What are the biggest RPG crimes?

[Gradine]

The question is, "Is an RPG like a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text"? I would strongly say that it is not. The key distinction is that all of those other things are just stories, while an RPG is supposed to represent a believable place. There is no "plot" in an RPG; there's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

This is fine as far as personal preference goes. It is not, however, a universal rule. In all honesty, I could think of very few ways that would more quickly turn me off to RPGs as a whole if it were.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This is fine as far as personal preference goes. It is not, however, a universal rule. In all honesty, I could think of very few ways that would more quickly turn me off to RPGs as a whole if it were.

Well, this is a thread about personal opinions, and my opinion is that any GM who treats the game world as a story rather than a believable world is committing a terrible crime against RPGs. It's fine that you disagree, but it does mean that we would not be able to play at the same table.

 

[Celebrim]

The question is, "Is an RPG like a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text"? I would strongly say that it is not.

I would very strongly say that it is.

The key distinction is that all of those other things are just stories, while an RPG is supposed to represent a believable place.

Well, for certain values of 'believable'... maybe... we could be playing 'Toon', 'Paranoia', or even 'Star Wars', none of which are particularly believable. But more to the point, an RPG is not supposed to represent a believable place. A "believable place" in and of itself is not an RPG. An RPG is not a setting. The RPG is what transpires in the setting, and that is a story.

There is no "plot" in an RPG; there's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

There is no distinction between these two things. What happens is the plot. I mean "Infinite Jest" and "Ulysses" are just "a bunch of stuff that happens". The transcription of the things that happened is the plot of an RPG.

It's the difference not between "plot" and "a bunch of stuff that happens", but rather between a script and a transcript that is the real meaningful distinction. The difference between an RPG and most movies, novels, dramas, and other fictional text is that it is improvisational. That is to say, there is no script of the story, there is only a transcript of the story. RPGs are related in some ways to 'Theatre Games' like 'Whose Line is It Anyway?', where a director provides a setting for a conflict, and then leaves it to the actors to play out the scene in an improvisational matter. There is more to it than that, but there is that relationship. But a drama or even a movie may be improvisational. It is not unique to the medium of RPGs that they involve improvisational story telling. The Drill Sergeant introduction scene in 'Full Metal Jacket' and the scene where the characters in 'The Breakfast Club' explain why they have detention were done through improvisational story telling without a script. Yet, a story is produced and the transcript of the two scenes helps develop the plot.

Moreover, it is rare for an RPG to be fully improvisational. Quite often an enormous amount of mythic creation is undertaken by the GM to prepare for the game, so that the story will smoothly flow from scene to scene without the GM being stuck for interesting ideas (to say nothing of the fact that RPGs, unlike theater games or even storytelling games, have a close relationship to wargames with all the scenario setup that implies).

In short, RPGs have a plot. Certainly the adventure path I started last night has a plot and various story points it intends to check off, and it is without a doubt an RPG. If your definition of an RPG doesn't include D&D or Pathfinder, chances are your definition is the thing that is wrong, not the most iconic RPG of all time.

 

[Celebrim]

I'm not the only one to bring up meta-gaming as an RPG crime...

I admit that at first glance, most people think I have a somewhat heterodox view of metagaming. I know it is popular to blame metagaming for everything, just as once upon a time it was popular to attribute to 'realism' the solution to everything. But I believe both are based on fundamental misunderstandings.

and you didn't object when I mentioned it originally.

I didn't object originally because your first statement was not as absolute as your later statements. I don't object to the idea that metagaming can be a crime. I object to the idea that it is universally objectively bad and further any good role-player should hate metagaming.

Before we get into why, let me note our agreement:

This is one definition that I know is well-accepted. When role-playing, meta-gaming is the act of having a character act on information that they don't (or can't) know.

Good. This definition accords well with the one I offered, so we are on the same page. Now, I'm going to hold you to that statement.

First proposition:

1) All players and all DMs always and with every action metagame all the time with every action that they take within an RPG. There is no action that you can take in an RPG that is not metagaming.

