king_ghidorah said:Not to sound like an idiot, but don't all uses of rules involve metagaming? Any use of a power, spell, skill, etc. involves the invocation and application of rules in an abstracted sense. The only way to avoid metagaming at the table seems to involve describing actions and having the DM adjudicate without the players discussing rules. This can be a valid way to play, but I don't remember the last game I ran or played without metagaming necessarily coming into play.
When is invocation of the game mechanics too much?
Except, you don't have to go that far to avoid metagaming. As was pointed out earlier, discussing actual game mechanics for the purpose of moving isn't meta gaming. Saying, well, I know that the poison from this moster isnt' really that deadly, so we shouldn't have issue is meta gaming. Basically, metagaming as I know it is using your own outside knowledge of the game mechanics and projecting that onto your PCs. Using abstracted out of character terms to describe things your character WOULD know or do, is not. Metagaming IS NOT the same as out of character. If people ONLY do things according to what their character would know... they are never metagaming even if they are never in character.