so of course there is the asking for random perception checks. I also sent my players to explore some ruins that appeared in LA, and left my copy of "Parlanth" laying around, but no body feel for it. What have you guys done?

Well, usually I would just throw a mob of drunk Humanis Policlubbers (Like there are many sober ones!) at them...

...

Oh, wrong Meta! Sorry.

Doing an entire campaign in Chicago while having Bug City lying around.
Some kind of survival horror ambiance...
Using all sort of creepy critters/spirits, but not even ONE insect spirit.

The best part was the couple of time they thought seeing insect spirits and bought massive amounts of insecticide/napalm...

I guess the time I ran a couple of sessions that involved "a tall man with burning eyes", "an old family from Eastern Europe, that died out 200 years ago", "a heavy accent", unusual strength and "an old family home near a graveyard"...
...All seemed to infer something Vampiric, which they tooled up for.

And wasn't.


Or having Dr Herbert West in charge of a medical facility, which seemed to make them especially nervous, would count.

I just try and keep those things that'll usually get someone's hackles up (a bunch of gangers across the street talking shit, etc) occurring on a regular basis. When something like that actually turns into something, it's unexpected.

Occasionally, of course, one of the PC's will go winging off-course at the scenery that they think is about to be a problem. "What the hell are you doing?" over the team PAN from one of the other guys usually gets 'em back on track.

Using polite stealth NPC's against the group is usually enough to make gamers want to tear their hair out without killing them

"You see this bright flash and an unpleasant current of electricity runs through your body."

"Son of a BITCH! I hit him back!"

"Roll Perception..."

Reminds me of a joke scenario I'd written on a forum. It took place in Switzerland where the PC had to investigate about a very powerful and influential man. During the investigation they'd learn, among other things, that he came from Romania, that he had a very pale skin and a lot of other rumors which seem to indicate he's a vampire. The PC were finally led to some old catacombs where the guy was supposed to be. The catacombs are a really creepy place with some bass sounds resonating from time to time. If the PC follow the sounds, they finally find some guards with masks guarding a door. There are loud thumping sounds coming out from the door. If the PC wants in, the guards ask if they're the guys for tonight's event and let them enter if they say they do. The guards slowly open the door... to a metahuman-friendly gay club.

To get back on topic, one of the way I like to mess with meta-gamer on a rule standpoint is to mess up with magic (magic and spirits don't always follow the rules) or more generally applying common sense and story elements to the rules (for example shooting a heavy pistols with a wounded arm/hand is likely to lead to more trouble than just a -1/-2 modifier to the dice pool).

Maybe you know the "holy cow" from Knights of the Diner Table? Describe something in detail that is just a diversion. If it is detailed it has to be important.

Enhance that by combining it with Shrikes idea, if you give details on the third ganger in the fifth random encounter, but not for any other ganger, that one has to be really important...

Metagaming is bad roleplaying. No karma for good roleplay. By the book.

Knowing and using the rules is not metagaming. The rules not being consistent is bad GMing and is the GM metagaming to me but unfortunately there are no rules against bad GMing. Or rather, one particular rule supports bad GMing.

Oh and always have a list of names to avoid giving away important PC... and look at it for important PC as well.

Knowing and using the rules is not metagaming, abusing them can be. I mean, for me it's ok for the player to say "I send my Steel Lynx here, its hardened armor is too high for the light pistols to get past it." because the character is probably aware of that. But it's not ok to say (in SR3) "I do this because even if I get a +1 TN modifier, the TN just goes from 6 to 7 which is the same thing." since the player is in this case abusing a rule-only situation and there's no way his character could think that (except maybe if he lives in toturi's SR3 world).

half the things people mentioned in this thread just seem like "ways to be a bitchy GM," not ways to mess with metagamers.

meta-gaming usually comes about anyways through especially bad GMing. if you explain a single red herring object in detail to the players, of course they're going to pay more attention to it. why do you look at an item in detail in real life? because it's important for some reason. likewise, if i pick up a pistol and aim it at various things different sizes and distances away, i am going to have a rough idea of what i can hit with it and what i cannot.

in a roleplaying game, the rules are the physics of the world; to say that metagaming is bad is like saying that understanding how acceleration and friction work is bad. if you just randomly change the way things happen ("magic is unpredictable," *whine*whine*), bear in mind that your players are probably just going to get pissed off and feel like you are singling them out. if i've been casting an invisibility spell say once every two weeks for the past eight years, there had better be a DAMNED good reason that it's suddenly not working the way it used to, besides just GM whim.

