Out-of-character/metagame knowledge

[Lanefan]

When we put being a jerk on the spectrum of metagaming, then we're effectively saying that there's a little bit of that end of the spectrum the bleeds through the rest -- that metagaming is at least associated with being a jerk and cheating and whathaveyou. I find that this poisons discussion.

I don't see this as poisoning discussion at all, rather - given that in my eyes some of the listed-upthread forms of metagaming take a player well into the "jerk" spectrum - it merely serves to clarify it.

Some others, however, I don't see as metagaming so much as just playing the game. Knowing you're playing through a module, for instance, or even what module it is, isn't really metagaming; but having and using prior foreknowledge of that module in play (e.g. knowing its secrets via having read, played, or run it before and acting on that knowledge) is metagaming and IMO verges on (or is) cheating.

Oftentimes before running a canned module I'll ask the players if they've hit it before, and if someone has then I'll go to plan B. Other times I'll run something they haven't seen in ages and rely on faulty memory and-or change it up just enough to make a difference.

I'm also pretty hard-line on trying to keep player knowledge and character knowledge the same where-when I can, in full realization that such is not always possible and that sometimes one will know more than the other in either direction.

 

[James Gasik]

Back in 4e, we had the reverse of this problem a lot. I was involved in the Living Forgotten Realms scene, and we'd often get new players who wanted to join. Of course, there were only so many low level adventures, and you needed to fill tables, so you'd have instances where people would go on the same adventure two or three times.

So it became an effort to NOT metagame, even when you knew there was a skill challenge or b.s. fight about to happen. The worse was this adventure called, if memory serves "The Black Knight of Cormyr". There's a missing child and this guy in black armor running around with a flaming helmet who everyone is sure is responsible. He sets up a battle in advance on difficult terrain, and boasts how he will crush us all. One tough fight later, he's dead, and we find his journal, where it inexplicably says he was a good guy all along, trying to fight the real villains, the Cult of Cyric or something, but nobody believed him because he had a cursed helmet.

So the adventure makes you feel bad for killing someone that is set up to be a villain, and not once is there a moment where you go "maybe he's not?". I mean the guy even gives a villain speech when you encounter him! This was very frustrating (but the adventure gave out a good quest reward, I think, which is why it kept getting run), and invariably, the new player would be shocked while we're all biting our tongues to keep out damn mouths shut- and then gripe that we could have warned them when they murdered the guy!

 

[Lanefan]

I see a connection between these statements and @Manbearcat's "First Rule of Planchette Club". Some RPGs seem a bit hesitant to come out and state their premises/rules. For instance, the game text might say that your job as a player is to portray your PC, but then the game play that is presented depends upon not conflicting with other PCs, or not splitting the party, or following the GM-presented premise, even when that means not faithfully portraying your PC.

The "problem" in these cases is unclear/confused rules text.

And in mixed or crossed expectations between any of the game itself, the GM, and-or the player(s).

For my own part I put faithful portrayal of character above all else and expect-hope the other players will do likewise; and if that means splitting the party or whatever then that's what's gonna happen.

What I'm about to post comes out of a fair bit of thinking about the topic, but is nevertheless new in my attempt to actually write it down, and so at this stage remains fairly conjectural.

I think that most RPGing needs to focus on non-typical facets of life. Even the Pendragon/Prince Valiant example, which takes knights errants who by definition live quest- and joust-filled lives as its protagonists, needs to gloss over the polishing of armour, tedious dealings with squires, weeks of riding through the enchanted forest before arriving at the strange castle, etc. This requires at least one participant to make editing-type decisions about the fiction - what aspects of setting, what aspects of situation, what aspects of protagonist decision-making (motivation and/or action), are foregrounded?

This is going to be both system dependent and table dependent.

Some systems want to delve into minutae more than others e.g. a system that expects and demands that gear and encumbrance be tracked to a T vs a system that doesn't worry about these things.

