Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6755948" data-attributes="member: 22424">In a great many cases, the player will respond to claims of metagaming by providing some sort of justification: "oh, my ranger heard about trolls and fire from his mentor", "that just sounds to fantastical to be true", or whatever. And, since the DM can't read the player's mind, there's not really any comeback to that - the DM might well know it's metagaming, and the player might know the DM knows, but are you really going to call him out as a liar and end both the game and the friendship over this?But none of that applies here, because in the case under discussion I was the player in question and as a consequence I do, indeed, know the thought process that went into the decision. And so there's no doubt: I was going to have my PC take action because I knew the dice had come up with a botch. Had the GM rolled secretly and then presented that same answer, I would have acted differently.There's no ambiguity here: it was metagaming.(Incidentally, my motivation there was quite simple: I wanted to 'win'. I hadn't yet realised that the players are both actors and audience for the game, and that it's frequently more fun if the characters get themselves in trouble over things that the player knows but the character doesn't.)Yes, it's always possible, and usually easy, to come up with some after-the-fact justification for whatever course of action you want to take, which makes it impossible to be absolutely certain metagaming is going on, since you can't know what's happening in the player's head.Except when you are the player, of course.Yep, I can understand why you would have an issue with that one.But where I take issue is when you generalise from "that event wasn't metagaming" to "there's no such thing as metagaming".</blockquote>

Verification