Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Nor am I. I'm responding to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s claim that it is cheating to (i) impute my knowledge of troll weaknesses to my PC, and (ii) to explain this, within the fiction, as stuff I learned from my dear old uncle.
All "cheating" means here is that Maxperson doesn't like it. But he presents it as if it is something more. And his argument for the "something more" rests on a general critique of metagaming that encompasses practices that he himself engages in.
That's just plain wrong. Cheating means that it gives an unfair advantage to the player. Do I dislike metagame cheating? Yes. Because it gives an unfair advantage to the players. It's also a fact that it's cheating in my game. It's not a "claim."
No one in this thread, other than him, cares what his preferences are. But some do get frustrated with his presentation of essentially arbitrary preferences as hard-and-fast rules, especially when the formulation of those rules seems to have a strong element of special pleading if not outright hypocrisy.
So first, I've said at least a half dozen time, maybe more, that it's cheating for MY GAME, so it's pretty darn disingenuous for you to make the claim that I am presenting metagame cheating as "hard-and-fast rules.: Second, I've not said that metagaming is okay, so there's no hypocrisy going on at all.
If my character knows it then it is not "out of game knowledge". Maxperson has no objection to my PC knowing what a crossbow is, or a spear trap, even though it is quite conceivable that some people in the gameworld are ignorant of such things, just as in the real world there are people ignorant of such things. But he objects to my PC knowing what a troll's vulnerability is.
False Equivalences are false. Troll vulnerabilities are not even remotely as common knowledge as crossbows, or as easily reasoned out as "Look, it's a spear trap."