Editing Metagame (section)

==Details==
Everyone who plays traditional and/or board games at all but the MOST casual of levels has probably experienced metagaming at some point; you've probably experienced it when your sleazy uncle was being [[That Guy]] while playing [[Monopoly]] during a family get-together.

Crafty metagaming is often hard to spot: doing a number of small but frustrating things during a game of [[Warhammer 40000]] can make your opponent impatient and flustered, causing them to miss rules or skip moving units that would otherwise win them the game. The entire idea behind the "poker face" is rooted in metagaming. An example from [[video games]] would be counter-picking: instead of selecting a character, faction, equipment and/or even stage based on the game's internal balance, a player picks their stuff based on how they expect the opponent to play. It's not a mechanic within the core gameplay, but knowing your opponent as a person (and thus, their weaknesses, such as a tendency to [[dakka|beeline for the minigun pickup]] or [[dwarf|get too drunk to play right by game 3]]) is important to doing well in 1v1 games like fighters or arena shooters, while predictability on your part is a weakness in itself.

Some people find metagaming to be quite fun when not used for an in-game advantage, but instead to [[troll]] [[that guy|other players]] (e.g. "I know what you did last summer...").

The thing about metagaming is that '''''any''''' game-direct mechanics that are visible to players gives you the ability (and often the encouragement) to metagame, in a sense - as a player, you will probably have a lot of knowledge about how different classes and dice pools interact, and so to use your limited actions to your best advantage (or at least not to attempt things that are very unlikely). Only the most dickish of play groups would call this real metagaming. But it's a fine line between rational decision making and horribly abusing your knowledge of things your characters had no possible way to know about. If, for example, you happen to know than an NPC is statted in the book and you can easily kill him, and use that to inform your role playing to threaten or even kill him when he is presented as a hard ass you don't fuck with, that would be metagaming. Another example is a seasoned gamer facing a Beholder, even if the character has never seen one of the multi eyed things before, the player knows exactly what he's facing against. But at the same time that's just an inevitable consequence of playing a lot of D&D not of any nefariousness at work and not using that knowledge can be tricky. It's a complex concept really.