Player Success and Character Failure AKA What Is the Difference Between Players and Characters in a X-

Meta-Awareness Framework?

by: Silver Smoulder

I’m going somewhere with this, okay. Yes, at first blush the difference is obvious – players are
real people, whereas characters1 are not. This is for all intents and purposes true and if this is the truth
you want to use, far be it from me to correct you. The purpose of this essay is to present an alternate
framework, that I personally think will lead to a more complex and comprehensive enjoyment of the
hobby, as well as being beneficial to just consider for entertainment and edification purposes.

So, first let me lead off by an example. I have made the statement that “In an RPG, players
should not fail.” This is a very important statement that requires clarification and nuance. But first, let
me illustrate a quadrant of examples:

Table 1: Player Success/Failure vs Character Success/Failure

Character Success
Player Success Goals of the character and
player align, the character
achieves the goals that the
player set for their character.
“Save the Kingdom” type of
story.
Player Failure The player manages to succeed The player did not achieve what
with character actions but is
unsatisfied with the result.
Example would be a monkey’s
paw situation.
Character Failure
Goals of the character and
player are not aligned.
Character failure is the goal of
the player, and by the player
succeeding, the character fails.
Tragic anti-hero story.
they wanted in the campaign
and neither did the character.
An aborted story. There is
another way that this can
happen, but it is outside the
scope of this essay.2

Again, the question arises – can the character actually have goals? The intuitive answer is “of
course not, they’re not real people,” which again, technically correct, isn’t interesting. The character,
when considered, is a product of the world they are in. Some authors mention that the way they write is
more like “describing what their characters are doing” versus “I am writing what these characters are
doing.” Pratchett said it very well, if a bit directly: “Once you have your character sitting right there in
your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what
they do, say, or think.”3 So, in essence, these are chunks of your brain devoted to processing this
character, but at the same time, the amount of effort is minimal – you place them into situation X or

1
Characters here being “player characters,” but saying it as players vs player characters would lead to more
unnecessary confusion.
2
Essentially, if the GM says “No, this is outside the scope of the campaign” or “I don’t want to deal with that,” then
the player goal is unattainable, and thus the character goal is unattainable as well..
3
Gaiman, Neil. “An Interview with Sir Terry Pratchett.” Boing Boing, 10 Oct. 2011, boingboing.net/2011/10/10/an-
interview-with-sir-terry-pr.html. Accessed 7 Dec. 2021
world Y, and then the character just does stuff on their own, and you are just the medium through
which the story of that character is being told.

For writers who are just telling a story, this is all well and good, as they have to deal with a fairly
static situation – they have a world or an idea that they expose their character to and just write that
down. The situation for RPG players is obviously much different, because of the following:

• They control one character.

• The GM, GM’s world, characters, and players are in a constant state of flux – the GM adapts the
world to the players who in turn adapt the characters to the world, which causes the GM to do
some revisions, which causes the players to shift their goals; and so on and so forth – point is,
it’s a complex system of feedback that is dynamic – as juxtaposed to the writer’s semi-static
world.
o You COULD make the argument that the writer can also have a dynamic world, where it
changes and adapts based on the actions of the characters interacting with this world,
and this is true, but at the same time, in the RPG situation, there are a LOT more
elements outside of the writer’s control.
• The players and the GM are not telepathic and thus are always going to have different qualia
about the world they are co-creating.4
• The NPCs, characters, players, and GMs have different levels of meta-awareness.

Now the crux of the preceding list is the last one – the entities involved all have different meta-
awareness of the world. But what, in this case is understood by meta-awareness? Well, first was it
awareness, in this context? It’s defined as “knowledge and understanding that something is
happening or exists.”5 Thus, meta-awareness would be defined as “knowledge and understanding
that (knowledge or understanding that something is happening or exists).” Basically, it’s the ability
to step back an examine their own capacity for examining the world around them, on their level.
And there are multiple layers of this. The above definition can have a lot of stacks of parentheses
that allow you to go higher and higher in meta-awareness, to meta-meta-awareness, to meta-meta-
meta-awareness. All it would mean is how far the individual is from their level of sensory input and
whether or not there is a useful level of information that can be gained from that kind of thought
pattern. So, what are these patterns? For the purpose of this argument, they are listed as follows,
from least-aware to most-aware:

