I feel like sometimes people refuse to “meta game” in a way that is also metagaming, except targeting bad outcomes instead of good.
Like your characters live in a world with trolls. They’re not a secret. Choosing to intentionally avoid fire because “that’s metagaming” is also metagaming. You’re using your out of character knowledge (fire is effective) and then avoiding it.
Usually cleared up with a "hey dm, what are common knowledge and myths about this stuff? or whatever.
Yes. It’s so annoying. A lot of good roleplaying is imagining a way your character would have/know something. Obviously you can take it too far, but it’s an important skills for keeping the game moving. Like, say one character is obviously falling for some sort of trap by a doppelganger. OOC you either know or are suspicious, but IC you don’t. You want to go with them so they aren’t alone. But you can’t just say that. Say something like, “I’ll tag along, I’m getting stir crazy and could go for a walk.” It’s technically metagaming but it’s a very different situation than doing something like telling that character not to go because the other person is suspicious when you genuinely have no reason to think they are.
Another good example of metagaming that so many people view as okay that they don’t even view it as metagaming is telling your party OOC how many hit points you have remaining the healer choosing who to heal and with what spells based on the information. Your character doesn’t know that number. A lot of times all you really know IC is if someone has less than half of their hit points remaining and a vague idea that barbarians can take more hits than wizards.
Obviously there are scenarios where this doesn’t hold but I find in general that metagaming which benefits everyone, doesn’t completely ruin encounters, and is done with an excuse that your character would actually reasonably do is typically okay.
Another example. I remember in one game we were trying to open a creaky rusty door quietly. Someone asked if anyone had oil. We all checked our inventory and nobody did. He explained that my character in heavy armor would likely have some because regular maintenance of it would require that. Which seemed fine. The DM agreed. So my character hands his character some oil.
It’s funny. I know a lot of players who think like you, but I and many others go in the completely opposite direction. The tension in my combat encounters has increased significantly since my group and I started to only give vague health info. Suddenly, it’s a surprise agin when a character goes down and you can almost feel the tension every round when another hidden death save is rolled!
Combat damage is random and it’s still dramatic and exciting knowing everyone’s health. I think hiding death saves is better than hiding health though. Because in reality everyone would act super urgently seeing a friend collapse. When I’m DMing I explicitly say when things are bloodied (less than ½) and double bloodied (less than ¼) in addition to qualitative explanations.
I think there are numbers worth hiding, I just don’t think character health is one. Like I think stealth rolls should be hidden. You shouldn’t have an idea that you’re not hiding well.
Like I think stealth rolls should be hidden. You shouldn’t have an idea that you’re not hiding well.
I don’t have the players actually make the stealth roll until something opposes it. They’re doing the best they can. Here comes the guard. Roll, please.
That’s how I did it when I DMed. On the off chance they need to make a check and I don’t want to alert them I just use passive or roll for them.
I’ll tag along
I quite like this when characters are in relatively safe spaces, cities and the like, especially in sci fi settings with little or no magic, so they leave their laser proof armour and serious guns behind and have only a pistol and effectively 1 hit point against serious weapons.
Makes the trap triggering exciting. Hope your mind state backup is recent in case of a couple of bad rolls
Eh, I know nothing about how to handle most dangerous animals, even ones that live in my area; I’d imagine that even in a world with trolls, regular people wouldn’t know anything about them.
If your character is a seasoned adventurer or monster enthusiast, sure, light it up, but if your backstory places you as the village baker for most of your life, running in with alchemist’s fire at the ready seems a bit strange.
Ultimately I’d consider it to be on the GM’s shoulders - if the only way your group is going to survive the troll encounter is with fire, then put an NPC in the local tavern who warms newcomers of a troll in the area, recommending that they have a lit torch at the ready.
Eh, I know nothing about how to handle most dangerous animals, even ones that live in my area; I’d imagine that even in a world with trolls, regular people wouldn’t know anything about them.
Debatable. You definitely know a Tigers greatest weakness, and a bears greatest weakness even if you don’t know how to use them. >!Bullets!<
Id say that we don’t know those things now because we live in modern technological times where you don’t have to know those things to survive. If this was the middle ages and you were an adventuring type who could hold their own out in the wilds, you would almost definitely know all of those things.
Metagaming kills the game!
I took some very silly decisions because that’s how I thought the character would behave. Only once did I regret it: I made too shy a character and that made for a boring trip. Usually, it was a lot of fun. Honorable mention: being flown away by an angry dragon that I knew would be defeated soon without my character’s intervention, but my character obviously didn’t care. So they went >splat<. Worthy death at the end of a campaign!
Person on the left is calculating every move and winning battles so the other one can be a careless goober (also they’re dating)
This is exactly how my last D&D campaign went!
Best of both worlds: Always role play a tactician or veteran if you have a lot of game knowledge and you want to use it.
Play an idiot when you are playing a game set in a world or using a system you are completely unfamiliar with.
if your headed to a place called troll canyon you should probably do some research on what trolls are weak to beforehand
Yeah people complaining about “fire on trolls” as metagaming is a huge bugbear of mine because it’s so ubiquitous across RPGs that it’s virtually part of the definition of what a fantasy troll is. Imagine actually living in a world where they exist, becoming a professional mercenary, and still not knowing you need fire.
As GM I’d accept that argument from a person with a smart enough player, but not from one whose intelligence attracts penalties and not from one whose background is from an island or at sea or a city rat
In some settings I might have monsters like trolls only in some parts of the world, so you’re out of luck if you’re not from those places unless you read a lot (and if my group is prone to metagaming, change the monster’s weakness)
I feel like trolls are common enough that even a farmer would know they don’t like fire or acid. And yet, some DMs will make you roll a dungeoneering or other knowledge check to see if your adventurer knows.
Trolls are only common if they’re made common, though. Like, they’re common in the Forgotten Realms, or Golarion, or whatever, but commonality is out the window in a homebrew setting.
“Don’t worry, it’s just a name!”
Gets attacked by trolls.
“I thought it was just a name!”
Troll canyon is actually a ravine
I played all of Death Stranding 2 with BOOBA written on my back because I thought it was funny.
Nice
I get around this by having the memory of a goldfish for metagaming knowledge.
My low wiz eldrich knight that keeps touching blatantly cursed shit and just rolling with it.
My tiny tortle sorcerer is obsessed with putting gems in his mouth. The DM knows this. The party knows this. It makes for some very funny conflicts
please tell me they experience different flavours from gems, like they’re candy, but the other party members keep trying to taste gems and it’s always just flavourless crystal.
and every now and then your sorcerer meets someone who shares their baffling ability to use gems as infinite gobstoppers, and they start enthusiastically chatting about what materials and cuts are best, as everyone else just looks on in confusion and exasperation
Trolls turn to stone so they’d logically be fireproof.
they turn to stone when exposed to sunlight so wouldn’t it be logical to think fire might turn them into stone?
Fire doesn’t work like that on vampires though. It must be the radiation component that does it, and in high concentration.
N.B. Dazzler from the X-Men can flat-out blow up vampires with her light powers.
baby me, reading like 10000 pages of military theory and shopping gas masks for a month before my first protest
Some people just like rolling up new PCs 🤷🏼♂️😅😶
