ROLE-PLAYING IS A VERB

Character sheet says:

Brave.

Player says:

“I check for traps.”

Character sheet says:

Hot-headed.

Player says:

“I carefully consider the tactical situation.”

Character sheet says:

Curious.

Player says:

“I don't touch anything.”

We have all been there.

MetaCards are a simple, system-neutral way to prod players into actually playing the personalities, moods, impulses and genre conventions everyone agreed were supposed to matter.

They are not another role-playing game.

They do not replace your rules.

They sit on top of the game you are already playing and occasionally give somebody a nudge.

Do this.

Act like this.

Lean into that mood.

Make the interesting choice instead of the perfectly sensible one.

If the player follows the prompt, the system gives them a small mechanical encouragement for doing so.

Nothing enormously complicated.

Nothing requiring you to convert your campaign to another rules engine.

Just a little bit of game machinery pointed directly at the role-playing.

THIS IS A DIGITAL PRINT-AND-PLAY PRODUCT

This edition of MetaCards is supplied digitally for you to print and use at the table.

The basic idea is deliberately simple.

Players receive cards carrying role-playing prompts.

Those prompts encourage them to portray a particular attitude, mood or behaviour during play.

Follow the prompt and there is a modest mechanical incentive.

That is it.

The important bit is what happens afterwards.

A player who might otherwise spend the whole evening making tactically perfect decisions suddenly has a reason to let the nervous character behave nervously.

The arrogant character gets to be arrogant.

The curious character opens the box.

The romantic notices the obvious romantic complication instead of carefully manoeuvring around it because “that's what my character would logically do”.

The rules already reward people for hitting things.

MetaCards give the rest of the character a chance.

BECAUSE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES ARE STRANGE THINGS

Most RPGs tell players that personality matters.

Then they devote several hundred pages to things which are not personality.

Armour.

Spells.

Range.

Movement.

Weapons.

Saving throws.

Encumbrance, if somebody was feeling particularly vindictive.

The actual portrayal of a character is usually left hanging somewhere between good intentions and whatever the player happens to remember after three hours and two beers.

That is not necessarily a rules failure.

You cannot mechanise every human interaction without producing something that resembles a tax return for imaginary people.

What you can do is provide reminders and incentives.

MetaCards operate at that level.

The card gives you a prompt.

The player decides how to interpret it.

The existing game continues underneath.

No rebuild required.

A LITTLE PUSH TOWARDS THE INTERESTING DECISION

Role-playing games often create a conflict between the decision that makes the best story and the decision that makes the most tactical sense.

There is a dark staircase.

The horror protagonist goes down it.

The experienced RPG player sets fire to the building from sixty yards away.

Perfectly sensible.

Absolutely dreadful horror film.

MetaCards can be used to tilt players towards genre-appropriate behaviour without requiring the Games Master to seize control of their characters.

The player still chooses.

There is simply a little incentive sitting on the table saying:

Go on.

You know what sort of story this is.

That can be useful in almost any genre.

HORROR

Horror characters investigate noises.

They split up.

They conceal things from one another.

They behave irrationally when frightened.

They become obsessed with clues.

They go back for people they should abandon.

Experienced role-players, meanwhile, have been conditioned by decades of dungeons to move in heavily armed groups, maintain lines of sight and poke every suspicious object with a ten-foot pole.

Excellent dungeon technique.

Awful slasher film.

A customised horror MetaCards deck could encourage behaviour appropriate to the genre without simply announcing that everyone must become stupid.

Give someone a reason to investigate alone.

Encourage denial.

Prompt curiosity.

Reward somebody for going back.

The game remains your normal horror RPG.

The deck just helps keep the horror from turning into a SWAT exercise.

ROMANCE

Exactly the same principle works somewhere completely different.

Romantic stories depend upon people noticing one another, taking emotional risks, misunderstanding signals, making gestures and occasionally behaving in ways a perfectly rational person would avoid.

A romance-oriented set of prompts could encourage players to:

show affection;

be jealous;

make a gesture;

misread a situation;

reveal something personal;

take an emotional risk.

