Generally put, the goal of most meta-plot is to provide a direction to the narrative of the world and stories. For instance, the overarching meta-plot of many Greek myths are the inter-fighting among the gods and the interaction between them and the mortals. Some Meta Plot are justifications – why on earth is a powerful starship exploring vast, unexplored corners of the world. Others are used to suspend the disbelief – if magic is introduced into a world, it is easier for people to accept that there are staves that can shoot fireballs and spells that can turn someone into a statue. Meta-plots, basically, are expositions, and rules for good expositions follow too.

Right, let’s get on to fleshing out the meta-plot then.

1. Overall Theme

One way to generate ideas for the Meta Plot is to decide its theme. Remember, a Meta Plot does not have to be for the whole game world. It can be for an epoch of history, a series of adventures, or even just for one city or dungeon. So something like “greed” would do well for a dungeon (the typical dragon hoard) while “despair” is a good theme for an entire campaign world (Call of Cthulhu, for example). The theme could explore hard questions, such as “Who really has right to call anywhere his country since everyone’s country is obtained through war?”

Theme and genre can be decoupled, and different combination of them generates different feel of games. Unknown Armies and Call of Cthulhu are both horror games; yet Unknown Armies has a somewhat upbeat optimistic theme to it “We are utimately in charge of our destiny”) whereas Call of Cthulhu is “we are ultimately doomed”. Eberron and Midnight both used the OGL D20 system, but in Eberron, magic plays the role of technology and there is a sense of adventure and excitement. In Midnight, the world has been conquered by evil and everyone struggled to survive. Both are fantasy, but with a switch of theme, you get a different feel.

2. History

If using theme to generate ideas for a meta plot is too far high up on the ladder of abstraction, a more concrete way would be to come up with a history for the world, city, scenario or dungeon. History, however, is more than “this then that and then some more of those”. Reading through history, the thing to look for is why did the event happen and what were the people’s reaction. Take the simple Meta Plot for a haunted house scenario. What is the history of the house? Of course, the realtor who sold the house may not be important (or is it?). What may be important is who once stayed there, what horrifying events happened before, what did the previous owners do (and what happened to them) and is there anything n history that explains why wolves are encircling the house preventing escape?

The important thing in crafting history is to leave in “openings” for further trouble in present (in Chinese, this is known as “the hidden pen”). A story with total closure is basically finished. Modern history has many examples of those “openings” – unfortunately mainly rooted in coups and wars. The “good guys kill a bad guy and the bad guy’s descendant returned for revenge” is a standard “opening” in a Meta Plot.  A Song of Ice and Fire used the history of the seven kingdoms to open up the way for a clash of kings. It is precisely because that the olden way of life in Westros is not completely forgotten which is why there are events as it is. If the story goes “And everyone was conquered and their culture lost forever”, the plot has written itself into a corner.

When writing history, think beyond the borders of your scope. Writing a history of the world would require gods, beings from other existence, interference (be it unknown horrors or meteors) and maybe even other worlds. Likewise, writing the history for a scenario would require input from the bigger world as a whole. Take a keep at the edge of a civillised kingdom. Who built it (and if the architect designs a secret passageway, would his descendants know of it)? What is the purpose of the keep, and is it still the same now? And most importantly of all, what does all this got to do with the present situation?

One big work that uses history as its meta-plot is Lord of the Rings. The MMO game (Lord of the Rings Online) borrowed heavily from the little history that was told in the appendix to create an expansive world. Melkor taking on Eru, and the forging of the rings, as well as the two kingdoms Arnor and Gondor, set the stage for many exciting events and stories within the novel.

3. Norms and Culture

Culture plays a big part in making a Meta Plot feels real. Norms would determine what sort of actions the PCs can do. Let’s take a game with intrigue, for example. It is apparent that a rival merchant house is responsible for the arson of a few of the PCs’ warehouse. Does norm allow the PCs to return the favour with torches and magefire? Or does the norms demand that the PCs get back via other methods?

Norms are ultimately set by people and people differs from places to places, cities to cities, world to world, so it is possible to come up with different type of approach in the same world just by modifying the culture and geographical location. Perhaps in one city duels on the street are the norm, while the other it is equally okay to get the assassin’s guild to “teach your target a good lesson”.

One of the biggest applications of norm to restrict character’s actions is once again…Nobilis. You are avatars, a god-human, yet because of these laws and custom, and not to offend your fellow god-like peers, you can’t do this and can’t do that. In Dragon Warriors, the culture is that if you don’t have a suzerain, you are just a landless vagabond.

Some games do get away without explictly defining norms and culture. This is usually because norms and culture, while adding details, do impose on the game to be played in a certain way.

4. Laws of the World

How does the world work? Let put physics and chemistry aside, as those can be hard to defined in-game (or much less change). But how does magic, the gods, supernatural powers, demons summoning and such work? Other “laws” to think about also the right to bear arms, how does one become a citizen of a country, what sort of common law of courtesy exists between gods and supernatural beings and so on.

