What's the difference between acting OOC and metagaming?

What's the difference between acting OOC and metagaming?

Have you ever played with someone who metagamed? How did it go?

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Acting out of character means you are doing so0mething your character wouldn't do.
Metagaming means you are using out of game knowledge to inform the decisions of your character.

So you acting OOC can be caused by metagaming. It could however also be you just mischaracterizing your character by ignoring the background you've given him or doing another acting based mistake.

I get accused of "Metagaming" quite often, but it's always in cases that I wouldn't consider metagaming. Coming from an OSR background, I often rely more on player knowledge or experimentation. I'll give a couple of examples.

>Party is walking through the woods, expecting an ambush. The DM describes voices mimicking what we say. I tell the party, "Be prepared for an ambush. I think it may be Kenku or Tengu. Something of that nature."
>DM gets mad and yells, "You're metagaming! You have to make a check before you can know that!"

>Playing a Barbarian character. We come across a trap in a dungeon. I start to examine it and ask for specific characteristics about the trap. It seems rather simple, so I should just be able to describe how I would take care of it. It's a simple trip wire trap, meant to snare small animals and the like.
>No, you're not a rogue, and you have to roll to see if you're knowledgeable enough to take it apart.

There's a reason I stick to oldschool stuff.

That second example seems more of a lack of skill than knowledge, though. If an engineer can't take the trap apart simply because he lacks rogue levels, I call BS. But the woodsy Ranger who knows literally nothing of mechanisms more complex than "attach rope to stick, use to shoot arrow forward"? He probably sets off the trap.

The first example is an issue I'm running into more and more as I play (I am still relatively new). If the DM describes an enemy a certain way I'll be able to identify what kind of monster it is and what kind of attacks it has, but that doesn't necessarily mean my character would know that. If my little shepherd boy turned fighter has never seen a dragon before how could he possibly know which colors go with which breath weapons. The problem is that even when I'm aware of that sort of thing I'd never let myself walk into danger that would be obvious to me but not my character.

I come from a time when you really didn't write out a character background beforehand. You were just a warrior, or wizard, or whatever, and any knowledge that your character had was assumed to come from rumors he'd heard or adventures he'd had.

I mostly GM games, and the way I solve this problem is, I never throw monsters at my players that they've seen before. It keeps things fresh, and it prevents this kind of thing from happening.

Even with classic monsters, you can change things up by changing their appearance a little or giving them a different kind of attack.

Players may see a "green" dragon, but if they're too confident in their knowledge, they'll quickly find that it breaths flames.

You can't possibly separate meta knowledge from character knowledge but you can still act in a way that your character would have reason to. Anything strange is cause for suspicion in a fantasy game, so I don't think it's meta to go "stay away from that strange mist" even though you are saying that partially because you know OOC it's a black dragon's lair or something.

That's kiiiiinda metagaming, but blatant metagaming would be something like

>one player is alone in the woods while the others are back at camp
>lone player encounters a monster that kills him and takes his form
>monster goes to players' camp
>other player decides to attack the returning "PC" for no reason other than because he knew what had occurred when his character wasn't around

That's why you always leave the room or use notes to do stuff like that

The first is your metagaming, full stop.
How does your character know what a kenku or tengu is, or how they act? But you know, and that isn't enough. It would be little different than failing a perception check, then proceeding to be overly cautious because you expect an ambush.
The second? That calls for a check modified by background and skillset.

My party tends to do pretty well with it, since we like to roleplay and separating character/player knowledge is standard since we all know a lot about the game. We constantly do stupid shit from our perspective simply because it's in character to not know any better.

I just find it more fun to get into character than try to "win." That said, most of our characters learn quickly, so once we've encountered something we usually 'wise up' in character afterwards.

Honestly, why does every single minute thing have to come down to a roll?

I mean, if we're talking about sufficiently experienced adventurers, is it really difficult to assume that somebody in the party heard of tenku/tengu, especially if they're common enough for someone in the area to recognize their attack patterns?

Not only that, but why do I need to be one of the shittiest classes in the game just to notice, recognize, and disable something as simple as a trip wire?