Again, MetaCards do not dictate the outcome.

They create opportunities.

The player supplies the performance.

The rules running underneath can be anything from fantasy adventure to science fiction.

ACTION

Want the table to behave like an action film?

Reward bravado.

One-liners.

Reckless rescues.

Personal rivalries.

Ridiculous entrances.

Ignoring the sensible route because there is a motorcycle and a plate-glass window available.

You do not need a dedicated action-film RPG if the game you already have handles guns, cars and explosions perfectly well.

Sometimes what is missing is simply permission to behave like the genre.

FANTASY

A fantasy campaign can use MetaCards to encourage character traits which otherwise become decorative writing on the back of a sheet.

Honour.

Greed.

Curiosity.

Superstition.

Hospitality.

Rivalry.

Distrust of magic.

Respect for tradition.

An obsession with dragons.

Whatever actually matters in your campaign.

If the group has decided that dwarven honour, elven etiquette or the customs of the local knightly order are important, you can put those ideas where players can physically see them instead of trusting everybody to remember page 73 of the campaign notes.

CUSTOMISE THE DECK

This is where MetaCards become more interesting than a fixed collection of generic personality prompts.

The concept is deliberately expandable.

You can make prompts for your own campaign.

That means the cards can reinforce exactly the sort of play you want to see.

Running gothic horror?

Write gothic prompts.

Running pulp?

Encourage punching Nazis, swinging across gaps and explaining the occult relic while escaping in a stolen aeroplane.

Running political intrigue?

Use prompts about suspicion, ambition, loyalty, secrets and favours.

Running something inspired by old samurai films?

Honour, obligation, restraint, shame, loyalty, revenge.

Running a campaign about petty criminals?

Greed, paranoia, bravado, resentment, betrayal.

The deck starts generic.

It does not have to stay that way.

WRITE PROMPTS FOR THE CHARACTERS

You can go narrower still.

Instead of building only by genre, make cards that matter to the actual player characters.

Suppose one character is:

reckless;

jealous of another character;

terrified of enclosed spaces;

protective of children;

unable to resist a wager.

Those are all things the player presumably wants to portray.

Otherwise they would not be on the character.

Turn them into prompts.

Now those traits can enter play at unexpected moments instead of waiting for the player to remember them during the one scene the Games Master carefully prepared around their backstory.

The character sheet describes the person.

The deck keeps poking them.

CAMPAIGN CULTURE CAN BECOME PLAY

There is another useful application: setting behaviour.

Suppose people in your game world are expected to offer hospitality to travellers.

Make it a prompt.

Perhaps insults must be answered.

Make it a prompt.

Perhaps touching the dead is taboo.

Make it a prompt.

Perhaps every respectable person carries a weapon but drawing it without good cause is deeply shameful.

There you go.

One of the persistent problems with setting lore is that it gets read once and then evaporates at the table.

Cards turn some of that lore into visible play.

The culture stops being an essay.

People start behaving as though they actually live there.

THE BONUS IS SMALL ON PURPOSE

MetaCards use a modest mechanical incentive for following prompts.

That restraint is important.

The bonus needs to be worth noticing without becoming so valuable that players feel obliged to twist every scene into satisfying the card.

This is encouragement.

Not obedience.

The player retains control over the character.

If the prompt does not fit the moment, leave it alone.

If it does fit—or if following it would make the scene more entertaining—there is a small reward for going with it.

Because the reward is intended to be broadly applicable, MetaCards can sit over very different kinds of RPG without needing an entire conversion chapter.

You continue using your own game's actual rules.

HELP FOR THE QUIETER PLAYER

Not everybody finds spontaneous character acting easy.

Some people can launch instantly into accents, speeches and elaborate emotional scenes.

Others stare at the character sheet and think:

What would this person actually do?

A prompt helps.

It gives the player something concrete to react to.

You do not have to invent the entire performance from nothing.

You have a little instruction, impulse or mood to interpret.

That can make role-playing less intimidating.

It can also stop one or two highly performative players from dominating every social scene simply because they are the fastest people at the table to improvise.

