Let's Talk About Metagaming!

Umbran said:

...players may be carrying this around as an unwritten rule in their heads, which brings up cognitive dissonance when you suggest impaling with a shortsword. This dissonance does not necessarily manifest as telling you that shortswords are slashing weapons, but with some other rationalization.

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Cognitive dissonance! Thanks Umbran, that gives me an idea...

I think pemerton is looking at the RPG from a holistic point of view. Which is fine - nothing wrong with that. The group creates a story, and they use the rules to help create that story. The rules provide incentives, and PCs (and GMs) act on those incentives. That's playing the game, gaming, and everyone has the goal of having a good time. All the parts contribute to the whole.

Let me drop a couple definitions in:

The story (of the game) is what you would get if you took the shared creative efforts of all players and wrote it down in a narrative format. There are no classes, alignments, dice, etc. in the story: just what happens in-game.

The rules are the framework in which everyone acts in order to create the story. Or, if you will, what's written in the rulebook.

Gaming, then, is what happens when you mix the two of these things. If you want to ensure the death of your enemy (story), you choose to use your shortsword that does 4d6+10 damage (rules). You use the rules to create the story.

Metagaming is one step removed from gaming. When you're metagaming, you're not trying to ensure the death of your enemy (story). You're trying to do as much damage (rules) possible, and using your 4d6+10 weapon (rules) to do it.

It's a subtle difference, so I'll boil it down a little bit (a lot?):
Gaming is using rules to make a story.
Metagaming is using rules to affect other rules.

pemerton said:

Are you saying that the GM should suspend or change the action resolution rules, and so (for instance) award bonus damage to the mounted lance attack to make it mechanically stronger than the shortsword? Or penalise the shortsword attack? At what point is the GM supposed to tell the player that s/he will do such a thing?

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I was saying that even though the rules promote some behaviors, it's up to the GM to be the ultimate giver of rewards. If a PC charges a bone (undead) dragon with a mounted lance, and it's reasonable that a bone dragon has no organs worth impaling, as GM I would 1) use an NPC to convey the futility of the effort, or 2) let the PC know, after the attack, what the result was and probably how it had little effect.

pemerton said:

if you want players to choose lances over shortswords when they want their PCs to impale enemies, the best way to achieve that is to give your game mechanics that are more likely to generate stories of impalement when the PCs attack with lances than when they attack with shortswords. If the mechanics will only achieve this result by the GM suspending or changing them on an ad hoc basis, that seems to me simply an indication that the mechanics aren't very good.

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This may be well and true, but it's beside the point. Metagaming isn't about what the rules are. As I've said before, it's about your goal. Do you want to create a story, or do you just want to see the gears and axles of the rules spin?

DMMike said:

Gaming, then, is what happens when you mix the two of these things. If you want to ensure the death of your enemy (story), you choose to use your shortsword that does 4d6+10 damage (rules). You use the rules to create the story.

Metagaming is one step removed from gaming. When you're metagaming, you're not trying to ensure the death of your enemy (story). You're trying to do as much damage (rules) possible, and using your 4d6+10 weapon (rules) to do it.

It's a subtle difference, so I'll boil it down a little bit (a lot?):
Gaming is using rules to make a story.
Metagaming is using rules to affect other rules.

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I have to admit, I'm struggling to find the distinction that you're making here between Gaming and Metagaming. I think what you might be aiming to imply is that Metagaming is "using rules to affect other rules with disregard for the (perhaps aberrant) fiction that is created (hence genre/trope-incoherent story emerges)."

Is that what you're meaning?

If it is then we've completed the circle and we're back to [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]'s and [MENTION=23240]steenan[/MENTION]'s well-constructed points above (and [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and my own). If the system incentivizes PC build choices that produce genre/trope-incoherency or aberrant fiction, then the blame needs to be placed on the system...not on the players.

DMMike said:

Gaming is using rules to make a story.
Metagaming is using rules to affect other rules.

<snip>

Metagaming isn't about what the rules are. As I've said before, it's about your goal. Do you want to create a story, or do you just want to see the gears and axles of the rules spin?

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Like [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], I'm having trouble applying this distinction to actual episodes of play (either actual ones I've taken part in, or imagined ones).