I mean, I could make a trip wire trap made of dental floss and a bucket of water if I wanted to, and disabling would be as simple as taking a long ass pole and tripping the wire from a relatively safe distance away.

Both of these instances could be solved through roleplay, yet for some god-forsaken reason, you have to make an arbitrary roll to recognize local threats and an arbitrary roll to notice a trap and know how to disable it without getting ganked.

Why is this player wrong in doing that? Specially the second example, it seems incredibly anti-fun for the DM to talk to you like that. To me, he is just mad you are smarter than him.

Because the argument that you are making benefits only you, not sensibilities of the game.
Further, because the gm told you to do so.
> I could make a trip wire trap made of dental floss and a bucket of water if I wanted to, and disabling would be as simple as taking a long ass pole and tripping the wire from a relatively safe distance away
Now add fantastical elements that you aren't familiar with to this. You, the player, are making massive assumptions that you "know" what is going on. As a long time gm, players that proceed to make demands because the game isn't catering to their convenience are the ones you would rather not deal with.

Because assuming he was playing D&D he is ignoring the mechanics of the game. Even a simple trap could be set of accidentally while being disarmed.

True but sometimes it's fun to be in the dark as a player. it can help immersion

You're basically asking the GM to describe the trap to the player so they can solve it instead of the character. That's metagaming with the GM's help.

Your character can already see the trap, and the GM says it's too complicated for your character to solve without a roll. So you roll, because that's how the game works.

>Because the argument that you are making benefits only you, not sensibilities of the game.

The only way your bullshit holds any water is if I went out of my way to not let anyone else in the party know that shit was about to go down.

It's not like I said, OOC, "hey guys, tenku are here but don't meta-game hyuk hyuk hyuk."

>Now add fantastical elements that you aren't familiar with to this.

Three things.

1) Assuming D&D, the "fantastical elements" aren't all that fantastical, especially since most of it is lifted from other fantasy series and mythology.
2) Assuming that a simple trip wire trap works like a simple trip wire trap is not that big of an assumption
3) Unless you're one of those GM's who won't even let a PC take a step along flat ground unless they roll a successful athletics check, it's really not that big of an issue to get hung up about.

>You're basically asking the GM to describe the trap to the player so they can solve it instead of the character. That's metagaming with the GM's help.

>You're basically asking the GM to describe the trap to the player so they can solve it instead of the character. That's metagaming with the GM's help.

Oh my god, your stupidity just gave me a headache.

But if the trap really was just a tripwire holding something to cage small animals. Is it really necessary that you roll knowledge for that? Specially when the DM gave such description to the player?

Why shouldn't the fighter know how a trap to cage rabbits work? Specially if he lives in "medieval" times. Why shouldn't the wise wizard know how the trap works?

It's not the player's job to determine what constitutes as common knowledge or a difficult challenge. If you truly believe something to be simple, then you won't need to roll very high, now will you?

And just because something's common knowledge doesn't mean every fucking person knows it; just because something's easy doesn't mean no one will ever fuck it up. If you don't like rolling dice, stop playing a game that revolves around rolling dice.

And if your Intelligence score is just going to be replaced by your player's own intelligence, might as well replace every stat with your own, too. Have fun.

SpongebobFriedBrain.png

Yes. Now roll the fucking dice, you metagaming faggot.

The first one is metagaming in 3.0 and beyond, plain and simple. Creature identification is one of the most frequent and basic checks you'll make. It's like asking to skip over a stealth roll or an attack roll because you described your character as succeeding.

>If you truly believe something to be simple, then you won't need to roll very high, now will you?

If something is simple then you shouldn't need to roll at all, honestly.

Walking down a flat plane is relatively simple for the average person to do, you wouldn't you agree? Yet you wouldn't ask the PC to roll for every step made to walk from point A to point B.

>And just because something's common knowledge doesn't mean every fucking person knows it

Unless you're playing with literal retards here, I'm not quite sure how you can justify seasoned adventurers, or even greenhorns, not knowing a trip wire when they see it.

