Metagaming and powergaming

Metagaming is bringing knowledge your character does not have into the scene — reading a Discord channel and acting on it, recognising a masked player by their voice from stream, knowing where a robbery is because you watched it on someone's POV.

Powergaming is the other half: forcing an outcome without giving the other player a chance to respond. Typing an action that is already complete, inventing abilities your character has no reason to have, or treating an injury as nothing.

Both rules protect the same thing — that the scene is shared rather than authored by whoever types fastest. They are also the hardest rules to enforce, because intent is invisible and the evidence is usually a judgement call.

Servers that handle this well write the rule with examples rather than definitions, and train staff to ask "could their character know that?" rather than "did they break rule 7?".