Following on last week’s activites, I returned to my local library to once again preside over a session of Dungeons & Dragons for a group of middle-school-aged children. When the game had left off last week, there was a fight over a fish brewing within the party, which made for an interesting place to break off for the evening; cliffhangers work to prompt ongoing engagement, after all. When actual play resumed, that fight got addressed; afterwards, the narrative resumed pretty much as expected. Gamers are gamers, after all, and kids are kids–and middle schoolers are still very much kids.

Owing to the need to be more explicitly educational, however, I did not resume play immediately on starting the session. Instead, I addressed a narrative and ludological concern: metagaming. That I would need to do so was prompted by one of the players making a comment in the previous session about trying to read my mind…by pulling out a copy of the source text I was (and still am) using for the current narrative arc. It was clear to me from the remark and the action that the player is trying somehow to “win” the game. I’ve been guilty of doing such things, myself, so I can certainly understand the impulse. While there is some sense to some kinds of metagaming (there’s no way not to do it, to some extent; that there is a game going on is always clear within it, and the tension between the real and the game drives some of the humor that invariably creeps into play), I do find myself somewhat concerned to confront it.

As I play, and as I worked to clarify to the players way back at the beginning of the program, TTRPGs should generally be collaborative endeavors. That is, those at the table should work together to tell a story that is about all of them. The kind of metagaming that seemed to me to be brewing moves more towards things being competitive, with one player trying to make the game about their one character rather than about the group. Some of this will happen naturally, of course, dice being what they are, but there seems to me to be a difference between an organic emergence of such a thing and the calculated contrivance towards the same–and the former is, in my mind, better.

I’m glad that the player in question is actually reading. I’m glad, too, that the player in question is trying to think around things. Both of those are good actions to undertake, and I could stand to see more people doing both of them. And it is the case that the player in question, being one of the more experienced at the table (mine was not the first game in which that player participated, as was the case for several others at my library table), will necessarily know more about how the game works as a game and cannot reasonably be expected not to know it. (Indeed, I’m looking at said player as a candidate to run future games, one of the goals towards which I and the program generally are working.) But I am concerned about the player–and, to be fair, others, if for different reasons–making the game about themself rather than about the group…and I admit to concern about being caught out railroading my players, which is not a good thing to do.

What I’m doing, moving forward, is making a few changes to the text I’d originally thought to use; sticky notes are my friend in this. Some of the material was designed to be dice-determined; I rolled for that previously, making notes of results. I have adjusted a few points of narrative, as well, and redone progression through the major puzzle that presents itself in the published text. The player will still have something of a leg up on the others, which is okay, but the ability to simply read ahead and know all of what is coming…that has been removed, now, which should make the playing field just a little bit more level. The others at the table deserve their chances to shine, after all…which is a useful reminder for more people than just them.

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