>just because something's easy doesn't mean no one will ever fuck it up.

Yet most people don't choke to death whenever they eat something.

>If you don't like rolling dice, stop playing a game that revolves around rolling dice.

Even in D&D, the ur-example of dice rolling games doesn't make you roll for every fucking thing your character fucking does.

Hell, in OD&D, shit, like doing research, and searching a room, was just something that happened and success depended on how you described your character doing a thing.

I mean fuck, even in cancer like 3.PF you could still take 10/20 on a basic roll if you wanted to.

>And if your Intelligence score is just going to be replaced by your player's own intelligence, might as well replace every stat with your own, too. Have fun.

Oh boy, you're one of those brands of retards.

I gotta admit, between skeleton-fag and "argues in bad faith," you're probably up there among the 3.PF trolls that frequent this site.

I'm going to call you "met-autism" for the rest of this argument since you're too autistic to understand what common knowledge actually means.

I'll take 10, "met-autism."

On of my players played a douche character who slowly redeemed himself through the players metagaming to 'accidentally' make his actions have good results.

Almost all problems for the party was stuff from his past coming back to bite him. But the players ended up bonding over conquering the challenges.

Game was 9/10

Can't on knowledge checks, and can't on disable device checks. Whoops!

Also, faggot, calling everyone the same person reallly doesn't help your argument.

So you're saying that I'd need to roll a die to recognize a kobold on sight?

Pray tell, would I need to roll to recognize a dire rat?

Or fuck, would I need to roll just to recognize a fucking goblin?

I mean fuck, there are people who have never even read fantasy novels that know what a goddamn goblin is yet my character, a seasoned adventurer, needs to roll just to glean basic knowledge that even commoners are aware of to a reasonable extent?

Orion Stormwind never metagamed. His expulsion was bullshit.

My thoughts on this are that people always fall into the trap of "You're a normal person! Normal people wouldn't be able to know what these things are!"

The problem is, normal people in Real Life probably wouldn't be able to tell... but your characters live in a world where these things exist. Plenty of the villages in the surrounding area would probably have cautionary tales of "Be careful in them woods, there be giant birdfolk about in there." Because you don't settle down in an area, have people constantly moving through the area for trade and such, and completely fail to notice something like giant bird-people flapping about.

It's like saying characters shouldn't be able to read, because it's a medieval fantasy setting, so only wizards, priests, and clerks take the time to learn their letters.

So many people gobbling bait.

Fine, you'll be "met-autism #2."

I'm sorry, it's just really hard to consider that more than one person is this fucking stupid, especially over the basic knowledge that even amateurs should know if they're expected to survive in a world of dragons, liches, and other terrible creatures.

Now you're pathetically trying to self justify your metagaming bullshit.

Nigger, you roll. If you succeed, you've heard those fucking tales whispered about.

If not? You didn't. This is assuming you're new to the area, of course, if you lived there, which has never once been established as a thing, so don't even try to pull that card, you might have an argument.

If you're in the Tengu Woods and the old man at the entrance tells you, "Watch out for the tengus!" you can guess they are tengus.

Otherwise, you know what the GM tells you you see and hear. If the GM says you see a goblin, you know its a goblin. If he says you see an emaciated walking corpse, you know it's probably a hostile undead, but you don't know that it's a ghoul with a paralyzing touch unless you make a knowledge check.

Holy shit
Just....you fucking spergs
What the fuck

Stop playing dnd. It makes you goddamn animals.

Do I just not have eyes until the GM tells me that I see something?

Do I just not exist unless the GM tells me to roll a die?

Because honestly, it's a tough pill to swallow to say that my character, who is living in a fantasy setting where goblins exist, cannot say "watch out for goblins!" when he sees short green men wielding shitty clubs and rusty daggers menacingly accosting the party.

I mean, is it a sin to even make a lucky guess?

>I have been argued into a corner about the actual game rules, and now have no recourse but to shitpost wildly and leave in a huff!

Yes, please, keep insisting your metagaming dogshit is 'basic knowledge'.