In the Tales of Earthsea, magic works via true names and the principle of balance. You will need to know the true name of a living being in order to work magic on him/her/it. This is itself is a big story element in the novel. The other being that if you use magic to bring rain down on one region, you are causing another to suffer a drought. This has ramifications on the PCs’ actions and is also excellent for plot hooks.

Hopefully what I am typing make sense. To fill up a meta-plot, basically, try to strike for a theme. You can have more than one – unorganised chaos is a theme good for the usual hack and slash or sword and sorcery genre. History would help to come up with interesting characters, events that have repercussions that would affect your PCs now. Norms and culture could restrict what your PCs can do but at the same time helps to suspend disbelief.  Finally, adding a touch of “how things work in this game world or dungeon” grounds the player to the world.

On reading a RPG.Net thread about campagins which go downhill rapidly, one type that often surfaces is the “time-travel-with-characters-from-different-worlds”. The problem? Inconsistency and lack of a meta-plot. What is a Star Fleet officer doing in Victorian London with a werewolf? How are they supposed to behave in a world that is so chaotic? What are the norms? Can they just kill someone they don’t like because there is no police? If there is a police, how could they stand against phasers and werewolves? And if the police are actually clockwork robots

Hopefully, from this one can see the value of the Meta Plot and how things can quickly go south if it is not properly managed.

So to go on from where I have stopped on the meta-plot series, I am going to write down my thoughts on writing a meta-plot. Whether the result is good depends on the writer

1. Decide on the Level of the Meta Plot

No, no I am not talking about a Leve 20 Meta Plot or something of that type. Meta Plot exists on different scope and level. There’s no definite chart. but it might look something like this:

• Dungeon/Scenario : Why is the dungeon created? What are the limitations of the sandbox?
• Campaign : What factions are involved? What’s going on in the background? Why are things happening?
• World : Who created the world? What is the cause of so much problems? What’s going on in the world?
• Cosmos: Who/what created whatever/whoever created the world? What laws bind those forces?

2. Bottom up or top-down?

You could start with a world-specific meta-plot (“this fantasy world is acutally seeded by a high-tech worldship from a doomed star-faring civilisation”) and start let the original idea runs downward (“monsters are actually the native creatures of the planet”) and let it seed campagins (“lore-spheres from the worldship have been scattered all over and they contain incredible knowledge”) and specific scenarios (“a particular lore-sphere has been stolen and a mystic realises it contains a spell that could rip the world asunder! Recover it at all cost”).

I personally go with a top-down approach but sometimes you could think of something at a dungeon level and let it spread. Let’s take a simple example, say a fortified keep on a  hill. The purpose of the keep? Mm…let say it is to a trade hub for the evil races. The adventurers defeat the monsters there, conquer it and take home the plunder. According to the meta-plot for the dungeon, a few questions have to be asked:

1. If the keep is a trade hub, who are the trading partners?
2. Likewise, who is going to be upset that the hub is destroyed?
3. What are monster merchants like, anyway?

All these could be used to spawn more dungeons and perhaps, over time, explanations would have to be devised to explain those dungeons (“Why do monsters trade with each other instead of devouring each other? Because they all belong to the same god!”)

More to come….using customs, norms and law, as well as themes, to write your own meta plot.

Meta Plots of Antiquity

It comes from a very old book which I read so I couldn’t really remember the title, but a lot of board games out there have meta-plots built into them. Chess has one – and a reading on the meanings of the pieces in both proto-chess, International Chess and Chinese Chess (and more besides) show that. There games where you are trying to get sheep together in one place, ascend to heaven and so on (here’s an interesting book on the subject).

Why a meta-plot for a board game? Maybe it gives a sense of purpose; it also gives some guidelines for design. Consider the rules for Chinese Chess:

• A cannon can only attack a piece if there is a piece between its target and itself
• The minister piece can not cross the river (as it has to take care of its country)
• The marshal (the ‘king’) cannot leave the palace

Where would one think of such rules if there isn’t a meta-plot? This has been discussed before for Don’t Rest your Head, Spirit of the Century, War of the Ring and Nobilis. So the firs purpose of the Meta Plot is to guide the game design.

How do play a game according to the Meta Plot

The Meta Plot does not just help the game designer; it also gives a frame of reference for the game player. Monopoly can be reduced to moving around a board where each location is marked from A to Z, and you have to give wooden cubes to the player owning the location. If he got triangles on that location, you have to give more cubes. If you run out of cubes, you lose.

But once you put in the Meta Plot of “you are a real estate developer who can owe plot of lands, buy buildings on them and you have to pay others if your piece land on their lands” – it does not only give the game some colour – it also set a context for them, giving them something to be fmailiar with. According to human-computer-interaction theory, when we come across something new, we usually try to understand it from our past references and experiences. If the game has a meta-plot that has some links to the player’s pre-conceptions, it would be easier for him to learn and enjoy it.