For some tables the in-setting minutae is the game at least some of the time - they want to know a lot of detail about that enchanted forest they're riding through, for example, along with each day's weather and anything interesting seen or met along the way. They want to take the time to explore each hallway and search each room. Etc.

And for some, and I fall squarely into this camp, that greater level of detail is desired because it allows and encourages a greater degree of interaction with the setting - which is what I want - which can and sometimes will include left-turning e.g. in this case never getting to the strange castle because something else caught our attention on the way and we followed up on that instead.

So while I somewhat agree that an RPG should focus on the non-typical aspects of life I don't think those typical aspects should be overlooked or forgotten; nor should it be forgotten that not every player or GM is going to define typical and non-typical the same way. For example a long-time player might not care about polishing armour or riding through an enchanted forest because it's all old hat but for a new player those "typical" things might be highly engaging as they're both new and not something said player gets to do in real life.

 

[pemerton]

So it became an effort to NOT metagame, even when you knew there was a skill challenge or b.s. fight about to happen. The worse was this adventure called, if memory serves "The Black Knight of Cormyr". There's a missing child and this guy in black armor running around with a flaming helmet who everyone is sure is responsible. He sets up a battle in advance on difficult terrain, and boasts how he will crush us all. One tough fight later, he's dead, and we find his journal, where it inexplicably says he was a good guy all along, trying to fight the real villains, the Cult of Cyric or something, but nobody believed him because he had a cursed helmet.

So the adventure makes you feel bad for killing someone that is set up to be a villain, and not once is there a moment where you go "maybe he's not?". I mean the guy even gives a villain speech when you encounter him! This was very frustrating (but the adventure gave out a good quest reward, I think, which is why it kept getting run), and invariably, the new player would be shocked while we're all biting our tongues to keep out damn mouths shut- and then gripe that we could have warned them when they murdered the guy!

There are two things I don't like about the sound of that adventure.

One, it sounds like a railroad - "you knew there was a skill challenge or fight about to happen". That is, it sounds like the sequence of significant events was pre-scripted.

Second, it sounds like it features my least-favourite thing in scenario design, namely, using the GM's privilege of control over backstory to make the players (and/or their PCs) look like fools. It baffles me that this is so popular in published modules, when it is so obviously cheap and abusive of the players' metagame-driven decisions to go along with the GM's scenaio.

 

[James Gasik]

Oh yeah, these were short adventures intended to be run in a couple of hours, so they weren't usually very free-form. You were on a railroad, though you usually had a little freedom to tackle objectives, like, there's three leads, take them in any order you want, you're eventually going to end up in the final encounter, with maybe a few changes in difficulty based on your decisions/success at the skill challenge.

And yeah, making the players look like idiots when they had no reason to know otherwise is pretty shabby, but while this was frustrating, there were only a few LFR modules I truly despised- it's hard to write an adventure for an "average party" when there was no telling who or what would belly up to the table.

And as I recall, the people who kept LFR going were volunteers, not paid staff.

For an example of a really bad scenario, "Dancing Shadows" has this big fight with a Black Dragon. When it gets low on hit points, the adventure says it dives into the swamp and escapes (it rejoins it's mate and gets some hit points back for the final battle).

I had it slowed reducing it's speed to like 20 ft. when the DM announced "the dragon swims away" and I was like, wait, what now? "That's what the adventure says, it gets away."

Very frustrating. I ran into something similar in 5e Adventure League, where an enemy flees under cover of darkness, as if the writer forgot Warlocks with Devil's Sight and 250' range Eldritch Blasts were a thing!

 

[pemerton]

For an example of a really bad scenario, "Dancing Shadows" has this big fight with a Black Dragon. When it gets low on hit points, the adventure says it dives into the swamp and escapes (it rejoins it's mate and gets some hit points back for the final battle).

I had it slowed reducing it's speed to like 20 ft. when the DM announced "the dragon swims away" and I was like, wait, what now? "That's what the adventure says, it gets away."

Very frustrating. I ran into something similar in 5e Adventure League, where an enemy flees under cover of darkness, as if the writer forgot Warlocks with Devil's Sight and 250' range Eldritch Blasts were a thing!

