It's a possibility, yes, but you've been posting as if it's a preordained certainty in all cases that characters have no knowledge of dragons whatsoever to justify your accusations that a player who uses information about dragons acquired in gameplay is a filthy metagamer. It's stomach turning how little tolerance you have for even the mention of a play style you yourself don't enjoy.
No, characters certainly can have knowledge of dragons and all sort of other things. We even have various knowledge skills in the game to roughly measure the amount of knowledge they have. It is just that this that this knowledge does not necessarily correspond with the knowledge the player has.
And are you now differentiating the player knowledge based on how it was acquired? You emphasis on "
acquired in gameplay" seems to imply so.Now if the character acquired the information during gameplay that is of course fine. But I would not expect that information automatically be transferred to all characters of that same player irrespective of their circumstances. And how are you expecting to differentiate where the information was acquired from? Like I for most of my knowledge, I honestly could not tell why I know it. It has been accumulated over decades from various sources.
And I am pretty sure I did not say "filthy metagamers" or anything of the sort. I just identified what is happening in the style you describe. It is not for me, but if you wish to play in such manner, that really is not my problem.
It's not surprising that your preferences are different from those of game designers from 50 years ago. What I find odd is a play style in which the players are expected to ignore the characteristics of the monsters their characters encounter and pretend they didn't notice them. Where's the fun in that?
Playing a chracter who is a different person than yourself by necessity entails assuming they know different things than you do, that they might react to things differntly than you would, that they would express themselves differntly and make differnt decisions.
Now one thing I agree with you, is that in a puzzle solving sense, it is not terribly fun gameplay to solve a puzzle answer of which you know, but you need to pretend that you don't. These things might come up occasionally, if one is to avoid metagaming, but I think the GM can pretty effectively avoid such if they want to. For example I often alter both monster abilities and appearances, so it might not be instantly apparent to veteran players either what they are capable of.
And I'm glad you mentioned the 50 years. The fact of the matter is that, how information was available half a century ago when the game was invented and how it is now are completely different. Like it might have been viable then to the GM not let the players read the monster manual etc and the only way the players could learn information was during the play. But that is not the case any more. If you make "know monster information" a player skill the game tests and rewards, then that is also a skill players can improve by studying and memorising monster information that is freely availabel them via internet. And that sounds far too much like school to be a part of fun leisure activity for me.
