I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
As tabletop RPG players, we engage in a fairly unique cognitive exercise every time we sit down to pretend to be a magical gumdrop elf, or an alien psychic, or an immortal vampire, or whatever. In a lot of our conversations, we're used to thinking about it as "using our imaginations," but that phrase is ambiguous and a little trite. A more anchored description of what we do when we pretend to be something we are not might be to say that we personify and perform metaphor.
What's a Meta For?
I'm sure many of my readers, being the erudite scholars you all are, are well aware of the use of metaphor as, essentially, an artistic description of one thing as being another. Author James Geary elaborates:
This rather transparently applies to our RPG characters, too. That bundle of numbers and stats is not simply a game piece, but they are a person, a character that we breathe life into whenever we play.
The fundamental activity of any tabletop RPG is in transforming the numbers on the character sheet into a person. We get a clearer picture of who our character is in their true essence from those numbers and acronyms than we get from a literal description of them, using a sort of synesthesia where STR 15 is turned into bulging biceps and sinewy thews. The metaphor works on game statistics -- we turn some element that affects a dice roll into some element that affects a person. An imaginary person, but a person all the same. This works because game rules, essentially, create patterns. STR 15 indicates a higher chance of success when a roll using that number is made, and so the gameplay creates a pattern where the character with that number succeeds more often on those rolls than characters with lower numbers. That roll is called for, according to the rules, when a test of physical power is undertaken, creating a character who succeeds more often at tests of physical power than others.
In the process of shaking up those statistics and using them to represent our characters, we create the fundamental forces of fun that govern RPG gameplay.
Story vs. Stats
This process is the same kind of process that creates fictional characters of all stripes. Author Cory Doctorow elaborates on that. It is this predictive, metaphor-genrerating power of our minds that gives these characters life and allows us to imagine them as having a "life of their own:" our model of them is complex and detailed enough to imagine how these characters would react in many circumstances. In a sort of step-up from the granularity of fiction, we now not only have a statement or description or action in which your STR 15 character has been physically powerful, we have a quantification of that -- one that can literally be modeled, statistically.
That detail does create a bit of a conflict that isn't present in fiction, however. In fiction, a character can be exactly as strong, exactly as smart, exactly as fast, exactly as lucky, as they need to be to work in the story. If the hero needs to escape from the evil villain in this scene in order to keep the narrative rolling and get to its ultimate climax, the hero will have that capacity. If the writing isn't bad, this won't violate the model we have of the character in our heads already, and if the writing is actually god it may even enhance that model, organically arising out of what the character is actually capable of.
In an RPG, however, we know how likely that STR 15 character is to accomplish a given task. They can't be as strong as they need to be -- they're STR 15, and that has meant something about the character before they even get in their first bar fight. And that bar fight is a fight they might lose! Like I've pointed out before, "winning" and "losing" are important aspects of gameplay, and they conflict with this fictional narration. The model of our character has to include the possibility of not winning, of not escaping that villain. Even at their most narrative, RPG's always include some possibility that you fail. This is part of what makes them games.
Gimmie Fiction
Your character, then, in an RPG, isn't just defined by the stats they have, either. We translate stats and traits into a living, breathing being that exists outside of us, but we also derive who this character is from their interactions with the world. Your STR 15 character can fail an arm-wrestling contest, simply by rolling low on the die. Our models of our characters have to include the idea that this beefy creature with massive biceps occasionally screws up, occasionally in a big way. One of the things you have to get used to about your RPG character that you don't have to get used to about a fictional character is that your RPG character might not get away from the villain.
This means that in an RPG, our character isn't just defined by what the stats define them as -- they're also defined by the DM, the world, the rolls of the dice, other players, and a multitude of other factors outside of our control. Indeed, in the earliest versions of D&D, you couldn't even decide that your character had a STR 15 -- part of the gameplay was in the dice telling you what the STR value was. In this way, D&D resembles improvisation much more than it resembles fiction writing. A key element of the enjoyment of improvisation is its unpredictability, and the lack of control each individual member has on the outcome. Because our fighter might fail, we get a rush of tension and excitement that is more than just about relating to the character, it's about your own victory or defeat as a player. An essential part of the fun here is in not knowing what's going to happen. In a novel, you can be confident that the only events that will happen are events that are intentional -- there's no chaos in a novel (though a well-written novel might be able to engineer surprise). In an RPG, you don't have that luxury: big things could happen simply because the dice roll a certain way.
