The Information Game, Part Two: Cooperation and Antagonism

When I began this blog I figured, I wouldn't put it on a schedule. I'd just post whenever I wrote an article. Well, shortly after I decided that, I wrote six posts in two days. There went that plan. So, since I didn't want to overload people with reading all at once, I went with plan B: I post one a week at most. We're still not on a strict schedule really, but this way nobody's ever assaulted with a bunch of shit. I find that there's far more chance someone will read something if it's concise, or if it's spaced out fairly. I also usually know what I want to say immediately, so when a topic comes up, the whole post is often already in my head. So this means most of the time I've been sitting on an unpublished post for a while, sometimes up to a month.

I said all that so you'd know what it means when I say it's 6am on Sunday morning as I write this. It's not procrastination. I've been thinking about this part ever since I posted the last one. This is one of my pet peeves, but it's really hard to put it into words. Today we're talking about information control in gaming, but more specifically, two different game types and their different methods.

So before I explain what the hell I mean by that, I can go into the peevy part of all this. I'm dead certain this has happened to everyone: You figure something out in the game you're playing and you're either told "You don't know that" or get accused of metagaming. This is due to a GM's attempt at information control, and there's a lot of reasons they'd want to do this, depending on the game type they're running. Usually, this is a form of advantage protection.

Okay, what the hell is Mouse talking about THIS time? While this concept crops up more in supernatural, Lovecraftian, or social intrigue games, it can happen everywhere. Everything in gaming has some list of advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes not being widely understood or known is on that list. It can be heavily implied like in most White Wolf games, or directly stated such as when you're discussing the Scorpion clan in Legend of the Five Rings, or even just ninja or secret service agencies. So basically the GM sees a player being really laissez-faire about knowledge of something and naturally feels he needs to put a stop to it. After all, the setting book says most people don't think <Insert Supernatural Monster>s are real, so your character has no reason to either.

Let's be clear, I fucking hate that.

I'll explain why momentarily. There are two general types of games when it comes to information control. I initially wanted to call them PVE(Player Vs. Enemy) and PVP(Player Vs. Player) but that's not exactly what they are. The first type is a traditional cooperative game, where the group is working together and is intended to work together. This is most games. The other game I struggled to name, since most things I can call it are either nondescriptive or negative. Either way, an antagonistic game is one where the players might work together, but more often than not need to keep a personal agenda in mind or support a clan, guild or group before the "party". A lot of White Wolf games are presented with this as an option, and nearly all LARPs in existence also work like this. It's not better or worse than a traditional cooperative game, but it's certainly different. Fewer people like this style of game, to be sure.

Anyway, the GM(or in the case of a LARP, Staff) has to think in different terms when they're running these games. In case you hadn't already guessed, Advantage Protection is far more important in an antagonistic game. There are players who may be relying on this sort of thing to stay alive or to gain ground in a situation. Like I said last week, the best way to eliminate metagaming is to simply not provide the information, but you may have to put your foot down in an antagonistic game because of players sneaking through information they shouldn't be looking at or hearing about events their character simply wasn't at. They may not even mean to do it: A lot of accidental metagaming happens at a LARP. There's also going to be a lot of characters keeping secrets, either to protect themselves or just because it's a lot of fun and everyone else is doing it. This is their prerogative, and the GM ought to protect them from people trying to gain some sort of OOC advantage.

So information is very important in a game where the players aren't necessarily a cooperative group and GMs must sometimes make heavy use of direct obfuscation(as I mentioned last week) or simply rooting out metagaming.

Do you know where it's NOT important to do these things?

Cooperative games have a much lower need for this sort of stuff. Sometimes a player will have a secretive concept that requires a little bit of help from the GM, like a Scorpion Clan wu-jen, or a Tzimisce masquerading as a Nosferatu because the Black Hand is after him. You know. For some friendly questions. Otherwise, the same constant policing of information necessary in an antagonistic game becomes a nonsensical, tiresome exercise in slowing the game down. It's more Iron Fist stuff, and often a very lazy way to 'enforce' a mystery without putting any work in to actually create one.