This follows directly from the definition that you just gave. Every player at all times knows things that his character does not know, including the fact that it is a game. It is impossible to act in a way that you disregard the information you as a player know that the character does not know. Even if you consciously note to yourself the things you know that you know that your character doesn't know, and try to disregard those things completely, you are still then acting on the knowledge of the things you know that your player doesn't know. Because you know these things, you can never unknow them. Your decision making process is forever tainted by this knowledge, and can never be pure and free from metagame knowledge. Although you can try very hard to be introspective and ask yourself, "What would my character do in this situation?", even then you are asking yourself that and engaging in introspection, and you are not yourself in the game world and cannot possibly answer the question except as influenced by all the other stuff that you know.

So when we talk about metagaming being a crime, we are perforce, speaking of a very narrow range of metagaming activity, since the whole of playing an RPG where you make choice for your character is metagaming activity. It can't possibly be the case that metagaming is bad, unless we also agree that playing an RPG is bad.

Which brings us to our second postulate:

2) Metagaming is actually good and necessary to playing an RPG.

Let's suppose that we were obsessed with the idea of playing a pure simulation of an imagined world, free from any metagaming. We could begin to create procedures of play that would ensure that we didn't act based on metagame knowledge. For example, faced with a situation where we know the character is facing a troll, but we also realize that deliberately not using fire in this situation is also metagaming, since absence our knowledge that this is a troll and is vulnerable to fire, either we might have stumbled on the idea of using fire anyway or the character might have heard in his long life within the setting stories of trolls and their vulnerability to fire (and many other traits). So we in this situation decide to flip a coin, in order that we can guarantee our decision is free from bias and we cannot be accused of the 'evils' of metagaming.

However, by the first proposition all decision points are identical to the decision point of whether to hit the troll with the torch. Everything is tainted by our out of character knowledge, and so every decision must be resolved by a coin flip of some sort. The result of our obsession is that the game will cease to be an RPG. Indeed, it will cease to be a game at all. What we will instead have created is a model. We can set it running, but once it is running, to maintain the purity of the simulation we - being outside the model and so influenced by our knowledge that the characters in the model couldn't have - can't in fact touch it. We won't make decisions at all.

3) When the DM creates a setting or scenario, he acts on knowledge no character within the scenario or setting could have - including the fact that it is a game. However, this is not (in and of itself) metagaming.

Why? Because you said yourself that metagaming involves acting on behalf of a character and a DM creating a castle or a city or a jungle isn't acting on behalf of a character. No NPCs wishes are consulted in that creative process. While he may at times after things have begun ask, "What might this NPC do in this situation based on what the NPC knows?", there is no way that he can ask questions like, "What might this setting be like based only on the information within the setting?" The setting can't be defined in terms of itself - it's always defined in external terms, by making reference to the one setting we have, reality. Even when it differs to reality, that's still referencing reality as a baseline.

Now, for the record, I consider your definition slightly too narrow. There are things you can do in a setting that are metagaming, and I mentioned a few (such as adjusting the nature of your setting to counter the abilities of the players) but merely establishing a setting is not metagaming. And, even if it was, it wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

It can include knowing that trolls are weak to fire (if the character wouldn't otherwise know that), and it can include making an assumption that a puzzle is solvable because the GM presented it to you.

So let's get to this now. I put it to you that you can't unknow that the character knows that trolls are weak to fire, and you can't but metagame about that. You can't unknow that and ever again actually simulate the not knowing that. At best you can do is try to pretend for a while you don't know that, and make some determination of how quickly your character might figure that out, but that entire decision making process will always be based on your out of game knowledge.

