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DMs: where's your metagaming line?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8404794" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>I'm not following your question. It's not a problem because I don't base the structure of my encounters on the players pretending to not know things. I provide lots of information and hate knowledge checks to see what you know (proficiency gets you lots of free info, no roll needed -- you tell me how much you think your character knows). The nature of the challenges in my game do not rest on having to pretend you don't know things as a player.</p><p></p><p>There are two conflicting things going on in every discussion about "metagaming." The first is the sense of wonder of the player -- running into new fantastical things and figuring them out is fun but you actually have to be surprised by them. The second is the placement of the character into the setting -- it makes sense that the character knows things about their world because they live there. What might be new to me as a player could easily be the stuff of legends for the character, told and retold every holiday. These conflict because we're talking about two different goals that do not align; I cannot be surprised as a player by new and wonderous things when my character should know about them as a matter of being in that world, and vice versa. So, this conflict is usually solved by skewing one way or the other -- you force characters to be aliens in the world to preserve player wonder or you lessen player wonder by providing the information the character would know about their own world. There are a few constructs that get around this, but you average D&D adventure or setting is not one of these.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 8404794, member: 16814"] I'm not following your question. It's not a problem because I don't base the structure of my encounters on the players pretending to not know things. I provide lots of information and hate knowledge checks to see what you know (proficiency gets you lots of free info, no roll needed -- you tell me how much you think your character knows). The nature of the challenges in my game do not rest on having to pretend you don't know things as a player. There are two conflicting things going on in every discussion about "metagaming." The first is the sense of wonder of the player -- running into new fantastical things and figuring them out is fun but you actually have to be surprised by them. The second is the placement of the character into the setting -- it makes sense that the character knows things about their world because they live there. What might be new to me as a player could easily be the stuff of legends for the character, told and retold every holiday. These conflict because we're talking about two different goals that do not align; I cannot be surprised as a player by new and wonderous things when my character should know about them as a matter of being in that world, and vice versa. So, this conflict is usually solved by skewing one way or the other -- you force characters to be aliens in the world to preserve player wonder or you lessen player wonder by providing the information the character would know about their own world. There are a few constructs that get around this, but you average D&D adventure or setting is not one of these. [/QUOTE]
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