A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

Detect Magic should be renamed Detect Everything

Maxperson said:

That's not true. In D&D a rock is just a rock, but an earth elemental is magical. A tree is just a tree, but a treant is magical. A person is just a normal mundane person, but a wizard uses magic. And so on. There's lots of magic in the D&D world, but the world itself is not magical as a whole. This holds true even with the other planes. If your PC went to Hell and encountered a river of lava, that lava would be mundane lava, not magical lava.

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Ah, but it is true. The world of D&D presumes that said world is inherently magical. Some things may have more magic than others, but that does not mean that everything is mundane and devoid of magic by our sensibilities. It is a world influenced by other planes of existence and you can use portals in the world to traverse them. The stars may have a bearing on the fate of mortals. The world may follow a magical destiny foretold from before. Magic is an inherent part of the physics of the world. For us it is metaphyics, but for D&D characters, it is physics. Magical energy infuses the entirety of D&D's world. A treant is just as natural in D&D as a tree. Bat fur is not just mundane fur off a bat; it has magical properties that can be used for spells. A wizard may use and manipulate magic, but a mundane person is no more removed from the magical physics of the world than the wizard is. Just because you are not splitting the atom does not mean that you aren't composed of atoms, so to speak.

Clearly! You've added magic to everything, where the game itself doesn't have it.

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The game already added magic to everything; we are only debating how much.

Sadras said:

Detect Magic should be renamed Detect Everything

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I would say that Detect Magic is meant to detect comparatively sizable quantities or concentrations of magic that are worthy of note. Think of magic like radiation and Detect Magic as a geiger counter. Human beings are not devoid of radiation. Radioactive processes happen naturally within the human body all the time but it only becomes an issue when it exceeds certain thresholds of safety. So geiger counters are meant to detect and measure if radiation, or certain forms thereof, exceed those thresholds. And the way that Detect Magic works in 5e is that the spell creates a faint, visible aura on creatures or objects. I would say that it's not a matter of detecting whether you are magical or not, but how much of a glow you produce.

Aldarc said:

Ah, but it is true. The world of D&D presumes that said world is inherently magical. Some things may have more magic than others, but that does not mean that everything is mundane and devoid of magic by our sensibilities. It is a world influenced by other planes of existence and you can use portals in the world to traverse them. The stars may have a bearing on the fate of mortals. The world may follow a magical destiny foretold from before. Magic is an inherent part of the physics of the world. For us it is metaphyics, but for D&D characters, it is physics. Magical energy infuses the entirety of D&D's world. A treant is just as natural in D&D as a tree. Bat fur is not just mundane fur off a bat; it has magical properties that can be used for spells. A wizard may use and manipulate magic, but a mundane person is no more removed from the magical physics of the world than the wizard is. Just because you are not splitting the atom does not mean that you aren't composed of atoms, so to speak.

The game already added magic to everything; we are only debating how much.

I would say that Detect Magic is meant to detect comparatively sizable quantities or concentrations of magic that are worthy of note. Think of magic like radiation and Detect Magic as a geiger counter. Human beings are not devoid of radiation. Radioactive processes happen naturally within the human body all the time but it only becomes an issue when it exceeds certain thresholds of safety. So geiger counters are meant to detect and measure if radiation, or certain forms thereof, exceed those thresholds. And the way that Detect Magic works in 5e is that the spell creates a faint, visible aura on creatures or objects. I would say that it's not a matter of detecting whether you are magical or not, but how much of a glow you produce.

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That's a neat setting concept, but it's by no means baseline. D&D has as much or as little magic as needed by whichever setting you're using.

Arilyn said:

And is this having a mechanical effect? While experiencing the searing pain of a fireball are the characters getting any disadvantages? After the sword slices through flesh, is there bleeding, which will continue to weaken the character until treated? Probably not, because fights in DnD have to be meta because of the sheer number of them. It's abstracted out of necessity. And once again, not a problem, but certainly meta. The loss of hp mean very little until they start creeping toward 0, therefore, I'm not in my character's shoes, experiencing the world through her eyes. FATE is criticized for its meta mechanics, but having a fate point slide my way is just as meta, to me, as those vanishing hp, from weapon blows, fire, acid, exploding traps, that don't actually have consequences until I'm dying.

But then all rpgs have meta elements. They don't bother me, or break my immersion.

