What does and doesn't constitute metagaming?

[kingcheesepants]

I'd like to get all of your opinions on where you draw the line for metagaming what's fine for a character to know and what is clearly out of game knowledge that should be left behind at the table. I tend to find myself in disagreement with some of the folks that I play with over what is and isn't acceptable and usually I am the one being told that I am too metagamey whereas I maintain that they are playing their characters in a somewhat unnaturally ignorant fashion.

To me if a character is a professional adventurer who has studied nature, arcana, history etc and encounters a monster it seems perfectly reasonable for him to have a general understanding of what that monster is and what it does. He sees an animated skeleton and knows that bludgeoning attacks are particularly effective or he sees a blue dragon and knows that he needs to watch out for lightning breath or he knows that elves are immune to being put to sleep. Some folks however seem to maintain that no if your character hasn't personally seen these things before they can't know it, therefore I'm going to use a sleep spell on this group of drow attacking us even though out of character I know it won't work. But honestly that seems really silly to me, surely an adventurer someone who goes out expecting to encounter monsters and whose life may hang in the balance of what he knows, would definitely learn what he can about stuff before heading out. Are you telling me that nobody in the world has heard of dragons or knows what the various colors mean? Professional mercenaries heading into the underdark don't know even basic information about drow? This is doubly true for folks playing as bards, wizards or otherwise well learned or travelled folks. Surely a wizard who just cast detect magic on the mysterious circle on the floor to discover an aura of conjuration can put 2 and 2 together to figure out that it's a teleportation circle.

Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I intended. I guess a better way to say it is I feel like knowledge checks about certain basic things should probably be low enough to be auto successes for folks who are proficient in them. When I personally know that a blue dragon has lightning breath and therefore I should get some lightning resistant armor if I can only to be told that no you only got a 14 on your nature check so you don't know that blue dragons shoot lightning. Or to have someone make frankly suicidal decisions because he wants to avoid metagaming, well it seems really silly to me. Maybe you guys can help me sort out how to approach this in a way to make everyone happy.

[Tanarii]

Metagaming is when a player pretends their PC doesn't know something they know.

Also, this might help:
https://theangrygm.com/through-a-glass-darkly-ic-ooc-and-the-myth-of-playercharacter-seperation/

[PhoenixPhyre]

Metagaming is when a player pretends their PC doesn't know something they know.

Also, this might help:
https://theangrygm.com/through-a-glass-darkly-ic-ooc-and-the-myth-of-playercharacter-seperation/

That's definitely a variant understanding of the term.

The DMG defines it as "using knowledge that is a game to govern character actions". Knowing that you rolled a 2 on your trap check, so you ask someone else to try. Figuring that there must be a trick/trap because the DM wouldn't do X or always does Y (from other campaigns with that DM). Reading the adventure ahead of time. Playing the rules, not the game--acting like your character knows it's a game and what the rules are.

I don't consider monster knowledge or genre savvy to be metagaming. It may be out of character for some characters and thus bad roleplay, but it's not metagaming.

[Greywander]

Roleplaying games are, well, games. If you just want to roleplay, there are places on the internet for that. There's nothing wrong with knowing the rules of the game and applying them to your advantage. There are times where you have to "play along" with a failed check, even though you as a player know something is wrong, but this, too, is part of the game.

It is a fair point that a given character might not be familiar with something that their player is. In such cases, I would just ask the DM something like, "Does my character know what this is?" or, "What do I know about this?" The DM also has the liberty to make changes to stat blocks if they really want to put players in a position where they actually don't know what the capabilities of a monster are.

The real problem is when, for example, a roleplay interaction occurs, and a player whose PC wasn't there to witness it changes how they act as a result. For example, the paladin who tries to murder the rogue for stealing their holy symbol, even though the rogue passed their Stealth check and the paladin has no reason to suspect the rogue. That said, don't steal from party members, or try to murder them, unless you've talked it over with the other players and they're okay with such shenanigans.

Edit:

After all, I hate players having to ask questions like “do I know what that is” or “can I make a knowledge check.”
Welp.

Edit2:
As Angry points out, you can probably assume that one player will fill in the others on anything important that they didn't witness themselves. So mostly I'm referring to situations where an event occurs that a player hasn't witnessed, and they react to it before meeting up with the player who did witness it, so there really should be no way that they would know about it.

[Jerrykhor]

Everyone have different tolerance for metagaming. Some people think just because you encounter a particular monster for the first time, you shouldn't know anything about it. That knowing a monsters specific vulnerability is cheating, because you must have peeked at the Monster Manual before. Well excuse me if i have DMed before, not everyone is 100% player or 100% DM.

For me, if a player casts Chromatic Orb at an Earth Elemental and chooses Thunder, I won't question how his character came to know about the vulnerability. Its disrespecting and frankly, completely stupid to question a player on his metagaming knowledge. He is simply doing what the spell says. This is why i hate it when DMs like to tell druids 'You haven't seen this type of beast before'. Basically when metagaming is used as an excuse to shut down the potential of abilities, that's not fine.

Some DMs just get a kick out of seeing players flounder around like morons, and therefore act like the PCs were born yesterday.

[Kylar0990]

This is why i hate it when DMs like to tell druids 'You haven't seen this type of beast before'. Basically when metagaming is used as an excuse to shut down the potential of abilities, that's not fine.

Some DMs just get a kick out of seeing players flounder around like morons, and therefore act like the PCs were born yesterday.

I've always seen this as silly. Even as a 1st level character your character isn't an infant. What kind of person pursues the path of a Druid without ever seeing any animals?

[MoiMagnus]

Tension about metagaming are mostly tension about what kind of game a RPG is.

(1) Having an heavy separation between character and player push the players toward one of the following:

(1A) A role of spectator or actor. The character is given the precedence over the player, resulting in the lost of some player agency ("you can't do that because you don't know that"). In exchange, you can build some dramatic irony (the players know that they are running toward a disaster, but the character don't) or similar complex story structure. To the extreme, the "PCs" are in fact just "NPCs each played by a different DM" as everyone around the table are pseudo-DMs.
[Despite the hate of the angry DM for OOC/IC separation, I'm sure even him agrees that the DM should have an OOC/IC separation for each of its NPCs]

(1B) A boardgamer. The player is given the precedence over the player, resulting in the RPG being seen as a tool and set of rules, rather than as a universe to immerse oneself in. This is what peoples usually complain about when they complain about metagaming.

(2) At the contrary, absence of separation between character and player push the players much more "natural" gameplay. The main problem here can be a tonal dissonance between the universe and the PCs (the PCs are expert in magical bestiary while the rules say that they should be unknowledgable farmers), though it usually indicates that the intended tone of the campaign just doesn't match the players.

[Valmark]

Imo metagaming is when you pretend characters have knowledge they can't possibly have. Stuff like two players talking between themselves and the third somehow knowing everything they said (without having listened in or stuff like that)- it has nothing to do with knowing stuff like dragon colors and their meaning or that elves are immune to sleeping magic.

In fact I'd probably make fun IC of someone not knowing that stuff because it does require you to be living under a rock. Or be a new player that doesn't know anything (in which case it'd be explained to them).

Generally it's not a problem when the latter happens anyway- homewever the former can lead to annoyance when players start butting in IC when their characters shouldn't have any reason to.


Metagaming is when a player pretends their PC doesn't know something they know.

Also, this might help:
https://theangrygm.com/through-a-glass-darkly-ic-ooc-and-the-myth-of-playercharacter-seperation/

Interesting- that's like the exact opposite of what I often heard metagaming be defined as. That definition is kind of an important part of roleplaying.

[MrStabby]

I think that some of this should be expectations set at the start.

So you come across skeletons and you whip out a mace for bludgeoning damage... adventurers probably know about low level monster vulnerabilities right?

Well maybe. It depends on the world - is the plot that the dead are becoming animated? That this is news and hasn't happened before? I.e. is this a world where undead are common or not?

And can you reason that the skeleton would be vulnerable to bludgeoning damage? It is still a stretch - its magical. Your character has never seen it before. Some force is holding the bones together anyway after all the ligaments and tendons and muscles have rotted away - why would you believe that frce would disipate or fail to act between two parts of a broken bone?

It depends on the campaign world. Discuss it.




Easiest way is just have the DM reskin monsters or reasign abiltities for things they think the players won't know about. It saves bogging things down at the table with more eperienced players and gives the players the reward for exploring the world.


That said, I do like the use of skills to know things about the world and about monsters. I think this is an imporant element of roleplay to allow for knowledgable characters. I think that it is also a good thing to allow higher Int/skilled characters to get value fromtheir knowledge rather than handing it out to everyone either in character or through using monsters that players know about.

[minute]

Simplest thing to do, in terms of what knowledge your character would know about a certain monster/creature/race, is ask the DM. If it's something you think your character would know, explain that. The DM might force you to make a check for it, they might easily tell you the information that you're seeking, or they might say that your character wouldn't know. Whatever the case, you should accept the DM's ruling on it.

Now, I know that intelligence is a popular stat for all the powergamers out there to dump. A 6 or 8 intelligence character isn't going to know as much about certain creatures as the wizard does; somebody who has probably spent their entire life studying and gathering knowledge.

Lastly, and I know this is an unpopular playstyle on forums like this, but during character creation I don't create adventurers. I create characters. I flesh out their backstories and their motivations and their personalities. So when you say "a seasoned adventurer" would know certain things about certain creatures, that doesn't apply to all tables, because not every character starts the game as an adventurer, or even somebody who wants to be an adventurer. If that's the case it just depends on what your character's backstory was like; yes, the druid would know a lot about woodland beasts. Yes, the blood hunter would know a lot about fiends/undead. Etc. Etc.

[stoutstien]

Mostly a pointless term used when either there is a miss match of player expectations at a table or when a gimmick encounter doesn't work because of the impossible task of trying to regulate player/character knowledge separation.

it's a lot easier to just work from that fact than trying to label whats good from (roleplaying) or bad (metagaming) is subjective and definitely not enforcable so why waste the effort.

[MoiMagnus]

Interesting- that's like the exact opposite of what I always heard metagaming be defined as. That definition is kind of an important part of roleplaying.

I think that's purposefully the opposite. (That's definitely not how metagaming is used in practice)

The whole point of the angry GM's rant linked is to explain that if there is enough separation between the player and the character for metagaming to be a thing, and OOC conversations to be significantly different from IC conversations, then you're doing something wrong (in his opinion).

[diplomancer]

I think that some of this should be expectations set at the start.

So you come across skeletons and you whip out a mace for bludgeoning damage... adventurers probably know about low level monster vulnerabilities right?

Well maybe. It depends on the world - is the plot that the dead are becoming animated? That this is news and hasn't happened before? I.e. is this a world where undead are common or not?

And can you reason that the skeleton would be vulnerable to bludgeoning damage? It is still a stretch - its magical. Your character has never seen it before. Some force is holding the bones together anyway after all the ligaments and tendons and muscles have rotted away - why would you believe that frce would disipate or fail to act between two parts of a broken bone?

Heh... I was about to make the opposite point. Getting a big hammer, instead of a sword or, Gods forbid, a Bow and Arrow, to put down an animated pile of bones is the first thing that would spring to my mind.

If Skellies, instead of having Vulnerability to bludgeoning, had, for some magical reason, Resistance to it (other damage types remaining the same), and a PC did NOT get out a big hammer to strike it down, THEN he could be suspected of metagaming (and all the arguments about whether that would be "expected character knowledge" or not, which would indeed vary from table to table, setting to setting, and even PC to PC)

[Corran]

To me if a character is a professional adventurer who has studied nature, arcana, history etc and encounters a monster it seems perfectly reasonable for him to have a general understanding of what that monster is and what it does. He sees an animated skeleton and knows that bludgeoning attacks are particularly effective or he sees a blue dragon and knows that he needs to watch out for lightning breath or he knows that elves are immune to being put to sleep.
Big no from me here. How can you know that blue dragons have a lightning breath when in my setting there has been only one blue dragon alive for the past couple thousand years, and that blue dragon has not been seen or heard from by almost anyone? Or how can you even know what a skeleton even is, let alone to what kind of weapons it's vulnerable, since necromancy is on its first legs and unheard of by the general population and only now we are close to a breaktrhough. And next week when the first zombie will be produced, kill the mad wizard who created, breaks free of its dungeon and stambles upon your party who is travelling closeby, I think I am more likely to ask everyone to roll a wisdom save against fear than to ask you to even roll to see if you can recognize anything about this threat which you see for the first time.

Yes, such examples are extreme, and they probably dont have place in the typical dnd setting. But who's responsible for the setting? Who decides what's typical and what is not, what tales get told around the places the pc's grew or adventure? The DM. Yes, no DM can create a setting in such excrutiating detail so that no matter what monster you come across there is a fixed list of things you know about it, of things you cannot know about it, and of things you might know about it. The easiest thing a DM can do, is to let the dice decide. And the DC set tries to approximate the monster's place in the game world. Sure, players can influence that decision. So for example if you come across ghouls and you tell the DM that in your backstory your pc's hometown was attacked by ghouls, you might not even have to roll to know things about them. Or you may roll with advantage to see if your character does indeed remember anything about these creatures. Or you may roll normaly, and failure to meet the DC could mean that your character was too young to remember anything about that incident, or that this incident was purposely not discussed and people of your hometown tried to forget it and move on after it had happened. And some DM will set impossible DC's and others will allow automatic success, and the DC's wont always be consistent or always make sense inside the game world for someone who always looks close enough.

You call some things obvious. Such as skeletons being vulnerable to bludgeoning damage. Or at least you say these things should be obvious to adventurers. Maybe. But many things that you would think they would be obvious, are not obvious unless someone tells you about it, or until you figure it out on your own and then you are thinking 'how could I have not seen it all along'. And many ''obviously correct'' things tend to be an error of judgement after all. The point is, that all this depends on the individual for whom we are discussing, so in this case for each one of the pc's. It might be obvious that you should not use fire against a fire elemental, but is the effect obvious? Should fire just not affect it, or would it even heal it and empower it? Different pc's may very well have different answers to such questions, and some pc's may not have even thought of such things at all, at least before such situations present themselves before them. And the stress of combat is certainly not helping someone think clearly, so a check may even represent the chance to do something stupid because you dont have enough time or the clear mind to think it over.

All that is not to say that you shouldn't have an opinion about what your pc knows and what they dont. Or that you shouldn't argue when a DM makes a call that seems nonsensical to you. But there's no guarantee that just because you know you pc better you should be the only one deciding on these matters, because the decision is not dependent only on the pc, but also on the game world, for which the DM is responsible. And that's without even mentioning that players are more than capable of nonsensical decisions about their character's knowledge (because they are not impartial, because they like their pc so much that overestimating them is common practice, etc), so that alone means you could do with an impartial arbitrer.

[stoutstien]

Best just actually identify the issues. Mostly when someone calls foul it's about the removal of either discovery, tension, or challenge. None of those factors are within the control if the players besides the DM.

There are plenty of ways the DM can address this without reverting to trying to ask the impossible from theirs players.

[AHF]

Big no from me here. How can you know that blue dragons have a lightning breath when in my setting there has been only one blue dragon alive for the past couple thousand years, and that blue dragon has not been seen or heard from by almost anyone? Or how can you even know what a skeleton even is, let alone to what kind of weapons it's vulnerable, since necromancy is on its first legs and unheard of by the general population and only now we are close to a breaktrhough. And next week when the first zombie will be produced, kill the mad wizard who created, breaks free of its dungeon and stambles upon your party who is travelling closeby, I think I am more likely to ask everyone to roll a wisdom save against fear than to ask you to even roll to see if you can recognize anything about this threat which you see for the first time.


Just by way of counterpoint, dinosaurs haven’t been around for longer than that and people commonly can probably name a dozen varieties and lots of people with no particular education can talk about theories relating to their evolution, etc. because they are the stuff of legend and capture people’s imagination. I’d imagine the same would apply in a world with dragons. They wouldn’t disappear from collective consciousness because they would be memorialized by song and story. This is even more the case if there is a living connection like Dragonborn and Draconic Bloodline sorcerers whose magic and breath weapon are linked to the color of their dragon ancestor. Knowing something as basic as “dragons breath stuff and what they breath is linked to their color” doesn’t seem unreasonable.

[Willie the Duck]

The conversation seems to be mixing discussion of what metagaming is, and whether metagaming is okay.

Apparently most everything mentioned meets that wikipedia definition, but I always have thought of metagaming as more of the 'stuff a character would only do if they realized that they were in a game.' An example might be 'let's not bother fighting those heffalumps, because their treasure type is mostly just large amounts of silver and copper and everyone is already encumbered, let's go over to where we saw the Jabberwockies, as they have a high chance of a magic item drop.' Whether your character knows that blue dragons shoot lightning to me is something of a separate concept (although apparently still falls under metagaming).

In both cases, I think the only answer regarding whether it is okay is group consensus/individual table culture. The game has been played in so many ways with so many differences in what is considered important that I don't think there's a consistent expectation. That's why we do session zeroes.


Roleplaying games are, well, games. If you just want to roleplay, there are places on the internet for that.
:smallbiggrin:Roleplaying games are, well, roleplaying activities. If you just want to play games, there are places on the internet for that. :smalltongue:

[da newt]

If I was an adventurer by choice or happenstance in a world filled with monsters and magic, I would go out of my way to collect useful knowledge to help me survive encounters with monsters etc, so if I am playing a PC who either decided to be an adventurer or has been adventuring for a while, I always make a point of adding something like "Grog actively searches for information about monsters, creatures, lore etc. He asks the local wise folk and reads every book that might contain useful knowledge." into the PC's backstory / character make up. Realistically, how much would an average 200 yr old elf monster hunter know about hunting monsters? More than me, the dumb player who has been learning about this stuff for a few years as a hobby ...

The WotC cannon includes people like Volo, Tasha, Xanthar, Mortiken, etc who write books that contain this sort of information. Only the most foolish of adventurers wouldn't seek out the information in these books.

Unless your DM's world has some reason why the monsters haven't been seen/encountered before or your PCs aren't adventurers and grew up ignorant of combat and adventuring and tales of battles with epic monsters, it should be assumed the PCs know as much as the players.

[Corran]

Just by way of counterpoint, dinosaurs haven’t been around for longer than that and people commonly can probably name a dozen varieties and lots of people with no particular education can talk about theories relating to their evolution, etc. because they are the stuff of legend and capture people’s imagination. I’d imagine the same would apply in a world with dragons. They wouldn’t disappear from collective consciousness because they would be memorialized by song and story. This is even more the case if there is a living connection like Dragonborn and Draconic Bloodline sorcerers whose magic and breath weapon are linked to the color of their dragon ancestor. Knowing something as basic as “dragons breath stuff and what they breath is linked to their color” doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Yeah, fair enough. Tried to come up with some extreme examples on the spot to eventually support a more general claim (that the DM definitely should have a say), and looking at them both now, I am not very pleased with either one.

