Do you ever have fourth wall breaking in your games? Stuff like

>>49667683
People are free.
But I think it's just about the lamest gimmick and I struggle to remember one instance in any medium where it was even mediocre.

>>49667683
I think the furthest I've done it was a recurring NPC casual noting how weird it is that the PCs always seem to show up in time to help with some weird thing going on in his life. It was just a casual joke and it never went any further, as I don't think it should if you want to have serious game.

If you want to joke around however, its a good way to get a laugh as long as you use it sparingly I'd say. It loses it's humor if you use it too often.

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>>49667683
I'm going to play a slightly deranged 14-year old soldier who talks to himself and refers to himself as "we"

I am going to break the fourth wall, if I get a chance where it's funny

>>49667683

You could do something like the the dungeons and dragons cartoon. Play players playing characters in a real not-real game.

Most of the time 4th wall breaking stuff in my games is limited to jokes with roleplaying and not directly talking to the players. Like an NPC might mention something about how terrible it would be for someone to hurt an innocent boy. Of course they have no way of knowing the characters just beat the smack out of a 10 year old street urchin for information, but that's tha joke.

We have a new NPC that basically originated from our dyslexic player saying a name wrong. He's popped up a couple times and is kinda similar to Maiiq from Elder Scrolls.

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>>49668184

>I'm going to play a slightly deranged 14-year old soldier who talks to himself and refers to himself as "we"

>>49667683
The idea for my next campaign is if the players go on too long OOC, I'll start having the NPC they were talking to get confused. The idea is while they were doing that, the PC's were "hearing" it all and zoning out. Maybe even tapping their feet impatiently to tell the Powers That Be to get on with it.

tl;dr, PC's are weird and can hear voices telling them what to do.

As a player yes.

>NPC: What do you know about the legendary plot item of doom.
>me: Nothing, but i assume you're going to tell me anyway.

I played the character like he always wanted to be a hero. So he knew many of the conventions in heroic stories.
He was a little bit genre savvy but i toned it down later because it was too snarky and not very clever.

>>49667683
Played a crazy sorceror one game who had schitzophrenic voices in his head which was basically all conversation above the table.

You'd think it'd be a shit gimmick but we weirdly had fun with it.

Quotes include:
>Don't try and break the door down, "Harold". They all say your rolls are terrible. I don't know what those are but the consen-consensus seems to be it means you're shit at breaking doors.
>I hate, hate, HATE exposition. All that drivel, all these feelings about some snot-nosed kid who likes to wander near werewolf dens- and I have to listen to it TWICE. DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND!? Right now I am hearing me bitch about me bitching about you! You wonder why I have trouble stringing a sentence together!? .. a sentence togeth- a sentence to-FUCK.
>Sorry, I don't know what kind of undead it is. One of the voices said it knew but wouldn't tell anyone, which was apparently a good thing but he was super smug about it. Everyone hates him.

>>49667683
Partially. There's been some sort-of leanings, like my Shadowrun character betting there was going to be a third artefact after finding two mysterious, weird, old thingies that apparently were really powerful. There was.

In another campaign, I had an ork Oddboy complain loudly about "rattlin'" whenever somebody rolled dice around him. They didn't quite catch on. But then again, the retcons I had to make in that game due to players leaving did eventually turn out to be in-universe. It was a weird game.

But in general, do it carefully, and don't do it obviously. Make observations that are ironic to the players and makes sense in-character works. Some campaigns work better than others.

However, on the note of fourth-wall breaking, I have to admit that Zifban's rant about being a wizard when the party wanted a cleric in The Death Gate Cycle made me laugh.

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>>49668184

I run a sci fi text game. At some point I plan on having a mission where the party has to stop an A.I. that fucks with the chat (changes names, adds dummy players, etc.), if that counts.

Occasionally my characters are genre savvy, but it tends to fit. The wizard recycled from an unfinished campaign had already been on an adventure and wanted this one over so he comments on how things work and is snarky about everything, for example.

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>>49669688
>>49669072
There's nothing that can go wrong with it, don't worry about it

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>>49668184
>slightly deranged 14-year old soldier
>talks to himself
>refers to himself as "we"

>>49669702
ai flick sounds great
just don't reveal that it's an AI problem at the beginning, let them wonder

>>49668184
edgelord much?

>>49669328
I sometimes do something similar; when my players talk to me/ask me something in the middle of a roleplaying sequence, I go: "the people nearby look at you wierdly for yelling that question at the sky"

>>49669558
100% stealing that idea

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>>49669748
Don't worry about it mate

>>49669821
>edgelord much?
Naw man, that would be the 13-year-old thief/thug/quasi-assassin that is in the party~

Don't worry, I'm going to play it straight heh

>>49669558
Might steal this for an NPC.

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>>49667886
i dunno there's a few classic works of theatre and literature that pull it off ok
but maybe that's just me

>>49670175
It only works if the entire story is written to be meta.

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>>49670175

>>49668111
What if it is a recuring gag, like a npc showing up in the background of every village/quest and if the pc talk to them he says something like " i felt compelled by a power stronger then you or i"

>>49667683
It's a gimmick that me and a friend run in a comedy game as characters, that has somehow turned into a piece of worldbuilding.

We're the main magic users in a supers game, and so we bullshitted that breaking the fourth wall was part of mage sight going beyond the veil of reality. Now being in contact with magic for extended periods of time causes a mild psychosis in which other people can break the fourth wall.

>>49667683

Played in a game where my character basically had all the meta knowledge (plus some additional stuff that would have made him into a Sue in most over games, here he was mediocre). He danced around mentioning fourth wall and similar meta-concepts but never outright said it. Mostly because even if he dropped it on NPCs it wouldn't have given them any advantages and all the things happening could be traced to their roots in the world. Including special status of PCs and some NPCs.

>>49667683
I've had characters comment on stuff like the PCs always showing up somewhere where there's trouble, or had PCs that make some genre-savvy comments (like quessing that if some legendary artefact of whatever gets mentioned, they're probably going to be tasked to find the bloody thing soon), but no real 4th wall breaking.

I'd kind of like to do some weird experimental boss fight that plays around with the 4th wall, though. Like the players fight some eldritch nth-dimensional being, which is actually aware of stuff happening outside the "reality" of the game world and react to it (ie. if the players discuss their next moves out loud, it hears them and prepares to counter their attacks, or it alters the PCs' stats or takes away their character sheets, forcing them to remember what spells they still had prepared or whatever).
If it would be not-Nyarlathotep, it'd probably also speak directly to the players and shit-talk the characters for having bad stats or whatever.

>>49667683
I run special semi-canon sessions on or around holidays that are usually a bit nod-and-wink. On Christmas a big red dragon covered in bags of useful items sometimes shows up in my fantasy setting. Halloween last year I ran a spooky one off centered around investigating a number of variously haunted houses.

In the "playing it straight" timeline the only time I've ever referenced "the audience" was when I got a chance to play a demigod, who referenced a realm above the gods' own. When the players asked what it was like, the demigod said it "wasn't as heavenly as you might think, but full of giants."

>>49667683
I've tried a lot of different approaches to this, had fun with most of them, had one or two well received by others.
I have another attempt planned in the future where Azazoth affects the story and PCs read a message telling them how not to break the universe and end the game forever, signed by the players themselves.