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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley37" data-source="post: 7611993" data-attributes="member: 6786839">I agree, more or less. I don't like the remedy of the DM veto, the declaration "You can't do that." I prefer the remedy of another player asking "Wait, do our characters know - at this point - that thunder damage will be extra effective?" If the barbarian's player responds "No, my character doesn't know, he's making a lucky guess", then I still want the DM to decide what happens *in the fiction* on the basis of whether anyone in town has such scrolls and is willing to sell them (and at what price).If this is metagaming, then it's the kind of metagaming which I consider useful, appropriate and part of a good story. It is functionally equivalent to playing a PC who is cautious and resourceful... which is one of the many possible forms of heroism.It *might* lead to the purchase of Thunderwave scrolls. It might lead to the DM inventing, on the spot, a new NPC, in the form of a wizard or sage; that new NPC might in time become a recurring character. It might mean that the DM gets to *finally* introduce that librarian NPC which the DM has been *aching* to introduce to the PCs (with a side quest to recover some missing books of arcane lore). It might lead to the discovery that an NPC bought all the Thunderwave scrolls in the city, last week, and also bought some rope, rations and similar adventuring gear - and thus the hint that there's another party, also heading into the same mountains, who now has a head start on the PCs. This range of outcomes, all arising from an IC proposal to do some research, is lush with opportunities, more so than just going directly to "mark off X gold pieces, and add Y scrolls of Thunderwave to your character's inventory".Another example of Riley-approved metagaming: the PCs meet someone in a tavern who wants to join their party, and the PCs find plausible reasons to welcome that person to their party, even though the PCs don't know that this stranger is the PC of a new player joining the group. If the PCs go through the motions of reasonably wary precautions (membership in a faction such as Order of the Gauntlet, or perhaps asking the newcomer to consent to Detect Thoughts or Zone of Truth), then they're establishing a higher level of IC plausibility, but they're still moving towards the answer of yes. (Depending on the table's convention about PCs with ulterior motives, that is.)I agree on the first. As for the second, the IC welcoming of a new PC to the party, on the first session of a new player to the table, isn't the GM's fault, because no error has happened and thus no one is at fault. I agree on the third.Tangent: could you perhaps recommend to me an article or essay which explains the Author stance and Actor stance, as you are using those terms?</blockquote>

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