For instance, if I'm playing D&D, and I want my PC to kill a monster, then I will be aiming at reducing that enemies hit point pool to zero, by rolling successful to hit rolls for my PC, and then maximising my damage.

Or another example: I'm playing a cleric, and (as my PC) I want to help my comrades make it through the magically warded dungeon. So I look through my spell list to see which spells grant a bonus to saving throws. Then I have my PC memorise one of those spells, and cast it on the other PCs.

Both these examples look to me like the use of rules to affect other rules (eg the use of attack and damage rules to affect rules about hit point tallies; the use of spell memorisation and casting rules to affect rules about saving throws), but both are also pretty typical instances of what playing D&D involves.

DMMike said:

I was saying that even though the rules promote some behaviors, it's up to the GM to be the ultimate giver of rewards. If a PC charges a bone (undead) dragon with a mounted lance, and it's reasonable that a bone dragon has no organs worth impaling, as GM I would 1) use an NPC to convey the futility of the effort, or 2) let the PC know, after the attack, what the result was and probably how it had little effect.

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I don't really see how this relates to metagaming at all. It's about damage resistance rules, isn't it?

Whether bone dragons, or non-earth elementals, should be immune to all or some weapon attacks is a recurrent issue of system design. In AD&D non-earth elementals can be damaged by magic weapons (from memory, with a minimum +2 bonus) but no fiction explaining this possibility is offered. In Rolemaster, there is explanatory text that describes how elementals have a "spirit core" that can be disrupted by weapon blows (even non-magical ones). Presumably one could equally posit a "spirit core" to a bone dragon that can be disrupted by a charging lance.

The fiction of the game can be more or less complete or "pre-packaged" in these various ways, but I don't see any connection to metagaming. The player who thinks "I'll attack the air elemental with my sword, because its +2 to hit and so I know it'll do damage" isn't metagaming, just because s/he can't explain what, in the fiction, is happening when a sword blow reduces an air elemental to zero hit points.

DMMike said:

Gaming is using rules to make a story.
Metagaming is using rules to affect other rules.

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I disagree. Gaming is using rules to affect other rules, as is done in Monopoly or Risk. You could play D&D as a board game, without making any mention of a story, although it might not be very entertaining.

Storytelling is when the story is shaped directly from the story, without any rules interaction. You don't need any rules to tell a story.

Roleplaying games are in an interesting place. What a roleplaying game is, in a traditional sense, is a means for converting story into mechanics - for the purpose of resolution - so you can translate that back into story and figure out what happens. You have a story goal, like wanting to stab something until it dies, and the rules tell you how to model stabbing something in order to impartially determine if it dies.

Metagaming is when the resolution is directly affected by the story, without going through the rules to get there. Metagaming is widely considered to be a bad thing, (though most will admit that there's a time and place where it's acceptable).

To use your example, of someone who wants to kill the bone dragon, the game rules tell us how to model that lance striking the dragon, in order to determine what effect it has. The GM might think that it's not going to be very effective, but since this isn't a storytelling exercise, we can't skip right to the narration. Instead, we use the game rules to model the attack and damage against the monster, calculating whatever resistances it might have, and then translate that damage result back into its meaningful narration.

If the GM thinks that the attack should be ineffective, but the game rules say that the dragon is going down, then that's a problem. The GM is meta-gaming here, by trying to apply story-level resolutions directly to the mechanics of the attack. Instead, the proper resolution is to model that the dragon has Damage Reduction against Piercing attacks (or whatever language the system happens to use), so that the mechanical interaction will resolve into the story resolution that makes sense for everyone.

If the GM says that impaling attacks should be ineffective against a bone dragon, but then uses the rules to resolve it and there's nothing to mechanically represent that the attack is less effective, then the GM is flat-out lying - the statement, that impaling attacks are ineffective against a bone dragon, is simply not true.

And there's no reason why the GM should ever have to lie like that. The GM has control over what the exact stats are for every monster. The GM can go ahead and add in a resistance (or even immunity) against stabbing attacks. Until doing so, though, the player and the character can go ahead and stab that bone dragon, because it is a truth within the game world that stabbing is a fully effective method of attacking this monster.

Saelorn said:

Metagaming is when the rules are directly affected by the story, or vice versa.

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This doesn't seem right either.