[OldTrees1]

Metagame is a term that is broader than just RPGs. Sometimes metagaming is used as slang for a related concept that does not represent the whole. I will be talking about the whole concept rather than individual instantiates thereof.


The players (including the GM) playing the game know they are playing a game. They can think about the game rather than just think inside the game. There are actions/options the players can do that impact the game that are not within the game. Using those actions/options is engaging with the metagame. This is in contrast to when the PCs pull out dice and start a mesagame.


There are tons of actions and options the players can do that are not within the game. Here are some random examples:
1) They can have a session 0 where they discuss what they want the game to be and what they want to avoid.
2) They can impart knowledge to a character that would not know that knowledge, or make a character forget knowledge they would know.
3) They can bring brownies or other treats to the table.
4) When a PvP conflict arises in game, they can discuss and decide it OOC to avoid the in character conflict.
5) The GM can let the players see a scene the PCs can't see.
6) They can fudge dice rolls
7) They can edit/ignore the game rules
Etc

Some of these actions/options are accepted or even welcomed (session 0, resolving conflict as friends OOC). Others might feel like cheating (this is where the derogatory slang usage of metagaming comes in).

So metagaming is when the player does actions/options that are available outside the game (although they can impact the game) which they are able to do because they realize they are playing a game. (Like session 0 in D&D, or when a MtG player changes their deck in response to changes in popular cards, or when a Grandmaster studies next their opponent's games and common openings).

[Tanarii]

Mostly a pointless term used when either there is a miss match of player expectations at a table or when a gimmick encounter doesn't work because of the impossible task of trying to regulate player/character knowledge separation.
Also a good definition.

[MrStabby]

Just by way of counterpoint, dinosaurs haven’t been around for longer than that and people commonly can probably name a dozen varieties and lots of people with no particular education can talk about theories relating to their evolution, etc. because they are the stuff of legend and capture people’s imagination. I’d imagine the same would apply in a world with dragons. They wouldn’t disappear from collective consciousness because they would be memorialized by song and story. This is even more the case if there is a living connection like Dragonborn and Draconic Bloodline sorcerers whose magic and breath weapon are linked to the color of their dragon ancestor. Knowing something as basic as “dragons breath stuff and what they breath is linked to their color” doesn’t seem unreasonable.

I think this is a really good example. I like it

So you see a dinosaur - it is a dark brownish colour, about 8ft high, bipedal. eyes mounted high on the sides of its head, no crest. It has larger thicker teeth curving backwards - the front ones about 3 inches long. You can't see its feet in the grass but its hads have 3 digits each. How strong it it's dex save? Is it more likely to fail a strength save or a constitution save?

[Darth Credence]

I think that's purposefully the opposite. (That's definitely not how metagaming is used in practice)

The whole point of the angry GM's rant linked is to explain that if there is enough separation between the player and the character for metagaming to be a thing, and OOC conversations to be significantly different from IC conversations, then you're doing something wrong (in his opinion).

I always like to see links to angry GM, because I pretty much know to go the opposite of what he is arguing. He's horrible, and this is another example of it. Specific to your post, of course there are differences between IC and OOC conversations. If one cannot see that, then they need to think about this one:
IC: Gragnok, hold the line! Keep that door shut while we finish the ritual or we're all dead!
OOC: Bob, I'm grabbing a slice of pizza - you want one?

By his logic, Bob's character Grognak is being asked if he wants lunch, and if they are in the middle of a battle at the time, the enemies know this and... I don't know, think that the fight is going to be paused for a meal break? I know that the response to this is that he doesn't mean that, but his absolutes lead to it.

And more to the point of what he does mean, I'll take a direct lift from this article. The part where he says that if one person says my character wouldn't do that because of reasons, that must mean the character is saying that out loud in the moment. Which means that someone cannot remind the others of something that their characters would know, because they have know this person for a long time and truly know them, without saying it aloud in character. If one player has forgotten another characters backstory, but in game the characters have known each other since they were kids and the one that forgot would absolutely, without question, know, then saying that them reminding is the character also saying it out loud is stupid, and in direct conflict to what the ADM says here. It's a bad argument, and he seems to be a horrible DM that is only known because he uses the shock jock method of recognition.

[stoutstien]

I think this is a really good example. I like it

So you see a dinosaur - it is a dark brownish colour, about 8ft high, bipedal. eyes mounted high on the sides of its head, no crest. It has larger thicker teeth curving backwards - the front ones about 3 inches long. You can't see its feet in the grass but its hads have 3 digits each. How strong it it's dex save? Is it more likely to fail a strength save or a constitution save?
By DnD logic it would probably have roughly equal str/dex and is a bruiser that likes to use it's speed and power to use some form of multi-attack. Con save would be slightly over average because it's large and big stuff has more Con.

Might be a pack hunter so watch for ambushes and limit flanking and charging/pounce space if possible.

[MrStabby]

I always like to see links to angry GM, because I pretty much know to go the opposite of what he is arguing. He's horrible, and this is another example of it. Specific to your post, of course there are differences between IC and OOC conversations. If one cannot see that, then they need to think about this one:
IC: Gragnok, hold the line! Keep that door shut while we finish the ritual or we're all dead!
OOC: Bob, I'm grabbing a slice of pizza - you want one?

By his logic, Bob's character Grognak is being asked if he wants lunch, and if they are in the middle of a battle at the time, the enemies know this and... I don't know, think that the fight is going to be paused for a meal break? I know that the response to this is that he doesn't mean that, but his absolutes lead to it.

And more to the point of what he does mean, I'll take a direct lift from this article. The part where he says that if one person says my character wouldn't do that because of reasons, that must mean the character is saying that out loud in the moment. Which means that someone cannot remind the others of something that their characters would know, because they have know this person for a long time and truly know them, without saying it aloud in character. If one player has forgotten another characters backstory, but in game the characters have known each other since they were kids and the one that forgot would absolutely, without question, know, then saying that them reminding is the character also saying it out loud is stupid, and in direct conflict to what the ADM says here. It's a bad argument, and he seems to be a horrible DM that is only known because he uses the shock jock method of recognition.

I think that is a bit unfair. Angry DM isn't always wrong. He has a pretty even split between So Totally Obvious it Adds No Value Whatsover, and Wrong. So really only wrong half the time.

[Shadean207]

I always saw metagaming as "the players acting instead of the characters". Which, to a certain degree, is perfectly fine with me. I know that there are definitions for the word out there, but even the fact that there are multiple definitions, and that this thread exists, tell me that there is an inherent disagreement about the term.

In my (still fairly limited) experience, metagaming is almost inevitably bound to happen at some point and in varying capacities.

Some examples of "okay" and "not okay" metagaming instances, all in my opinion, include:

-- A player taking a long turn to think about their actions during their turn (which in-game has only six seconds, mind you) and discussing them with other players ("okay" with me, especially so for newer players)
-- A player immediately jumping to action, saying "Oh, I've fought these monsters in another campaign!" ("not okay", this is an abuse of player vs character knowledge in my opinion)
-- Animosity between players being carried over to their characters ("not okay")
-- The party/players discussing combat strategies after the fight and what could have been done better, using the words "turn", "bonus action" or similar ("okay" with me, again, especially when newer players are involved)
-- A player mid-turn asking the DM "is that allowed?"/"can I do that?" ("okay" with me, but by the definition I know, that would still constitute metagaming)
-- The DM looking up a monster's stats in the rulebook and telling the players that monster's AC, for example


I could go on, but as i see it, "Metagaming" can - and I emphasize CAN - mean anything that is not happening in character. Some people take it too far, sometimes it is necessary to explain to another player how things work.
At the end of the day, for me, DnD is a game, nothing more. So it would be a bit counter-intuitive for me to limit players to strictly in-game actions and knowledge. I've only seen that in "hardcore" LARP, on a basis of "your character can only do what you can do".

So, technically, everything the players do outside of character that still refers to the game is metagaming to me. The question is just, how much of that is okay, and at what point does it ruin the fun, perhaps?

[OldTrees1]

I always saw metagaming as "the players acting instead of the characters". Which, to a certain degree, is perfectly fine with me. I know that there are definitions for the word out there, but even the fact that there are multiple definitions, and that this thread exists, tell me that there is an inherent disagreement about the term.

-snip-

I could go on, but as i see it, "Metagaming" can - and I emphasize CAN - mean anything that is not happening in character.

Another example:
The player with a thief PC turns to the party OOC. They say their thief PC wants to pick pocket some of the noble NPCs in the room. They ask how the other players would feel about that. They then use that input to decide whether to allow their thief PC to act in character (pick pocket the nobles), or whether they will amend the characterization (not pick pocket the nobles).

1) Announcing information OOC
2) Discussing something OOC
3) Having that OOC discussion permit or amend the characterization of the PC

[Edenbeast]

I'm quite against metagaming, especially when your character knows what they rolled. As mentioned here in the example above with the disarm trap check. But another example is a character rolling for e.g. diplomacy, and rolls low, another player sees the result and want to try as well. Within reason, I let them, albeit with a penalty/disadvantage.


To me if a character is a professional adventurer who has studied nature, arcana, history etc and encounters a monster it seems perfectly reasonable for him to have a general understanding of what that monster is and what it does. He sees an animated skeleton and knows that bludgeoning attacks are particularly effective or he sees a blue dragon and knows that he needs to watch out for lightning breath or he knows that elves are immune to being put to sleep. Some folks however seem to maintain that no if your character hasn't personally seen these things before they can't know it, therefore I'm going to use a sleep spell on this group of drow attacking us even though out of character I know it won't work. But honestly that seems really silly to me, surely an adventurer someone who goes out expecting to encounter monsters and whose life may hang in the balance of what he knows, would definitely learn what he can about stuff before heading out. Are you telling me that nobody in the world has heard of dragons or knows what the various colors mean? Professional mercenaries heading into the underdark don't know even basic information about drow? This is doubly true for folks playing as bards, wizards or otherwise well learned or travelled folks. Surely a wizard who just cast detect magic on the mysterious circle on the floor to discover an aura of conjuration can put 2 and 2 together to figure out that it's a teleportation circle.

I find it mostly annoying when I describe a monster that is quite unique and appears for the first time to the party and people go like "oh I know what it is," or worse: grab the MM (or look it up on their phone. I've seen this happen once. Bad behaviour.). I mean, sure you know what it is, but your character definitely sees it for the first time! We kind of solved it by using the older edition rules where you still had to roll for monster lore which was tied to the knowledge skills. The better the result, the more information the DM gives you. Like roll for Religion for undead, or Arcana for magical creatures or stuff about the planes (could use Religion as well for the latter). In the end it's difficult to avoid when they use the right spells to overcome immunities, but it's a tactical game, and as DM you also know a lot about the PC's that the monsters don't necessarily know... And to make it more interesting you could always come up with some variant monster where you just switch some immunities.

[Demonslayer666]

Telling the DM how their world works is not a good approach.

I could easily see how that would be considered metagaming - you are applying knowledge to their world that your character has not experienced. Worse still, you are using it for a tactical advantage in combat.

I my game, adventurers are very rare. So when encountering something you have never encountered before, you should do what your character normally does, and if that doesn't work, then try something else. Not try something else first because of player knowledge.

I agree with those that said if you reasonably think your character would know that, and can justify it, then sure, go for it. But if you do it all the time, that's cheating. Err on the side of caution.


I do not like playing D&D and testing player knowledge or player skill at acting/persuasion. Some do, and think that's part of the game. I don't think I will ever understand that.

[stoutstien]

Telling the DM how their world works is not a good approach.

I could easily see how that would be considered metagaming - you are applying knowledge to their world that your character has not experienced. Worse still, you are using it for a tactical advantage in combat.

I my game, adventurers are very rare. So when encountering something you have never encountered before, you should do what your character normally does, and if that doesn't work, then try something else. Not try something else first because of player knowledge.

I agree with those that said if you reasonably think your character would know that, and can justify it, then sure, go for it. But if you do it all the time, that's cheating. Err on the side of caution.


I do not like playing D&D and testing player knowledge or player skill at acting/persuasion. Some do, and think that's part of the game. I don't think I will ever understand that.

The issue is there isn't a reasonable way to dictate what a character knows amd when roleplaying and metagaming meet if the distinction exists at all. Playing the "how many rounds do I have to pretend I don't know the obvious strategy" isn't that different from "this game is most based on FR lore so dragons are color coded for our convenience". the only difference is the DM in question can feel more accomplished in the first circumstance?

deciding what a character knows based on how well a player can justifying is the highest form of metagaming. That challenge is resolved solely by the player's ability to come up with a in-game reason to sell to the DM. Saying adventures are rare isn't even much of a hurdle either. It's still fully within the realm of the players agency to justifiy what their character knows. they could be the only X in the entire campaign and still come up with a good reason.

If a DM wants to include Discovery in a game they have to take the time to come up with something new. Little more work but in the end it's worth it for everyone.

If a DM wants to add challenge best bet is to assume the major knowledge points are going to be known and/or make those points obvious early on both mechanically and theatrically. if Red dragons are immune to fire in a campaign put them someplace where it's obvious that fire doesn't bother them or add other clues to level out any player knowledge discrepancy a table might have. Then give the dragon some self awareness and if they have a weakness that they can address let them. The challenge isn't what the players know but how can they apply that knowledge.

If a DM want to use the unknown as tension then it should probably be larger in scope where the range and specifics of the threat and dangers are open ended enough to prevent players from feeling well informed. you can't expect the unknown to be treated like the unknown if it is not unknown. Tension is formed when you combine the sense of Discovery and the challenge of applying what you do know.


if you think of it like one of those escape room games the enjoyment is from knowing the information needed is provided. if it's randomized that you might not have all your information that you need provided to you, it's not a challenge, it's gambling. Personally, that doesn't sound fun to me.

[MoiMagnus]

[About Knowledge Checks]

The point of putting information behind a skill check is to gatekeeping the gameplay of playing on the weakness of a creature behind having invested in knowledge skills.

This is far from the only instance of gameplay being gatekept by skills. If you don't have the good skills/abilities/spells, the infiltration gameplay is mostly inaccessible to you.

As all similar gatekeeping, you are sacrificing part of enjoyment of the "average table" in order to increase the reward of the character that were build for it. (Building a lore master that knows everything is much weaker if everyone can pick the monster manual and read the entries and use this knowledge without needing to "buy" it ingame).

But in general, it's very bad to gatekeep part of the gameplay which is central to the game. So the question becomes: is knowing precise information about enemies central enough to D&D that gatekeeping it is a bad idea?


If a DM wants to include Discovery in a game they have to take the time to come up with something new. Little more work but in the end it's worth it for everyone.

Agree on that. Custom monsters (and also custom spells) are great to push your players away from metagaming. Assuming that your players don't have too high expectations about consistency and balance, you can even get away with improvising some of them on-the-fly.

[stoutstien]

[About Knowledge Checks]

The point of putting information behind a skill check is to gatekeeping the gameplay of playing on the weakness of a creature behind having invested in knowledge skills.

This is far from the only instance of gameplay being gatekept by skills. If you don't have the good skills/abilities/spells, the infiltration gameplay is mostly inaccessible to you.

As all similar gatekeeping, you are sacrificing part of enjoyment of the "average table" in order to increase the reward of the character that were build for it. (Building a lore master that knows everything is much weaker if everyone can pick the monster manual and read the entries and use this knowledge without needing to "buy" it ingame).

But in general, it's very bad to gatekeep part of the gameplay which is central to the game. So the question becomes: is knowing precise information about enemies central enough to D&D that gatekeeping it is a bad idea?



Agree on that. Custom monsters (and also custom spells) are great to push your players away from metagaming. Assuming that your players don't have too high expectations about consistency and balance, you can even get away with improvising some of them on-the-fly.

Off topic-
As far as the DM challenge of integrating the knowledge skills into the game where players feel justify in those opportunity costs I try to always have a short list of bonus information depending on the nature of the stat/proficiency/expertise combo they have. they range from just interesting little facts they could leverage in someway to flat out mechanical impact like advantage against effects or added damage.

a player knowing that a troll is weak to fire is nice. A character that knows this fact and has taken the time to ingrain that knowledge would probably also know when they feel their life is threatened trolls are known to bite off thier own hands and have it retreat to try to prevent it's whole body from being destroyed. They also tend to hold grudges against those who temporary interrupt their constant feasting.

[cookieface]

The issue is there isn't a reasonable way to dictate what a character knows amd when roleplaying and metagaming meet if the distinction exists at all. Playing the "how many rounds do I have to pretend I don't know the obvious strategy" isn't that different from "this game is most based on FR lore so dragons are color coded for our convenience". the only difference is the DM in question can feel more accomplished in the first circumstance?

deciding what a character knows based on how well a player can justifying is the highest form of metagaming. That challenge is resolved solely by the player's ability to come up with a in-game reason to sell to the DM. Saying adventures are rare isn't even much of a hurdle either. It's still fully within the realm of the players agency to justifiy what their character knows. they could be the only X in the entire campaign and still come up with a good reason.

If a DM wants to include Discovery in a game they have to take the time to come up with something new. Little more work but in the end it's worth it for everyone.

If a DM wants to add challenge best bet is to assume the major knowledge points are going to be known and/or make those points obvious early on both mechanically and theatrically. if Red dragons are immune to fire in a campaign put them someplace where it's obvious that fire doesn't bother them or add other clues to level out any player knowledge discrepancy a table might have. Then give the dragon some self awareness and if they have a weakness that they can address let them. The challenge isn't what the players know but how can they apply that knowledge.

If a DM want to use the unknown as tension then it should probably be larger in scope where the range and specifics of the threat and dangers are open ended enough to prevent players from feeling well informed. you can't expect the unknown to be treated like the unknown if it is not unknown. Tension is formed when you combine the sense of Discovery and the challenge of applying what you do know.


if you think of it like one of those escape room games the enjoyment is from knowing the information needed is provided. if it's randomized that you might not have all your information that you need provided to you, it's not a challenge, it's gambling. Personally, that doesn't sound fun to me.

The issue all comes from a disagreement over what "the major knowledge points" are. It's the DM's world. As someone else mentioned, maybe dragons are exceedingly rare in this world, and so everything about them is dismissed as rumor or folklore. Maybe there is knowledge about them, but it is not common.

Is your PC a fighter with a soldier background? I don't see how they would be aware of dragons in the above examples. Is your PC a bard, or a wizard? Heck, even a druid sage. This is exactly what backgrounds are for: If you want a character that knows what specific dragons can do, you'd better have justification for it.

The example about dinosaurs doesn't hold up. Dinosaurs weren't discovered until the 1800s ... for the first several thousand years of human civilization, no one knew what dinosaurs were, but they were real. Even for the first 150 years of studying their fossils, we didn't know how they acted -- the assumption was that they were like giant lizards, slow and plodding thanks to their cold-blooded nature. In the 1990s, we believed that they were warm-blooded and acted a lot more like how modern mammals do. Not until the last 10-15 years did we realize they were covered in feathers, and actually more closely resembled birds.

