Metagaming

[Quasqueton]

What is the worst, or most outrageous, or most annoying, or most aggravating situation you've seen with a PC (or DM) metagaming?

Quasqueton

 

[Voadam]

Player "After killing the farmer I go to the southwest corner of the house and start digging."

Me "You what?"

I then look down at the module and read that the prosperous farmer has buried his stash of gold in the southwest corner of his home. No clue of this had ever come up in game, no reason existed for him to be randomly digging there unless the player read the module. So I changed it.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I supose it blurs the line between metagaming and cheating.

We were playing WFRP at school, when I was about 12-13. One player would buy whatever module we were playing... He used to use it to work out where all the best treasure was and get to it first. Been getting more and more obvious as the campaign went on.

It came to a head in one particular module. We were attacking a castle. He went up to a certain point in the walls - X feet from this tower, Y feet from that one. Cast a dig spell at a 45 degree downward angle. What luck. He'd hit the treasure room.

Ran over to a particular treasure chest. Casts some trap disabling spell on it. Opens it. Out jumps this huge dribbling demon (a Bloodthirster) and tears his character's throat out. The other players and I all started having hysterics. Think I got a bruise from falling off my chair laughing.

He got tears in his eyes and started screaming about the DM 'cheating' and how he was meant to find a powerful magical weapon instead. Stormed off when asked why he thought that was the case.

Absolutely priceless.

 

[amethal]

I supose it blurs the line between metagaming and cheating.

We were playing WFRP at school, when I was about 12-13. One player would buy whatever module we were playing... He used to use it to work out where all the best treasure was and get to it first. Been getting more and more obvious as the campaign went on.

It came to a head in one particular module. We were attacking a castle. He went up to a certain point in the walls - X feet from this tower, Y feet from that one. Cast a dig spell at a 45 degree downward angle. What luck. He'd hit the treasure room.

Ran over to a particular treasure chest. Casts some trap disabling spell on it. Opens it. Out jumps this huge dribbling demon (a Bloodthirster) and tears his character's throat out. The other players and I all started having hysterics. Think I got a bruise from falling off my chair laughing.

He got tears in his eyes and started screaming about the DM 'cheating' and how he was meant to find a powerful magical weapon instead. Stormed off when asked why he thought that was the case.

Absolutely priceless.

Thank you, that has brightened up my day no end.

Not sure about "blurring the line" between metagaming and cheating though. (I know which side of the line I think its on.)

My feeble example is in a one-off game where we stumbled across a dragon.

We all rolled initiative in the open. The dragon got a 1.

One of the players (who I'd never met before) said "Right lads. Its going last, so everybody charge it and try and kill it before its turn."

This same guy was an experienced player who knew all sorts of cunning ways of maximising his player's advantages, but apparently didn't know that his human fighter's movement was reduced in medium armour, and that (normally) you can only charge in a straight line.

 

[Bastoche]

I think the worst is concerning the sort of "it was bound to happen" scenario. Suppose your character has a stash of treasure he don't want to carry around. Let's say he doesn't make a big deal out of it and leave it at an obvious place (for a thief) to find out because he just didn't bother to hide it corretly. Nothing happens. Now if said character goes to great lenght to protect the treasure: buying a high quality chest and lock, have magical wards placed on it and hide it in a secret place, you know it will be gone when you return.

That or the "You're playing an evil character therefore the guard on duty that night WILL be the only paladin in town"

I also greatly dislike how one has to think a coup keeping in mind that the victim of said coup necessarly will rely to scrying and divination spells to find the culprit.

 

[Henry]

Both Al's and Voadam's examples to me are outright CHEATING, with a capital "C" -- And HOW!

No examples I know of with outright cheating, but a bit of metagaming here and there -- I don't even try anymore to get them to fake not knowing to put fire to a troll, for instance -- so the easiest way to counter it is to make up unusual monsters that they don't recognize, or just change the description slightly.

Actually, a bit of metagaming doesn't bother me, as long as it's not actual cheating (such as sneaking a peek at the Monster Manual while you are fighting a beastie). I once had a new player bust open the MM in the middle of a combat, but we told him we don't do that in our games, not accusingly, just matter of factly (jokingly), because he didn't know differently at the time.

 

[painandgreed]

The metagaming that gets me is the half hour kibitzing sessions when all the other players converse on what a single characters action should be even though they're not only not there but also because the character supposedly makes this decision in a split second.

For a specific example, we were playing Twilight 2000 and while in Warsaw had heard about the Red Bear having a SCUD with a nuclear warhead. The Red Bear was using it to blackmail Warsaw and we came up with some plans to take it out over several sessions but one player who had gone to a store and read the module said "let's not worry about it, it's not a nuke". He said this in front of the GM who got angry and said "It is now!"

 

[iwatt]

The Red Bear was using it to blackmail Warsaw and we came up with some plans to take it out over several sessions but one player who had gone to a store and read the module said "let's not worry about it, it's not a nuke". He said this in front of the GM who got angry and said "It is now!"

lol .....

 

[orsal]

3 PCs and 1 NPC adventuring together. I've given them the NPC because I feared they'd be underpowered otherwise. He is in all in-game respects an equal to the party, not an employer or a plot hook or a henchman or anything like that. Comes time to sleep, they need to arrange watches. Some discussion about whether they fully trust the NPC. Minor metagaming issue: some of the PCs were adventuring together for the first time. No in-game reason to trust each other any more than they should trust the NPC. But we've all seen that kind of metagaming. What happened in the course of the discussion was far more interesting: One of the players picks up the NPC's character card (this was 1/e, character "sheets" were a lot smaller), saying "Does he have his alignment written down?" He turns the card over trying to look for alignment. I stop him, explaining that turning the NPC over in the hope of finding his alignment written on his backside is not something his character would do, since said character had sufficient wisdom (I don't remember how high, but definitely at least 3) to know that (a) most people don't have our alignments written on our backsides, and (b) even if we did, such inspection violates social norms.

 

[iwatt]

Quas, from this and other threads you've started I'm under the impression that you're suffering from EMPC (exposure to metagaming PCs). Care to give us some more examples of what is bugging you?