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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3034651" data-attributes="member: 7240">OK -- I hardly need to stir the pot at this point. Thanks everyone for making this thread as vibrant and fun as I was hoping it would be this morning! Nevertheless, here goes:This is the RAW definition of metagame thinking: totally unhelpful, incoherent and subject to inferences being drawn in all kinds of directions about what might or might not fall into the category of metagaming. Then the DMG offers a solution to the problem that further muddies the waters:Wayne 62682 managed to sum up the DMG in about hald as many words:Anyway, back to my responses to the posts:This is one of the few things I would categorize as cheating, unless it was reasonable for the character to guess or infer this from second-hand knowledge or from observing the properties of the creature in question.Again, this is cheating in my books too.For me, this is just an opportunity to prove a point to my players that I never get tired of proving: a set of physical laws that lets you make giant exploding balls of fire out of words and guano is clearly not the same set we are working with in this world. It is abundantly clear that your game world's physics are going to be quite different from our world's; when my players try to get water to conduct electricity, I calmly inform them that the elements fire and air, which comprise lightning cannot be conducted by water; they naturally rise and water naturally falls towards the centre of the universe.Exactly. There is gaming and there is cheating while gaming. There is no metagaming.Although I disagree with the term being used at all, I think your definition is really helpful here because it exposes, what in my view, are unreasonable definitions of what constitutes an out-of-character reason.Excuse the pedantry but it's a subset of the set gaming. A superset is a set of sets.I agree. This is cheating. But it seems crazy to prohibit inter-player communication because of the possibility that it can be used to cheat. Furthermore, this prohibition isn't even effective at stopping that you want to stop because the PC2 already knows what PC1 discovered because you, the GM, have announced it.Cheating is bad. But the only way to stop people cheating in RPGs is to shame them to discourage the behaviour. It is not to de-socialize games by prohibiting inter-player communication which, if used for a purpose other than cheating, only serves to enhance the roleplay experience.Once again, prohibiting inter-player dialogue is not an effective way of doing this. What if the wizard is the guy who read the book? How does your rule help then? When making rules, you need to assess whether they will actually achieve their desired objective and, what costs there might be to their implementation. In my view, your rule against inter-player communication does not achieve its objective and has unreasonable costs.Neither would mine. Why? Because they're not cheaters. You see I don't need strange socially inhibiting rules to prevent this evil. I do just fine without it.How does this follow? How do "maybe you should use the hedge for cover," or "remember you can use your spontaneous cures to kill that undead," or "don't you remember Lord Thorfinn from three sessions ago? That's his crest the cavalry are flying,"  qualify as metagaming. All the player is doing is reminding someone of a fact they have already been told or making tactical suggestions based on information possessed by every character in the group.While I wouldn't go so far as to call them a bad example, I do think that there are all kinds of knowledge not represented in these skills and it might be worthwhile to consider how and when its employment qualifies as cheating, or, as Wayne says,To me, this suggests a bit of a hole in the D&D knowledge system, as elegant as it is. But what about types of knowledge we all agree are outside the skills system. Are there any kinds of general/common knowledge, ThirdWizard, that are not covered under the Know (*) mechanic whose employment you would have a problem with?I find this too. It is rare for a GM to enforce "metagaming" rules; when they are enforced, they usually show up in the form of self-censorship. I have had to retrain many a player into letting him know it's okay to speak out of character or base decisions on parts of the RAW not covered by the Know (*) mechanic.This is a pretty excellent summary of the approach in my games. Looks like I'm not as far out on the fringe on this issue as I imagined myself to be.</blockquote>

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