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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8570082" data-attributes="member: 19857">But is this a problem?  It depends on the kind of game the table wants to play. If you're playing an investigative game and you've all bought in on an investigative game then it is yes a type of #4 metagaming, but it's "accepting the premise" metagaming rather than rejecting it.  The time to reject the premise is when the game is proposed, not once you've started in on the game.  Rejecting the premise once you've agreed to play is just being a jerk.Personally I'd argue that in fact once you accept that you're doing an investigative game you're following the rules of the game by playing into those tropes rather than fighting them - deciding to not follow up on them because "that would be metagaming" is deciding you don't want to play the game.  It's like agreeing to play Clue and then not showing the other players your cards when you have them and never making any accusations - if you don't want to play that game just say no before the game starts.And if you haven't bought into the investigative game and the GM is running one, then the table has done a lousy job of communicating desires to each other and that's a separate problem.  Again, while this is metagaming in the sense that it's outside of the rules as laid down by the game, it's not something that should actually be coming up regularly in play if players are accepting the premise of the game they're playing. IMO this is something that needs to be broached when the campaign starts and ground rules set.  If you have a game where everyone has their own goals and everyone knows that sometimes those goals will be at odds and folks have bought into that then great - you have no conflict here, act as you want in character (this is in fact how my table of old people sometimes wants to run games, sometimes not - yeah you might get stabbed in the back by a sudden heel turn, but it's fun sometimes to watch the heel turn happen).  If you explicitly have rules in place that there's no PvP then it's time for out of character resolutions to this and explaining to Bob why you don't think your character would back down - as my mother would say "it takes two to tango" in an argument like that and Bob is potentially equally needs to consider compromising (this is how I run games for the kids I run for - where I'm wearing a Dad hat in addition to a GM hat and have to make sure siblings aren't clawing each others eyes out).  Yes it's absolutely metagaming in the sense that it's outside of the game itself so it's "meta", but this kind of social dynamic is already outside of the rules as written anyway.  These are rules that the tables impose on themselves either (preferrably for me ) explicitly or (more dangerously IMO) implicitly.  Unlike the first example (which yeah is metagaming under the category 4 that I listed), this kind of thing just feels  of a different piece from the others that I think about when I think of metagaming - these kinds of considerations are far more important and far more fundamental to having a good game experience IMO than any of the other things I list as metagaming.  And so to me it almost trivializes the potential problems that can arise to lump these in under the title of metagaming.  Also since as I said I think these kinds of rules need to be explicit rather than implicit that also moves them in my eyes away from the "meta" tag - they're rules that the group has agreed to play under, so they're just as much a part of the game and the flavor of the game as what dice mechanic gets used or how the perception skill works.</blockquote>

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