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General Tabletop Discussion
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DMs: How Do You Handle Metagaming?
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<blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6426160" data-attributes="member: 6696971"><p>I'm pretty much in lockstep with your initial post and this follow-up response to Iosue [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION]. My guess would be that our tables probably look and feel pretty similar.</p><p></p><p>As GM, I'm primarily interested in (a) pushing every moment of every session toward conflicts that my players (through their characters) care about, (b) playing worthy/fun opposition/adversarial elements to the hilt, and (c) sustaining an intensive, dramatic pace throughout. My players are primarily interested in playing the heroic archetype they've chosen by being put in thematic spots (conflicts) that * test their mettle (both the player's from an action declaration perspective and the character's from a "post-conflict fallout" perspective) and which force them to address the dramatic premise(s) that they've embedded into the core of their characters (or how it synthesizes with setting). Through that process, we flesh out the characters/places/history of our game-world, find out who wins/loses/suffers/changes, and derive our fun. </p><p></p><p>Metagame transparency and overt leveraging of that transparent metagame are key components of that fomula spitting out the product we're looking for. Less metagame transparency can make action declaration more difficult for players (stunting the autonomy and expedience of * above) than we would like. This in turn negatively affects my pacing goals (see "c" above) which is key to keeping us all mentally engaged, excited, and on our toes. Players are spending too much mental overhead on trying to divine numbers from opacity and then calculate odds of success with a margin of error they are uncomfortable with (that would exceed what it would be if they were actually "there"). That bogs decision-making and yields more back-and-forth than is necessary to clarify the math-centric relationship of the fictional components of the imaginary space we're operating in to the system's resolution mechanics. Finally, these multiple negative feedbacks affect my players' ability to emotionally interface with the dramatic components of play (that they would be otherwise invested in) and the plodding path generally just erodes my mental sharpness and antagonizes my sensibilities toward a pace that doesn't let up.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Manbearcat, post: 6426160, member: 6696971"] I'm pretty much in lockstep with your initial post and this follow-up response to Iosue [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION]. My guess would be that our tables probably look and feel pretty similar. As GM, I'm primarily interested in (a) pushing every moment of every session toward conflicts that my players (through their characters) care about, (b) playing worthy/fun opposition/adversarial elements to the hilt, and (c) sustaining an intensive, dramatic pace throughout. My players are primarily interested in playing the heroic archetype they've chosen by being put in thematic spots (conflicts) that * test their mettle (both the player's from an action declaration perspective and the character's from a "post-conflict fallout" perspective) and which force them to address the dramatic premise(s) that they've embedded into the core of their characters (or how it synthesizes with setting). Through that process, we flesh out the characters/places/history of our game-world, find out who wins/loses/suffers/changes, and derive our fun. Metagame transparency and overt leveraging of that transparent metagame are key components of that fomula spitting out the product we're looking for. Less metagame transparency can make action declaration more difficult for players (stunting the autonomy and expedience of * above) than we would like. This in turn negatively affects my pacing goals (see "c" above) which is key to keeping us all mentally engaged, excited, and on our toes. Players are spending too much mental overhead on trying to divine numbers from opacity and then calculate odds of success with a margin of error they are uncomfortable with (that would exceed what it would be if they were actually "there"). That bogs decision-making and yields more back-and-forth than is necessary to clarify the math-centric relationship of the fictional components of the imaginary space we're operating in to the system's resolution mechanics. Finally, these multiple negative feedbacks affect my players' ability to emotionally interface with the dramatic components of play (that they would be otherwise invested in) and the plodding path generally just erodes my mental sharpness and antagonizes my sensibilities toward a pace that doesn't let up. [/QUOTE]
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