The 4th Wall
As TTRPG players we switch frames constantly. One moment we’re players, arguing rules and optimized builds. The next we are our PCs, swinging swords and slinging spells and shouting one-liners. Then the session wraps for the night, and suddenly we’re just a group of friends hanging out independent of the game. In today’s comic, we’ve got Oracle peering through the veil of realities, and so glimpsing the hand of beings more powerful than the gods. But regardless of what frames we’re talking about, I think it’s important to remember that those frames are permeable.
Character, player, designer, and social group… All have the power to affect one another. An errant bit of errata can have far-reaching consequences for a player, especially if it causes an oracle to fail an all-important save. The stereotype of the GM’s girlfriend links the group dynamic to the fictional game world in a major way, showering one character with undue benefits. Your status as a total noob might mean that your homebrew class gets vetoed by the grognards at the table, putting your chops as a designer at odds with your social status. Once you become aware of these relationships, it’s hard to believe that the fantasy exists independent of the other world(s) at play. And what with all the frame-switching at play, certain ideas begin to bubble up at the table.
“Hey guys, why don’t we play ourselves in this campaign?”
“Dudes… What if you make a Perception check so high that you realize you’re a character in an RPG?”
“We should do a session where our characters show up on Earth!”
Clearly, this kind of stuff can work well. The much-loved “The Gamers” franchise trades on the trope constantly. That one episode of Thundarr where the gang went to San Antonio is a personal favorite. The famous closing shot of Duck Amuck might as well be the icon for the technique, making Bugs Bunny the patron saint of 4th wall breaking.
Be warned though: This stuff tends to work better in cartoons and comedy. If you’re trying to build a coherent fantasy world it can get messy in a hurry, undermining the seriousness of the project. For example, The Handbook of Heroes incorporated the voice of a GM exactly once, and it’s always bothered me that we made that call way back in the beginning. Of course, we aren’t exactly Middle Earth over here, but I do like to provide a veneer of world-building in this comic. We’ve since switched over to Quest Giver as a GM stand-in. Various monsters have taken up similar duties. That’s because the suspension of disbelief is a tenuous thing, and breaking the 4th wall is best handled with a degree of restraint. Watching a character suddenly turn to address the audience is good for fun and laughs, but when that becomes a weird meta-plot things get muddled. Case in point: Do edition wars and game designers actually exist in Handbook-World? Or is it just a gag and not really part of the setting and dear-gods-please-no let’s not go down that rabbit hole?
And so, speaking of addressing the audience, I think you guys can guess what’s coming up for today’s discussion question. Tell us about a time when the 4th wall broke in one of your games. Was it a campaign premise? A one-off joke? An oddly inebriated session wherein you believed that you had actually become a half-elven wizard? Let’s hear all those stories of blurred boundaries and converging realities down in the comments!
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So when my tabletop players tried this, they discovered that they were in fact in a larp being portrayed by 11 dimensional squid god children.
Neat. Were they allowed to alter their character sheets?
After seeing players working to avoid meta-gaming, I decided that it would be a fun idea to remove the 4th wall entirely, and allow players to run loose with their knowledge of monster stat blocks, to avoid in- and out-of-character controversies, and utilise information gleaned from the DM’s facial expressions. I ran a one-shot, and since I was keen to try it out, a friend DMed for a second. And it turned out average. Just average, basically a normal D&D session. Since it was a one-shot, players didn’t have much knowledge to meta game with; sure, they could justify knowing a monster’s stat block, but veterans tend to have a general idea of the monster’s power level anyway. All that happened was a few OotS jokes, and a yuan-ti getting shanked after his player forgot about the lack of 4th wall.
So if I’m hearing you right, the yuan-ti was a treacherous type, everyone was assumed to know that, and so preemptive murder happened?
Actually, what happened was the yuan-ti player thought we had completed the dungeon, and attacked us while we were weak, then immediately retconned it when they realised that we still had a bunch of enemies to fight. However, due to metagaming being allowed, we knew, and surprise attacked him at the end of the dungeon. I think it’s my own fault that the yuan-ti attacked us, originally; just moments earlier, I had commented out-loud on how hurt and weak I was, which most definitely tempted fate.
