Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4820317" data-attributes="member: 58197">The definition I use for "metagaming" (and I think the generally accepted one) is, "Using out-of-character knowledge to make in-character decisions."Examples of metagaming:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">You've read Order of the Stick, and know that liches have phylacteries. So as soon as your party kills a lich, you go hunting for the phylactery, even though your character has never before encountered a lich, has no training in any relevant skill, and has no background that would imply knowledge of what is in your game world a closely guarded secret.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your DM is running a published adventure by a writer you're familiar with. You know that this particular writer is very fond of menacing the PCs with illusions of gigantic monsters. When you run into an ancient red dragon, you announce that your normally cautious PC is going to walk right up and attack it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your character is blinded and deafened for 3 rounds. On the first round, a series of lucky crits drops a fellow PC into the negatives, in a location out of your line of sight. That PC then fails two death saves in succession. When you recover, you immediately rush to that location to stabilize your dying ally, even though your character can't see the fallen character and there are other threats close by.</li> </ul>Examples of things that are not metagaming:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your party runs into a lich. Your character is a necromancer with excellent Religion and Arcana skills and a backstory that involves having been enslaved by a lich for ten years. You ask the DM if you can make an Arcana check to know that liches have phylacteries.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your party runs into an ancient red dragon, in a dungeon where you have already encountered a couple of illusion-themed traps. You note that there are no signs of the depredations of a dragon on the lands around the dungeon, and nobody said anything about a giant dragon in the nearby village. You also observe that all the doors in this room are too small for the dragon to fit through. You announce that your somewhat reckless PC is going to walk up and attack the dragon.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Your character is blinded and deafened for 3 rounds. You come out of it, and see a fellow PC on the ground bleeding out not ten feet away and no monsters in sight. You rush to stabilize your dying ally.</li> </ul>In the OP's case, there is no in-character decision - the character doesn't get to decide whether the acid does damage or not! - so the question of metagaming doesn't even arise.</blockquote>

Verification