Emerikol
Adventurer
I have observed that when people just simply don't like certain aspects/rules/behaviors in an RPG they will concoct elaborate...and sometimes impressively sophisticated...theories to explain why this is not just their opinion, but that these things are objectively bad. In particular, people will latch onto arguments invoking "realism" and "metagaming" to prove why they are right.
I'm not claiming that it is not a preference. I'm not claiming it is objectively bad. Never have. Even on the old WOTC forums. I do claim that it is bad for me. I also claim that there is consistent way of viewing a set of rules that makes them bad for me. I have used numerous terms because I don't really care about the term.
What I reject and object to is people who tell me there is no consistent way of viewing a set of rules that makes them bad for me. I believe there are many people (perhaps a small percentage of the gamer population but still numerous) who would designate metagame rules in a consistent way. If not with absolute perfection at least with a high degree of correlation.
So this post was not intending to resurrect the debate about the various merits of play. The people who don't care about metagame mechanics won the day and 5e is rife with them. Not 4e levels of metagame but still a lot of metagame and it's baked in pretty hard core. The champion fighter existing as it does while still having Second Wind is clear evidence to me that WOTC never understood the concept to begin with or didn't care. If they had given one single iteration of the fighter that had no metagame mechanics as one single option I would have bought the game on day one. I still haven't bought the game. I did come on here and see if anyone had any ideas on how the game could be fixed for people like myself.
So forget about trying to convince us that our views are arbitrary. Please stop trying to convince us to just join the crowd and get over it. I won't. I'd rather quit roleplaying entirely than play a game with metagame mechanics. At that point watching another tv show is preferable. I will definitely NEVER try to convince you that you should play my way. I do consider overall that it is just a preference. I am not denying that. I am only denying that these mechanics are a random assortment of unrelated mechanics that have little in common besides being old. I will argue that that is not true.
The real question is -- why do so many on here fight so hard to try and prove there is not a mechanical pattern that undergirds metagame mechanics. It would not mean they can't play with those mechanics. It only means some people don't want to play with them. It's really like chocolate and vanilla. You don't have to deny the existence of vanilla to choose chocolate.
ELFCRUSHER: Don't take this as all directed at you. This is just where it all spewed out. It can be frustrating.