4
There is an underlying assumption that the players and GMs are co-creators of a single narrative, with the GM
providing the setting and the players providing the main characters. This probably could be a topic in of itself, but
for the sake of this argument, this is treated as axiomatic.
5
“Definition of AWARENESS.” Merriam-Webster.com, 2019, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awareness.
 Table 2: Ladder of Levels
Level Description Type
1 The GM’s setting: the NPCs, the set-pieces, and so on Directed &
Simulated
2 The characters Directed &
Simulated
3 The meta-game of the characters: the characters being brought into Emergent &
contact with the world and the generation of resultant data that Simulated
they may choose to iterate over again.
4 The players Real
5 The narrative: the players responding to the story that emerges Emergent
from these interactions
6 The GM’s narrative: the GM making decisions about the story Directed AND
Emergent
7 The game itself: the rules, the tropes, and so on. Real
8 The player’s meta-game: making decisions based not on the lower Emergent
levels, but on the meta-knowledge of the game – optimization,
house rules, etc.
9 The GM6 Real
10 The group of co-creators deciding to do an RPG together and Emergent
presumably have a non-zero amount of fun
11 The real world: time commitment, personal interaction – Real
everything that’s not actually part of this co-creation process.

Every higher level is aware of the levels lower than it. Meaning that a level 1 entity cannot be
aware of anything lower than it, but if the GM chooses to write it in such a way, the NPC can be aware of
the real world and thus be meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-aware. While it
certainly sounds nonsensical, at the same time, when a GM creates an NPC that makes a joke about
current political events and then engages the characters in discussion about it could be said to be meta-
meta- meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-aware. Admittedly, such an example would be fairly
immersion breaking. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that such a character would be worthwhile. But it is
important to note that a character could actually be this aware, since nothing truly prevents a player
from doing so – except that of course it does, because the higher you go, in addition to more awareness,
the more power to act on this awareness the entity has. For example, if the whole world gets nuked,
there’s not going to be people left to play RPGs. The GM’s narrative can technically override the regular
narrative7, the players can constantly override the characters and NPCs, and so on. Finally, it must be
said that a decision made at a lower level propagates to the higher levels. This doesn’t necessarily mean
that the decision was made with X-meta-awareness8 – intent and reasoning behind the action matter.

6
8 and 9 could technically be flipped, it really depends on whether the players and GM are more about rules vs
rulings. Definitely outside the scope of this argument.
7
Of course, whether or not you should is outside the scope of this argument.
8
X here being any number of “meta-,” that is dependent on meta-awareness of levels. So somebody who is acting
from say level 5 to level 8 would be “meta-meta-meta-aware” or “2-meta-aware.”
 Kant aside9, what the hell does all that mean? Well, let’s consider. Level 1 is trivially true – the
NPCs and so on have no awareness, period. They are just set pieces made to advance the story. The
characters, while lacking true awareness, theoretically respond to the world as if they were aware. A
character who sticks their hand in boiling water is going to pull it out, because (assuming the character is
a baseline human, and the world has realistic physics) boiling water is hot and painful and the character
would have no reason to subject themselves to pointless pain. Unless of course, the character was
created where sticking their hand in boiling water is a good thing OR unless the player chooses to
override the sensible action of the character. As an aside: the characters should be assumed to be
sensible and react like a normal person would to the situations around them (again, assuming they’re
sane, can react, etc.,) This leads us to the 3rd level, of the characters being meta-aware of their
awareness of their world, or being able to notice trends and patterns, and then go one step higher, and
start interacting with the world with the simulated understanding of the world around them. So, an
adventurer who’s been around the block a couple of times is going to just groan and draw their weapon
when they see an overturned wagon in the middle of a road with a forest on both sides – they know
they’re going to be ambushed. They know that fighting makes them stronger. They know that if they
have been successful on multiple runs, that Herr Brackhaus is the real deal, not one of the decoys. And
so on. They’ve become meta-aware of the nature of their world and, if played true to themselves might
realize that there is yet another level above them.

