A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Aldarc said:
I hope you don't presume here that my PCs don't.

It is inherently a fool's errand. You are correct that "it's easier to play true to character if what you know as a player matches what you know as a character," but this is striving after wind. There is an inherent disconnect and power imbalance between player and character knowledge that [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] overviews quite well. So for me this is really a discussion of "which metagaming poison do you pick?"

I've been doing it successfully for years. I just don't tell players what they don't know. I change up monster stats all the time. I once had a player complain that a certain monster could not do what it was doing. My answer "Are you going to trust some dusty old tomes you read in a library or are you going to trust your eyes?" You see only what I tell the players is reality.

Aldarc said:
But isn't that metagaming? Sure, but part of Fate's social contract is that a player creates the Troubles that the player wants their character to experience in the game. The player is getting rewarded for roleplaying the character they wanted. This "metagame" is important for Fate as a game. The mechanic engages the player to embrace and think as character. You can spend Fate points when you put yourself into opportunites that lean on your character aspects. You gain Fate points when you put yourselves into opportunities that lean on your character aspects.

You are arguing that metagaming can be fun. I'm saying good for you. I know it can be fun for many people. It would be insane on my part to deny something so obvious. I stated though that for me it's not or it lessens the game for me and I'd rather go for it all when I roleplay. Roleplaying is a far bigger commitment timewise than most other games. I want only the very best game I can get for me. And it's not because it would be absolutely impossible for me to play through a metagame style rpg. It just wouldn't satisfy me any more than a board game would and I'm unwilling to commit that much for board game level fun. And before anyone cries foul, I am not saying your approach IS board gaming. I am saying that the satisfaction I would get is equivalent to the satisfaction I'd get from a one off board game. Which is not zero by any measure but it's not even close to a good rpg campaign.

My way of dealing with the example of the outlaw is just rolling for it. In this town, what are the odds are famous outlaw will be recognized. Just roll for the various patrons. So yes, it is out of the players hands. Some don't like that. But it really is true that the character if he is hiding out doesn't want to be detected OR the character can let that out of the bag himself intentionally.

Aldarc said:
I do not doubt that this process can be immersion-breaking for some, but these transactions most often transpire in-character for most Fate games I have played or run. Not only has [MENTION=6698278]Emerikol[/MENTION] raised how this makes him feel like they are playing a chess piece, I had a similar conversation with [MENTION=4789]Lord Mhoram[/MENTION] about this awhile back too. But several of players in my D&D group have said that D&D makes them feel more like minis in a tactical war game than characters, and they find Fate's mechanics more conducive for in-character roleplaying. (Though I wager that most people who game don't care.) My point here being that people have different preferences for mechanics that engender the in-character roleplaying experiences they want, and different games can produce different results depending on those preferences.

On this there can be no doubt. I hope I have not in anyway given the impression that I don't agree that people have different tastes and different experiences.

The Crimson Binome · Jul 4, 2018

Emerikol said:
I don't agree Saelorn. D&D became popular to Gygax because it transcended what he could get out of wargaming. Sure day one he went in as a wargamer. He soon discovered far more and shared it with the world. That is why D&D exploded as a hobby.

That doesn't mean he discovered role-playing, though. From what I can tell, his discoveries were much more in line with discovering a new type of board game, to which he applied a storytelling layer. Consider the Tomb of Horrors, which he wrote in order to challenge his players, after they thought themselves to have mastered the game. Consider how he described a fighter chained to a rock, with a dragon breathing fire on him, and a successful save against breath weapon meaning that the fighter must have broken free and hidden behind the rock.

Nothing I've ever read about him has ever given me the impression that he cared about role-playing, as we understand the term. He would never have been caught up in the debate between what a player wants to do, and whether it makes sense for the character to do that. Meta-gaming, in the common usage of the term, was entirely expected at his table.

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

pemerton said:
This claim is controversial.

AD&D saving throws are metagame: Gygax says as much in his discussion of saving throws in his DMG.

AD&D hit points are metagame: see above.

Barbarian rage, in 3E, is as metagame as martial dailies in 4e.

Spell memorisation encourages highly metagame play, and the fact that there is a veneer of an in-fiction rationale doesn't change that.