Secondly, the assumption that a puzzle is solvable based on the fact your DM presented it to you is metagaming, but it's a really lousy assumption. This is an example not only of metagaming, but metagaming based on knowledge that is likely wrong. The fact that a player is acting on out of game knowledge that is actually wrong is really the only reason I tell my players not to metagame. It's not that I think that there is any wrongness in a player metagaming, it's just that I think players are usually pretty terrible at doing it and further that if you get in the habit of relying on out of game knowledge, you'll tend to ignore end game clues. I don't tell my players not to metagame because I think it's a crime to do so - it's all metagaming. I tell them that because I think that players use it as a weak crutch.

In point of fact, I believe all metagaming is the DMs fault and reflects badly on the DM. A DM should never be upset with his players for metagaming, and never tell his players, "Don't do that. That's metagaming." It took me maybe 15 years to realize that, but telling your players not to metagame is proof of your own bad DMing and your own reliance on crutches. If the players are metagaming and you are upset about it, one or more of the following is true:

a) You became invested in some sort of 'gotcha' encounter, which is adversarial DMing.
b) You are trying to play the player's character, which is a violation of the baseline social contract of an RPG.
c) You did a bad job in your role of secret keeper, and let slip a secret at the wrong time, and you are doing an equally bad job of improvising. This suggests you need to work on your skills, you were bragging to the players, you were impatient, you didn't study enough before the session, or you just otherwise made a noob mistake. Now that the secret is out of the bag, it's ridiculous to act like the players can ignore the secret.

So the question is, why did this specific NPC make all of the necessary decisions that led them to become the preeminent villain of the setting?

Why not?

If the answer is "to provide a compelling foe for the PC" then that's meta-gaming.

Sure, although as I noted above, not by your definition. But if that is metagaming, so is putting 5 Bugbears in the room instead of 50 or 500, or not chasing the players down with an ancient red dragon, or deciding that the country you will start on is loosely based on medieval Scotland, or deciding to play a pirate game because you know that your players are beer and pretzels casual gamers that like to blow steam, not super heavy thespian types wanting a deep story line. The entire setting is crafted by the DM based on knowledge he has from outside of the setting. He's only requirement is that he make the setting rich, believable, and fun. And there is nothing inherently unfun or unbelievable about the protagonist, uber-talented scion of destiny that he is, has an older brother he is estranged from that is just as talented as he is, but who has chosen a different path in life.

While it's possible to have their motivations be entirely in-character, and for that to be established before the GM ever finds out who the PC will be, it is nevertheless highly improbable.

So what? An average RPG session involves dozens of highly improbable things before breakfast. As I established earlier, we don't pick a random character from the population of the world for the player to play. We pick someone to whom highly improbable and unusual things are not only likely to occur, they are absolutely guaranteed to occur. If we eschewed improbability, we'd be back to picking a character solely by dice rolls out of a model, and we'd likely end up with a subsistence farmer living a hard scrabble mean existence and never doing anything more glorious than managing to survive and maybe care for a family. And while that's a valuable thing and we might could tell a great story about it, that's not the sort of improbable character living an improbable life that we choose to focus on.

There are millions of people that could potentially rise to power in opposition of the Big Bad, and the likelihood of them being related is insignificant...

Sure. But there are also millions of people that the player could play other than the younger idealistic brother of the Big Bad, and the vast majority of people we could have chosen for the player to play are 'insignificant'. Fortunately, we aren't required to choose a random insignificant being to be central to the casting of our story.

(Note that you can raise the probability of such events significantly, if you let the players play nobility. If you're playing the Prince of England, then the likelihood that the mysterious villain is somehow related to you is actually pretty good.)

I don't really see how this follows. Regardless of whether we are playing the 'Prince of England', we aren't playing a nobody unless the player specifically tells me that what he wants for the character is to be a nobody that pulls himself up by his bootstraps.

At least according to the writers I follow on Quora, they usually develop the outline of a story before they figure out the specifics.

I suspect that is a formula for extreme writer's block.

That's not the case, for characters in an RPG. Their bottom line is not written yet.

Heck, it's not even the case for the characters in a novel. Plenty of authors will tell you they had no idea what the character would do until they happened. Sometimes, they are just as surprised as the reader by the turn of events.