Back when the computer game designers are debating the issue of “plot and story” for games, many dismiss plots are just fluff, an excuse for violence, looting and blowing raspberries at the social norms of the days. Yet looking at what the meta-plot does for board games, I would say that we have a computer game industry because games have meta-plots inherently. And because of that meta-plot, we understand the game and put up with it.

What am I talking about? Let return to the day of the 1970s and 1980s, where computer graphics are mostly ASCII base and blockly sprites which doesn’t look like anything it is supposed to represent. Why do people put up with Space Invaders then? Because they know that they are shooting aliens. Who told them they are shooting aliens? The Meta Plot. In NetHack or Rogue, who on earth would be interested in find ! and $ scattered about what seems to be just nonsensical arrangement of | and _ and +? They are, because the Meta Plot tells them that they are an adventurer exploring a dungeon; the Meta Plot helps the player to stay put with all the unbearable madness of PC games back then (complicated keypresses, lack of GUI, using the keyboard for everything, graphics which does not look like anything it is supposed to be).

I do not know how accurate my opinions are for PC games, though. Feel free to discuss on this!

As for pen and paper roe-playing games, the meta-plot guides the player’s style of play and interaction. A game of Ars Magica and Dungeons and Dragons run differently and have different feel because of the Meta Plot. Both have powerful magic users. Both have the idea of a celestial, divine power. In Ars Magica, though, mages try to steer clear of the Divine because the angelic forces could crush any magus – in Dungeons and Dragons, that is not the case.

Ars Magica tells the magus players to steer clear of angering the Church. Dungeons and Dragons say mages and clerics are on the same playing field. Woe betide the player who thought he could march into a Church in Ars Magica because he can throw fireballs!

Hence the Meta Plot, as discussed before and in prior articles, gives the players what the setting expects of him, what can he do in the game and why he is someone noteworthy.

So the second purpose of the Meta Plot is to guide player’s decisions making.

Meta Plot and the Artefacts of the Game

By artefacts,  I do not mean “Ring of Protection +1″ or “Gauntlets of Giant Strength”. I am borrowing this term from management studies where artefacts is used to represent the physical manifestation of a group’s culture and norms (like how Google has gyms, rec rooms and swimming pools for its employees. Those are the artefacts of the company). Meta Plots also manifest itself in the tangible stuff of the game -for board games, it is the board design. For RPGs, the fonts and artwork used in the rule-books. For computer games, the themes of the artwork, its box cover and the poster used for the advertising campaign.

Needless to say, the Meta Plot provides the theme, the motifs and other clues for designers to pick up and incorporate it into their final product. A science-fiction game using gothic fonts in its rulebook may be problematic (not if the game is Warhammer 40K though -again, it fits because of the Meta Plot)

So the third purpose of the Meta Plot is to set design guidelines for the ‘tangible’ parts of the game.

Meta Plots should inspire more Plots

This is particulary for role-playing games and computer games with sandbox style of play (or which like to have lots of expansion packs).  The Meta Plot, for it to be use to the GM, must provide ideas for his own adventures. There are some Meta Plots which are choked full of details that the GM cannot even place a fictional city somewhere. Meta Plots which define everything and anything leave no room for mystery and no way to keep the players on their toes instead of throwing more and more powerful and over-the-top challenges. Some people do like that; but for me as a GM, I always prefer something that is loosely defined than something that has the weight of a thousand novels, splat books and spin-offs.

Not all meta plot restricts. Some just rumbles on…and on….and on. They are histories, deeds of heroes 10,000 years ago which has no bearing on the world now. They are not as bad as restrictive meta plots, though.

Some games’ meta-plot provides no hooks at all, or it relies on the genre to do so. This is fine, but things could get really derivative after a while.  Games that meta-plots with lot of hooks include Unknown Armies. Its ‘plot-hook-in-a-sentence’ is wonderful and it gives some much inspiration. In just one sentence! Other worth looking at includes Dragon Warriors, Spirit of the Century and Call of Cthulhu. The D20 edition of Call of Cthulhu has a short timeline of modern history and how the Great Old Ones fit in.

If you are doing a game, and your Meta Plot rambles on about the founding of this dynasty, that dynasty and a latter dynasty, with wars in heavens and all that, but offers no suggestions on how the GM can create a plot hook from it, then maybe it is good to introduce some mysteries into it or to find ways in which those events, even if they take place a dozen centuries ago, relevant now. Nobilis has tried very hard and true to the author’s credit, she has done a good job at giving GMs how to come up with adventures for an abstract, mindblowing game.

So the fourth purpose of the meta plot is to provide adventure hooks.

