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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5490712" data-attributes="member: 54877">The equally great strength and great weakness of metagaming effects is that they require the participants to provide the world context.&nbsp; It is a strength when the participants have a view of the world that makes providing the context easy.&nbsp; It is a weakness when the view is otherwise.&nbsp; (It makes no difference for this point whether or not the view of the world is &quot;correct&quot; or any other such judgment.&nbsp; Only whether the view is able to easily or not leverage the metagaming construct into the context.)&nbsp;To use a silly example, assume a game where the main mechanic for magic is that you (the player, not the character) sing a bit of a song that is relevant to what you want to accomplish. (Apologies to Alan Dean Foster.)&nbsp; That is almost pure metagame, the one world context hook being the &quot;relevant to intent&quot; part.&nbsp; You can play this game with young kids, maybe.&nbsp; They might use nursery rhymes.&nbsp; It works.&nbsp; You add an adult to the mix.&nbsp; IF that adult can put themselves into a view of the world where those nursery rhymes can work, loosely, then it will work.&nbsp; Otherwise, the gap is too far--the adult can grudgingly get from &quot;Little Miss Muffet&quot; to summoning or driving away spiders or padded furniture or maybe a bit of fear effects involving arachnids, but cannot get from there to, say, having a group of talking animals over for a tea party.&nbsp; In the childs' mind, it is all a strange mixture of fairy tale logic and impressions from a story book twisted with half memories of Lewis Carroll and walruses.&nbsp; (Not that adults can't tie into that.&nbsp; But when they do, the tie is into a part of childhood.)&nbsp;What you think you know about how something does work (or would work, if it was possible) informs your view of metagaming mechanics as much as what you do know or don't know.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5490712, member: 54877"] The equally great strength and great weakness of metagaming effects is that they require the participants to provide the world context. It is a strength when the participants have a view of the world that makes providing the context easy. It is a weakness when the view is otherwise. (It makes no difference for this point whether or not the view of the world is "correct" or any other such judgment. Only whether the view is able to easily or not leverage the metagaming construct into the context.) To use a silly example, assume a game where the main mechanic for magic is that you (the player, not the character) sing a bit of a song that is relevant to what you want to accomplish. (Apologies to Alan Dean Foster.) That is almost pure metagame, the one world context hook being the "relevant to intent" part. You can play this game with young kids, maybe. They might use nursery rhymes. It works. You add an adult to the mix. [B]IF[/B] that adult can put themselves into a view of the world where those nursery rhymes can work, loosely, then it will work. Otherwise, the gap is too far--the adult can grudgingly get from "Little Miss Muffet" to summoning or driving away spiders or padded furniture or maybe a bit of fear effects involving arachnids, but cannot get from there to, say, having a group of talking animals over for a tea party. In the childs' mind, it is all a strange mixture of fairy tale logic and impressions from a story book twisted with half memories of Lewis Carroll and walruses. (Not that adults can't tie into that. But when they do, the tie is into a part of childhood.) What you [B]think[/B] you know about how something does work (or would work, if it was possible) informs your view of metagaming mechanics as much as what you do know or don't know. [/QUOTE]

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