Ataraxia wrote:The only real way to reduce metagaming is for players to avoid giving away too much OOCly.
I agree and disagree with this, in as much as - yes - if it's
possible to avoid giving away metagame information then, for sure, don't go flaunting it. However, in the case of Evil characters, there are yet to be many active at one given time. Perhaps one or two, or as the server has had in at least one case, a group concept.
Now, in most instances, if something suspicious happens people are almost always aware OOCly of whether not it happened because of a DM event, because if anyone so much as catches as whisper of an event it spreads across the server like wildfire, either because of people sending Tells to each other or because of a post announcing the event on the forums.
And if people know it's not a DM event, every eye turns to 1.) the new folk in town or 2.) anyone even remotely suspicious, IC or OOC. As people we are inquisitive, we want to know all the juicy gossip. It's natural. But not very healthy for others' roleplay if we can't stop that affecting the way we treat their characters IC.
But I agree with your TL;DR / the rest of what you said. It has no downsides, but it won't make much impact on metagaming. I'm not exactly arguing against it, but if it is currently difficult to implement for the admins then for now it's best to simply look at what can be done in the feature's absence.
Poisonous wrote:Personally, I always find it better to avoid sharing metagame-able information. We can all say we won't use that information, but we're all human..
..I feel that proclamations of "we're all above metagaming, right guys?" aren't conductive to less metagaming, they just encourage oversharing..
The mindset of 'but I'm human' is not conducive to the abolition of metagaming, either. People can make every excuse under the Sun as to why a player's character is too obvious or too subtle - and by too subtle I mean that the characters in question aren't doing anything 'Evil' therefore how can they justify that alignment.
A genuinely, well-rounded Evil character tends to be defined by selfishness and morally questionable actions. They don't have to be selfish 24/7, they don't have to avoid being helpful at times and they don't have to be doing anything shady all the time. Some can be very subtle, but given the sparsity of Evil-aligned characters on the server, even the subtle Evils
have to drop some hints amongst the Good or else be questioned by the DMs as to how their Evil alignment is justified. I have seen this happen.
No-one is above metagaming, it's an exceptionally difficult thing to avoid, but if anyones goal is to improve their RP then the questions in regards to metagaming that they need to ask - for anything, not just sussing out Evil characters - are these:
1.) Would my character realistically learn [x] information?
2.) Is my character honestly smart enough to figure [x] out?
3.) Am I using things I'm privy to OOCly to influence my character's actions here?
This is what can be done to improve our own roleplay, without relying on other people to avoid sharing OOC information. After all, that OOC information may be thrown around by someone else who figured it out themself, or who had to be made aware of it for a specific IC reason. Or it may just be made known by accident. Having OOC information is not valid excuse for a metagaming free-for-all.