Everybody gets something to work with.

HELP FOR THE OLD HAND WHO HAS BECOME TOO GOOD AT RPGs

There is another sort of player who may benefit.

The veteran.

The person who has been gaming for thirty years and knows perfectly well that:

the statue will animate;

the innkeeper is hiding something;

the isolated cabin is unsafe;

the helpful NPC will betray everyone;

and absolutely nobody should read the book wrapped in chains.

This knowledge is excellent for surviving adventures.

It can also make characters behave as though they have read the rulebook.

A prompt gives the veteran permission to stop optimising for survival and do something because it suits the character.

Yes, you know opening the forbidden book is idiotic.

Your character does not know they are in a role-playing game.

Open the bloody thing.

VERISIMILITUDE WITHOUT A SIMULATION ENGINE

“Verisimilitude” is one of those RPG words that can start arguments lasting longer than actual campaigns.

Here it simply means getting people to behave in ways that make the fiction feel more convincing.

A frightened person occasionally does something frightened.

A proud person refuses to back down.

A superstitious sailor behaves superstitiously.

Somebody grieving does not forget about it because initiative has been rolled.

None of this requires a twelve-page emotional-state subsystem.

Sometimes it just requires something on the table saying:

Remember this.

Play with it.

FOR GAMES THAT CARE MORE ABOUT THEME

The same tool works in more narrative campaigns for a slightly different reason.

Instead of trying to model realistic behaviour, the prompts can reinforce genre and theme.

A noir deck might encourage cynicism, temptation and bad decisions.

A superhero deck might encourage grandstanding and protecting innocents.

A fairy-tale deck might reward promises, curiosity and taking warnings literally.

A cosmic-horror deck might prompt obsession, denial and digging further into something clearly dangerous.

The underlying mechanic remains simple.

The meaning of the prompt changes with the campaign.

A TOOL, NOT A NEW RELIGION

MetaCards are deliberately introductory.

They present the concept and give you something usable, but the intention is that you take the idea and adapt it.

You do not need to redesign your campaign around the deck.

Use every card.

Use half of them.

Replace some.

Make campaign-specific ones.

Make character-specific ones.

Drop the mechanic entirely for a session if it gets in the way.

This is a role-playing aid.

Not a manifesto about the One True Way to Pretend To Be An Elf.

PHYSICAL CARDS ARE ALSO AVAILABLE

This product is the digital print-and-play edition.

A professionally manufactured physical MetaCards set is also available separately through The Game Crafter, where the game was released as a first edition in 2019.

There is also a Blank Booster set for people who want physical blank cards for their own additions.

The blank-card idea is particularly appropriate here because customisation is built into the concept.

Your table knows what your table needs better than a generic deck ever can.

Give yourself the tools to add it.

USE IT WITH ALMOST ANY RPG

MetaCards are intended to remain independent of the underlying rules system.

Use them with fantasy.

Horror.

Science fiction.

Superheroes.

Cyberpunk.

Historical games.

Urban fantasy.

Mystery.

Romance.

Pulp.

Whatever else has players sitting around a table pretending to be people who make decisions.

You do not need another core rulebook.

You do not need a conversion guide.

You need the game you already play, the MetaCards, and players willing to occasionally choose the interesting mistake.

WHAT YOU ARE BUYING

MetaCards – A System Neutral Roleplaying Prompts is a digital print-and-play role-playing aid.

It provides a simple card-based method for encouraging players to portray moods, behaviours, character traits and genre conventions during ordinary RPG play.

The system:

• Sits on top of an existing RPG rather than replacing it

• Uses cards as role-playing prompts

• Provides a small mechanical encouragement for following those prompts

• Can support verisimilitude or deliberate genre behaviour

• Can be customised for a particular campaign, genre or group

• Can be expanded with prompts of your own

• Requires no dedicated underlying RPG system

It is less a new game than a little behavioural crowbar for the game you already have.

Your character says they are impulsive?

Excellent.

Here is an opportunity to prove it.

Your horror character hears a noise upstairs?

Off you go.

There is probably nothing there.

Probably.