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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7818435" data-attributes="member: 29398">Fair enough, and laudable; but doesn't the responsibility for the manner of the players' engagement largely fall on the players themselves?By this I mean that even if the fiction is described completely neutrally, it's on the players to find ways to engage with it in character as opposed to out of character - assuming, of course, that's their end intention.All excellent; though I rather suspect we'll define each of these three things a bit differently based on our own perspectives.And here's one of those differences already. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Just because a player's made a cutlass-wielding Marine as a PC doesn't oblige me to present anything the least bit differently than if, say, said player had instead brought in a doe-eyed technician with no combat skills whatsoever.All good, but tailoring your descriptions based on the specific PCs would to me almost immediately feel contrived and thus serve to reduce my engagement rather than enhance it.  Just tell me the situation as it stands, in as neutral of terms as you can, and leave it to me to engage with it (or not!) through the eyes of my PC; and also to choose which elements of the scene I'll engage with.  If I-as-player have more questions, I'll ask 'em. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That's on the players. If they're thinking about "what do you-as-GM want them to do" instead of "what would my PC/our PCs do in this situation as presented" that's not your issue to fix. It's theirs.This is absolutely true.This is presented as an either-or, but it's not; at least on a large scale.  Unless the GM is running a hard-coded adventure path and the players have bought in to this, the players always have choice on where to go and-or what to do next; and if these choices take them beyond what the GM happens to have prepped then it's on the GM to wing it.On a micro-scale, yes there's sometimes going to be puzzles or situations where there's only one correct answer (as in LotR's Speak Friend and Enter scene) and there's nothing at all wrong with that.Agreed on all counts.  Nothing wrong with some metagame joking around provided that when in-character decisions are to be made those decisions are made as far as possible while thinking like the PC would think.It's usually pretty easy to tell when PC decisions are being made in the metagame rather than in character; and it's that I want to smack down on.</blockquote>

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