Role-Playing Games | 

   The problem with metaplots is actually very simple:

   I did not buy your game to hear about *YOUR* lame characters. I bought it so me and my players could tell stories about *OUR* heroic and cool characters. Even if your characters weren't objectively lame, we still wouldn't care about them, because they're *not our characters*.

Designer's characters = LAME
Player's characters = COOL

   Game designers with a tendency to write metaplots should write that on the wall above their computers.

   Metaplots are also a vain and lazy conceit.

   Vain, because they're based on the idea that you, the game designer, are so incredibly cool that you can make other people want to hear stories about your characters. You cannot. We do not. "Tell me about your character and DIE!", as the cartoon in White Wolf's Subsidiaries book says, and yet they don't take their own advice, and don't understand when people get irritated with them.

   Lazy, because they allow you to avoid having to do any of the hard work of thinking about consequences in module design, or how to incorporate diverse PCs into the game. It's so much easier to have a super-powerful NPC cause all the problems and another super-powerful NPC clean them all up, with the PCs as mere tourists. Once you put in a metaplot, the players *cannot* be allowed off the metaplot railroad, because if they do derail, no further modules are of any use to them.

   So when I get a metaplot-tainted game, I have to throw a good chunk of it out, because it's full of lame stuff about your characters. I basically never touch metaplot-infested modules, because they're useless to me. White Wolf has more or less guaranteed that they'll sell me the core book and maybe a player's book for each line, and nothing else. Ever. Because every line is based on a metaplot.

   The way I, and most gamers, really like to get a game is with the setting and some very static NPCs described in a perfect moment frozen in time. The key point there is "static NPCs". Your NPCs do not normally get to change the world. Only the GM's NPCs and the PCs get to change the world.

   If you want to put that stuff in a module, fine. Describe the potential consequences for various PC responses. That's good stuff.

   If you want to have a series of modules, you have to tread carefully, and make sure your links work even if the PCs did something very different. But as long as the fact that it's a sequel is clearly labelled, that's okay.

   You should *not* be having the events of one module series affect any other modules, because the GM and players may not have run that module, or may have resolved it completely differently.

   Whether or not game designers have a lot of "frustrated novelist" in them doesn't really matter. But if you're perpetrating a metaplot, stick to writing novels. Detailed, author-created characters and rigid plots work great in novels, because there's no players interfering. Be happy with your novel-writing career. Don't inflict it on games.

   Not all metaplots are huge "change the world" events. If you're in a lower-powered game, then the metaplot is also lower-powered. Instead of changing the world, the metaplot changes the city. Or your apartment building.

   If you can't do anything about it, then there's no point in wasting very much space on it.

   For example, suppose you have an RPG about rat catchers in medieval Paris. The political changes going on at the top of society are completely irrelevant to the PCs, so they can be summarized in a few lines, saying "King Louis the Nth ascends the throne in XXX A.D." (if it's a WW product, it probably really does say "XXX A.D.") But the characters *can* influence the Rat-Catchers Guild and the Beggars Guild, and so the guild politics need to be laid out.

   A non-metaplot game will just describe the guild politics and let the players get involved however they want.

   A metaplot-infested game will have a specific political arc, with Little Timmy the Beggar being kicked out of the B.G., rescued by the PCs, diverse alarums ensue, and Little Timmy becomes the new Guildmaster of the Rat-Catchers Guild after the old Guildmaster chokes on a fried rat. Then all the future supplements will depend explicitly on Little Timmy's benevolent but naive hand guiding the R.C.G.. Good luck using any of that if the players drowned Little Timmy for his tin begging cup and the 2cp inside, burned the B.G. to the ground, and seized control of the R.C.G. with help from the Seamstresses Guild.

   On the gripping hand, most people don't play in that low-level a game... Almost every published RPG is primarily about the PCs playing heroes (or rarely villains) who may start at lower-middle range, but are capable of becoming more powerful, reaching the top of society, and really changing the entire world.

Last modified: 2003Jan29
Created