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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8340567" data-attributes="member: 16814">Rather bluntly, this is a crutch, and it's actually adversarial to boot.  If the GM is doing things at their whim to players just to make them paranoid or waste resources or maintain uncertainty, that's absolutely adversarial -- there's no reason to do it for the sake of the game.  And that gets to the crutch part -- if you need these tricks to keep up tension or interest, then it's because your game isn't doing it on it's own.  Up your game.Take caring about metagaming.  This is absolutely adversarial.  The player wants to play his character his way, and the GM is deciding that they want that character played a different way.  This is directly about control over the character, and not in a cooperative manner.  It's who gets to say what that character can do in any given moment -- the player has to receive GM permission to play their character their way.  And it's entirely avoidable -- just don't build scenes where the scene depends on the players pretending they don't know things!  Don't present trolls as a dangerous encounter that hinges on the players having to pretend to not use fire.  Use trolls, absolutely, but don't make them a gimmick monster where pretending to not know the gimmick is important.  Instead, put them in a place where their gimmick is reinforced by the location -- like being underwater (harder to use fire) or in a gas-filled cave, where use of fire is dangerous, or just change the gimmick.  Metagaming is always going to be the fault of the GM for designing a scene where it's important to pretend you don't know things for the GM's idea to work to the GM's satisfaction.  Note it's all about the GM, there, not the game or the players.I used to care about metagaming.  Then I stopped, and just changed my challenges to just not rely on metagaming not happening.  Do you know what happened?  It wasn't a glut of dirty metagaming, it was just a better game where I had less to worry about because I was no longer policing my players for metagaming.  My game got, in all ways, better.</blockquote>

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