A discussion of metagame concepts in game design

[Lanefan]

Upthread someone ( [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]? [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]) referred to "life force".

Not guilty, y'r honour.

For once.

Lanefan

 

[Ted Serious]

On the other hand, if he actually tried to impose his playstyle, and made players defend their decisions as character-knowledge-driven, I suspect his tables wouldn't stay full.

Likewise, if he house-ruled away all the mechanics he dislikes, he might have trouble recruiting players. Not necessarily because they disagree with him philosophically, but because they just want to play the game they know.

I've never known DMs to go begging for players. Even DMs everyone knows are bad.

Playing is just so much easier and more fun.
You have 20 wanting to play for every one actually wanting to run.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Maybe they were malicious, or maybe they were just incompetent, but either way they failed to deliver on the promise. It wouldn't have been hard to design a game that would have been more inclusive. They should have just owned up to the fact that they were intentionally excluding certain groups.

Deceptive marketing counts as malicious practice, in my book.

Wow.

This is just not even rational.

I was logging in to add some more thoughts I had on the topic, but I guess there's no point.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I've never known DMs to go begging for players. Even DMs everyone knows are bad.

Playing is just so much easier and more fun.
You have 20 wanting to play for every one actually wanting to run.

Really? I've known (and/or known of) a couple of DMs who eventually find themselves with few or zero regulars at their tables. Just the newcomers who don't know better, or the equally problematic players who aren't welcome at the other tables.

I guess it depends on your geography, though. I've only seen it in areas with pretty vibrant gaming communities.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

While I have a strong opinion on metagame design elements, I by no means intend to imply that those who enjoy such concepts are doing it wrong or should convert to my way of thinking. This is about a preference. It would be just as silly to try to convert everyone who prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla. Vanilla is better in my opinion but philosophically "a matter of taste cannot be disputed"

So a short definition: Metagaming.
Metagaming is when a player makes a decision that the character the player is playing could never conceive of or know about.


Here are some examples of metagame rules in 5e.

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?

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.

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.

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.


I realize I'm picking on the fighter but the fighter is pretty egregious in these areas. I'm sure may of the other classes have at least some issues like this though perhaps not to the same degree.

So how do you guys with my own sentiments (or at least some sympathy for my sentiments) handle these things. What house rules have you developed? Is the game salvageable for someone like us?

I've been thinking about Pathfinder 2e as another possibility. Do you think it will do better in that particular area? Worse? I'm going to check out the pdf.

What about you old schoolers? There is a lot to like in some of the old school games but I find them not systematic enough for me. Heck 5e probably isn't as much as I'd like. Everything is a special class rule. I do think feats as a mechanic might be better ala Pf2e. But I am also thinking they'll make some pretty awful feats as well.

Thoughts?

Sure.

1) Healing. So it helps to define hit points a bit here. To us, your first level hit points are kind of your physical health. The remainder are a combination of luck, stamina, and skill. Primarily the last two. Why? Because you gain more as you gain a level. A higher level character is capable of turning a good hit to a glancing hit. In addition, they are able to outlast somebody lesser (of lower level).

So the applying hit dice mechanic is a way of simulating how much you recover your stamina more than anything else in my mind. Sometimes you stop and wait until fully refreshed, sometimes you don’t.

One tweak we made for a while is that you rolled your available Hit Dice at the beginning of the day. Then as you rested, you automatically topped off your hit points if you had enough remaining.

2) Action Surge. The short answer is yes. It’s that extra burst of energy, maybe adrenaline, that you can put into things. Like a race horse pulling away. There isn’t a proper fatigue system in D&D, but requiring a rest between uses of abilities like this is a bit of one.

3) If you’re on board with 1 and 2, this answers itself. You’re using one of those bursts of energy to replenish your stamina. I would prefer something like a requirement to spend a round not attacking. For all three of these, look at short and long distance runners, boxers, and similar sports for real life examples.

4) Inspiration. In general I’m not a fan of disassociated mechanics like this one. As you point out, the fighter is full of them, especially their superiority dice and they way they are used in regards to maneuvers. They wanted to make sure things like trip aren’t overused, along with making more cool things for the fighter to do. Why didn’t people try to trip their opponent very much in real sword fights? They did, when the opportunity presented itself. I suspect the answer as to why it’s not used more is because it must be very risky. The reward for knocking somebody prone in a sword fight is huge. So it must be hard to do and risky.

But I digress. I do like Inspiration and the Superiority dice themselves. In our game Superiority is basically the same as bardic Inspiration, but used on yourself instead of somebody else.

There are moments where luck is smiling or frowning at you more than usual. These mechanics give you a way to address that. They are super simple and non-intrusive when used as a simple modifier. I like them even better because they are a variable, not a fixed bonus or penalty.