As time has moved on in D&D, we've seen each iteration of the game clamp down more strongly on that chaos, in favor of predictability and control. Your STR score is no longer random, it's assigned, by you, often from a pool of points rather than a die roll (to keep everything balanced). Your character can no longer Disintegrate Asmoedeus, and Asmodeus can't Disintigrate you, so binary extremes are removed from the game. Encounters are no longer random, they are planned, designed, and detailed. Heck, the most recent edition even clamped down on things like wings, being more than 10 feet tall, and long-term charm effects, in an effort to make this game of dice and chance more predictable, and less prone to dramatic swings of chaos.
You can see this specifically in a place like the the Fighter's abilities in, say, 1e, in comparison to their abilities in 4e. There was nothing stopping a fighter in 1e from running into the center of an enemy-filled room, challenging all within to come at him, and then smashing them all (accomplished through the help of an attack rate higher than that of most other characters). In 1e, we'd rely on a DM's judgement for such a daring move -- the fighter could do it, and the DM could determine based on their judgement of the situation what would happen. Maybe the fighter WOULD get mobbed by the angry orcs. Maybe the clever kobolds would ignore him and go for the wizard, though.
In 4e, we rely on Come and Get It. 4e codifies that rule, and thus gives the DM something to use to adjudicate that action, and something players can use with confidence that they won't regret it. The DM won't do something like make the enemies all ignore the fighter -- the rules don't allow that to happen. If they get hit, they're doing what the ability dictates. That scene in the novel or in the movie is now explicitly supported and encouraged. You're not just saying what your character does, you're saying, this would be a cool scene, and using a game element to dictate that scene to everyone else at the table. There is little dark ambiguity or wiggle room there.
This arc should sound familiar to anyone who has read my post about brain hemispheres and autism: the emergent quality of game rules means that as time goes by, we tend to create and rely on rules over rulings. The leftward drift means that consistency, predictability, organization, and "elegance" grow to prominence. But as these things grow, our language, and the order of our thoughts, fundamentally shifts. When we're thinking in 1e-style "Right Dominant" mode, we see our characters from the inside out, as in: "My character runs into the room, then what happens?" or "My character has a STR 15, what does that mean about them?" When we're thinking in 4e-style "Left Dominant" mode, we see our characters from the outside in, as in, "My fighter gets the attention of the orcs through a show of bravado," or "My character is pretty strong, so they should have an STR 15." We go from being intention-oriented to goal-oriented, from being personal to being global, from being an actor to being a director, from being in-character, to being metagame.
"What I Really Want To Do Is Direct"
So we can see, then, that this leftward drift of mechanics over time also changes the way the game is played. The metaphor gets tuned into a definition. Juliet is no longer the sun, she is now a 14 year old daughter of a man with a feud who lives in Verona. It's perhaps a more accurate depiction, and it certainly matches the plot of the story better, but it's out of character for Romeo to think that way.
The actor playing Romeo must think of Juliet as the sun -- to embody his character, he must find the truth of that metaphor, and run with it. The director of the play, though, does need to think of Juliet in context. The director is the maestro of all that happens on that stage, and so to the director, Juliet is defined, rather than romanticized. Romeo's actor must be very "right-dominant" about the situation: it is personal, local, immediate, and intimate. It is young emotion running high. It is real to this character. The director of the play must be very "left-dominant" about the situation: it is factual, mechanistic, detail-dependent. It is a story to be told to an audience.
And that is the conflict in our games between metagame mechanics and more immersive, organic mechanics. It is that the games we play can be seen in those two directions: as a role to be played, or as a story to be told. Ultimately a preference for one or the other boils down to style: all design is local, and different people think about their characters in different ways. Some folk take readily to metaphor and poetry and can easily see STR 15 as having bulging muscles. Other folks take a longer view and see their character as having bulging muscles, so they give them STR 15. Some people make brilliant actors, but resist looking outside that shell -- this is part of what makes them great actors. Some people make amazing directors, but can't ignore the broader context -- this is part of what makes them great directors.
This matters when you're browsing through games or wondering what to play next or questioning whether or not a given kind of game is up your alley. If you're a director-type, metagame mechanics (and, thus, a lot of indie games) will probably appeal to you. But if you're an actor-type, you aren't necessarily going to take kindly to rules that violate your sense of reality and get the order of thought "backwards." That metaphor is important to you, and if you say that Juliet is the sun, that tells you all you need to know about her to play that character that is in love with her. If at any point you're reminded that Juliet is really just a 14 year old Italian girl, it breaks the reality for you in a way it wouldn't for a director-type. This likely has bigger implications that I'll dig into in future articles, but for now, we'll sit with establishing the reality of this.