The choices they make - the choices that we imagine them to make, while we pretend to be them - actually matter, because their world is actually controlled by internal causality rather than plot contrivance.

Sure. But that has nothing to do with metagaming. And again I insist, that if you write a novel which is obviously controlled by plot contrivance rather than internal causality, it's going to be a bad novel. The trick is to make your plot contrivances, whether in a novel or an RPG, seem not to be contrived. However, they are always contrived to one degree or another. If the appearance of your evil brother seems too contrived, that's a problem with the GMs artistry. It's not however metagaming.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Well, for certain values of 'believable'... maybe... we could be playing 'Toon', 'Paranoia', or even 'Star Wars', none of which are particularly believable. But more to the point, an RPG is not supposed to represent a believable place. A "believable place" in and of itself is not an RPG. An RPG is not a setting. The RPG is what transpires in the setting, and that is a story.

For certain definitions of "story", perhaps. If the session transcript is just a bunch of people messing around in town, never getting into any conflict or performing any uncertain actions, then that could very well be a session of an RPG; but many critics would hesitate to call it a story, or even a story fragment. It lacks purposefulness. Everything in a novel or movie happens in order to drive the plot. Everything in an RPG happens because it happens. It's like the difference between The Sims and Max Payne. You could say that The Sims doesn't have a story, or you could say that it does; but saying that it has a story would make it more difficult to talk about the relevant differences between those two games.

Maybe it's a matter of semantics, but it's extremely relevant to the worst habits of certain GMs, which is that they treat the world like a story rather than like a world. If we can't agree on what to call that, then that's unfortunate, but failure to label does not resolve the underlying problem.

In short, RPGs have a plot. Certainly the adventure path I started last night has a plot and various story points it intends to check off, and it is without a doubt an RPG. If your definition of an RPG doesn't include D&D or Pathfinder, chances are your definition is the thing that is wrong, not the most iconic RPG of all time.

Don't conflate D&D or Pathfinder with their adventure paths. Although I wouldn't necessarily classify it as an RPG crime, using an adventure path is a huge red flag that the GM may not be up to the task of running a game without enforcing their own preferred outcomes, since straying too far from the assumptions of the book would make it unusable.

 

[Celebrim]

For certain definitions of "story", perhaps.

Well, yes. But, I think it's not stretching the term to any breaking point to say that the transcript of an RPG is a story, or to say that one possible goal of playing an RPG is to produce a worthwhile story. After all, I think if you will reflect, you'll recall that you have over the years produced many a memorable story while playing an RPG, and while hanging out with friends from time to time you'll even recount those stories, much as veterans or long acquaintances will recount times had together. Except, these times will be entirely works of fiction. So yes, I think that RPG play counts as story making, and that the RPG counts as a narrative medium.

If the session transcript is just a bunch of people messing around in town, never getting into any conflict or performing any uncertain actions, then that could very well be a session of an RPG; but many critics would hesitate to call it a story, or even a story fragment.

I've never had much respect for critics. I think you might say that if the story wasn't worth recounting, that it probably wasn't a very good story. But then, it seems like to me that "just a bunch of people messing around in town" doing things that weren't worth recounting, wouldn't strike many players as a good RPG for very long. Certainly, if this continued for more than a single session, I'd start to question whether we ought to call this an adventure much less a campaign. Technically it might be one, but unless we are manufacturing stories worth recounting at a more rapid rate than that, I'll have a similar experience that I might have reading a tedious novel were nothing seems to happen.

Everything in a novel or movie happens in order to drive the plot.

Now you are listening to the critics again. It's more accurate I think to say that it is widely agreed that when writing a novel or a screen play, that everything should advance the story. However, this rule is regularly broken and sometimes there is even a good reason for it.

What you are talking about is not whether something has a story, or whether it is a novel, but the sort of artistry involved in telling a story in the medium of a novel. It's generally good artistry to tell a tight story, where everything in someway is necessary to the story, and to do nothing that isn't necessary to the story.

