Out-of-character knowledge: A solvable problem

Note: This primarily applies to trad RPGs, played as trad RPGs. I doubt it has much relevance for story-telling games, or people running a trad TTRPG as a group story-telling exercise.

 

I often think about the player knowledge / character knowledge dichotomy, and in particular the problem of out-of-character or "meta-game" knowledge.

It boils down to this: in any game, within the world a character has capabilities (skills, powers, a viewpoint, certain possessions) that the player doesn't. But the player has information that the character doesn't.

Players, as they get experienced, inevitably end up having knowledge of X that their characters don't. Even if they learned something during the game, they'll eventually have a new, know-nothing character.

People are usually concerned about X being 'monsters' or 'enemy powers and vulnerabilities' or 'magic item properties' or the like. But it can include other, more meta-level, stuff:

• Players hear about what's happening to other player characters, even when they're not together.
• Over-arching information about the scenario, which the player has played or read a review of.
• The GM just said "oops, forget I mentioned that".
• Savviness to the genre of the universe being played in. Players know that pleasant tidy off-ramps in Call of Cthulhu won't be what they seem.
• We remember where our last characters bit the TPK, and the layout of the dungeon level.
  
• The GM brought a whole box of fire imp models to the game.
• The player has read a mathematical analysis of which spells/weapons/feats/etc are optimal.
  

 

Separating player knowledge and character knowledge

I think it's fairly obvious that at least in trad TTRPGs, it's desirable to reduce the impact of out-of-game knowledge on gameplay. Players ideally should have just the information their characters have, and make decisions accordingly.

Otherwise, why not just play with all the GM's stats and maps laid out on the table? Or better yet, given to the players to study before the game? Why not let the players roll to see whether they would succeed or fail at something before deciding whether to try it?

There are solutions, of course

I listed out all the solutions I could think of to "experienced players having knowledge about X that their characters don't". Then, as if I didn't have enough to do today, I rated and ranked them according to my

personal scoring rubric:

✅ Effective

✅ Low-effort

✅ Widely applicable

✅ Incorporates game mechanics

😠 Reduces immersion

😠 Requires doublethink

😠 Culture of play I dislike

😠 GM has to remember something

 

From best to worst, then:

👍 Players who know about X are required to put character points into character knowledge/skill relating to X.

Simple, effective, works with many but not all game engines. Aligns the character knowledge with the player knowledge neatly. Completely passive, but requires some honesty and introspection while setting up. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 5

👍 The GM uses mostly unique or procedurally generated new forms of X.

Unique monsters, custom-made scenarios, etc. This works well in most situations but is a lot of extra effort. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 4.5

👍 Any player knowledge of X is rumour, and rumours about X don't match the truth completely.

Very effective and fairly easy for grounded stuff like monsters and setting lore. Much more difficult (possible, but probably not worth doing) for other kinds of meta-knowledge. Risk of it feeling like bait-and-switch. GM has to stay on their toes. Score: 4

👍 Accept that X is well-known within the world.

Very easy, but only narrowly applicable (doesn't work with most kinds of meta-knowledge). Score: 3.5

🤏 Set things up so that knowledge of X has less impact on player decision-making. 

Difficult to do even in the best cases, but can pay off. For example, you can play with time and scene order so that players knowing what's happening with each others' characters at remote locations has less impact on play. Onerous for the GM and there are ways it can all go wrong, but impressive if it does work. Score: 3

🤏 The GM uses lots of deliberate misdirects about X, with in-world justifications.

A partial solution and one that eventually gets tiresome in practise. Technically works on a surprisingly broad set of meta-game knowledge, but doing that would take a ton of work and creativity on the GM's part. Score: 2.5

🤏 Treat the whole thing as not an issue.

I think this is pretty common, especially for sloppier/lower-stakes/beer-and-pretzels play. Players end up using doublethink or feeling vaguely guilty. As low-effort as it gets, but not great pay-off in terms of an actual solution. Score: 2

🤏 Shift the focus of gameplay into identifying that something is X.