If the last dragon died 100 years prior to your adventure, then sure, some sources may have true stories about them. But there would also be plenty of tales told about how they were the size of mountains, or how they had six legs ... just look at crazy stories about travelling to Africa or Eastern Asia from medieval European literature. There's a ton of stuff humans tend to understand very wrongly simply due to a generational version of the telephone game.

So to bring it back to the metagaming question:
- I don't like it when PCs know things they would not, reasonably. I am fine with them checking, "Do I know anything about dragons in this world?" I'd much rather they do that than say, "Blue dragons breath lightning!" Sure, there's a chance you would know that, but if it is something I want to keep mythic in my world, then please respect that.
- I am okay with it when PCs use game mechanics (within reason) to make decisions in-game. Saying, OOC, "I'll go try and do this other thing instead of attack, because I know the monster I am standing next to already used its reaction" is fine with me.
- I am okay with it when characters discuss, within reason, their tactics for combat. That can be explained, IC, as these adventurers having talked about this during rest or similar downtime, or as their instincts of how to work with one another being very strong.
- I don't like it when PCs adjust their reactions due to failed dice rolls. If a player was trying to argue down the price of something, rolled a 1 on persuasion, and immediately conceding is one case of this. The worst instances are when a player is talking to an NPC, rolls Insight to determine if the NPC is lying, rolling a 4, hearing "You believe them", and then still believes they are lying because otherwise they wouldn't need the roll in the first place.

Metagaming is when the PCs act like they are in a game, as someone else said.

[stoutstien]

The issue with the low insight roll when a DM says something like," you believe them." That is well outside their authority to tell a player what their character believes or not.

It might seem like it's semantics to argue that they should say something like, "the NPC doesn't show any obvious signs of being deceitful" or "the NPC is so flustered and frightened you can't form a accurate baseline to determine if they are being forthcoming" but the distinction is very important when working with the flow of information. Player agency isn't something to take away lightly.

If you want some mystery in your insight deception challenges then roll behind a screen or flip a coin and use inverse values (1 is highest) so they can't really tell based on the value of the die what's what. Or you could use a single DC and dice pool roll so they have to base their decision based on looking at three numbers rather than a single one to determine their action. The math behind rolling 3d20 for a single check and 2 results over the DC means passing, disadvantage needs 3 and advantage only needing 1, is a nice little trick MoG posted a while back.

Regardless of what is the outcome the DM cannot tell the player what their character believes.

[Tanarii]

[About Knowledge Checks]

Knowledge checks aren't even really part of 5e.

Lore checks are, recalling information. In other words, based on how 5e ability checks are for things that require one roll vs automatically succeed if the PC takes ten times as long, and that PCs automatically fail things they cannot do:
Lore checks are for things your PC already knew, and is trying to recall in the heat of the moment.

Knowledge checks are just people carrying over the idea from previous editions. They are "randomly determine the state of my character" checks, where your character is a Schroeder's character prior to the check, both knowing and not knowing information.

[Keravath]

In my opinion, metagaming occurs when the player bases the decisions of the character on knowledge that the character is unlikely to have in the context of the game.

This can range from very minor to significant and happens to some extent or another in almost every gaming session. This is part of why there can be such a difference of opinion.

Examples:
1) Is the character aware of the conversation between another player and an NPC? Do they take action on knowledge they don't have yet? A common example is a scout 30' in front of the party. Often everyone rolls initiative at the same time and acts as if they are aware of what the scout has seen.

2) What knowledge does a character actually have? How much monster lore do they know? If they grew up in a village training as a blacksmith, hearing legends from their grandfather around the fire at night - would they have any clue what color of dragon corresponds to what breath weapon? That you need to avert your gaze from basilisks to avoid being turned to stone? What is the difference between skeletons, ghouls, ghasts, wights, ghosts, vampires and will o wisps? Are any of them even real?

A character, even an adventuring character, is unlikely to have access to a memory filled with a compendium of knowledge on the capabilities of a vast range of creatures. Even meeting these creatures might not give the character an idea of their full range of capabilities.

A DM could instigate a check to see if the character can recall any information about a specific creature. Simple or common creatures might not need a check ... the feeding habits of a Glabrezu might be an automatic failure unless the character has specifically studied fiends.

On the other hand, a player who designs the character response to an encounter based on knowledge they know about the creatures being encountered that the character does not know IS metagaming.

Avoiding metagaming does involve a willing suspension of the players knowledge and acceptance that role playing the character's lack of knowledge does mean a less than optimal response to a situation.

3) Metagaming also happens all the time with die rolls. Make a low roll on a perception check and the character should actually not know how effective they were. The character should assume that there is nothing there they can see and proceed accordingly. However, if the character rolls a 23, the player has the character march forward without a care in the world and if they roll a 6, the character often behaves much more cautiously. That is metagaming since the character doesn't know whether the check was successful or not even though the player has a good idea.

Anyway, most games have an implicit (sometimes explicit - it is something that should be mentioned in session 0) agreement that players will try not to take advantage of metagame knowledge while playing their characters.

[Darth Credence]

I think that is a bit unfair. Angry DM isn't always wrong. He has a pretty even split between So Totally Obvious it Adds No Value Whatsover, and Wrong. So really only wrong half the time.

OK, you're right. I was being hyperbolic in my statement.:smallbiggrin:

[Dark.Revenant]

Where would you draw the line?

Not Metagaming:
"I attack with Flurry of Blows! Sixteen and twenty."
"You hit with both attacks. Are you going to use Stunning Strike?"
"No. I'm not confident of my ability to stun something that looks as hardy as a giant."
(This is a reasonable in-character judgement call.)

Probably Not Metagaming:
"I attack twice. Seventeen and eighteen."
"That's a miss and a hit."
"Okay! So this monster has 18 AC. Good to know."
(You're putting an out-of-game mechanical number to something your character wouldn't be able to conceptualize, and making decisions based on that. However, it can be argued that your character would be able to understand how hard it is to hit/injure a foe, and that puzzling out the AC out-of-character is basically the same as your character getting a measure for their foe in-character.)

Possible Metagaming:
"I don't trust him."
"Roll Insight."
"... Five."
"You don't sense anything wrong."
"... I still don't trust him."
(You're most likely setting your character's perception of reality based on your own judgment as a person, judging the DM's portrayal of an NPC outside of the confines of the game world and mechanics represented by the Insight roll.)

Likely Metagaming:
"I search this wall for a secret passage. There's got to be one here."
"Roll Perception."
"... Six."
"You don't find anything."
"Hey, Rogue? You've got good eyes; can you come look here? I can't find anything but I just know there's got to be something here."
(You're making a personal judgment call, outside of the game, that your character wouldn't trust his/her own senses. While this is not necessarily unrealistic, would your character do the same if you rolled a twenty?)

Definitely Metagaming:
"I walk ahead of the party and keep my eyes peeled for traps."
"Roll Perception."
"... Five."
"The coast looks clear."
"I stop walking. I hold up my hand to signal the group to stop and beckon the Rogue forward to take another look."
(You're using the poor roll as an excuse to have someone else take a second try.)

Blatant Metagaming:
"I try to jump the gap."
"Roll Athletics."
"... Fourteen."
"Almost, but not quite. You-"
"I would have cast Guidance beforehand... four!"
(Now you're changing history and the flow of time to make up for a poor roll, after the result of the roll is made available to you. Note that in this scenario—unless you have house rules to the contrary—you can't even use Bardic Inspiration; the DM opened their mouth and said the roll failed, so it's sealed.)

Also Metagaming:
"I know out of character which type of weapon I need to use to dispatch these skeletons easily, but my character has never fought them before. So instead of drawing my maul, I'll draw my pike!"
(You're using your out-of-character knowledge to inform what your character does. In this case, you're doing the opposite of what you understand to be the best move.)

Well-Intentioned Metagaming:
"The party is split. Group A, you're bleeding out on the ground after the Goblin ambush brought the last of you to 0 hit points. Group B, you're in another area of the dungeon. What do you do?"
"I double-back and start running toward Group A again, sword drawn. I have a bad feeling about this place."
(This is pretty blatant metagaming, but it's done to try to keep the group together and avoid a TPK.)

[greenstone]

Metagaming is doing things in the game that wouldn't make sense in the real world.

Sometimes this is because the rules of the game are strange.

For example, in late game Monopoly, players want to go to jail. In real life, property moguls don't.

For example, players in online games often take off gear when running through dangerous areas, because gear that is not worn doesn't get damaged when your toon dies. In real life, you would keep the protective gear on.

Sometimes this is because of player knowledge, and this, I think, is the one most people dislike.

For example, a GM in an RPG asks a player for a preception roll, which the player rolls badly. Knowing the GM wouldn't ask for a roll if nothing was there, all the other players have their characters stop traveling and search around. In real-life, the characters didn't notice anything so wouldn't have any reason to stop traveling.

[kingcheesepants]

Hmm, you guys have given me a lot of things to think about for sure. I'm glad to see that there are a decent number of people who agree pretty wholeheartedly with my initial statement and that I'm not alone in thinking that my adventuring wizard who has studied nearly everything should probably know things about the world, and I'm also glad to hear that there are a decent number of folks who agree with the people I played with and think that I'm too metagamey. Having read your replies I think I have a much better understanding of why people feel that way and what I might do in the future in order to alleviate some of that tension.

In general I shouldn't assume things about a DMs setting without first asking the DM about it and that I should probably have a pretty good idea of why my character would know these sorts of things and be ready and willing to make a check to see if I can recall what I know. I think I'm still going to be a bit annoyed if my teammates try to cast sleep on some drow, or I have to pretend that I don't know I should be using thunder damage spells on earth elementals. But I'll have a talk with my group about where we should draw lines and try to come to a consensus that everyone can live with.

Also a couple of people noted asking another person to take a look at something if you fail to find a trap or secret door that you think might be there as an example of unacceptable metagaming. But do you really think that? If I have reason to suspect that there might be something hidden and I should check for it, I have reason to double check for it. I would say that if you roll a 20 and don't find anything and then don't ask any of your teammates to take a look, that's metagaming but honestly it's metagaming being done in order to streamline things and quicken the pace so I doubt many people would be too annoyed.

One other example of metagaming that nobody mentioned but I often see (and am not bothered by at all) is adding new players to a game. We want to have all the players treated equally and getting an equal share of the treasure and such and working as a team. If a new player is added he'll show up and for whatever reason (depending on the table it might be really organic or it might be pretty forced) he'll want to join the group and then soon enough they're working together as a team and sharing the spoils and acting as if they've known each other for ages. If an NPC were in the same place they certainly would not be treated in the same manner but players are exceptions and I think we all (or at least most of us) accept that. If this were not the case it would slow down or even in the worst cases totally destroy games.

[Jerrykhor]

I thought the definition of 'metagaming' is treating it like a game, or gaming the system.

'Oh I would have cast Guidance, sorry i forgot' is not metagaming if it make sense that you have the time to cast it

'I spam Guidance so that i have Guidance on Initiative' is metagaming.

D&D is weird. Everyone knows its a game, and treating it as a game shouldn't be wrong. But sometimes it is.

[Dark.Revenant]

Hmm, you guys have given me a lot of things to think about for sure. I'm glad to see that there are a decent number of people
One other example of metagaming that nobody mentioned but I often see (and am not bothered by at all) is adding new players to a game. We want to have all the players treated equally and getting an equal share of the treasure and such and working as a team. If a new player is added he'll show up and for whatever reason (depending on the table it might be really organic or it might be pretty forced) he'll want to join the group and then soon enough they're working together as a team and sharing the spoils and acting as if they've known each other for ages. If an NPC were in the same place they certainly would not be treated in the same manner but players are exceptions and I think we all (or at least most of us) accept that. If this were not the case it would slow down or even in the worst cases totally destroy games.

I'd argue that isn't metagaming, because it's not really related to an aspect of gameplay. You're suspending your disbelief, as a group, in the interests of facilitating the group's collective fun. You're bending the portrayal of your character not for an advantage or disadvantage in some task you need to complete, but to make sure the game can happen at all.

[OldTrees1]

I'd argue that isn't metagaming, because it's not really related to an aspect of gameplay. You're suspending your disbelief, as a group, in the interests of facilitating the group's collective fun. You're bending the portrayal of your character not for an advantage or disadvantage in some task you need to complete, but to make sure the game can happen at all.

But it is having the metagame impact how you are choosing to have your character react to this particular character (and the characters are an aspect of the gameplay). So I would argue it is metagaming. RPGs are one of the games where everyone frequently cooperates on the metagame level to enable the game level to best fit the desires of the playgroup. It is not all about advantage or disadvantage in game.

[Composer99]

I'd like to get all of your opinions on where you draw the line for metagaming what's fine for a character to know and what is clearly out of game knowledge that should be left behind at the table. I tend to find myself in disagreement with some of the folks that I play with over what is and isn't acceptable and usually I am the one being told that I am too metagamey whereas I maintain that they are playing their characters in a somewhat unnaturally ignorant fashion.

To me if a character is a professional adventurer who has studied nature, arcana, history etc and encounters a monster it seems perfectly reasonable for him to have a general understanding of what that monster is and what it does. He sees an animated skeleton and knows that bludgeoning attacks are particularly effective or he sees a blue dragon and knows that he needs to watch out for lightning breath or he knows that elves are immune to being put to sleep. Some folks however seem to maintain that no if your character hasn't personally seen these things before they can't know it, therefore I'm going to use a sleep spell on this group of drow attacking us even though out of character I know it won't work. But honestly that seems really silly to me, surely an adventurer someone who goes out expecting to encounter monsters and whose life may hang in the balance of what he knows, would definitely learn what he can about stuff before heading out. Are you telling me that nobody in the world has heard of dragons or knows what the various colors mean? Professional mercenaries heading into the underdark don't know even basic information about drow? This is doubly true for folks playing as bards, wizards or otherwise well learned or travelled folks. Surely a wizard who just cast detect magic on the mysterious circle on the floor to discover an aura of conjuration can put 2 and 2 together to figure out that it's a teleportation circle.

Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I intended. I guess a better way to say it is I feel like knowledge checks about certain basic things should probably be low enough to be auto successes for folks who are proficient in them. When I personally know that a blue dragon has lightning breath and therefore I should get some lightning resistant armor if I can only to be told that no you only got a 14 on your nature check so you don't know that blue dragons shoot lightning. Or to have someone make frankly suicidal decisions because he wants to avoid metagaming, well it seems really silly to me. Maybe you guys can help me sort out how to approach this in a way to make everyone happy.

I think the answer to "what is acceptable metagaming at any given table" is "what is negotiated and agreed upon at that table". If your table hasn't hashed out what constitutes acceptable metagaming, it's probably past time to do so.

To sort out how to approach this in a way to make everyone happy (or, at least, satisfied with whatever compromise is reached), I think you may want to reach out to the DM and other players, come up with a few examples of occasions when you think metagaming - with or without some kind of in-setting fig leaf to cover it up - is acceptable, a few examples of occasions when you think metagaming is unacceptable, and even a few examples of occasions when you think not-metagaming (anti-metagaming?) is unacceptable. Probably best to come up with more tactful wording as required. Invite the rest of the table to provide their own examples. Then see what you have in common, how you can come to agreement/consensus on variances, and, where you can't come to agreement/consensus, what you can or can't live with. This discussion may also reveal whether or not you have similar or dissimilar ideas of what constitutes metagaming to begin with.

Ideally, this open and honest (but tactful) communication and negotiation will allow you to have more fun during a game session without necessarily causing others at the table to have less fun.

[Garimeth]

Where would you draw the line?

Not Metagaming:
"I attack with Flurry of Blows! Sixteen and twenty."
"You hit with both attacks. Are you going to use Stunning Strike?"
"No. I'm not confident of my ability to stun something that looks as hardy as a giant."
(This is a reasonable in-character judgement call.)

Probably Not Metagaming:
"I attack twice. Seventeen and eighteen."
"That's a miss and a hit."
"Okay! So this monster has 18 AC. Good to know."
(You're putting an out-of-game mechanical number to something your character wouldn't be able to conceptualize, and making decisions based on that. However, it can be argued that your character would be able to understand how hard it is to hit/injure a foe, and that puzzling out the AC out-of-character is basically the same as your character getting a measure for their foe in-character.)

Possible Metagaming:
"I don't trust him."
"Roll Insight."
"... Five."
"You don't sense anything wrong."
"... I still don't trust him."
(You're most likely setting your character's perception of reality based on your own judgment as a person, judging the DM's portrayal of an NPC outside of the confines of the game world and mechanics represented by the Insight roll.)

Likely Metagaming:
"I search this wall for a secret passage. There's got to be one here."
"Roll Perception."
"... Six."
"You don't find anything."
"Hey, Rogue? You've got good eyes; can you come look here? I can't find anything but I just know there's got to be something here."
(You're making a personal judgment call, outside of the game, that your character wouldn't trust his/her own senses. While this is not necessarily unrealistic, would your character do the same if you rolled a twenty?)

Definitely Metagaming:
"I walk ahead of the party and keep my eyes peeled for traps."
"Roll Perception."
"... Five."
"The coast looks clear."
"I stop walking. I hold up my hand to signal the group to stop and beckon the Rogue forward to take another look."
(You're using the poor roll as an excuse to have someone else take a second try.)

Blatant Metagaming:
"I try to jump the gap."
"Roll Athletics."
"... Fourteen."
"Almost, but not quite. You-"
"I would have cast Guidance beforehand... four!"
(Now you're changing history and the flow of time to make up for a poor roll, after the result of the roll is made available to you. Note that in this scenario—unless you have house rules to the contrary—you can't even use Bardic Inspiration; the DM opened their mouth and said the roll failed, so it's sealed.)

Also Metagaming:
"I know out of character which type of weapon I need to use to dispatch these skeletons easily, but my character has never fought them before. So instead of drawing my maul, I'll draw my pike!"
(You're using your out-of-character knowledge to inform what your character does. In this case, you're doing the opposite of what you understand to be the best move.)

Well-Intentioned Metagaming:
"The party is split. Group A, you're bleeding out on the ground after the Goblin ambush brought the last of you to 0 hit points. Group B, you're in another area of the dungeon. What do you do?"
"I double-back and start running toward Group A again, sword drawn. I have a bad feeling about this place."
(This is pretty blatant metagaming, but it's done to try to keep the group together and avoid a TPK.)

Its a long post to quote, but personally I agree with this.

I also ABSOLUTELY agree with Corran's post on the first page. I'm the DM, and if its homebrew then I wrote the setting/adventure/whatever. Additionally, if its a module, I'm gonna change stuff, cause they are never ready for play right out of the box. Its absolutely acceptable for me to tell a character they don't know something about a creature, environment, spell, individual or whatever.

DM: "Yeah druid, you grew up in the forested mountains of Hometown, and you have definitely never seen whatever this weird giant land bird with a long neck is."
Player: "Guys its an ostrich."
Player 2: "I don't know, could be an emu."
Player 3: "Its totally a chocobo."

