Frank's talked about the whole "no-one knows how this came to be/what he wants/what's happening here!" thing in games and how that's terrible, but I can't really think of a way to find the various times it's come up with the search.
I don't know if people here are familiar with Mortasheen, but the guy who created the setting talked about one of the races, shades, on tumblr today and he used the "Nobody knows!" thing in their origin-
It may have been a system left over from a civilization trying to rebuild a then-dead world. Or maybe invading aliens abandoned their workforce. Maybe the city itself is a monster and Shades are its immune system, or it was just lonely one day and wanted to be lived in, eons before the mutants and monsters showed up. Nobody knows!
Frank, could you go into this sort of thing a bit more and why designers shouldn't do this, or what they absolutely must do if they want to be stubborn and allow people to make the decision for their own game on these sort of things?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
First of all, it's ok for players to have things that nobody knows, the problem is for GMs.
The biggest problem is consistency. If you expect people to play your games with multiple groups, different writers to work on your game or to publish follow-ups, then having multiple possibilities means that whenever someone chooses one possibility as the right one, he's at risk of not playing in the same world as other groups.
Furthermore, even if the GM is trying to keep all possibilities open, there might be problems that comes up just because of a small detail and that forces the GM to choose whether one possibility is true or not.
So in my opinion, if you're just writing this up for your own campaign, in order to keep your options open, it's fine (just make sure that it's not trivial to tell that one possibility is right or wrong, if you say "nobody know if he's good or evil" and anyone with a "detect good/evil" spell can find it out, this will be a bit ridiculous).
But if you want other groups to share the same world as yours, you'll have to make sure that there is absolutely no way to know and that it will never ever come up in the game until you need it.
Seems to me any "it's a mystery" backstory is a metaplot dead end. Because groups will come up with their own solutions, and at that point answering anything as canon will require either taking into account every one of your own suggested possibilities, or more importantly, will invalidate the game world, and thus really discourage players from purchasing supplements.
Old vampire is an excellent example of why it's bad. First, the official answers to the game's mysteries were seriously terrible more often than not. Second, they usually were so out of fucking left field that they were rarely compatible with anything that a normal gaming group would have been running. As a result, significant amounts of the fanbase ignored the metaplot.
TheFlatline is right, but that just means you can't have both mysteries and a metaplot that cares what the answers to those mysteries are. Which shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.
But considering that game-wide metaplots are far less popular these days than in the 90s, and for good reason, that isn't much of an argument against mysteries. Overall, they don't do any harm, as long as you have an ounce of sense about where you put them -i.e not in the origin story of one of your PC races, where it will have a major impact on that race's culture and history and as such is a complete non-starter as a mystery if anyone wants to play that race- and as long as you recognize that having individual groups come up with their own answers to them is what they are for. So you don't put a bunch of mysteries in one sourcebook and the answers in the next one -you put mysteries in your sorcebooks where appropriate and then don't answer them officially.
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Fri Apr 10, 2015 4:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I should point that that "It's a mystery" is only problematic when applies to questions that actually matter.
It's okay for your response to the question of where vampires come from to be "that doesn't actually matter, and it's never going to come up in the metaplot, but here are some competing theories. "
It's not okay to say "it matters a lot, but we're not going to tell you, here are some competing theories, they're all equally valid, except for this one, it's actually right. But psych, no, we lied. It's this one that's actually right.
"It's a mystery," is just a tool for enabling GM fiat, which in turn hamstrings player agency. By leaving a possibly important question in an indeterminate state and presenting it as such, writers encourage the GM to withhold possibly important information from the players. Then, when the player attempts to do something, the GM can spring a fiat "Fuck You" on him/her -- and with no need to be consistent, either. When the player comes up with a plan to compensate for the new information, the GM can again spring a fiat, saying, "Ha, that's what you thought was going on, but you were wrong, sucker!"
In other words, it lets the GM play Cops & Robbers rather than an actual, ya know, game.
Current pet peeves:
Misuse of "per se". It means "[in] itself", not "precisely". Learn English.
Malformed singular possessives. It's almost always supposed to be 's.
In "Metaplot" or canonical situations I think Mysteries can be pretty cool. I dislike it when a mystery goes unanswered, and if hasn't reached an answer, would prefer it takes on an answer from one of the more better prevailing fan theories. Since those can be usually well researched, thought of, and conductive to future stories opposed to what the others might generate (as seems usually the case). Mysteries also serve to generate cool sounding ideas, but leave them hanging so given author/GM has time to try and deliver a proper answer to it (despite usually no payoff, or its just not very good).