Difficult to do, and only works on a narrow set of gameplay content; doesn't help with most meta-game knowledge. Generally requires the GM to be comfortable tinkering with the fundamentals of how the game works. Can be effective within its wheelhouse, but it's high-risk, low-reward. And what happens when players get player skill at identification and then start over at level 1? Score: 1.5

🤏 Players pretend that their characters don't know about X, but play as if they do.

Doublethink all the way. Thoroughly immersion-breaking. Leads to a narrative that seems plausible from the outside, but not from within, even done right. Is it worth it? I know some tables default to this all the time, but I'd rather keep it to just to the most necessary circumstances. Score: 1

👎 GM uses deliberate misdirects about X for no good in-world reason, so players learn they can't rely on any knowledge they have.

Yuck. Takes a lot of effort for pretty much no upside and a lot of downside. Don't do this. Score: 0.5

👎 Players have to commit to their characters not knowing about X, and therefore make deliberately bad decisions. Optional extra: Players get unrelated, perhaps even out-of-game, penalties for (seeming to) act on player knowledge of X.

The worst of all worlds. I've never seen this but I bet it happens. Score: 0

Putting it together

I recommend combining multiple 👍 solutions for best effects. I know that the 🤏 solutions work for some people/games/styles. Steer clear of 👎 solutions.

Did I miss any?

One mechanic to fix RPG spellcasting

(Or, well... it's an untested work-in-progress idea for fixing the things that usually irk me about it, personally.)

Magic has to be constrained, obviously, to avoid just having an instant win button that any wizard can press at any time.

Fantasy game designers usually accomplish this by giving spellcasting certain factors:

• Limited uses (in the form of spell slots, power points, consumable resources, etc). Book-keeping, yuk. You also need to stretch to find a good in-world reason for the limits to exist and the character to be aware of them, so immersion doesn't break.
• Spells of different fixed power level. Usually these have to be unlocked. If only one high-level spell has some effect, then you'll never have a lesser magician who has a knack for that one spell, or can even use it. Different fixed power levels pairs with limited uses to have several consequences:
• Even more book-keeping (bleh).
• Spells often just succeed, or have a single opportunity to resist, because it sucks to have a valuable resource just do nothing.
  
• Strategic choices usually become obvious (and therefore boring). You might straight up stop using your weakest spells.
  
• If spells have different power levels and are only rate-limited then a spell can be exactly as powerful as you can bear if a wizard wants to cast it their allotted N times per day, every day, including in downtime. Get it wrong and some spells are too weak to bother with; others break the game. Usually both, and it gets worse the wider the range of power levels.
• Jarring styles of play. The wizards have expendable resources and an incentive to use them in overwhelming bursts and/or to solve every problem, as much as possible, and then switch to 'spell recovery mode' (usually rest). This doesn't apply to other characters (or it gets awkwardly levered in by giving them inexplicably rate-limited mundane powers).
  
• Quick casting. It's bad enough in D&D-likes, where most spells take six seconds to cast. That's on the shorter side of what I'd prefer. In more granular games like GURPS, they're often cast even faster.
  
• Not much ritual. If there's a big slow evil magical spell happening, it's almost always a plot point rather than a mechanically underpinned option, let alone the primary method of spellcasting. In a lot of the genre fiction, spells are cast over long periods, either building and building in power/effect, or building towards a moment where they take effect! I really like the feeling of this, and almost never see it in a RPG.
  

I think these four aspects are worth changing for their own sake. It's worth noting that they also lead to a 'best practise' which I dislike:

Bum-rush the wizard

The RPG spellcaster in combat is unarmoured or otherwise fragile, and makes up for this with a limited number of extra-powerful hits which they deliver quickly and at range without cost, and can usually snipe a specific target and/or affect swathes of foes at once.

That adds up to a nearly universally optimal strategy: bum-rush the enemy wizard. Expend resources or open yourself to risk in order to take out the spellcaster early; it'll be worth it.

This is made worse by the usual mechanical parity of NPC/PC spellcasters (a satisfying and useful part of most games which I'd like to keep). The strategy is also optimal when it's creatures fighting a PC party with spellcasters. Enemies either bum-rush the PC wizard or are complete idiots. The best you can do is switch up those two options, sometimes making it unpleasant for the PC wizard player and sometimes boring the whole group with stupid enemies.

