NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7888570" data-attributes="member: 6779196">So that poster was me (though a few folks did agree with me), and I just want to clarify: my claim is that it is not possible, once you have information, to act without that information informing your decision. You can choose to act contrary to what that information would suggest is a good course of action. You can choose to follow a procedure you had been following prior to obtaining that information. You can devise a system whereby your course of action is determined randomly. But the decision to do any of those things is necessarily informed by the information you are attempting to avoid acting on.I’d say they are similar. In the troll case, unless you are a player who is not aware of D&D trolls’ vulnerability to fire, you cannot make a decision about what to do when faced with a troll that is not informed in some way by your knowledge of trolls’ vulnerability to fire. You can choose to use something other than fire. You can choose to follow the same tactics against the troll that you have used against other monsters that don’t seem meaningfully harmed by your normal attacks. You can choose to decide what method of attack to use based on the result of a die roll. But any of those decisions are necessarily informed by your knowledge of trolls’ vulnerability to fire. Likewise, with the safe path scenario, you can choose not to follow the safe pat. You can choose to use whatever navigation procedures you had been using prior to seeing the path. You can choose where to move based on the result of a random dice roll. But all of those decisions are informed by your knowledge of the path.It has been said that my argument is overly academic, but my point is that since any method you may employ for deciding what action to take is informed by player knowledge, rules against “metagaming” don’t really prevent players from acting on knowledge the player has that the character doesn’t. What they do is prevent the player from taking actions that their knowledge would suggest is optimal, if their character doesn’t have that knowledge, at least without some form of justification that the player would not be expected to provide if they didn’t have that knowledge.</blockquote>

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