Who knows? Not the PCs.

Also, the dinosaur example is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard, lol. I promise you that many of the "facts" we know about dinosaurs currently will get over turned in a century, just like all the previous ones did. I certainly wouldn't know the equivalent of its stat block. A wolf? sure, I can take a good guess at that. How about some crazy poisonous South American frog hiding deep in the Amazon? Probably not... cause its RARE.

The best answer is that the group has to have an understanding of where they draw the line for a particular game cause it means different things to different people.

[MoiMagnus]

Blatant Metagaming:
"I try to jump the gap."
"Roll Athletics."
"... Fourteen."
"Almost, but not quite. You-"
"I would have cast Guidance beforehand... four!"
(Now you're changing history and the flow of time to make up for a poor roll, after the result of the roll is made available to you. Note that in this scenario—unless you have house rules to the contrary—you can't even use Bardic Inspiration; the DM opened their mouth and said the roll failed, so it's sealed.)


Possibly not Metagaming.
If there was no drawback at casting Guidance, this is retconning (correcting the past to be more consistent with how reasonable character would have acted).
If there was a potential drawback at casting Guidance, like being detected, this is quantum play (making a choice a posteriori, depending on latter consequences).

The first issue is definitely orthogonal to metagaming. "No retconning" and "no metagaming" are different questions. The second issue is related to metagaming, but still in the grey area IMO.
[That doesn't make it automatically acceptable, it's just that IMO that's a pretty bad example of metagaming]

[Garimeth]

Possibly not Metagaming.
If there was no drawback at casting Guidance, this is retconning (correcting the past to be more consistent with how reasonable character would have acted).
If there was a potential drawback at casting Guidance, like being detected, this is quantum play (making a choice a posteriori, depending on latter consequences).

The first issue is definitely orthogonal to metagaming. "No retconning" and "no metagaming" are different questions. The second issue is related to metagaming, but still in the grey area IMO.
[That doesn't make it automatically acceptable, it's just that IMO that's a pretty bad example of metagaming]

I agree with your general statement, but not this specific application. Unless this person literally guidances all the time, to retcon it for this specific failure is metagaming AND retconning.

Retconning would be better exemplified by somehting typical that gets glossed over in play, like "I would have filled my quiver with arrows before I left town" or even "we are all in the same merc group for a while now, so we have developed a simple system of hand and arm signals to communicate quietly".

EDIT: We may actually be saying the same thing, cause I see some references to what I'm talking about in your post.

[Dark.Revenant]

Yeah, that particular example has a lot of things going on. In retrospect, a purer example would have been better, but it's still the sort of thing players should avoid doing.

[KorvinStarmast]

DM: "Yeah druid, you grew up in the forested mountains of Hometown, and you have definitely never seen whatever this weird giant land bird with a long neck is."
Player: "Guys its an ostrich."
Player 2: "I don't know, could be an emu."
Player 3: "Its totally a chocobo."
Who knows? Not the PCs. [/quote]
This is where I facepalm. The PCs are not tabula rasa plus a few die rolls. They are beings who have decades of a life growing up and learning and doing things. Those are abstracted so that the game can begin. A druid not knowing what a beast is breaks my suspension of disbelief, since druids are specialists in the natural world. For unusual beasts, perhaps a Nature(INT) check is appropriate.

The druid, and all of the PCs, learned stuff when they grew up.
Example: when I was 7 years old I already knew what an ostrich was and I had not lived anywhere near one. Saw one at a zoo a few years later. By the time I was 17 and leaving high school I knew a considerable amount about the history and geography of the whole world I lived in. I could identify dozens of plants and hundreds of animals because I learned stuff while growing up and I was in boyscouts and so on.

Your point about dinosaurs is at least partly valid: depending upon how common they are in your game world.

[Nifft]

Probably Not Metagaming:
"I attack twice. Seventeen and eighteen."
"That's a miss and a hit."
"Okay! So this monster has 18 AC. Good to know."
(You're putting an out-of-game mechanical number to something your character wouldn't be able to conceptualize, and making decisions based on that. However, it can be argued that your character would be able to understand how hard it is to hit/injure a foe, and that puzzling out the AC out-of-character is basically the same as your character getting a measure for their foe in-character.)

I actually made that a concrete mechanic in my games.

When the PCs either hit the AC exactly or miss by 1, the AC is announced.

If the PCs have previously encountered this sort of thing, the AC is not secret in the first place.

This gives a few tense rounds of combat where AC (and saves which worked the same way) are unknown, then faster combat as the characters have earned information which just happens to make for more expedient player decisions.

Both the initial tense combat with unknown enemies, and the faster more expedient second part of combat, were regarded as positive by both me and the rest of the group.

(We also stole the "bloodied" mechanic from 4e, and announcing that -- even without any particular mechanics to take advantage of it -- also helps player decision making.)

[Tanarii]

Passive checks resolve many so-called metagaming issues. If something is secret, the DM is supposed to use passive score so there isn't a roll involved.

[da newt]

My basic litmus test for what does my PC know goes something like this:

I'm a fairly average guy IRL, what do I know about my world? Is my PC more ignorant or more of an expert in a certain field than I am?

What do I know about the animals that live in my world? Quite a bit but not everything. My PC will know as much about their world as I do about mine, adjusted for exceptional ignorance, expertise and societal norms.

[cookieface]

This is where I facepalm. The PCs are not tabula rasa plus a few die rolls. They are beings who have decades of a life growing up and learning and doing things. Those are abstracted so that the game can begin. A druid not knowing what a beast is breaks my suspension of disbelief, since druids are specialists in the natural world. For unusual beasts, perhaps a Nature(INT) check is appropriate.

The druid, and all of the PCs, learned stuff when they grew up.
Example: when I was 7 years old I already knew what an ostrich was and I had not lived anywhere near one. Saw one at a zoo a few years later. By the time I was 17 and leaving high school I knew a considerable amount about the history and geography of the whole world I lived in. I could identify dozens of plants and hundreds of animals because I learned stuff while growing up and I was in boyscouts and so on.

Your point about dinosaurs is at least partly valid: depending upon how common they are in your game world.

A modern 7-year-old's education is way, WAY better than 99.9% of people from whatever real historical era you consider DnD to be equivalent to. There weren't boy scouts in the 1500s. Have you ever seen a drawing of what medieval Europeans thought exotic animals look like? No way would anyone, even a highly nature-attuned individual, know details about animals from a vastly different ecosystem from their own.

That's why Nature is an INT check by default and not a WIS check -- it would require an immense amount of study to know things about Nature that aren't the basics of local animal behavior.

[greenstone]

Example: when I was 7 years old I already knew what an ostrich was and I had not lived anywhere near one.
You grew up in a world with printed books and televisions and museums and formal schooling and (depending on how old you are) the Web. Also, you can read & write.

In a swords & sorcery world, this is not be the case.

For example, a citizen of Athens or Rome probably knew what an ostrich is, because those cities had zoos and games. A citizen of a small village, probably not. A rural person (especially an archetypal druid secluded in a forest), almost certainly not.

[Garimeth]

This is where I facepalm. The PCs are not tabula rasa plus a few die rolls. They are beings who have decades of a life growing up and learning and doing things. Those are abstracted so that the game can begin. A druid not knowing what a beast is breaks my suspension of disbelief, since druids are specialists in the natural world. For unusual beasts, perhaps a Nature(INT) check is appropriate.

The druid, and all of the PCs, learned stuff when they grew up.
Example: when I was 7 years old I already knew what an ostrich was and I had not lived anywhere near one. Saw one at a zoo a few years later. By the time I was 17 and leaving high school I knew a considerable amount about the history and geography of the whole world I lived in. I could identify dozens of plants and hundreds of animals because I learned stuff while growing up and I was in boyscouts and so on.

Your point about dinosaurs is at least partly valid: depending upon how common they are in your game world.

Korvin, I think context is key. You knew what an ostrich was because of the advances of modern communication, publication, and education. Remote mountain tribes druid from Norway wouldn't know. He would know a TON about his area, and some pieces of lore from elsewhere, the rarity and distance of which would be represented by a DC skill check.

Now say this druid is playing in a campaign taking place in an appropriate climate, then sure he knows what an ostrich is, but now he doesn't know what a polar bear is.

I emphasize this because I completely agree with you on this:

"The PCs are not tabula rasa plus a few die rolls. They are beings who have decades of a life growing up and learning and doing things. "

That's why the DM should constantly feed things to the players and call for skill checks when necessary and tell them don't bother when its not. FOR EXAMPLE, I had a PC in my game last night ask an important NPC a question about national history that his PC DEFINITELY knows. I interjected and said "growing up in XXX you know YYY" the player recanted his question.

Think about the idea that a PC knows the equivalent of what we know to its extremes. At least half of my group knows how to make explosives from scratch. One of them is a paramedic. Hell, you yourself from reading your posts were a Naval pilot (I'm also Navy btw) imagine taking what you know and mapping it to a character.

My argument is not to infantalize the PCs, but saying that this idea that your PCs just know everything about the world the player knows about it (not your words, someone else's in the thread) and the DM is gainsaying the players to say otherwise, to me, is unrealistic. Heck, if anything the PCs probably know a good bit of incorrect information just like people do IRL.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That's why the DM should constantly feed things to the players and call for skill checks when necessary and tell them don't bother when its not. FOR EXAMPLE, I had a PC in my game last night ask an important NPC a question about national history that his PC DEFINITELY knows. I interjected and said "growing up in XXX you know YYY" the player recanted his question.
.

I agree with this and would note that it's even more than just them asking questions. It influences player decision making. A noble character in their home court would know that the king can't be persuaded by certain types of arguments. They would just know that trying to impersonate <notable> is going to fail because he'd never be seen at that kind of event. Etc. The DM has to be an active participant in player planning, injecting the world-facts (acting as the Source of Truth) about the setting. Of course, the DM also should avoid the temptation to use that meta information to influence how the NPCs act, because the NPCs don't know this information.

That's one reason I try to maintain a wall between my knowledge and the characters' knowledge--the NPCs absolutely cannot know everything I know. Because that breaks everything. And I'm a player too--I expect the same sort of play from my players. I don't get mad if they aren't perfect about it--90% of the time I don't care. I'm open with facts about the world, and expect the characters to be suspiciously well-learned. That's fine. More info is generally better. But not always.

[Tanarii]

That's one reason I try to maintain a wall between my knowledge and the characters' knowledge--the NPCs absolutely cannot know everything I know. Because that breaks everything. And I'm a player too--I expect the same sort of play from my players. I don't get mad if they aren't perfect about it--90% of the time I don't care. I'm open with facts about the world, and expect the characters to be suspiciously well-learned. That's fine. More info is generally better. But not always.
It's that 10% that leads to accusations of metagaming. Even though merely attempting to put a wall of separation in place in the first place is metagaming, far more so than failing to do so in many so ways. Anything to do with the myth of player/character separation is is metagaming in one form or another.

[cookieface]

It's that 10% that leads to accusations of metagaming. Even though merely attempting to put a wall of separation in place in the first place is metagaming, far more so than failing to do so in many so ways. Anything to do with the myth of player/character separation is is metagaming in one form or another.

There has to be a wall somewhere. Some just make that "fourth wall" more obvious and take a top-down view of their world and characters than others.

For example: If there were no wall, I would not be able to play a character with high CHA. It wouldn't be possible -- I am not a charming or persuasive person. If the response is, "It doesn't matter -- just roll the dice", then that's your wall of separation. Just like I don't have to be able to swing a sword to be a Fighter.

Intelligence skills (which seem to be the core of what is discussed here) are where it gets super fuzzy, alongside some Wisdom skills.

If I'm in a low-magic setting where suddenly all sorts of strange things start happening, I (the player) will know that a black cat-like creature with tentacles is a Displacer Beast. However, my PC will not know that. If there were no wall, then there would be no reason for me/my PC to use tactics that will work well against a Displacer Beast before I understand how they operate. There must be a separation of player and PC to make sense -- otherwise no player would ever be able to play a second PC after they gain experience from their first PC.

[Garimeth]

There has to be a wall somewhere. Some just make that "fourth wall" more obvious and take a top-down view of their world and characters than others.

For example: If there were no wall, I would not be able to play a character with high CHA. It wouldn't be possible -- I am not a charming or persuasive person. If the response is, "It doesn't matter -- just roll the dice", then that's your wall of separation. Just like I don't have to be able to swing a sword to be a Fighter.

Intelligence skills (which seem to be the core of what is discussed here) are where it gets super fuzzy, alongside some Wisdom skills.

If I'm in a low-magic setting where suddenly all sorts of strange things start happening, I (the player) will know that a black cat-like creature with tentacles is a Displacer Beast. However, my PC will not know that. If there were no wall, then there would be no reason for me/my PC to use tactics that will work well against a Displacer Beast before I understand how they operate. There must be a separation of player and PC to make sense -- otherwise no player would ever be able to play a second PC after they gain experience from their first PC.

Totally agreed. In fact, it can even go the opposite way in CHA checks. IRL, I'm a fairly persuasive person who is good at thinking on my feet. I have to self-limit my social skills when playing a non-face PC (on the RARE occasion I get to play...) because I start RPing a social dynamic my PC is just not capable of sometimes. Similarly, I have a hard time playing non-decisive characters.

It is toughest on the knowledge stuff, because like Phoenix said: it influences player planning too. I give out some pretty extensive lore handouts that my players are free to read or not, but if they don't and I catch wind they might be missing a key detail, I make sure to remind them or feed it to them.

Add on top of that it varies from setting to setting...lol.

I personally just homebrew everything and tell the players straight up not to assume that the stuff that was true in Forgotten Realms is true in my games. Granted, I can do this cause its a home game with a group I have been DMing for around a decade now so we have the trust and history, and they know I won't pull them around and they are gonna have fun in my games.

[Tanarii]

The point is the second you put up an artificial wall, you're metagaming. That doesn't make it always a bad thing, but it is what it is.

Also Cha checks are a useful tool for DMs, because they really work well with player declaring intent and approach, followed by DM determining outcomes and consequences. They're practically the model case for it, because they can either be done under the cover of a normal conversation, or can be done more explicitly, as desired. Player and NPCs interact, intent and approach are clarified if not obvious. DM determines if a check is needed and the value based on the interaction, outcomes and consequences follow.

OTOH as I already said, knowledge checks aren't really even a part of 5e, they don't really fit in with the paradigm of "if you can't succeed or automatically succeed don't make a check" very well, and they especially don't work with taking ten times as long resulting in success.

If you want to randomly determine the state of your character's knowledge, go for it. But besides not fitting with the design philosophy, it carries its own (commonly complained about) pitfalls, due to everyone potentially knowing everything and the randomness of the dice.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The point is the second you put up an artificial wall, you're metagaming. That doesn't make it always a bad thing, but it is what it is.

Also Cha checks are a useful tool for DMs, because they really work well with player declaring intent and approach, followed by DM determining outcomes and consequences. They're practically the model case for it, because they can either be done under the cover of a normal conversation, or can be done more explicitly, as desired. Player and NPCs interact, intent and approach are clarified if not obvious. DM determines if a check is needed and the value based on the interaction, outcomes and consequences follow.

OTOH as I already said, knowledge checks aren't really even a part of 5e, they don't really fit in with the paradigm of "if you can't succeed or automatically succeed don't make a check" very well, and they especially don't work with taking ten times as long resulting in success.

If you want to randomly determine the state of your character's knowledge, go for it. But besides not fitting with the design philosophy, it carries its own (commonly complained about) pitfalls, due to everyone potentially knowing everything and the randomness of the dice.

Only if you take a very odd definition of metagaming, one very much at odds with the standard ones and the DMG one.

You've defined metagaming in a way that basically no one else (except AngryDM, maybe) does. Hence what you're calling metagaming is basically the inverse of what everyone else is.

[137beth]

Metagaming is having your character do something that they wouldn't do based on out of game information. Whether something is metagaming does not depend on whether it gives your character an advantage. If you use out-of-character knowledge about an enemy's weaknesses to have your character target those weaknesses, you are metagaming. On the other hand, if your character is in a life-or-death situation, and you choose to have them do something suboptimal even though they are smart enough to think of a better course of action because you want to make things more interesting for the real people playing the game, then you are also metagaming. Likewise, if you use out-of-character knowledge about a monster's weaknesses so that you can deliberately avoid exploiting those weaknesses, you are also metagaming, as in this example (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2tk2b&page=9?Is-pathfinder-becoming-unbalanced#433) courtesy of Kirth from the Paizo forums:



I've often posted before about the guy I played with whose character's prized possession was his flaming sword. The first time the group encountered a troll, he said, "I drop my sword and draw my dagger."
Everyone at the table stared blankly at him.
I said, "You ALWAYS use your sword! You yell 'flame on!' every time we meet a monster! And now all of the sudden you don't want to?"
Player (proudly): "Well, my character wouldn't know that fire hurts trolls! I'm not metagaming!"
Me: (headdesk)

There definitely comes a point at which the efforts of the "metagame police" are self-defeating. In this instance, the poor player was so traumatized by previous DMs that he resorted to blatant metagaming in order to avoid the appearance of metagaming.

I'd rather let the players know stuff, and have us all know that we all know it, and then let the game proceed based on how the character would act.

[Tanarii]

Only if you take a very odd definition of metagaming, one very much at odds with the standard ones and the DMG one.

You've defined metagaming in a way that basically no one else (except AngryDM, maybe) does. Hence what you're calling metagaming is basically the inverse of what everyone else is.Yes. That's because most people are ignoring that the natural state of playing starts with no player/character separation. It's something introduced, something meta, outside the game.

It certainly can enhance the game. But let's not pretend we can really not know things we know. We can pretend to do so, and it will affect our decision but not match actually not knowing to one degree or another, and that's the meta game right there. But we can't really do it or match it.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes. That's because most people are ignoring that the natural state of playing starts with no player/character separation. It's something introduced, something meta, outside the game.

It certainly can enhance the game. But let's not pretend we can really not know things we know. We can pretend to do so, and it will affect our decision but not match actually not knowing to one degree or another, and that's the meta game right there. But we can't really do it or match it.

But for communication, using idiosyncratic definitions is rather less than helpful. You can prove anything, just by setting the definitions in advance.

And I disagree that your definition is meaningful. Because there must be a separation in both directions. You are not in that universe. So the character knows things you cannot know. And they are not in this universe, so there must be things you know that they cannot know. Separation is the natural state, at least if we treat the universe as anything other than a hollow shell. Which is rather the point of role-playing, in my mind.

The default is full separation, but the game allows us to translate from one frame to the other. It connects the two, but only in a limited fashion. There is tons outside the game's compass in both directions.

[Tanarii]

The default is full separation, but the game allows us to translate from one frame to the other. It connects the two, but only in a limited fashion. There is tons outside the game's compass in both directions.
This is manifestly not the case, because neither game world nor character are real. They exist only in our head. Which is exactly why player / character separation is a myth. It cannot exist. At best, we can do something we *think* will simulate it, like pretend not to know something But we can't ever know if what we're pretending to simulate actually emulates the real thing. It entirely possible that in pretending, we make it less similar than by not pretending at all.

