A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

Bedrockgames said:

That is not the wikipedia page i quoted. I was quoting this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metagaming_(role-playing_games)

But even so, I think that still isn't really the case. I mean they are clearly talking about things like the player taking the left passage because he knows the GM always puts traps in the right passageway. They are not talking about talking about rules disputes, giving the GM feedback, etc. To me it is just pretty obvious things are being projected onto that Runequest that don't really apply.

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That one old DnD grognard would reply in discussion about metagaming: "what do you call hit points?"

Which is to say, there is always some metagaming going on, if just to streamline the game. The RQ advice is just to act in character. I can say definitely that the term metagaming is fairly new, we didn't use it in the 70's or 80's, for sure.

Lanefan said:

Because the party is, by convention, made up of adventuring characters who are usually a minority within the overall population. And so when we look at the MU-to-fighter ratio we're only looking within the adventuring subest of the overall population.

When looking at backgrounds, however, the entire population comes into it as an adventurer can come from any background - farmer, miner, merchant, orphan, knight, jeweller, sailor, pirate, slave, and hundreds of others of which one uncommon one is nobility.

Within any given party, of course there's perhaps going to be some wild skewing of all of these ratios - maybe this time the players decided to take an all-thief party into the field and all of them happen to come from a merchanting background, and to top it off they all chose Part-Orc for their race. But over the long to very long term over many characters things should in theory move toward a representative average.

Lan-"the character who recently became my longest-serving out of all of 'em has as her previous profession: herder"-efan

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What a weird thing this is! It's okay to be the rare portion of society when it comes to you class (which is what, exactly?), but that rarity cannot every translate into backgrounds. Because, you know, in a pseudo-medieval society the vast majority of men-at-arms are either favored retainers of a noble house or minor nobility themselves. What, praytell, what do you think a knight is but a noble?!

Those that have the time and resources to pursue training in many of the classes are already going to be predominately nobility, if you're hewing to a pseudo-medieval (or even Renaissance) world. I just don't get the 'well, 1 in 4 party members are mages, who've spent years getting super-expensive training to go out and try and kill some goblins with their 1 magic missile spell (because, you know, people that invested in that education are going to let that happen) but the odds of these people receiving pricelessly expensive educations are going to be a cross-section of the population at large rather than the subset of that population that can actually afford such education. This makes total sense. Or rather, it doesn't, but it does showcase a common weirdness about how D&D has generally treated such things as world consistency and coherence -- which is to say pretty much not at all. I gave up a long time ago trying to create believable gameworlds where characters are not nearly uniquely special within the world as a fool's errand.

Lanefan said:

the party is, by convention, made up of adventuring characters who are usually a minority within the overall population. And so when we look at the MU-to-fighter ratio we're only looking within the adventuring subest of the overall population.

When looking at backgrounds, however, the entire population comes into it as an adventurer can come from any background - farmer, miner, merchant, orphan, knight, jeweller, sailor, pirate, slave, and hundreds of others of which one uncommon one is nobility.

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Who established these conventions, and the contrast they draw between "class" and "background" - Lanefan's table?

Your complaint was that it is unrealistic to permit significant numbers of PCs of noble background. But now you say you are happy with realism giving way to a "convention" whereby a signifcant nunber of PCs are MUs or highly-trained warriors.

Well maybe at some tables there is a convention that PCs can be nables in larger-than-population-typical numbers! Or to put it another way - can you not see how arbitrary and idiosyncratic the distinctions are that you are drawing?

Maxperson said:

There was a game that I was playing in where we had to find a powerful witch in order to stop a powerful group of NPCs from having their way with our homeland.

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Where did this come from? I am assuming the GM - that is, I am assuming that it was not a player action declaration or an element of player-atuhored background that made the witch a focus of play.

Maxperson said:

The leader told me that he had my wife and kids captured and that when we found the witch, I was to call them via a magical device so that they could come and get her. I was told that if I said anything to anyone else, my wife and kids would be killed.

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I am also assuming that this came from the GM, in the sense that the leader, and the leader's connection to your family, were not things that resulted from player action declaration nor from an element of player-authored backgorund.

Maxperson said:

we came across a hut in the swamp with an old woman who was an herbalist. I had the great idea of using the device to call the NPCs on this woman, who I knew wasn't the witch we were looking for, but who could easily be mistaken for a witch. That way I could alert my companions as to what was going on via an "honest mistake."

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OK. This reads like a clever puzzle solution. But am I right in taking it that the herbalist was a story element established by the GM, and made no particular reference to elements of PC backstory or PC goals?

Also, did the fact that your "great idea" presumalby had rather sorry implications for the herbalist (who, as you present it, seems to be harmless at worst, generous at best) come into play here?