What I find wrong w/ 4th edition: "I want to stab dragons the size of a small keep with skin like supple adamantine and command over time and space to death with my longsword in head to head combat, but I want to be totally within realistic capabilities of a real human being!" --Caedrus mocking 4rries
"the thing about being Mister Cavern [DM], you don't blame players for how they play. That's like blaming the weather. Weather just is. You adapt to it. -Ancient History
The problem is that a lot of RPG materials read more like history books and not as usable game material. This leads to a lot of explanation of things that won't ever improve any adventure you'd care to have, and it ruins any sense of discovery you might have as a player.
I mean, knowing the true history of the owlbear is not going to improve the encounter in the forest where you kill one. On the flipside, the secret history of githyanki is interesting because you can do entire campaigns where specific details are revealed, known locations are teased and then visited, and celebrities are met and/or murdered (Lich Queen!).
That being said, no one is playing the same game. Ever. An RPG doesn't need rigidly controlled lore because DMs and players don't give a shit. The default campaign is always "homebrew" because the nature of a tabletop RPG is to constantly create material for it even when you'd decided to play in an established setting.
I understand where the argument that GMs shouldn't be given room to come up with things that suck is coming from... but they're not computers running a program. If you can't trust your GM not to do stupid things, you shouldn't be gaming with that GM.
Done properly, the "this is a mystery" card can be quite useful. One problem is that it's easy for developers to use it to take the cheap and lazy way out, instead of thinking of neat and interesting details themselves. Like many spices, it has to be used with the proper touch.
Most settings don't specify the entire prehistory of its peoples. So in most games, the origins of various groups *are* a mystery. They're just not noted as such, and it tends not to come up in play. The OP-mentioned situation is designed to come up in play.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"If you can't trust your MC not to do stupid things, you shouldn't be gaming with that MC" is a stupid argument. If the writers leave the door open for an MC to be stupid then the onus of that is on them. The less ways the writers leave for the MC to be stupid, the better - ideally, they wouldn't leave them any ways. Blaming the MC for taking a formula that produces a result of "Not Enough Information" and telling them to fill in the blanks and expecting them to do something that isn't stupid is lazy and bad design. Worse, it's bad writing.
Also, if I avoided playing with everyone who has done things I think are stupid in the GM seat, I would never play another game. I might run, but you're putting that forth as a maxim for people which implies they shouldn't play with me because I've done stupid things as a gm.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
RelentlessImp wrote:"If you can't trust your MC not to do stupid things, you shouldn't be gaming with that MC" is a stupid argument. If the writers leave the door open for an MC to be stupid then the onus of that is on them.
The only way for them to NOT do that is to specify ALL aspects of the setting, then give the GMs complete adventures that are scripted out in total detail. Basically turning GMs into computers running Baldur's Gate, only with worse graphics.
Giving people the option to be stupid also gives them to option to NOT be stupid. Really, if your GM is so terrible that no freedom can be given to them at all, you'd be better off not gaming with them.
Any game with intentions of being anything other than a standalone will intentionally come with as many loose ends as splat books they plan to sell you later on. This can't be helped.
NineInchNall wrote:"It's a mystery," is just a tool for enabling GM fiat, which in turn hamstrings player agency.
I dunno, I wouldn't compare keeping the origin of vampires a blank line with Numenera's anti-player fappery where everything is Schrödinger's Game and you aren't entitled to know even which way is up from one minute to the next.
Dogbert wrote:Any game with intentions of being anything other than a standalone will intentionally come with as many loose ends as splat books they plan to sell you later on. This can't be helped.
That's a terrible business model. If the mystery is anything important that will be addressed by the GM then you actually have disincentive to pick up a splat book since it will go against your game/solution, whatever it might be.
And coming to think of it, there are few games that explicitly release splat books saying "this is the mystery we posed in the core book!" outside of nWOD, and we know how well that turned out.
Dogbert wrote:Any game with intentions of being anything other than a standalone will intentionally come with as many loose ends as splat books they plan to sell you later on. This can't be helped.
That's a terrible business model. If the mystery is anything important that will be addressed by the GM then you actually have disincentive to pick up a splat book since it will go against your game/solution, whatever it might be.
And coming to think of it, there are few games that explicitly release splat books saying "this is the mystery we posed in the core book!" outside of nWOD, and we know how well that turned out.
I thought it was oWoD that indulged in that shit...
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
nWoD explicitly said that they were never going to answer any questions and only pose more. oWoD and Shadowrun were the big banner holders of writing up answers to questions posed in older books with newer books. Both systems had problems.
nWoD of course had the problem that since the fact that the questions were never going to get answers and indeed had no answers was explicit meant that no one cared about them. There is literally zero reason to go poke at the town with the bleeding statue in Urban Legends (or Ghost Stories, or whatever fucking interchangeable nWoD book it was actually in), because it specifically doesn't matter and is never going to have an effect on anything you do or care about.
