Maj at [unixtime wrote:1083536339[/unixtime]]
Metagaming, to me, is using knowledge that I have as a player, but not as a character, to make my character's decisions/actions/etc. This means that I have to be thorough about knowing what my character knows or would know.
Right.
I create my characters assuming they don't live in a vacuum. To say that someone who's taken a couple of fireballs wouldn't jump off a cliff implies a couple of things to me:
1) The character's never heard of anyone jumping off a cliff and surviving.
2) The character is completely unable to measure the ability to be hurt.
Well, I keep going back to this because it's important. Hit points represent a character's ability to turn a greater wound into a lesser one. A barbarian really can't survive an arrow to the heart or a broken neck from a fall. He's just good enough to avoid the majority of that damage and have an arrow that just happens to graze the side of his chest, or land in such a way that the damage is just bruises. This in no way implies immortality.
Again, these guys don't stand with the superman pose sitting there taking arrows. So they don't necessarily think they're invulnerable based on what they've survived. Now some characters who have that overconfident personality could say "the gods are with me, I've survived five fireballs and I'm still alive! I can do anything!" and that's a perfectly fine roleplaying attitude in a world with magic and real gods. A character may actualyl think he's immortal, but he has to roleplay that.
The primary reason why a wizard uses Fireball is because it kills things. If you've taken a couple of fireballs before and lived through it, you know you're one tough cookie. If you've heard about someone jumping off a cliff and surviving, and you already know you're one tough cookie, you've got a pretty good case for surviving when you jump off the cliff.
Eh... I dunno about that. Differences in toughness are profound and there's no real way to determine exactly how tough you are. I mean there's so many levels...
There's "take a fireball and live", "take a horrid wilting", "Take a sequence of 5 wails of the banshee" and then there's "Soak an annihilating strike from Thor". These are all different grades of toughness, and the character won't necessarily understand what he can survive until he tries it. Sure, if he falls 20' and isn't hurt that badly he may try 30' or 40'... but to just jump off a cliff without any sense of how much damage it may do... well that's bad.
Again, I'll bring the point I brought forth before. If you didn't see the rules for falling damage, but knew the rules for everything else, would you still jump 500', risking a beloved character without first trying smaller distances?
The only reason to assume that you would die if you jumped off the cliff is if everyone who'd ever jumped off a cliff had died - and you knew that fact.
Well, this depends on how you see yourself. A character with a huge ego might put himself right up there with Hercules and take the plunge. A character who is more cautious and more or less attributes his victories to luck probably wouldn't. This is again a roleplaying issue.
RC wrote:
I don't understand why your examples seem to assume that characters don't know their own strengths and weaknesses. As a person, in real life, I know I'm not physically strong, I'm poor of health and not very sturdy, I'm a little graceful, I'm very smart and observant, and I get along with most people. In a fight, I know that my best weapon is my talking because I suck at fighting... Unless you don't see it coming; then I have time to plot and aim.
Well, the issue here is that if you indeed believe that you're invincible, you have to believe your capable of just about anything, that's what overconfidence is. Hell, you can survive a 500' drop... and if you can do that, what's a minor charm person spell or a little energy drain from a specter, or a great wyrm's breath... yeah you can probably handle all fo those too. To arbitrarily draw the line at some places is metagaming, because that line always tends to be drawn where the rules draw it. It's always a judgment based off numbers.
If you truly think you're up there with hercules herowise and do crazy stuff like jumping off 500' cliffs, then you should be fully expecting yourself to be able to solo a big hydra, just like he did.
Characters hear tales of legendary heroes all the time, and yes, sometimes they can associate themselves with them.. but if you're going to think yourself on par with a legend, then you better act like it in all situations and not just ones where the rules do actually favor you. In other words, you think you're a hero of legend? Start acting like one.
Overconfindence is a fine trait, it just has to apply universally until proven otherwise. If your barbarian got dominated before, then he may be a bit more cautious of mind affecting spells, otherwise he shouldnt' be thinking much of it.
The fact is that when PCs make decisions like this, it almost always "just happens" to be ok in the rules. This coincidence is strong evidence that we're dealing with metagaming here.
As for LAGO's comments about metagaming, this is pretty much not metagaming because it occurs outside the game (out of character). Really when you have a paladin and a rogue travelling together, the characters should be designed with some way of staying together (basicalyl both good alignment). This is done during the character creation phase and thus it's not metagaming.
It is metagaming and bad metagaming if you've got an evil rogue and a paladin staying together in a game that's already begun.
As for killing monsters in succession, that just happens to be the way it occurs, the adventurers don't actually decide to do that. The first level adventurer doesn't have a checklist with orc, ogre, minotaur, troll, flesh golem, beholder, dragon listed on it. It just simply works out that way.
But this stuff is scenario design, again out of character. No NPC is deliberately saying he'll send an orc, an ogre, a minotaur then a troll at them. Their adventures just kinda work out that way. The hand of fate isn't metagaming, because the hand of fate doesn't roleplay. Destiny can't really act "out of character" so I don't see how it could ever metagame.
Only characters capable of roleplaying can metagame. A character that has yet to be created cannot metagame, nor can a situation.