Maxperson said:

The NPCs arrived to collect the "witch" and when they did, they took one look at the girl we had rescued and thanked me for calling them to get the witch. Apparently the girl was who we were looking for and nobody in the party had any idea.

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This seems like a GM reveal/"gotcha". Was it pre-authored, or did the GM make this decision so as to negate your solution?

Maxperson said:

It was a very hard choice, but I made it and stood with the NPCs telling the rest of the group that they had my family and I would kill anyone who tried to stop them from taking the witch. Now the rest of the group was in the position of letting her go and allowing the NPCs to retain control, or attack and possibly kill the friend they grew up with and adventuring companion. They eventually relented and the girl was taken by the NPCs.

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And what resulted from this? Were your family released? Did you homeland get destroyed?

The hard choice seems to be between two options both established by the GM - lose family or lose homeland. Is that correct?

Numidius said:

So, we have Gm controlled Npcs that kidnap Gm contr. Npcs that force Pc* to search for a Gm cntr Npc** in order to invade a land of Gm cntr Npcs...

Man, if that's not railroad, I don't know what else could be.

I would dare say that Gm is violating the Czege Principle

*because family
**curiously appearing in the midst of events; also gotcha moment in the end

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Well, I did ask for examples of GM-driven RPGing, so in that sense there's no surprise that the example should be one that is heavily GM-driven!

Taking that context as given, the two things that I am curious about are the two moments of player choice: to summon the NPCs to attack an innocent herbalist and to stand with the NPCs at the end. I am very interested in the first in particular, as it seems to be harder choice - sacrificing an innocent person to save one's family.

Maxperson said:

the PCs set out and started tracking the orcs hoping to catch up with them and save the kids. Towards the evening of the first day they came across a place where the orcs had made their camp. They found an area with a fire pit and while investigating the fire pit and the area around it, they found some child sized bones.

Everyone at the table got really quiet as they realized that the orcs were using the kids as food. Suddenly the rescue got really serious as they realized that they were now in a time crunch to rescue the kids that remained before more were killed and eaten. The decided to forgo resting and push through to gain ground on the orcs and hope that they would come upon them in time, even though that meant taking penalties for lack of rest.

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Numidius said:

Ok so we have some pretty straightforward bad Npc that threaten lives of innocent Npc: linear railroad with evident psicological use of Force (because children + heroes pc, for Goodness sake).
And the Drama is, what? A metagamey resource management?

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I don't find this example as interesting as the first one. The only player choice is to take a modest mechanical penalty in order to establish some colour ("we're moving quickly"). It's not clear whether the colour is mere colour, or whether it factors into the actual resolution, because it's not clear what mechanics (if any) are being used to resolve the chase. And the issue of how many children are eaten and how many saved by getting to the orcs at time T rather than time T+1 seems to be entirely under the GM's control.

But anyway, I would expect this sort of thing to be pretty standard in "heroes vs orcs" FRPGing.

Bedrockgames said:

He is talking about players using out of character knowledge to inform their actions in play. A ban on that kind of meta gaming is in no way contradictory with what the text advises.

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The text advises players to inform their declared actions by considerations of the need, in the real world, to maintain harmony at the table. That second thing is "out of character knowledge" - the characters don't know that they are pieces in a game whose participants can't easily have fun if the characters don't hang out together in a more-or-less friendly fashion.

pemerton said:

The text advises players to inform their declared actions by considerations of the need, in the real world, to maintain harmony at the table. That second thing is "out of character knowledge" - the characters don't know that they are pieces in a game whose participants can't easily have fun if the characters don't hang out together in a more-or-less friendly fashion.

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But they ate just talking about not being a jerk (i.e. killing another PC and saying 'that is what my character would'). You are stretching the meaning very far from the intent

dragoner said:

That one old DnD grognard would reply in discussion about metagaming: "what do you call hit points?"

Which is to say, there is always some metagaming going on, if just to streamline the game. .

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Not following the point here

Bedrockgames said:

But they ate just talking about not being a jerk (i.e. killing another PC and saying 'that is what my character would').

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No they're not. They're also talking about sticking together and cooperating as a party ("the participants work together for a common goal").

By way of contrast, here's an extract from some advice from Ron Edwards on how to run a setting-focused game using a set of rules that doesn't directly address the issue:


The contrast between this and the RQ text I quoted is pretty clear: the idea is to set up characters, and a game context around those character, which will generate dramatic action without any need for player metagaming about "the party", cooperation, etc.

The bottom line is this: it doesn't stop being metagaming just because it's metagaming that [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] doesn't notice, or doesn't object to. (And note that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] does notice it and does object to it.)

Bedrockgames said:

Not following the point here

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No, I don't think you get it.

Why is Ron Edwards the expert on setting focused games here?