The Blog of Roon

I hopped over to this worthwhile article on metagaming from Roll the Bones, and I’m glad I did. The article would be improved by additional thinking about when to metagame—which situations make for good metagaming and which don’t—but even without that it’s a thought-provoking read.

A curious thing not brought up in the metagaming article is that knowing something out of character can sometimes actually blind a player to obvious solutions. Devious GMs take note!

I know a couple-three things about the Grand Ellipse that Shirley doesn’t. One of them is what Vroomfondel’s yacht is doing while Vroomfondel is chugging across Russia. I’ve known this for quite some time, and it’s driven me barking mad because if Shirley knew he could incorporate it into his plans to foil Vroomfondel (who, we have recently learned, is rather eviller than basically goodhearted Shirley was willing to give him credit for).

It wasn’t until coming home on the bus Monday that I figured out that Shirley doesn’t actually need to know the piece of information that I know in order to foil Vroomfondel. The natural, logical assumption Shirley would make about the yacht will do just as nicely. I didn’t realize this, of course, because I was so focused on keeping my knowledge away from Shirley.

So if all goes well in Osaka, Vroomfondel should have yet another Shirley-inspired monkey wrench in his works. I am rubbing my hands together in anticipation. Whenever you’re ready, Li…

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2003 at 9:37 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.