I don't agree that saving throws or hit points are metagame. Saving throws represent your likelihood of avoiding some negative effect. That is in world truth. Hit points are how hard you are to kill. Again in world truth.

I agree Barbarian rage is metagame. No one ever played a Barbarian in my campaigns.

My PCs do try to pick the right spells but they only act on their character knowledge. So sure if they have been dealing with undead or see signs of undead they will prepare accordingly. Who wouldn't? They may even research before going to a dungeon. Maybe cast legend lore etc... They don't act on out of game knowledge because I as DM give them none.

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Neonchameleon said:
On reflection I think that the real difference here is between inclusionists and exclusionists. Inclusionists consider the important part to be that they are able to make decisions that are as similar as possible to their character, and if that leaves them able to make other decisions too then why worry? They just won't make those decisions because their character wouldn't. Exclusionist consider it vitally important that they be unable to make decisions their character can't and if that cuts off decisions their character could then just too bad.

I don't see any decisions getting cut off but essentially except for that I agree. It's very important to act as your character. It's also not necessary to incentivize any act that can still be freely taken. The PC can still do it.

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Umbran said:
I am trying to take your words as they are stated.

And I'm saying that's the unrealistic bit. Real people don't always even try to act optimally, much less achieve it.

For example - many real world people smoke tobacco. The number of people born in the US after 1970 who do not know that smoking is a really bad idea is vanishingly small. But about 17% of adults still smoke - they are not even trying to be optimal. People do all sort of suboptimal things, not just because they don't have all the information, not just because their logical abilities are limited, but because humans have conflicting drives. They don't want just one thing, to which an optimal route is available. Humans often want conflicting, mutually exclusive things, such that there's no optimal route to what they want. And sometimes, they act sub-optimally just because!

It is past midnight, and I have a job interview tomorrow, and I'm here discussing how to pretend to be elves! Not optimal! Insomnia keeps me from having access to anything even vaguely optimal at the moment. So, I just pick something, until something better comes along.

Umbran said:

I can't win for losing. In another discussion, I try to convince someone that death isn't the only source of suspense in a game, and they were having none of it. Here, I can't get someone to accept death as the clearest consequence for screwing up in D&D.

Make up your minds, people!

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We are different people Umbran and I actually posted in support of you on that point.

Umbran said:

Do they look up in books during a fight which sword does more damage? 'Cause that's something players do.

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Not my players during the game session. "Oh you are pulling out a treatise on swordsmanship in the middle of a battle? I guess that means you won't be doing anything for a few rounds while you do that research."

Umbran said:

With respect, nothing you can say can "trigger" me. You can't moderate boards like this as long as I have and be "triggered" by piddling things like differences of opinion on how to pretend to be elves.

And that word is wildly overused. Let's reserve it for people who have PTSD, like it was intended, please

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Well I admit text is harder to get a read on a person. You just seemed that way in the way you were responding. If not then no worries.

As for the word, no. It's entered the wider vernacular now. They even have classes on it and those classes aren't about PTSD. But for this conversation of course we've cleared the matter up.

Umbran said:

Okay, actually, if we do want to get this back to something you care about, it is really an important bit. We cannot advise you on how to achieve no-metagame when your conception of what constitutes metagame is different than ours. If there's one thing here we should *not* discard, it is this. Yoru conception of what constitutes metagame is *central* to the issue.

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I did a post above that hopefully will help clarify things. I'm just trying to avoid getting into a big argument over what I should like which will inevitably fail anyway and get on to given what I do like what would be the best approach for achieving it.

Jacob Lewis · Jul 4, 2018

I find this topic very interesting. Even though my experience with 5e was short, I recognize the mechanics pointed out. I have some thoughts.

Emerikol said:
1. The player chooses the number of hit dice to apply towards healing during a short rest. There seems to be no analog for the character. There also seems to be a resource being consumed but what is that resource? Potential healing?

Resilience? Spirit? Endurance? Maybe an abstract combination not unlike how we try and define what hit points represent. I think it's just utilizing existing resources and recycling it into another mechanic. Good designs are like that. But if you're looking for higher fidelity, think of it as stamina. Body, mind, and spirit can only recover so many times from continual beatings before it reaches a breaking point. Being able to fully rest used to be the only method of recovery before the short rest became a thing. The hit dice just acts as a built in counter, as opposed to introducing something else, like healing surges.

