I am a terrible person.
Metagaming
Example Specialties: Crossovers, Heroics, Genre Enforcement, Plot-Relevance
Stories are how humans relate to their pasts, their surroundings, and other beings. Even in the beginning, the precursors to the magi told stories of the things they saw out in the world, stoking the imaginations of their people and spinning their own stories. Time went on, and soon the stories wove into a meta-framework, from which genre, tropes, memes, and other aspects wove structure into the overall pattern and spurred further form and maturation of existence.
Notice how that paragraph was, in its own way, also a story?
The Metagamer understands how reality is composed of myriad stories all intersecting, and how the threads of plot bind the world together. They learn to discern these threads, change how they and the events around them relate to the overall story, and at higher levels spin new stories from whole cloth and at great cost force genres to shift so they are more accommodating to the Mage's preferred type of storytelling.
Legends say that the Oracles of the Narrative Art have even transcended their need to exist within the stories of this world, and encountered a greater being who weaves the substance of Creation from raw imagination, called only "The Storyteller".
(Metagaming is an alternate version of Entropy)
• Sense Plot and Genre
The flow of events often conforms to particular tropes and memes, but myriad influences and forces often shape it in unexpected ways, subverting, inverting, or playing straight the many contributing factors. The Metagamer learns to perceive the signs that lead to the eventual outcome, and thus discern likelihoods and plot twists as they occur. This awareness of the story gives an intuitive feel for the mythic threads which give structure to a narrative, and when others are harnessing or tugging on those threads.
They may also discern where the story has been twisted and gone wrong, revealing Paradox flaws and backlashes.
With conjunctional use, they may perceive a potential twist before it happens, sense a particular entity's importance to the Plot, intuit whether a given rite is Vulgar, and sense when a faraway plot point occurs.
•• Roll the Dice, Play the Game
Sometimes a narrative device is, for reasons of dramatic suspense, left more-or-less to chance. It becomes easier to suggest how events could go at such places, as multiple outcomes are already valid, and a metagamer may shift which these crossroads in Plot tend as they come up – changing the difficulty of a roll for an event they can perceive. This applies nearly anytime a result hinges on a dice roll.
Likewise, they may defend the Plot against tampering from other sources, preemptively performing countermagic against Metagaming or other fate-shiftings for the duration of an effect, and weave their effects so that they respond to plot twists and other events. Usually, these events need to be anticipated when building them into the effect, at least broadly.
With conjunctional Spheres, the Metagamer may build enchantments set to go off at particular foreseen events of the story, tie effects to momentous decisions on another character's part rather than things visible to a third person perspective, and arrive somewhere at the most dramatically appropriate moment.
••• Chekov's Gun, Plot Armor, I Am Not Left Handed
With this level of Metagaming, the Mage learns how to increase the relevance of an item or character in the eyes of the Plot, altering the outcomes of events around it. The most usual effect is to shift events so that it is prevented from an inglorious end, performs exceptionally well (or poorly), or acts as a 'karma sink'; likewise, its relevance or 'luck' may be 'hung' to unleash when a climax or other event occurs. A weapon encountered ends up being critical in a later scene (expending its karmic potential) or being a Sword of Damocles that eventually dooms its wielder, and so on.
A Disciple of Metagaming may also create minor retroactive "bends" in the narrative, making something which was once presumed true unto falsehood, revealing that it was a ruse the entire time. This risks vulgarity if a fact was well-established and seems to come wholly out of nowhere, but these plot twists can deceive even destiny and the Players themselves if well-used.
With other Spheres, this narrative importance can be invested into a material, place, or future period, or even a phrase or relationship.
•••• Foreshadowing, Genre Shift, Break the Fourth Wall
Bringing up the relevance of an object is one thing; even more difficult to implement is foreshadowing future events, what the more traditional might term "destiny". An Adept of Metagaming may make implications or invoke tropes that bind a subplot into the greater Plot, creating Destinies and more complex blessings and curses. Story elements left to chance can be pushed into a path of success or failure within the bounds of their possibility.
Likewise, the very bounds of genre and good sense may be reworked by hammering the mythic threads into shape. An Awakened being can be realigned to the ambient genre, reducing the impact of Paradox by finding common ground. Conversely, a genre can be forcibly shifted to the metagamer's own, creating what amounts to a temporary Sanctum; this latter effect is always Vulgar, as it wrenches the very foundations of the Plot. Such events normally only last a scene before the strain forces it to revert.
In one of the more bizarre applications of this Sphere, the Metagamer may live up to their name and "look past the Fourth Wall", gaining fleeting glimpses of information they have no other way of knowing. In absence of Correspondence or Time, these always entail their immediate environs.
With the other Spheres, foreshadowing can be infused with resilience against other forms of magick and linked to the possession or presence of objects or beings. Genre shifts can be embedded in people, places, and other stranger things rather than the scene (which is believed to be one source of Marauders), and beings from other settings may be pulled across the gulf of the metaverse. The character may view omakes through the veil of alternate worlds and wield references to influence the other players.
••••• Subvert and Define Tropes, Mitigate Crossover, Mary Sue, Traverse the Fourth Wall
At the finest control of the narrative, the Metagamer has learned to reweave the underpinnings of the story. She may now bring a mythic thread into being and spread its influence, or degrade it to a stale cliche. Memes and counter-memes can be spread to encourage a gradual shift in the ambient genre.
When genres clash, the story itself degrades and lashes out to equalize the difference; with this level of knowledge, these conflicts can be mitigated and woven together in a satisfactory fashion, albeit at a cost of some effort and creativity. Much like with Prime 5, a point of Quintessence can be spent per point of Paradox to neutralize it.
In the most horrific application of the Sphere known, a character may be persistently granted the ability to warp the story about herself, succeeding consistently in endeavors where a more natural entity might merely have a substantial chance of victory. These Mary Sues live a life blessed beyond what any right-thinking individual might think safe or sane.
It is said that some Masters of Metagaming have learned how to bribe the legendary "Storyteller". These claims have not been substantiated, though persistent rumors of Archmastery doing so exist; however, it is known that Masters may travel to "omakes" and alternate presents. More traditional mystics consider this to be deliberately entering the Mirror Zone.
