Wanting more role play, less meta gaming


Advice


My table consists of 6 give or take players whom I'm really happy with.

Due to commitments my two least experienced players often missed sessions leaving the other players to surge ahead in gaming experience. This in itself isn't a problem until my less experienced players pretty much delegated their decision making to the other players. A lot of meta gaming was happening and lots of "back seat general" play was happening.
To try and rectify this I've put in a trial of the following combat system: There is no I in team
"all discussions of strategy must happen in character, and in combat order if initiative has already been rolled.

This accomplishes multiple goals at the same time. On the one hand it lets everyone know that all interactions must be done strictly in character. On the other hand the role play can lead to back and forth between characters, and get everyone involved in the game. Ideally what it will do is allow the party to develop a battle rapport, with allies calling out to one another in the thick of it and adapting on the fly to the changing scenario."

There's been an overall good response from my players but I have noticed some inherent flaws.

Pros:
*Players are now more invested in learning their own characters/classes
*Little or no metagame
*Players are now making their own decisions
*Combat is no longer being dominated by one or two players ordering others.

Cons:
*Massive drop in table/player interactions with each other
*Still little role playing
*Players are now tuning out until it’s their turn
*Less teamwork as players are no longer co-ordinating their attacks.

Now the lack of teamwork comes from players concentrating on only their character, tuning out during other's turns (nearly dead silence and no banter between players) and seemingly avoiding in character speech.

One of my players has pointed out the speaking system is quite awkward now as questions and responses now take an entire round to get a response. Additionally there's really little difference between "giving orders in character" and giving orders out of character, which was one of the major things it was supposed to fix.

Multiple problems but essentially in a nutshell:
What can I do to encourage role playing and teamwork of my players?

Or how can I further refine and improve this system?

Shadow Lodge

Talk to your players. Tell them what you want.


They don't need to talk on there turn in combat. Talking is a free action that can be done anytime, I think.

Sovereign Court

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Spend less time in combat.


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I don't believe that players advising one-another counts as meta-gaming, per se. True meta-gaming is when a player possesses knowledge his character could not have and is using it to advise his character's actions. For instance, when everybody at the table knows what an owlbear is, but none of the characters is supposed to have ever seen nor heard of one, and they all play as if they know exactly how to fight it. That's meta-gaming.

I believe that a collective mindset can overcome individual players' shortcomings to more accurately simulate characters' expertise. I shall explain.

You have to imagine that the PCs are experts at what they do. But the players may not be experts in the same way the characters are. Barbarian Joe knows just what to do when he rages, but Tom, who is playing him, may be new to the concept. If another player advises him, it is not necessarily meta-gaming. It can easily be seen as a collaborative attempt at roleplay. Similarly, we have characters on the table who have 18s or 19s or 20s in Intelligence. Does that mean we expect their players to have IQs in the 160s - 180s? No. None of them do, sadly. But if all the PCs have Int 8 except one, and he is being played by the guy who cannot get the answer to the riddle, it is still perfectly within the purview of the GM and the players, to agree that the character with the 18 Intelligence is the guy who actually came up with the answer.

We do it all the time. It encourages teamwork and camaraderie at the table. Yes, it's possible it can go a little too far (it does not at our table because our players - like most, I believe - want to keep their autonomy). But sometimes a challenge does belong to a single player/PC combination. You also don't want anybody taking over another character or ordering everybody in what to do.

But to my mind, the isolation you now are experiencing says you might have gone too far in trying to curb this. It probably pays to keep in mind that Roger got Cs in school, and a little help from Mike in helping him to understand how a spell works, is perfectly fine in simulating Gornstaff the Mage's 18 Intelligence and expertise with spells.


Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I don't think OOC combat tactics necessarily constitute metagaming. I think it's reasonable to assume that the PCs spend a lot of time "off camera" talking their way through tactics, since they likely spend a lot more time with one another than the actual players do.

