Metagaming and things that exist for OOG reasons but are IG-observable
- Thread starter Alex319
- Start date
jpariury
Duke
Says who?
The game world as experienced has substantially more reality than any amount of off-board described events. As a body, players will react more to the things they do than the things they imagine they did, and I generally think that they should. That infuses a certain amount of deeper reality than some random talking about how the world operates away from the game. I would propose that if we want to set the reality of our world to be a certain way, we need to infuse that reality into the game players interact with live. If a big attack on Saturday afternoon an hour before folks need to memorize and rest isn't meant to be the way the world works, then we shouldn't make that the way the world works every event.
As a matter of my experience as a player, here's a big difference in the game between having plot tell me a Bad Thing® happened and I should play sad, and making a Bad Thing® happen during a game and giving me something to play sad about - the latter will always have more reality to it than the former. Likewise, if Dawn's in trouble, it's probably Tuesday, because that just seems to be how the world works.
Mind you, there's definitely a certain amount of bias involved in this view; ultimately we're talking philosophy. Personally, I prefer to play and run a live-action game with some occasional backstory to fill in the blanks, not a big backstory with some occasional events to fill in some space.
Last edited: