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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8984586" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, then you understand my motivations better than I do, despite all the self-reflection and self-critique that I outlined in discussing this.The important thing to me though is not whether I threw the fight or not, but to emphasize the importance of the observation that a GM will frequently find themselves in a situation where despite all intentions of being neutral and unbiased and "playing to see what happens" they will have to make judgment calls where they can't really know whether their biases influenced their decisions.  This gets deep in that you claim to know my motivations but remember that while doing this I'm also second guessing my motivations.  Maybe I wanted the BBEG to not escape mainly because I would have felt guilty about setting up the PC's to fail just so my BBEG could escape (a cliche of bad GMing) and so I erred on the side of overcompensating for that precisely because I did want the BBEG to escape so that I could have another dramatic scene.  (The BBEG had already escaped from the PCs once before.)This is all just a special instance of my observation that metagaming is not a bad thing, but rather an inevitable thing.  The bad thing is being placed in a position where you can't help but metagame.  Participants shouldn't be asked not to metagame as if that was a reasonable demand, but rather participants should try not to be put in a position where metagaming is possible.  For players this means not seeking out OOC information that your character shouldn't have, and for GMS this means not passing meta information to the players and not putting yourself in a position where you have no choice but to improvise freely.  You mention later how a GM that learns that his players have cheated by acquiring meta information about the story ought to be miffed, to which I agree.  But consider the reverse situation: a GM asks his players if they have ever read 'Tomb of Horrors' and one them honestly answers, "Yes".  But rather than realizing he can't run ToH as written, he tells the player "Well, just don't metagame."  This is not a fair or reasonable request, and the GM that makes this request ought not be upset when the player then comes up with the solution to a puzzle.  After all, it's equally metagaming for the player to deliberately fail challenges just because they know the solution.  Once the meta knowledge is out there, you can't take it back.I don't know what you mean by this, because your next two paragraphs seem to contradict this advice.</blockquote>

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