rpanons | Friends don't let friends TFLN

Friends don't let friends TFLN

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what does this mean
can you give an example?

AYRT

So for example, say that there's a Christmas party and Alice doesn't want to attend. The real reason is that her mom died on Christmas, but there are plenty of other reasons why she might not want to go (she's beefing with the host, already busy, under the weather, not a party person, etc.) Alice says that she's not going to the Christmas party. Bob replies with something like "I don't blame you, I wouldn't go to a Thanksgiving party because my dad died on Thanksgiving."

That's absolutely metagaming. But if you bring it up to Bob's HMD, the player will most likely say something like "oh, well Bob would naturally think about dead parents because of his own experience!" when that's still not the first leap most people would go to (source: that's happened to me before.)

You've also got things like your Sherlock Holmes or your FBI profiler types who'll jump to conclusions about your characters but won't 'show the work,' so to speak. If you give a tag that's something like "Sherlock notices that Alice has been super depressed recently and mentioned that the one year anniversary of her mom's death is coming up, that might be why she's not attending the Christmas party," I'd view that as an actual deduction and a reasonable ic leap of logic. But more often than not, the tags are something like "Sherlock knows that Alice is bummed because her mom died" which how tf does he know that?

this depends on which sherlock they're playing, to be fair. Actual canonical sherlock holmes would need to do some kind of deduction to figure that out, but BBC Sherlock from the self-titled show is actually literally magic and can just know things for no reason because the writers hate you.

TBH playing characters like that the player needs to take some responsibility and play nicely with others even if their character is a borderline telepathic deducer of others' motivations and intent. In other words nerf where appropriate and show your work.

That's absolutely metagaming.

it's not though?? if bob has an ic reason to say what he does then why should the player not have him say it just because it coincidentally matches the other character's background? i would read that as a very natural progression in a conversation if bob wants to share that detail.

imo metagaming would be something like bob saying "do you have a problem with christmas because of your family?"

i agree that some players have issues with metagaming but if this is the bar you've set for it then i'm not surprised you're seeing it everywhere.

I disagree. The "I don't blame you" indicates more knowledge to the other character's reasoning than is being given, especially when continuing with "I wouldn't go to Thanksgiving because of my dad died then". That definitely gives the impression that they think the reason is similar. What if the reason is their car broke down? Wouldn't then the "I don't blame you" come across really stupid?

i think depending on the other context clues in the tag, you could icly infer that the reason wasnt circumstantial. sure, probably not with just the dialogue, but who writes tags that way? there's probably more for the character to react to than just that, alice probably didnt say this while staring directly into bob's eyes with her hands glued to her sides

i think if there was enough there to infer, it would have been fine if bob left it at "i dont blame you" but i also have the radical and brave take that a smidge of metagaming is ok sometimes and actually good in some situations for sowing future cr seeds because it allows you to icly react in a way that builds a satisfying narrative

I do have to agree on the last point. Anything to guide threads out of boring small talk and “hi how are you”s

agreed. oftentimes you can have viable ic reactions a, b, and c to the same tag, and if it's metagaming to pick the option that's maybe a bit less safe but still reasonably inferrable and more importantly is most likely to sow the seeds of interesting cr or conversation then fine, let's use a bit of ooc knowledge to pick which reaction to go with.

ddda but agreed x3, this is so real. i just cannot handle bland intro smalltalk chatter for more than a handful of tags, and if i know our characters have some common points that might synergize in a neat way i wanna get that unearthed and rolling asap before we both flake out of boredom. if it's a bit too contrived or coincidental sometimes then sue me for not realizing we have to prioritize complete conversational realism over fun in rp now ig

+1 more da here. It really makes me take these types of complaint threads with a grain of salt. I guess one man's hook is another man's metagaming but nothing kills my interest in CR faster than trying to leave hints for the other player to pick up of things our characters could have in common or directions for the thread to go and then getting them ignored or worse, some passagg metatext shooting it down.