Had a discussion about the implications of this with my One Piece game DM this past weekend! About a year ago, our long-running campaign got a reboot, where people were suggested or offered to make new characters, or new versions of their old characters, and start over new. This is due to him having revamped large swaths of his homebrew system he’s using, and he needed to go back and test some of it again. He promised this was going to be the only full reboot.
I was only one of two players who decided to remake the same character (with some tweaks of course), and the other guy was relatively new to the table anyways. The problem with this comes up with the fact that characters and locations are very different in the reboot, but I still remember some of the stuff Lance Biers Alpha went through… Stuff that lead to the phrase ‘Tze Chai?! WHERE?! I’ll KILL EM!”
The thing is, Tze Chai could be someone totally new in this campaign! NEW Lance didn’t have to deal with this guy betraying his family, ruining their business, and getting the most unholy streak of lucky rolls and party-fumbles in existence during a big plot moment. NEW Lance didn’t watch him dance away laughing with the mcguffin and then join fantasy Arnold Schwarzenegger in wrecking our shit, forcing us to flee! NEW Lance might meet a kindly philanthropist by that name, or a simple farmer, or a helpful shopkeeper.
But for some reason, some inexplicable (to him) force in his gut is going to fill him with murderous rage towards this total stranger and he will have no control over that. Can you imagine how disorienting that would be? Meeting a guy on the street and thinking, ‘Not only do I not like him, but I would stab him in a dark alley and walk away smiling,’ if you’re a generally good and restrained per-… Okay, he’s still a PC, but he’s not a murder hobo.
I imagine it would fit in much better if we were playing something Lovecraftian, but in this setting? I think it would be less unsettling to see past the 4th wall.
We did an alternate timeline arc in our Mutants and Masterminds campaign once. Half of us got murdered by a Deadpool type hero assassin in the future, but the other half made it back to the past. There they discovered the teenage version of the hero assassin, and had to explain to rest of us that this innocent kid was no-good-very-bad.
“Oh come now. He is so small and puny!”
“He killed you!”
“Yes, but look at that face!”
“No, you don’t understand, we HAVE to kill this child.”
Guards: “Uh huh. And, uh, what was your alignment again?”
There’s actually a part of the Pathfinder adventure path Reign of Winter where the players take one of Baba Yaga’s portal to the Earth of roughly 100 years ago. That chapter is aptly titled “Rasputin must Die”.
Ever wanted to face zombies with WW1-era firearms, magic tanks, and more? While still playing as your mideval stasis wizards, paladins, and barbarians?
It’s ridiculous and I love it.
I’ve always wanted to give RoW a shot just for that premise.
Weirdly though, I don’t think it quite does the 4th wall thing because of period setting. I mean, it’s hard for me to conceptualize 1914 Russian Front as quite the same thing as “Our characters show up in our home town.” Still, I guess it is part of the same continuum.
Wasn’t everything you could loot from this part of the AP hilariously OP, too? Or am I thinking of Iron Gods?
I don’t recall the loot from “Rasputin Must Die” being particularly powerful. The guns are better than regular guns, but unless you are a Gunslinger, melee weapons and bows will have surpassed them by 15th level (not to mention spells).
Iron Gods has very nuts loot that fits more with what you are thinking of. Iron Gods 6 even has this ( https://aonprd.com/EquipmentTechArtifactsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Powered%20Armor ) with a note specifically saying that the GM might not want to give the party such a power boost, even if it is just for the last couple of sessions.
My ratfolk wizard (now retired, as we finished the AP!) skirted on it. He’d frequently repeat statements from the narration voice for comedy sake (“Our heroes now must find the mcguffin” – “We must find the mcguffin.”). His hyper-genius intellect of 44 int at the endgame let him flat out invoke it for the epilogue, making himself implied to be involved in future events of Starfinder / Ysolki.