Why do I say nonsensical? Well, it's really hard to justify a character's suspicion or opinion when we know the truth. "My guy just thinks werewolves exist, so he carries around a silver knife." sounds like(and even probably is) a lame attempt at metagaming when it's a LARP player talking. Policing this is illogical but necessary to protect the werewolf players. Put aside the fact that the werewolf players don't need any fucking protection if we're talking about Classic World of Darkness.

It's illogical because, when you're a supernatural creature, it's absurd to think you're the only one. I mean, say you're a werewolf, and you KNOW these nasty spirits called Banes exist, and you KNOW they can crawl into a human and fuck them up, so it's STUPID to say this character has no idea vampires exist. Like he doesn't have an inkling. This is where my blood boils because I feel someone's hand pointlessly wrapping around my character's brain. I'm not removing anyone's advantage with forming my own opinions because a single person controls all of the game's antagonists, unlike that other type of game.

It's true that most settings say things like "most people don't know about this" and it could be true(particularly with organizations) that you may need to require some sort of background information or knowledge skill. Mostly though, there's a core difference between cooperative and antagonistic games that shatters the need for this line of thought. In a cooperative game, the players are inarguably the exception. The player can believe whatever he wants or make whatever kind of reasonable action or preparation he'd like. As I already said, the GM has no need of advantage protection. In an antagonistic game, the player is not necessarily the exception. They are in many ways, but it has to be tempered with advantage protection, and the two different types of game really shouldn't be confused.

But you want something to be a mystery for god damn once, because everyone always immediately knows what's going on.

Fair. First off, this is just something that happens when you're consistently gaming with people who have been at this for ten to fifteen years. That's most of our dear readers. Your only option is the method I mentioned last week, where you don't give all the information. Yeah, it can feel dirty, but most people I know really appreciate being asked to figure something out. Just be sure to let them figure it out, and don't just stonewall attempts to find out more. It doesn't have to be instant gratification, but keeping something a mystery by simply saying "You have no reason to think that" or repeating "no, no no no" is a non-option. Neither is an OOC implication that they'll find out later.

That doesn't mean you should never say no. However, you really should figure out some sort of reward for making a good skill check. Some sort of small clue can be the bone they needed thrown at them to feel good about their attempts, even if it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Even then, giving them something really small can turn into a list of clues that slowly points at what's really going on. Maybe it's just me, but I fucking love this kind of thing. I love slowly figuring something out, and I'm perfectly okay with not being directly told what's going on at first in OOC or blunt terms.

You do have to be careful, though. You can't give wildly strange descriptions of events or obfuscate absolutely everything. Someone who moves faster than light can absolutely look like they're teleporting, but if the players are in a FIGHT with that person, you might have to tell them what's going on simply for mechanical sake. Basically, you have to really adapt your efforts to the situation at hand and I can't just tell you how to do that. You have to learn it. Just remember the flow of information is natural as possible when you refuse to discuss what's going on frankly and OOCly until it's no longer relevant. Let the players brainstorm, but don't jump in yourself with objective information. It's not out of suspicion or some assumption that all players are terrible. It's because nobody really means to metagame, most of the time.

I really don't like pointing at Five Nights at Freddy's for anything anymore. I love the franchise, but there's a lot of baggage now. The games really aren't very good, and the fandom is...well, if there were a top five shitty fandoms, FNAF is certainly on the list along with Homestuck and probably even Undertale.

But.

If you want an example of decent information control, look into the story of the games and where hints are dropped. The story, what's really going on slowly builds and comes into focus over the course of the five games. In one we find a boy's teddy bear is talking to him and we assume something supernatural is happening. In the next game, we find a secret office that holds a "whammy" reveal: A copy of the bear, a walkie talkie...and cameras positioned all over the boy's home. This sort of thing can be very easy to put into your game, and done well it can feel very cool.