GM's shouldn't mess with metagamers, they should strive to create a more realistic gaming environment for their players where the physics of the world take a back seat to underlying framework on which it operates.

Hmmm
It seems we may have a difference of opinion to what "meta-gaming" means.

The "meta" part indicates it refers to something relating to itself, or something referring to something more (metahuman, for instance).

Using meta to complain that someone is providing info, and someone else interpers that wrong is incorrect.
any more than someone in the realworld not providing full information is "meta".

Having characters refer to bonuses and basing their actions on that info is "meta", using info about the game to make decisions in the game.

But then, many players design and build their characters using such "meta" behaviour.

meta is when they say 'he wont kill us all off in a TPK, lets just go in the front door'.

the way to stop this, obviously, is to do something WORSE than a TPK.

I think the classic example of "Meta" gaming, is a player assuming there won't be any more fights for the characters because they just had the climactic fight, and the story has reached its logical end, or because the last fight was hard so the GM probably won't hit them again until they have time to rest. I get this most often in D&D, where players tend to assume there can really only be one "random encounter" during travel a day.

Best way to mess with this perception is to have the runners stop at a stuffer shack on the way back from a succesful run, to pick up some first aid materials, and stumble into a robbery or something like that. If used sparingly, it can be pretty unexpected.

I agree with that.



That's a way to consider it. That's something I'd accept in some games, up to an extent. But personally in Shadowrun I tend to consider that rules are a way to model the real world, (and the BBB seems to agree with me on this).
I don't say that it's wrong or bad to consider that if the rules say that a bike ramming into a train will destroy the train then in the game's world it happens this way. I just say that it's not the only good/right way to consider things.



IIRC it's mentionned in the BBB or Street Magic and I'm pretty sure it's written that spirits (or paracritters maybe) shouldn't always have the same powers to surprise players and give magic that unpredictable feeling. Of course, it has to be done well enough and shouldn't be done just to torment the players.

Recently, Shiloh abused an Earth Elemental: used it to tamp some explosives. The next session, he tried to summon up spirit and rolled really badly. No botch, but no net successes either. Retry was the same, and the ref said I got the feeling the Spirits were on strike. When the Run was done, I made the time to make up with the Spirits, but I didn't even bother trying any more summons: they weren't going to work cos of uppitiness... A bit of a ball-ache, but it added some colour to the game, and seemed entirely reasonable to run with what the dice were saying.

Most of the time, though, absent whacky background count effects, spells should be spells and spirits you've summoned before should be the same...

The most common meta-gaming behaviour by players is when the GM asks for a perception check, the players fail the roll, and then have their character's be extra cautious "just because". Or searching the area an extra time because they have a feeling something is there.

Another example would be the GM asking what security precautions the PCs are taking for their base, and the players begin to describe incredibly complicated and paranoid traps, which they've never before employed.

The only way to get around that is to fairly regularly call for perception checks when there's nothing there, and to ask about security precautions every time they hole up somewhere.

My players are actually pretty good about that kind of thing though. A few sessions ago the mage encountered a couple of spirits of man on the astral. The face was petrified when his glow moss began to react, despite knowing OOC that the spirits were there. When the mage came back to his body, and in his excitement described them to the rest of the party as earth spirits the groups wireless comm net became alive with chatter and fears. The mage then promptly broke his own PAN with a gremlins induced glitch, and was thus unable to answer any of the PCs questions. While the players knew what spirits of man were capable of, they still took the IC opportunity to wind each other up with what their particular character thought spirits were capable of. We all had a good laugh.

Leave out sourcebooks like Corporate Boardroom (or whatever the corp politics one is), then run Renraku shutdown.

I leave my college psychology text book on the table. Its enough to at least make 'em wonder.

leave BOTH those books sitting out on your table while you run a game. that is enough to make any hardened meta-gamer nearly soil himself. flip through each of them occasionally just for show.

Ditto on Ryu's idea. Make the unimportant seem important by going into hideous amounts of detail about the most mundane thing or give LOTS of irrelevant background detail. I'm notorious for describing in intimate detail the Seattle sidewalks but give almost nothing on the Chimera hitman about to shoot my runners in the heads.

Eh, while amusing, I don't count "leaving clues that the bad guy might be a vampire so the players gear up to fight a vampire, only to find it's not a vampire at all" to be meta-gaming.

The characters are merely operating with the information they are given. It's not unreasonable for the characters to know at least legends about vampires. Or to prepare to fight a vampire if given clues that there might be one.

