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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6632608" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, you are metagaming to a certain extent.  But the fault here is not with the player, but with the GM.   It took me probably 15 years to figure that out for myself.So, you as the GM in this situation want the player to behave in a manner you consider consistent with the established fiction.   And the trouble is, the player is refusing to do that and is instead metagaming.But the problem isn't with the player, but with the GM.  The problem is not the desire of the GM to behave in a manner consistent with the established fiction which is a perfectly acceptable goal.   The problem is that you've provided the players with a system which does not model the fiction you want it to model, but a completely different fiction.  So it's not surprising that the story generated by play doesn't match the story in your head, because the physics of the world you are making the player play in don't match the physics you are imagining for the fiction.  You've got an incoherence here and the way to fix it isn't to demand of the player that they stop acting in a way that is perfectly rational for the setting, but change the rules of the setting such that the rational and rewarded behavior is the one you want to see.  You say:"When your goal goes from impaling the enemy (an in-game goal) to dealing more damage, in terms of dice, to the enemy (a rules-based goal), you're metagaming."In point of fact, there was not actually a chance to impale the enemy from the fictional position of being on the horse.  Your system I dare say offers zero chance of impaling anything because it has no impaling mechanic.  And if your impaling mechanic is simply, 'IF his hit points go below zero then as a fictional stance I'll say the character is impaled", then the actual truth of this situation is that for the in game goal of impaling the enemy the higher likelihood of achieving this goal is obtained by getting off the horse.   Both the player and the character were here behaving rationally for the situation.  And if the character is behaving rationally based on his in world verifiable knowledge that in his world attacking on foot is more effective than attacking on a horse, is the player really metagaming?  At most, only a little.  For the most part, it's the GM that is metagaming here!  The GM is demanding the player behave according to his knowledge of a feature of the game - the tropes of imagined external reality - that isn't actually a part of the experienced game world.   That's the GM's fault for not incorporating the tropes into the system so that they show up in play; and not the fault of the optimizing player.So if you want your fiction to contain the idea that attacking with a lance from horseback is a very effective attack, you have to do something like create a mechanic that says, "If you charge while on horseback while wielding a lance, you do double damage."   Now the game reality you as the GM want matches the reality you want to create outside of the game in as much as that player's are now encourage to leap on a horse and impale things with a long piece of wood.</blockquote>

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