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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bawylie" data-source="post: 6732717" data-attributes="member: 6776133">I was at a weekend retreat last month and ran the same scenario for two different groups. The first time was with children, the second time with adults, for the most part. And both times I drew small crowds of spectators. Now the first game went swimmingly and all was well. The second time though, we had an incident. One of the spectators from the 1st session played in the second session. He knew everything from having watched it already - and he was NOT the problem. Yes he did use knowledge his character wouldn't have. No I didn't care. At the start of these things, I tell the players that their immersion is their own responsibility and that I will do nothing to enforce any player/character knowledge barrier. I don't care, and policing it takes more time than it's worth. No, the problem came from a spectator who watched the 1st game, and then tried to tell the players what do do while spectating the second game. Now, while it is (in my view) your responsibility to decide for yourself how much metagaming you want to do at my table, I have a problem with someone else making that decision for you. In this case, the spectator was adversely impinging on the players' agency by backseat driving and ruining surprises. (This is a bit like someone not playing poker looking into the players hands and shouting what the cards are). Bad deal. So I asked him to either keep quiet or excuse himself, because he was ruining whatever sense of discovery the players might have wanted for themselves. This was rough on him, but he piped down. He had to - he's my son.</blockquote>

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