[cullynthedwarf]

This is why i hate it when DMs like to tell druids 'You haven't seen this type of beast before'. Basically when metagaming is used as an excuse to shut down the potential of abilities, that's not fine.

I do this, specifically because there are no dinosaurs any where in my game world. So no you can not turn into a T-rex because you have never seen one inorder to imitate it. There is enough natural variety in the world that you should not need to turn into a Triceratops when a dire ape can do the same thing and it's not logical to have seen one or have had one described to you, in the age of mammals.

[PhoenixPhyre]

This is manifestly not the case, because neither game world nor character are real. They exist only in our head. Which is exactly why player / character separation is a myth. It cannot exist. At best, we can do something we *think* will simulate it, like pretend not to know something But we can't ever know if what we're pretending to simulate actually emulates the real thing. It entirely possible that in pretending, we make it less similar than by not pretending at all.

The game world exists in our *shared* minds. And that makes all the difference. No single person contains the entire thing. Which makes them more that just us, individually. And thus requires separation between character and player.

[TrueAlphaGamer]

The game world exists in our *shared* minds. And that makes all the difference. No single person contains the entire thing. Which makes them more that just us, individually. And thus requires separation between character and player.

The game world may be shared, but the character is owned by the player. The player will always have a vested interest in their own character, because (most of the time), they're the ones who make it, and who play it. The player projects their own ideas onto the character, their own thoughts, their own voice. The character is the result of the player's own imagination, an avatar of themselves. If things are separated, it becomes dispassionate - a connection is lost. If my guy is not my guy - a guy who is, in some way, a reflection of me - but instead a guy that I happen to control, there is created a limitation of how well I can represent the character. Why should I feel anger when they're slighted, or feel happy when they triumph, or feel determined to complete their quest? If I am to be separated from the character, the only thing driving my reactions would be whatever the mechanical impact of those situations are, or forcing myself into acting, rather than organically putting myself in my character's shoes. There's a level of separation, of course, but there is an upper limit to how much separation is possible before the game turns from a roleplaying game into a wargame with talking segments.

[KorvinStarmast]

You grew up in a world with printed books and televisions and museums and formal schooling and (depending on how old you are) the Web.
Wrong. The web wasn't invented until I was in my 30's. I grew up in a world where people taught their children. (Well, my parents did, but I had to learn auto mechanics on my own).

Korvin, I think context is key. I guess that, perhaps, you may be taking a greenstone attitude (as expressed in their reply to me) that, strangely, since there was no TV and no books, the Amerinds didn't teach their children anything about the natural world.
Or are you trying to have it both ways?
I completely agree with you on this:

"The PCs are not tabula rasa plus a few die rolls. They are beings who have decades of a life growing up and learning and doing things. " Thank you. Perhaps the question is a matter of degree or depth.

Here's a DM level suggestion to all reading this: don't assume that the characters are idiots nor that they were not raised in a culture of story telling and legend learning - they don't have TV .... GOOD! I was raised without it. Parents controlled access and unlike most of my peers I was not TV saturated as I grew up. Oddly, I did very well in school. Lack of TV and good performance in school: correlation or causation? One wonders.

As to the PCs, their whole village and their families teach them a wide variety of stuff. And, they have to remember it: memory is a skill that is highly valued in a pre writing society. And people develop it, a lot. (and any with a Noble background, or a guild artisan background, get even more on top of that).

And then, ADD TO THAT (the above) what they would learn as their background stuff indicates AND then ADD what their formative years in getting to their class would pile on top of that.

Children, pre teens, and teens Soak Stuff Up like little , medium, and large sponges. And then there's this: if you stop learning, you stop living.

PCs are above average/exceptional people else the don't even exist in the game world.

Nuff said, off to bed.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The game world may be shared, but the character is owned by the player. The player will always have a vested interest in their own character, because (most of the time), they're the ones who make it, and who play it. The player projects their own ideas onto the character, their own thoughts, their own voice. The character is the result of the player's own imagination, an avatar of themselves. If things are separated, it becomes dispassionate - a connection is lost. If my guy is not my guy - a guy who is, in some way, a reflection of me - but instead a guy that I happen to control, there is created a limitation of how well I can represent the character. Why should I feel anger when they're slighted, or feel happy when they triumph, or feel determined to complete their quest? If I am to be separated from the character, the only thing driving my reactions would be whatever the mechanical impact of those situations are, or forcing myself into acting, rather than organically putting myself in my character's shoes. There's a level of separation, of course, but there is an upper limit to how much separation is possible before the game turns from a roleplaying game into a wargame with talking segments.

There is a necessary separation. That separation is not total, as you say. But the DMs characters cannot know everything the DM knows, else the game falls apart. The PCs cannot know everything the players know, because that is nonsense within this world. The players cannot know everything the PCs know--what did the bread taste like this morning? What color what the flower that the DM didn't mention?

If the world is not to be merely a flat backdrop, potemkin village style, it must be considered to have independent existence outside the framework of the game and the players. Otherwise verisimilitude is impossible and ask you have left is a board game, chess with more trappings.

Edit: the NPCs are often antagonistic to the PCs. Does that mean that the DM must be antagonistic to the players or vice versa? No. So there is necessary, inevitable separation of character and player.

[stoutstien]

There is a necessary separation. That separation is not total, as you say. But the DMs characters cannot know everything the DM knows, else the game falls apart. The PCs cannot know everything the players know, because that is nonsense within this world. The players cannot know everything the PCs know--what did the bread taste like this morning? What color what the flower that the DM didn't mention?

If the world is not to be merely a flat backdrop, potemkin village style, it must be considered to have independent existence outside the framework of the game and the players. Otherwise verisimilitude is impossible and ask you have left is a board game, chess with more trappings.

Edit: the NPCs are often antagonistic to the PCs. Does that mean that the DM must be antagonistic to the players or vice versa? No. So there is necessary, inevitable separation of character and player.

I would personally classify most of that under the concept of suspension of disbelief which is a type of metagaming.
Sort of like the idea of collaborative environments. No two mental pictures of what the game world looks like are identical but somehow it works.

[MrStabby]

I do this, specifically because there are no dinosaurs any where in my game world. So no you can not turn into a T-rex because you have never seen one inorder to imitate it. There is enough natural variety in the world that you should not need to turn into a Triceratops when a dire ape can do the same thing and it's not logical to have seen one or have had one described to you, in the age of mammals.

Yeah, this seems pretty uncontroversial (at least if the party druid knew from session zero what the world was like and waht creatures are in it). It is not for the players to tell the DM what ecosystems there are in the world.

On the flip side, as a DM, I would be homebrewing beasts to encounter to fit the ecosystem and that might be useful to the druid.

[Tanarii]

The game world exists in our *shared* minds. And that makes all the difference. No single person contains the entire thing. Which makes them more that just us, individually. And thus requires separation between character and player.It is still you playing the character. This doesn't require anything. The base state is any character, PC or NPC, is an "avatar" of you, before you start adding "rules" (e.g. personality traits or stuff they don't know that you do) to make any character into "me, but ...".

It's important to note when I say the myth of player/character separation, it's this point I'm calling out. Player/character can never be fully separate, because it's always you, and there's no requirement for any separation, since the base state is an avatar of you.

Roleplaying games absolutely work if you play the character as an avatar of you, making decisions in the fantasy environment. They're even still roleplaying, since that's what roleplaying is.

But most of us like to add a meta layer to the game by adding rules for "stuff my guy feels I don't" and "stuff my guy does that I don't" and "stuff my guy doesn't know that I do", and envision that as "making decisions as the character in the fantasy environment".


I would personally classify most of that under the concept of suspension of disbelief which is a type of metagaming.Suspension of disbelief is nice term for a lot of what goes on too. :smallamused:

[Darth Credence]

Parents controlled access and unlike most of my peers I was not TV saturated as I grew up. Oddly, I did very well in school. Lack of TV and good performance in school: correlation or causation? One wonders.

Neither. It's an anecdote.

[Rev666]

My biggest metagame gripe:

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 24
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Rogue: i open it

...compared to...

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 6
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Bard: ok i look to see if the door is trapped.

I really don't want to make the roll for them in secret to ensure they don't jump on a train of "I'll roll to look" until one of them gets a really high number but there's no justification if they want a go.

[OldTrees1]

My biggest metagame gripe:

3 tips that you already know for reducing this gripe (beyond the obvious of talking):
1) Have plenty of not trapped doors around the trapped ones. If the Rogue checks every door in a dungeon, and most are not trapped, then the Bard's player has less reason to suspect this door is trapped despite the Rogue's low roll.

2) Have some low DCs surrounding the high DCs. If a 10 detected a trap 15 doors back, then the Bard's player might think that maybe the 6 is good enough to notice the common DC 5 trap. (actual numbers depend on the variance)

3) 6-24 is quite the variance. Ways that decrease variance make it so the Bard's player has less reason to suspect the dice failed. Advantage or Reliable Talent are useful for covering this.

[Tanarii]

My biggest metagame gripe:

I really don't want to make the roll for them in secret to ensure they don't jump on a train of "I'll roll to look" until one of them gets a really high number but there's no justification if they want a go.
Luckily 5e has Passive Perception so that doesn't happen.

[Dark.Revenant]

Luckily 5e has Passive Perception so that doesn't happen.

Passive Perception is meant to be used against a dynamic target (such as another creature's Dexterity (Stealth) roll). If Passive Perception is compared against a plain DC, then there is either a 100% chance of failure or a 100% chance of success. This is problematic; for example, in a dungeon with a bunch of DC 20 secret doors, a group with a maximum Passive Perception of 14 would simply never find any of them under any circumstances.

In any case, the most consistent definition of metagaming is: a player's character behaves according to knowledge that the player—but not the character—possesses about the state of the game. This is unavoidable, at least to some degree, in practical play. So it could be argued that some metagaming is good, or at least not all metagaming is bad.

[cookieface]

Yes. That's because most people are ignoring that the natural state of playing starts with no player/character separation. It's something introduced, something meta, outside the game.

It certainly can enhance the game. But let's not pretend we can really not know things we know. We can pretend to do so, and it will affect our decision but not match actually not knowing to one degree or another, and that's the meta game right there. But we can't really do it or match it.

Is the point you are trying to make "metagaming is the fact that we are playing a role, but we are in fact a different person, therefore we are that role and that role is us" or "metagaming is any time you make a decision in-game that does not match your -- the player's -- logic out-of-game, and that is a foolish endeavor"? The former seems to be meaningless, because then metagaming simply refers to the fact that we are not playing ourselves in an RPG (which, duh). The latter seems needlessly rigid.

Intelligence (and "knowledge skills", which do exist in this game -- referenced by Religion, Nature, Arcana, History, etc) being symbolized by an ability score necessarily means that if my character in one game with INT18 and my character in another with INT8 know different things about their worlds.

My INT16 artificer knows how to turn an ordinary sword into a magic sword. I do not. My INT20 Wizard might know the best strategy to pull of a stagecoach heist. I do not. My INT8 Rogue is illiterate. I am not.

I don't get how saying "Player and PC must have different sets of knowledge" is controversial.

It is a role-playing game. Your PC must have a different skillset from you, the player. It's a necessity of an RPG. If that does not vibe with you, find a non-RPG tabletop game that gives you what you want. When I play Puerto Rico, or Caracassonne, or Horrified, or whatever, I don't worry about "Does this decision jive with what my PC knows?" When I play a TTRPG, that question must constantly be asked, because I am playing an entity that is not identical to me.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Is the point you are trying to make "metagaming is the fact that we are playing a role, but we are in fact a different person, therefore we are that role and that role is us" or "metagaming is any time you make a decision in-game that does not match your -- the player's -- logic out-of-game, and that is a foolish endeavor"? The former seems to be meaningless, because then metagaming simply refers to the fact that we are not playing ourselves in an RPG (which, duh). The latter seems needlessly rigid.

Intelligence (and "knowledge skills", which do exist in this game -- referenced by Religion, Nature, Arcana, History, etc) being symbolized by an ability score necessarily means that if my character in one game with INT18 and my character in another with INT8 know different things about their worlds.

My INT16 artificer knows how to turn an ordinary sword into a magic sword. I do not. My INT20 Wizard might know the best strategy to pull of a stagecoach heist. I do not. My INT8 Rogue is illiterate. I am not.

I don't get how saying "Player and PC must have different sets of knowledge" is controversial.

It is a role-playing game. Your PC must have a different skillset from you, the player. It's a necessity of an RPG. If that does not vibe with you, find a non-RPG tabletop game that gives you what you want. When I play Puerto Rico, or Caracassonne, or Horrified, or whatever, I don't worry about "Does this decision jive with what my PC knows?" When I play a TTRPG, that question must constantly be asked, because I am playing an entity that is not identical to me.

Heck, my character knows how to cast spells and/or swing a sword. I do not. My character knows what the skin of a Quartan sheep feels like. I don't. I know what an atom is. My character does not, because atoms don't exist in Quartus. My character knows what it's like to kill a living, intelligent creature in anger. I know what it's like to fire a gun (at a paper target). Neither of these the other can possibly know. We are not our characters, they are not us. We are responsible for our characters, but they are not subsets of us, mere avatars.

And as far as identifying with and empathizing with our characters, feeling excited by their victories, saddened at their tragedies despite them not being avatars of ourselves...that's something that's considered normal at an early age for people here on Earth. Separating the fiction from the reality and understanding that there are other creatures out there, each with their needs and inner life and that their emotions are real and valuable. When I read a good fiction book, I am saddened at the tragedies of the characters and excited for their victories despite having no control nor connection other than outside observation. I'd say that anyone who can't empathize and feel the emotions exhibited by someone else has a really stunted outlook on reality, and I feel sorry for them. Not only that, if you can only empathize with your own character, how can you empathize with your party members, who are not extensions of yourself? I wouldn't want to play in a game where each person only thought of themselves and their own character. I want people who can rejoice together, for whom your crit is just as great as their own, for whom your death is a tragedy as much as theirs is. This means that fundamentally, the world is shared. It exists outside of any individual and is separate from the individuals that imagine it together.

[Garimeth]

Wrong. The web wasn't invented until I was in my 30's. I grew up in a world where people taught their children. (Well, my parents did, but I had to learn auto mechanics on my own).
I guess that, perhaps, you may be taking a greenstone attitude (as expressed in their reply to me) that, strangely, since there was no TV and no books, the Amerinds didn't teach their children anything about the natural world.
Or are you trying to have it both ways? Thank you. Perhaps the question is a matter of degree or depth.

Here's a DM level suggestion to all reading this: don't assume that the characters are idiots nor that they were not raised in a culture of story telling and legend learning - they don't have TV .... GOOD! I was raised without it. Parents controlled access and unlike most of my peers I was not TV saturated as I grew up. Oddly, I did very well in school. Lack of TV and good performance in school: correlation or causation? One wonders.

As to the PCs, their whole village and their families teach them a wide variety of stuff. And, they have to remember it: memory is a skill that is highly valued in a pre writing society. And people develop it, a lot. (and any with a Noble background, or a guild artisan background, get even more on top of that).

And then, ADD TO THAT (the above) what they would learn as their background stuff indicates AND then ADD what their formative years in getting to their class would pile on top of that.

Children, pre teens, and teens Soak Stuff Up like little , medium, and large sponges. And then there's this: if you stop learning, you stop living.

PCs are above average/exceptional people else the don't even exist in the game world.

Nuff said, off to bed.

To clarify what I mean... pre-printing press, your parents would have been far less educated than they were, therefore so would you. they may have had a handful of books if at all, and everything you got taught would have been by them or someone in the community or maybe a trade.

The oral tradition is going to primarily apply to their geographical area, regionally, maybe nationally, maybe a handful of nations depending on how isolated they are or are not and what level of travel/sailing is available to them.

Therefore, it stands to reason that they know all of the things applicable to their background, trade, or class that other highly capable people in their region know.

That does not equate to a viking knowing what an ostrich is. Or a kangaroo. Or what all of the breath weapons and alignments of chromatic dragons are, unless they are super common in the world. Now if we are talking about Forgotten Realms? Sure, maybe.

This post:


If I was an adventurer by choice or happenstance in a world filled with monsters and magic, I would go out of my way to collect useful knowledge to help me survive encounters with monsters etc, so if I am playing a PC who either decided to be an adventurer or has been adventuring for a while, I always make a point of adding something like "Grog actively searches for information about monsters, creatures, lore etc. He asks the local wise folk and reads every book that might contain useful knowledge." into the PC's backstory / character make up. Realistically, how much would an average 200 yr old elf monster hunter know about hunting monsters? More than me, the dumb player who has been learning about this stuff for a few years as a hobby ...

The WotC cannon includes people like Volo, Tasha, Xanthar, Mortiken, etc who write books that contain this sort of information. Only the most foolish of adventurers wouldn't seek out the information in these books.

Unless your DM's world has some reason why the monsters haven't been seen/encountered before or your PCs aren't adventurers and grew up ignorant of combat and adventuring and tales of battles with epic monsters, it should be assumed the PCs know as much as the players.

Is specifically what prompted my response.

I and some of my players have alot of the monster manual down to memory. We are talking about some of the rarest and most powerful beings in existence. Would my 2e character know that wish had to be cast on the Tarrasque? Probably not, but I do. Would my 5e character understand the limitations on the regional effects of a hag? Probably not, but I do.

My stance is that the character is a product of their environment, and as the thing they are dealing with becomes more and more rare, it becomes more and more likely that their PC knows less than the player. What that line looks like has to be tailored to the setting and PC.

The example Newt gives is to compare his hobbyist knowledge with what a 200 year old elf knows. My response to that is that the elf doesn't have the benefit of a monster manual that has the no kidding facts in it. Unless the elf has access to the right tomes and mentors, he probably knows less than you about the rarer things, and he knows way more about the less rare stuff. Like... diet, and mating habits, and migratory patterns, and tracks and spoor, etc.

This has become a bit longer than I intended, but I rather value most of your posts Korvin, (even though I am not that active here) so I wanted to take the time to explain in detail because I was surprised by your reaction. I think you have misinterpreted what my stance is to be:

"The PCs are incompetent or ignorant."

When in fact it is:

"What level of knowledge a PC has depends alot on the character and the setting. DMs and players should work together on this, your DM is not being unreasonable to say your PC knows less than you."

[JoeJ]

I'd say that a player thinking, "my character grew up in a secluded monastery. She doesn't know anything about trolls, so I'll just attack the way I always do unless somebody tells me otherwise." is roleplaying. A player thinking, "this is a troll, so instead of attacking this round I'll light a torch for extra light and maybe it can 'accidentally' fall against the troll and I can 'discover' that trolls are vulnerable to fire" is metagaming. The second player isn't really fighting the troll, they're trying to outwit the DM.

