Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6809384" data-attributes="member: 85870">I think there's a distinction to made here between "meta-gaming" and "meta-authoring." Meta-gaming, to me, only occurs when the player thought process specifically revolves around something that ultimately manipulates the real or possible mechanical resolution in-game. Reading an adventure before hand, for example, meets this criteria, because the use of that out-of-fiction knowledge directly impacts in-game mechanical resolutions --- checks for traps, avoiding damage and resource depletion because a combat encounter is bypassed, furiously insisting that every character in the game bring an extra torch and a vial of acid because the player KNOWS that they will be encountering trolls, because resolving the troll encounter successfully hinges on meeting the requirements of the game mechanics.The "jumping on an idea the GM just spouted off and then running with it because it's obviously more interesting than what we're doing now" is meta-authoring. You're completely re-constructing the characters' intentions and motivations in the fiction based on something that happened out of fiction, something the characters could have no conception of. In a sense, meta-authoring could be seen as a subset of meta-gaming, but in my mind the functional practice of the two touches on two distinct points.Okay, so maybe I'm just being pedantic, but I think cheating, at least in terms of an RPG, is objective, while metagaming is subjective."Cheating" is direct misrepresentation by a player of a mechanical resolution process explicitly outlined in the rules. If a player action can be directly referenced in the game rules by another player and the mechanics explicitly say, "That's not allowed," it's cheating. Any other kind of out-of-fiction manipulation falls under the heading of meta-gaming. Ex 1. -- "To see if you hit a target, roll 1d20, add your base attack bonus, add and subtract all relevant modifiers. If your final number meets or exceeds to the targets Armor Class, you hit." You roll an 11, but instead tell your GM you rolled a 20 -- Cheating.Ex 2. -- [Based on the progression chart for a given class, the game indicates a character should have a total of 2 feats at second level and 40 skill points.]Player: "No way, I'm totally giving myself seven feats and 65 skill points."  -- CheatingThus, the example of telling the players not to read from source book X to find out about monster stats is an attempt to avoid meta-gaming, not cheating. In fact, the player is perfectly free to read every monster stat block in Monster Manual X if they choose, and it will have no discernible effect on your game if the player chooses not to use that knowledge in play. The only reason I'm being picky about it is I think it's an important distinction. If meta-gaming is just a form of cheating, then let's just call it "cheating." If meta-gaming is semantically something else, then let's have a real differentiation between them.</blockquote>

Verification