So some meta-gaming is just more meta-gamerish than other meta-gaming. Maybe we should create a scale, 1-9, ranking the relative severity of meta-gaming, and Magistrates only handle cases ranked 4-7, while Titans handle 8-9. A little bit of unfair play by GMs, hey, that's just BM being Gygaxian, right?
Which is exactly why the term 'meta-gaming' is too broad to fit into our mandate neatly. We are and should be limited to those specific aspects of meta-gaming that violate the Fair Play clause of the Social Contract, e.g. exploiting bugs to obtain a material advantage in the game. Also, I would not quantify what the Zuma GM has done here as 'unfair', since it does not confer any particular advantage to him to act the way he is acting. If you believe otherwise, explain.
I get that we are titled Magistrates. But do we have to be so lawyerly? We admit that this is basically extremely poor form by the GM, you said it should be heaped with derision. And yet you're going to give it the rubber stamp of approval. Seriously? The Magistrates are a body for regulating a community. This is a case where the GM, according to you: "Do I approve of what the GM is doing here? No. I do not. I think it's pretty lame actually, mostly for the many reasons you've already spelled out. "
Do we have to be lawyerly? Yes. We are a body that enforces law, and are thus governed by those same laws; we are not above them. We cannot be above them without compromising our mission. Hence the lawyerly aspect of what we do. We are not vigilantes. Our role is not to police peoples' RP. That is NOT our mandate, and moreover it is an enormous can of worms to go that route. There is literally no end to the number of behaviors we could infract if we really want to start scrutinizing the purity of people's RP. That is beyond the scope of the the IRs and the Social Contract, and therefore it is not within our mandate.
And, by the way, deciding that something is not within one's jurisdiction is not the same thing as approving of it.
