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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6809495" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The basic act of role-playing is to imagine that this is a character who actually lives within the world that's described, and make decisions from that character's perspective, based on what they know and believe and events that have occurred in their past. All out-of-character information is disallowed from a role-playing standpoint. If it's information that the character doesn't know, then there's no way that the character would make a decision that takes it into account. If the character doesn't know that trolls are weak to fire, or that the password is SWORDFISH, then they could not possibly make a decision to act upon that knowledge. The subjective part is that it's not always obvious to everyone whether any given information is something that the character would know. Does the character know that trolls are weak to fire? If you're playing Pathfinder, then you can make a knowledge check to determine that; otherwise, it's up to the player and the DM to work together on figuring out whether the character has this knowledge (but if you just assume that the character does, without consulting the DM, then you'll probably get accused of meta-gaming - if you wanted to play a troll-hunter who knew all about trolls and their weaknesses, then you should have established that with the DM before you ever found out that you would be encountering a troll in the game).Things get more complicated when you try to talk about Hit Points, or sometimes even spell slots. At some tables, the characters can see the general health level of everyone around them, so the player can make a decision based on current/total HP and that's not meta-gaming because the character can make the same decision based on what they see - who is cut, and who is coughing up blood. At other tables, Hit Points are a vague abstraction about luck and skill or something, and... I'm not sure how anyone ever decides when to cast a Cure spell, because it seems like that would always require meta-gaming, but there's a reason why I don't use that interpretation at my table. And you could go on with turns, initiative, AC, or other game mechanics; to some players, it will be obvious that this reflects character information that they can act upon, and to other players the opposite will be equally obvious.As with any significant disagreement about playstyle, you should talk this over with the group before you start playing, in order to make sure that everyone is on the same page.</blockquote>

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