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 →