May 13, 2019, 5:00 PM

@faraday said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

Or you accept that metagaming is not a problem but a natural part of the gaming experience, and as long as it's not being used unfairly (which is in the eye of the beholder of course) does no harm at all. Again, it comes down to what kind of game you're trying to run

Aaaaaaabsolutely. Everyone from the GMs to the players needs to be in sync not only with the theme, but with what kind of show it is.

I use this analogy a lot when it comes to WoD: Some people play The Strain. Some play True Blood. Some play Buffy.

For as long as I've played games with other players that involve choices and ambitions (so, excluding most D&D/Warhammer Quest dungeon crawls) I have always had moments where players act on OOC information. There may be an invisible guy in the corner of the room and said metagamer's PC will suddenly feel the need to climb over garbage to wave a stick around that corner of the room. I may ask "why is your character doing this, because YOU know Oocly there's an invisible guy there, but your character doesn't," and they'll say something like "Oh, my PC does this to other people so they're always paranoid about shoppers."

"But just that corner?"
"Yes...just that corner."
"Ooooooookay."

Sometimes it's a fight that isn't worth it, but it's a fight I think is important to keep things fair for everyone. For someone to win, someone else may have to fail.

This is very much so a WoD problem, as WoD highly involves secrets between PCs and powers that leverage social rolls and espionage that require players to relent agency over their PCs due to results, which is not popular in mushing.