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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2937165" data-attributes="member: 18832">That's actually what I was getting at: I didn't think you were talking about a "voiceover" being jarring because you're super-immersive. I got the impression you just took the traditionalist position that "metagaming = bad"; therefore, your character can't react to what you, the player, just heard; therefore, the guy doing the "voiceover" is just wasting everyone's time and playing by himself.  The fact that you ask that question illustrates how different we are as gamers - which is in no way a bad thing. For me, the answer to that question - "Why would I, as a player in Smallville, bother questioning how Clark ran so fast?" - is so simple and obvious it's taken for granted - "Because my character, Lana Lang, doesn't know Clark has superspeed."I would say "Because I know Joe enjoys playing Clark Kent squirming to come up with a bogus story". If he doesn't - in other words, if it was Joe who would be squirming and struggling to come up with a story - then he's presumably not enjoying it and I wouldn't want to be playing in this mode with him. I want Joe to be on-board with the fun of this too! In fact, if we were playing in a game where I, as a player, knew Clark Kent's secret, but I knew Joe doesn't want to play the dance-with-what-Clark's-friends-know game because he doesn't enjoy it, I wouldn't ask those pointed questions as Lana Lang.Hopefully, of course, if we're playing Smallville Joe does want to play that dance, and that's why he's playing Clark Kent.Well, there are three things here:a) That happens in Smallville - Pete Ross learns the truth about Clark's origin and abilities - but it doesn't have to change the game. Instead, Pete's player could do as the writers did, and have Pete conspire with Clark to keep his secret. This is similar to my original example of the male channeller in the Wheel of Time campaign: obviously the player of the other suspect knew who the channeller was, but as it happened his character had his reasons for keeping the secret from the other PCs, and the player also enjoyed keeping the secret from the other players until the player of the channelling PC decided to "come out".b) Joe's not the only one who might be invested in keeping the secret. Continuing with the Smallville example, there are occasions when other characters like Lana or Lex Luthor are present when Clark Kent uses his powers, but they're prevented by the confusion of the moment, or by unconsciousness, or by some other factor from seeing exactly what happened - and, in the context of the game, these can be factors deliberately added by Lex's or Lana's player in the name of maintaining the "genre conceit" that Clark always gets away somehow with using his powers around his friends until he chooses to reveal them. "Gee, Clark, I couldn't see anything with all this blood in my eyes. How did you get that knife away from him?" "Just lucky, I guess . . . I didn't want to see him hurt you." In another context, it can be fun to play the "almost caught you, there!" game - like if Lana has been knocked unconscious by a lunatic, and I'm sitting there while she's unconscious watching Clark take the guy out, I can enjoy the fact that if Lana had stayed conscious one more round I would have seen Clark zoom in at super-speed.c) It's not necessarily a game-wrecking thing to have a PC secret revealed, is it?So I guess what you're trying to say is that you either can't, or don't enjoy, knowing more about the world and the other characters than what your character knows. That you can't or won't firewall the distinction between in-character and out-of-character knowledge, and that you don't enjoy toying with that divide.That's cool! I'm just suggesting that it's not universal, and that there may be some (even many?) players who only think that way because it's the traditionalist way to play that was drummed into them when they started gaming, and who might enjoy something different if they got the chance.Sure. I don't personally value deep immersion as a playstyle because I don't get any enjoyment out of identifying with my character to that degree. Perhaps it would even be difficult for me to play with a deep-immersive player, if it meant I had to constantly check my impulses to play with the divide between character knowledge and player knowledge (which is, as you can probably tell, one of my favourite aspects of the game).</blockquote>

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