Image Source: D&D 3.5 Monster Manual
This is part of a series of articles that tackles the concepts of tropes and how they can be applied by a DM/GM to improve their favorite Role-Playing game adventures. It is heavily inspired by the sheer goodness of the TV Tropes Wiki.
“I’m sorry, you’ve never faced a troll before, so you’re not supposed to know that fire damage is lethal. That’s Metagaming”
“Ah come on!”
Have you ever had this discussion or one like that with your players? I sure did, and quite often too. That’s why I’d like to tackle another trope that fantasy gaming DMs* more often imposed on their players than on their NPCs:
Genre Blindness
A condition afflicting many television characters, seen when one demonstrates by their behavior that they have never in their life ever seen the kind of show they’re in, and thus have none of the reactions a typical audience member would have in the same situation. Worse, they are unable to learn from any experiences related to their genre.
The current incarnation of D&D is all about near-super humanoid heroes and their quests to become the legends that bards will sing about for centuries to come. And there lies the problem of DMs applying this Trope ‘for believability’ or ‘to prevent Metagaming’. If bards have been signing songs about all the world’s heroes exploits, then any tavern scullion worth her salt would know all about Trolls regeneration, Succubus life drain, Color-coded dragons and Rust Monsters by the time she was 12.
I have always found it easier to design an adventure while assuming that the characters know nothing about the monsters and the context they would appear. But that’s being somewhat unfair towards the inherent coolness of the characters. The later D&D books confirm this by allowing players to know key things about a monster or character class with a Knowledge skill check. So I now try to avoid imposing this trope. Heck, the Rust monster’s continued existence from edition to edition is directly linked to the huge reaction it triggers in Fighter types, so using them might not be all that bad …
Furthermore, in order to properly challenge the players, DMs create encounters where antagonists are painfully aware of the whole Fantasy Genre and take creative measures to prevent getting killed and losing their loot (the early Goblins webcomics were exactly about that).
I’m not saying that players should be handed all the monsters books and be told about each special abilities. But they should not be penalized if they react or plan based on commonly known things about canonical creatures of your game world. However, once this is established with your players and they had the immense pleasure of using bits and pieces of knowledge to their advantage, it’s your turn to subvert the trope and surprise your players:
- Trolls may be killed by fire, but Crystal Trolls are only vulnerable to Sonic attacks.
- A Silver dragon caught a disease that makes it always ravenous and destroys all the crops and cattle of a trusting community.
- A Succubus was actually striped of all her powers and she must actually fall in love with a Paladin and get him to reciprocate for her to regain them.
How was this trope used or subverted in your games?
*It may happen in other genres, but I think the trope actually needs to be imposed in most horror campaigns or any game where a certain level of cluelessness is ‘de rigeur’.
I exploited my players’ confidence in their metagame knowledge once, with a little help from Andy Collins.
It’s incredibly how much “White Dragon” and “Wight Dragon” sound alike. Even after it breathed fire on them twice, and despite the description of grey rotting flesh, they still tried to blast it with fireballs for a couple rounds before one of them asked how to spell Wight.
They were just so sure of their assumptions.
Pure gold!
A Wight dragon! That’s such a cool subversion of the trope!
I’m not so happy with the way the current DM is using this trope. It can be a little frustrating as a player. And take from me challenge is good. Frustration however does not = fun. My DM’s world. Just because a races alignment is evil in the book. Doesnt make it so. So sometimes its hard to sort out the bad guys. Which quite frankly is starting to get old. Because if you go up to someone and start talking you leave your self open for AoO. I doesnt matter if hes never done this before. The fear still is there so the hack and slash mentality comes to the forefront. Kill him before he kills me. Then you kill a good guy. Or something else to screws things up.
In my book Ronin, if a DM swings at a PC because the party attempts to parley, that’s just bad form. There should be some blustering and saber rattling.
If the DM plans on double-crossing the players, he should be droping hints before the meeting and then allow the PCs to perceive the threat with Spots and Sense motive rolls.
I personally have an issue with the Always Chaotic Evil trope but i’m not advocating screwing with players expectations at every turn. But a well placed surprise, like the Wight dragon above is nice.
Frustration = bad if pushed too far or used repeatedly without a significant payoff. But really awesome games are those where players get slightly frustrated (we’re going to die!!!!) and then win in extremis (Yes! Natural 20!)…
Well thats just it unfornatly he’ll sometimes give us just enough info to not know whats going on. The demon worshipers we fought last night. Turned out to be good guys. And one of the demon worshipers happened to be the guy we were looking for. Who is a cleric of Kord. So this cleric of Kord is helping these demon worshipers contain a demon menace. So let get this straight. Demons are evil. So the their worshipers are too. Are they not? And they had a priest of Kord helping them. But seeing our cleric (who is a cleric of Kord), and expecting way over due reinforcement from kord. They didnt say hey are you here to help? Or anything. They just try to shoo us off. I really think my DM tried to put in a twist with his brand of everything isnt as it appears jive. And it just didnt fit.
I like the point you bring Ronin although personnally I hate the racial base alignement (or the alignment at all come to think of it)…
The perception of good vs evil or chaos vs order is so much influence and determined by the society in which you evolve that in my point of view racial inclination is close to meaningless.
