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Metaplot: What and How
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I got sidetracked onto this line of thought when I was talking to people about something else.
The question MOSTLY goes out to game runners, or at least game plotters and storytellers. What do you define as ‘metaplot’? How do you implement it? NAME A GAME. GIVE EXAMPLES. I’m curious about concrete ways it’s taken – or taking – place.
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@Tez To me, a metaplot is an overarching story that impacts every character on the game, regardless of their location or role. I can share a concrete example from a DC Comics game I staffed at recently.
Our opening metaplot centered on a Brainiac invasion, which played out across our three major city grids: Gotham, Metropolis, and NYC. Though we had dedicated game runners, we operated as a sandbox game - our storytellers ran regular scenes in each city, but we also empowered players with enough information to run their own scenes.
What made it interesting was how each city dealt with the threat differently:
- Gotham primarily faced technology running amok as systems got infected with the “Brainiac virus”
- Metropolis saw the heaviest action since it was Brainiac’s main target, with regular drone battles and major confrontations
- NYC ended up being a mix of both, dealing with both technological chaos and direct conflicts
We kept the plot fresh with monthly updates that outlined how the situation had evolved, introducing new story elements players could interact with while phasing out older ones. The whole arc ran for about six months, and honestly, it was an absolute blast. The game eventually closed, which was pretty heartbreaking since we were all having such a great time with it.
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I agree with @Raistlin’s definition of metaplot as an overarching story that impacts every character on the game.
My example from The Savage Skies would be “The Global Fight Against Fascism.” So metaplot involved trying to protect an area of northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War, softening the landing of Czechoslovakia into the Drachenordenung orbit, collecting magic spheres to raise Atlantis, and preventing the Hollow Earth from becoming a fascist garden were all chapters in the metaplot.
On the other side, exploring ruins for magical artifacts, meeting with dragons, random skirmishes with fascists, and the like weren’t necessarily part of the metaplot, but sat within it, defined by it.
On The Fifth World, the metaplot was “The War Against the Hostiles.” All the noble political maneuvering and concert series and Senate elections and the like were smaller plots that were placed in context by the metaplot.
At the simplest level, I would say that Metaplot is the stuff that NEEDS to have a post on the game boards, simply so that everyone knows what’s going on with it.
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I have always used the old TTRPG definition. As summarized by wikipedia:
The metaplot (also, metastory) is the overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity of a published role-playing game campaign setting, also defined as an “evolving history of a given fictional universe”. Major official story events that change the world, or simply move important non-player characters from one place to another, are part of the metaplot for a game.
So while individual players/storytellers will run their own plots, the metaplot is more like an umbrella plot - an overall direction for the game as a whole.
Some metaplot examples from games I’ve run (or helped to run):
- Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.
- BSG Unification had an overarching plot of “war progress” with the PCs changing planets and ships.
- Sweetwater Crossing had a metaplot around the range war conflict between the Blake and Cooper ranches.
- TGG had a metaplot for each campaign, following (generally) the major events from history.
My definition differs slightly from @Roadspike’s because I think you can have really big game-impacting plots that are not part of an overarching or connected story. They’re more like episodes. Battlestar Pacifica was more like this. You could connect the Big Plots in retrospect and call that a “metaplot”, I suppose, but they weren’t deliberately planned/connected that way.
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Metaplots are interesting in MUs because a significant number of players on MUs don’t pay attention to them (which can have interesting results when the metaplot touches them).
That said, to me a metaplot is the overarching plot being run by staff on a game alongside the canon continuity of the universe being played in (for games based on actual TTRPGs or movies or book series or whatever).
I have no issues with metaplot at all, and think they can be great, but I have definitely seen people lose it over metaplot stuff that was common knowledge to most of the players but some sort of world-ending revelation to them.
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I like the definition that a metaplot affects every character even if they don’t realize it. It also typically changes something major in the setting, though that major change may only be seen by specific characters.
An example I can think of is a oWoD MU* years back that had a metaplot centering around Locational Weirdness of a small city and it’s environment.
In specific, every sphere had different aspects of this Weirdness to attend to. For Werewolves, the Wyld and Weaver were best buddies for some reason and absolutely crushing all the Wrym spirits around. Things were still hella imbalanced, but imbalanced in a much different way from normal WoD.
