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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 3809625" data-attributes="member: 49613">I'm not sure we're discussing the same thing.  When I play a character, I do ham it up a bit, and have the character say and do some things which are "thematically appropriate".  Just for the sake of goofing around.But I can never "think like" my character.  First of all, this is because the way my character would think is not "guy thinking like another guy would think", but "guy thinking like he himself would think".  But no one can do he-himself thinking unless he is indeed thinking for himself.  Role playing will always be like-another thinking.  So there's that absolute barrier.Secondly, even ignoring for a moment the absolute identity barrier, the way of thinking of someone of another culture, world and/or species could never be perfectly replicated... reason itself may be the same, but the entire contextual content of the thought-process would be missing.  So, to continue with the terminology above, not only will the "character thinking" necessarily be like-another thinking rather than he-himself thinking, even the like-another thinking will be extremely removed from the putative context that it is meant to replicate.Even if someone were to somehow approach adequacy in like-another thinking (I take it perfection is simply out of the question, and adequacy probably is as well), like-another thinking can never become he-himself thinking.  I will never "be" Gunnar the Skandic, I will never really think as a Skandic would think (rather than as a modern pretending to be a Skandic would think), and most of all I'll never be Gunnar-himself thinking but only ever like-Gunnar thinking (because I'm not him; he doesn't exist and I'm just a guy trying to simulate how he would think).In view of that, I don't see why it should be counted as "bad role playing" to think in a metagame way.  Why not have Gunnar the Skandic figure out how the steam riddle works?  Why not have him be able to be clever no matter his intelligence, or draw on real-world principles of engineering (as monitored by the DM, of course)?  It's a game, and I'm the one playing, not Gunnar the Skandic.</blockquote>

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