Genre Police: The People Game

One of the things I love about RPGs is the game you play when you aren’t playing them. 

You know the one? 

Where you spend time between sessions thinking about what happened and what might happen next. Where you talk to others and share your game experiences. Where the world sort of is paused but you’re analysing, thinking about character, or how cool something was. 

As an eternal DM, usually I’m thinking about what NPCs and scenes might come up and the repercussions of actions taken by various PCs. But I’ve done it as a player and seen it happen. Some of the players for games I run meet to discuss conspiracy theories and plots that are happening in games they play in. Others send me feedback on how they think their character is evolving. And I’m often really glad that this is my job so I don’t have to feel guilty about diving back into those worlds at 10 on a Thursday morning when I should be doing the washing up or whatever. It’s sort of living in the meta of the game. Which I think is honestly a healthy habit. 

Recently, I had a few moments happen in game where I benefited from an awareness of the discourse around a game as well as the knowledge of playing in it, so I’m going to take a look at a few ways you can use ‘good meta’ in your games in order to help the game run.

Stepping back

It’s really important that we occasionally take a step back from the game as a universe we inhabit as players and GMs and look at it as both a game and a narrative. It can help you to unblock a scene if we take a breath and look at how it is serving a narrative. 

For example, in one of my Vampire games, a pack of Sabbat vampires have been tasked with poisoning another vampire’s food supply. It’s a complex plan with a lot of steps and the characters themselves are best described as semi-functional maniacs with disparate goals. It’s not easy for them to work together and the players are doing extra work in order to keep them at a table with each other. 

It sometimes results in difficult ‘team meeting’ scenes where the players are supposed to be progressing the scheme but the communication between the characters can work against that. Eventually realising this, I took a moment to jump out of the ‘character’ style of play and into the meta by saying the players ‘I’m aware that this meeting is going to progress in this awkward style but so you can all feel like we are getting somewhere, would we like to make the plan as players so something gets done and then we can zoom back into characters afterwards?’ and there was an audible release of tension in the room as players went into ‘planning with their friends mode’ without feeling like they couldn’t show vulnerability in a room full of predators. 

Of course, we went back to that tension as soon as a plan had been decided on but I realised that we’d been so tied to the reality of the game from the perspective of characters, we’d lost sight of the idea that we were also playing a game that we wanted to have fun at. The team meetings continue to be amazing character studies in awkward power psychopathic power plays. But now the players also felt like they had a plan. And it’s started to come together, moving quickly compared to earlier sessions. 

It’s this stepping back that allowed us to move forward. So I’d suggest occasionally looking at your play group and asking ‘could we occasionally move into this meta space to discuss things?’. 

Connecting with your players in a session and making a framing choice but explaining what you are attempting to accomplish is really useful. Keeping that meta conversation going. 

Thinking about the game as a thing you are doing to together means we find ways to move towards a common goal or fun. Rather than the players assuming that it just your concern.

Being Careful

I recently also made a massive mistake. Looking back I should have seen it coming. I was aware of players and their playstyles, as well as where my GMing can cause trouble. Yet I wasn’t looking at the meta enough, the parts of the game that don’t happen inside the game – the people you play with. First, some backstory.

I have a bit of a reputation as a GM as a person who imposes time-sensitive parts to my world, players can’t just sit around and expect the world to do nothing, they have to keep pace. But also I have a reputation for hiding important pieces of world lore in places the players have to ask about. I won’t just hand them info, I reward asking about the world. 

Now I write it down like this, I think the problem is obvious. These two things existing create a tension – do we actually follow the thing we are doing and commit before disaster strikes, or do we wait around and do research so we are better armed? Players sometimes struggle with doing downtime because it might cost them. I’ve been working to shave off the edges of this without losing some of the things that appeal to players. Normally it isn’t too much of a problem. Players tend to decide they are going to be ‘mission focused’ or ‘lore hound’ types and stick with it.

But I messed up. I made the question of focus versus research into a thing IN-GAME. The characters had to choose between escaping a dungeon in time to be effective in stopping a current threat or to learn about the bigger bad by staying and studying things in that dungeon. And this question didn’t just hit the characters but actively challenged the two conflicting playstyles and forced the group to make a choice. 

Needless to say disagreements ensued that got out of hand. I’d not looked deeply into the conversation around the game, my style and how that affected players making choices. 

We don’t GM in a vacuum. And I’d forgotten that. 

All of our decisions about how we pitch a game are about the context of the group we find ourselves running, the way they approach narrative and the way those things conflict. To ignore that level of meta is to find ourselves in a situation that can prove calamitous.

As I write this article, I’m now looking forward to fixing my mistakes with that group – we haven’t played since things got a little tense, but I know things went wrong and how I can make things better. And I’m taking this lesson to my others groups too, examining how my conflicting ways of delivering a game can be problematic. So I hope to improve, even this far into gaming. I hope you to are able to occasionally look into the meta of what is happening and find a way to make your experience even better!