Something I've done a whopping lot over the years is pontificate on gaming forums. While the exchanges summarized below are about metagaming over NPC monsters specifically, the subject of metagaming generally is a hot button topic for me. Read on for some modest ranting.
~~~~~~~~~
ForumDood: Whaddaya mean adventurers don’t know all the stats of monsters? Does your world have taverns? Do adventurers stop by taverns to have a drink? Do they talk to other patrons when having said drink? If so, word has just spread in that town of the critters said adventurers have encountered.
 | ||
| "Alright, smart guy, what are its stats?" |
These are, of course, taverns much akin to those in our own history. You know, the ones where travelers swore that they'd seen dragons, hippogriffs, manticores, Amazons with their bow arm breasts cut off ... things like that. Or, ya know, where the travelers blurted out, "It was TEN FEET TALL!!! Fangs like spears! Hide like steel! It ripped apart trees and boulders like they were PAPER!"
Anyway, you just might be more sanguine about the honesty and reliability of your average drunk wanderer, trying to impress the locals, than I am.
For my part, no, of course not: players don't get to use their past knowledge any more than their PCs get to know the formula for gunpowder, who's really behind that death cult or how to rig a Leyden jar.
Beyond that, it's relatively simple: I don't feel the need to be bound by the sourcebook as far as critters go.
ForumDood2: How do you handle situations where the players know something the PCs don't, like a monster that has a weak spot if you hit it between the eyes or something.
Well, for one, GURPS makes provision for such skills. Naturalist, Hidden Lore (Monsters), Occultism, Folklore ... they're all valid choices. The better the roll, the more likely the info is both sound and useful.
For another, I'm not a huge fan of "This is an unstoppable juggernaut except for its left testicle, upon which a good shot will surely slay it" monsters. That smacks too much of the pull-the-right-lever-or-die dungeon fantasy BS I got past decades ago. There are certainly useful strategies to engage certain beasts, and that's as far as that goes. And even that doesn't mean some critters stop being tough -- sure, you made the roll, and you remember reading that giant crocodiles have relatively soft underbellies. Awesome, but that's still a very tough, very tenacious 30' lizard with teeth the size of short swords, slithering on the ground so that it’s not showing you the underbelly, and it's comin' for you ...
ForumDood: Generic D&D-land assumes that critters like orcs and trolls are fairly common.
See, you're metagaming yourself: you presume that there's a certain density of monsters, that they all have unitary stats and abilities, and that these apply to every campaign out there.
I agree that "generic D&D-Land" is a thing, but sorry, that doesn't make any sense. Some lions are a lot tougher and more capable than others, the same way that some humans are a lot flimsier and less capable than others. I see no reason to presume that ANY foe of ANY kind always has 20 HP and always does 1d6+1 damage and always has the exact same move or armor protection, any more than were I to play D&D, I would presume that every enemy fighter I encountered was precisely 2nd level and had 20 HP and carried a bog-standard broadsword and sported AC 6.
ForumDood3: Do you suppose that people who live in an area where lions are a genuine threat to life would know a few things about lion habits, or would they be just as clueless as a zoo-goer like me?
It depends. Do any of us really need to be told that human beings are very good at (a) thinking we know more about a subject than we really do, (b) swallowing the POV of the loudest, or the first, or the cutest, or the most eloquent speaker on a subject over that of acknowledged experts, and (c) blathering our inflated, flawed views to anyone who'll listen, except when they're (d) deliberately lying about the subject to get a rise out of the listeners? How many parents, for instance, have rejected the all-but-unanimous advice of thousands of pediatricians, doctors and researchers on the subject of vaccination, on the strength of the word of the likes of Jenny McCarthy, whose credentials are that her boob job got her into Playboy a couple decades back? (I won't even touch the subject of COVID anti-vaxxers, living in a land of compulsory childhood vaccination, except to observe that they tick off all the boxes above, and that I make zero apologies for schadenfreude every time another one of them wheezes its last from the disease they claim is a liberal media hoax. To the degree their proselytizing emboldens others to follow their despicable example, they are each and every one of them murderers.)
Sure, a veteran herder or livestock farmer on the verge of lion-infested country would probably have a good handle on the habits of lions -- otherwise they wouldn't get to be veteran herders or livestock farmers. Of course, those folks might be real willing to pull the chains of the outlanders ... "Aw, sure, yooze guys got nuttin' t'worry aboot. Them lions be as meek as sheep. Just toss 'em some raw candleroot, ye'll be fine. Where do ye find candleroot, ye ask? Why, happen I got some, right back in th' dryin' shed! What's it worth t'ye?"
I would presume such skills of no one else. A number of other folks might have such skills. Did you pick such skills when you designed your character, by the way? A number would not, beyond the basics of common sense practice for any scary-looking critter lurking about. (I'm minded of the Sudanese NBA player Manute Bol, renowned for having killed a lion with a spear as a goat-herding teenager. Far from being an epic battle, he stated that the lion was old, asleep, and that he'd snuck up on it from behind. Otherwise, he opined, the lion would have eaten him.)
Otherwise? Look. You and I live in a world of mass media and mass education. People in a medieval world didn’t grow up watching Animal Planet, or have access to Wikipedia articles or encyclopedias. "Damn, that’s a huge cat. You think that's one of those lions Farmer McHayseed was telling us about?" "I dunno. He didn't say they had stripes." "Never mind that. Who's got the candleroot?" is the best I’d expect from medieval types.
Make it an owlbear or a gelatinous cube, and “What the hell is THAT?? Mitra save us!” is more likely.
ForumDood4: Big furry cats who hunt. Are they social? Do they have a special diet? Are they different from those OTHER stories of cats? Fuck if we know.
And beyond that, there'll be the guy who is absolutely convinced to the marrow of his bones that he knows All About Lions, based on a dimly remembered conversation he overheard between two panther hunters a few years back. And this is talking about something so basic and mundane as lions. How will even expert naturalists manage to explain rare and bizarre monsters, comprehensively and accurately? ("TEN FEET TALL, fangs like spears ..." yeah, yeah.)
My classic "confirmation bias" adventuring anecdote comes from a combat LARP session. We had a Raise Dead spell, and a second-event newbie (unable, per the system, to have the spell at all before his fifth event) was absolutely convinced that the spell worked a particular way. Me, I was a "magic marshal" of twelve years experience and the Grand Master of the guild that taught the spell, I set him straight.
So I thought, anyway ... yeah, not so much. The guy just wouldn't take my word for it. Soon three other veteran magic marshals joined the conversation, each of whom had ten years or more experience teaching and adjudicating the system. One of those marshals had invented the magic rules then in use. Another was the guy who'd invented the previous magic system the then-current system had replaced. The third helpfully had a pamphlet of the official rules on his person.
The newbie just didn't care -- he was just one of those types who Knew What He Knew and no one could ever tell him any different -- and wound up being escorted off the event site when he started throwing punches.
And guys like that can be found around gaming tables all over the land.
No comments:
Post a Comment