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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2936134" data-attributes="member: 18832">There's a dramatic difference, it seems to me, between metagaming which undermines the challenges which the DM presents to the players, and metagaming which contributes to the portrayal of the PCs and their relationships with the world and each other.You use "metagaming" as a consistently dirty word, as if the two types were equivalent. I don't think that's so.I also don't think you propose a valid dichotomy when you talk about the choice to react - "metagaming" - and the choice to not react - "that guy is playing with himself". I think it's a false dichotomy because it's not as simple as "that guy is playing with himself", given that it is possible for players to enjoy learning things about other PCs that their PCs do not know and may never learn.For instance, I played in a long-running Planescape campaign and in a fairly long-running Wheel of Time campaign. In both instances, players learned about the other characters' backstories partly through witnessing events during play (both when their characters were present, and when they were not), and through bull sessions where we all talked about our characters' histories, plans, and reactions (emotional and active) to the events of the campaign.Before anybody asks "What about secret elements of my PC's backstory?", both games also featured secrets that members of the party kept from each other and that players kept from the other players. In fact, it was doubly fun for me, at least, when I as a player learned which of the two other male PCs was a channeller (male channellers bad, apparently) in the Wheel of Time game, quite a number of sessions before my character learned which of them it was. The players in question had kept it a secret as to which of their PCs was the channeller, and both had secretive stuff to do which kept the suspicion on them equally, and I can't say that it would have been any more fun to have known all along which had the mojo or to have had it kept from me in-character. The revelation to the players came at the height of our speculation on the matter, and at a dramatically-appropriate moment for the campaign; much fun was had with "accidental" in-character comments and out-of-character jokes about the situation for the next few sessions until our characters learned about it.There's just so much more fun to be had in a campaign than simply reacting only to what your character knows, and so much metagaming which is actually a good thing which contributes to the gaming experience, that I'm baffled that anyone other than people who cannot enjoy a game that isn't a deep-immersive exercise would have a closed mind on this issue.Here's the way I would look at it: Does my character know that the other PC is feeling antagonistic towards him at all? There's a lot of fun to be had, as I mention above, in directing the shape of your in-character play towards producing consequences which are unknown to the characters themselves. I might lean towards continuing to aggravate the character "accidentally" from my innocent/ignorant PC's perspective, so that everyone around the table can enjoy the building tension until the other PC finally does something about this bastard who's been getting on her nerves, and my character can react in complete surprise even as the players enjoy the climax they've been anticipating.(This is all, of course, presuming a healthy play situation in which no-one is using their PCs' actions to aggravate another player, but I have been fortunate in that only one or two people I've ever played with have been unable to happily and readily distinguish between PC-versus-PC antagonism and player-versus-player antagonism.)So I think it's perfectly possible to react as a player to the revelation of something your character doesn't know by having your character respond to the revelation in all ignorance. It's the same kind of fun, I suppose, as when characters in Smallville ask questions about Clark Kent doing the seemingly impossible and he has to hastily construct an explanation or hurriedly change the subject.I do appreciate, though, that people who only enjoy gaming when they're experiencing deep immersion in their characters and can't stand to be shown or told anything about what's going on other than what they know couldn't enjoy this way of playing. It seems to me, though, that deep-immersion as a motivator for disliking what I'll call "constructive metagaming" takes a distant backseat to simple traditionalism which automatically labels all metagaming as negative.</blockquote>

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