That being said I’ve GM most of my campaign in humain only world with no alignement and the conflict where based around something else then fighting evil.
It’s all a question of setting up the scenes and like Chattydm said you need a build up for a fight to at least give it significance and let the player understand what is going and why.
This is crucial in a non alignment based world as otherwise either your player will attack everything on sight on the of chance that it might be a trap or they will just be dead as they will be constantly attack for no apparent reason.
Obviously if the story calls for an ambush go ahead but make sure that the player gatter some clue on the fight scene to explain it afterward.
my 2 cents
My kingdom for an edit button!
A Wight dragon! That’s such a cool subversion of the trope!
Thanks to Andy Collins, there. My players threw things at me afterwards. 😛
So let get this straight. Demons are evil. So the their worshipers are too.
As far as alignment goes, that’s why I like the Eberron campaign setting. (Well, that and airships.) In it, the default alignment of a race or organisation doesn’t exist, and the setting promotes freedom of choice. You’re as likely to have a benevolent red dragon, or a CE gold dragon, as you are to not.
To give an example relating to the demon cult, however, an inquisitor of the Silver Flame (a LG religion) may very well be LE. Heck, he might have to be, to do the things he has to do as an inquisitor. A group involved with demone is not necessarily worshipping those demons, though that may be what the townspeople think they’re doing. And even if they are, they could believe that this demon is benevolent, and has the world’s interests at heart, even if he doesn’t. All of these make it possible to have LG people associated with demons, and indistinguishable from a demon cult.
That said, when alignment is not a given, you need to run those NPCs as their actual alignment. If a goblin is good, he shouldn’t be pillaging with other goblins. If your demon-cult-ish people are good and expecting help from Kord, they shouldn’t shoo off a Kord-ian.
Now, when you come up to a demon cult, you should definitely be suspicious of them. I don’t blame the party for the fight that started, I blame the DM for not making it clear enough that these demon cultists were not the same as normal ones.
But in other cases, you just need to remember to judge the NPC or creature on its actions, and not on its default alignment.
And if the DM makes that impossible, and has a red dragon burning down a town right before you find out he’s “good”, then I feel sorry for you, as that’s no way to run a game like this.
Thanks for joining us Ve4grm. I removed the edits 🙂
Please take a few minutes to fill in either the DM or player questionnaires as I love to see what makes RPG Players/GM tick.
Ve4grm, I removed your last post, split it in two and re-posted both responses to the questionnaires in the comments sections of the ‘Meet the DM’ and ‘Tell me about you players’ questionnaires posts (look on sidebar of the blog’s main page).
And for those who missed it, Ve4 comes from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yan and I are from Montreal.
Sounds good. It was… a bit long, eh?
I for one can’t criticize long posts… I’m called Chatty for a very good reason… 🙂
The posts were perfect, I just wanted to have them handy when I start refering to them in future posts!
Thanks so much for dropping by!
Having a player pull what I call ‘Lazy Metagaming’ stunts drives me insane.
‘Lazy Metagaming’ is when the city kid knows all about the wilderness, and how to handle the creatures there; things like that. They break, for me, the verisimilitude of the game. It no longer feels like we’re playing living, breathing characters, we’re just using whatever works best within the rule mechanisms.
Sometimes my DM has to stop a player and ask, ‘Okay, why is your character making this amazingly convenient assumption, given that his background and experiences so far lead nowhere even close to that?’ Not quite in such direct language, but the gist is the same.
I’m lucky, though, in that I’ve got a pair of very, very good DMs who don’t abuse they players (characters, sure, but we ask for it!) with the ‘you don’t know that’ clause. Ignorance can and should hurt sometimes, though – skills and knowledge aren’t free. If we all know how to defeat a troll, or whatever, why would anyone spend skill points on Knowledge: Horrible Monsters?
I don’t disagree with you Noah, however I just have a somewhat generous definition of ‘general knowledge’ that all PCs have.
I focus more on the fun for players than on the Verisimilitude. Unless deep suspension of Disbelief is what my group wants, I won’t make raise an eyebrow to some metagaming that stems from the fact we’ve been playing that game for 7 straight years now.
Now if Yan rolls a Barbarian and writes in his 14 pages of background that he comes from the frozen wastes of Kwaluland and that his tribe fought Ice trolls and White dragons every wednesday afternoons, well I won’t be so generous when he starts gabbing about the best way to kill a Red Dragons.
Like you’d read the 14 pages backstory… ;p
“I just have a somewhat generous definition of ‘general knowledge’ that all PCs have.”
That’s an entirely reasonable take on it – actually, ‘How Much Fantasy World Knowledge Does Everyone Have?’ might be a good determiner to keep in mind when designing a setting.
I am the verisimilitude cheerleader of my group, though. So – grain of salt and all. 🙂
(We always laughed about the standard D&D setting, at least as implied by the Monster Manual(s): the world is filled with Horrible Creatures, almost all of them carnivorous. It’s a wonder that something like a 1HD Human survives at all…)
They don’t bath! It keeps away the predators… 😉