Metagaming in beardygames

[Dog Pants]

Videogames have had some sort of metagaming in them for years, and recently it's become a big part of MMOs. Crafting is a good example, but really I'm referring to anything that can be played without being directly involved with the job at hand. I've never really seen it in beardygames though, and I think it might add appeal. I can only assume that they are never included because they're either not considered interesting to tabletop players, or because they're too easily exploited.

However, I think they could be done fairly easily in most games, and having some active things to do in downtime would help the campaign flow rather than just being a series of adventures. All our games have downtime, but at the most they involve a few dice rolls. Personally I can see potential in expanding on downtime to involve player choices and skill checks that would lead to things that were advantageous within the adventures, but what do you guys think? Please discuss.

To give an example, in SLA I've been developing downtime rules for stuff like media footage, finance, and lifestyle choices. In other games you could create or modify equipment like MMO crafting (Frank does something like this in SR). None of these systems are interactive, but they could be if players wanted to get involved in that sort of thing.

[Joose]

I like this idea. Im sure ive seen something about similar stuff in the Dumpshock forums, I'll do a bit of digging and see what I can come out with.

Technically speaking, SR already has a lot of this. If you are following the proper availability and skill learning rules, theres a shitload of stuff to do between missions. The reason we are not using all these rules is that I find them needlessly complicated, and in some cases quite harsh. Getting some balance would be good though.

I would certainly like to expand on what you can do and how you can do it, downtime wise, in shadowrun. I would be interested to see what you have put together for SLA too.

[Dog Pants]

Well I've already published the SLA stuff in the house rules, but it's all just skill checks really and I'm not sure how to make it more interactive without it turning into boring bureaucracy. However, in say AD&D it would be very interesting (to me at least) to have to go finding resources to make equipment, later on learning how to enchant stuff, the player prompting the GM about what experiments to try, and having them maybe blow up in his face a few times while he learns the right combinations.