The Information Game, Part One: Metagaming

So maybe you only need that title to know why I took a bit of time off. I hate to keep putting bombast and gravitas and such into these topics, but this is another one I'd kind of just think about it and go "Fuck." out loud. For those of you who might be really new to gaming, metagaming is using knowledge that you wouldn't necessarily have in character. It can be as devious as stealing your GM's notes and reading ahead to make all the right choices, or as simple as remembering what a monster's weaknesses or powers are when your character would really have no idea. Something so simple has deep, deep roots so don't be surprised if we have several posts on metagaming and information in games.

In my experience, a lot of gamers are abjectly terrified of metagaming, like it's the worst thing you can do. I mean, obviously it's not great. Willful metagaming is irritating at best and nasty at worst. Accidental metagaming is just...something that happens. I've heard some ridiculous stories of people going out of their way to avoid it, though. One friend of mine(you know who you are) had an online game full of players so terrified of metagaming that they'd routinely ignore deliberately placed in-character information. I mean, they're at someone's mansion and they hear loud scratching and banging coming from the cellar, and it's locked with heavy chains, and they're telling this friend of mine he's "metagaming" for wanting to investigate. I mean this guy literally had ghouls or something in his basement and they're all like WE HAVE NO REASON TO DISTRUST HIM. It's like the doctor from Dead Alive with the blatant Nazi uniform and thick German accent. What a nice man, let's have him give you that flu shot. You have no reason to distrust him.

Before we go into me giving advice about this concept,  I want to go into why this kind of fear happens. The first is a common but bad habit GMs can get into where they want to drop a clue or a hint but don't want the players to investigate yet. As a side note, you should know not to do this. You never want the player to think "Okay fine, he doesn't want us to do it yet". Ideally the clue should lead to an investigation they may or may not have the time to perform, or a dead end. So, that happens and when the player wants to look into it they're told "You have no reason to do that". It's the final defense phrase of the inept. This makes people second guess what ostensibly in-character information means for their motivations, and the whole process grows artificial and awkward.

The second major reason happens way more often in online games, but it's still pretty prevalent everywhere. It's natural in real life to simply have a feeling about a situation or person. You're not always right, but there's a lot more analysis going on in your head than the conscious kind sometimes. You read a situation and act accordingly. Sometimes you're going off previous knowledge. Three men standing around the street corner at night might not be a big deal, but THOSE men on THAT corner are probably drug dealers. You get the point. In a PNP game it's harder to "read" a situation and even tougher to justify it when you have. It's also next to impossible to define or defend your character's past experiences. A lot of characters don't even have them. So, arguments happen. Sense Motive gets thrown around, with the proviso that "If you fail, you believe him.". Situations often get robbed of their minute details in an argument, when the details are probably what guided the offending decision.

There's also the fact that sometimes, we're reading the situation in terms of being a story. This is broadly called Genre Savvy, knowledge of how stories function in terms of genre. Basically, we make the right call or decision based on what significance there is to the story, which is not anything the character himself would have knowledge of. If you don't know what I mean, imagine a party walking into Agrabah before the events of Aladdin have taken place. Even if they didn't catch Jafar in the act of hypnotising the Sultan, they'd peg him as the bad guy. Why? He's slick, he's wearing black and red, he's got a snake staff and he's the only motherfucker in the whole movie with an accent.

But like I said before, sometimes genre is shorthand. So yes, in those situations you're COUNTING on people to metagame. You wanted them to do it. Your ideal situation is for them to get a bad feeling about the villain so they investigate or position themselves against him. Technically, that's metagaming.