To borrow from an example in another recent thread: if my elf PC approaches an ogre to try and open diplomatic negotiations, and the GM has a note in his/her backgroud for the ogre that the ogre hates elves, then the GM might reasonably impose a penalty on the ogre's reaction roll. That is a case of story directly affecting rules. It doesn't look like metagaming to me, just sensible adjudication.

And to flip the direction of causation around: if a monster's hit point total falls to zero (which is a fact about the rules, which relate damage dice outcomes to a tally on a piece of paper), then the GM is obliged to narrate that the monster is dead.This is a case of the rules directly affecting the story. And it doesn't look like metagaming to me - it looks like a completely ordinary piece of RPG play.

pemerton said:

This doesn't seem right either.

To borrow from an example in another recent thread: if my elf PC approaches an ogre to try and open diplomatic negotiations, and the GM has a note in his/her backgroud for the ogre that the ogre hates elves, then the GM might reasonably impose a penalty on the ogre's reaction roll. That is a case of story directly affecting rules. It doesn't look like metagaming to me, just sensible adjudication.

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Maybe I should phrase it differently. My point was that the story is trying to affect the resolution without going through the rules to get there. If your GM imposes a penalty on the ogre's reaction roll, then that's just the game working as intended.

I'm going to go back and edit my post.

By defining meta-gaming as any attempt to skip straight to a desired story outcome, without going through the proper game mechanics to get there, it now covers the traditional case of a player exploiting knowledge that a character doesn't have.

I think Wikipedia helps here:

"Metagaming is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. Another definition refers to the game universe outside of the game itself. Metagaming differs from strategy in that metagaming is making decisions based upon out of game knowledge, whereas strategies are decisions made based upon in-game actions and knowledge.

In simple terms, it is the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one's in-game decisions."

It doesn't really have to do with "story", as most traditional games don't have "story" we care about, but metagaming can still be an issue.

If your character knows about weapons, choosing one that does more damage is not metagaming.

If your player knows that one weapon does marginally more damage than another, and steps outside his or her previously established character behavior to get that marginal increase, they are probably metagaming. Whether this is good or bad is debatable by circumstance.

If your chess player ribs you about having a bad breakup with your significant other to anger you into making a mistake, that chess player is metagaming, in a bad way.

If your D&D player realizes he's been a spotlight hog, and steps back to let someone else be awesome too, that's metagaming, probably in a good way.

Its funny, generally when I think of "metagaming" I think about it as a form of cheating, though I like Umbran's point of how letting someone else have the spotlight could be that too.

From a decade of LARP (particularly Vampire), it seems rampant (and hence one of the reasons my wife and I dropped out of that scene).

Common Examples:
You are walking around Obfuscated (invisible), but you hold your hands over your chest in an X to represent that people are supposed to ignore you. However, what happens is that suddenly anyone with Auspex (which has a chance to detect Obfuscate if actively searching), suddenly wants to activate it and make tests.

OR the power Dominate requires eye contact to work, so people wear mirrored sunglasses at all times so they can always say "I wasnt looking at you so it doesnt work".

OR you are having a telepathic conversation with someone via Auspex (but of course you have to actually speak) and suddenly people who shouldnt know anything about what you are talking about telepathically start to "wonder/predict" that you might do what they heard Out of Character.

OR using Mask of 1000 Faces (which in some versions meant you could look completely different), but characters still believe it is "you" even though they shouldn't

The list goes on.....clearly I am butthurt by how rampantly this went unchecked

Desh-Rae-Halra said:

Its funny, generally when I think of "metagaming" I think about it as a form of cheating, though I like Umbran's point of how letting someone else have the spotlight could be that too.

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Meta-gaming is breaking the rules, and as such, it is always a bad thing. It's just that sometimes there are might good reasons to meta-game, and whatever benefit you gain can outweigh that you're cheating to do it.

Kind of like how theft or murders are always wrong, but sometimes it's the lesser of two evils.

Saelorn said:

Meta-gaming is breaking the rules, and as such, it is always a bad thing.

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Well, this gets back to [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s OP.

I [-]don't[/-] think that player A going along with player B's thing, even though player A's PC doesn't know about player B's PC's dark secret, is a good thing. And I don't see what rule it is breaking, either.