What I'd say is that there is an artistry to telling a story in an RPG, and that while it had some things in common with the artistry of a novel, the two mediums were different enough (ensemble, improvisational, nondeterministic, etc.) that if you tried to apply the artistry of a novel to an RPG (or visa versa) you probably wouldn't tell a great story.

Maybe it's a matter of semantics, but it's extremely relevant to the worst habits of certain GMs, which is that they treat the world like a story rather than like a world. If we can't agree on what to call that, then that's unfortunate, but failure to label does not resolve the underlying problem.

I agree that on many levels we are just having a semantic argument. We I think agree quite strongly regarding the underlying problem. But we have a difference of opinion over the words we should use to describe that problem. It may seem pedantic on my part to hold to such fine distinctions of language, but I do it because I don't think we can describe the cure to the problem until we very precisely describe the problem itself. To say that the problem is that RPGs shouldn't (or don't) have a story is not only objectively false, but it is highly misleading. It leads to people inventing cures that aren't actually cures and condemning practices that aren't actually problems.

So I think what you are getting at is that a DM should not prepare for a game using the same techniques that they would prepare to make a movie, or to write a novel. There is a little bit of overlap here and there, but if you misapply the techniques of movie making or novel writing to a medium that is very different than cinema or books, you're going to not make a very good RPG. RPGs have and require an artistry all of their own.

Don't conflate D&D or Pathfinder with their adventure paths. Although I wouldn't necessarily classify it as an RPG crime, using an adventure path is a huge red flag that the GM may not be up to the task of running a game without enforcing their own preferred outcomes, since straying too far from the assumptions of the book would make it unusable.

I don't actually agree with any of that. I think there is an underlying idea somewhere down in that I could agree with, but I will just repeat myself in saying that there is nothing objectively better about a well run sandbox than there is about a well run adventure path. That's a chocolate versus vanilla sort of argument, that comes down to subjective preference. However, just because your preferences for one or the other type of narrative might be subjective, doesn't mean I concede that there aren't objectively better ways to run in or participate in a game.

 

[Hussar]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] - Good luck with that conversation bud. Keep it up a couple more posts and [MENTION=6703052]SA[/MENTION]elorn will whack you on his ignore list. Come and join the club. [MENTION=6703052]SA[/MENTION]elorn has been banging this particular drum for YEARS without varying a beat, regardless of how reasonable an argument you make. I would seriously suggest just backing away slowly.

List of Player Crimes:

• Not bothering to inform the group when going to be late or absent. Good grief, there is no excuse for this.
• Completely ignoring the rest of the table. Pretty much about anything you want to talk about.
• Rules lawyering without actually learning the rules first.
• Taking ridiculous amounts of time to do simple tasks and forcing the rest of the group to wait. I once had a player whose turns took more time than the entire table combined.
• Creating characters deliberately counter to the DM's intended game.

List of DM Crimes:

• Allowing ego to drive table decisions.
• Using "aha gotcha" moments as a substitute for challenge.
• Playing favorites.
• Playing favorites. (Yeah, so bad it gets put in twice)
• Presuming that your setting is more important than the players.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

3) When the DM creates a setting or scenario, he acts on knowledge no character within the scenario or setting could have - including the fact that it is a game. However, this is not (in and of itself) metagaming.

Why? Because you said yourself that metagaming involves acting on behalf of a character and a DM creating a castle or a city or a jungle isn't acting on behalf of a character.

The world is a character. Every NPC who ever existed is a character. Is the vine going to grow in such a way as to provide a conveniently-plausible travel path for characters that invested in certain skills? It's not allowed to take their relative athletic capabilities into account, when deciding how to grow. The GM should remain impartial in their determination of this. Is the castle architect going to build a wall in this way, or that way? Their decision must be based on information that they have access to, and not based on whether the PCs (specifically) are likely to be passing through later on.

So let's get to this now. I put it to you that you can't unknow that the character knows that trolls are weak to fire, and you can't but metagame about that. You can't unknow that and ever again actually simulate the not knowing that.