Emerikol said:
2. Action surge. Why is this limited (besides game balance) early on to once between short rests? Can a fighter really only once in the course of a battle choose an exact moment to make an extra effort and then not again? This again seems like the player is choosing something the fighter would know nothing about.

I can see a character used to battle knowing how to push beyond his limits in an unexpected surge of determination and grit. I just don't see why it's limited to just fighters since every D&D character class in every edition is built and bred for battle. But I guess the fighter needed something.

Emerikol said:
3. Second Wind. A player decides to give his character a surge of energy. The character just gets it apparently unexpectedly. It happens in the fast and furious furer of combat so it's not even something the character could think about much.

Another surge of resolve and tenacity? I think I'm seeing a pattern...

Emerikol said:
4. Inspiration. Since this part of the game is pretty optional (and my guess is anyone close to my thinking ignores it anyway), it's not that big a deal.

This is a conundrum. Since Inspiration is largely a metagaming mechanic--DMs often use this as a reward for the player, not the character--it's going to feel metagamey. There's no way around it. How about some XP instead?

Good topic! Thanks for that.

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Aldarc said:
I hope you don't presume here that my PCs don't.

No. I was responding in my mind to the idea that my style would lack those things and not that your style does.

We have a very rich downtime game almost always in my campaigns. I do like that PF2e is really making it part of the official game. I find I end up writing the rules anyway because my groups all want them. They end up running businesses, building all sorts of structures, influencing the various rulers of nations, etc... So while my adventures very much are about survival and optimal play, there exists all the other traditional stuff around it.

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Saelorn said:
That doesn't mean he discovered role-playing, though. From what I can tell, his discoveries were much more in line with discovering a new type of board game, to which he applied a storytelling layer. Consider the Tomb of Horrors, which he wrote in order to challenge his players, after they thought themselves to have mastered the game. Consider how he described a fighter chained to a rock, with a dragon breathing fire on him, and a successful save against breath weapon meaning that the fighter must have broken free and hidden behind the rock.

Nothing I've ever read about him has ever given me the impression that he cared about role-playing, as we understand the term. He would never have been caught up in the debate between what a player wants to do, and whether it makes sense for the character to do that. Meta-gaming, in the common usage of the term, was entirely expected at his table.

Again I disagree. I think a lot of "modern" roleplaying concepts would be foreign to him yes. But if you read the DMG 1e, you will see advice on handling player knowledge vs character knowledge. That tells me he is aware of the issue. I still consider the 1e DMG to be a great book on how to run a campaign successfully (at least in my preferred style).

Emerikol · Jul 4, 2018

Jacob Lewis said:
I find this topic very interesting. Even though my experience with 5e was short, I recognize the mechanics pointed out. I have some thoughts.

If it can stay civil, it can be interesting. Not sure my desired outcome though will be achieved.

Jacob Lewis said:
Resilience? Spirit? Endurance? Maybe an abstract combination not unlike how we try and define what hit points represent. I think it's just utilizing existing resources and recycling it into another mechanic. Good designs are like that. But if you're looking for higher fidelity, think of it as stamina. Body, mind, and spirit can only recover so many times from continual beatings before it reaches a breaking point. Being able to fully rest used to be the only method of recovery before the short rest became a thing. The hit dice just acts as a built in counter, as opposed to introducing something else, like healing surges.

But how and why do I choose to use HD as a player? It seems more logical to me to say you keep using HD until you are healed up or run out. In fact, I'd just take the average of all the HD, add the number to a pool and draw off that pool until it's gone. The decision making going on here to use or not use a HD is not character decision making.

Jacob Lewis said:
I can see a character used to battle knowing how to push beyond his limits in an unexpected surge of determination and grit. I just don't see why it's limited to just fighters since every D&D character class in every edition is built and bred for battle. But I guess the fighter needed something.

Another surge of resolve and tenacity? I think I'm seeing a pattern...