Here's my solution so far.

 

One unified mechanic which solves all my problems

A spell has fairly minor base effects which always apply, and a buffet of advanced effects.

If you're not already casting a spell, you can always try to cast any spell you know. You must continue casting it if you want the effect to continue (no check) or build (requires check).

When you cast a spell, its base effects take place. When you continue casting a spell, you either maintain it, or you try to make it more powerful by adding an advanced effect. You can do this each round, for most reasonable definitions of 'round'. Each time you want to add an advanced effect to the spell you are casting, you must make an appropriate check, which becomes more difficult with each effect added.

If you spend a round winding down a spell you're casting to end it, there's no risk at all. If you choose to stop casting it abruptly, there's a small risk. If you're forced to stop casting by some interruption or injury, there's a moderate risk. And if you bite off more than you can chew with advanced effects and fail the spellcasting check, there's a high risk.

The more risk, the worse the potential outcomes when the spell ends, and the higher the weighting towards the worse outcomes. The spell might just fizzle or have some cosmetic effect, but then again it might lash out at or turn on the caster, or run horribly rampant. These effects could be generic, tuned to the spell, or both.

The more skilled at wizardry you are, the more likely you are to succeed on your checks, and therefore reduce the risks you face by casting a more sophisticated spell.

Examples

The mage's change spell only makes her target look like a frog, at first. As she adds more and more advanced effects, they become the size of a frog, and then become a frog, and then start thinking like a frog. By adding other advanced effects, she can make the spell last – first an hour, then a week, then permanently – even after she stops casting it.

The wizard raises a wall from the ground at the heel of his staff. As he walks, it follows in his tracks. He puts more effort in, and it changes from packed earth to sandstone, and then to granite. If he risks enough advanced effects, he can make it higher and thicker, or join it up and add features to turn it into a building, or make it last well beyond the time he spends casting. A skilled wizard with patience and a tolerance for repeated small risks could make a whole stone fortress, a little section at a time, and only have to renew it (say) once per year.

The warlock starts casting a spell to call lightning down on the enemy camp. Clouds gather, roil, and darken as she casts. If she releases it immediately, it will have no effect, but as she continues casting, an ominous glow signals more and more charge is gathering. The choice of when to actually bring the lightning down is a calculated risk. Wait too long, and it might lash out at her!

The evil cultist starts conjuring blood eels directly from the bodies of the victims. Over time, more and more of them exsanguinate, and the blood eels grow larger, more numerous, more self-directed, and roam further from the caster. If he doesn't want to push his luck, he can then maintain his swarm of eels for as long as he keeps casting.

Outcomes

So how about those desiderata from the start of this post.

Limited uses? Nope.

Spells of different fixed power level? Gone.

Quick casting? Not if you want to accomplish much!

Not much ritual? Effects build as the chanting continues, which is the key part; see also Possible Extensions, below.

The "bum-rush the wizard" strategy? Still useful, for PCs and NPCs alike, but not a no-brainer. When the wizard starts casting, he's not particularly dangerous. If you let him keep on casting, he eventually becomes very dangerous indeed ...unless he overreaches and destroys himself! We have arrived at "actual decision-making", the backbone of TTRPGs!

Corollaries:

• Casting a spell is a risk, so spells can be powerful and yet not rate-limited. Just play out the spell each time, to see whether something goes horribly wrong. The more powerful the effects you're invoking (and thus the more potential to 'break the game' when done over and over), the more likely you are to suffer catastrophe.
• Note that this requires negative outcomes to have actual major impacts, not just be slaps on the wrist. Otherwise you end up with a long, slow cycle of spend-resources-to-make-resources-to-fix-the-harm-which-occurred-while-making-free-resources-etc. It's going to work best in games where healing is neither easy nor quick, and where character death is a possibility.
• Character improvement for magicians is easy. You can take whatever approach you want with learning/acquiring spells or specific advanced effects, specialising in spells, etc. The main improvement is just in spellcasting skill: a better caster can reliably get more spell effects before something horrible happens. This is skill-system-independent, with one exception: casters shouldn't get so powerful that they can do magic without risk (except possibly for the weak base effects of the spell, which might be safely freely repeatable if that won't damage the setting).
• Certain styles of spell, with quickly-achievable instant fixed effects, wouldn't work very well with this. Your words of command, snap featherfalls, reflexive shields, wizard knocks/locks cast while fleeing, etc. But I'm confident that every interesting spell can be made more interesting with effects that build and layer.
• I expect this to work very well with progressive status conditions, Pathfinder-style. Binary save-or-suck is often a problem with magic systems. "Spells get more powerful as the casting continues" fixed that pretty directly.
  