Finally, a special note goes to monster weaknesses. I don't feel this is something you can get around because of the nature of preparation. Essentially, games count on a certain amount of preparation when designing challenges. Being prepared means some amount of knowledge of weaknesses or powers, on some level. Basically, telling a player "You don't know anything about that" means you're either robbing him of his ability to prepare or adding a "tax" of knowledge skills. With all the rolling he'd need to know things about monsters, the game can get bogged down quick. It's also pretty shitty to look at someone who spent a lot of gold on various weapons of various enchantments and materials and tell him with total seriousness that he has no idea when to use them. It herds him toward a decision of not even bothering and just dumping all of his gold into mechanical effectiveness. Trust me, you didn't want that. You don't want the PCs feeling like preparation is an impossible task, because that will make the game less fun for everyone.

This means the first piece of advice is to let people try to remember things about monsters. Don't let them go looking at the book until the thing is dead. In fact, don't be THAT GUY and try to look up the stats of everything the GM is using. As a GM, occasionally toss them weird monsters to shake things up, but remember not to make the idea of preparation worthless. Let people use knowledge skills to confirm ideas about monster knowledge, but don't require them. This is especially true if the players have several levels or karma under their belt when the game starts. Nobody is "fresh" in this situation(or as Sam would call them, pukes straight from the farm) but nobody wants to define their character's whole history. In fact, even if they did, nobody would want to read that. There's even a famous story about a guy who wrote a character background so long that A: Nobody in their right mind would read it, and B: He could justify knowledge of anything. Note that I don't recommend you do basically anything Old Man Henderson's player did.

The second piece of advice is to limit accidental metagaming. If it's not something the characters would know, don't tell the players. Be reasonable and try to keep this to plot details so the mechanics don't get bogged down. This way players can count on details they've been told, or gleaned, or had a feeling about to be in character. They can naturally act on it. If you use a puzzle and someone's seen it before, don't complain or try to rule over what they would logically know. In fact, we'll get into this at a later date but don't ever lord over knowledge with an iron fist. Your primary goal is to make the flow of information feel as natural as possible. This will remove most unwanted metagaming.

Basically, chill the fuck out. Every time you want to argue and your opening statement has the words "logically" or "reason" in it, I want you to count to ten and think about if you should really bog the game down with this. Damaging metagaming does happen, but in my experience pointless arguing happens way more often.

So, I told you what to do, but not really how to do it. Well, remember when you're describing something, you're describing what the characters see and not necessarily the objective truth. This has the potential to be an excellent tool. We'll use Vampire: The Masquerade as an example. Picture a mortal, or any character being introduced newly into the world of darkness. In pure mechanical terms, he watches a toreador use celerity 5 to escape an encounter with a hunter. You have a few options when describing this scene.

You could just flatly tell them what's happening. The toreador moves real fast out the door. This is acceptable when the players are used to this sort of thing or if the obscuring of knowledge isn't important. Please note that it's not always important to obscure knowledge.

Or you could describe what their human eyes see. There's a blur of motion around the willowy guy in the expensive clothes, and then he's simply gone. The night club's door is swinging wildly on its hinges, maybe even broken. This does two things. First is that someone who knows the system can speculate on what happened but won't be sure. He'll have a hunch that can be interpreted as a feeling, but he won't truly be sure of what happened. People new to the system are left to wonder and are entirely unable to metagame since you didn't use the name of a power.

Obviously, you need to use kid gloves with this. Try not to use a description that implies something radically different than the truth happened. Don't use this to try and deliberately "trick" the players. It DOES mean that they'll never guess the truth, but it also means they're reliant on you to give them more clues. That sort of leading around by the nose gets really old. You should also either drop this or use repeated/familiar descriptions as the players get close to the truth. Keeping up the mystery ad infinitum gets old.

But really, that's the through-line to all of this advice: Don't worry about it so much. Metagaming is bound to happen, and constantly making a huge deal out of it when it's not necessarily an issue will just slow the game down. In my experience, GMs who desire total control over their game often question motivations readily. Remember this is a collaborative effort to tell a story, not you presenting something untouchable for someone else's enjoyment. Try to keep your complaining to willful, repeated or very damaging examples of metagaming.

Next time we talk about another sort of information restriction and control.