That just sounds like incredibly poor world-design. Even if the DM doesn't decide everything in the world before the campaign starts, and just assumes that the non-immediate regions will take care of themselves, those things really should be settled long before the party gets anywhere near them.
So I guess I can't answer that question because it's not one that makes any sense to me. Similar to the rope thing, it's just so far outside of my realm of experience that I can't even take it into consideration.
Yet whole playstyles are based around it. Here is a link to an
actual play report from one of my 4e sessions. The bit I want to focus on is towards the end - in the session it occurred after the PCs had defeated the hobgoblin forces (including a captive chimera) that were attacking the tower they were exploring, and had then defeated the dragon, Calastryx, that had come to take revenge for the death of its chimera child:
the two arcanists and the ranger remained at the base of the tower. The sorcerer did some sort of awareness check (I can't remember exactly what) and I told him that he could feel chaos energies in the area, coming out of the Bloodtower (leaking through the teleportation portal) and also leeching out of the dead body of the dragon. The PCs decided to try and harness this energy, and channel into an item so as to enchant it. There was then some discussion about what items they might try for, and how they might go about it. I had brought my recently acquired copy of Heroes of the Elemental Chaos to the session, and showed the player of the sorcerer the Gift of Flame alternative reward. He liked the look of it, and without consulting the other players had his PC leap up onto Calastryx's body and cast a Cyclonic Vortex (? 13th level sorcerer encounter power) to summon the chaotic energies to him.
The two other PCs - the wizard and the ranger - just looked on with shock and a degree of dismay, as he had done something similar earlier that day on the Elemental Chaos which had caused a bit of mayhem, and the player weren't very surprised when I mentioned they could see something flying from the hills towards them. At first they looked like bats, but as they got closer it was clear they were too big to be bats - they were actually 4 mooncalves
The chaos energies were invented by me in response to the player's check (the Bloodtower contained a portal to the Elemental Chaos, and Calastryx was a four-headed fire drake). The mooncalves were, in the fiction, attracted by the concentration of chaotic energy - but at the table they turned up because I wanted something to be summoned in response to the player's hijinks, and flipping through my new monster book (MV2) turned up the mooncalves as a good option.
By your definition there is no metagaming here, as there is an ingame reason for the mooncalves to turn up. By my definition the whole thing is metagaming - it's what [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] calls "Pemertonian scene-framing"! Namely, as GM I frame the PCs into some sort of crisis or challenge in response to the resolution of the previous scene, also having regard to the expressed or implied interests of the players as demonstrated through their play of their PCs.
Honestly, how likely is that event? Would it have happened, if he was not the protagonist? A lot of the DM's job, in that mode of thought, just goes down to saying that the thing which happens is the thing which is most likely to happen. If I was playing in a campaign, and an NPC introduced herself to me under those circumstances, then I would probably roll my eyes at the sheer improbability of it.
The thing is, "most likely" is no more self-executing than "obvious". It is still a series of events driven by the GM, as I described upthread.
It also produces a Spartan world - in this case a world that is metaphorically Spartan, in that the number of social and emotional attachments to the PCs is far less than it would be in the real world.
Just the other day (probably a fortnight or so ago) a new colleague at work was in my office crying. I've known her for less than two months, and have probably spent fewer than 6 hours in her company. But she was upset by something that had happened to her, and I was the person she happened to know who was around for her to talk to.
How likely is this? I don't know - but I can say it's never happened to me before. But the world is full of unlikely occurrences, and the emotional lives of human beings aren't easily predicted.
Tying this back to RPGing - I'm not really interested in a GM making covert decisions under the guise of what's "likely" or "obvious". I'd much rather a GM be upfront about making choices, and that those choices be guided by a deliberate agenda of putting the players in the hot seat!
(An alternative, when it comes to meeting NPCs, is to have player-side mechanics. In my Burning Wheel game, we have had two Circles checks in five sessions. The first - an attempt to make contact with a fellow cabal member who might have some work for a couple of sorcerers down on their luck - failed, and so the cabal member sent a thug instead to run the PCs out of town. The second -
made while the PCs were floating on wreckage after their ship had burned to the waterline after encountering a ghost ship - succeeded, and so the PCs - who included an elven princess - were rescued by an elven sea captain who was looking for the princess after she had failed to arrive in Greyhawk as scheduled. A lucky event - but the real world contains lucky and unlucky eventualities, as well as likely ones!)
