Do you prefer your character to be connected or unconnected to the adventure hook?

[Cadence]

even the appearance of meta-gaming.

What is an example of a justification for a party to decide to work together over time that doesn't involve any metagaming? (Is it only bad if the DM does it? Is it not meta-gaming if the players all make their characters with a pretty unshakable reason to always be cooperative?)

Do the games you play in ever have rules against interparty conflict, or is that always fair game to play out as the dice fall?

 

[Nytmare]

Just trying to wrap my head around which pieces of information on a character sheet aren't metagame.

So far I've got name, description, backstory, and treasure. Is there anything I'm missing?

 

[Ovinomancer]

“When I use metagaming,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make metagaming mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

--With many apologies to Lewis Carroll.

 

[Fenris-77]

Part of that is also clearly setting the expectations for the campaign...which is part of the DM's job. DM's should also know what their players want to play.

While I agree up to a point, I think it's more appropriately the job of the group, not the DM, to set expectations. It's not just on the DM, it's also on the players to use the voice they have in session zero to advocate for what they do and do not want to see in a given campaign. If you have a pitch and a session zero, 'what the players want to play' isn't an issue.

Some players want to just play a nice dungeon crawl and don't want to worry too much about things like backgrounds or trying to tie their characters to a campaign. And that's fine. That's why I have a conversation before every campaign I run and let everyone know what to expect and how much involvement each player should expect. I ran a Dragonlance campaign a few years ago that had quite a bit of involvement, and it also required the players to be engaged because each character had a part of the story that focused on them. Even my players who are usually less involved and who normally like hack/slash/loot really enjoyed this game. Because I helped keep them engaged.

Yes, the players need to be active participants, but if the GM doesn't make it engaging, or if the DM doesn't use what the players who are engaged are giving, then why should the players be active participants?

All I'm suggesting is that the players also have to shoulder part of the job of making a given game engaging. They need to be active participants, not passive observers. There needs to be a back and forth, a recursive movement if you will, between the players and the DM to make the game happen. It's not a matter of who does what first, a good game needs everyone doing their jobs and engaging in the spirit of the game at hand.

 

[Bacon Bits]

In general, I prefer my characters not to be connected to adventure hooks. I like them to happen once or maybe twice a campaign, but in general I want the campaign to be about what we find going on. It might be true that we find ourselves on the road, but I don't want it to be the only thing we ever find. That makes the campaign feel... really egocentric. And if the party is large enough, it feels contrived. Obviously, everything is actually contrived, but it should not be distractingly so. It can do that if the PCs are always personally invested in everything going on.

It's nice to finally resolve that backstory hook, but I also just want the simple joy of exploring the unknown, defeating evil and monstrous foes, and finding cool stuff.

 

[MGibster]

People have their particular likes and dislikes and that's cool. We should just accept the diversity of opinions in gaming and move on.

 

[Scott Christian]

I guess it depends on the AP. Some AP's are pretty linear - start at A, proceed through B, C and D until you get to the end of the AP. The Giants adventure, for example, isn't exactly open world. So, so long as you have a character in hand, you can pretty much proceed through the adventure, and everything is good to go. And, there's nothing wrong with that kind of play. It can be very engaging.

OTOH, if the world is more open, and there's room for side bars and whatnot, or if you're going whole hog sandbox, it's pretty incumbent on the players to actually be engaged with the setting and the campaign.

Proactive vs reactive would be my characterization here. Proactive players take whatever the DM places in front of them and run with it (sometimes into some really, really bizarre directions ). Reactive players more or less passively wait for the DM to roll up the plot wagon and dole out the adventure du jure.

I'm rather fortunate right now to have a group of really, really pro-active players. It's actually hard to keep up to be honest.

Very cool about your present group. I am glad it works for you.
As for the AP's, I've never seen one that is as linear as you're describing. To a novice or non-motivated DM, maybe. But in general, there is so much room in those things to play around, I can't imagine why it would be called linear. Unless you mean it follows a plot line such as: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, resolution, conclusion. If that is what you are saying is linear, then I can't debate it, although I do think it is a wrong conclusion.

This is obviously a particular issue with pre-written adventures but which don't have specific characters associated with them. If you have pre-gens, it usually solves that problem, so long as they're clearly written.

Every single 5e adventure path has a host of tie ins that can directly relate to a character's motive. On top of that, they have vast amounts of NPC's and villains - how hard would it be to make one up or tie it in to a character's backstory that is already written?

 

[Hussar]

Not sure why you say that they aren't linear. Storm King's Thunder is pretty much A to B to C. Nothing wrong with that, but, it's not exactly a sandbox is it? Same with Princes and with Hoard. Other AP's are more open - Strahd and others are more open ended.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

What is an example of a justification for a party to decide to work together over time that doesn't involve any metagaming? (Is it only bad if the DM does it? Is it not meta-gaming if the players all make their characters with a pretty unshakable reason to always be cooperative?)

That's a weird question. Role-playing is only concerned with the process by which you make decisions as your character. The decision of which character to play, and whether to make characters with a reason to work together, is one that exists entirely outside of the game. It isn't a matter of role-playing, as much as it is one of world creation.

You can create the world into any state you want, with any characters in any relative position that you feel like. Meta-gaming is just the critique that, given an initial premise, the world ends up playing out according to factors that exist outside of the model.

Do the games you play in ever have rules against interparty conflict, or is that always fair game to play out as the dice fall?

Given the previous point, it isn't necessary. Players are responsible for creating characters who will work well together, and if they have a falling out for whatever reason, then it might come down to the dice; but it very rarely goes that far, as long as everyone is playing in good faith.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Just trying to wrap my head around which pieces of information on a character sheet aren't metagame.

So far I've got name, description, backstory, and treasure. Is there anything I'm missing?

Most games do not have meta-game information on the character sheet. Some do, of course, but those are the exception rather than the rule.

Using D&D as an example, the only thing on the sheet that doesn't reflect in-game information that's observable to the character, is the "Player Name" field; and that shouldn't affect anything any in-character decisions, one way or the other.

Everything else on the sheet represents in-character information. Although a character doesn't think in terms of "that Fighter has an 18 Strength" or anything like that, they can see the in-game reality which corresponds to 18 Strength; and they can do so with sufficient detail that they can make the same decisions we would make on their behalf, and for the exact same reasons.

Likewise for Hit Points, spell slots, alignment, and anything else that interacts with any game rules. We only see their world in abstract terms from a distance, but they actually live there.