Usually, if someone talks about metagaming, they're specifically referring to the act of using out-of-character knowledge to give yourself an in-game advantage. For example, your character has never heard of the exotic monster you now face. But you, the player, has read the Monster Manual, and you know that this monster is weak to cold. Your character uses this out-of-game knowledge, and defeats the monster using ice spells.
Some consider this cheating, some consider it a necessary evil to speed up combat, and some just don't really care. But that's not really the point of this blog. Today I want to talk about some of the less commonly recognized forms of metagaming.
Eleven years ago today, I played a D&D 4e session that took place on a zombie-infested island. I'm not going to link to the session, because I don't want to blatantly call out the problem player by name, but you can find my session recap if you look hard enough.
One of the players, let's call him José, was a bit of a rules lawyer. He had a reputation for being good at combat tactics, which is probably why he liked 4e so much. But he also had a tendency to pick fight over flight, even when all signs were pointing to flight.
In this session, scores of zombies converged on us, herding us towards a church. The plot required us to take refuge in the church. Tactics-wise, our smartest move would be seek refuge in the church. Common sense told us that we would be safest in the church. Really, the DM might as well have shown us giant red arrows floating in the sky, pointing at the church.
José would not be herded. He had total confidence that his character could survive hundreds, if not thousands of zombies. For him, D&D was about combat, so this was heaven for him. The rest of us were a bit less enthused by the endless hordes. Especially the squishy bard and warlock.
Since José wouldn't follow us toward the church, we climbed onto the roof of a house. A few zombies tried to climb after us, but they were incapable of making it that far up. We were safe to pick off zombies from a distance, with little risk.
But José wouldn't have it. He didn't want to climb onto the roof, because he didn't have any decent ranged attacks. But he also didn't like that he was the only one taking damage. So he resorted to psychological warfare - he gave us a guilt trip. "Your hit points are a party resource," he told us. "Now get down here and take your licks with the rest of the party."
Our bard and warlock were not designed for melee. The warlock in particular was a glass cannon. From the roof, he could take out three or four zombies per round. My bard wasn't quite as destructive, but her support abilities were still helpful to the other characters. On the ground, getting pounded from all sides, neither the bard nor the warlock would have lasted three rounds. But José, who considered himself a master tactician, tried to make us feel bad for maintaining our position.
And at the time, we did feel bad about it, and we even started to climb back down. But we somehow managed to convince him that our opponents were infinite, that this was more of a roleplay encounter than combat, and that he wasn't really earning more XP so much as bleeding out his own resources. We fled to the church and barricaded the door behind us, surviving to play another session.
"Your hit points are a party resource" burns me to this day. Not only was José's request tactically unsound, but it reduced our characters to numbers on a sheet. In a way, that sums up everything I didn't like about Fourth Edition. It's like it was designed from the ground up to make people think of their characters as data instead of people.
José's request was also metagaming, to a degree I hadn't previously experienced in a D&D game. Our characters weren't exactly cowards, but it still would have been insanely out-of-character for them to do something so reckless as to dive into a swarm of zombies just to get XP.
Of course, it was also metagaming for me to recognize it was a plot encounter. I knew early on that zombies would keep spawning forever, because the goal was to herd us to the church. But it was also the most logical thing for our characters to do, so that little bit of metagaming wouldn't have hurt the story.
Since then, I've seen a lot of metagaming from both players and DMs, but never anything that dramatic. One thing people forget is that metagaming works both ways. Sometimes players act on knowledge they couldn't have had, sure. But sometimes the players are denied knowledge their characters should have. In both cases, out-of-game knowledge (or lack thereof) influences in-character actions.
One fun part of D&D is solving puzzles. Unfortunately, sometimes the players aren't as smart as the characters. It's always funny when character with intelligence as their dump stat solves the puzzle, simply because that was the player who figured it out. But other times, the party is stumped even though some of the characters have 20 INT.
Of course, a good DM won't let the story grind to a halt over such a thing, and will give the players hints in exchange for INT checks, or have an NPC help them. But it can be frustrating playing a character smarter than you are, when most of the puzzles are designed for the players to solve, rather than the characters.
My point is, it isn't really metagaming for a player to ask for hints to solve a puzzle. The metagaming occurs when the DM requires an 8 INT player to solve a puzzle his 20 INT character should have figured out instantly.
Back when I hosted a NeverWinter Nights server, I had a lot of talks with other module designers. One of my designer friends didn't like the fact that the game showed the names of characters above their heads. From a roleplaying perspective, this allowed you to know another character's name before you had actually been introduced. He was looking for a way to disable that feature for his module.
I strongly disagreed. As I explained to him, NWN only had about ten heads for each race. This did not mean that humans only had ten different faces in Faerûn. The fact is, the characters had access to more data than the players did, because in-character, they could recognize each other's faces. Having our names over our heads was an out-of-character tool that actually helped players stay in-character.
I mean, what if two players happened to use the same head, and wore similar outfits? This actually happened to me on multiple occasions. If it weren't for the names over our heads, the rest of the party wouldn't have known who was who. Does this mean they were twins in-game? Obviously not. From the characters' point of view, they would have had completely different faces.
One NWN server I played on was very strict about roleplaying. I liked the RP-heavy environment it created, but sometimes the moderators went too far and it actually broke the immersion. The moderators often complained that players leveled too fast, they spent too much time farming for XP, and that they treated death like a slap on the wrist.
They often threatened to make death more permanent, so that players would pick their battles more carefully. It sounds good on paper, I guess, but did they consider how often PCs got killed by lag? Or server crashes, or their computers locking up? I'd be pretty pissed if my computer crashed, and when I got back in my character was permanently dead, all in the name of "better roleplaying." There's nothing "in character" about that, just bad moderators.
A more recent example is from my current Daggerford campaign. In an early session, my bard decided to fire a Shatter spell into a room full of centipedes. This turned out to be a bad idea, because another party member was in the room with the centipedes. So why did she fire? That's not like her.
Well, it's because we were using Roll20, and the other party member was occupying the same space as a centipede swarm. Roll20 displayed the centipede token on top of the character token. In character, Vanya definitely would have seen her teammate in there, fighting off the centipedes. The other players warned me it was a bad idea, but they only said that it was a waste of a spell slot. None of them mentioned that there was a party member in there.
When I realized my mistake, I told the DM that I wouldn't have done it if the player's token had been visible. But it was too late. I still think it was a bad call by the DM, but everyone makes bad calls now and then. The fact remains that my character would have made a different decision if we'd been playing in person, with miniatures.
Requiring players stick to decisions influenced by interface problems is a form of metagaming. Maybe not metagaming in the traditional sense, but it's still allowing out-of-game factors to affect the story. The format should never change the plot.
The bottom line is, while a little metagaming can be good for the game, most of the time it's a bad thing. But reverse metagaming - that is, letting out-of-character ignorance slow down the game - can be even worse.
