In a hypothetical situation, I want to destroy a castle's walls. To do so I came up with the idea to build a bomb a la Saruman in LOTR. Perhaps my character would have to dig around for records on bomb-making, search for the ingredients, and finally craft this device, as par the course for an RPG. However in retrospect my character might not even know such a thing exists in the first place. Certainly Theoden did not realize that his castle could be overcome by such a device, and made no precautions against it in LOTR. Thus, would undertaking this plan be considered metagaming because it came from knowledge that I knew, outside the game?
[RPG] Is it metagaming if I want to build a bomb
dnd-5emetagamingroleplaying
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OK, I don't have time to answer this as I want to. My background is in psychology, and I fell into role playing games when I turned 10 in 1976. So by the time I was in college, understanding where the term Roleplaying game really came from, I understood the critical nature of immersion, how it is the most important ingredient for game success.
And to be clear, the definition of immersion is to "Immerse oneself into the identity and Role of the part one is playing. To respond, as much as possible, as the person one is playing, not as oneself."
And before getting into the smaller details, I will dive right into the fact that the very system/game one chooses has a huge amount to do with the amount of Immersion.
Metagaming is the opposite of immersion. You use both terms, but I need to make that absolute definition from the beginning. This also means rules that encourage metagaming decrease the immersion in a game and therefore, decrease the main ingredient of a roleplaying game. The mechanics are called "Dissociated Mechanics", a term coined by Justin Alexander. This is very worth reading, because it gets into many of the larger picture issues with players being able to use in-game logic to see the world around them, as opposed to the rules forcing dissociation from in-game logic.
Once the players assume that rules are going to determine the content of an encounter or treasure (based on EL, or whatever) instead of what the environment or history of the area dictate, verisimilitude is lost.
Vreeg's Rules of Setting design are also heavily immersion related. My current campaign is 26 or so years old (started in '83). Building verisimilitude is a huge part of this.
Vreeg's first Rule of Setting Design
Make sure the ruleset you are using matches the setting and game you want to play, because the setting and game WILL eventually match the system.Corollary to Vreeg's First Rule
The proportion of rules given to a certain dimension of an RPG partially dictate what kind of game the rules will create. If 80% of the rulebook is written about thieves and the underworld, the game that is meant for is thieving. If 80% of the mechanics are based on combat, the game will revolve around combat.- Multiply this by 10 if the reward system is based in the same area as the preponderance of rules.
2nd Corollary
Character growth is the greatest reinforcer. The synthesis of pride in achievement with improvement in the character provides over 50% of the reinforcement in playing the game. Rules that involve these factors are the most powerful in the game.
Vreeg’s Second Rule of Setting Design
Consistency is the Handmaiden of Immersion and Verisimilitude. Keep good notes, and spend a little time after every creation to ‘connect the dots’. If you create a foodstuff or drink, make sure you note whether the bars or inns the players frequent stock it. Is it made locally, or is it imported? If so, where from? If locally made, is it exported?Vreeg's Third Rule of Setting Design
The World In Motion is critical for Immersion, so create 'event chains' that happen at all levels of design. The players need to feel like things will happen with or without them; they need to feel like they can affect the outcome, but event-chains need velocity, not just speed.Vreeg's Fourth Rule of Setting Design
Create motivated events and NPCs, this will invariably create motivated PCs. Things are not just happening, they happen because they matter to people (NPCs). There is no need to overact, just make sure that the settings and event-chains are motivated and that the PCs feel this.Vreeg's Fifth Rule of Setting Design
The Illusion of Preparedness is critical for immersion; allowing the players to see where things are improvised or changed reminds them to think outside the setting, removing them forcibly from immersion. Whenever the players can see the hand of the GM - even when the GM needs to change things in their favor - it removes them from the immersed position. (Cole, of the RPGsite, gets credit for the term).
Remember that part of immersion is the lack of feeling walls around and rails under the characters. This means that the players should not feel that there are things that their character cannot do solely because of the rules or the GM's mindset. The job of the GM is to enable roleplay, not to inhibit it. This also means the GM must be as immersed as the players, or more.