To an extent that's true, if he had just been like, be on guard it might be an ambush it would be entirely within reason, but yeah he should have to roll to actually know if it's a tengu or not unless his character is explicitly knowledgeable.

The solution to this of course is gfor the GM to stop throwing the same crap as his players or explicitly have players with high levels of game knowledge roll up characters that are well traveled but old/mechanically weaker classes.

>there are people in this very thread insulting people that "metagame" because they know basic shit

If so, would it be considered metagaming to design a device? I mean, was I metagaming when I bought a rope? I bought it for the sole purpose of needing to tie or climb something. I don't know if my character knew that and quite honestly don't care as I wanted to be prepared for the future. Is this metagame?

I see no difference between a rope and a goblin, and if goblin is metagame then so is rope. The DM never mentioned my character knew how to handle a rope.

For your original example:
Acceptable: "Watch out. It might be some kind of magical trickster nature spirit."
Not acceptable: "Watch out. It could be a Tengu."

If you can't pick up on the pattern here, you're too dumb to play these kinds of games.

Naw dawg, look at the poster count. I'm someone new.
Yall need jesus.or a drink. I can't tell which

So what about people who treat their characters as more than numbers on a piece of paper "met-autist?"

Do we just not know how to do anything unless we make an arbitrary roll so you can tell us how retarded we are?

Because you seem like the type who would have us run into a mountain because we failed our perception tests or some bullshit like that.

What is the course of action the player should take?

>watch out! there are tengus or whatever nearby!
>DM, I want to roll for knowledge
or
>can I roll for knowledge on the creatures that are trying to ambush us? I think I know them.
How can the player warn the party about the nearby menace without metagaming?

Okay, I say it could be a tengu, I could be right or I could be wrong.

It's called a shitty guess "met-autist," people do it all the time and most people don't make that big of a deal about it.

Yeaaah, I'm done. Funny, you nickname someone argues in bad faith, and then you trot out this load of horseshit.

Don't leave, I genuinely want to know.

The fact that there are voices in the forest that might be hostile?

I mean, I say it could be a tengu but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually a tengu. It could be any number of weird forest dwelling creature but since the GM made a big fucking deal about, I guess it has to be a tengu now.

I swear, people who make a big deal about this kinda shit are the ones who ruin their own twists most of the time.

I've been accused of meta gaming before, but most of the time it was unfairly so, and mostly by a guy who only had a faint idea of what the term meant. That being said

> 3.5, playing a wizard
> exploring a dungeon, after the mcguffin
> tunnel we're walking through has ice all over the ceilings and walls
> reach a dark, cavernous room
> DM says we see a large, scaly white tail flicking in the darkness
> me: hey guys I think there's a white dragon in here
> guy: hey that's meta gaming! Your character wouldn't know that.
> me: I'm a wizard. I know shit, that's my job.
> guy: it's still meta gaming
> enters room, proceeds to get mauled by white dragon

"Watch out there might be an ambush"(reasonable assumption)
To GM "I want to roll to check knowledge"
Pass:
"I think it might be Tengus, they hunt in Packs Arisen"
Fail:
Say Nothing or some throw away line like "I'm freaking out man"

There, no implicit knowledge is assumed the character was scared of an ambush in general then rolled to see if they were capable of narrowing it down.

So are you going to answer the questions or are you going to leave because you realize how retarded your argument is?

>I want to genuinely argue in bad faith, and waste everyone's time being a retarded moron!

Last reply you get, you rancid sack of shit. Have a garbage night.

Answer the questions.

>metagaming is literally anything the DM wants it to be
How do we fix this issue?

You're still assuming that your character:
1. has heard of tengus specifically
2. knows their powerset

This EXPLICITLY falls under the domain of "requires a knowledge check" -- like right on the fucking bullseye, unless they're very common in the setting.

And if you're not sure, you ask, "Do I know these are tengus?"

I wasn't even the guy you replied to ;_;

>Implying your character knows what an ambush means
>Implying knows how to vocalize his thoughts
>Implying he can understand when he's freaking out
>Implying you can tell your dm when you want to roll.

So what?