Vampire had a very different problem: the metaplot was a rambling arrgle bargle that made no sense. The Generation system was a bad system, and any time the early generation vampires came up things got stupid. They pulled back the veil and... the Bronze Age was secretly a four color comic book where there was a fucking eight-way tug of war between different dudes who could all individually control the hopes and dreams of every person on the planet. It was just... dumb.
Shadowrun's revelations were at times nearly as bad. But most of the time they weren't, and that is why when it was time for new editions in the early 21st century the White Wolf crowd was ready for a hard reboot and the Shadowrun crowd wasn't. Of course, a few years of colossal Catalyst Game Labs fuckups, and now the Shadowrun crowd wold probably take a mulligan too.
I have run into this issue already on CotEotM, and I think the absolute best middle ground is to supply the MC with options for the big-ticket mysteries. I think leaving little mysteries alone as in-game references to build verisimilitude is a good thing.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
You can buy my books, yes you can. Out of print and retired, sorry.
It didn't help Vampire that the only thing people hate more than a dumb plot twist or boring new arc is a retcon. Incoming message from Captain Obvious: Vampire characters can be really fucking old. Clan leadership is typically presented as rather entrenched in many areas and so digging up dirt on clan leaders from the 1700s is relevant in ways that doesn't really apply in other modern settings, which can make material tough to integrate into existing campaigns.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Dogbert wrote:Any game with intentions of being anything other than a standalone will intentionally come with as many loose ends as splat books they plan to sell you later on. This can't be helped.
That's a terrible business model. If the mystery is anything important that will be addressed by the GM then you actually have disincentive to pick up a splat book since it will go against your game/solution, whatever it might be.
And coming to think of it, there are few games that explicitly release splat books saying "this is the mystery we posed in the core book!" outside of nWOD, and we know how well that turned out.
I thought it was oWoD that indulged in that shit...
I was specifically thinking of shit like VII and the pure born in werewolf and some of the other "spooky mysterious baddies" who were supposed to be mysterious but ended up being stupid terribad splat books.
Content in RPGs is always optional. There never has to be a One True Story unless you are writing up a series of adventures that depends on that one story, and then the only requirement is that you personally keep the story consistent for your campaign.
Your campaigns can really can have opposing answers to a mystery because that makes things actually mysterious to the players. Your campaign can even warp to make multiple answers to the mysteries all true despite seemingly being in conflict, or none being true at all. It's your campaign and you can just do that. Official lore and splats can't ruin your campaign unless you make the choice for them do so.
Lore is just a tool for making campaigns and adventures, and is as flexible as any story. It's only your core rules that have to be set in stone so that players can play the same game between play groups and you can keep a standard for balance. The whole "our elves are different" problem, on the other hand, doesn't mess up anyone's ability to play.
Last edited by K on Wed Apr 15, 2015 5:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
Frank, Could you elaborate on the benefits of a well-run metaplot? From my perspective it seems like it's all bad. Suppose you have a mystery in the first book and you reveal the answer in a later book. Let's grant that the big reveal is well done and the answer is really cool. You still, just by answering, kick tons of ongoing games out of the canon. That's probably not immediately a big problem because no individual game is actually canonical. Every table runs an "AU" informed by their MC's sensibilities, and every table's setting diverges from the setting books as soon as anything happens in their home game.
If players reject one of your answers, there's no immediate problem with that book. I'd still buy if I rejected some of its story choices. But as following books developed the consequences of those choices I rejected, they'd become rapidly more irrelevant. Even the game mechanics might not be usable.
Last edited by Orion on Wed Apr 15, 2015 6:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
Metaplots help give the broader fan community shared references and experiences to care and speculate about. It's easy to make fun of the fan wank and exhaustive nerdery that such things ultimately inspire, but such materials still have some value because they help give a setting a life of its own outside of what happens at any given table. There are drawbacks to letting metaplots, novelizations and famous modules loom large over entire game lines but it must also be said that such things are what helps separate your game from GURPS in the eyes of the roleplaying public.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Wed Apr 15, 2015 6:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Metaplots are probably my least favorite part of RIFTS, it's more fun to just introduce a new area than go back and mess around with established areas.
In Warhammer 40k the scale is galactic so it's usually not that important if some solar system falls to chaos or orks or not, but it is fun to hear about a new craftworld emerging from the eye of terror or something. Things that add content are fun. Then again GW routinely retcons even major campaign results.
Metaplots are an excuse/motivation for publishers to pump out new material without putting in the effort to develop fully original material. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing depends on the implementation.
Metaplots and living worlds inside committee-written TTRPGs - much like superhero comics - don't function well after more than a decade. By that point, the barnacles left behind by the bad writers slow the ship. Even prior to 5E, Shadowrun's on-going story had so much garbage bolted on that it had degenerated into self-parody.
