Saibaking

By uvouba

• August 27, 2025
Rules: Yes
Referral: Through a Friend
Discord: uvouba
In your own words, what is powergaming, and why should it be avoided in roleplay?: In a lot of scenarios, to avoid powergaming you should tend towards writing actions in a more open-ended manner, and not definitive statements. A good way of exercising this is asking yourself the question, "Would my character be able to realistically accomplish this?" while taking into account the situation.

Instead of writing actions as like: He rose his sword, proceeding to impale the man's chest, instantly piercing his liver.
(This is unfair / forced upon the opponent - powergaming)
Write actions more like this: He rose his sword, proceeding to ATTEMPT to impale the man in the chest, with the INTENTION of aiming for his liver.

That is a clear example of Definitive vs. Open-Ended, in the second action the opponent has all the room they need to accordingly react to the action with a roleplay action like parrying, dodging, bracing or anything.
In your own words, what is metagaming, and why should it be avoided in roleplay?: Metagaming is the act of using, sharing or coordinating things and information OOCly in order for you or others to gain an IC advantage, information that otherwise wouldn't be available to your character. Now this, similar to powergaming is one of the fundamental breaches of good roleplay, and it's usually quite difficult to prove in a lot of cases. In my opinion it's the rule that's always broken in RP games, every game has metagaming groups of friends somewhere. If they're smart, they won't ever be caught because they'll do things ICly but use OOC coordination as a segway into those events.

This clearly disrupts fair roleplay because as I mentioned in the definition, it directly leads to people gaining an IC advantage which otherwise wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for the OOC information / coordination. Not only is it unfair, but it's also unrealistic and often times breaks the immersion of a good roleplay setting. Annoyingly, it's hard to combat and often leads to it being very difficult to have a perfectly fair RP environment set in a game like Minecraft, or GTA or wherever; in my experience, metagaming is everywhere, and it has always disrupted the balanced nature of good roleplay games because of intricate, collusive OOC groupchats / servers scheming together to gain personal advantages.
Status: Accepted