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. Continue reading Metagaming in Role-Playing Games→
A bit over four years ago, I clicked on the only facebook banner ad that I have ever clicked on. It took me to the website of a podcast called Gamerstable. It had only a couple of episodes (one called Episode 0), but they seemed to know what they were doing. Sound quality was great, they managed to pull off a conversational style without walking all over each other or rambling for hours, and, above all, it was about role-playing.
In a very real way, Gamerstable picked up where the Escape Artists podcasts (Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Pod Castle) left off. Since I was no longer bussing into work, I didn’t have as much time to focus-listen to podcasts. Instead of being able to listen to a podcast on the bus and focus on nothing else, I was listening to podcasts while I worked where I had to be able to focus on what I was doing. Gamerstable fit this paradigm much better as I could listen to the conversation, but if I missed snatches of the conversation because of my work, I could still follow the remainder of the podcast. Continue reading Gamerstable→
Thoughts are stripped of their texture to form words that they might be colored by the mind of another.
