The guys over at Gamerstable recently did an episode on Metagaming. To give a bit of an introduction, my definition of metagaming is: Using player knowledge to guide character action. For example, as a player, I know the enemy that my character is fighting is a werewolf (even though my character has never seen or heard of one) and I know that werewolves are weak to silver (even though my character doesn’t know this), and so my character attacks his enemy with a silver weapon. This is metagaming, and, in particular, it’s using player knowledge to gain an advantage that a character wouldn’t have.

The gamerstable crew was pretty critical of metagaming, and, I’ll admit, there are lots of ways that metagaming can be bad for a role-playing game. However, in my experience as a GM, I have found that metagaming can be a much more positive force on the game, so I want to talk about it a bit more here.

First, I think it’s the responsibility of the GM to metagame. While the Gamerstable crew hinted at this, they didn’t actually state it explicitly. If the GM is using his knowledge of the players at his gaming group to change the adventure on-the-fly, he is metagaming. However, this is almost always considered a good thing and the right way to GM. For example, with my gaming group, I know that I can get the attention of my entire gaming group by making an oblique reference to Keyser Söze or Verbal Kint. In a very real sense, I’ve manipulated the characters in my game by using what my players know.

Another situation where metagaming has had a very positive impact on my game is when I have a group of new players with a single veteran role-player. In this case, it made the game significantly better to have someone who knew my storytelling style and use that to help immerse the other players. Similarly, having a player that is a natural leader use that to keep the game on track, even if they are not the party leader, can be very handy – it keeps things moving and makes sure that the party isn’t suffering unnecessary downtime due to analysis paralysis.

Finally, I really believe in empowering my players to tell the story with me, and the best way I have found to do that is to give them the responsibility to metagame for good – just as I do as the GM. In particular, since I play a lot of story-based games, this is precisely making the players responsible for the story. In my mind, trusting your players with the fate of the story is the same as trusting your players to metagame for good – if you can’t do that… …it’s not really cooperative storytelling.

A lot of these ideas have been in my mind for a large part of my GMing career, but they were formulated well by John Wick in his Play Dirty books. If you haven’t read them or checked out his videos on you tube, I highly recommend it.