These would be examples of circumstances which, to work in play, require players acting on metagame knowledge - ie having their PCs let the NPC get away with it because that's what the adventure says.

@hawkeyefan has posted about something similar to this in his 5e play experiences.

 

[James Gasik]

I'll have to look those posts up, suffering is more bearable when it's shared. : )

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

These would be examples of circumstances which, to work in play, require players acting on metagame knowledge - ie having their PCs let the NPC get away with it because that's what the adventure says.

@hawkeyefan has posted about something similar to this in his 5e play experiences.

But that has nothing to do with 5e, or particular RPGs in general.

It's a feature (bug) of running published adventures.

For that matter, unwritten norms that exist in D&D (such as "don't split the party apart") aren't rules for a reason- because not all table play that way. Some tables are perfectly happy splitting the party apart! That was, in fact, somewhat common in the 70s and 80s.

The reason it has developed into more of a norm is just because of the desire to keep most of the table engage most of the time; it has nothing to do with meta-gaming.

For that matter, the rise of the norm against PvP likely mirrors the rise in people choosing to play their characters longer. When D&D had more meat-grindery features, it was less of a taboo because people were less attached to a single character that they might be playing for six months ... or six years. On the other hand, games that are single-shots, or rarely played as "campaigns" (or are explicitly about the PvP, like Paranoia) do not have the same norms regarding PvP. All that said, there are still table that don't use that norm.

Putting all of this in terms of "metagaming," if you're actually looking at "framing," seem ... weird. IMO.

 

[Hand of Evil]

It is 'role' playing, experience is reward for it, players that go outside their characters should not be rewarded for it. GMs know what the players are doing and have just got lazy with. This is not wrong if the table is having fun but once it causes issues, the GM should stop rewarding bad behavior.

 

[hawkeyefan]

But that has nothing to do with 5e, or particular RPGs in general.

It's a feature (bug) of running published adventures.

The examples from my play that @pemerton cites are from my 5e game. They are not from material that was published.

One involved a hag escaping from a battle essentially because she “was supposed” to get away so we could face her again later. The second involved my use of my Ranger’s Folk Hero background feature to avoid a conflict and the GM essentially bypassing it to ensure a conflict happened.

I would say that the 5e system and general approach were very much a part of the reason why these things happened. Part of that is the requirement of prepared material. You say “published” but I’d say “prepared” is more fitting. In both cases, the GM was essentially trying to preserve what he’d prepared.

I’d also attribute the fuzziness of certain rules/processes as a factor. How exactly does the Folk Hero background ability work? Here’s the text:

Feature: Rustic Hospitality
Since you come from the ranks of the common folk, you fit in among them with ease. You can find a place to hide, rest, or recuperate among other commoners, unless you have shown yourself to be a danger to them. They will shield you from the law or anyone else searching for you, though they will not risk their lives for you.

Seems to me like it should just work. And it did… until our PCs woke in the morning to find the farmhouse they’d taken shelter in was surrounded by the duke’s men. How did that happen? The GM admitted to doing this because he felt no conflict was “too easy” and he thought a showdown with the duke’s men from inside a surrounded farmhouse would be an exciting scene (he mentioned the final scene of “Young Guns” as coming to mind).

Nothing he did here was against the rules or processes of the game. That’s what I found frustrating. No checks or dice rolls… just the GM deciding “this is what’s going to happen”. And while I think that may be fine at times, especially in establishing a scene or initiating a scenario, doing it in response to a player move and basically rendering that move pointless seems questionable. I think many folks would be at least somewhat frustrated by that.

And although you are correct that this can happen in games besides 5e, there are also games where it would not happen. Where the mechanics and processes are designed to avoid such things, where they are sufficiently player facing so that the results of play are clear. Where the principles of play are clearly stated and would actively discourage this kind of decision. Such games actively discourage that kind of thing, and make it clear as day to the players that the GM went against the principles of play.