Player metagaming

Herremann the Wise said:
And another: opening an orphanage to gain +1 on a PC's leadership score. That one was so blatant, it made me laugh.

I doubt not that it was, indeed, a deliberate ploy to up the Leadership Score.

However, cynical social maneuvering is a perfectly legitimate roleplaying choice:

"Yes Pinky, opening 'Brain's Home for Wayward Kneebiters' is the perfect move: increasing my standing in the community, establishing my reputation as a dogoodnik, and, if my calculations are correct, providing a tidy tax write off as well... All part of tonight's plan to TAKE OVER the WORLD!!!"

Ahem. Bit of a flashback there...

A'Mal
 

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Tom Cashel said:
All right, calm down everybody, willya? Nobody's a bad DM.

I am. I've been playing the pundit for so long on Intarweb mailing lists like this one, that I have become caught up in my own rhetoric. Sad to say, I've lost all sight of plain, simple, objective criteria on which to evaluate a game, and have fallen into the relativist trap of thinking every game is good and no game is bad. In short, I never metagame I didn't like, and yes, I will be here all week.
 
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I'm cool and all with metagaming, so long as it's smart metagaming. Buy a token skill rank or two, I'll be lenient about your monster metaknowledge. If you read here that I was going to be running an outsider-heavy game, knock yourself out starting with abyssal, celestial, and infernal. Just please give me at least a blurb about how your character has these things, and make token mention of them in game every now and then.

What does cheese me is when a player acts in full video-gamey mode. If you suddenly act out of character for a specific in-game reason, I'm going to call you on it. (Gradually changing your character for an in-game benefit is one thing, but sudden inexplicable acts are quite another.) Your two ranks in knowledge: arcana might tell you that blue dragons breathe lightning, but not what spell-like abilities they get by age group. Really, I'm quite cooperative, so long as I don't feel like you're trying to pull one over on me.
 

Metagaming at character creation/development...

On the long run in a full campaign, it could even be counter-effective. I can imagine someone rolling a new replacement character in the middle of an adventure against e.g. giants, and making a gnome ranger/giant-killer (or something) with giants as favored enemies. Then the adventure is quickly over, and no one meets another giant for the rest of the campaign :p

To us it happened a few times that a player knew something about an adventure and designed the PC around that knowledge. Once at least it wasn't nice: a player knew that the BBEG was going to regularly scry on the PCs and he cast Detect Scrying every day (which is a valid tactic of course, but if you know that it's part of the story that the BBEG scry on you, it's not that fun).
But other times is perfectly acceptable. I once ran an undead-based short adventure at a lost shrine, I had told the players the adventure was going to be undead-heavy, and two players made up a ranger (undead stalker style) and a cleric focused on turning undead as best as possible. Not only I allowed them, but I said to the group that it was actually more likely that such characters would be motivated to go an free the shrine from the undead infestation than someone else who has no special interest/hatred in undead.
 

Metagaming in monster encounters...

This is about the legendary player knowledge / character knowledge debate. The best would be to separate them, but it's the most difficult challenge for a player. As a DM, the best help comes from the near-infinite options for monsters, from completely new to advanced via class levels or house-modified creatures. For me it's just as nice to throw common creatures which the characters should know about, as to throw other monsters which aren't what they seem and see the characters make mistakes. In this way, a player who knows a lot about monsters is rewarded on the average, but is not guaranteed to always get it right.

OTOH, what I just can't stand is those few players who always pretend the creatures to be as in MM (or even worse those who pretend that vampires work exactly like in their favourite tv series), so they first metagame and second complain that it didn't work...
 

Li Shenron said:
On the long run in a full campaign, it could even be counter-effective. I can imagine someone rolling a new replacement character in the middle of an adventure against e.g. giants, and making a gnome ranger/giant-killer (or something) with giants as favored enemies. Then the adventure is quickly over, and no one meets another giant for the rest of the campaign :p

As a DM I would positively encourage this. First of all it gives the player an option to make a real difference in the story and second of all it gives me a nice and easy way of writing them in to the story as they have a good reason to be here. The player would have to deal with the fact that the rest of the campaign may not see another giant at all, but nor am I going to go out of my way to ensure it doesn't happen. Ultimately this game is about everyone enjoying themselves.

As to metagaming as a whole I both love it and despise it - depending on what we're talking about. Metagaming where a player provides me with immediate plot lines (like language selection) I don't have a problem with. Metagaming where a fighter knows the exact best route to leave an AoE or players blatantly use tactics that they're characters could/would not be aware of I can't stand. However it's really not a problem in our group, and I'll usually give the players a run down of what they're characters would know about certain creatures if it becomes relevant.
 
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You call it metagaming, I call it the invisible, inexplicable Hand of Fate.

Why do you think there are so many stories about heroes who are ideally suited to the task they were supposed to accomplish?

How else do you explain the fact that heroes often do things that are illogical or out of character but turn out to be exactly the right thing to do?

What else accounts for the mysterious way in which a band of heroes with disparate and mutually complimentary skills and talents (instead of, say, four identical warriors) always shows up to save the world when it is threatened by the forces of darkness?
 

Herremann the Wise said:
The character had no idea of the boundaries of the Acid Fog and if they continued in the same direction that they had been travelling in, no one would have battered an eye lid. The fact that they moved at a 225 degrees bearing of their original direction seemed so contrived for an optimal outcome that the DM questioned it with the result being that the player ended up retracting it. Our group normally does its best not to metagame.

Maybe this was not the right thing for the DM or player to do though?
Opinions?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

To me it would depend on how the DM described the spell; was it completely opaque, or could the player have seen a point of origin which they're moving directly away from? Or did the DM just say "he casts Cloudkill," in which case the character would have to access their metagame memory immediately....
 

Goblyns Hoard said:
Metagaming where a fighter knows the exact best route to leave an AoE or players blatantly use tactics that they're characters could/would not be aware of I can't stand. However it's really not a problem in our group, and I'll usually give the players a run down of what they're characters would know about certain creatures if it becomes relevant.

But do not forget, a lot of people expect players to max out their - not their characters - tactics skill and play each combat to perfection, sometimes complaining when players do not use advanced tactics from level 1 onward, and end up with dead characters for it.

Can't really win them I guess. Act without player knowledge, and end up in a "stupid player death", or act on player knowledge, and end up in an "metagaming player" thread. At least sometimes I have this impression.
 

FireLance said:
You call it metagaming, I call it the invisible, inexplicable Hand of Fate.

Why do you think there are so many stories about heroes who are ideally suited to the task they were supposed to accomplish?

Because the heroes who aren't ideally suited to the task turn into yesterday's news?

How else do you explain the fact that heroes often do things that are illogical or out of character but turn out to be exactly the right thing to do?

Because the ones who do things that are illogical and out of character and turn out to be one of the many wrong things to do never make it home to relate that story.

What else accounts for the mysterious way in which a band of heroes with disparate and mutually complimentary skills and talents (instead of, say, four identical warriors) always shows up to save the world when it is threatened by the forces of darkness?

The fact that all those worlds where the band of heroes didn't show up went "Poof!"

It's quite simple, really :D
 

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