Another big-picture thing that may irk some folk who sell stuff is that published settings can hurt immersion. They don't destroy it; but when the players have a lot of knowledge about a setting that their character would not have, this increases the opportunity to use it, consciously or unconsciously. Similarly, if your setting has its own bestiary that the characters learn as they go along, or at least a lot of homebrew tweaks, the players get used to working with the in-house data and not trusting the published sources.
If you have done all of this larger-scope stuff, the smaller scope stuff becomes easier. As a GM with miles on the tires, I find that playing up the level of knowledge my NPCs might have and do not have helps keep the players in the same mindset. Players key heavily off the way the GM plays their NPCs. They won't do the funny voices or the mannerisms if the GM does not, and if the GM is particularly careful about what their NPCs know and don't know, especially verbally, the players emulate this.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook (1981, Gygax & Arneson), pg B60:
Your character doesn't know that
A player should not allow his or her character to act on information that character has no way of knowing (for example, attacking an NPC because the NPC killed a previous character run by the player, even though the NPC and current character have never met). If the players get careless about this the DM should remind them. The DM may, in addition, forbid certain actions to the characters involved. The DM should make it clear to the players before the adventure begins that characters may not act on information they don't have. It will save lots of time later.
In my experience (and I started playing in the 80's with the Basic Set referenced), it has always been bad form to use out-of-character information. Reading an adventure module or studying the Monster Manual just to get an edge was frowned upon.
"Metagaming" apparently originated in military/political theory (Wikipedia), via the work of Nigel Howard (Wikipedia), published in 1971. This original use of "metagame" doesn't seem to match the way we're using it in roleplaying, and I can't find a source for where it began to be applied to "using out-of-game knowledge in-game".
Wikipedia also has an article on metagaming in roleplaying. It may not add anything useful to this discussion, but I include it for completeness.
It's worth noting that not all game systems (or communities) consider metagaming to be a bad thing. Generally, this is when meta information is used to improve play (as in many storygames, where players may intentionally have characters make sub-optimal decisions to complicate the story in an interesting way), as opposed to the player gaining an advantage.
Best Answer
In this situation: if you have to ask, it's almost certainly meta-gaming.
This sounds flippant, but it is not. This could also be construed to apply to any meta-gaming question, but I do not intend it that way, I intend it for the narrow class of, "Is it meta-gaming to build X?" and closely related questions.
Meta-gaming, very tersely defined, is the inappropriate application of player knowledge to guide character actions.
In this case, the player knowledge is somewhere on the spectrum of, "There are chemicals that can be made to explode," and "the chemical formula of TNT is and can be made by the following process; see footnotes for procedures to avoid blowing up self." In other words, you the player know bombs exist. You might know a little or a lot about how to build them.
The desired character action is, "The character builds a functional bomb of some sort, by some process."
The thing that makes this sound meta-gaming is that there is no obvious and appropriate link between the character knowledge and the character action only between the player knowledge and the character action.
Conceivably there could be. We don't know much about this game setting. It could be a post-apocalyptic earth with legends of explosives. It could be the Guardians of the Flame universe, which was straight-up fantasy where conventional explosives worked. It could be some homebrew fantasy where dwarven miners are rumored to use such things. On the other hand, it could be homebrew fantasy where explosives just don't work by divine/GM fiat, period.
What causes me to think that this is meta-gaming, and what causes me to formulate the answer as "If you have to ask, it's probably meta-gaming," is that by the phrasing of your question you don't know, either. As you say:
If you're not sure where it is your character is getting an idea, it's probably coming from you the player, and not the character's interaction with the game world. That makes it meta-gaming in my book.
As an addendum, some level of meta-gaming is almost unavoidable. We as players have a rich and detailed first-hand knowledge of exactly one world (the real world) and probably shaky knowledges of other fictional worlds.
It's almost unavoidable to ask questions like, "Hey, does this world have gunpowder?" or "Does this world have xorns I could capture to eat the castle walls?" purely in order to efficiently sharpen our knowledge the game world we're playing in. But you can avoid going very far down those roads by asking your GM and then abiding by his or her answer.