JasonPogo wrote...
I just don't get the hate....
I think it's a holdover from the attitudes many people have in tabletop gaming. (Nor do I think it's fair to attribute this opinion to the devs--I have yet to see one criticize people for meta-gaming. They just take it into account when they're designing.)
I actually like meta-gaming quite a lot, in fact, I tend to run my tabletop games in such a way as to *encourage* it. I write up story interludes for my players where they learn about things their characters may not know, and have no means to know. Why? Because I've seen so many games fall apart when the GM is doing a bad job of conveying information strictly through direct interface with the players.
Unless you're intentionally running a mystery game, the characters ought to know way more about the world than the players do. Not necessarily about the inner workings of the world, but the characters ought to have a developed filtering mechanism for what is unusual and what isn't. The players have no such mechanism because their information all comes through the same channel--asking questions of the GM. It is INCREDIBLY easy for players to become completely deranged over some bit of information that they extracted by excessive questioning but that the characters would automatically dismiss as trivial and ordinary, and thus unimportant. So I use the meta-game knowledge to subtly direct my players attention toward what's actually relevant.
Some GM's don't like to do this--in fact, they have no problem with the game going off on a lengthy tangent about Syphrian weaving styles because their players have gotten fixated on the GM's description of a rug pattern. They might even find it amusing to turn this into the actual focus of the game. Some GM's (and some players) see this as an ad-libbing challenge, and it'll become a contest between the players asking ever more arcane questions and the GM struggling to be ever more wildly inventive.
Me, I see this as a waste of time. I do tabletop one night a week (and we frequently miss sessions--it's a small group and if someone gets sick or their car breaks down, we can't play) and we're lucky if we get to play for 2 1/2 hours. I don't have time for the rug-weaving if I ever want to get to the parts where I cleave vile caitiffs to the kine. I'm not saying the rug-weaving bits can't be cool, it's just that for me, they're not as consistently cool as the bits where I do some actual adventuring. So I make an effort to keep the focus.
It seems to work for my players--I've never, ever, not even ONCE received a complaint about this. In fact, I've received many compliments about how my worlds seem very alive, full of detail, and interesting. (Even when I'm making things up as I go--my players often tell me that they can't tell whether I've prepared or I haven't. Which is very flattering to my ego, of course.) I've even run games where people who usually play (and prefer to play) one-dimensional combat monsters have had lengthy discussions about the morals of this and the implications of that and have
insisted on gathering information, talking to people, and role-playing. We did a Shadowrun game where we were 4 sessions in before they had a single combat. Even then, the fight was nothing much, they rolled over it without effort, but they spent a long time ruminating over it and I think they even felt bad that they hadn't managed to avoid some killing.
Meta-gaming is not a
bad thing. It is a different stylistic approach that results in a different focus for the game. I find it actually
helps in producing a world where the players view NPC's (even nameless, faceless NPC's) as other people with motivations and interests and independent lives, because they get to see more sides than would just be available through direct playing. It is the difference between two dimensions and three.
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