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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6825023" data-attributes="member: 6775031">That's patently not true. Most skill point systems explicitly state that you should only improve skills that you've actually used, and even 3.5 explained this in the DMG. Granted, most people ignored that part of the book since it added a lot of bookkeeping, but you shouldn't fault the system for players misusing it. And then there are games like Skyrealms of Jorune, where skills only ever advance in the aftermath of having used those skills. (In this specific case, it's a chance for a skill to improve after a fixed period of time, based on how often you used the skill and under what circumstances).Even for systems where you do improve at combat/skills you haven't used, like much of D&D (and especially the 3.x Commoner class), that doesn't necessarily mean it's a meta-game thing. Meta-gaming is very specifically the term for player knowledge which the characters lack, and the characters should be aware that they get better (at what they do) by doing stuff (that they can learn from). They don't know the numbers, but their knowledge about how they improve mirrors our own knowledge about how they improve. Unless you hand out extra experience for RP or something, at which point the characters don't really have any analogous knowledge on that front.Edit:It's certainly possible to meta-game with experience points. The whole class-based advancement system only makes sense in the context of adventurers who go out and fight/magic/skill in roughly equal proportions, such that improving all of those things at once is a reasonable abstraction made in the name of bookkeeping. If the characters starting acting on this, by killing boars until they were better at lockpicking, then the assumptions made in order to justify that abstraction are no longer sufficient.</blockquote>

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