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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6354905" data-attributes="member: 42582">Correct. This is exactly how you run a game based on fiction and genre first, with the mechanics subordinate to that and used to allow players to choose genre-appropriate narratives that fit within whatever parameters the mechanics might determine.As you yourself go on to acknowledge in the second of the two quoted posts, there is no "supposed to" here. Some RPGers prefer to avoid metagame. Others don't. As a GM, I use metagame all the time: for instance, if I want to make the players anxious about a pending combat, I will tell them the level of a creature, or the overall encounter level (eg "You guys are still 26th level? This is a level 32 encounter!"). The player character's don't know what's waiting for them, or how tough their enemies are (at least until they recall their knowledge of ancient monster lore). This is about generating a particular response from the players, which might then inform their play of their PCs. For instance, they might decide to buff up. In game, that is a moment of "I've got a bad feeling about this . . ."As you noted in the passage I quoted at the top of this post, the world in which a PC has a bad feeling and buffs up out of an abundance of caution isn't less believable than one in which s/he stumbles in blindly. But (in the right circumstances) it might be more fun!Why should the character be aware of it? The PC's enemies regularly charge him/her. That's hardly some bizarre event that is going to lead to genre-breaking speculation about "meta entities" dictating NPC behaviour on a 1x/encounter basis.</blockquote>

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