My solution is that it's up to the player to decide how much of their own knowledge about the game world carries over to their character. As for what animals the druid has seen, I figure that if it can be found anywhere near the region the character came from they've probably seen it, unless the player decides otherwise. So lions, leopards, and bears are definitely yes. Ostriches, sure if the player wants to (maybe as a child they visited the royal menagerie when it was open to the public on the king's birthday). Kangaroos, mammoths, and dinosaurs are impossible.

[stoutstien]

My biggest metagame gripe:

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 24
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Rogue: i open it

...compared to...

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 6
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Bard: ok i look to see if the door is trapped.

I really don't want to make the roll for them in secret to ensure they don't jump on a train of "I'll roll to look" until one of them gets a really high number but there's no justification if they want a go.

Use inversed values with a coin flip behind the screen. They don't know if that 6 is high or low and can still make after roll adjustments if they wish. Only real hang up are the "on failed roll" mechanics but they are rare enough not be a huge issue.

Realistically why wouldn't every PC check for traps if times allows? No reason not to have as many sets of eyes look over the potential trapped door. It's the 10 ft pool paradox all over.

telling a player what their PC thinks is bad form. Best to avoid it.

[KorvinStarmast]

So it could be argued that some metagaming is good, or at least not all metagaming is bad. That's my experience.

To clarify what I mean... pre-printing press, your parents would have been far less educated than they were, therefore so would you. they may have had a handful of books if at all, and everything you got taught would have been by them or someone in the community or maybe a trade. OK, thanks for the amplification and a nice post. *golf clap*

[Garimeth]

telling a player what their PC thinks is bad form. Best to avoid it.

Agreed. the DM presents sensory and setting information. The Player decides how their character interprets that and what they do with it.

[JoeJ]

My biggest metagame gripe:

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 24
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Rogue: i open it

...compared to...

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 6
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Bard: ok i look to see if the door is trapped.

I really don't want to make the roll for them in secret to ensure they don't jump on a train of "I'll roll to look" until one of them gets a really high number but there's no justification if they want a go.

If other PCs want to use their action that way, why is it a problem? Or, if time is not critical, why roll at all? Per DMG p. 237, if failure has no consequence, just multiply the time used by 10 and rule that they succeed (assuming that it's possible for them to succeed at this task).

[TrueAlphaGamer]

My biggest metagame gripe:

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 24
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Rogue: i open it

...compared to...

Rogue: i look to see if the door is trapped.
Me: roll Perception.
Rogue: i roll a 6
Me: you don't think it's trapped.
Bard: ok i look to see if the door is trapped.

I really don't want to make the roll for them in secret to ensure they don't jump on a train of "I'll roll to look" until one of them gets a really high number but there's no justification if they want a go.

Maybe it's metagaming, maybe it isn't. The players could just as easily justify it as saying "well my dude noticed your dude didn't look hard enough/under the door/through the keyhole, so my dude is going to verify for himself." Regardless, I think that specifically is a consequence of design and the inherent lack of interaction traps and similar hazards pose. You either see it or you don't, and the consequences for not seeing it can be rather severe. It's not like dialogue where the failure state is not knowing something, or having an NPC be mad, or whatever, but instead you're forced to take a penalty and lose hit points, a resource that drives around 80% of the game forward.

Are DMs just fine with creating these kinds of roadblocks where, unless a check is successful, the players can't progress or are penalized in some way? Can't they just take 20? This ties back to the disparity between skills and features, and the different standards we hold different parts of the game to. Like, a disconnect between having heroic characters who cast spells and shrug off death being stumped by not seeing something. It becomes a cop-out when compared to actual gameplay. Skill checks are a sort of sacred cow, though, so it likely wont be until next edition that we may see some shift in design philosophy around that.

[kingcheesepants]

A lot of people are talking about some of the more philosophical distinctions of player character separation and the link between a player and a character and such. While that's an interesting conversation, I was inspired to post this thread out of a more practical consideration of wanting to judge a baseline for how much knowledge should a character be expected to have before it constitutes metagaming and how much metagaming might be allowable before it becomes a problem at the table. I play with a lot of different folks (in addition to a couple normal campaigns I'm also in a westmarches server where the groups are constantly different) and we don't always have the time to go over the baselines of what is and isn't appropriate. So I wanted to get a broader perspective in order to approach more games in such a way that I wouldn't cause any problems by being too metagamey while at the same time not making my character feel like an idiot.

I think that one of the big problems in easily evaluating things is that some people assume that everyone in a pre industrial era was extremely uneducated and would know next to nothing about things outside of their community, while others feel that people would be going around and learning and hearing things and would of course know a pretty good deal. Another complication is that some people are running games with lots of monsters and magic and others are running games with almost nothing (or it's all super secret). So I think that maybe even if I can't have a full proper conversation about metagaming expectations I could at least ask those 2 questions, namely what's the general education level and how common are various creatures.

I think that the tensions I've had with some of the groups up until now arose from a mismatch of expectations. I thought that the things we were running into were if not common at least not ultra rare and would have been written about or had stories told of them which people would be familiar with. Whereas the DM was intending for the things to be completely surprising and different and have no antecedent or stories or anything that would tell us about them. Just basically occasions where I thought info would or should be easily obtained to the point of just being background info but the DM wanted to make it much rarer than I assumed. So from now on I'll try to have a quick chat and just ask what can I assume about general education and rarity of stuff in this world.

[Garimeth]

IRT the trap example, I see it both ways.

One one hand, yeah it is metagaming.

On the other hand... who cares?

Speaking with my DM hat on, for starters, I'm not invested one way or the other in whether the PCs trigger the trap, so it doesn't effect me personally. In terms of resources, I don't care either, because I put the trap there because IT MADE SENSE and there would be a trap there. If the PCs spot it, cool. If not, cool. so if everyone wants to conga line for the trap search, I don't really mind because all of the skill check stuff is an abstraction. Mathematically, the rogue had the best chance anyway probably, so the bard is now less likely (potentially) to find it. but even if he wasn't NBD.

Maybe I had this really cool idea for a trap that would have been climactic and exciting to deal with... like the doors slamming shut and the room flooding...

"You pry aside a loose brick and as you disable the trap you come to the realization that this room would have flooded and you all would have been trapped inside to drown."

Now I get my reveal, and the PCs probably high five about spotting it and avoiding a watery grave.

Also, if I really wanted to make the trap super hard to spot, I can just set the DC high.

On my list of metagaming that bothers me this is not on the list personally.


So I think that maybe even if I can't have a full proper conversation about metagaming expectations I could at least ask those 2 questions, namely what's the general education level and how common are various creatures.

I think that's solid but I would maybe tailor it more like this:

"PC XXX is a AGE/RACE/CLASS/BACKGROUND. In your setting how common is magic, how rare are supernatural creatures, how rare are adventurers (and of what avergae level), and what is the average education level? Could PC expect to have a working knowledge of magic and the more common monsters in the monster manual?"

Obviously, you could get way more in depth, but their responses to that is going to let you know how permissive or not they are, which is a good starting point. It also opens it up to a bit of a dialogue with the DM about it, which if they are reasonable - they will be open to, and if they aren't.... well its good to identify that upfront.

[mistajames]

IMO, using out-of-game knowledge when it's impossible for your character to know this is metagaming. But be generous - your character is an expert at what they do, and is supposed to know a lot.

This happens a lot as a player when you DM often and you have a decent memory. You often know monsters' stats, magic items, etc. and can identify them and how to activate/use them with a brief description. If that comes up, be a good sport and don't ruin it for the rest of your players.

Example: We fought a pair of Flameskulls in our recent adventure. Me, having run LMOP as a player and DM, know exactly what these are and how to kill them. I'm playing a dumb fighter in this game, and it's not really likely (though technically possible) that my character would know what these are. I message the DM and tell him that I know what these are, but that I want to make a knowledge check to see if my character knows. I fail, so I keep my mouth shut because I want to be a good sport and I don't want to ruin the encounter for the new players in the group.

[Tanarii]

Heck, my character knows how to cast spells and/or swing a sword. I do not. My character knows what the skin of a Quartan sheep feels like. I don't. I know what an atom is. My character does not, because atoms don't exist in Quartus. My character knows what it's like to kill a living, intelligent creature in anger. I know what it's like to fire a gun (at a paper target). Neither of these the other can possibly know. We are not our characters, they are not us. We are responsible for our characters, but they are not subsets of us, mere avatars.
Your character doesn't exist. What you are describing is pretending the character that is a figment of your imagination within your own head knows these things. That's not the same as a person that's not you actually knowing these things. At which point you either resort to rules to resolve things involving said knowing, or you make something up about it despite not knowing. Both of which could be totally unlike the actual thing (if the actual thing exists).

This becomes even more problematic when it comes to the player knowing something, pretending the fictional character inside their head doesn't know the thing, second guessing themselves, then claiming it's the same as not knowing. Because the last part is just opinion, and that's a big part of where the issues and screams and nerd rage about "metagaming" often come from.


I'd say that a player thinking, "my character grew up in a secluded monastery. She doesn't know anything about trolls, so I'll just attack the way I always do unless somebody tells me otherwise." is roleplaying. I'd say that's second guessing yourself, and also metagaming while you're at it.

[JoeJ]

I'd say that's second guessing yourself, and also metagaming while you're at it.

No more so than me deciding that my character is afraid of heights, or is prejudiced against humans, or can't pass a tavern without stopping for a drink.

[Tanarii]

No more so than me deciding that my character is afraid of heights, or is prejudiced against humans, or can't pass a tavern without stopping for a drink.
Yes exactly.

[JoeJ]

Yes exactly.

It sounds like you're arguing that playing a character with a personality different than I am in real life is a bad thing. Is that your point, or am I misunderstanding.

[Tanarii]

It sounds like you're arguing that playing a character with a personality different than I am in real life is a bad thing. Is that your point, or am I misunderstanding.
Nope. Pretending to play a character with a personality different from your own is metagaming. That's not inherently a bad thing.

The only thing that's a bad thing is getting twisted in knots about "metagaming" because someone else didn't sufficiently pretend not to know something they actually knew, in the twistees opinion. Often because they're failing to understand the other person can't actually act like they don't know, all they can do is pretend to behave that way, and how they would have acted if they honestly didn't know is purely conjecture and opinion.

[JoeJ]

Nope. Pretending to play a character with a personality different from your own is metagaming. That's not inherently a bad thing.

The only thing that's a bad thing is getting twisted in knots about "metagaming" because someone else didn't sufficiently pretend not to know something they actually knew, in the twistees opinion. Often because they're failing to understand the other person can't actually act like they don't know, all they can do is pretend to behave that way, and how they would have acted if they honestly didn't know is purely conjecture and opinion.

Okay. That's not how I would define "metagaming" but I agree with your point about it not being bad.

[Tanarii]

Okay. That's not how I would define "metagaming" but I agree with your point about it not being bad.
I'm getting that a lot hahaha

I'll ... just leave this thread be for a little while, given that. :smallamused:

[jas61292]

If other PCs want to use their action that way, why is it a problem? Or, if time is not critical, why roll at all? Per DMG p. 237, if failure has no consequence, just multiply the time used by 10 and rule that they succeed (assuming that it's possible for them to succeed at this task).

If its not critical, then yeah, just have them succeed or fail. Don't have them roll. but the idea of one character rolling, failing, and then having another character roll (when they would not know the other character failed) only when they fail is not in the spirit of the game, imo. Its also kinda not in the spirit of the rules themselves. If one person wants to do something, the one character rolls. If multiple characters want to do it, you make it a group check and then everyone rolls, with a success if 50% of the group pass the DC. If, instead of one of those, you let each character try in sequence until one succeeds, you not only unreasonably skyrocket the odds of always being successful, but you strain the believability of the situation.

[Tawmis]

I think Metagaming is different for everyone.

First and foremost is the expectation at the table. Is everyone just gathering to hang out and have fun? Metagaming might not be an issue.
Is the table some serious roleplayers - some metagaming might be an issue.
Rogue rolls a 3 to check for traps - player knows he failed - other saw he rolled a 3 - so the bard decides to suddenly check for traps, when they normally don't.
That's a source of metagaming.
Also knowing an ("exotic") creature's weakness - say trolls are EXTREMELY rare in your world - and one of the players shouts, "Burn them with fire!" How might they know that if trolls are so rare and their background has no connection to trolls?
Another time is if two people are discussing a plan, and the third who isn't there (party separated, maybe) - decides to take specific actions based on knowledge the player is hearing rather than what the character knows.
Or if the rogue sneaks ahead, gets extra gold - and doesn't divvy it all among the players - and a player calls them out for it (maybe the DM says, "You find 600 gold" - and among 6 players, the rogue only shares out 40 per player.

In the end - it's all a very gray area as to what falls under "metagaming."

The best thing to do is establish those rolls with Session 0.

One thing I do - make the Rogue, for example, roll their check behind my DM screen - so only me and the Rogue know what they rolled.

But that doesn't stop a suspicious player from checking anyway.

[Garimeth]

I think Metagaming is different for everyone.

... <LOTS OF GOOD COMMENTS> ...

The best thing to do is establish those rolls with Session 0.

This sums it up.

[JoeJ]

Also knowing an ("exotic") creature's weakness - say trolls are EXTREMELY rare in your world - and one of the players shouts, "Burn them with fire!" How might they know that if trolls are so rare and their background has no connection to trolls?

If I had to deal in real life with something that seemed to grow back after I hurt it, fire would be the first thing I'd think of to try.

[Tawmis]

If I had to deal in real life with something that seemed to grow back after I hurt it, fire would be the first thing I'd think of to try.

Fair enough - was just trying to think of a universally known (among everyone here) - of a creature that has a specific weakness.

Werewolves and silver, for example. Creatures that can only be hurt by magic or silver.

You get the idea. :D

[kingcheesepants]

I think that's solid but I would maybe tailor it more like this:

"PC XXX is a AGE/RACE/CLASS/BACKGROUND. In your setting how common is magic, how rare are supernatural creatures, how rare are adventurers (and of what avergae level), and what is the average education level? Could PC expect to have a working knowledge of magic and the more common monsters in the monster manual?"

Obviously, you could get way more in depth, but their responses to that is going to let you know how permissive or not they are, which is a good starting point. It also opens it up to a bit of a dialogue with the DM about it, which if they are reasonable - they will be open to, and if they aren't.... well its good to identify that upfront.

Yes this seems like a very good starting point. Concise enough not to take too long but detailed enough that I can get a good working knowledge of what to expect and allows for easily bringing up anything else in a similar vein that might complicate things.

[Angelalex242]

I'm gonna sum this up as 'not every player is suited for every DM's table.'

This strikes me as the same debate that happens when people go to gameFAQs for a video game vs. those that don't.

Player A looks up the sidequest on GameFAQs: as a result, he completes in 30 minutes cause he knows where he's going.

Player B considers GameFAQs beneath him, and takes a whole week trying to figure out the sidequest cause he hasn't got a clue where he's going.

Player B self righteously considers himself superior to player A cause he did it 'right.'

Player A thinks player B is a moron who just wasted 80 hours of his life he'll never get back.

If Player A and Player B then go play D&D together, Player B will spend all the live long day declaring Player A (Who naturally reads the monster manual thoroughly and probably researched the adventure modules the DM is running) a metagamer, where Player A considers Player B an unprepared moron.

And thus, nobody is happy.

[Rev666]

If other PCs want to use their action that way, why is it a problem? Or, if time is not critical, why roll at all? Per DMG p. 237, if failure has no consequence, just multiply the time used by 10 and rule that they succeed (assuming that it's possible for them to succeed at this task).

Its more the fact that the others decide to try because they've seen the dice roll low whereas if they saw the dice roll high they instantly trust that its clear.

[kingcheesepants]

Its more the fact that the others decide to try because they've seen the dice roll low whereas if they saw the dice roll high they instantly trust that its clear.

Both double checking the low roll and trusting the high roll are instances of metagaming, allowing the result of die rolls which your characters have no way of knowing dictate their actions. Do both of them bother you in the same way? I wouldn't be bothered by either case, it makes sense for characters to double check for one another in the former and it speeds up gameplay in the latter. In your estimation should both characters attempt to find traps in every instance where they fail to find a trap the first time? I suppose that's less metagamey but it would slow things down a bit.

[cookieface]

I think that one of the big problems in easily evaluating things is that some people assume that everyone in a pre industrial era was extremely uneducated and would know next to nothing about things outside of their community, while others feel that people would be going around and learning and hearing things and would of course know a pretty good deal. Another complication is that some people are running games with lots of monsters and magic and others are running games with almost nothing (or it's all super secret). So I think that maybe even if I can't have a full proper conversation about metagaming expectations I could at least ask those 2 questions, namely what's the general education level and how common are various creatures.

I think that the tensions I've had with some of the groups up until now arose from a mismatch of expectations. I thought that the things we were running into were if not common at least not ultra rare and would have been written about or had stories told of them which people would be familiar with. Whereas the DM was intending for the things to be completely surprising and different and have no antecedent or stories or anything that would tell us about them. Just basically occasions where I thought info would or should be easily obtained to the point of just being background info but the DM wanted to make it much rarer than I assumed. So from now on I'll try to have a quick chat and just ask what can I assume about general education and rarity of stuff in this world.

I think that, in the example you originally gave (knowing that a blue dragon has lightning breath), it would be dependent on the availability of that knowledge (a) and your PC's skills (b).

What I mean by that is ...

Is knowledge of dragons commonplace? Are dragons exceedingly rare, to the point that they are considered fantastical? If they fall somewhere between, would a moderately educated person know details about them (for instance, most people know that raccoons can get into trash, or that lots of snakes are poisonous and should be avoided), or would they need to specifically seek out that knowledge (for instance, learning about the behaviors of jellyfish, or Amazonian ants would require the person to seek out that knowledge, given they are not living in ocean or in the Amazon)?
Generally, this information would need to be provided by the DM.

Does your PC meet the prerequisites set out by the DM to have the level of knowledge needed for this particular creature? If they are a soldier fighter, they might not know about a blue dragon's abilities, but if they are a sage wizard, it would be expected that they do (provided someone, somewhere, wrote details about dragons). Do you have proficiency in Arcana? Nature? Animal Handling? Survival? Would your character's backstory reasonably cause you to have some knowledge about a specific creature? If you can justify why a certain skill score or a certain facet of your background would translate to knowledge in a certain way, then I think a DM should allow it. ("My draconic bloodline sorcerer feels a kinship with dragons, and therefore has a preternatural knowledge of their specific chromatic abilities." or "My ranger who survived for weeks all alone in the feywilds would know that Hags are weaker when they are not with their coven.")
Generally, this information would need to be provided by the player.

That's my personal thought on how to actually litigate these things -- these are things that should be addressed in session 0, but if not, then a discussion between player and DM would be needed when the issue arises.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Okay. That's not how I would define "metagaming" but I agree with your point about it not being bad.

Just absolutely useless, because every character is different from ourselves. It's a definition that sets everything to metagaming, and thus mashed the concept meaningless.

