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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
4E combat and powers: How to keep the baby and not the bathwater?
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<blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5871471" data-attributes="member: 52073"><p>Perhaps taking a different tack would help explain my point of view better.</p><p></p><p>RPGs benefit sometimes from having the players act on metagame knowledge. Existing PCs welcome a new PC into the party because a new player has joined the playgroup. PCs decide not to go to a certain area because the DM hasn't mapped it out. DMs contrive to make encounters always level-appropriate because they know that those make for more fun combat. Acting on metagame information can also be detrimental to RPGs. PCs are suddenly more cautious for no reason because the players failed some Listen checks. A PC paladin smites a PC rogue for stealing from him despite there being no way the paladin could have discovered this. A DM makes NPCs that are exact counters for PC abilities despite the fact that the BBEG doesn't know all of their capabilities because he's trying to pull a "knock them out and capture them" scenario or the like.</p><p></p><p>The former cases are praised, while the latter cases are scorned. Why is that? It's because when the fiction and the metagame mesh, the story tends to come out well and is aesthetically satisfying, as you said, whereas when they contradict, it doesn't make much sense and pulls people out of the story. If the heroic fighter issues a challenge to all comers and vanquishes the dozens of orcs that come out to kill him, that's immersive; if the dozens of orcs attack him instead of the wizard or rogue because he's the fighter and he has more HP and AC than anyone else, that's not very immersive. That doesn't produce a narrative that you or I want to see.</p><p></p><p>The big difference between "good metagaming" and "bad metagaming" is that good metagaming can be (and usually is) justified in-game, however tenuously, while bad metagaming can't be or isn't; to use the above examples, "We badly needed a mage; thank the gods you're here, fellow adventurer!" and "No one has information on those mountains; it's probably not safe to go there until we check it out more" and "The goblin army is divided into squads of 20; it'll be tough, but we should be able to take them!" are things that add constructively to the narrative, while "Gee, the entire party suddenly have a funny feeling about something..." and "Yes, I'm a paragon of goodness, but I'll attack you just because you look...thief-y" and "So, apparently they have a counter for the super-secret spell I researched under tons of wards of secrecy; imagine that!" are things that are bad for the narrative.</p><p></p><p>If you take the primary feature of the fighter, the feature that's supposed to make him the rough-and-tough hero instead of the guy the monsters ignore on their way to gank the mage, and you make it a metagame thing and don't even bother paying lip service to the in-game rationale, that's bad metagaming.</p><p></p><p>It's fine to have marking be a purely in-game things. It's fine for it to be an in-game thing some of the time, and some of the time have it be an out-of-game thing because them's the rules, what are you gonna do? But to advocate that it doesn't <em>matter</em> what (if anything) marking means in game because you can just treat it as a metagame thing means that you're hurting the narrative.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>If you think that utilizing metagame knowledge to make in-game decisions is bad playing, why did you advocate treating marks as purely metagame mechanics that force characters to use metagame knowledge to make in-game decisions? That's exactly what I've been arguing against.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Eldritch_Lord, post: 5871471, member: 52073"] Perhaps taking a different tack would help explain my point of view better. RPGs benefit sometimes from having the players act on metagame knowledge. Existing PCs welcome a new PC into the party because a new player has joined the playgroup. PCs decide not to go to a certain area because the DM hasn't mapped it out. DMs contrive to make encounters always level-appropriate because they know that those make for more fun combat. Acting on metagame information can also be detrimental to RPGs. PCs are suddenly more cautious for no reason because the players failed some Listen checks. A PC paladin smites a PC rogue for stealing from him despite there being no way the paladin could have discovered this. A DM makes NPCs that are exact counters for PC abilities despite the fact that the BBEG doesn't know all of their capabilities because he's trying to pull a "knock them out and capture them" scenario or the like. The former cases are praised, while the latter cases are scorned. Why is that? It's because when the fiction and the metagame mesh, the story tends to come out well and is aesthetically satisfying, as you said, whereas when they contradict, it doesn't make much sense and pulls people out of the story. If the heroic fighter issues a challenge to all comers and vanquishes the dozens of orcs that come out to kill him, that's immersive; if the dozens of orcs attack him instead of the wizard or rogue because he's the fighter and he has more HP and AC than anyone else, that's not very immersive. That doesn't produce a narrative that you or I want to see. The big difference between "good metagaming" and "bad metagaming" is that good metagaming can be (and usually is) justified in-game, however tenuously, while bad metagaming can't be or isn't; to use the above examples, "We badly needed a mage; thank the gods you're here, fellow adventurer!" and "No one has information on those mountains; it's probably not safe to go there until we check it out more" and "The goblin army is divided into squads of 20; it'll be tough, but we should be able to take them!" are things that add constructively to the narrative, while "Gee, the entire party suddenly have a funny feeling about something..." and "Yes, I'm a paragon of goodness, but I'll attack you just because you look...thief-y" and "So, apparently they have a counter for the super-secret spell I researched under tons of wards of secrecy; imagine that!" are things that are bad for the narrative. If you take the primary feature of the fighter, the feature that's supposed to make him the rough-and-tough hero instead of the guy the monsters ignore on their way to gank the mage, and you make it a metagame thing and don't even bother paying lip service to the in-game rationale, that's bad metagaming. It's fine to have marking be a purely in-game things. It's fine for it to be an in-game thing some of the time, and some of the time have it be an out-of-game thing because them's the rules, what are you gonna do? But to advocate that it doesn't [I]matter[/I] what (if anything) marking means in game because you can just treat it as a metagame thing means that you're hurting the narrative. If you think that utilizing metagame knowledge to make in-game decisions is bad playing, why did you advocate treating marks as purely metagame mechanics that force characters to use metagame knowledge to make in-game decisions? That's exactly what I've been arguing against. [/QUOTE]
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4E combat and powers: How to keep the baby and not the bathwater?
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