>>29065Okay, I feel like this "meta-gaming control" thing requires a much more in depth response than I ever gave it.
First of all, it's just impossible to not meta-game, and there is no way around that fact. For every single in-game post of action or dialogue, these threads have about 4 posts worth of meta talk or action or speculation. An obscenely large amount of information is spread through posts. By contrast, our in game characters
never talk to each other. Thez and Inferius never told Trumpaladin or Tracy about their wedding. Tracy and Trumpaladin never told Torcuil or Inferius about their engagement. Nothing was told to Trumpaladin about Durpistan, except possibly a single remark by Tracy. I also want to point out that for some reason you insist on playing a character who absolutely refuses to tell any information to any other character, even when its transmission is essential to the progression of the plot and there is no reason at all for her not to do so. Think of the initial mention of Durpistan.
Second, you just can't un-know information from meta knowledge and separate it from player knowledge. That is not how the human mind works. Why was your characer (or mine, for that matter) in Durpistan? "To see the dragon," you'd say. But that's just wrong. Your character was never told that Torcuil was going to Durpistan, nor was mine. They were told he and the dragon were going to the sea, and then on the way (after GM suggested it) they went to durpistan. You can try to make up some bullshit about "oh well this was communicated before they left the bog" but this is nothing other than a post hoc justification for the fact that meta-knowledge is seeping through. likewise, I was pressured into "releasing a pigeon" because Infernius's faggot wanted to get into action before it disappeared, and he rushed through a conversation with Thez for the same purpose. And I can go on and on, but the simple fact is that to perfectly separate player-knowledge from character knowledge in a game like this where so much is said between players but characters refuse to talk to each other, requires a continual act of Orwellian Double-Think that is just not humanly possible.
Thirdly, keeping characters "oblivious" to the actions of another doesn't make the problem go away, it just replaces actual knowledge with the Suspicion and Paranoia Game. And that's a hell of a lot worse for Tracy, because I have to let my character's paranoia and suspicion judge Tracy instead of actual knowledge. Instead of Judging Tracy on what she actually does, I have to make Trumpaladin constantly suspicious of her actions, and extrapolate that what she does in front of him is a much better version of what she does away from him, and that what he finds out about is just a tiny portion of what she is actually doing. So every time she gets caught doing anything bad I have to penalize her five times over for it. In fact, I have to penalize her every-time she does something entirely within what is acceptable, but she does it in front of Trumpaladin and does it in a way that is improper. For example, she did nothing, or fairly little wrong during the Kefka fight and Golden Lady sequence, but I had to Penalize Tracy for her behavior there, because she was so monstrous that it suggested that it was just an astonishing coincidence that she chose an asshole victim, and she'd do the same or worse when he wasn't looking. If you'd let there be some degree of reasonable trust then there would be no difficulty in not penalizing her for being a complete monster to victims who had it coming. Instead, you want to play the "I'll do what I can get away with" game, and I have to make up for your playing style by making Trumpaladin paranoid and mistrustful, and automatically assuming the worst when it comes to Tracy's behavior - which means she tends to be worse off with regards to relations with him than if he actually knew what she was doing.
And I was content to play the mistrust game. It had the result that Trumpaladin was never going to propose to Tracy because he was never going to trust her, and they'd be stuck in an infinite limbo of fighting and breaking up and getting back together and attempted murder, but was what the logic of my character in the circumstances necessitated. I meant what I said when I said he'd marry her the day after he trusted her, and you had no intention of playing a character who could be trusted -like a dog that eats food off the table the moment the master is out of view - and so there could never be peace nor progress. But then you forced my hand (understandably under the circumstances) in giving a proposal. And GM, Torcuil, and maybe you were all growing very impatient that there was fighting but no progress, so I decided to take a leap of faith, and figured that if the behavior of the two weeks before that was extrapolated she'd be entirely within the realm of tolerability, so good enough.
And I'm sorry, but that particular circumstance was
not one that would have gone unnoticed by character knowledge. He asked "why are you in durpistan, do you have evil intentions involving a dragon and corpses?" and she hung up on him. He tried twice more, with no response. The only conclusion a reasonable person could draw from that is that she is avoiding answering the question "do you have evil intentions concerning a dragon or corpses" because she does in fact have evil intentions. True, at the time I thought it was more likely she was going to raise an army of undead than eat the things, but the fact remains that he figures out that she's doing things he doesn't approve of. And of course, he does things she doesn't approve of in response. It's problematic because anthropophagy, like adultery, is a sin of purity. Once contaminated, the contamination is there, and does not go away. It cannot be undone, and can't quite be forgiven since it is a crime against one's own body and not another person. It's not like killing horses, where forgiveness is easy enough. So the whole situation is back to zero with little chance of progressing. And the marriage is fucked before it begins, the proposal is over, and why do you do this shit.\r