That brings us to the players, who can at a whim decide to override the characters at any point.
A way to think about it is that what the player can just play by simply relaying to the other co-creators
what their characters are doing in such-and-such scenario that they are currently faced with. It is of
course the player’s prerogative to modulate this message, or since they are ultimately in charge of the
characters, to undertake a decision that the character wouldn’t make, in order to have the player
support the narrative that they are trying to create. To put that in numeric levels, there is a decision
made on level 4 (the players) that goes down to the 2nd level (the characters), so that there are changes
at level 5 (the narrative). Potentially, these changes could go even higher, since the players can be meta-
meta-meta-meta-aware of the GM and thus could have the characters do something that the GM will
really like and thus the GM creates a house rule that then filters all the way down to level 1. So, to look
at it from the perspective of these levels, a decision made at the 4th level was carried out at the 2nd level,
which maybe made a change to the 3rd level (the character now acts in a way that now he knows that he
can reliably do this thing), the 5th level, the 8th level, which then changes the 6th and 7th level as well.

Now it must be said that this is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, if abused this it’s called
meta-gaming (in the derogatory sense). If the players act as though they are aware of the higher levels,
they would not necessarily act as they would naturally. This is also known as meta-gaming and it’s
generally accepted to be a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be, but that argument is outside the scope of
this one. The main point is as mentioned that the characters would act unnaturally, which propagates
this unnaturalness up the levels, potentially causing problems and disruptions at the higher levels.10

Having squared all this away, how does this allow for a situation of “character failure but player
success?” Well, if the reader is going to agree with the framework proposed above, the answer should
be intuitively obvious – if the player sets a goal that requires the character to fail, and then it happens,

9
To paraphrase “intent matters more than outcome.”
10
As has happened a bunch of times.
then great. Let’s look at an example, using the levels and meta-awareness, to have this make sense in
this framework:

Let’s say we have player A and Character 1, existing in a standard fantasy setting.11 The player
decides that they want to have a story similar to that of the Greek tragedies of old. This already
indicates that the player (level 4) is aware of the real world (level 11), which is trivially true. Okay. Now
they design their character, which is decisions made at level 4, being 3-meta-aware of level 8 and meta-
aware of level 5 to build this character, who exists at level 2. The character presumably does not want to
have a tragic fate befall them, since that’s natural for a person. This is all level 2 stuff, although in the
course of the character’s adventures and the player making decisions for them to better fit the narrative
(level 4 meta-aware to level 5 and maybe level 6) might make it so that the character is now meta-aware
to level 3 (and is cognizant of the dark fate that is going to befall them). Then, finally, at the conclusion
of the story, Character 1 dies or fails at something important, but Player A is satisfied, since they got to
carry out a story that they wanted to tell and experience for themselves. I will of course note that we
are excluding a LOT of confounding factors, but I’m assuming that the rest of them are not a problem for
this experiment.

The same can be true as well. Looking at every case provided in the table at the start of this
argument, we can see that all of the other cases can be modeled using the similar kinds of X-meta-
awareness. The actual details don’t matter, but for the sake of argument, I can examine any sort of RPG
session and break down the interactions in it level by level.

Examples and specifics aside, the argument is now formulated thusly, that player and character
X-meta-awareness, decision-making, and influence have a very complex interaction. Could it be
simplified into “the character does what the player wants?” The answer is yes, but the gist of this
argument is that the player is seeking to enjoy roleplay and place themselves into a situation where they
get to experience something that they perhaps do not have direct control over, and yield results that are
emergent rather than directed. This is not meant to say that the directed way is wrong, but the
argument is that it’s more fun, allows for better storytelling and less work for the co-creators when this
is the approach chosen – essentially a choice made at level 2 propagating all the way up the list of levels.
Likewise, a poor choice made at the lower levels can propagate the negativity up the levels as well. To
reiterate – it does sound a little bit crazy and counter-intuitive to leave the “decisions” to characters,
that aren’t even real. But the point is that they simulate choices and the character is a product of the co-
creators working in tandem, and those simulated choices are what make the RPG great. 12

11
We could use a different example, say Shadowrun, or World of Darkness; or we could use a specific example –
but I think a white room example is better in this case.
12
Simulation of choice is an adjacent topic, but for the sake of completeness: the players can simulate the
characters, the GM can simulate his world.