In addition, the plot of the game incorporated it, due to time travel stuff – one PC who died and was replaced by a different character class was effectively an accidental time traveler / alternate reality fugitive. Only my ratfolk noticed the time retcon (being the only character that stuck from start to finish).
I always like the metagame artifacts for the alternate reality fugitive “I want to rebuild my guy” thing:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/artifacts/metagame-artifacts/hourglass-of-transfiguration/
Not exactly what you’re talking about, but I just love incorporating modern tech and jokes in the context of my campaigns. Just yesterday, my players found a movie theatre in a dungeon, with a magically-powered projector that spewed political propaganda at them.
Methinks you’d appreciate Saonuihun’s Speeding Sphere Game:
https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/images/5eedfb0d7a48aa649344da10d641e51d6dd5dacbd2bf40f13acb276817b2e539.png
Once, I chucked a muffin to the DM (as he had requested I do) and accidentally pegged him directly in the face with it. He wasn’t hurt, but it was so funny and caught him so off guard he actually dealt some muffin-inflicted damage to the monster we were fighting at the time, due to trauma from the Higher Powers.
Had to read this four times before I saw “muffin” instead of “maguffin.”
To make a maguffin muffin, preheat your plot device to 350 degrees….
I didnt really break the 4th wall, but I’m trying to fuck with one of my players. In the first session I gave him glasses capable of translating any written language to something the wearer understand. A few sessions ago I gave him a book that these glasses could not translate. The title? “Larem Ipsum”
I forgot that Monte Cook put one of those in the megadungeon I’m running. A computer from “another world” has access to information and small items from across planes. When the players discover it, it’s got a sports almanac from Earth.
https://serverlessimageresize-imagebucket-1k649d8ug3han.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/2019/12/back-to-the-future.jpg
One time, back when I still had a live group, I violated the 4th wall rather horribly.
I was GM’ing an AFF game, and one of my players prayed to the goddess of beauty for help in a tense situation.
A voice came from on high: “Thank you for calling Asrel. All our operators are busy right now, but please hold. Your prayer is very important to us.”
My group was in stitches, but all hope of immersion was pretty much lost. ^_^;
That’s more or less how my group conceptualizes the Celestial Bureaucracy in Exalted.
http://exalted3e.wikidot.com/lex:celestial-bureaucracy
You have selected “Tumor”. To choose the type of tumor with which to smite Asrel’s enemies, chant “three” now 😀
You have selected, “colon tumor”. 😛
In the World of Darkness, all Malkavians have some derangement that is flavored somewhat to be because they have seen the full truth of the world but their minds had to break to understand it. One GM would play music at the game for ambient effects and would switch it out for mood music at critical times. So one player, not me, chose to have the derangement “could hear the game music” which gave them clues about the tone of a scene but also caused them to struggle to hear people at game unless they spoke up and kept making IC requests to lower the noise please.
That’s actually a really cool derangement. Well played.
Nice, good job 😀
I’ve never broken the 4th wall in-game, but I have made countless out-of-character jokes.
If I ever resume the post-module-game of my Tomb of Annihilation campaign I might have it as a gimmick though.
Spoilers for ToA
So in the second-to-last floor of the eponymous tomb there’s an armillary and you can climb inside of the central sphere to operate it. If you make it so the planets align you roll on a special table.
Me OOC: “Okay Neil DeGrasse Tyson, take me on your ship of the imagination!”
I rolled a 93, and my Paladin’s intelligence went up by 1d4+1 bringing me from 14 to 18. (Apparently I dodged a bullet. Dangers on that list included being teleported anywhere in the multiverse that the DM chose, and she said that among the list of options she would have picked Victorian London. It also included having a major personality-shift, and most dangerous of all: Getting a Wish)
DM: Does a NDT impression “I bestow upon you my knowledge of the cosmos.”
If I ever pick this character back up, he’s going to be haunted by visions of “The beyond” which is just him describing our actions at the table.
Heh. Now you’ve got to watch out for the shade of your PC hovering behind your shoulder on game nights.
4th wall breaking … never happened.
as for todays comic: New editions happen to other people as I‘m too old for that shit.