It's a game which you can get better of playing. It isn't just a community theatre session

I say "hold on guys, it might be tengus."

If it turns out to be something else, oh well, it was a shitty guess, shit happens, let's roll initiative or something.

If I'm right, oh okay, it was a lucky guess, that's cool, I guess we know what we're up against, let's roll initiative or something.

Ultimately, I'm making a guess IC and there's a 50/50 shot of me being correct.

Requiring a knowledge check just tells me, whether I succeed or not, that I was correct and now everyone is subconsciously making judgment calls based on the fact that they're tengus.

Similarly to how asking for a perception check makes people on edge because they failed it.

In a nutshell, stop getting hung up on stupid bullshit and just play it forward if you wanted your encounter to be a twist.

Last point is legit though, players shouldn't ask for rolls.

>If you roleplay an assumption, you're meta-gaming.
>If you ask for a roll, you're meta-gaming.

Is everything meta-gaming?

Holy shit. People like this exist

People who don't want their time wasted because the GM wants to spring the most obvious twist since the end of "6th sense" over a lucky guess that might have been wrong if he didn't sperg out over it?

No. Not those people

Then who are you talking about?

Stop taking the bait.

People who can jump to conclusions in a single bound. You're like those people who say legalizing gay marriage will mean people will want to marry their dogs or something

Tiberius/Orion never metagamed per se - that said, he handled spellcasting poorly and he always had a laundry list of things to do when in town that was clearly grating to at least Sam and Travis. He wanted to do a million things in the span of a second which made things drag on a little longer than they needed to, which I've always chalked up as him having to make the transition from Pathfinder to 5e.

During his run in Critical Role, he was no worse or no better than say Vax trying to figure out if he scored a sneak attack or an assassinate. It was clear he was clashing with Marisha, then again it was very, very clear that her definition of fun was much different than his.

That said, he does come off as very Mary Sue-ish in the spinoff series Orion created.

Except for the fact that all I'm making is a guess that could just as easily be wrong as it could be right.

I mean, just because I say it's a tengu doesn't mean that it actually is until the GM has it appearing in front of us...unless the GM is a sperg who assumes I'm meta-gaming based on a shitty guess that I made IC and ruins his own surprise in the process of trying to keep the surprise a secret by forcing arbitrary rolls.

Y'know, people who jump to conclusions in a single bound?

>That said, he does come off as very Mary Sue-ish in the spinoff series Orion created.

Go on.

Why did he leave? I stopped watching shortly afterwards as it was nofun for me. The group lacks "that weird guy that is cute when he speaks" type so I dropped it.

People always insult him on the web though, dunno why.

When I GM I let my players make assumptions about what they're facing and only call them on it if their backstory makes it unlikely they've encountered or heard about the creature before. Most times I reskin the less standard critters so that any assumptions made are off the back of description, rather than meta-knowledge.

In a session a few months back, for example, I threw a bunch of Kobolds at my second level party, which was separated into two groups at the time. In my setting Kobolds are an invasive species that were brought over from their home island by slavers and are still relatively unknown on the mainland.

Pretty much all of the players recognised them as soon as I described them, but I allowed the former pirate character to know offhand because it made sense for his character to know them. Of the others I gave them the chance to roll to recognise them, which none of them passed. It meant that only the former pirate's group knew that these Kobolds were small threats by themselves, but dangerous in groups, rapid breeders and good with primitive traps.

It meant that when the second group got forced back into a cave, their characters didn't realise it was trapped, even though the players were well aware and cracking jokes about it. It's that separation of in character and out of character knowledge that makes a good D&D group. I kinda lucked out with mine, I think.

youtube.com/watch?v=u_lHGFL69bE
it's little surprise since it's a story written by and for himself, but the instances where he's doing anything he's automatically the best at it and he's the center of attention for everyone. when he's sent on the mission to deal with an attacking force (episode 3), he faces no real conflict or any real hurdle to overcome.