I’m an old schooler in that I generally run my game to feel like it did based in Holmes basic/AD&D. For the most part, these particular things are not really problematic. We’ve made a ton of other alterations, though, in part because we don’t care for most disassociated mechanics, and we prefer the rules to help adjudicate the fiction, rather than define it. 5e is by far the easiest to to this, because to eliminate these sort of concerns it’s easier to do it with fewer rules, not more. 5e is quite streamlined, but you can tweak it to be even more so.

 

[Guest 6801328]

or maybe, they were just targeting the 70% of the market that lies within 1 stdev of their market center and you were in the other 30%?

Sometimes the simplest answer isn't deception, it's perception.

Or misperception, from the audience. WotC says, "We are going to appeal to players from all editions" and some people hear, "Oh, good, they just promised to include Feature X."

What could possibly go wrong?

 

[ccs]

Yes, for right or wrong, house rules have a severe stigma attached to them which are likely to turn away players. That's why it's such a betrayal that they would market this game as being for everyone, and then fail to support anything but a very middle-of-the-road audience of players who don't care. Anyone with a strong opinion on any topic - the kind of player who might actually care enough to change rules that they didn't like - is left without the framework or authority to do so, because other players are likely to see those changes as illegitimate.

Boy did you ever take swig of that Marketing Cool-Aid back there in 2012/13.... What'd you do? Roll in the negatives on your Wisdom save?

D&D was, is, & always will, be as modular & mutable as any particular group chooses it to be. How do you think we got to the point we're at today? Untold #s of people tinkered with the game over the decades. Some of that tinkering even finds it's way into the official books.
That said, it's not the designers fault if you can't persuade the other people at the table to change some rule...

 

[Maxperson]

Not guilty, y'r honour.

For once.

Lanefan

I talked about life force in Dark Sun. A term it used and equated with spirit, then applied it to all things including plants.

 

[heretic888]

Of course [giants] are biomechanically possible. That is what the physics says.

A little tangential here, but as a math teacher I wanted to address this point real quick...

Actually, "the physics" says precisely the opposite: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/scaling.html

A giant with 3 times the proportional height, width, and length of a human being would not weigh 3 times as much. He or she would weigh 27 times as much (all other things being equal, volume is height cubed) as the human. The moment said giant stood up, most of the bones in his or her leg would collapse under the immense weight.

In other words, if a "human" averages 6 feet, 200 lbs then an 18 foot "giant" would weigh around 5400 lbs. You can't support that amount of weight without a deep structural change in the anatomical proportions of the organism: the result wouldn't be anything that remotely resembles a gigantic human, at least not in terms of musculature and skeletal structure.

An elephant is not a bipedal primate, nor is a tyrannosaur. Their musculature, bone structure, and anatomical proportions are totally different from ours.

There's a lot of stuff in D&D style games that is like this (dragons being able to fly with their listed weights and wingspans being an oft-cited example). D&D's world only obeys the laws of physics if by "physics" we mean, as pemerton suggested earlier, common sense tropes and not actual mathematics.

 

[Shasarak]

A little tangential here, but as a math teacher I wanted to address this point real quick...

Actually, "the physics" says precisely the opposite: http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/scaling.html

A giant with 3 times the proportional height, width, and length of a human being would not weigh 3 times as much. He or she would weigh 27 times as much (all other things being equal, volume is height cubed) as the human. The moment said giant stood up, most of the bones in his or her leg would collapse under the immense weight.

In other words, if a "human" averages 6 feet, 200 lbs then an 18 foot "giant" would weigh around 5400 lbs. You can't support that amount of weight without a deep structural change in the anatomical proportions of the organism: the result wouldn't be anything that remotely resembles a gigantic human, at least not in terms of musculature and skeletal structure.

An elephant is not a bipedal primate, nor is a tyrannosaur. Their musculature, bone structure, and anatomical proportions are totally different from ours.

There's a lot of stuff in D&D style games that is like this (dragons being able to fly with their listed weights and wingspans being an oft-cited example). D&D's world only obeys the laws of physics if by "physics" we mean, as pemerton suggested earlier, common sense tropes and not actual mathematics.

Say you had a Human who weighs 100kg and made him a Giant who weighs 27x as much = 2,700kg. A T-Rex can weigh up to 18,000 kg.

So tell me again how physics proves that Giant (2,700kg) would collapse and at the same time a T-Rex (18,000kg) is fine?

I think the main incorrect asumption that you are making is that a Giant is the same as a Big Human. Of course a Giant is going to have musculature, bone structure, and anatomical proportions totally different to a Humans.