[cookieface]

Pretending to play a character with a personality different from your own is metagaming.

I think that that is what most people's definition of "gaming" is; nothing "meta" about it.

For instance, do you consider playing, say Halo or Mario Galaxy or Dark Souls to be "metagaming"? What about Monopoly or Risk?

I'm not strong and courageous like Master Chief. I'm not whimsical and risk-taking like Mario is. I'm not greedy and power hungry like a player is meant to be in Monopoly or Risk.

There's nothing "meta" about, essentially, playing pretend. "Meta" means self-referential, so in this case is generally accepted to mean changing how you play pretend in order to be better at playing pretend.

[Darth Credence]

Both double checking the low roll and trusting the high roll are instances of metagaming, allowing the result of die rolls which your characters have no way of knowing dictate their actions. Do both of them bother you in the same way? I wouldn't be bothered by either case, it makes sense for characters to double check for one another in the former and it speeds up gameplay in the latter. In your estimation should both characters attempt to find traps in every instance where they fail to find a trap the first time? I suppose that's less metagamey but it would slow things down a bit.

It certainly wouldn't have to slow things down. If one person says they are going to search, have everyone make an investigation check. A few seconds slower than just one person rolling because everyone will have to call out, but much faster than even one person deciding to roll after seeing what someone else got. Plus, it lets everyone join in, instead of going down the same progression every time. You may even get a chance to enact the trope of the clueless person stumbling on the lever that opens a secret door.

[JoeJ]

Its more the fact that the others decide to try because they've seen the dice roll low whereas if they saw the dice roll high they instantly trust that its clear.

Yeah, that's a result of rolling the dice when there's no reason to. The other players can't see the roll if there isn't one. Just by using the rules for passive checks, and for automatic success (on tasks that are possible at all), you don't really ever need to create a situation where you're giving the player information their character couldn't have.

[TrueAlphaGamer]

I think that that is what most people's definition of "gaming" is; nothing "meta" about it.

For instance, do you consider playing, say Halo or Mario Galaxy or Dark Souls to be "metagaming"? What about Monopoly or Risk?

I'm not strong and courageous like Master Chief. I'm not whimsical and risk-taking like Mario is. I'm not greedy and power hungry like a player is meant to be in Monopoly or Risk.

There's nothing "meta" about, essentially, playing pretend. "Meta" means self-referential, so in this case is generally accepted to mean changing how you play pretend in order to be better at playing pretend.

Then, would it be meta-gaming when replaying Mario Sunshine to know there are 120 shine sprites? Or to know how to get to a secret level? Or where to find the blue coins?

Would it be meta-gaming when replaying Dark Souls to know how to get certain weapons? Or how to save Reah from Petrus? Or what to trade to Snuggly?

Is it meta-gaming in Halo when I know where all the weapon/power-up spawns on Blood Gulch are? Or how the boss on the first Arbiter level in Halo 2 works? Or what weapons are best against Flood enemies?

I'm not changing how I play. This is the natural state of how I would play these games, especially on consecutive playthroughs. It's the same with D&D. If one plays it often enough, they'll develop skill and knowledge about how the game works. It would be kind of silly not to use it.

[cookieface]

Then, would it be meta-gaming when replaying Mario Sunshine to know there are 120 shine sprites? Or to know how to get to a secret level? Or where to find the blue coins?

Would it be meta-gaming when replaying Dark Souls to know how to get certain weapons? Or how to save Reah from Petrus? Or what to trade to Snuggly?

Is it meta-gaming in Halo when I know where all the weapon/power-up spawns on Blood Gulch are? Or how the boss on the first Arbiter level in Halo 2 works? Or what weapons are best against Flood enemies?

On a certain level, yeah. But when you play Mario Sunshine, you aren't expected to roleplay what your little plumber would do when he finds out Bowser Jr. kidnapped Peach (or whatever, I can't keep all of the inciting SMB incidents straight). You have plenty of ways to play the game, and the operating system allows this. The accepted level of meta-gaming is very high. Compare that with even, say, Bioshock or Fallout, where player decisions lead to different outcomes down the line. Do you harvest every Little Sister because it gives you a mechanical advantage? Or do you not, because killing these small children is morally wrong? Or is it dependent on other contextual events?

Even so, in those games you are allowed to play outside of your character's "knowledge" in game because, again, the game system allows it.

In DND, you are definitively asked to roleplay. You are going into another character's eyes and ears and boots and you are expected to constantly ask yourself, "What would [PC] do in this moment?" Your character may or may not have a lot of the knowledge that you have, but you are expected to play the game as though the character is making decision, not as though the player is. There are times when that line being blurred is okay -- for instance, I know I can walk away from this enemy because it already used its reaction! or I know I can cast this buff spell because that teammate's turn is next and they can utilize it before I might drop concentration!

Add to all this that your playing in DND is not part of some mechanical gaming system. You are playing in the DM's world at the DM's discretion. If they say you cannot seek a certain shine sprite because there is no way your version of Mario would know it is there, then uh oh! You won't be able to seek that shine sprite.



I'm not changing how I play. This is the natural state of how I would play these games, especially on consecutive playthroughs. It's the same with D&D. If one plays it often enough, they'll develop skill and knowledge about how the game works. It would be kind of silly not to use it.

No offense, but then I think you're missing a key element of what it means to roleplay. A level 20 fighter that you play your first campaign with is going to have far, far more experience than a level 1 fighter in the campaign you are about to start. If you are using the same "skill and knowledge" developed from playing a level 20 character for your level 1 character, then for me that is excessive metagaming.

(Here, I mean "skill and knowledge" as things like knowing what specific rays a beholder can fire, or how best to traverse a certain dungeon best in a rerun of the same campaign -- not the obvious mechanical advantages that a level 20 fighter gives compared to level 1, or knowing basic tactical strategies. No matter how often you, the player, plays the game, your PC only gains experience and knowledge from what they've done in-game/in-character.)

As an honest aside, do your DMs never say anything offhand when fighting a homebrewed monster like "This thing still has over 100 HP left, it's a freakin' tank" or "This beast has that one absolutely devastating attack, but it can only do it once a day so it's not like I set this up to be a TPK"? (in the case of the second, my DM just said something similar in a recent session, which was MUCH appreciated because otherwise the morale was super low in the group at that moment -- it felt like a fight we couldn't win when our Paladin was one-shot right away.) If they say something like that, to you the players out-of-game, do you really immediately weaponize that in-game to your advantage? For instance, if your DM responds to a large blow with "No, it's not bloodied yet -- this thing has non-magical resistance AND tons of HP" when your PCs were otherwise ready to fight to the death, do you turn and run away against the motivations of your PC?

[rel]

metagaming is the process of using out of character information to direct the action of a character.
It is in general most egregious when the GM does it; having cowardly creatures grimly fight to the death, flawlessly targeting the squishies and damage dealers regardless of disguises or chicanery, confidently ignoring illusions and taking hidden characters into account when taking actions, having dim or mindless creatures become inexplicable tactical geniuses once combat starts, the list goes on.

Whichever side of the screen the players are on the issues with metagaming are twofold; spoiling peoples fun and breaking the verisimilitude of the fictional universe.

The best solution is to talk things over out of game and get everyone on the same page.

Trying to institute rules to stop metagaming runs into the problem that, like card counting, it exists mostly in a persons head. You can ban the notebook and the calculator but you can't stop an enterprising soul from thinking wrong or even prove that they were.

And the kind of people who enjoy meta gaming often also enjoy examining rule systems, exploiting their flaws and finding the loopholes.
Like trying to counter optimisation by ramping up monster difficulty, it risks setting off an arms race, great if everyone is invested in that, but often an unintended consequence.

[Glorthindel]

I have always interpreted metagaming a "playing the rules of the game" instead of "playing the game"; where you use knowledge of the games rules and interactions to short-circuit events and encounters, that would have taken longer or been more difficult had you just played the game straight.

I am going to use a non-roleplay example of what I mean:

I was recently playing a Blood Bowl 2 (PC version of the GW board game) league. The final game of the league between me and another player would decide the league (if he won, he would win the league and I'd come third, if I won, I would come second and him third). Both of us had a surplus of cash to spend on inducements (bonus players, and special effects like wizards throwing spells onto the pitch) for the game, as we expected our game to be the decider. However, a quirk of how the game is programmed was the handicapping system - the team with the lowest team rating got bonus cash equal to the rating difference for inducements (this is fine and normal), BUT, the team with the highest rating had to spend any inducement cash first, and that spent cash was added to their rating before the second team spent theirs, so if they spent any of their cash, their rating would shoot up, and give a massive bonus of 'unearned' cash to the lower rating team (this creates a bit of a weird effect where its actually beneficial to have a lower rating, as you can always spend cash as you like, while a higher rating team will always be penalised for spending any cash - I am not sure if this is a mistake in the game or intentional). As it stood before the game, my rating was 20 points higher than my opponent, and we both had around 150k to spend on inducements. As things stood, if I spent my 150k, my rating would inflate to 170 above my opponent, giving him 320k (170 for the difference, plus his own 150) to spend, a massive, game-changing amount. However, I knew about this rule quirk, and I was fairly sure my opponent didn't, so I sacked a player (worth 50 rating) immediately before the game, dropping my rating below his, which meant the game forced him to buy his inducements first, which he did, giving me the massive inducement value advantage. This I consider the definition of metagaming - I did something that made no sense in the context of the game 'world' (firing a player from my team) because I knew that it would create a rule interaction that would give me an advantage - I played the rules not the game.

[OldTrees1]

I have always interpreted metagaming a "playing the rules of the game" instead of "playing the game"; where you use knowledge of the games rules and interactions to short-circuit events and encounters, that would have taken longer or been more difficult had you just played the game straight.

This I consider the definition of metagaming - I did something that made no sense in the context of the game 'world' (firing a player from my team) because I knew that it would create a rule interaction that would give me an advantage - I played the rules not the game.

I use a similar but slightly broader definition (partially due to metagame being a term defined outside of D&D).

Metagaming is "playing the game outside of the game".

In your example you engaged in learning the rules to find a rule interaction that would provide you an advantage. You then used that knowledge disparity and the rule interaction to out maneuver your opponent inside the game.

In Magic the Gathering, I might edit my deck between weeks based upon the shift in what decks other people brought last week. Deck construction is part of setting up the game of MtG and I am making moves (amending my deck to flank or avoid being flanked) on that meta level. The net result of everyone doing this defines the main part of the metagame for magic. https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Metagame

However not all metagaming is about trying to get a competitive advantage. In cooperative games the metagame level is where all of the compromises and arrangements happen.

When building a commander deck in MtG (commander is a more laid back / friendly format) to play with my friends, I take into account what gameplay would be fun / unfun for them. If a card / mechanic would hurt the fun of the group, then I don't want to include it during deck building.

In D&D our session 0 discussions are similar. We are talking outside of the game and configuring the game based upon these metagame elements. We are playing a cooperative game of seeing what campaign configurations would be the most fun for the group.

So metagaming is about anything stemming from the metagame (game outside the game) whether it is to gain an in game advantage or cooperation to satisfy an out of game objective.

[Garimeth]

However not all metagaming is about trying to get a competitive advantage. In cooperative games the metagame level is where all of the compromises and arrangements happen.

When building a commander deck in MtG (commander is a more laid back / friendly format) to play with my friends, I take into account what gameplay would be fun / unfun for them. If a card / mechanic would hurt the fun of the group, then I don't want to include it during deck building.

In D&D our session 0 discussions are similar. We are talking outside of the game and configuring the game based upon these metagame elements. We are playing a cooperative game of seeing what campaign configurations would be the most fun for the group.

So metagaming is about anything stemming from the metagame (game outside the game) whether it is to gain an in game advantage or cooperation to satisfy an out of game objective.

I think this is an important distinction. I do the same thing when I play Civilization with my wife. I am competitive, and she is not. she just wants to explore and found her cities and manage her resources. I want to win. So when I play a game with her, I do not do domination (military) victories. Because that would make the game unfun for her, and we are playing together to have fun. I stick to "soft" victories.

Session 0 is the time to discuss specifics, but I do unspoken versions of this all the time in the one game I get to play, which is CoS. I chose a Twilight cleric, and I just make everyone else awesome at what they do. I am a high OP player, and the others aren't. If I start playing my high OP playstyle unleashed the others will have less fun, so I don't.

Granted, this does lead to me rolling my eyes and cursing behind my monitor (we play online) but hey whatever, they are my friends and I want them to have fun their way.

[KorvinStarmast]

The game world exists in our *shared* minds. And that makes all the difference. No single person contains the entire thing. Which makes them more that just us, individually. And thus requires separation between character and player. I mostly agree, but as regards your last sentence I am going to disagree with you in a different way than Tanarii did, because I think we have a terminology problem.

The Player and the Character can't be separated, else the Player can't make decisions that the Character acts upon. They are connected at the very least at the conceptual level, or as a matter of ideation.

The issue, in a discussion like this, is the degree of intersection of the two sets, with "sets" substituting in for "states of being" or "condition". The player and the character are well illustrated, I think, as intersecting sets or overlapping circles.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Venn0001.svg/1200px-Venn0001.svg.png

The extent of the overlap will range from there being a sliver of red to having the two circles nearly be on top of each other and it be nearly all red. That represents to me the range of 'depth of immersion' - which is another facet of player / character distance versus proximity. You are right in this respect: the player's ability to utterly fill in the boots of the character is incomplete.

I didn't, to use an example, grow up in "that game world" for 22 years before we started our adventuring career.
I rolled some dice or picked an array and met the character during chargen. She emerged as a result of my process of creation of her existence. That is the foundation of our bond, of our intersection, our overlap.

A great deal of intuitive knowledge and understanding that my character possesses is unknown to both the player and the DM. Playing a character with which you have less in common is (IME) a bigger challenge than playing one where you have a few RL parallel skills or knowledge bases or predilections in common. I have a bit of a habit of defaulting to the Sailor background because I spent a lot of years in the Navy, I like pirate stories and sea stories, I have sailed, and I have learned a lot about sailing ships through history. But I do play PCs with other backgrounds. It is easier, I think, to play a character where your own skills overlap somewhat.

1. IRL, I know how to play guitar, albeit not all that well, and I can carry a tune, though at present my singing is best done in the shower.
2. The bard that I play is an excellent enough singer and musician to earn money from doing that. I most certainly am not. My daughter, however, is. (Voice major, and now in the music industry).
3. My bard and I are in a state of imperfect overlap between player and character without that overlap being debilitating. I am able to play her, and role play her, well enough.

What makes this possible? Among other things, the Die rolls help us flesh out, when needed, how well the character's understanding, talent, or knowlege surfaces when I decide that the bard recites a joke or poem, persuades a sheriff not to arrest a friend, scares a pirate captain into helping the party, or what have you.

As for the magical spells like dissonant whispers I, the player, can't do it. What I the player can do is decide that the character casts the spell because I understand how a given spell works. I, in the real world, understand how the spell works in the imagined world, or as you call it, our shared world.
Yet the bard (Character) can't do anything until I make a decision, or the DM narrates something.

While this may sound nit picky, I don't think the term separation is a very good choice of terms for the relationship between player and character in this particular RPG.

Beyond that, and to return to the topic, where metagaming discussions can get prickly is where the overlap, illustrated above, is perceived as being of different amounts by the participants in the discussion. The two sides can, as The Dude might opine, respond to the other's points with "well, that's your opinion man" and both be right.

This can make these kinds of conversations quite challenging. (All that the Forge succeeded in doing, for the years that it existed, was to pour fuel onto that flame in my opinion).

--------------------

As for metagaming being described as playing the rules versus playing the game, we see it in profesional sports all of the time.

Killing the clock in football and in basketball, for starters. :smalltongue:

[PhoenixPhyre]

Ok, so go back and edit "separated" to be "have non zero but not total overlap". That's all I meant anyway. It's a separation, just not a complete one. There are things that I know that the characters should be treated as if they don't know (otherwise the game devolves into comedy of the 4th wall breaking and/or isekai types).

[stoutstien]

Ok, so go back and edit "separated" to be "have non zero but not total overlap". That's all I meant anyway. It's a separation, just not a complete one. There are things that I know that the characters should be treated as if they don't know (otherwise the game devolves into comedy of the 4th wall breaking and/or isekai types).

I think the level and intensity of the PC/player overlap is in a state of fluctuation most of the time. Every time something changes or a dice is rolled the whole relationship warps to fit the new state the game is in. Sometimes this means that players need to willingly play down knowledge they have or play up to knowledge the PC has. It's mostly a self regulated concept and trying to establish any sort of hard parameters isn't going to remove it and cause a lot of extra work with no noticable impact.

There are more efficient ways of making sure the game runs well for all involved then trying to constantly judge players actions to determine if they have breached some arbitrary knowledge separation.

[JoeJ]

For me, the key distinction is between the player deciding that they want to roleplay a character who is ignorant of certain aspect of the world (that the player is not ignorant about) and the DM telling the player that they must roleplay that.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I think the level and intensity of the PC/player overlap is in a state of fluctuation most of the time. Every time something changes or a dice is rolled the whole relationship warps to fit the new state the game is in. Sometimes this means that players need to willingly play down knowledge they have or play up to knowledge the PC has. It's mostly a self regulated concept and trying to establish any sort of hard parameters isn't going to remove it and cause a lot of extra work with no noticable impact.

There are more efficient ways of making sure the game runs well for all involved then trying to constantly judge players actions to determine if they have breached some arbitrary knowledge separation.

Oh absolutely. I don't particularly care about player metagaming. And a lot of it is normal and expected--I fully expect players to balance things like "would this be fun for everyone else" with "what would the character do/know", among other things. DM metagaming is worse IMO--DMs darn well better not use their OOC knowledge of the players' plans against them. That's a breach of game trust.

I do care about getting common definitions for words like this. And I also do care about people (at least in games that I'm in) treating their characters and the world as if it really existed and they were just connected to it. Because without that, I find very little purpose in playing the game. Board games bore me, in the main. And if all you have is a mental puppet acting by arbitrary rules, you've got a board game. Without the board.

[Tanarii]

Just absolutely useless, because every character is different from ourselves. It's a definition that sets everything to metagaming, and thus mashed the concept meaningless.
Using it as something like the actual meaning of the word metagaming before it was corrupted by RPG games, and busting the player-character separation myth in the process, works toward preventing the continued harm of the twisted RPG-use of the word.

That's hardly useless, and definitely it's superior to the alternative.

[stoutstien]

Oh absolutely. I don't particularly care about player metagaming. And a lot of it is normal and expected--I fully expect players to balance things like "would this be fun for everyone else" with "what would the character do/know", among other things. DM metagaming is worse IMO--DMs darn well better not use their OOC knowledge of the players' plans against them. That's a breach of game trust.

I do care about getting common definitions for words like this. And I also do care about people (at least in games that I'm in) treating their characters and the world as if it really existed and they were just connected to it. Because without that, I find very little purpose in playing the game. Board games bore me, in the main. And if all you have is a mental puppet acting by arbitrary rules, you've got a board game. Without the board.