In Conclusion

These are just my opinions of course, but that I take an hour to write it down means that I sense that I am right This comes not just as a want-to-be designer, but also as a consumer. Of course, there are always exceptions, and as a standard disclaimer, not all games without a meta-plot sucks. If but your game does have one, it’s good to have a helpful one. If you are writing one, see if the meta-plot meets any of the purposes listed and if not perhaps you want to revisit it a little.

I hesitate to list out games which I think has bad meta-plot, just because I don’t want to raise up my flame shield. At any rate, I think this series is at an end (till I think of something about the meta-plot).

Introduce the Meta-Plot Slowly

There are some games which are 100% crunch and 0% fluff – then we have the opposite where fluff takes up so much room that it becomes as much as a required reading as rules. Nobilis suffers from this – what with Mythic Earth, Prosaic Earth, Lord Entropy, Ash Tree, the Bright and Shadowed Realms and more besides, fluff takes up about 70% of the book while the rules could be summarised on two sheets of A4 paper (with really small fonts).

What I have experimented for my first Nobilis game is to dish out the Meta Plot in small servings. Sure, I give an overview of the Vlade Bellum, what’s an Imperator and estates, but I save the rest for further espiodes. Sometimes in a setting-rich game there is a temptation to throw everything at the players – it may be wiser to focus on a particular aspect and as the players get their bearings, introduce more and more elements of the settings. For the first game I introduce the group to a “dead chancel” – which press in the point of what happened to estates that are erased out from creation and bring home the Vlade Bellum. They don’t have to deal with Lord Entropy or his bunch of Cammore for a while.

Get the Group to Create the Meta Plot

Spirit of the Century has a fantastic idea which I will be using for all my other games – getting the player to plot the backstory of their characters and having them star in each other’s story. For my fantasy homebrew of SoTC, I called each story a “novel” and have each character stars in them with another one as the “co-protangonist”. First, the player will offer ideas for how they will fit in the Meta Plot. The game was set in Titan (the Fighting Fantasy setting) and I briefly describe, on  a map, the important places, their culture and what significiant events have happened there. As the players plan their character’s origins, what they did during those significant events, how they end up meeting each other, who are their nemesis and so on, the players are describing how they fit into the setting’s Meta Plot. You, as the GM, could take chances to explain what’s relevant to their character instead of doing an information overload on all of them.

Second, the players come to owe that part of the Meta Plot – they created it and described how they would fit into it, anyway! That in SoTC yo would get Aspects for Meta Plot is a nice touch too.

Fast Forward Time

Sure, the status quo is this and that now, but what will happen in a hundred years time? Turning the clock ahead of the cannonical “present time” of the setting allow you, as a GM, to customise the material to your taste. Going backwards could be problematic as you need to make sure the latter events still happen, which call for research – unless you are ready to “reboot the setting” as in new Star Trek movie. In a hundred years time, a strong kingdom could become a weak one, the Great Old Ones are just a step away from being freed, a great war is on the verge of happening and a new weapon technology has shifted the balance of power.

You can also try to find an epoch in the settings where not much material was given – such as what Bioware did with Knights of the Old Republic – and fill in the gap yourself. There is also a geographic shifting – such as in Lord of the Rings Online, the attention is paid to all the lands mentioned in the novels but never visited by the Fellowship, such as Angmar, the Forsaken Inn, Oatbarton and so on.

History Lies

In the Chinese manhua “The Ravages of Time”, which gives a radical re-interperation of the events found in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the author basically says that “History lies” . That is one way to treat the Meta Plot if you need to loosen it up. They are, after all, just one version of the world according to the author of book. Add in new details, behind-the-scene facts and now-you-know-it truths.

Don’t Let Meta-Plot Stands in the Way of Fun

Nit-picking, canon walling and meta-debating are just waste of time when one rather be gaming. A game ought to be fun. Consistency can be resolved when the game is over, through email or forum – facts can be added, motivations could be altered. Saying “Drizzit would never do this!” while in a game (and while encountering the famous drow ranger) is akin to reducing the NPC and the Meta-Plot to just a black and white straitjacket. If we think of Meta-Plot as just the point of view of one person, not the entire record of a world or a person, the GM would have more fun planning and the players would be kept on the toes more often.

One way to have the right balance of Meta-Plot, to me, is to understand its purpose. To sum up the next article I have in mind, the Meta-Plot is to:

• Gives direction
• Influences design
• Influences the artefacts used in the game
• Provide plot hooks for adventures

Getting a Paladin to Lie

Quick question: how do you get a paladin to lie? To scheme and to plot destruction? Simple, play a game of Saboteur – a card game which has the meta-plot of you are dwarves mining for gold, and there are good dwarves and bad dwarves. Good dwarves want to get to the gold, bad dwarves don’t want the good guys to find the gold. Meanwhile, some players will get cards that allow them to check one of the three possible locations to see if the gold is there. Then that’s where the fun start.