As Orion states on his twitter, he left because he wanted to pursue other projects that were clashing with his time in Critical Role. He was also battling with cancer at the time, so it didn't help. At around episode 24-25 you also see he makes his session mates visibly uncomfortable with certain decisions he makes, so a hypothesis goes he left because he was not necessarily working with anyone and instead was focusing on his own ends and means.

Ironically enough, it turns out the project he was pouring a lot of his time was his spinoff series which is basically Critical Role with Tiberius as the focus of the story.

>What's the difference between acting OOC and metagaming?

Acting OOC is when autists start acting like authority figures on how your character acts.

Metagaming is when That GMs think you should bend over and take Troll dick up your ass because otherwise we couldn't have that scene that every shitty GM who uses metagaming like a 4 letter word enjoys where the characters we made up to have fun learn something the rest of us knew as soon as the GM described the creature as a Troll. Because that is fun, I guess.

Eh, that's fair.

>Honestly, why does every single minute thing have to come down to a roll?
thats a symptom of the system. In other games metagaming is far less of an issue.

Yes and then I say, well how would you know what a tengu is? And you say well do I have to roll to know what a goblin is? Or how to use a rope? And on and on and on

You sound incredibly bitter

So... he become Tommy Wiseu?

youtube.com/watch?v=Plz-bhcHryc

You have to produce a signed affidavit that you are a DM to own or read a DMG/MM.

youtube.com/watch?v=qCVSyhjBhro
truly, the Tiberius experience

>well how would you know what a tengu is?

Maybe I heard about them in my travels?

Maybe I heard stories about them from other adventurers?

Maybe I encountered them at some point in my journey?

There are multiple reasons that could be used to explain why a well-traveled adventurer would know about tengus, especially if the party was traveling through an area for an extensive amount of time.

Someone's sodium level's a bit high! Tired of getting blown out at every turn?

Yes, that is what the knowledge roll is for

If Orin is Tommy, who is Mark?

Hi, Mark.

I shouldn't need to make a knowledge roll unless I'm trying to learn about the creature(s) that we're about to fight though.

I'm making a guess, not a statement.

I'm not saying "these are tengu," I'm saying "I think these might be tengu."

That's the distinction that you need to understand, my character is making a very shitty guess based off of information that he gained during his travels.

If I'm making a knowledge roll then either I know that these are tengus from a successful roll or I know that these are tengus from making the roll in the first place, which in turn would mean that I'm meta-gaming due to information that I wouldn't have known about if the GM didn't force a roll.

It's the same principle as a GM who makes a player make a perception roll and the rest of the party decides to roll perception too, are they meta-gaming by making a perception check or are they meta-gaming by NOT making a perception check even though their character has no reason not to roll a perception check?

You're the reason that bear lore was a joke in 4e.

I guess you don't have anything to add to the argument anymore?

The knowledge roll is to see if you know what a tengu is at all. You keep saying you're making a guess, but the problem is you can't guess that your hearing tengu's if you have never heard the word tengu before in your life. That's metagaming

Additionally just because you are rolling doesn't mean you are actively doing something. In your perception roll example the roll would be to just notice something rather than actively searching

And yet not wrong.

Sure, if that's what helps you sleep at night to think.

Correct. They should simply make them.

>10 minutes and "helps u sleep at night" is the best he could come up with

Jesus.

Well, thanks for the nightly reminder to never play an rpg with anybody from Veeky Forums.

I used to try meta gaming by having my character be insane so I could be the voice in his head lol

>shopping time
>hear from party member's shopping time that greater healing potions are around
>be on a trip with party again, say
>"Boy I sure wish there was a way to heal ourselves better than with this tiny drinks"
>wait for my party member to tell me there are newer potions available at X place
Is this metagaming? Is it wrong or good?

I've known since a young age that the woods near my house are filled with enough hemlock to topple the Roman empire at its peak.

I know jack fucking shit about botany.

ITT:

"It's a giant red button that says "Push" on it"
"I push it."
"NNNONONOONSDOFKOIBSDFIUGHWERI?ythwefdjuog asd YOPU FUCKNIG FAGGOT THAT'S METAGAMING YOU DON;'T KNOW HOW TO USE BUTTONS REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"