I count meta-gaming as players taking actions based on information their characters do not possess.

Like knowing for certain that a friend won't lose that last box of health until the end of the next turn, and delaying til just before then to bother aiding said friend. This would be using the rules to meta-game, as the CHARACTER shouldn't know exactly when his friend might die.

Or more related, a player having his character gear up to fight a vampire, not because he's received any clues that the opponent might be one, but because the player knows the GM likes vampires. This would be using out-of-game knowledge to affect in-game actions.


-karma

Yes that's why I followed my summary with "to get back on topic".
Actually in that particular case, the players could have used meta-gaming to infer that the place in the catacombs was a gay club if they had seen Quarter to Two Before Jesus Christ.

I find that the most common meta-gaming is unintentionally forgetting who can talk to who. I find it's even worse now that every team has their own wireless network (though, we were all pretty connected in other editions, too). It's easy to forget that you can't hear your commlink if you're astrally projecting. Or that you can't talk through it. Playing a shaman, I'm guilty as hell of this. I'll be like "Holy crap, there's a cybermonster in this room!" Everybody will already know, because they just heard the GM tell me. But the GM wasn't telling their characters, and my character couldn't tell their characters. I'm a douche-bag, I guess is the point.

The favorite time I've messed with metagamers wasn't to punish them, but just to try something new. We were playing Call of Cthulhu, and one of the characters (new to the game) thought it would be a nifty idea to summon a "teacher" to help him learn arcane secrets. We walked back inside (with that game, there's lots of private whisperings with the GM on the porch), and I turned off the music so everyone would get real quiet. Then I dropped a retcon on them by telling them that Nyarlathotep was coming to town to do a lecture series, and that they had always known this was about to happen. I figured that in that game, the way magic works, it often tears apart the fabric of the universe, so almost anything is fair game. It was almost anti-metagaming, because it meant that the characters (at least at one point) had knowledge that the players didn't. It was fun to sort of challenge one of the conventions of roleplaying, where once something's happened, it's happened, yet do it in a fair, organic way. Everybody had a blast. Unfortunately, one of the members of the group was so impressed by it, he started using retcons in other games, to tie up loose ends. Like if someone should logically have opted for a piece of equipment that's only in Arsenal, yet made their character before Arsenal came out, this guy will retcon the character so they have that piece of equipment. Or if he forgets to tell us some part of the mission, he'll retcon it. So far it hasn't caused any problems, but I meant for the retcon to be a one-time thing, so it would be shocking and world-shaking (it was Nyarlathotep, for Zangief's sake!)

I encourage metagaming. I don't know why people get so upset about it. By metagaming, in this context, I mean having the players choose what their characters do based in part on the fact that they are playing a game and creating a story. Sometimes, the thing that makes the most sense to do realistically makes for terrible story. I want my players to say "OK, my character has no way of knowing this, but I do, so in the interest of savign us some time, he's going to "randomly" choose to go left." I want them to say "that NPC is obviously important because the GM went into great detail about him." I went into great detail for the express purpose of letting them know. I only have 4 hours to get this adventure over with, i don't have time for them to pretend they don't know what to do next.

Hell, I metagame in real life. By which I mean I make decisions as if I were a character in a game. Try it sometime, it's fun.

If I want to get to the point where I can reliably get away with attacking police officers, I first need to level up by breaking into a school and grinding on some 8 year olds.

What if you want to provide some surprises for a group of efficient meta-gamers? And I´m not speaking of the punishing kind of surprise. They think about that group of gangers for a moment, instead of thinking "random encounter". If you want to get them off that track, say something along the lines "while your intention is diverted, your target..."

Anything from popular entertainment, especially recurring classics, it is probable that the characters will know it, from remakes if not from the originals.

The best way to deal with metagaming is to simply point it out and, if it continues, to roll with it. Metagame yourself as GM. It is absurdly powerful.

Of course, GM metagaming just means that the players will have to metagame more which inevitably escalated to a No Fourth Wall game. This eventually escalates into a game-within-a-game in which the GM and the players control characters based on themselves who control their Shadowrun characters. But that can be fun.

Eh, it's more along the lines of "you know, taxes are quite easy when you think about them as your character sheet for the year. I think I'll twink my insurance forms next."

Also, when in doubt about what to do, I usually choose the course of action that would make the most sense if my life were a movie. "hmm, I missed the bus. Should I wait patiently for the next one, or should I run through a complex urban environment to try to beat it to the next stop?"