I have friends whom I could entrust a million dollars with (and still would) yet they have lied their way smoothly through the game. Yet we all just burst out into laughter, lambaste each other with mock threats, and think that no harm is done, because the meta-plot encourages it. Heck, why you have a card that labels you “You are the bad guy, the BAD GUY!”, no one blame you for going along being a sneaky, underhanded, lying bastard…in a game.

Relying on the Kindness of Strangers

I think one of the commonly held consensus is that you find all types of people on a MMO – with varying levels of maturity, level-headedness, consideration and so on (psst…it just my politically correct shorthand for saying that there are jerks on most MMORPGs). While there are those who make the news on being rabid min-maxer, griever and whiners, I find this is not so much of the case for Lord of the Rings Online. On chat channels, you find people giving away free stuff. I run past a Captain and usually one out of five will give me a free buff. When I was playing the Loremaster I will too randomly debuff mobs and heal – not so much now because this reduces the XP gained by the other player, but there’s a spirit of helpfulness in the air.

Why so? I think it is because the game is Lord of the Rings, and the meta-plot is that “You are the free people of Middle Earth. The enemy is Sauron” and unlike World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online, the bad guys are not fully playable (oops my bad, I should have say “the other side”). Everyone other player-character you come across online is automatically your ally in the war against Sauron. (For those who find this terribly dull and boring, there’s also monster-play mode, where you can play as a monster PC and kill hero PCs that come challenging you on your turf). Sometimes, I think the lack of real PvP in LOTRO contributes to the atmosphere. After all, in Tolkien’s novels, the stuff that heroes are made of are the like of Aragorn and Faramir (who wouldn’t even claim the One Ring for his own if he finds it by the roadside, according to the novel, not the movies). The meta-plot enforces that, and I feel, somehow subconsciously cause people to act this way. Yeah, sure there still people who make life difficult for other people, and not to say you don’t find friendly behaviours on other MMOs or MMOs with PvP, but just that the meta-plot of the game contributes to behaviour.

Take a look at Age of Conan and its meta-plot – it is deliciously cartered for PvP gameplay, and Warhammer Online for its Realm vs. Realm mode. Why isn’t there a duelling arena in Lord of the Rings? Because it doesn’t fit the Meta-Plot, but an arena is not out of place in Age of Conan. Likewise, you can’t cramp Lord of the Rings’ “Spirit of Default Cooperation” into Warhammer Online because there exists natural enmity between the races, which again is encouraged by the Meta Plot.

(One thing what if one day Lord of the Rings incorporate a full-featured “other side of the fence” play, such as you can play as orcs or wargs? Even still, according to the Meta Plot, that conflict would only take place at high levels area, such as Mordor, because the novels didn’t let them in further than Gondor, to consider the northern border).

“Forget about saving the world! Let’s retire and start an inn!”

There’s one type of game in the Pen and Paper Roleplaying World and it is called the Railroad. The GM led the party by the nose through every bends and tunnels, with the players’ actions having little impact on the plot. I’m thinking of re-using this metaphor for the Meta Plot. It is not a railroad, but a railway, a system of railroads put together. It limits and directs.

For example, in Nobilis, despite characters being god-avatars, there are many storyline limits placed on them. They have to be loyal to their Imperator, for without him their powers would fade. They have to protect the innocent, or else bad-ass Lord Entropy and his human cronies would make your life miserable. You do not simply crush enemies with brute force or brainwash everyone directly. The author called this “inelegant” – an indignant player may say, “GM fiat!” or simply “Shrug, just because Miss R says so”.

There are games, which exist on the other side of the spectrum, does not have any meta-plot – or it is so “high level” that players are not affected by it unless they earn 10+ levels. In a normal game of Dungeons and Dragons, you could forsake a quest and start an inn, depending on your alignment (and if you are willing to take a shift, who cares?) In Dragon Warriors, you do not simply start an inn – you have to gain permission from the lord, etc. etc. etc. It’s not like Baldur Gates (the PC game) where two adventurers just decide to settle down in the middle of nowhere and start an inn. Who collect taxes from a fighter and a druid anyway? Who dares to, in Dragon Warriors, if the landlord of an inn is reputed to be a slayer of monster and his wife is someone who could cause trees to move?

I find when running tightly plotted game that the Meta Plot is useful because it weeds out “meaningless” options. As mentioned, I did run into the scenario where the PCs got rich enough in between missions that they are considering just fleeing to somewhere and retire – though they did say it in jest, I don’t doubt that there are players out there who did just that. The Meta Plot is useful in this regard – it gives direction even for the players.

However, for sandbox style of play, the Meta Plot can be like a Constricting Ring. Take Nobilis – with the war going on, other NPCs who are waiting to suck your estate dry so that they can stay in the war and Lord Entropy’s cronies snooping around to make sure you don’t break any of his laws, it’s hard not to step on anyone foot, much else say “Screw my Imperator! I going to explore the Ash Tree!”