So which do you think you are? Do you shun the metagame and like the sound of rolling dice to find out what your character is like? Or do you appreciate the bigger picture, and think that you should be able to play the character that's in your mind with support from the rules? Is Juliet the sun, or is she a human?
View attachment 55932
What's a Meta For?
I'm sure many of my readers, being the erudite scholars you all are, are well aware of the use of metaphor as, essentially, an artistic description of one thing as being another. Author James Geary elaborates:
[video=youtube;2cU56SWXHFw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cU56SWXHFw[/video]
This rather transparently applies to our RPG characters, too. That bundle of numbers and stats is not simply a game piece, but they are a person, a character that we breathe life into whenever we play.
The fundamental activity of any tabletop RPG is in transforming the numbers on the character sheet into a person. We get a clearer picture of who our character is in their true essence from those numbers and acronyms than we get from a literal description of them, using a sort of synesthesia where STR 15 is turned into bulging biceps and sinewy thews. The metaphor works on game statistics -- we turn some element that affects a dice roll into some element that affects a person. An imaginary person, but a person all the same. This works because game rules, essentially, create patterns. STR 15 indicates a higher chance of success when a roll using that number is made, and so the gameplay creates a pattern where the character with that number succeeds more often on those rolls than characters with lower numbers. That roll is called for, according to the rules, when a test of physical power is undertaken, creating a character who succeeds more often at tests of physical power than others.
In the process of shaking up those statistics and using them to represent our characters, we create the fundamental forces of fun that govern RPG gameplay.
Story vs. Stats
This process is the same kind of process that creates fictional characters of all stripes. Author Cory Doctorow elaborates on that. It is this predictive, metaphor-genrerating power of our minds that gives these characters life and allows us to imagine them as having a "life of their own:" our model of them is complex and detailed enough to imagine how these characters would react in many circumstances. In a sort of step-up from the granularity of fiction, we now not only have a statement or description or action in which your STR 15 character has been physically powerful, we have a quantification of that -- one that can literally be modeled, statistically.
That detail does create a bit of a conflict that isn't present in fiction, however. In fiction, a character can be exactly as strong, exactly as smart, exactly as fast, exactly as lucky, as they need to be to work in the story. If the hero needs to escape from the evil villain in this scene in order to keep the narrative rolling and get to its ultimate climax, the hero will have that capacity. If the writing isn't bad, this won't violate the model we have of the character in our heads already, and if the writing is actually god it may even enhance that model, organically arising out of what the character is actually capable of.
In an RPG, however, we know how likely that STR 15 character is to accomplish a given task. They can't be as strong as they need to be -- they're STR 15, and that has meant something about the character before they even get in their first bar fight. And that bar fight is a fight they might lose! Like I've pointed out before, "winning" and "losing" are important aspects of gameplay, and they conflict with this fictional narration. The model of our character has to include the possibility of not winning, of not escaping that villain. Even at their most narrative, RPG's always include some possibility that you fail. This is part of what makes them games.
Gimmie Fiction
Your character, then, in an RPG, isn't just defined by the stats they have, either. We translate stats and traits into a living, breathing being that exists outside of us, but we also derive who this character is from their interactions with the world. Your STR 15 character can fail an arm-wrestling contest, simply by rolling low on the die. Our models of our characters have to include the idea that this beefy creature with massive biceps occasionally screws up, occasionally in a big way. One of the things you have to get used to about your RPG character that you don't have to get used to about a fictional character is that your RPG character might not get away from the villain.
This means that in an RPG, our character isn't just defined by what the stats define them as -- they're also defined by the DM, the world, the rolls of the dice, other players, and a multitude of other factors outside of our control. Indeed, in the earliest versions of D&D, you couldn't even decide that your character had a STR 15 -- part of the gameplay was in the dice telling you what the STR value was. In this way, D&D resembles improvisation much more than it resembles fiction writing. A key element of the enjoyment of improvisation is its unpredictability, and the lack of control each individual member has on the outcome. Because our fighter might fail, we get a rush of tension and excitement that is more than just about relating to the character, it's about your own victory or defeat as a player. An essential part of the fun here is in not knowing what's going to happen. In a novel, you can be confident that the only events that will happen are events that are intentional -- there's no chaos in a novel (though a well-written novel might be able to engineer surprise). In an RPG, you don't have that luxury: big things could happen simply because the dice roll a certain way.
As time has moved on in D&D, we've seen each iteration of the game clamp down more strongly on that chaos, in favor of predictability and control. Your STR score is no longer random, it's assigned, by you, often from a pool of points rather than a die roll (to keep everything balanced). Your character can no longer Disintegrate Asmoedeus, and Asmodeus can't Disintigrate you, so binary extremes are removed from the game. Encounters are no longer random, they are planned, designed, and detailed. Heck, the most recent edition even clamped down on things like wings, being more than 10 feet tall, and long-term charm effects, in an effort to make this game of dice and chance more predictable, and less prone to dramatic swings of chaos.
