SDN Worlds 4 Commentary Thread IV

[Dark Hellion]

Can I ask that no one one initiate any hostilities upon the MEH until I finish up my plot against them? I won't be attacking but I think it will give additional RP hooks for those assembling against CN to utilize.

How am I supposed to feel threatened by one nation a a time? The more the merrier.

You are seriously hopelessly retarded aren't you? I am going to be tying together a number of different posts from the story thread soon so that people will see what all the odd stuff I have been doing actually leads to. Since it is pertinent to an invasion of the MEH I would like to get a time to actually complete them before a unified task force makes you their bitch.

See, I have been using the story thread to tell a story. You could be doing so to instead of trying to metagame in the OoC thread all the fucking time.

[Shroom Man 777]

What do people mean by "metagame" anyway?

Uh oh 50 pages!

[Chaotic Neutral]

What do people mean by "metagame" anyway?

Cheating

[fgalkin]

Metagaming is not cheating. It's using OOC knowledge and rules lawyering rather than actual IC gaming. Spending more time on the wiki and the OOC threads than actually writing game posts. That sort of thing. It's gaming using OOC means, rather than IC means.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Shroom Man 777]

That's pretty lame. Rock Stronggo was right!

[Akhlut]

What do people mean by "metagame" anyway?

Uh oh 50 pages!

I'll use a D&D example, since that's what I'm most familiar with.

Say you're playing Bob the Barbarian, from the frozen plains of Hoth the North, and Bob, in character, shouldn't know shit about tropical monsters like Yuan-Ti (snake dudes). However, Bob's player, Erik, knows all about Yuan-Ti since he's read all the books, online errata, and shit like that. Erik then plays Bob as if he knew everything about the Yuan-Ti, despite Bob having no knowledge about anything south of the tundra, belonging to an isolationist culture, and being illiterate to boot.

Another example would be minmaxing everything all to hell, such as giving Bob the Barbarian nothing but strength, dexterity, and constitution, while completely shafting charisma and intelligence, while also not giving him any skills outside of combat ones.

So, metagaming is basically gaming the system to make a better outcome for your character at the expense of story immersion.

[Dark Hellion]

Ugh... Okay, let me break down metagaming. It has a lot of different definitions but basically it is the game of playing a game. It is about looking for out of game strategies, methods, etc. to improve the chance of winning in the game. For example, a poker player may bet differently at different tables because the players at another table might have a different level of skill or play style.

There is nothing inherently wrong with metagaming but how much is acceptable depends very much on the game. Primarily it depends upon things like information availability, the mechanics of the ruleset and the overall level of competition in a game. In STGODs metagaming is generally bad and often in a form of cheating because there is a lot more information that is publicly available than available in game, the ruleset is designed for flexibility instead of being mechanically robust and rigid and because the overall goal is cooperative instead of antagonistic.

Force Lords detection of Darkevilme's ship could be seen as an example of metagaming, but it wasn't that bad because really all it did was use improper information. There was no attempt to abuse the rule set and it clearly wasn't designed to give an overall competitive edge.

CN on the other hand has been attempting to weasel and rules lawyer all the time and has yet to make any large in character contributions that would require this.

[Simon_Jester]

For that matter, he's yet to produce any small in-character contributions either; he doesn't have any characters. Nor has he undertaken any actions of consequence other than "I exist and am annoying."

[Steve]

Okay, new thread time.