Meta-gaming is having your character act on knowledge that they don't have, and we are operating under the assumption that they don't already know trolls are weak to fire. Great. If you have them attack with fire because trolls are weak to it, even though they don't know that yet, then that's meta-gaming and bad.

What you're wrong about is that we can't simulate what we would do if we lacked that knowledge. We can, and flipping a coin is as good a method as any other. If the character attacks with fire because you flipped Heads rather than Tails, then that's just acting pseudo-randomly, which is not based on information that they don't have - it's random, not based on any information at all.

And in any case, committing a crime really requires some amount of deliberate intent. I'm not going to hold it against someone for trying to stay honest, whether or not the task is hopeless.

So what? An average RPG session involves dozens of highly improbable things before breakfast.

In your games, perhaps, but I call that poor GMing. By my standards, improbable events should occur during the setup and world-building. If you want something unlikely to happen, then it's already happened, and we're playing out the events after that point.

Sure. But there are also millions of people that the player could play other than the younger idealistic brother of the Big Bad, and the vast majority of people we could have chosen for the player to play are 'insignificant'. Fortunately, we aren't required to choose a random insignificant being to be central to the casting of our story.

There's a central conceit to the game, which is that the PCs will have agency within their world. And that conceit disqualifies the vast majority of random subsistence farmers, who will never be in a position to change much of anything. If you want to expand your conceit, to say that everyone secretly grew up in an orphanage together and then got amnesia from using magic, then that's... probably something to consult your players about, but it's fine if that's the conceit.

What I object to, is the mysterious dark villain not having their identity determined beforehand, such that you only decide he's actually Bob Smith after the player of the PC Will Smith takes an interest in him. That is an example of Bob Smith acting on the information that Will Smith is a PC, and choosing to become evil. Regardless of how you later rationalize it, that's the true reason why it happened.

And again I insist, that if you write a novel which is obviously controlled by plot contrivance rather than internal causality, it's going to be a bad novel. The trick is to make your plot contrivances, whether in a novel or an RPG, seem not to be contrived. However, they are always contrived to one degree or another. If the appearance of your evil brother seems too contrived, that's a problem with the GMs artistry. It's not however metagaming.

And I insist that the process is more important than its appearance. No matter how well you pretend to justify it as something that could plausibly happen, if the real reason you decide for something to happen is for the sake of the plot, then that's meta-gaming. Trying to pretend otherwise, whether or not you are skilled enough to pull that off, is a deception toward the players.

 

[Shasarak]

The question is, "Is an RPG like a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text"? I would strongly say that it is not. The key distinction is that all of those other things are just stories, while an RPG is supposed to represent a believable place. There is no "plot" in an RPG; there's just a bunch of stuff that happens.

I would agree that RPGs are nothing like movies or novels and on the other hand I do think that they are story creation systems where Players and DM work together to create a story.

Even if that story is that a bunch of stuff happens.

 

[billd91]

I just started the 'Skull & Shackles' adventure path last night (as a player for a change!) and one of the other players struggled for the first hour or two with the fact that the narrative harshly deprotagonizes the players in the first few scenes, robbing from them the agency that players normally expect to have. I was on board with it, but I understand (to some extent) his confusion at finding his position to be basically helpless and at the mercy of NPCs who are initially holding all the cards. Presumably, at some point we'll have the resources to avenge ourselves, but the game would be in my opinion dysfunctional if the point of robbing the PC's of their normal advantages was simply so that we could watch the NPCs be awesome all the way through to the end of the game.

Frankly, if the player thinks that Skull and Shackles “deprotagonizes” characters, I think he’s got a poor understanding of what a protagonist does or is. A protagonist doesn’t always control their situations, they just retain the focus of the observers (usually readers) so that we see how they choose to respond to them. Being at the mercy of brutal pirates at the start just means they’re in the position of many predecessor protagonists like Spartacus, Maximus, Ben Hur, or Offred. Their (your) job is to decide what to do about your predicament.