A Meta Plot does not have to be elaborate – Nobilis has a finely weaved one, so much so that some people can’t keep up with it and some people loathed it (it’s like having a Ferrai but being told that you can’t drive more than 40km per hour in it) . Spirit of the Century has a simple one – the Century Club, and it is free-form enough for many styles of play, but provides a certain direction for the GM and the PCs. Of course, anyone who feel that just being told “You just have to be the good guys” is bad would too dislike the Meta Plot for Spirit of the Century (hey, it’s the same for me when I read “You just have to be suffer for being a good guy” in Vampires!)

Transcending the Meta Plot

The GM is alive, the rules are dead. The Meta Plot is already published on paper, but you can still write on. It is possible to transcend the Meta Plot, but it requires the cooperation of the GM and the player. It is much easier for a new game or setting than one with an established canon, like Star Wars or Star Trek (which is why I always avoid GMing games based on licenses; I felt constrained by the fan-base!)

Take for example, Nobilis – there are places where Lord Entropy won’t snoop and many other unexplainable things in the fluff itself (such as the Lady of the Third Age). If the players are itching for some massive destruction I could always bring them to an alien world, or a empire erased out of time or even to just good old Mythic Earth. Alternate dimensions are good for canon-heavy games (Star Trek just rebooted itself with a “When-Canon-Sucks-Hit-This button), and for historical fantasy, they just have to take a ship and find a culture that suited them (there are evidence that ancient China might be a matriarchal society instead of a patriarchal one).

Sometimes, however, the game is the Meta Plot – like Dogs in the Vineyard or Don’t Rest your Head. However, I do think it is possible for an enterprising GM to modify the Meta Plot to meet his needs.

I will talk more about this next time, where I hope to give an example of how I use a custom Meta Plot in a sandbox-style fantasy world to provide more direction, how it influences the details of design for games and some commonly useful Meta Plots.

When the Meta Plot Limits

Some role-playing games (the paper form with a human CPU – aka. the GM) allow sandbox style play – Dungeons and Dragons, for instance. Then there are games with heavy meta-plot elements that impose limits on your freedom – even if you are kickass vampire or an avatar-god.

Nobilis is one of those – yes, you can change creation with a snap of the finger, cut a mountain into half and perform other miraculous deeds. That will, however, bring the wrath of the law-keepers (the most powerful avatars ever lived) and earn the ire of other supernatural avatars as well as causing hell lot of trouble when mortal folks see those things (basically, you send them crazy, and you have pissed of 1/3 of all god-like beings in Creation). The most famous Meta Plot limit of Nobilis must be “you cannot love”.

Some have complained “Yes, you give me god-like powers, but the settings has 101 rules preventing me from doing what I want. What’s the deal?” The Meta Plot limits.

Or to put it in a nicer way, the Meta Plot also make sure that the player’s actions are in line with it. Given the Eru-Melkor conflict for Lord of the Rings – it’s impossible to bargain with a Balrog as if he is a traditional demon (that’s impossible according to the Meta Plot ), or as another example, in Star Wars, the many restrictions that a Light side user of the Force must obey is also a Meta Plot.

There are some who see limits as inherently bad. Me? Limits are bad in sandbox style of play, but are important for games which has a strong theme, such as Nobilis, Lord of the Rings and games with historical basis. Weapons of the God has an intricate set of Meta Plot which enforces the wuxia feel of the game. Different genres of game would have different Meta Plot – take Call of Cthulhu, for example. Its Meta Plot that eventually mankind will be wiped out, the Great Old Ones would rise and all we are doing is to postpone the inevitable prevents the players from going off track like “Hey, let sell those Mythos curious for a big sum of money and retire elsewhere!”

As an example of a sandbox style play where things could derail, I ran a homebrew game where Earth was partially destroyed and the PCs are send on a mission to infiltrate an enemy’s stronghold. Along the way, they receive credit payment for their first mission (and a sum of credits to let them outfit their ship and to make preparations for the infiltration campaign) and they manage to hijack a trading vessel packed with goods. At this point, one of the player said, “Hey, we are rather rich! Let’s screw this mission and go for a holiday”. Fortunately, this is made in jest, but a good Meta Plot would strike that thinking off the list (as noted in the Call of Cthulhu example up there).

It is understandable why some people hate Meta Plots, but I see it more of a “style of play” than “bad or good” (as usual, right?). Without a Meta Plot, a game may end up being “pointless” (Yes, we kill monsters…grab their loot….so that…?) while a bad Meta Plot is like a stranglehold. By “bad”, it could be something incoherent or put down funny restrictions tha tmay offend other people’s taste (google F.A.T.A.L the RPG if you dare).

