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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5768747" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't mind the sort of metagaming you describe. In fact, these days I almost actively encourage it! I find it helps he game run more smoothly.It depends a bit on the game system coping with metagaming. 4e's low-scrying, low-buff set of PC abilities works better for this - when the bridge comes out, for example, the players anticipate a fight but there's nothing in particular their PCs can do that provides a mechanical benefit from the metagaming. (Not that I use minis or terrain, just paper maps and boardgame tokens - but when I pull out "a map that I prepared earlier", my players start warming up their dice!). I find real life does this adequately - between non-play stuff like food and toilet breaks, wrangling kids, shuffling through papers, etc, and also the record-keeping aspects of play like rests, equipping, the players comparing notes on whose PC has the highest skill bonus, etc, I don't feel much need to play through fictional down time as well.For me, this just highlights the difference between real, lived life, and the ficitonal life of the PCs. I'm sure the PCs, in their imaginary world, enjoy some down with their up. But my players, in our real world, come to the game for a bit of up. They don't need to play through their PCs' down.Once upon a time, as a GM, I used to keep my best or most dramatic in reserve. I've since formed the view that that was a mistake. I think my game has improved since I've done my best to maximise the dramatic (within my own limits as a creator of dramatic situations).Personally I don't do too much of this stuff. I try to move through empty rooms pretty quickly. And I don't do a lot of verbal description of the sort you mention - I'm not a particularly skilled narrator, and I tend to find it gets lost on the players - if I want to convey this sort of stuff, I try to pick it up and make it matter in the context of action resolution. In my session yesterday, the PCs finished exploring "The Tower of Mystery", a slighly-modified version of the last section of H2 Thunderspire Labyrinth (modified to 14th level, to fit a change in Paldemar's motivation from the slightly boring module backstory, and because I made a mapping error in drawing up my battle maps).There were five empty rooms. One was an empty bedroom. Because the PCs went into it first, it created a nice contrast with the other bedroom which had enemy mages in it - in an earlier encounter one of the players had worked out that there were mages firing spells through magical pillars, and once the PCs had examined the empty bedroom this player worked out that the other unexplored door must lead to the room with the mages. He was right, and it made for an interesting little encounter.It was only good fortune, though, that the PCs went to the empty room first. In retrospect, I should have been prepared to run it so that, whichever door the PCs went to, the empty room was behind that (in order to create the build up to the mage enconter).One empty room was a storeroom. It was in there just for verisimilitude, and took probably two minutes of play to resolve. Another was a straw-filled holding pen. The module writer hadn't put anything useful in there, so I ad-libbed that it smelled still of Thunderhawk (the tower is floating in the Elemental Chaos). Now the wild mage PC wants to track down and tame that Thunderhawk. This took probably about five minutes of play to resolve.The other two empty rooms were a library and a laboratory. Both of these were really noncombat encounters - the library being a source of information, but with the puzzle of bypassing the secret page on the books, and the challenge of phsycially getting all the books out of the tower and back to the PCs home base; and the laboratory containing a Fluxx Slaad head floating in a vat of acid with various mechanical, chemical and arcane processes going on, which again was a source of information and puzzles (and speculation, also, as to whether it could be moved out of the tower and back to home base).My own view is that 4e doesn't do exploratory play as well as other games, because it doesn't give the mechanical support for such play in its action resolution mechanics, but I think my opinion on this may be a minority one.</blockquote>

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