Saturday, September 11, 2010

A Quick Little Choose Your Own Adventure Regarding Monsters, Meta-Gaming and Role-Playing

1
The Dungeon Master:
"Although inexperienced, you're party is armed, brave and eager to make a name for themselves. You cautiously enter the dungeon. You're flickering torchlight reveals a tall, hunched, skinny figure, with warty, rubbery green skin; a long nose; black pits for eyes; and writhing black-grey tendrils for hair."

If you draw your sword and attack go to 2
If you throw a flask of oil at the creature and ready your torch in an attempt to set it on fire go to 3


2
The Dungeon Master:
"You rush forward and slash a deep wound into the green monster's torso. Ropy, writhing guts are exposed...however the wound doesn't bleed and begins closing up. You continue hacking at it to no avail, it's wounds healing before you're eyes. Soon you're head has been ripped of and the monster is feasting on your guts."

THE END


3
The Dungeon Master:
"Whoah there Ted...that's out-of-character knowledge! This is a role-playing game; not a meta-gaming exercise!"

Ted:
"Are you kidding me? It's a troll and fire is the only way I can hurt it."

The Dungeon Master:
"You're character would have no way of knowing that as he has never encountered trolls before, and he wouldn't even know it was a troll; you're practically cheating!"

Ted
"What the hell!? I didn't spend that time rolling up this guy and buying his equipment...and "talking" to your imaginary NPCs in that imaginary tavern only to throw this character's life away for the sake of method-acting!"

The Dungeon Master
"Fine, if you're going to meta-game you'll just have to deal with a substantial experience point penalty for this session"

Ted
"For fuck's sake Bill, I'm pretty sure if I lived in a world with trolls that ate people and were only hurt by fire it would be pretty fucking common knowledge that you would defend yourself against them with fire; there would be fortune cookies that say "wise man say if you run into a big, skinny, green freak set it on fire before it eats you!""

The Dungeon Master
"Ted, you're a friend, but if you're not going to play properly perhaps this isn't the group for you..."

Ted
"You didn't have a problem with my meta-gaming when you were stuffing your greasy face with those chips I brought!" *storms out of the house*

9 comments:

  1. Holy fuck, I just saw my former GM... O.O
    Luckily for me, he left my country :D

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  2. I always feel a little bit guilty that I've memorized various monster manuals over the past 30 years. But then I kill 'em anyways. I'm not going to suicide a PC that's taken 9 years to get to 10th level (yeah in this campaign we don't play that often) over a little metagaming... DM doesn't seem to care either way.

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  3. Where is entry 4. run like hell ?

    You don't have to outrun the troll you have to outrun the guy in plate.

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  4. Ha! I just wrote a post about this yesterday, I just haven't put it up yet.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Argh I cant get the link to work properly in blogger, but anyway i put the post up here:
    http://themetalearth.blogspot.com/2010/09/retro-redbox-outrage.html

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  7. I always hate the "Bah, you're metagaming!" crap. Any smart person knows two facts to surviving life:

    1-If the thing trying to hurt you isn't already on fire, chances are it's not going to like being on fire.

    2-If the thing trying to hurt you has a head, it probably isn't going to be very effective at hurting you when said head is removed from said body.

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