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Getting a Fate Point is far less meta for me. Its directly connected with the Fiction AND the Mechanics, the very antithesis of "meta". Similarly, Fate's system of consequences (or conditions) is much more reflective of the fiction than HP even have the possibility of being. Spending a Fate point might be slightly more "meta", but when you consider what you are doing when you spend it, once again we find that (usually) spending a Fate point is directly tied to the fiction and mechanics. Spend a Fate point to invoke an aspect and you are simply pointing out or utilizing some aspect of the fiction in play (whether the aspect is yours or otherwise.) A re-roll might be the only time that spending a Fate point is "meta", but those don't come up nearly as much, IME.

Once again, the idea of HP being somehow non-meta is simply a matter of familiarity, and not reflective of their actual nature.

Embrace the meta, love the meta, become one with the meta.

Flexor the Mighty! said:

Embrace the meta, love the meta, become one with the meta.

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Wait....are we talking about Red vs Blue now?

chaochou said:

You need to know your character history to figure it out? Sorry, bud, your character got amnesia. Makes no odds to accurately playing their health in all the systems above. But how many D&D hit points do you have now? How do you feel right now? Or does your amnesiac character forget their hitpoints?

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Considering hit points are a function of level, and level is a function of lived experience, I could certainly see an argument for amnesia depleting your hit points in a D&D setting.

Aldarc said:

That is how Stress works in Fate too. Consequences can put more "meat" on the character, but Stress boxes are functionally as you describe here.

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I would say this is correct because Stress boxes are intentionally and openly a meta-game pacing mechanic (within a scene), just like HP. If a character has persistent/lasting issues (some folks nowadays call them "sticky"), then those translate into Consequences (or Conditions).

I would also point out that the number of Stress boxes, and even number, value, types and spectra of Stress, Conditions, and Consequences is one way that different incarnations of Fate really play with how this kind of thing works in different genres. A Fate game could easily be tweaked from default to gritty and deadly and then to "Disney Damage" just by fiddling with these knobs a bit.

Heck, you could recreate a D&D-style system in Fate. You have a great pile of Stress boxes, and one (possibly three) Condition box(es) called "Dying".


Just to bring up an Old-school Game that gets less credit for this than it deserves (probably because the rest of the game was fairly limited) Boot Hill had an interesting combination system. You rolled percentile dice (and the table varied with gun and other factors) and got both a wound location, and a wound severity. The location and severity could both have impact on play separately. Additionally, each level of severity came with a number of HP, which acted as a separate "doom clock" that had its own impact on play.

On a distinct track from the meta/not argument about HP. I must say that the supposedly wondrous saving of bookkeeping that HP are reputed to have simply is mythical. IME, the bigger and more tedious numbers often slow things down more than the additional flexibility of many of the systems mentioned in this thread. The Boot Hill system, for example, sounds like a nightmare. However, in play, it didn't seem to be much worse than straight HP. (The biggest bookkeeping problem, AFAICT, is keeping track of whose HP/health are whose, so systems that can group minions and the like seem to have massive at-table gains vs. straight HP.

5ekyu said:

more and more i come to the conclusion that the meaning of metagame is "whatever i need it to be to fusss about something i dislike."

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Exactly. You can take literally any mechanic and make arguments about how it is or is not meta, as you like. That's all Emerikol is doing. He has preferences...logically consistent preferences, I will grant...for the kinds of mechanics he likes, which is cool (if a bit quixotic, given his specific flavor of zealotry). The rest is just an attempt to persuade others, despite protestations to the contrary, that he's "right". Whatever that means.

This discussion is an amusing diversion in between actual game sessions, but it's pointless. Like the vast, overwhelming majority of gamers, I'm perfectly happy to blend roleplaying, powergaming, and metagaming in equal measure. I just want to be immersed in a good story while killing monsters and taking their stuff. I don't need anybody at the table to be "in character" for that to happen.

Elfcrusher said:

Exactly. You can take literally any mechanic and make arguments about how it is or is not meta, as you like. That's all Emerikol is doing. He has preferences...logically consistent preferences, I will grant...for the kinds of mechanics he likes, which is cool (if a bit quixotic, given his specific flavor of zealotry). The rest is just an attempt to persuade others, despite protestations to the contrary, that he's "right". Whatever that means.

This discussion is an amusing diversion in between actual game sessions, but it's pointless. Like the vast, overwhelming majority of gamers, I'm perfectly happy to blend roleplaying, powergaming, and metagaming in equal measure. I just want to be immersed in a good story while killing monsters and taking their stuff. I don't need anybody at the table to be "in character" for that to happen.

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"Like the vast, overwhelming majority of gamers, I'm perfectly happy to blend roleplaying, powergaming, and metagaming in equal measure. "

And steaks... for me definitely add steaks.