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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9683944" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Of course, "metagaming" is often in the eye of the beholder.I've frequently been told that in standard old-school play, "player knowledge" is perfectly acceptable in nearly every instance, even if the character simply should not know that trolls are weak to acid and fire (or whatever example is relevant). I know OSR isn't a monolith and such, but this has come up so many times that I'm reasonably convinced it was standard practice at most tables in the days of yore and remains standard practice at most "old school" tables today.Further, it's pretty clearly blatant metagaming to have Bob IV, the cousin of the recently-deceased Bob III, just show up imprisoned in the next room of the dungeon, but this was a common behavior at many old-school tables because it meant getting right back into the action without having to do a bunch of (for that player) very tedious waiting.And that's not even touching on things like a wizard who was named "Melf" because the player literally never wrote more on its top line than "M ELF", as in, a male elf, or that people just used literally their own name spelled backwards (e.g. Snilloc), or anagrammed, or whatever else. Or the near-endless plethora of silly """jokes""" peppered throughout the rules. Or the active "gotcha" game design Gygax would engage in if his players ever got, in his opinion, too comfortable with their SOPs and such, no matter how ridiculous the leaps required (I'm looking at you, Ear Seeker.)"Metagaming" is so loose, so variable depending on who you talk to and what specific things you look at, that it's extremely difficult, borderline impossible, to have any kind of conversation about it. Things I would consider to be blatant and unacceptable metagaming, you might consider to be perfectly acceptable ordinary gaming, and vice-versa.Like "realism", it's a word that everyone "knows" what it means...but no one agrees on what it means. Which makes it functionally useless as a tool of communication. Everyone has their own private definition.</blockquote>

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