A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

[The Crimson Binome]

Which is precisely what I pointed out several posts back*, its all "Disney damage" to coin a phrase.

At sufficiently low resolution, dramatic physical injury is indistinguishable from Disney Damage.

Even worse, no critical wounds, no dramatically interesting injuries whatsoever (even Disney occasionally has the occasional limping character in need of help)....no damage, just cosmetics....oh and that pesky totally metagame doom clock. Certainly nothing about "how bad a shape you're in", but maybe a "how bad does your makeup look".

There's nothing meta-game about it. The character can observe the physical injury; they simply observe that it's not immediately fatal, in and of itself. They might very well have a limp! All that the mechanics say on the matter is that any limp isn't so incredibly extreme as to warrant modeling under typical combat conditions. Which is perfectly reasonable, given how simplistic the model is.

The characters might be observing it, but they must also be observing that (unlike IRL) these injuries have no impact on their performance.

They can certainly observe that the impact is not sufficient to prevent them from fighting. I don't know that any of them are inclined to test things more thoroughly than that. If you wanted to hold a triathlon between characters in various stages of injury, the degree of injury might be worth modeling at that point, at which point the DM will figure it out. That's exactly the reason why the DM exists in the first place.

The map isn't the territory. Just because there's no injury represented in the mechanics, that doesn't mean there's no injury within the reality. As it stands, at certain tables, physical injury is represented on the map - as HP damage.

So...if you want to call cosmetics "physical" then I guess go nuts, but then there's this big "no-go" zone of injury in between "Just another scratch" and "Whoops, I'm dying!"

As contrasted with the "doom clock" model, where the no-go zone includes any amount of physical injury whatsoever. A model that can only reflect shallow physical injury is still better than one that can't reflect physical injury.

*although broken bones stretches it. What bones are you breaking that don't affect your performance? I've broken some pretty "minor" bones in my life and been amazed at how much it degrades performance/capacity.

My typical example is a fractured sternum. Have you fractured your sternum? And if so, how much did it degrade your combat performance in your next swordfight-to-the-death against orcs? Over the course of two minutes, what fraction of your swings do you feel would have landed, were it not for your injury?

 

[Arilyn]

In all my years playing DnD, I have never heard a player say, "My arm is busted up from that last fight, and I'm feeling really woozy, maybe a cure spell please?" I hear, " Ahhh, I have only 4 hp left. Heal me up."

HP are very meta. I mean if you were really immersed in your role, wouldn't you be screaming in pain from being hit by a fireball or Dragon breath attack, not calmly changing your hp total and fighting on?Surely even the stoutest warrior feels the agony of burns.

This is fine. It works for DnD because of the constant fighting and peril typical groups face. Meta for sure, though, because hp have no bearing in any kind of reality, even high fantasy. No bleeding, sprains, broken limbs, internal injuries, infection, punctured organs, concussions....Just a nice clean bar that steadily drops, having no effect on your performance, until it's gone, and then you're dying.

 

[Shasarak]

In all my years playing DnD, I have never heard a player say, "My arm is busted up from that last fight, and I'm feeling really woozy, maybe a cure spell please?" I hear, " Ahhh, I have only 4 hp left. Heal me up."

HP are very meta. I mean if you were really immersed in your role, wouldn't you be screaming in pain from being hit by a fireball or Dragon breath attack, not calmly changing your hp total and fighting on?Surely even the stoutest warrior feels the agony of burns.

This is fine. It works for DnD because of the constant fighting and peril typical groups face. Meta for sure, though, because hp have no bearing in any kind of reality, even high fantasy. No bleeding, sprains, broken limbs, internal injuries, infection, punctured organs, concussions....Just a nice clean bar that steadily drops, having no effect on your performance, until it's gone, and then you're dying.

Ah do, do we need to scream out the pain of being hit with a fireball? It reminds me of a story of a DM that used an air gum to shoot his players when their characters got damaged. Is that something we want in an RPG or can we just leave that to the LARPers?

 

[Arilyn]

Ah do, do we need to scream out the pain of being hit with a fireball? It reminds me of a story of a DM that used an air gum to shoot his players when their characters got damaged. Is that something we want in an RPG or can we just leave that to the LARPers?

I didn't mean literally scream. I mean, narrating the results. "I drop to the ground, writhing and screaming from the burns." In DnD, our characters feel nothing from the most horrific things thrown their way, like fire, acid, axe blows...

And that's fine for the game. We don't need all those graphic results, but it's pure meta.

 

[Shasarak]

I didn't mean literally scream. I mean, narrating the results. "I drop to the ground, writhing and screaming from the burns." In DnD, our characters feel nothing from the most horrific things thrown their way, like fire, acid, axe blows...

I have one player that always narrates those type of effects on his character and one player that never shows any concern for his character.

Come to think of it none of my characters have ever had to go to the toilet and yet they are always eating and drinking. I wonder how that is supposed to work? Seems like an oversight there. ;0)

 

[Ratskinner]

I have one player that always narrates those type of effects on his character and one player that never shows any concern for his character.

Come to think of it none of my characters have ever had to go to the toilet and yet they are always eating and drinking. I wonder how that is supposed to work? Seems like an oversight there. ;0)

That, at least, is an oversight that is reasonably consistent with the fiction.

 

[Jhaelen]

Come to think of it none of my characters have ever had to go to the toilet and yet they are always eating and drinking.

Curious indeed! I tend to mention it from time to time, especially when I'm bored.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In all my years playing DnD, I have never heard a player say, "My arm is busted up from that last fight, and I'm feeling really woozy, maybe a cure spell please?" I hear, " Ahhh, I have only 4 hp left. Heal me up."

Describing damage is a job for the DM, and different DMs describe damage differently. If the players don't understand how badly their characters are hurt, then the DM isn't describing the injury very well (or they are describing it as distinctly non-physical).

For contrast, though, I'm currently playing in a game with a DM who has never played or run before. Every single attack that beats armor class, he has described as the blade getting past armor and striking flesh. Every single time someone has failed a save against Fireball, he describes the intense pain of how their skin is burning. Because that's the obvious interpretation of damage, if you read the rule book, and nobody on the internet has tried to convince him otherwise.

 

[Aldarc]

While those suggestions do solve the metagame problem, I am attached to the idea of the non-magical fighter. That is I admit just a preference. For the monk though I could definitely go with many of these kinds of ideas.

(1) It was an example of a potential solution, but I have no doubt that you could create such a solution that was more appropriate to your sensibilities.

(2) I don't think that this interpretation necessarily needs to be understood as "magic." Ki, for me, is simply some form of latent energy (e.g., life? psionic? etc.) that permeates the world or life therein. The fighter may be "non-magical" and mundane but that does not necessarily mean that any mundane person living in such a fantastical world is completely removed from the surrounding cosmological forces that infuse it, such as life energy. In fact, this edge fighters have may be what separates them from common guards and warriors. As a comparison, just because you are not a Jedi does not mean that you are not connected to the Force or potentially subjected to its influence or possibly benefit from it.

 

[Arilyn]

Describing damage is a job for the DM, and different DMs describe damage differently. If the players don't understand how badly their characters are hurt, then the DM isn't describing the injury very well (or they are describing it as distinctly non-physical).

For contrast, though, I'm currently playing in a game with a DM who has never played or run before. Every single attack that beats armor class, he has described as the blade getting past armor and striking flesh. Every single time someone has failed a save against Fireball, he describes the intense pain of how their skin is burning. Because that's the obvious interpretation of damage, if you read the rule book, and nobody on the internet has tried to convince him otherwise.

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.