There are games that have elements of this mechanic – the GLOG's wizards, which I like; games with spells you pump up over time like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; that one Conan game with open-ended / modular casting; any game with spell mishaps. I haven't seen anything exactly like this, but if I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.

Possible Extensions

Off the cuff, ideas for advanced rules:

1. Capacity for the caster to change the spell they're casting on the fly by relinquishing specific advanced effects they added previously, lowering the check difficulty.
2. Extensions for counterspelling / duels of wizardry.
3. In some styles of game, advanced effects might be improvised rather than listed for the player.
4. Rituals involving long timespans and more casters: Increase the time requirement for each 'stage' of the spell, multiplying by some factor or by the number of casters. Get a benefit like reduced risk or easier checks for adding advanced effects.
5. Maybe everyone can do magic; the specialised wizards are just the ones who are good enough to do it with advanced effects and lower risk.
   
6. If you really wanted, you could add complexity back in by giving each advanced spell effect a numeric power level, and a corresponding increase to check difficulty.
   

Random vs procedural generation for game content

Random generation and procedural generation (which is a little more than 'random generation with the crusts cut off') are powerful tools. As GMs and designers we use them to spark inspiration or to populate a game or setting with interesting content. But we use them, or ought to use them, in different ways.

Here's the difference, as I see it.

Random generation

Roll a dice, get an outcome. Or variants thereof.

Random generation is

👉 Extremely quick
👉 An opportunity to use big random tables, which everyone loves
👉 Useful for inspiration by hitting possibilities you wouldn't have thought of, even if you don't use the actual prescribed results 

But it may also result in content with major dissonances and peculiarities.

I think a little incongruence is good, but generating too much randomly can create a sort of silly homogeneity where everything is dissonant, nothing quite makes sense, and no world elements are linked or correlated except by accident. You get ooh-so-zany slop.

Over-reliance on randomness thus requires work to repair, which can itself be entertaining, but takes time and effort.

For example, suppose you roll a random encounter across multiple tables, and get: [roll] hundreds of ... [roll] skeletons ... dressed as ... [roll] jesters .... and they're [roll] hauling a cartload of ... [roll] scented soap ... through [roll] a desert in bloom.

It's something you wouldn't have thought of, sure. But it's too dissonant to be usable in most settings. You hear it and maybe an inkling of a consistent narrative jumps to mind, but the designer needs to plaster over the gaps, tweaking or adding things, to actually get there.

Zany. Too zany? Image by CDD20, via Pixabay.

Procedural generation

Technically a subtype of random generation, procedural generation uses a more complex function to go from inputs to results. It uses randomness, but has deliberate human design built in to create plausible outcomes.

This takes longer, both in the up-front design work and the use of it for creation.

Procedural generation...

👉 Both uses and creates interlinked/ordered/self-consistent information
👉 Combined human decisions and design with randomness to spark novelty but to constrain it in certain ways
👉 Results (ideally) in more plausible or verisimilitudinous outcomes

Examples include:

👉 Branching tables and subtables
👉 Little bits of pseudocode for dungeon room generation
👉 Features added to a consistent core, like a themed monster which gets appropriate thematic features generated via branching dice tables or if/thens

One Application

I'm currently working on a zine. Its premise is that wizards are powerful, crazed, unique, and have strange features which align with their individual theme. For me, that means procedural generation.

I'm exploring a process of taking a wiki article from, say, Wikipedia and pulling out a bunch of descriptive phrases. From these, you get semi-structured thematically-coherent content. Then you follow some guided rules to apply them to the underlying core, which is 'a creepy and erratic wizard'.