You can see this specifically in a place like the the Fighter's abilities in, say, 1e, in comparison to their abilities in 4e. There was nothing stopping a fighter in 1e from running into the center of an enemy-filled room, challenging all within to come at him, and then smashing them all (accomplished through the help of an attack rate higher than that of most other characters). In 1e, we'd rely on a DM's judgement for such a daring move -- the fighter could do it, and the DM could determine based on their judgement of the situation what would happen. Maybe the fighter WOULD get mobbed by the angry orcs. Maybe the clever kobolds would ignore him and go for the wizard, though.
In 4e, we rely on Come and Get It. 4e codifies that rule, and thus gives the DM something to use to adjudicate that action, and something players can use with confidence that they won't regret it. The DM won't do something like make the enemies all ignore the fighter -- the rules don't allow that to happen. If they get hit, they're doing what the ability dictates. That scene in the novel or in the movie is now explicitly supported and encouraged. You're not just saying what your character does, you're saying, this would be a cool scene, and using a game element to dictate that scene to everyone else at the table. There is little dark ambiguity or wiggle room there.
This arc should sound familiar to anyone who has read my post about brain hemispheres and autism: the emergent quality of game rules means that as time goes by, we tend to create and rely on rules over rulings. The leftward drift means that consistency, predictability, organization, and "elegance" grow to prominence. But as these things grow, our language, and the order of our thoughts, fundamentally shifts. When we're thinking in 1e-style "Right Dominant" mode, we see our characters from the inside out, as in: "My character runs into the room, then what happens?" or "My character has a STR 15, what does that mean about them?" When we're thinking in 4e-style "Left Dominant" mode, we see our characters from the outside in, as in, "My fighter gets the attention of the orcs through a show of bravado," or "My character is pretty strong, so they should have an STR 15." We go from being intention-oriented to goal-oriented, from being personal to being global, from being an actor to being a director, from being in-character, to being metagame.
"What I Really Want To Do Is Direct"
So we can see, then, that this leftward drift of mechanics over time also changes the way the game is played. The metaphor gets tuned into a definition. Juliet is no longer the sun, she is now a 14 year old daughter of a man with a feud who lives in Verona. It's perhaps a more accurate depiction, and it certainly matches the plot of the story better, but it's out of character for Romeo to think that way.
The actor playing Romeo must think of Juliet as the sun -- to embody his character, he must find the truth of that metaphor, and run with it. The director of the play, though, does need to think of Juliet in context. The director is the maestro of all that happens on that stage, and so to the director, Juliet is defined, rather than romanticized. Romeo's actor must be very "right-dominant" about the situation: it is personal, local, immediate, and intimate. It is young emotion running high. It is real to this character. The director of the play must be very "left-dominant" about the situation: it is factual, mechanistic, detail-dependent. It is a story to be told to an audience.
And that is the conflict in our games between metagame mechanics and more immersive, organic mechanics. It is that the games we play can be seen in those two directions: as a role to be played, or as a story to be told. Ultimately a preference for one or the other boils down to style: all design is local, and different people think about their characters in different ways. Some folk take readily to metaphor and poetry and can easily see STR 15 as having bulging muscles. Other folks take a longer view and see their character as having bulging muscles, so they give them STR 15. Some people make brilliant actors, but resist looking outside that shell -- this is part of what makes them great actors. Some people make amazing directors, but can't ignore the broader context -- this is part of what makes them great directors.
This matters when you're browsing through games or wondering what to play next or questioning whether or not a given kind of game is up your alley. If you're a director-type, metagame mechanics (and, thus, a lot of indie games) will probably appeal to you. But if you're an actor-type, you aren't necessarily going to take kindly to rules that violate your sense of reality and get the order of thought "backwards." That metaphor is important to you, and if you say that Juliet is the sun, that tells you all you need to know about her to play that character that is in love with her. If at any point you're reminded that Juliet is really just a 14 year old Italian girl, it breaks the reality for you in a way it wouldn't for a director-type. This likely has bigger implications that I'll dig into in future articles, but for now, we'll sit with establishing the reality of this.
So which do you think you are? Do you shun the metagame and like the sound of rolling dice to find out what your character is like? Or do you appreciate the bigger picture, and think that you should be able to play the character that's in your mind with support from the rules? Is Juliet the sun, or is she a human?
View attachment 55932
