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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gentlegamer" data-source="post: 5755369" data-attributes="member: 2425">Your player awareness of character sheets (particularly the character sheets of other players) *is* meta-game. Stop breaking immersion and pretend you don't know about character sheets. Do you see the difficulty in 'policing' 'meta-game' knowledge?Intelligence score shouldn't be used as a "saving throw vs. puzzle/riddle." Puzzles and riddles are there as part of the challenge to the player, and are a perfectly appropriate thing in the game. You might also say, "my 18 Int character would certainly know the optimum spell to cast in this situation, so can I roll an Int check for the DM to tell me which spell to cast?" Those questions are essentially the same.The best riddles are those that build upon the campaign's 'lore-background' or other in-game clues and give players and their characters in-game knowledge to use to solve them, preserving 'immersion.' But those can be pretty hard to devise. As substitute, 'real world' riddles can be used, with the assumption being they are a 'translation' from the campaign's lore and background into the language and cultural reference of the players. This is similar to the assumption that when players speak in first person in their real world language, their characters are actually speaking in the fantasy language appropriate to their culture/race/education, etc. Then why can't you see that it isn't intrinsic to the game-form? That is the epiphany I arrived at over time, and is why I adopted the view I now hold (I used to have a view similar to yours).You keep stating character sheets and stats should matter, and also talk about how important immersion is. From these, I interpret what you are really saying is that you value play-acting and role-assumption very highly, and see them as synonyms for 'role-playing.' I believe this is where the disconnect is coming from in the two basic views. Role-playing (in respect to the RPG game-form), at its most basic, is the participants acting and reacting to the imaginary environment and characters through the interaction of the players and the game master. When playing a role-playing game, the entire activity in-game *is* role-playing, including combat (which is commonly and erroneously stated as something separate from the role-playing part of the game, in my opinion). Participants may add additional layers to this basic structure, such as play-acting (hamming it up) and role-assumption (behaving as the character would, not using player knowledge). This is perfectly fine as part of how the game-form is organic and takes on the character of the participants based on their behavior and preferences. But it (play-acting and role-assumption) is not intrinsic (that is, necessary) to the game-form. It's something extra that can be added, just like highly tactical/realistic combat resolution mechanics isn't necessary, but can be added based on the preferences of the participants.</blockquote>

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