After enough customisation, you have generated yourself a wizard. The random element of procedural generation means your character has features you wouldn't have thought of yourself. The human-guided element means the wizard should be more plausible, or at least thematically consistent, than pure randomness generally achieves.

(More news on the zine as I progress with this idea!)

The First RPG Ever Published in 2025

It occurred to me that living in New Zealand (GMT+13) means a shot at being the first to publish a TTRPG in 2025.

So here it is.

 

The premise

SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE is a mystery puzzle-based role-playing game for two players. Play as a small, psychic cat burglar and the specialised anti-psychic hired to hunt them down.

 

The background

Usually, of course, the REGIONAL CONSTABULARY simply hire a MEDIUM to solve any given crime. But this time, a MEDIUM is the perpetrator, and is muddying the PSYCHIC AETHER to cover their tracks. What's needed is a CLAIRVOYANT whose third eye can still see when things are UNCLEAR.

An UNCLEARVOYANT, in fact.

 

The game

This is a joke but also an actual game I made, and published at 12:45 AM, January 1, 2025, New Zealand time. Until I hear otherwise from my competitors in the Republic of Kiribati, I am declaring it to be The First TTRPG Of 2025.

You can check it out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/507211/SMALL-MEDIUM-AT-LARGE

Monsters of the Month: Mindless Devastation

My end-of-the-year monster collection for D&D 5e is funding now on Kickstarter!

This new 45-page compendium gathers tons of monsters under a single theme: swarms and other mindless rampagers. Hellbat colonies, malformed omens, dissolving hydras, swarms of undead leeches, star-seeded abominations, octopoid leviathans, and many more!

Check it out!

Quality and Quantity of Player Choices

Just some brief design musings.

Player choices are perhaps the most important component of TTRPG play. They're certainly one of the very most fundamental parts of any game.

We know that having more, and more compelling, choices means more fun when it comes to (for example):

• Spells or powers that are one-use, very limited, or come with a dramatic cost
• Systems where combat is dangerous and clever play gets you a huge edge
• Traps, in the style of play where traps are fundamentally puzzles and roll-to-disarm isn't an option
• Exploration, in an environment where there are (a) resource costs + (b) threats + (c) a goal which can (only) be accomplished here + (d) no clear-the-whole-map expectation

So a natural question to ask is: Can we improve certain game loops by adding more, or more compelling, choices?

Some areas come immediately to mind – places where many RPGs, big and small, have struggled in the past.

• Researching and investigation. In some games these are a simple matter of GM fiat, or just an in-world-time commitment plus a few dice rolls resulting in binary success or failure.
• Social relationships. In the (unfortunately common) absence of mechanical support and game structures, the need for these puts a burden on the GM. Social relationships ought to have mechanical impact on gameplay and emotional impact on the player... but all too often you hear them relegated to meaningless flavour. Some games don't really even ask: how do you live your character's life?
• Wilderness journeys. These can sometimes become somewhat performative/menial resource juggling or a matter of having the prescribed One Combat Encounter.
• Trade. When it comes to selling loot / buying equipment, some games skip past it, make it abstract or automatic, or reduce it to a haggle mechanic. Playing out the 'social encounter' with every trader isn't any better, if it doesn't involve compelling choices!
• Dying. Why not give a dying character things to do with their last breath? Or offer a decision between a slim chance to survive and using one's last strength to attempt something?
• Hacking archetypes/minigames. My impression is these often have a poor reputation even in otherwise-good games.

Some of these certainly could be improved with a greater centering of player choice.

More choices; more compelling choices

It's far from trivial to solve, of course.

Adding player choices may actually make things worse unless you meet the criteria for quality, which I would say at a minimum are:

1. The choice is interesting, urgent, or otherwise compelling to players
2. The choice has enough risk or potential mechanical impact to be worth the game time
3. The choice can't just be resolved with a straightforward calculation in terms of concrete or absolute costs, preference ordering of relative outcomes, etc
4. The choice is presented alongside enough grounded detail for the players to actually make informed decisions

Worth thinking about.