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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8061322" data-attributes="member: 16814">What, then, is it the player's authority to decide?  This phrasing, that the GM has ultimate authority to determine what a PC knows, places a huge amount of things under the GM's authority in regards to playing the PC.  Essentially, the player is in a position where anything they declare can be overridden by the GM, not as a failed attempt, but as a possibility.  If I cannot decide that my PC think that that NPC is a lich, for whatever reason, without GM permission (explicit of implicit), then I don't have much control over my PC at all.The reality is that whether or not the GM decides they need to use this authority is entirely dependent on if the PC asserts a fact that the GM wants to be a secret.  Example -- the OP situation is only a problem because the GM wants to keep the lichyness of the NPC a secret.  If they don't care, it's not a problem.  If the NPC isn't a lich, it's not a problem.  To expand that last, many GM's concerned about "metagaming" wouldn't bat an eye at a PC asserting things not true, because that's fun.  It's only when the thing asserted is what the GM wants to be a secret that it becomes "metagaming."  This means that "metagaming" only exists when the GM is using that same "metagaming" to keep secrets.  No secret?  No "metagaming."Thus, "metagaming" is a problem created by GMs and confused with being necessary for proper play.  It's only necessary to protect GM secrets -- which is a trivially easy task to avoid as a GM by just not hinging your scene design on secrets that can be easily "metagamed."  Or at all.  Evidence abounds that people that do not care about metagaming have robust, deep, and immersive games, largely because they just steer around the pothole of "metagaming" instead of driving right over it and insisting everyone pretend there wasn't a bump.</blockquote>

Verification