Vampires had to contend with blood bonds simply not working any more. With anyone. This naturally threw huge wrenches into the vamps power structures. And now they actually had to treat their Ghouls well, since they could just rebel and weren’t mentally shackled to them any longer. Tremere were forbidden from entering the area and Sabbat were almost unheard of since the Vinculum just… didn’t work any more, so they quickly fell into infighting. Meanwhile, Anarchs moved in and quickly established themselves due to the massive power vacuum caused by blood bonds failing.
Changelings had to contend with a huge influx of Glamour. The place just glowed with the stuff. The downside is that this meant Bedlam was a constant threat and that all kinds of dangerous Chimera born from the dreams and nightmares of mortals around the place infested it. Some had to search out and purposefully cuddle up with Banal people just to keep the Things and ODing on Glamour at bay.
Mages – both Union and Traditional – made a pact to study the Weirdness. They also both lost established Constructs/Chantrys and there was a mystery there with both; in both places, the resident magi just simply disappeared without a trace. Magic also just… didn’t follow the normal rules where these places stood – the Technocratic Construct was without power and trying to reestablish it always met with failure (sometimes catastrophic), and the Traditions Chantry always treated ANY magic cast in it as Extremely Vulgar, regardless of paradigm. The Higher Ups wanted this thing Solved, so there was an oddly close working relationship between the Union and the Traddies. They met every week in the back of a bookshop/cafe. Donuts were supplied.
And regular mortals got treated to all kinds of bizarre weirdness. Disappearing alleyways in placed they’d been to a thousand times before, odd shadows that didn’t quite match, glimpses of Things just at the corners of their eyes, strange dreams and nightmares, inspiration striking with skills and knowledge they had no practice or understanding of, inexplicable equipment failures… and equally inexplicable equipment successes (“… This car has no engine. How is it running?”).
@Faraday said in Metaplot: What and How:
- Babylon 5 MU basically followed the key events from the TV series, with variations influenced by the PCs.
As a side note, I’d KILL for a Babylon 5 MU*. Sadly, one of the best (if not THE best) Sci-Fi TV series seems to have been mostly forgotten. Sigh.
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Someone wrote this on the former board, and I’m sorry that I don’t know who it’s credited to. The topic was what you expect to do as a GM. It covers Metaplot, as well as the plots surrounding it, so I think it’s useful in seeing how the Metaplot interacts with everything else.
How many people are you able to sustain GMing for? What are you going to do if your game gets 3-5x that? What are you going to do if the inverse happens and you get 3-5x less?
Metaplot: The background high-level long-term plot that plods along that provides a Background Reason for your other plots; the plot that creates the plots you actually run; the ‘history’, behind the scenes, what REALLY happened; the Big Picture – this is the glue that holds your stories together that you don’t interact with very much – the Antediluvian sleeping under your city, the origin of the Hellmouth, the fact that it’s actually the strain of grain that they’re being fed on the space station that’s giving everybody these powers…this is the story behind the story.
Chapter/Season Plots: These are the active day to day staff run “what is happening on this game” that your players can and should be able to directly impact. They should have a start, a middle, and an end. They should have LOTS of hooks for people to run PRPs from. They should give people stuff to RP about. So when you’re deciding on your chapter/season plot, you REALLY need to consider beyond the story itself:
what are my hooks for PRPs?
what will people RP about, in relation to this plot?
what RP will this plot create when I am not around?
What impacts will this plot have on peoples’ day to day RP?
Where are the pain points? What can I do about them? What will stall people’s RP about this?
DO NOT SEPARATE YOUR PLAYERBASE IN YOUR CHAPTER PLOT – THEY TAKE TOO LONG TO RESOLVEEpisodic Plots: This is what makes the game go round. This is all the little things that get run weekly, from parties to monster of the week to scheduled events that feed into the above types. They are typically self contained, and keep people entertained while the Chapter/Season gives them things to RP about. You want to make these REALLY easy to run – give people LOTS of easy hooks into your Chapter, and plenty of info with which to run them. You ALSO want to make sure it’s really clear what they CAN’T do, because people always have an easier time when they know what their boundaries are.
It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see yourself or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.
I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.