I dunno man… Other people still show up on your webcomic and talk about their own impressions of the newest edition. It’s tough to escape the community at large.
Our first, and only, D&D 5th edition game was one. Basically one of our former pc, who have achieved godhood and inherited some portfolios of the Raven Queen and Lolth, used his magic to survive the Twilight War between the 4E gods and the elemental lords. He, and some survivors he didn’t intended to bring with him but didn’t bother to do, end up in the 5E Forgotten Realms. Where he puts his plan in motion to achieve a new power position. He still used his old 4E powers, At-will Per-encounter Daily, included the Demigod’s Divine Miracle feature, infinite encounter powers. It was a way to make catharsis for the change in editions and good way to test the new one 🙂
But while that was a edition war of a sort, i for one, don’t think that is truly a breaking of the fourth wall. In our home-made campaigns, the one i make the settings, we kinda do more. Since making a new metaphysical and metamagical weave for each setting is tiresome, all of them are part of the same multiverse. Therefore many characters, player and non-player, appear from time to time. This is usually the case of high-end forces, Gods, their Servants, Demons, Apocryphals, think arete 15 Mages, some Fae, kinda unshaped Fair-Folk, Shifters, multiverse-walkers, and the First People, ambiguously neutral ambiguously precursors. But also things from other settings appear fro time to time, thanks to either the First People or the Shifters. Once in a campaign the BBEG got a his castle build around a First People ruins that end up being a space ship. And almost all of these beings know that each world in only a planet on a bigger universe. Only the Shifters can shift among universes as to reach every corner, some Apocryphals maybe can if they put the effort and like many things how much the First People reach extends is ambiguous. So in many of these beings break the fourth wall, from characters perspective, just by existing, and yes some of that worlds are part of others. I made a mess of a mega setting of which i am proud and i will not shy to make it even more messed by putting thing inside another things. But breaking the fourth wall, All-of-you-are-part-of-a-game is something we haven’t done, yet. Surely the Fae know but they have not say nothing so far 😀
Yeah… The Fae are pretty much 4th wall battering rams among my group. Always weird to see them reference pop culture, but it does kind of work with their “beyond mortal ken” shtick.
Of al the group they are the ones we have explored the most. They kinda can turn anything into a play, they are a whole race of living stories Shakespearean reality warpers. But that sound too much Exalted’s Fair Folk to me. I need to find a good spin for them. But since more of the time the game is dealing with the other beings, if they appear at all. My group and i know more about the First People than about the Fae, and the FP are the mysterious beings nobody fully knows. What the Fae have done setting wide amount to getting the gods angry at them because of reasons, some of the Fae getting exiled from their home and becoming physical beings, which are too much like elves for my taste again. They are in a uncreative limbo for now. In any case i don’t want to designate them the “4th wall battering rams”, too much obvious. The Gods may also know as may the Apocryphals. Maybe i could use this in a campaign, even more now that we have planned to continue a narrative campaign we got hanging some time ago, but since it treat themes like plagues, bio-punk and conspiracies this may not be the best time for that kind of games 🙁
I mostly keep my 4th wall breaking to non-canon in-character remarks in OOC threads or such things.
Like just today I had my character in an exploration themed game remark on the subject of animal attacks that unless the wolves in this new land were unusually aggressive a group our size should be too large for them to consider attacking.
And I then followed this up in the OOC by saying: “Note: For obvious reasons the wildlife will be more aggressive than back home. The writers were just making a little joke for the audience.”*
This entire conversation was preceded by our GM the day before noting that there aren’t any bears, but there would be wolves. The IC conversation was about concerns of bear attacks. Because why would we let a little thing like OOC knowledge stop us from having our PCs be worried about things?
*As you might notice here, this is an attempt at ME trying to break the 4th wall rather than my character. But close enough right?
Well enough to establish that on the rare occasion when I am playing “myself” it’s not at all out of character to break the 4th wall because it’s just a thing I actually do from time to time irl.
