[UA] Four Modes of Play

[James O'Rance]

Royal Minister of Stuff <yokeltania at yahoo.com> said:

 >>>Thanks for this post.  I'm not on many newsgroups and this just sparks 
my brain looking at it.<<<

rec.games.frp.advocacy has some very theoretical discussions about 
roleplaying. Some of the threads are so filled with jargon as to be 
incomprehensible to the casual reader ("reified genre conventions" for 
example). However, modes of playing seemed relevant to what CHad was worried 
about.

 >>>I wonder, what do you consider "metagaming?"<<<

Generally, metagming is when players consider issues that their PCs are not 
aware of when making PC decisions.

metagaming can be constructive or selfish. For example, when a player 
decides to involve other PCs in a campaign subplot, he's making this 
decision so that other players can be involved and he won't take too much 
time all for himself. That's constructive metagaming; his PC might not have 
had a strong reason to involve the other PCs.

On the other hand, using player knowledge of a setting to gain some 
advantage for a PC is selfish metagaming.

Every campaign has metagaming; it's just a matter of how you use it.

Cheers,

James O’Rance
“Divine being creates petting zoo. It gets out of hand.”
- The Bible (summarised by John W. Mangrum)

http://www.geocities.com/dragon-dreamer/




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