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Message: <blockquote data-quote="willpax" data-source="post: 884247" data-attributes="member: 1602">Here is another example, perhaps a bit less borderline than some: A player whose character was an illiterate woodsman in a low magic campaign (the party is around 3rd level) is joining in on a kind of raid of an evil temple to effect a cure on another party member. The central area is a large underground cavern with a rocklike, 140 ft. round spider statue, and in the dirt floor around the statue is a complex, interweaving pattern of symbols and words in a strange language that seems to form an unbroken circle. The party's wizard, having appropriate knowledge (arcane), points down as they step over the symbols and says "don't touch those."The player in question was staying to guard the escape route. The others found out what they thought was a spider statue was actually a large, disturbingly animated creature that began chomping people in half. Luckily for the party, it did not discriminate between the party members and the priests and guards who had come to drive the party out. While the battle rages and the party members desperately try to climb down from said large creature, the player in question (who rolled poorly on initiative) announces that he is going to destroy the pattern by running an arrow through the dirt. The wizard gives up his own desperate attempt to climb down to spend a round yelling "no!" but the player does it anyway. A brief yet spectacular display of arcane energies later, and the player has released a demon to work its own particular destruction on the world. He defended his actions by reasoning that: 1. I would never put something in an adventure that the party had no chance of defeating. 2. He reasoned that, because it was invulnerable to our weapons, it must therefore be powered by the magic circle around it. Therefore, destroying the circle would stop the creature. Some of the other players were quite incensed about this, and pointed out that his character would not reasonably know about the way these magics worked, and that he showed he had very little knowledge about the way I constructed adventures. I had no problem with this, as I had just been handed a wonderful Plot Twist on a silver platter. So: is this level of metagaming acceptable or unacceptable, and, if so, under which conditions? Should the problem of metagaming be subsumed under the general problem of players with incompatible play styles? Or is this simply a kind of arms-race style problem, where the DM should anticipate a certain level of metagaming and work with it? (to explain: I was, to a certain extent, relying on my long-time players' knowledge that I do, indeed, put in things that their only good option is to run away from; is that metagaming on my part? Is the duel between player expectation and DM innovation part of the fun?)</blockquote>

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