Theme, Meta Plot and Board Games

Do board games needs a Meta Plot? After all, board games are closed system where a sandbox style play is not available. Chess is Chess, and I have yet to see a role-playing chess (that’s an idea. “The Knight bows before the Queen” – and I try to seduce her, and I can’t fail because I would be eaten by her!!) Looking at lot of board games though, the good games are those which mechanics fit their themes (aka the Meta Plot)

Do Abstract Games, like Blockus, need meta plot? No. As mentioned, a Meta Plot can drive the design, the design can produce the Meta Plot, but it would be better if they both mesh. Dominion, for example, is a card game in which you try to get the best combos possible, but some reviewers point out that the theme of the game (medieval city building) doesn’t seem to gel well with the theme. Saint Petersburg has one theme-breaking moment which is usually used as a joke – upgrading an author to a…chambermaid.

The War of the Ring boardgame shows how the Meta Plot influences game mechanic, presentation and finally, its’ “feel”. Without the Lord of the Rings element, the boardgame would become just another RISK with orcs and elves. Due to the necessity of the Meta Plot, the Fellowship’s journey to Mount Doom has to be represented (in the form of “moving the fellowship”). There is a need to consider in the novels, the good guys’ coffers and manpower are drying up and the bad guys seem to have unlimited supply of cannon folders. What is done in the game is that good guys’ losses are never replenished while the bad guys will always get reinforcement.

In Senji, a Japanese-inspired wargame (which take hours to play, yes), you roll dice on which face is a symbol of all the players. If you are allied with a player, and you managed to roll his symbols while in a battle, it is counted as well. And you can send hostages to other players for alliance, including your grandfather (!?)

The question is – without the theme, without the Meta Plot, who could have think of sending your grandfather or daughter as a hostage? (They do that during the Japanese’s Warring States period). Without the Lord of the Rings Meta-Plot, would there be the idea of “hey, the bad guys can always replace their loses, while the good guys can’t”?

To me, the Meta Plot is important for board games – board games usually rely on theme and different mechanics  to sell themselves, unlike computer games which can always get away with better 3D graphics, shaders, bloom and what-not. Unless your mechanics is something out of this world, I always feel that a theme which meshes well with the mechanics is a better game (see Pillars of the Earth, Kingsburg, Small World, Ilaid, just for examples).

Next: Meta Plot and Decision Making

We see how board games and role-playing games can be inspired and limited by the Meta Plot; the next thing I feel like blogging about is how the Meta Plot can influence decisions a player can make. One question I will ponder over is – what is the difference between Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft? Dragon Warriors and Dungeons and Dragons? Chess and A Game of Throne? Then maybe further down I will try to give some ideas on co-existing with the Meta Plot.

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.

Having the power to vote your own party members, such as the virtual democracies in Eve Online, sounds very enticing. Allowing players to take the law into their hand in a free-form games sound fun. Instead of “you cannot be a bad guy”, it becomes “you can be a bad guy until other players stop you”.

Yet, including social mechanics like these introduce changes to the game’s challenge.

The Hour is Later than You Think

This problem exists before MMOs come along, in the form of social conflicts and rules for table-top RPGs. Usually, the general advice is to give a bonus to skill checks for the player who narrate his actions well. For a social conflict or social skill check, it would be how well he role-play. But what if the player has a poor Charisma stat but is a good speaker? Which one has a higher weightage, on the spot role-playing or mechanic?

Is this a big deal? Say a character with obvious social flaws, perhaps a Charisma of just 3, and is trying to persuade a rival guild leader to an alliance. He speaks eloquently and flawlessly; he has a sound win-win proposal. He has just done something to impress the guild leader. If the GM let him succeeds, then he effectively has a Charisma of 18 or more.

What about a player with Charisma 18, but isn’t so imaginative? Should such people be confined to brutes and warrior rules because of a real life aspect? Isn’t role-playing about being someone else in imagination?

Most modern pen and paper RPGs have come up with ways to deal with social conflicts, making it a legal part of the game – Weapons of the Gods have conditions, Spirit of the New Century has Aspects and Tagging and Exalted has formal rules for social conflicts. Perhaps this could serve as a model for MMO games too?

Typical RPG Challenges and Social Challenges

First, a typical RPG’s challenge involves analytical skill, resources management and situational awareness. You plan a build, equip your gear and learn skills, most of the time that is the bulk of the challenge (analytical and resources management). When you take to the battlefield, you see if your build is effective. Situational awareness comes in for a few classes, such as the crowd control and debuff groups, who have to stay on their toes.

Second, social mechanics include another set of skills all together – emotional intelligence, communication and like it or not, deceit. Who can forget about how the biggest alliance in Eve Online went down because someone basically was an insider? Now in eSingapore on eRepublick, there is this drama going on about how the joint chief of staff, a certain individual named William Shafter, moved to eRussia with the bulk of the country’s weapons and money. Now the president and the former chief of staff are bickering back and forth.

