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How do you fuckers feel about Table chatter/kibitzing at your RPG table? can a player make suggestions when his character isn't present in the scene? is that cheating/metagaming? Can a player make suggestions that his character wouldn't know? Say you encounter a puzzle that you, as a player, figure out but you're playing a half-orc barbarian with an INT of 6. Can you suggest an answer and just have whoever's playing the wizard be the one who "figures it out"? Or can players only declare actions that they themselves thought up?
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Ok, a little background. One player, Jordon, is playing a heretical beggar king in a solar system that's run by the church and their psychic supercomputer. Jordon's character wants to userp the church, and the past few sessions have been about him pissing them off left and right. Things came to a head and the Space Pope saddled up into his super battleship and started heading out to Jordon's personal fortress way out in the outskirts of the solar system: Salvation Forge.
So, we've got a space pope with a massively powerful battleship on it's way to the PC's home base in the system. Now, we know as players where we want this to go: eventually this is going to be open war between the church and the beggar king (Jordon's character). Immediately it occurs to us (at the table) that a great way to do that would to have the Space Pope open fire on a defenseless fortress chock full of refugees from the recent fighting. That'll get popular opinion on our side. So, out of character we decide we should enter the upcoming Duel of Wits with the stakes "The King enrages the Primarch (space pope) so much that he opens fire without formal warning". Now, in character we plan for this argument to be heated, but The King isn't actually, blatantly GOADING the Primarch. He doesn't have to. If the King wins the Duel of Wits, he gets his stakes, I.E. the Primarch becomes enraged. This way The King can maintain the moral highground and stay consistent as a character (i mean, who actually wants their asteroid fortress blown up?) but we as players get what we want: The Space Pope killing thousands of innocent refugees and sparking off interplanetary war.
That was the plan, anyway. Notice that plan involves The King winning the Duel of Wits, which he didn't. PROTIP: Don't argue with the Space Pope on issues of official church doctrine (i.e. Pope: Y ou're a heritic! King: No i'm not!). Yeah. Apparently, Space Popes are really, really good at arguing about church doctrine. The King got shut DOWN. He nly gets a minor compromise.
The Primarch's Stakes: Renounce your heretical views and surrender to me immediately. Ouch. Those are nasty stakes to lose. Still, Jordon gets a minor comprimise, so here's what we decided as a group:
The argument goes down like this. The Primarch tires of arguing with the king, and suddenly opens fire, a "warning shot". The King is undeterred. "I'd sooner die then bend to your tyranny!". So the Primarch starts to fire up the Big Gun, the planetcracker, which will reduce Salvation Forge to cinders. (We decided Salvation Forge is about 2 million people). The King, realizing his entire population is threatened, wisely backs down and surrenders.
What this leads to is a whole collection of awesome scenes: Players desperately running through smoking, burning hallways, trying to escape before church soldiers capture them all. The King making a final, Lando Calrissian-esq announcement over Salvation Forge's intercom. The king walking proudly away in handcuffs. Other players, in hiding, begin forming a plan to break him out. The Resistance has officially begun.
The GM had almost nothing to do with that. That was all players. the GM just played the Primarch in the Duel of Wits, (and so those were his stakes) but that was mostly all established through table talk.
in a "normal" game, this just wouldn't happen. Prolly 30% of what happened was actually Jordon's idea, the rest came from everyone else. Those ideas would have all been unavailable, and our game would have been less for it. Metagaming can be good! Burning Empires pretty much RELIES on it. Crazy, huh?
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