I always imagine the PCs shouting short in-character commands to emulate what we as players are painstakingly discussing out of combat. Sort of like in the X-Men comics, Wolverine doesn't say "Hey Colossus, this enemy that has a weak point that is too far away for either of us to reach! I will move over to you and then you can pick me up and throw him on your turn!". He just say "Fastball special!" and Colossus knows what that means because they've spent countless hours training together and going over all of these tactics because their lives depended on it.

So... do the players think the OOC combat planning is a problem? You might have tried to correct a problem that was only a problem for you.


Punish the character not the player. If a character needs some help with strategy on how his character would act, it's not unreasonable to allow input from other characters.

The only time it is truly metagaming is when the players are feeding each other information that the character should not posses, and are making decisions based on that information.

Especially with newer players who don't have strategy down yet, you should not punish them for not having their tactics down perfect yet.

Another thing, forcing people to do everything in character is fine for some tables, but at mine we all like to just have fun.

Bruunwald has it down pretty well above me, it isn't at all metagaming if a player is reminding another player of what their character's abilities and equipment are should they forget once combat starts. In fact, letting them have that communication actually improves role playing since it maintains the integrity of the story and of the characters. If I have a paladin player who forgets that he can smite, or that doesn't know that a particular spell or other activity only requires a swift action or a move action, it isn't metagaming for the players to discuss that.

Now, someone saying "my character only has 4hp left, you should come over here and heal me;" or "this guy has fire resistance 5, so don't bother with the flaming enchantment weapon you have;" are examples of metagaming.

If you want to promote more teamwork, let them work as a team.

If you want to start getting more into in character interactions, then spend less and less time in combat.
The more combat you see, the less time they spend talking and interacting in character. The more combat they see, the less they will spend skill points or feats or money on role playing, since they will only need to optimize for combat because that's all their character experiences.

Put in more encounters that don't end up in a fight, but rather require the players to remember phrases or passwords, or to deliver messages. "On your way through the city on orders from the king, you meet two guards saying they won't let anyone pass without expressed permission from authority." "You need to convince the wizard to help you, but you need to know what to say to him so he knows what you need." Encounters like this are worth experience.

Have more actual NPCs and less enemy stat blocks, and you will get more role playing.


By Bruunwald, Magic Butterfly and master_marshmallow definition, yes these guys are definitely meta gaming.

Let me outline how our games would normally go, we enter combat for xyz reasons and either the power gamer in our group or most experienced player would basically direct everyone else in the most optimum battle plan. Step by step battle planning with

"No don't go for him, he's bloodied and I can kill him by myself. You should 5 foot step and all out attack him."

Or

"No that's a bad idea, you need to move into flanking position so we can kill this guy faster."

Or

"Maybe you should use SPELL and give us a bonus this round as you can't hit his AC."

The advantages I've seen from implementing the system has proven massively positive. I'm essentially looking for tweaks or even better systems.


Deadalready wrote:

By Bruunwald, Magic Butterfly and master_marshmallow definition, yes these guys are definitely meta gaming.

Let me outline how our games would normally go, we enter combat for xyz reasons and either the power gamer in our group or most experienced player would basically direct everyone else in the most optimum battle plan. Step by step battle planning with

"No don't go for him, he's bloodied and I can kill him by myself. You should 5 foot step and all out attack him."

Or

"No that's a bad idea, you need to move into flanking position so we can kill this guy faster."

Or

"Maybe you should use SPELL and give us a bonus this round as you can't hit his AC."

The advantages I've seen from implementing the system has proven massively positive. I'm essentially looking for tweaks or even better systems.

Whether or not OOC he says "move into flanking position so we can kill this guy faster" or in game he says "Flank him!!!" the result is the same. I don't see why you are punishing the players for getting help with tactics.

Fine, maybe the more experienced player is giving them a little too much direction, sure, but without it those players may sit there and drool. I've had this happen to me when I run games with 6+ people at the table and it's no fun. To the point where I end up being the one to help my players by discussing their possible tactics.

It's a game dude, take it too seriously and you'll ruin everyone's fun, including your own.


Deadalready wrote:
"all discussions of strategy must happen in character, and in combat order if initiative has already been rolled.