When you move the game’s emphasis (chance of success) to the former (the typical RPG skill-set), social mechanics may become a moot point. It’s like someone who is a grandmaster at Chess and taking on 20 beginners in a Chess marathon. It’s no sweat to him. He has the best build, a good situational awareness, a mastery of the game mechanics. Even if there is a bounty on him, most players can’t take him down. He is protected by the system. Sure, he may have trouble joining parties or guilds, but does he need to?

Expand that to a guild – imagine you have a guild of kick-ass people. They run afoul of the current norms (remember the Funeral Massacre of World of Warcraft?). Say people want to punish them. Blizzard can’t do it – their Terms of Service does not have anything for ruining a social event. So the players have to take it into their own hand. But let’s the players are so good, have the best equipment, do well at the auction house, or maybe they buy gold (not saying they are, but just saying they have a complete mastery of the game). Who can do anything to them?

Social mechanics is a moot point then.

Let’s examine the second point, where social mechanics has a larger weightage.

You have shifted the emphasis on challenge to something softer, less deterministic and that is going to piss off some people. Take for example, Facebook’s RPGs where in PvP, one of the decisive factor is whether you have 501 clan members. In games where you elect people by voting, social capital comes into play, and that is a different skill set from most RPGs.

Some people like to win due to their skills. Careful planning of their resources, analysis of the mechanics and min-maxing to win. They may dislike social mechanics for it feels like “boot-licking” and “whoring for attention”. Some people find all this stressful and play games to precisely to avoid these. Some people, however, wants those feelings and social interaction throughout. It’s not a case of “this is better than that” but “apples and oranges”.

Consequences of Social Mechanics: Be careful for what you ask for

However, social mechanics does add an unpredictable dimension to the game, yet for most people, who are working and face office politics and social pressures in the real life, do they need more in their entertainment?

Second, in a social environment, the majority sets the rule. If people can get away with crime, which often pays if not for the law, you get lots of griefing. If you could rob a character of his item instead of farming of it, without any consquences, while most of the people are doing it, will you? The ToS says you could; the game mechanics encourage you to do it and society agrees that “hey, it’s just a game!”. Chris Crawford actually wrote in this book, The Art of Game Design, that computer games could also be “blowing raspberries” at social norms and the law, for they allow you to partake in acts frown upon in the real life. The success of GTA, IMHO, proves the point. Why would you want to be honourable, law-abiding and etc.?

Third, you have to put in the incentive to build trust, and that may be the only reason why people don’t steal from their friends (but it’s still okay to steal from others, right?) Darkfall now has this problem where crafters are afraid of trading outside their own guild in fear of being PKed the moment they talk to a stranger, and has try to fix it with a patch. Do you have this sort of game environment (some would say yes, some would say no, so keep this in mind when designing your game).

Defintely, a middle-ground could exist. Don’t make the social mechanics the end all and be all. It could be a perk for those who communicates well and likes social interaction. It shouldn’t infringe on players who wants no part of it. And the social mechanics should extend beyond killing or defeating the player to punish him.

For example, Dynamic Drive, a technical forum where people helps out each other with programming questions, has a Thanks feature where posters can thank other for helping. GameDev.net has a rating system. LOTRO has a hidden social mechanic too – if you are hugged (through the emote) by 100 different players, you get the title “The Beloved”. If you are saluted 100 times, you get to access the emote “sword salute” (the typical kissing the sword gesture before a battle or duel, like what Aragorn did in the Fellowship of the Ring Movie).

Indeed, if you want to include social mechanics into your games, I think that the reward should be social and off another nature all together, not loot, XP or money, but recognition, respect and significance, which is what drives people who are interested in social interaction.

To Socialise or Not To?

There’s no real right answer here; the answer is whether the mechanics are suited to the theme and design of your game. You will draw different types of players, encourage different behaviours, norms and culture through the mechanics you include in your game.

Stroking his thick beard, Mr. Wu replied, “There is a young genius by the name of Flowing Clouds, dwelling by the Cloud-Shadow Ridge. His mastery of code scribing is ultimate; his virtual creations are life-like! Scenes lit by imaginary bloom lighting challenge that of the real sunrise! Surely there is no one as professional as he is.”

Shaking his bamboo cane, the Wandering Teacher pointed out of the windows towards the river, where a Builder of Bridges, along with his men and carpenters, were building a massive wooden structure across the river. “There is the Bridge Builder,” said the Wandering Teacher, “and the bridge which he will build has the span of five ox-carts. With utmost care he planned the operations; with great precision he has drawn the plans, ordered his men and now with hawk-eye certainty he monitored the process. With such care he goes about his craft, because he knows that the bridge he built will be used by traders and hawkers and guards and maybe even the Honourable District Magistrate himself! He dedicate himself to this project for his pride and the safety of others. He’s a professional.

“Now tell me, in what ways does Master Flowing Clouds’ ability to scribe the perfect virtual creations make him a professional game creator?”

Mr. Wu began to think of an answer. He was still thinking when the Wandering Teacher left.