This has been a big debate for a long time and I think most of the people who believe in these "surges" are wrong. It could be a whole different thread though and I'm not sure I want to even go to that thread. All that is going to be said on the matter has been said. You either believe it or don't. I don't. And it's not necessary for anyone to get on here and shout that I'm wrong. We can just agree to disagree. And Jacob, that last sentence was not at you but the whole thread.

Jacob Lewis said:
This is a conundrum. Since Inspiration is largely a metagaming mechanic--DMs often use this as a reward for the player, not the character--it's going to feel metagamey. There's no way around it. How about some XP instead?

Good topic! Thanks for that.

Inspiration is a great way to provide metagaming to those that want it though. It is so easy to remove so it doesn't become a problem for those not wanting it. It is there and well defined for those that do. That is a big win in the design space. So I will say I like inspiration in D&D 5e but I would never allow it's use in one of my games.

Neonchameleon · Jul 4, 2018

Emerikol said:
On the metagame and how I view it. Hopefully this will help us to dispense with the debate about what I think it is.

Indeed. It just convinces me that we have an extremely different understanding of the world - and I think yours appears to derive more from historic Dungeons & Dragons rules rather than from the real world.

1. There was little or no metagame in D&D core books from 3e back.

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has already pointed out a few that are metagame and explicitly pointed out as such by Gygax.

2. No. I cannot enjoy a game if anyone in the group is playing using metagame constructs.

Why do you care how other people have fun if it doesn't directly impact yours? Why do you want to force their understanding of the world to match yours like this?

Any martial daily is unquestionably so for me. So saving any sort of potential combat attack energy resource across combats is absolutely not something I believe happens.

I consider this pair of sentences to be far more telling than you intended it to be.

I believe that inside of an individual combat that the opportunity to deliver an extra big blow is almost never the character's decision alone.

Well, obviously. If it was the character's decision alone then we wouldn't bother rolling attack rolls. We'd just say it hit.

But if you watch any combat sport from boxing to MMA to professional wrestling (and yes I know wrestling is fake) you'll find that the pace of the fight varies. You'll find that there are times when the fighters are probing each other. You'll find there are times when they are times when they are taking advantage of mistakes. And you'll find there are times when they either pick up the pace, pull tricks, or go in with extra force to try to force an opening.

By not having some sort of mechanics this way you're denying me the opportunities to do any of these except go in in neutral, and wait to find a mistake to take advantage of.

As for saving energy across combat, if you listen to marathon runners it takes them about a day per mile to recover. If you think exerting yourself hard (because you are fighting for your life and still trying to raise the tempo) is something you can do arbitrarily often and it just takes a few minutes of rest to recover from every single time I don't know what to tell you.

It happens because the enemy lets down his guard or is overwhelmed already with lesser attacks, etc.. So critical hits on a 20 are because you rolled a good attack and the defender had a bad day defending.

And this is of course entirely independent of exerting yourself harder, raising the pace of the fight to try to force an opening and either end it faster or change the way it is going.

The planets aligned. So I could see special attacks and maneuvers activated by certain die rolls. I don't believe it can be delivered with certainty.

Once again if you could automatically succeed there would be no reason for the to hit roll.

Emerikol said:
I don't agree that saving throws or hit points are metagame. Saving throws represent your likelihood of avoiding some negative effect. That is in world truth. Hit points are how hard you are to kill. Again in world truth.

Hit point loss on the other hand represents absolutely nothing at all. Someone is as physically capable of everything except taking damage at 1hp as they are at full hp. If it were anything to do with injury of any sort this would not be the case. So unless hit points are magical force fields then hit point mechanics are pure, raw metagame.

Emerikol said:
I don't see any decisions getting cut off but essentially except for that I agree. It's very important to act as your character. It's also not necessary to incentivize any act that can still be freely taken. The PC can still do it.

Yes of course I can raise the tempo or force of a fight, trying to force openings rather than exchanging blows and probing. And it absolutely feels right when I want to do this that it should have no mechanical impact at all.

Without the ability to try to control the pace of a fight and mechanics that back me up on this as mechanics are a big part of my standard interface with the game world I find it literally impossible to immerse in the role of fighter who is anything other than the sort of fighter that is less intelligent than his warhorse (and played more normally like a stereotypical barbarian). Fighting is what fighters are meant to be good at - and that goes beyond just swinging a sword with precision and accuracy.