He hobbles along the dungeon corrider and meets the PCs, many arrows sticking out his back. This would be adventure tells the PCs about the horde of orcs and the witch-doctor who has summoned a demon that killed his adventuring party. He asks to be healed and continues to run away.

Now you can give those orcs a few magic items that the previous party had, and the PCs have a clear idea of what is ahead and how to deal with it.

Surely there are plenty of NPC adventurers out there that the PCs run into, right….

“Ok, guys, we can quite an hour and a half early tonight… or we can have some sort of random encounter.”
“Hmm, we don’t want to quit, and XP is always nice.” (15+ years of playing for every group member, and they(we) all get that giddy teenage “leveling up” feel.)

We took a break, and as it turns out, I had a “sandbox” encounter that they had previously ignored that I was able to adjust slightly and plop in their path with a “you guys take a shortcut through the hills rather than going around on the road, right?”

In the end, it was actually the best encounter of the session.

Based on one session GMing BE and several playing BW at cons, I agree with Reed: it wouldn’t work nearly as well without Beliefs and Artha (particularly Beliefs).

@Rust

I don’t think there is anything such as Burning Empires without Beliefs and Artha. You may as well ask if D&D would be effective without classes and XP.

@Supercheese

I don’t think the problem was the metagaming. It’s that the GM said, “Here is the storyline…” You made characters for that storyline, then the GM threw a lot of other, unrelated stuff in there and expected you to ignore the storyline at times.

Also, how important do you find Belief and Artha in helping you reveal the situation in Burning Empires? Could you do the reveal as effectively in BE without Beliefs and Artha?

We found out, through some fun investigation, that there were a couple of minor artifacts we could retrieve to keep the undead army firmly planted in the ground. My character, a traditional 3.5 DnD Paladin, focused in on the global importance of this task. I used the info the GM gave us to drive towards the artifacts, forsaking other side-quests and minor infractions that only impacted a few individuals. Sure, i could and wanted to save that guy that was just carried off by a young dragon, but we have information that we could use to save thousands, if not millions. Greater good and all that.

The GM stripped me of my paladin-y goodness for not going to save that one guy and instead focusing on our main mission that could prevent death on a massive scale. I, of course, thought that was ludicrous. I knew nothing of that man, for all i know he was a murdering s.o.b. and the dragon was fulfilling a bounty contract. What i did know is that guy would be dead anyway if i didn’t go get those artifacts.

Looking back, i suppose it was inevitable that the Paladin was going bye-bye. In the campaign, the way the GM ran it it was a formidable character and was at a higher power level than the rest of the group. I figure if i would have saved the guy instead, i would be stripped to bring the power level back down anyway. I just wish he would have talked to me about it out of game instead of presenting it the way he did.

That long story is only meant to say buyer beware with divulging information to the players. I think the GM in the above example could have gotten the point across and accomplished much with the story line, i just don’t like them giving info that demands attention and then punishing us for making the right decision from my character’s perspective. I understand that your choices have consequences, but from any way i looked at it the metagame info that was given out sunk my character and enjoyment of that game from that point forward.

I had an NPC called Buscemi who essentially narrated the opening and close of each session and was in effect the go-to man of the town of Mierda De Perro where the scenario took place.

I introduced each PC, through Buscemi, as they appeared “on screen”, giving them a little private time to shine and then, once we’d run throught the first part of the fight sequence, flashed further back to them arriving in Mierda De Perro to investigate the place…

The players loved every moment of it. For an encore I plan to start the next one with each PC having to fight to meet up.

However, you can still be very surprised by how things go down while ACTUALLY KNOWING WHAT IS AT STAKE.

Keeping what is at stake secret would result in the players arguing for 20 minutes about whether or not to open a door!

One of the reasons for this may be the hyper-specific nature of the game we play: D&D. Who wants to build a character based around social interactions if you’re going to be trekking through a dungeon and fighting the “monster of the week” instead of talking to anyone? Any game where the GM tries to put in a “little bit of everything” winds up looking like a one-size-fits-all shirt. It doesn’t *fit* anyone and you end up with Generic Adventure #1. Booooring.

I think middle-of-the-road meta-game info is absolutely *vital* if you are trying to create drama and work towards a specific *end*. My group is currently undergoing a slight difficulty because we agreed (out of game) that we would be permanently splitting the party. Unfortunately, my players are having a hard time connecting that out-of-game necessity with the right in-game information. So I had to say, “whoa, whoa, these are the reasons why you need to split the group and the logical times *when* you could split the group.” I’m hoping that will take care of the problem: I’m going to write some “Interludes” where the NPC’s talk amongst themselves and see if that helps them get into the right frame of mind.

One of my old GM’s would write interludes like these of the bad guys doing things in the background. If you are skillful at this, you can do it without giving away everything, but giving the players enough that the PC’s can look really cool when the moment comes up. In books, TV shows, you name it, the main characters always have a near-supernatural ability to put all the pieces together at the right time. If they were only looking through Martin’s proverbial “flashlight”, this may not ever happen. If they have the flashlight plus some little side hints, they can pull it off.

After working some stuff out and switching back to in character mode (non-meta gaming, I guess), they burned the church down and it turned out to be one of the best sessions I’ve ever run.

I really see nothing wrong with meta gaming. Saying things out of character like “Ok, where is your character going to be, so we can meet up” just makes the game more fun. Meta gaming things like “The GM likes orcs, so I’ll buy a anti orc spell” is a little more iffy. I think meta gaming doesn’t work when people run games that are very much the classic GM vs players.

–Victor