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Anonymous 09/01/09(Tue)07:03 No.5677063
I recall a group almost ten years ago where “THAT GUY” was a relatively new player to our group and we’d agreed the game was going to be about mid-high fantasy D&D heroics - So he shows up with this drunken old man lout of a fighter. Meanwhile we’re all playing young kind of weeaboo anime hero types.
We tolerated him and how often he’d talk about how drunk, smelly, and generally obnoxious his character was. He would use metagame knowledge to make fun of our characters in character, laughing at us when we’d get knocked out, calling us cowards when we failed our fear checks, and the DM would take pity on us and just kind of give us “let it slide” looks and let us take rerolls.
We’d bitch about it between sessions and we sort of grew to hate the guy as a player; His character would go into long diatribes about dungeons and gold and how useless we were and we’d get into hour long arguments where the DM would constantly have to remind us all to “keep it in IC.” Anyway this campaign goes on for at least a year, and the storyline is kind of climaxing and a DMNPC gets kidnapped, so after another argument session we get convinced by “THAT GUY” to take a suicide mission and storm a castle, and he’s basically yelling at us IRL we have to do it.
Anonymous 09/01/09(Tue)07:03 No.5677068
5677063
So when we agree, he leaves the room with the DM for a few minutes, and we assume this is all some metaplot how he’s going to fuck us over and steal our shit. They come back in as if nothing had happened. Session continues but we’re all on guard, assuming something is up. We storm the castle or whatever, and have a lot of fun, not really noticing that this guy has stopped being so obnoxious. He hasn’t once mentioned how his character reeks of whiskey or onions or whatever, though he wastes a good five minutes explaining how his character shaved his beard. Whatever, we just assume the DM talked to him about how it was annoying us. Epic battles ensue and Fast forward to face off with the BBEG, some Lich thing, and the fight isnt going so well.
We’re getting spanked, our Cleric is down, and Mr. Fighter has a haste and out of nowhere he goes, “I rush to Cedric (the Cleric) and slap him ‘GET UP YOU COWARD’.” At this point I groan but the DM is like “Cedric, you’re back up with XX HP.” Then Mr. “Fighter” goes, “I turn to the Lich and I smite him.” And suddenly it clicked for all of us.
Fucker had been playing a Paladin the entire time. His insults were his lay-on-hands and calling us out as cowards were his Anti-fear aura. He wasn’t “That Guy,” *we* were “that guy” and we’d just been absolutely out roleplayed for almost a year.
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The payoff was funny but I really don’t think it was worth a year of abrasive annoyance. If the secret paladin and the DM had just been up front from the beginning and made it obvious that the others were getting healed, feeling inspired, etc so that the other players could figure out what was going on sooner it still would have been funny and everybody else wouldn’t have spent a year of gaming pissed off.
This is where restrictive definitions of metagaming detract from the fun of the game. Insisting that “your characters don’t know he’s really a paladin so the DM shouldn’t even bother telling you what the effects he’s buffing/healing you with are” is just BS. Maybe draw out the irritation for most of one session for the sake of a punchline but after that simply knowing that the guy is roleplaying as an abrasive ass rather than actually being an abrasive ass would allow most players to actually enjoy the experience and play along rather than getting constantly ticked off.
There’s also the matter of the PCs, completely in character, not noticing that they’re being healed or being emotionally bolstered against fear. Maybe once or twice in the heat of battle, but eventually there should be cases of “I just know I took a gash in my side there, I can see blood on my clothing, but the wound is closed.” Presumably characters who live in a world where paladins exist would at least know what paladins are and some of what they can do even if they don’t have previous direct personal experience with them. To insist that players should pretend their characters are ignorant is like telling them they aren’t allowed to ask the person in robes and a pointy hat with an ornate staff and an extremely emotive and capable cat following them around if they can cast fireball because they aren’t a wizard, haven’t met any wizards, and clearly have never heard stories of people matching this person’s description making things explode by pointing at them.
Metagaming is, by it’s simplest definition, any behavior that involves acknowledging that you are playing a game. Pretending that fundamental mechanics (like healing or giving advantage against fear saves) don’t exists is just an unnecessary hassle that overcomplicates things and encourages confusion. When you have to stop and think about how to describe something without using game terms, like “I feel as if two more hits like that last one could incapacitate me” rather than just saying “Crap, I’m down to 15 hp,” that breaks immersion for the sake of…not breaking immersion. The PCs should have had plenty of chances to realize what the paladin was doing, and figuring that out much earlier would have made the game a lot more fun for everybody for a long time.