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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2937509" data-attributes="member: 18832">This is why we have the disconnect: it is happening in game.The whole proposition here is that you can choose, as a player, to have your character "react" - and those quotation marks are important - to something about which they have no knowledge because you, as a player, will have more fun if they do so.You call this "metagaming". I deny the implicit supposition that metagaming is a bad thing, when it is not the type of metagaming which undermines the "challenge" aspect of the game the DM presents to you - an example of which would be reading a module to find out how to "beat" it.It doesn't make sense for your character to react to another PC getting angry at him in her internal monologue, obviously, since he can't hear her thoughts.However, what are the circumstances in which this character got angry at your character? Let's say your character implied that, as a woman, she ought to stay out of the thick of the fighting, and she felt insulted by that because she's perfectly capable of looking after herself, and certainly just as capable as your character is. She doesn't even have to be a "strong, silent type" to have a reason for keeping this anger and resentment to herself - perhaps she owes him her life, and doesn't feel she can voice her frustration because of the debt she feels to him.(Let's assume that both you and the other player in question enjoy conflict between PCs, and understand perfectly that it doesn't imply any conflict between the players, as you suggested.)If I were you, in this situation, I would choose to play up the male chauvinist side of my character. This is not because my character heard the other PC's thoughts, or is necessarily even aware of her resentment towards him, but I because as a player I intend to collaborate with the other player in fomenting friction and conflict between our characters, because we enjoy it. In fact, there is an additional level of enjoyment that both players can derive from the fact that my PC is oblivious to the effect his comments are having on the other PC.This is undeniably metagaming - doing things in-character which are informed by out-of-character knowledge - but it's not necessarily bad. It doesn't do anything to undermine the challenges the DM might present you with - it's not cheating, in other words - so why, exactly, is it bad? We're back to "It's bad because the traditionalist attitude towards roleplaying says you should always play from the perspective of your character". I'm just trying to suggest that the traditionalist attitude is, in this instance, very much not the be-all and end-all of the possible roleplaying experience.It might not suit your gaming style - in fact, since you tend to phrase things in terms like "I can't react to what they said in their voiceover", I think it's pretty obvious it doesn't suit your playstyle at all - but it's not inherently bad just because it's metagaming.Deep-immersive players can't enjoy this technique either, because their enjoyment of the game relies upon seeing the game as much as possible from the exclusive perspective of their character. "Voiceovers" from other characters would in fact be directly poisonous to their attempts at attaining and maintaining deep immersion in their characters.(There's an obvious distinction, to me, between "traditionalist" and "deep-immersive" perspectives. Nothing about the traditionalist perspective necessitates experiencing gameplay solely from the perspective of your character, which is the deep-immersive goal, it simply mandates acting only upon the information available to your character.)I'm not trying to say that the traditionalist style is universally bad, or that the deep-immersive style is universally bad, or that this style I'm talking about here is universally good. I'm just trying to get across to you that you're making assumptions about what you "can do" at the gaming table which simply don't always apply - nor should they be assumed as the default in discussion.After all, this whole tangent is about why playing the strong, silent type with an inner monologue that illuminates their character is not very much fun for everyone else - I'm simply proposing a way to make playing such a character fun for at least some people to see.</blockquote>

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