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I sometimes think there is this approach to the game design. It goes basically as “right, we have this technology, and I have a genre in mind. Let push a product out!”. The “technology” here could be a cutting-edge game engine, a universal role-playing system like D20, a particular form of genre (say MMO or RTS) or a sparkling brand new next-gen console.

Then there is this other approach. “We have this inspiration, let see what is the best way to present it as a game”, or sometimes “With this genre, and with this inspiration, let see what is the best approach for this game”.

I come to see the “inspiration” as the Meta Plot. In “plain speech”, the Meta Plot is the Plot of the Plot for the game. It’s like the horror of the Warp for Warhammer 40K, the Melkor-Eru conflict in Lord of the Rings, or something as down to earth as World War II. Sometimes, a technique to skin your game and to come up with game mechanics is to use a Meta Plot as an inspiration.

Not all Games without Meta Plot are Badly Designed

Before going on, I have to emphasis one thing – games without a Meta Plot as inspiration driving their design are not automatically badly designed. For instance, Super Mario Brothers lack a Meta Plot in a grand sense of thing, nor is there one for Tetris, or I suspect for Final Fantasy I (the Final Fantasy games franchise is an interesting case study of “We have these cool mechanics; the plot and story is a seperate deal!”

The point is that a Meta Plot can be the inspiration for game mechanics and game design. Its influence can trinke all the way up to User Interface Design, quest designs, music, gameplay elements and even marketing/packaging. Could it? Let’s see.

Meta Plot and the Pen and Paper Continuum

Let begin with the pen and paper RPG world first. I have been gearing up to run Nobilis, in which each player represents an “avatar” of a concept on Earth, be it horses, communication, reading, katanas or even just blankets. The game is thick with Meta Plot – and the Plot is basically that Destroyers from Beyond Creation have come to erase out all Creation, and that includes the foundational concepts such as nature, animals, war and everything else. This Meta Plot supports the diceless game mechanics. Characters are assured of their success in any task unless opposed. This is a different take from most pen and paper RPGs which require you to make a roll to see if you succeed or fail at a challenging task.

The Meta Plot may inspire the game mechanic or the other way round, but I personally think that one thing is for sure – the Meta Plot and the game mechanics (and other design elements) must be in harmony. A big complaint of Exalted is that you never feel like the supernatural heroes which all the “fluff” (or backstory Meta Plot) makes you out to be. Or that Call of Cthlhu D20 is not as grim as its Basic Roleplaying incarnation because D20 (a generic “RPG engine” spined off from D&D 3.5) tend to gears toward heroic role-playing and characters created with the system starts out as better combatants.

Spirit of the Century, emulating pulp fiction, use the Fate 3.0 rules to allow players to create larger-than-life characters for their first adventure. We are talking stuff like Nobel prize winning scientist, ace pilot who has flew countless sorties or even a trained and skilled deadly martial artist who can floor a dozen. In fact, there is a complaint that characters in Spirit of the Century are virtually invincible, but hey, it fits the tone of the pulp fiction.

Don’t Rest your Head seems to follow “Meta Plot influences Game Design” pattern. You play as an insomniac who has been “Awakend”, granting you special abilities. However, you are also sucked into the City Awaken, a dimenison removed from normal world and is something out from a nightmare. There are rules for being exhausted – when you get more and more exhausted, you perform better and kick more ass, but there’s also a chance that you can get even more exhausted. That sounds like a good deal, except that when you are exhausted beyond a limit, you sleep and become a normal human being again, and you attract the attention of monsters who can’t wait to feast upon your helpeless body.

If we instead try to shoehorn this idea into, say D20 and GURPs, it will still work, but the mechanics presented in Don’t Rest your Head has the elements of exhaustion built right into its mechanics – you roll a number of D6 equal to your Exhaustion each time, with a 5 or 6 counting as a success. But if the higher dice roll is an Exhaustion dice, you gain 1 more point of Exhaustion (basically, there are other type of dice rolled at the same time, such as Discipline and Madness). Using another system to emulate this would be contrived.

Right, I think this article is kind of getting lengthy, and there is still a real life Flu I have to fight off. So I will just end with a “To be Continued…” here. Next up, I will pen (type?) down my thoughts on the Meta Plot and its drwbacks and how it fits into computer and board games.

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