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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6113461" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know if you're old fashioned or not. But I have no objection to metagame. My personal opinion is that mainstream D&D can't work without it - it is metagame pressures, not ingame ones, that keep the average party together (truly Gygaxian play is immune to this, though, because it has no such thing as "the party", just "this session's expedition members").But anyway, besides the metagame covention of the party, there's a lot of other stuff I like the metagame to do. For instance, at the start of my campaign, I told each player that his/her PC (1) had to have one object of loyalty, and (2) have a reason to be ready to fight goblins. That metagame requirement kicked my game off, and sowed the seeds of thematic elements that have kept the game going for 4 years and 20 levels.That may be true for you, but not for me. Things can be verisimilitudinous, to me at least, although known to be authored deliberately for effect. I will nominate Minas Tirith in Peter Jackson's Return of the King as an example.I also don't find that metagame is an obstacle to immersion.I find it possible to think those two things at once.My players don't want to control the minutiae of the refereeing. They want to have levers they can pull that will make changes in the fiction, without needing my permission first.Huh? The giant's AC, which will among other things reflect its size and strength, is a consideration here. If the player had his/her PC Bull Rush instead, the chance of success may be a little lower (Fort for many, but not all, giants is better than AC).As for dealing damage too - what's wrong with that? An AD&D fighter can make 3 attack rolls ever two rounds. The rate at which weapon damage is dealt has no connection to verisimilitude - it only arises within the framework of the game's action economy, which is pure metagame.I don't see how it's in any special sense artificial. The whole game is artifice. The action economy is artifice - why can't a 1st level fighter in AD&D attack twice per round no matter how hard s/he tries? Whatever you think the answer is to that - s/he's not good enough, she needs more training, the enemies are too quick, she is trying but misses automatically without getting a roll to hit, whatever - the same explanation will do for why the 4e fighter can't trip twice per round unless the player invests in a second tripping power.As to "automatically doomed said group", why would the PCs be doomed because they can't trip someone? The players will just have to think of something else!I'm the GM in my group. But you are correct that I am bound by the rules. That's part of the point of having rules, for me at least! That is, I don't see the rules simply as rought heuristics for working out how things happen within the fiction ("rules as physics of the gameworld"). I see the rules primarily as allocating narrative power across the participants. They let me do a lot of stuff - for instance, declare that some particular NPC or monster enters the fictional action. But they let the players do some stuff, too - such as (if the fictional circumstances are right) roll a die, and if it comes up a certain value or higher tell me to roll my die, and if it comes up below 10 then while its true-in-the-fiction that this NPC or monster is there, it's also true that said NPC/monster is plunging down a cliff.My players are entitiled to have a share of the authorship of the fiction, given that that's what they're turning up every fortnight to do.</blockquote>

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