"And even if you do care about the meta-knowledge thing (which I don't, just in case I haven't made that abundantly and redundantly clear), why would you want to intentionally give the players more information their characters don't have? "
Because the other options are worse, to us and our game play.
There are a gazillion ways one PC can get info the others dont. Various senses, traits and activities would include languages, darkvision, blindsight, scouting ahead, scrying, divinations, personal knowledge etc. They are fairly obvious to settings snd fiction and can come up even by player choices, not just setting, so just saying "we dont allow them in our games" isnt really a preferential option we even vonsidered.
When those moments hit in game and in situations where it matters there are three basic and obvioys ways to do this.
1 play thru at the table and others hear the info as players but then choose to not use it in character until they get an opportunity for "I tell you..."
This if frankly our norm. Has been for as long as I can remember and it's not some torture or burden. It's not something we give mock awards to or really think anything of. It's the roleplaying equivalent to us of "tie your shoes" not exceptional at all.
2 separate folks by going outsidr, whispers, passing notes, emails texts etc. Basically keep the other players in the dark. This is rarely done by us as it's too much sn interruption. We sometimes see it in other games - Mercer does it eith whispers snd notes on CR. But it rarely occurs in our play outside of downtime stuff with emails (rarely). So we just ho eith the easy "just ignore it til the info dump" and dont interrupt play.
3 decide player and character knowledge are the same so when s pc scouts snd gets KOed your character knows the exact details even if not there? If domronecehispers sn offer in draconuc to the lizard man zpC all the other players know what was said and can use it in character.
3 is not an option we go in for. I can see how it can really help if your players have issues with separating PC and player knowledge but we dont have that to contend with.
Sure, there are likely more options than these basic three tent poles but we found an easy spot that works well for us.
But, I imagine choices to go to GAP and things like "meta-knowledge is ok" and the like are very much driven by what issues and problems and preferences a given table has seen in play. Certainly, if we kept hitting problems with players not separating knowledge as a matter of course or not knowing what the various ability scores represented in terms of applying to actions in play we would be looking at #2, #3, GAP or other styles more closely.
