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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7538528" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The game world is not our real world, but it is a world that could be real. Things work differently there, because they follow the local laws of nature rather than real-world laws, but the laws that they do follow are consistent. That's the minimum consideration for any fictional world, whether in a game or novel. If you cross that line, then it stops being fantasy and starts being a fairy tale.However, we don't know what those laws are. We can't actually go there and measure the gravity, or how much force it takes to penetrate six inches through oak. We don't even really have a sense of how things work there, aside from basic genre conventions, because all we have to go on is what the DM tells us. Our characters would have a pretty good sense of how things work, though, because they actually live there; they can look around and see all of the details, and they have at least a decade of experience with how things happen there on a day-to-day basis. When the player puts themself into the mindset of their character, they should be assuming that they have a pretty good idea of how things work around them, because the character knows that even if the player does not. (If you want a discussion about how much information is reasonable to assume for the character to have, and what sort of checks might be called for, then I'd be down for that at a later point. I don't really want to run too long here.)The other relevant issue is that, while neither the players nor (necessarily) the DM know exactly how the game world works, we do all know that the rules in the book are a reasonable approximation of it. We know this with great certainty, because we have out-of-game knowledge about the procedure of play. When my character tries to climb a wall, the DM looks at the rules in the book and follows the rules for climbing. If the climbing rules say that I have a 70% chance to climb right now, and failure results in 1-6 damage, then that's what happens in the world. And since the laws of the game world are consistent, it means that those circumstances will always yield a 70% chance of climbing, with 1-6 damage on a failure. Even though the character can't know the rules in the book, and probably hasn't studied the local laws of nature in any real depth, all of their observations must necessarily be consistent with those rules. Without even thinking about it, they will know that stronger people are better at climbing than weaker people - weight doesn't really seem to be a factor - and that falling from more than ten feet has a real chance of killing someone if they don't receive medical attention within a minute. They will have internalize everything that the observe around them, maybe not enough to run a probability assessment, but definitely enough to know what is a factor and what is not.If I was cornered by thugs, I would be able to glean enough information from the environment to make a fairly accurate assessment as to my chance of climbing a wall or running past them. Even if I can't name all of the factors off the top of my head, I could make a reasonable guess based on the exact distances and my knowledge of my own physical abilities and the appearance of the wall and the body language of the thugs.In a game, I wouldn't have nearly that much information (unless I wanted to stop and ask the DM many questions, which they may not be able to answer very quickly). But if I know the underlying mechanics of the game, then I can still make a decision with that same degree of confidence, as though I did have all of that information.I honestly can't tell whether you're being serious here. Meta-gaming is universally bad, from a role-playing standpoint. Role-playing is making decisions as your character would make them, based solely on information available to them; and meta-gaming is making decisions based on out-of-game factors that your character can't possibly be aware of. They are mutually incompatible, to the point that I wouldn't even consider Gygax's game to be a role-playing game in that sense, since you aren't making your decisions in-character.Many people are fine with meta-gaming, either because they don't care about the role-playing aspect of the game, or because they're extremely adept at jumping into- and out-of- character. Personally, I find that meta-gaming ruins my immersion, which is why I want the game to only present me with information that is observable to the characters. (It's also why I take a hard stand that a successful "hit" on the attack roll must be visually distinguishable from a "miss" on the attack roll, since my character can't react to a loss of Hit Points unless they can observe it.)</blockquote>

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