It can be INCREDIBLY DIFFICULTY to separate the character from the player. That’s why this whole taxonomy of frame switching feeds so easily into the 4th wall conversation. What’s obvious and natural in the moment takes a load of explanation when you wind up turning to (my new favorite word) ekphrasis:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ekphrasis
That’s probably why I’m confused with the last line in your response.
Do you mean to say that you “turn to camera” IRL for a bit of self-aware commentary?
Yeah probably at least a few times a month on average. turns to camera and winks
I’m working my way through this one at the moment…
https://www.routledge.com/Role-Playing-Game-Studies-A-Transmedia-Approach-1st-Edition/Deterding-Zagal/p/book/9780815369202
…And the sociology chapter is very much on my mind. There was a great example in there of a husband and wife couple getting upset at one another over Munchkin. Stabbing a spouse in the back is very different from stabbing a fellow thief. Frame switching fails to happen, and social fallout ensues.
Neat stuff. Now if only I could figure out what my dissertation was supposed to be about.
Munchkin is a great game…. for making people who like each other angry at each other.
It’s very cutthroat and everyone knows this, but at the same time it encourages partnerships and betrayals of convenience at a very rapid pace. And since this all relies on social dynamics it can get messy quickly.
Competitive gaming in general man… I wound up quitting Magic in favor of RPGs because I was sick and tired of competition getting in the way of a chill social experience. It just wasn’t the kind of gaming I was into anymore.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I got my Munchkin decks down from the shelf.
I’m just still annoyed that we got the trash heap that is PF2 rather than something closer conceptually to a Pathfinder 1.5
None of that now!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cessation-of-hostilities
I came to TTRPGs like D&D and Pathfinder relatively late in my freshman year in college. My first experience at the table was with D&D 4th edition, which I thought was pretty cool at the time (and still think it had at least a few of the right ideas), but VERY understandably it is not especially popular with the community. Around the same time I experimented with Shadowrun’s 4th edition, but that’s a bitch and a half to get a decent group for (let alone a good GM for it!) and even harder to make it last more than a session or two. Since then I’ve played mostly 5e and Pathfinder, which I’ve really enjoyed. 5e is a nice balance of creativity and sensible limitations. I particularly like the simplicity of Advantage/Disadvantage and bounded accuracy within the game. It makes the game far easier to pick up and you don’t have to hunting for different tables to figure out how X affects your attempted actions within the game. The limitations are a bit infuriating at times though. Pathfinder on the other hand laughs at such silly limitations and gives ever bigger numbers. I haven’t had a chance to look at PF2 yet and probably won’t for a while (we literally just finished book 2 of Curse of the Crimson Throne).
Good luck in Crimson Throne! I’m trying to get Book 2 started at the moment as a PBP game. I imagine we’ll finish around the time Pathfinder 4e comes out.
Thanks! I’m loving this adventure path. What is your party made up of?
I’ve only got two players, so I’m running it as a gestalt game.
Tiefling cabalist vigilate / aether kineticist
Half-orc stalker / urban barbarian w/ a double-chained kama build
Awakened dancing poodle bard (street performer) cohort for heals and buffs
Unfortunately I don’t have any stories of manipulating the 4th wall, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
I just found your comic when Rusty & Co linked to it, and I have been archive binging for the past 2 – 3 weeks. I am so incredibly impressed with the quality on display here and the Cooperative spirit in your comments section. I’ve definitely learned some new things, and I’m excited to add the handbook of heroes to my 42 other permanently open tabs of my phone’s internet browser.
Welcome to the comic, Mrjacob77! And thank you for the kind words. Nearly five years of Handbook, and Laurel and I are still having a blast doing this thing.
Hope to see ya down in the comments. It’s a great community, and there are a lot of scary-smart people that show up here on the regular. 🙂
Not sure if this is 4th wall. Playing D&D3.5 I had a dwarf cleric. I had to go to Vegas for a week so missed a game. When I got back the group had spent a week in town doing small quests. My dwarf spent the adventure in the tavern with 6 professional women of the night for a week. But I got exp for turning 4 of them to my religion.
So it’s a moment where your out-of-game absence was explained away in-game? If anything I’d think that would be preserving the 4th wall.