This is a personal favorite of mine.


If you're already in combat, there is no "discussion of strategy". It's tactical at that point. Strategy discussions happen around the campfire and during down-time practice. In a tactical situation, you're going to give a keyphrase or a hand-sign as to what tactics you're going to employ which corresponds to the strategies that were worked on before. I've seen this whole "no tactics discussions" in play and it was a clusterf#~$. It was my first Pathfinder game and we went down, hard, right at lvl 1 because we couldn't coordinate. Not much point yelling out, "heal me, I'm almost dead" because that kind of keys the opposition in on your condition. Party wipes due to not being allowed to talk tactics aren't fun and the point is, after all, to have fun.

Thus, the compromise. Encourage them to set up a number of "strategy presets" like football plays and, when they use them, you they can talk about them OOC in "plain English" but IC, they're using various handsigns to signal the specifics. This is done both in sports as well as real combat engagements. Because sitting there and saying, "I give the hand sign that means flank around the smaller enemy" actually serves to interrupt the flow of combat more than just using an OOC phrase like "Flank this one". Because, just as the characters aren't necessarily privy to all the knowledge of the players, the players aren't necessarily privy to all the knowledge of the characters; to say that the only tactics they are able to employ are based on the tactical capacity of the player is just as much metagaming as saying they have tactical knowledge from the player they wouldn't otherwise be expected to know (ie. stats on a monster).


When playing a game that absolutely requires good communication, you aren't going to make the players more engaged by limiting when and how they can communicate.

Also, the term 'metagaming' isn't really accurate to this situation.


Deadalready wrote:

By Bruunwald, Magic Butterfly and master_marshmallow definition, yes these guys are definitely meta gaming.

Let me outline how our games would normally go, we enter combat for xyz reasons and either the power gamer in our group or most experienced player would basically direct everyone else in the most optimum battle plan. Step by step battle planning with

"No don't go for him, he's bloodied and I can kill him by myself. You should 5 foot step and all out attack him."

Or

"No that's a bad idea, you need to move into flanking position so we can kill this guy faster."

Or

"Maybe you should use SPELL and give us a bonus this round as you can't hit his AC."

The advantages I've seen from implementing the system has proven massively positive. I'm essentially looking for tweaks or even better systems.

I don't see anything here that is any different from most of the tables I have been to, or run. It is completely normal for players to discuss alternatives to one-another's actions during the battle. As Master Marshmallow said, whether the player in question does it in a character's voice, or is simply offering the idea, doesn't matter. You can just as easily imagine that his character is the one directing his comrades.

Much of what you've written here is not meta-gaming as I described it in my previous post. I said meta-gaming was:

"... when a player possesses knowledge his character could not have and is using it to advise his character's actions. For instance, when everybody at the table knows what an owlbear is, but none of the characters is supposed to have ever seen nor heard of one, and they all play as if they know exactly how to fight it. That's meta-gaming."

You're saying that noting that a foe has taken a lot of damage and should be easy to put away now is meta-gaming, but how many times have you seen guys in movies tell their lackeys to go run an errand because they can "take it from here," or "take the trash out myself?" Yes, there can be rolls in the game - checks for determining how much life a foe has left in him, but if they've already beat him bloody, I don't see why one is needed. Likewise, I don't see how advising somebody to flank a common foe is meta-gaming. That's just good advice. The one I can agree with is the issue of determining AC. I don't think one guy advising another guy to use a spell he presumably knows he has after long adventuring with him is meta-gaming, but the players ought to remember that their characters have no comprehension of AC as a statistic.

But you don't need to bring a manual to the game to adjudicate that. You just have to remind them that their characters don't understand Armor Class, and that they need to rephrase how they handle it in-game, and also need to remember that talking about AC during the fight is not realistic.

Shadow Lodge

The #1 method of getting more role-play into the game is more social encounters. I.e., if the GM isn't roleplaying, then the players aren't going to either.

Dungeon crawls are always going to be meta-gamey.

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