I'd go beyond that to argue that it usually doesn't make sense -- characters can't tell when something is part of the narrative and when it's just something that happens, so this doesn't happen to other people but it doesn't even consistently happen to them. Similarly, characters in a game can't tell when mechanics are involved or how.

But the general point here is that unless a game explicitly tells you that the rules are "laws of nature" in the setting then they aren't, and if you bring that tension into the spotlight by having your character act like they are, it really forces the issue. The classic example is the character who is mostly immune to gunfire mechanically, but not narratively, so they shoot themselves in the temple with a huge gun to show off. The standard advice here is "they die", which is obviously not exactly right: the correct response is actually to go over how this all works OOCly, emphasize that if they do this the character will die and everyone will assume they killed themselves on purpose and be very confused, and then if they really want to they still can. And this isn't really a narrative mechanic, again, you get there pretty rapidly once you add hit points!

But I do take your point, which is that the disconnect can be a bit jarring, reaching a peak in games where the player is actively antagonistic to their own character, and it bothers some people more than others. Game designers should decide what audience they're targeting and avoid alienating people carelessly to no particular benefit. That's all fine; but I still feel the need to emphasize that it's always a matter of degree, and that the minimum you can pare this problem down to (outside of freeform or the far reaches of FKR) is still pretty large.

Now with regard to the earlier question of "should everyone use the same rules"; this IMO is mostly a flavour thing, it's about selling the objectivity of the setting and the idea that everyone casts the same Fireball. This is good, but it trades off against fussy and intensive mechanics, which is bad, so you think about what you want and you pick your poison. That said, there's a limit: the idea of using the same ruleset to cover PC ad-hoc crafting projects and off-camera NPC candlemakers is laughable. There's no way to do that without it being a mess; it's one of many, many places where "rules as physics" and "rules as game or adjudication mechanism" are irreconcilable. With legendary or magical items you can make it work, but the issue there is less difficulty than rate: there are always loads of people as powerful as the PCs, so if it's feasible for someone at that skill level to make, say, two or three magic items in a year, those people could all just be churning them out for the heck of it. But if it's much harder than that, the prospect of PCs doing it and especially of them doing it as their "thing" rapidly slips away. It's the same basic issue as "what if I want to train up as a competent doctor from a baseline of zero" -- well, the game's answer is not that it takes ten years, but that's got to be roughly how it works for the average person, right? You can just say that the setting has wide variation in potential and the PCs are at the upper end of it, I guess, or that some mechanism like "experience points" is driving their growth, but on some level it's kind of fake, right? You live with it.

First off, yeah, that thread was already too long and also it was on someone's post that I'd originally misread to begin with, so let's put it here.

I really have one major response to your post, which is

The classic example is the character who is mostly immune to gunfire mechanically, but not narratively,

what the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you ever do that? What does it mean to be immune to something mechanically but not narratively? Where do I apply to get your game design license revoked?

Like the game rules should tell me what happens if I shoot myself in the head without dodging. And they should tell me what happens when someone else shoots me in the head when I can't dodge. And those should be the same thing because it's the same action.

The version of this I've heard comes from D&D 3e: fall damage tops out at 20d6, so the maximum possible damage is 120. A typical level 11 barbarian should have 121 hit points (if not more through Con bonuses; I think they're very likely to actually have 132.) So by the rules, a full-health barbarian can reliably jump off a cliff and survive the fall.

And some people are like "yes but obviously a real human won't consistently survive a thousand-foot fall" but of course what the rules are telling you is that a level 11 barbarian is not, in fact, a normal human; they can absorb a level of punishment that no real person possibly could.

People periodically try to reinterpret hit points as, like, luck, or dodging ability, but as you say that never holds up once you start asking questions about what's going on. (The classic question is poison-on-hit attacks, but honestly the shooting someone in the head bit is also good.) In order for hit points to make sense, you kind of have to say that some people can walk off being shot in the head at point-blank range, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just the world you're building.

(Or you can keep max hp low enough and gun damage high enough that a max roll crit will kill anyone, but that generally undermines what people want the hit points to do in other contexts. If you want people to be superhuman just let them be superhuman!)

---

For the last bit: yeah obviously you're not going to, like, make crafting rolls for everyone in the city. But if your mechanics are wildly at odds with a functioning economy you really should expect your players to (1) ask questions and (2) exploit the hell out of them.

The world has to work the way the rules say it does because otherwise what's the point of the rules and how do you know how the world works?

[itsjustevil]

Kabru gives off serious D&D Player who swears they're not a metagamer but is lying to not only you but themselves vibes.

[justletmeon12]

Loving the NYC spin of Brennan's "Get the fuck outta there!"

Also, the camera work in that moment is amazing. Full props to the editors.

[confessionsofa-roleplayer]

Please don't meta game to make your muse know things they shouldn't about my muse. I put it in the narrative for context and to explain why my muse is being a smug villain but YOUR MUSE has no idea, couldn't know, doesn't know and so shouldn't be reacting to it. It's very boring if your muse always wins and it means that I won't give you context in the narrative in future and THEN we can see how good a detective your muse is (:

[oldschoolfrp]

An orc from The Fantasy Trip, Melee and Wizard (Jennell Jaquays, The Space Gamer 17, Metagaming, May-June 1978)

[citywolf]

Baghera had to discipline her chat, so I gotta emphasize again that metagaming is so stupid!! It makes it unfun for all the players involved, ruins actual suspense and challenges, and even if people think its helpful the streamers did not ask!! I feel bad that she has to keep doing this, or that any of the streamers do :(

[the-haunted-office]

Adding to the metagaming thing, I will say a couple caveats are crack threads and dashcoms - I'm okay with those being sorta metagamey, simply because they're not meant to be taken seriously. If we're both then okay with adopting them as canon, then that's fine.

And then information obtained via asks, if it's framed as a question directed at the muse, that's usually okay for your muse to then know.

Regular headcanons that are just shared, though? There's a popular PSA that was shared by a bunch of people in the RPC that I respectfully disagree with, and that's one that said something like "Here's a great idea to make your mutuals feel more seen - don't just read their headcanons, refer to them and use them in threads!". I disagree with this, because this can be a form of metagaming. If you share a headcanon that your muse loves raspberries, and it has never been said in character or shown in character, then there is no reason my muse should know that, so for my muse to just randomly bring that up in a thread would be metagaming. This idea is nice on the surface, but could be easily be turned into metagaming. So just, use it responsibly, I guess.

[forestshadow-wolf]

no okay because I sent this to someone - COD boys playing a COD style game??? Like- AGSHSNH

they are just boys

EXACTLY! You get the vision!

Ghost thinks it's ridiculous but soap finds it hilarious. He humors soap because he's a big soft softie

[cleric-posting]

The real necromancy was the blogs we made along the way.