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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6205474" data-attributes="member: 42582">"Roleplaying" I take as meaning "playing your character". "Metagaming" I take as meaning referring to or drawing upon considerations that do not exist within the gameworld as experienced by the PC, but are mechanical or other devices that matter at the table, or story elements known to the player but not within the ambit of the PC's experience.Understood in that way, I know from personal experience that metagaming is not antithetical to roleplaying and can in fact support it. The example is one I posted in a thread a bit like this one a couple of years ago now. The paladin had been turned into a frog by an NPC hexer. There were the usual jokes by the other player as they moved their token past the frog-token on the map during their turns of the combat - "Look out! Don't squash the frog", "Is it a frog or a toad", etc, etc". Then the effect ended as per the rules of the game. The paladin player's turn came up, and he had the PC advance on the hexer, saying something along the lines of "I'm going to defeat you in the name of the Raven Queen!" (This sort of stuff is the PC's default threat during combat.) The hexer (played by me, as GM) replied "I'm not scared of her or you - I already turned you into a frog!" And the player replied in character, without missing a beat "And she turned me back."That is roleplaying - playing the character, and particularly the character's religious convictions. And the player was able to do that because the mechanics themselves did not tell us why the spell ended. They simply imposed a mechanical rule - the effect ends - and left it for the table to nominate the fiction, the ingame causal explanation. Which this player did. That is metagaming - drawing upon considerations that do not exist within the gameworld but are mechanical devices (ie that the effect must end, according to the rules), and upon story elements not within the ambit of the PC's experience (namely, the workings of the Raven Queen in relation to her followers and the hexers they might findt themselves fighting).Furthermore, a system that limits the player to considering only the subjective experiences of the PC actually makes this impossible, because (except in very rare cases where the GM plays a god as a divinely intervening NPC) the PC never has direct experience of the workings of the divine, unless mediated via clerical magic. Having played religious PCs in the past, I am actually very aware of how process-simulation mechanics in conjunction wtih an instance upon this sort of non-metagamed RP actually make it very hard to maintain sincere religious belief on the part of the PC, because you are never able to confidently affirm that you have had experience of the divine directly in the world (except for clerical magic). This can be fine for a Conan-esque game in which the attitude towards the gods is fundamentally cynical, and priests and their magic are the only point of contact between gods and world. I don't think that it contributes to roleplaying devoutly religious PCs with a non-cynical outlook, however.This isn't true for my group. If the two PCs have different personalities, then this should be reflected in their PC build - and a game that doesn't have that degree of "heft" in its build rules is therefore not a good fit for my group.When I played Rolemaster it was very effective for this. For instance, you look down the PC sheet of a demon-summoning wizard and see a high Lie Perception (=Insight) skill, a high Duping (=Bluff) skill, but other social skills all pretty mediocre - and you can tell that this guy is a manipulative bastard with a heart of stone. (As indeed he was.)Compared to his wizard friend whose Lie Perception and Duping are find, but so is his Seduction, his Bargaining, his Pleading, his Public Speaking, his Interrogation, his Intimidation. This is someone with a huge personality, gregarious, able to dominate any social situation he finds himself in.Or compare these two two-weapon-fighting samurai. One whose skills are all in fighting with incredible finesse and speed, whose styles have names like Jade Harvest (for he cuts down even the young stalks still green as jade) and Jasuga Slice (named after the town where he perfect the style) - both crit-boosting styles, one for multi-target and one for single-target fighting - and whose only impressive social skill is Leadership. Another whose combat is not quite as effective, but who can fight in any terrain, whose styles have names like Port in a Storm and Keystone Arch (and which give him bonuses to fight defensively while keeping his footing in challenging terrain), who is a master smith, who is learned in literature, history and languages, and whose social skills are not superlative - he doesn't dominate social situations - but who has nice bonuses in Haggling, Etiquette and Amiability, plus just a hint of Seduction. Is anyone surprised that, in the end, it's the second of these two who successfully woos the sorcereress he rescued and, with her, starts a new family line whose members's integrity will be the ward against voidal incursions into the mortal realm for generations to come?In other words, I like a game in which the mechanical play of the game means that the personality of the PC comes through.</blockquote>

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