It just seems weird to me that 100% of a game like Axis & Allies is metagaming; indeed, 100% of most games is metagaming. It just seems like it's weird to give this name to the main activity that makes up gaming. But I do get how you are using the terminology. It just seems unnatural to me to define stuff that you only do in RPGs as "gaming" and stuff that you do in all games "metagaming."Odhanan said:When I say something is "metagaming", it doesn't mean it's not part of the game. That's not what I meant. I said that for me, asking for advice to other players while your character is talking to an NPC is metagaming. "Metagaming" here, for me, is "gaming" too, I thought my first intervention on this thread showed it plainly enough.
I agree with the overall thrust of your post and find it to be pretty much in tune with my own thinking. But this is, frankly, a house rule of yours and should be understood as such. Much as the Know(*) skills get on my nerves, they are nevertheless part of the core.painandgreed said:Knowing common description of monsters and even DR vulnerabilites is not Knowledge(Planes).
Now I think we're going somewhere interesting. Maybe this is a debate about verisimilitude in representing how knowledge works in fantasy/premodern societies.ThirdWizard said:For example, you say that fighters would have heard of stories of monsters and learned how to fight them, but I say that half or more of those stories wouldn't have been true or embellished and are useless to them in the real world.
I tend to see premodern/fantasy societies' worldviews as essentially empirical and accurate. Sure, the theories used to stitch these things together were often incorrectly premised but the fact is that Ptolmaic astronomy could have got us to the moon. But many people see premoderns as people with no real acquaintance with the physical laws of the world in which they were situated. They see premodern folklore with its monstrosities and saints as a sign that premoderns had a tenuous grip on the most basic aspects of reality.
I wonder if this difference in assumptions about how non-modern people think might be underpinning some of our debate, which is, fundamentally, a debate about how to approximate the level of knowledge a character might have about the laws and contents of the physical world.
I can't speak for painandgreed but I would find acting on this information to be an egregious breach of the social contract of my games.Here's a question that might help. If PC1 is off screen and PC2 is alone, and PC2 does something evil (burns down an orphanage or something), would you find it wrong for PC1 to act on the information because the Player was present?
The whole reason players give eachother hints in my games is because we all recognize it's so damned tough to play a character authentically that we need all the help we can get. My appreciation of hints is premised on how different and separate my character is from me. It seems to me that if one thinks one can do a decent job solo inhabiting such a radically different being, this comfort is premised on the character being, in certain fundamental ways, more like the player than not.
Hear hear! Hence my willingness to have "secret" information out there for everyone to hear.Pretending not to know stuff can be fun, too, though.
How do you like my theory above? Could this be about replicating a sense of ignorance and superstition on the part of the PCs?That's interesting. Hmm... combat is a sticky point for us. We used to offer bits of help fairly often, and we've actually curbed this back. So, its a concious decision to avoid it when playing that we've trained ourselves on. I can't say we ever stopped to debate why it was a bad thing. It just was. We never looked deeper into it than that.
The more I learn about the social dynamic at your games, the more I am struck by its similarities to the level of immersion and sociability of my groups.Right, it's not immersion. Not that we consider the PCs as puppets (I think that was a playstyle at least). It's somewhere in between. In fact, we often skim over conversations in game when they aren't interesting to roleplay. Something like "The PCs decide its best to bring the prisoner in" or something like that, where its implied that they talked about it, but we don't want to play that out. Then we'll have the in character conversation when we think it would be interesting to play out.
You see: I have exactly the same motivation as your DM. I want people to learn how to play their characters. We just have totally opposite pedagogies.ThirdWizard's DM said:Its hard to get into it if people are all talking about random stuff in the game ooc. It worse if their helping each other, as it doesn't encourage people to learn how to play their characters.
Again, opposite pedagogy, same goal. What I want is for people to pay attention to details they notice in the game. And the way I motivate them to do this is to create situations in which they can discuss them with one another.If the player knows, he should be paying more attention.
Go ahead. I'd be most entertained, even more so if you can get them to join ENW and liven things up.If I can, I'll get some comments from another group member, who is pretty much the opposite of this guy, to really confuse things.
But why should this be? Given the fundamental unknowability of one's own character, why shouldn't you get all the help you can to guess what he would think?ThirdWizard said:What you think is used to determine what your PC thinks. What another Player thinks is used to determine what his PC thinks. And never the twain shall meet, unless there is in character communication going on.
Here's where I would split the hair: if the instruction to flank is predicated on the PC also moving into a position at a future point in the round, it is cheating. But, if the PC who is doing the flanking is already in position, it is not. This is because one entails giving the other player foreknowledge of his character's moves that the PC could not reasonably have, whereas the other simply entials reminding the other player of the immediate application of the laws of the universe.Do you really not see the difference (any difference mind you, not a subjective quality difference) behind me telling another player at the table that his PC should flank the enemy with me, and my PC yelling out that we should flank the enemy?
One thing I'm curious about: does your group use spells like Status and Rary's Telepathic Bond more because of the general spirit of the game?