+1

this is the kind of metagaming that's good, actually. it's not so contrived as to be unrealistic in context and it also sets up a foundation for cr.

+1

I don't see why we gotta do RP in "hard mode" where we have to pretend that some reactions that could easily work to connect the characters aren't there.

theres a non-negligible number of us who are constantly monitoring themselves for any "undesirable" behaviours, and they expect others to do the same and will feel personally wronged when they dont and someone idk, bends things a bit to icly infer something they know ooc to be true for a fun thread that diverts from something boring and dry and safe

what they dont realize is the standards they set for themselves are ridiculous and are also choking the fun out of their tags because theyre self-monitoring so hard they dont let anything that looks like fun in

I know this is kinda crazy but maybe RP is NOT real life and you don't have to play as if it were and it's okay to bend things a bit for the sake of making it more interesting than "hi how are you".

if i know a casual acquaintance's parent died on christmas a few years ago, and they say they aren't going to a christmas party this year and i say "i get it, i wouldn't want to go to a christmas party either" because i'm assuming it's about grief, but it turns out they've moved on and it's just that their car broke down, i wasn't METAGAMING this person. i was just making an assumption that turned out to be untrue. it might be awkward but not "really stupid"

this is the strangest discussion about metagaming we've had in a while..

yeah this

characters can make assumptions, characters can go out on limbs without necessarily knowing the truth 100% for realsies

and sometimes they can be wrong! it makes for interesting conversation if you let it happen and roll with it

da but they can also be right and the other character can lie because they dont want to talk about it

theres tons of ways to go and i think that so many rpers just dont seem to consider anything but the obvious is indicative of the way larger and recent issue with media literacy and an inability to know when fiction is lying to you. i find a lot of people, myself included, just dont have the capacity to recognize when a character is saying something dishonestly sometimes, or just believes something that is wrong

ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-08 16:21 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-08 20:26 (UTC) - Expand

+1

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-08 20:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-08 20:47 (UTC) - Expand

Re: ayrt

(Anonymous) - 2024-07-09 03:20 (UTC) - Expand

Agreed in general but I thought the entire point of this scenario was that you would NOT know about the death of the parent years ago, making it a much stranger thing to assume about the situation.

Yeah, I'm gonna agree that it's metagaming, but the player/character & seeing more of this behavior would really be the deciding factor in what gets me annoyed about it.

For instance, if your character chooses to not say anything about their own loss, but Possible Metagamer doesn't let the subject drop, hinting in the meta text that "PM doesn't believe them because they just sense [Character's] smiling is a facade" then yeah, they can stop that shit.

A player in a previous game did that soft empathic metagamer shtick all the time, despite playing a character that was really terrible at reading other people. They wanted him to be everyone's instant best buddy and confidant, and if another character responded to him with suspicion or disinterest, the player would "jokingly" whine OOCly about it.

So yeah, if it's just a one off, then whatever, but some players who rely on this constantly just ruin it for everyone else who isn't weird.

For example, a player knows that Character X is evil because they've watched the series X is from. Their character, B, does not, though they can be a little bit suspicious of people. X has done nothing so far in-game that most people would categorize as actually evil or wrong and has, at most, been kind of unpleasant. However, B is telling other characters "I don't trust X and you shouldn't either! X is a bad guy, I just know it! X is totally evil!" despite having no reason to believe this.

That player is using OOC knowledge in an in-character way and going "Well, B is naturally suspicious of people! Of course they would say X is evil!" to pretend they aren't metagaming.

op already gave an example of what theyre talking about and it was nothing like this

Looked back and missed the AYRT in that message, my bad.

so it's just another term for infomodding, then?

i get that confused with "powerplaying"

Infomodding is a type of metagaming, but not all metagaming is infomodding

It is the most likely kind for you to come across in dwrp though since we aren't exactly mechanics heavy

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Friends don't let friends TFLN

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