Metagaming. It’s a conversation that we all need to have from time to time. Metagaming is any Out of Character discussion or planning with another player about In Character actions. Many of us have engaged in some type of metagaming at one point or another, but what we need to talk about is the difference between harmless metagaming and improper metagaming. Say you want to have a meeting with the Hierarch or the Prince. Normally you would just post a phone call or text in the communication forum and go from there, but because of scene limits they may not be able to have a scene for entirely OOC reasons. Harmless metagaming would be reaching out to the player in a private message or on discord and finding out if they have a scene slot available, or if they could hold a slot open for a meeting once one becomes available. This is technically metagaming because it involves an OOC discussion of IC actions, but it’s harmless metagaming because it does not involve defining or discussing in character actions or motivations. It only involves scheduling, which only comes up because of OOC scene limits.
Now let’s say that during that message determining availability you discuss the intent of the scene, even something as simple as saying you want to meet with the Prince to discuss a banishment. That’s when you starting crossing over from harmless metagaming to improper metagaming. To avoid this, the easy solution is to have that discussion about the intent of the meeting in character during the phone call or text conversation. It is perfectly fine to define what an intended meeting is about in character, but it is not okay to have that discussion out of character. This also means we want to encourage more scenes starting from a communication thread, instead of the players just going straight to the “show up at their office" thread. Now as we said, this kind of thing has been done by many people. We are not doing this to single out any one person, but we’ve noticed that this type of metagaming, the improper and potentially harmful kind, has started to become more and more prolific and thus more and more likely to damage the game. This post and the subsequent conversations on the matter are to place everyone on notice that we are strongly discouraging all improper metagaming and that we’ll start taking action if it doesn’t stop. Metagaming may seem innocuous. You think you’re just crafting stories and that it’s okay to discuss some direction for your scenes, or even to plan out your actions with other players. But metagaming has several unintended consequences:
1. It causes players not involved in the discussion to feel as if acts and discussions are being taken out of their hands. For example, if several players in a scene agree they are voting a certain way, before any in character discussion has even taken place, then for those left out it can feel as if they never had a choice at all, which is never fun. No one likes feeling like there are people planning against them, especially when it turns out it’s true
2. It can result in players purposely or accidentally reacting to information that their character should not know, because they gained insight through the OOC discussion. This doesn’t have to be as blatant as a character saying something that happened in a scene they weren’t in. This can be as simple as a player telling others out of character that their character would approve of a certain action, and then other players start doing that very thing without any in character discussion to support it
3. It can result in less interesting stories for roleplay, because the stories aren’t being created organically, they’re being manufactured by players. The essence of roleplay, such as with the World of Darkness, is to create stories together. But that requires that we each honestly react and interact with the actions of others, not ‘plan out the best story’.
Our job as staff is not to act like nuns, smacking your hands with rulers to stop any fun. Our job is to help the fun and creativity flow by preventing behavior that ruins the fun and creativity of others unreasonably. Metagaming, while it may seem simple, can have a damaging and lasting effect on a community and on roleplaying and we want to heavily discourage such behavior.
Please let us know if anyone needs any clarification. Thank you.
Sincerely,
The staff: Matrixchild Selena Steven Kelreth YumYumCrow Youngblood