Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

The easiest way to ensure that your character's secret is never known, is to never tell anyone anything about it, which also means that in reality it is no secret at all. Hinting at some secret can give other characters reason to interact with your character beyond generic greetings, and what not.

Elizabeth the Stripper: "Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone."

You may even fear yourself.

If you played multiple characters and started becoming unsure about certain details, what your character knows, said or has heard, what I used to do was use was this tool that was originally used for mass editting text files. So you could search a term, and look it back up. Or mass change the text to your liking.

What was nice about it, is that I could look up certain terms over all the chat logs (courtesy of the extended NWN2 client), and see which character heard THAT particular detail, so there would hopefully never be cross contamination of knowledge. The searching mechanism made it so easy, so you didn't have to scroll through each file individually. It went through ALL the files.

I think that there is such a fear of metagaming (among other things) that many times people end up going the other direction with things to an extreme. What happens, is they end up godmodding, essentially. People fear metagaming (or opposition), so they conduct RP in secret that should be shared with others. And when something big happens that should have included many others due to whatever factor, what happens is that the people involved have just godmodded entire populations of players that should have / would have known about what is going on. And that is the essence of godmodding; not allowing a player to decide how their own toon would react.

Metagaming can be an issue. And I'm not trying to downplay the negative consequences of it at all. But I would rather see more inclusion and chances to RP out scenarios with people/groups, and less of a focus of "it might be metagamed". If your character/guild is doing something that would be seen publicly, proudly post it to the forums so others can know! To me, the risk of concealing what should be known outweighs the risk of metagaming what shouldn't.

An excellent example of this in action was the Radiant Heart bridge. When it was being constructed, there was so much public RP put into it, with so many contributors allowed to be a part of it. People were allowed to react (or not) as they wished. But even that was not without its difficulties, as once it began going up, I heard players say things like, "This is not what I thought was going to happen. I may have intervened or reacted differently had I known." (note, this is NOT to bash the Radiant Heart, their players, or their toons in any way; I think their RP was very well done. It is just an example how of even when something is done right there can be a perception of "This is not what I understood OOCly, so I couldn't react ICly".)

Going back to metagaming specifically, I think the most important thing is to not take anything personally, or OOC. Most of the instances I've seen personally of metagaming have been complete accidents. Usually by someone who has a lot of toons, and they lose track of who knows what. Some people are great at keeping their toons separate, and some aren't. I personally am not. So I keep to a single toon, and rarely play alts.

But the point is, don't jump to conclusions. Firstly, it's likely it was purely an accident. Secondly, it's also likely that the toon heard it legitimately from someone who might not have heard it legitimately. And once it's out there, it's no longer metagaming; at least not to the toons who heard it legitimately.