I think the definition could be fixed by just adding the word belief to it somewhere or least it would fix the game's description of what it is.

The DM metagame is a precarious one. You want to make sure the game is built towards the players and the characters enough to make it engaging and rewarding at the same time not built where it's feel like it is purposely designed and laid out just for them. I think it is a major factor of what makes a good game that goes undiscussed.

[cookieface]

Oh absolutely. I don't particularly care about player metagaming. And a lot of it is normal and expected--I fully expect players to balance things like "would this be fun for everyone else" with "what would the character do/know", among other things. DM metagaming is worse IMO--DMs darn well better not use their OOC knowledge of the players' plans against them. That's a breach of game trust.

I do care about getting common definitions for words like this. And I also do care about people (at least in games that I'm in) treating their characters and the world as if it really existed and they were just connected to it. Because without that, I find very little purpose in playing the game. Board games bore me, in the main. And if all you have is a mental puppet acting by arbitrary rules, you've got a board game. Without the board.

(bolded emphasis mine)

This is a spot where I only agree in theory, but I think there are several margin cases where it is okay and potentially even encouraged. Here are the two examples I can think of:

1) The DM watches the party progress, and gets to know their common tactics. Then they begin introducing encounters that either (a) feature super powerful creatures that play exactly into those tactics, so the party can feel very powerful or (b) disallow some or all of those tactics (like in an anti-magic field, or devising a situation where a martial character cannot utilize their signature magic weapon, or simply sending creatures out that will maul a martial-heavy class with auras or other defensive abilities) in order to keep encounters fresh or to give players an added challenge.
-- I think this type of DM metagaming is definitely encouraged. Even if your campaign is full of a certain kind of creature or environment, an episode that features a different challenge in some way can be the most fun.

2) The DM watches the party plot against the BBEG (or any >20 INT villain) in the run-up to their final assault. Since the BBEG can use divination or because they are just expert strategists, they can anticipate some of the tactics the players use against them. Personally, I read an INT of greater than 20 to mean "can anticipate others' actions to the point of being nearly clairvoyant". For instance, from just a glance or a short interaction, that creature might be able to guess at the ability scores of the PCs. If its minions have had multiple encounters with the PCs, it knows their common tactics and knows exactly how to counteract them. Even when faced with a plot to undermine them, they are adaptable and intelligent enough to devise a new plan on a moment's notice. All this is enacted by the DM, basically, playing this character as nearly omnipotent -- they have been sitting at the table with the players, listening to them plan the whole time. Think Joker in The Dark Knight, or Baron Zemo in Civil War: The BBEG can nearly perfectly predict the hero's actions, to the point that they can manipulate the results of those actions.
-- This is definitely more controversial of a take, but it is reserved for only inhumanly intelligent beings. It is meant to keep the party guessing, so that even their best laid plans face some obstacles.

[PhoenixPhyre]

(bolded emphasis mine)

This is a spot where I only agree in theory, but I think there are several margin cases where it is okay and potentially even encouraged. Here are the two examples I can think of:

1) The DM watches the party progress, and gets to know their common tactics. Then they begin introducing encounters that either (a) feature super powerful creatures that play exactly into those tactics, so the party can feel very powerful or (b) disallow some or all of those tactics (like in an anti-magic field, or devising a situation where a martial character cannot utilize their signature magic weapon, or simply sending creatures out that will maul a martial-heavy class with auras or other defensive abilities) in order to keep encounters fresh or to give players an added challenge.
-- I think this type of DM metagaming is definitely encouraged. Even if your campaign is full of a certain kind of creature or environment, an episode that features a different challenge in some way can be the most fun.

2) The DM watches the party plot against the BBEG (or any >20 INT villain) in the run-up to their final assault. Since the BBEG can use divination or because they are just expert strategists, they can anticipate some of the tactics the players use against them. Personally, I read an INT of greater than 20 to mean "can anticipate others' actions to the point of being nearly clairvoyant". For instance, from just a glance or a short interaction, that creature might be able to guess at the ability scores of the PCs. If its minions have had multiple encounters with the PCs, it knows their common tactics and knows exactly how to counteract them. Even when faced with a plot to undermine them, they are adaptable and intelligent enough to devise a new plan on a moment's notice. All this is enacted by the DM, basically, playing this character as nearly omnipotent -- they have been sitting at the table with the players, listening to them plan the whole time. Think Joker in The Dark Knight, or Baron Zemo in Civil War: The BBEG can nearly perfectly predict the hero's actions, to the point that they can manipulate the results of those actions.
-- This is definitely more controversial of a take, but it is reserved for only inhumanly intelligent beings. It is meant to keep the party guessing, so that even their best laid plans face some obstacles.

I would find the first reasonably ok--that's adventure design. As long as it felt organic rather than "I'm gonna get you" or "I see you are really good at finding traps. So no more traps."

I would find the second intolerable and not want to discuss any plans around the DM from then on. Which is horrible. The players have to trust the DM (and vice versa). As soon as it looks like one side is using the meta layer against the other, you risk a feeling of antagonism. It feels like the DM is abusing your trust, not like the enemies are that smart.

And INT>20 absolutely does not mean that they can know things they haven't observed. And scrying in 5e is both costly enough and doesn't give enough information for that to be plausible.

[cookieface]

I would find the first reasonably ok--that's adventure design. As long as it felt organic rather than "I'm gonna get you" or "I see you are really good at finding traps. So no more traps."

I would find the second intolerable and not want to discuss any plans around the DM from then on. Which is horrible. The players have to trust the DM (and vice versa). As soon as it looks like one side is using the meta layer against the other, you risk a feeling of antagonism. It feels like the DM is abusing your trust, not like the enemies are that smart.

And INT>20 absolutely does not mean that they can know things they haven't observed. And scrying in 5e is both costly enough and doesn't give enough information for that to be plausible.

I might not have explained well enough, then.

What I mean is that the mechanics a DM can use to play a >20 INT creature is to listen to the players' plans, and have the creature in-game "anticipate" them with a high degree of accuracy. Not that the creature would know exactly what the plans are, just that any plan taken to defeat it would fall apart rapidly because the creature would have already planned for how to counteract any enemy using similar tactics against them.

It's hard to give an example here, but the MCU Civil War Baron Zemo example is the best I can do: He has a grand plan that requires the protagonists of the story to take specific actions in response to the events he sets in motion. He either gets lucky, hyper-intelligent, or "reading the script" ... as in, he either guessed, or he knew enough about the protagonists to predict their actions with high precision, or he simply omnipotently knew what they would do.

The result is the same in each scenario, but the way that the DM (OOC "reading the script") gets there is different from how the BBEG (IC predicts their actions) gets to the same place.

If my party with a bunch of <16 INT PCs in it can somehow outwit a 22 INT Pit Fiend, then that suspends disbelief. I'd rather that Pit Fiend be able to "anticipate" aspects of our plot than the DM just play along as though it has no reason to suspect the standard plot tropes, and act accordingly.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I might not have explained well enough, then.

What I mean is that the mechanics a DM can use to play a >20 INT creature is to listen to the players' plans, and have the creature in-game "anticipate" them with a high degree of accuracy. Not that the creature would know exactly what the plans are, just that any plan taken to defeat it would fall apart rapidly because the creature would have already planned for how to counteract any enemy using similar tactics against them.

It's hard to give an example here, but the MCU Civil War Baron Zemo example is the best I can do: He has a grand plan that requires the protagonists of the story to take specific actions in response to the events he sets in motion. He either gets lucky, hyper-intelligent, or "reading the script" ... as in, he either guessed, or he knew enough about the protagonists to predict their actions with high precision, or he simply omnipotently knew what they would do.

The result is the same in each scenario, but the way that the DM (OOC "reading the script") gets there is different from how the BBEG (IC predicts their actions) gets to the same place.

If my party with a bunch of <16 INT PCs in it can somehow outwit a 22 INT Pit Fiend, then that suspends disbelief. I'd rather that Pit Fiend be able to "anticipate" aspects of our plot than the DM just play along as though it has no reason to suspect the standard plot tropes, and act accordingly.

If there's a reasonable (even obvious) route to how they outthought the party, and it's clear that there was no substantive leakage, then that's one thing. Or if you show that yes, you did surprise the fiend but then he adapted really fast, that might work. But that's a really high hurdle to overcome. And runs horrible risks of destroying trust.

That sort of "I'm super smart" 5D chess master character works really well in printed fiction, but I've yet to see it work at all at the table. Because even smart people have flaws. In fact, I've been around a lot of genius-class people (having gotten a PhD in Physics). Most of them are worse as far as blind spots, inability to read people and predict what they're going to do than the much lower IQ but much more socially adapted folk over in the Business college. And much more prone to hubris, to the fatal flaw of thinking that their smarts compensates for their other flaws. That "just thinking about it" or "being smart" means you come to the right conclusions.

Being smart does not mean you're super perceptive or able to read people. That's Wisdom (Perception and Insight) respectively. Pit Fiends are super smart, but they're not particularly superhumanly wise. The fact that they're devils means that they have intrinsic flaws, blind spots, and other such things. And a party that exploits those flaws, blind spots, etc. deserves to catch the pit fiend off guard. Possibly fatally so. And being smart doesn't mean you adapt fast or well. A lot of the very smart people I know are super fragile once their carefully-laid plans get shattered by something unexpected--they keep trying to shove things back onto the "planned" track.

So forgive me if I don't find "he's really smart, so he can know everything and plan for all the eventualities" very persuasive. Even in comic books it rings really hollow and just like handing that character a superpower. Sure, Batman is canonically prepared for everything. But that's because the authors write that in retroactively. Not because that's even remotely plausible.

[stoutstien]

If I get the time I should start something focused on the DM side of this concept.
Little support from printed sources and it's also taboo for some groups so its nice to just have a frank conversation on it.

[cookieface]

If there's a reasonable (even obvious) route to how they outthought the party, and it's clear that there was no substantive leakage, then that's one thing. Or if you show that yes, you did surprise the fiend but then he adapted really fast, that might work. But that's a really high hurdle to overcome. And runs horrible risks of destroying trust.

That sort of "I'm super smart" 5D chess master character works really well in printed fiction, but I've yet to see it work at all at the table. Because even smart people have flaws. In fact, I've been around a lot of genius-class people (having gotten a PhD in Physics). Most of them are worse as far as blind spots, inability to read people and predict what they're going to do than the much lower IQ but much more socially adapted folk over in the Business college. And much more prone to hubris, to the fatal flaw of thinking that their smarts compensates for their other flaws. That "just thinking about it" or "being smart" means you come to the right conclusions.

Being smart does not mean you're super perceptive or able to read people. That's Wisdom (Perception and Insight) respectively. Pit Fiends are super smart, but they're not particularly superhumanly wise. The fact that they're devils means that they have intrinsic flaws, blind spots, and other such things. And a party that exploits those flaws, blind spots, etc. deserves to catch the pit fiend off guard. Possibly fatally so. And being smart doesn't mean you adapt fast or well. A lot of the very smart people I know are super fragile once their carefully-laid plans get shattered by something unexpected--they keep trying to shove things back onto the "planned" track.

So forgive me if I don't find "he's really smart, so he can know everything and plan for all the eventualities" very persuasive. Even in comic books it rings really hollow and just like handing that character a superpower. Sure, Batman is canonically prepared for everything. But that's because the authors write that in retroactively. Not because that's even remotely plausible.

Fair points. To me, high INT scores imply that the creature is an absolute master planner, with plans for contingencies, and further plans for the contingencies of those contingencies. The Pit Fiend isn't INT 22 because it studied lots of physics (I'm not saying this to demean an accomplishment at all, just to emphasize that intelligence in our world is measured differently that intelligence in a DnD setting), it's INT 22 because it can outwit beings with lesser intelligence.

You are correct in that some of these skills are very blurry in terms of the split between WIS/INT, and I definitely gave some examples that likely fall on the WIS side of things.

And also agreed that these villains will have fatal flaws and blind spots that heroes can exploit. It is on the players to find those things and exploit them, though, and a very intelligent being could either be very adept at hiding them, or know to lure adventurers into a trap by making them believe something that isn't true.

It's all very delicate, and it is a huge reason why I struggle with anything of very high INT. (Coming back around to the topic of this thread...) As me, a player/DM who likely falls somewhere around, I dunno, 13-15 INT, it is nearly impossible to comprehend what 22 INT looks like in practice. If I could better comprehend it, then I would be closer to that high of a score myself.

So what's the only way to run something with that INT? To metagame it. To "read the script" so to speak, so that the Pit Fiend can effectively defend against a player's plan against it. I admit it might not be the best, but I think it is easily justified in this case.

And in general, I avoid high INT creatures for this reason.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Fair points. To me, high INT scores imply that the creature is an absolute master planner, with plans for contingencies, and further plans for the contingencies of those contingencies. The Pit Fiend isn't INT 22 because it studied lots of physics (I'm not saying this to demean an accomplishment at all, just to emphasize that intelligence in our world is measured differently that intelligence in a DnD setting), it's INT 22 because it can outwit beings with lesser intelligence.

<snip>

And in general, I avoid high INT creatures for this reason.

I think you avoid high INT creatures because you've got an interpretation of INT that's causing issues for you. High INT means nothing more or less than "can remember facts easily and can perform abstract reasoning very well." It's entirely academic capability. It has nothing to do with planning or playing 5D Xanatos chess or out-thinking other people. At least by the stock settings. As such, playing a high INT creature who is normal in other respects is easy. Anything academic comes up? They got this. They can design whizbang blueprints. But are as likely as anyone else to leave big gaping holes for things like social engineering.

A high INT PC isn't necessarily a tactician or even capable of dealing with people. Take the Ur example, the cloistered "Ivory Tower" wizard. Super high INT, low-ish WIS, low CHA. He's barely poked his head outside his walls long enough to realize that there are people, let alone understand threats. Given all the information, he can make plans. But he's not particularly good at understanding people or dealing with them. Notorious for doing things that seemed like they'd work by his calculations, but which any street-wise idiot could tell you wouldn't work. Totally lacking in that thing called "common sense". Can calculate everything but understands nothing.

Outthinking people is much more tied in with understanding people. Which is entirely WIS (ok, might have a little to do with CHA to gain the info in the first place).

[rel]

I'd be very cautious about giving creatures with high int or divination magic the ability to automatically know the opponents tactics and plans by fiat.

At least some of the PC's will have high int and divination magic and the players will not be pleased to find that their NPC counterparts are being given special treatment.

[JoeJ]

Instead of just making the BBEG super smart, have them learn. Every new time the PCs show up, the BBEG's troops have adapted to the tactics they used the previous time. That way you can show an intelligent enemy without it seeming like you're being unfair. After all, the BBEG might not be able to scry the PCs 24/7, but they should certainly know what's happening to their own minions.

[Osuniev]

About the specific question of "Is it metagaming to tell the AC of a creature" ?

I feel like every competent fighter/soldier/basically anyone competent in martial weapons should know the EXACT AC (well, not the Dex bonus) of every humanoid, just based on what theyre wearing.
Chain mail ? 16
Plate ? 18
Plate and Shield ? 20.

Those numbers are an abstraction of something real in the fiction : a Fighter should know how hard it is to hit an armored knight much better than me, with my 2 years of modern fencing.

Based on that, I also consider that unless they encounter some strange outsider or very rare monster, they should have a decent idea of the AC of most Beasts.

So I usually start my combats like : there are 5 Hobgoblins, they're wearing shields and scale mail , meaning they have AC 18. What do you do ?

If it's not obvious, I'll annonce the AC after a full round, after they've noticed how some of their attack missed and some hit. Again, I feel a competent fighter would realize by then how likely they are of hitting their foe, even if they wouldn't know the math to translate their feeling into a number.

Plus, it saves time at the table , and it allows for interesting tactical decisions.

[Glorthindel]

2) The DM watches the party plot against the BBEG (or any >20 INT villain) in the run-up to their final assault. Since the BBEG can use divination or because they are just expert strategists, they can anticipate some of the tactics the players use against them.

While this can work, this is something you have to be very careful and sparing with; while once it will present possibly quite a unique and memorable encounter, if leaned on too often, it can just lead to annoyance and resentment.

I have used this idea exactly once, and my players loved and still talk about the couple of sessions that the events spanned, but only because I played it up hard, and I have only done it that once. If I did it again, I am sure the response would be much less favourable.

The adventure was a Ravenloft one set on an island mental asylum; initially the party were there my accident (shipwreck) and were allowed to remain 'as guests' til a boat arrived, but the villains in charge began gaslighting them in order to make their stay in the asylum a little more permanent. The villains were using psionic scying, polymorphing to have observers present during their planning sessions (during one planning session a character was feeding a bird that I had casually mentioned during the area description who was actually a polymorphed villain), and mind control to force party members to sabotage their own plans. I hard countered every plan they came up with for the first half dozen plans. And I did it blatantly, and arrogantly, because I wanted the party to know they were always being watched, and that the villains were smarter than them, and that they knew it, and were toying with them for their own amusement. In the end the party used that arrogance against them, but even then only barely got away (losing a party member in the process). My players enjoyed the whole process, but I think a key reason for that is because the tricks i was employing were not things I would normally do, so it made this adventure special, and a new challenge to face, but it would get quickly tedious if every super villain exibited these features.

[Reynaert]

Both double checking the low roll and trusting the high roll are instances of metagaming, allowing the result of die rolls which your characters have no way of knowing dictate their actions. (emphasis mine)


Or you drop this unwarranted assumption and then the problem simply goes away.

If a character does something that requires a roll, why would they not know how well they rolled?

Gratuitous Examples:
- Player A tries to open a lock, rolls an 18, but it doesn't open: "You were on your A-game, but you quickly realise that this lock is Just Too Good"
- Player B tries to open a lock, rolls a 5, it doesn't open: "You fumble around with the lock, but fail to get it to open"
- Player C searches for traps, rolls a 17: "You search the whole door and you are quite confident that there are no traps"
- Player D searches for traps, rolls a 4: "There's a bit of door that looks suspicious, but after careful examination, it was nothing. You didn't really have time to search the rest of the door"

I think most DM's already do this in battle. If somebody barely misses the AC, they go 'You expertly strike at their weak point, but they manage to dodge out of the way', or 'the blow was true, but bounces of the metal breastplate without doing damage'. And if a player rolls really low 'swing and a miss!' or 'the enemy laughs at your feeble attempt and steps aside to let your wild swing pass harmlessly'. (Probably with less flowery language but you catch my drift).

[DwarfFighter]

As the GM I will sometimes give the players information that their characters could not possibly know, but that explains stuff and allows them to put things into context. Cut-scenes of other important NPCs interacting, discussing PCs that are not present, often serves to emphasize to the players the role of those NPCs and illustrate the consequences of their actions, be they triumphs or misdeeds.

For example, I could do something like this.

GM: You successfully force open the grate to access the chute leading down to the dungeon's lower level. As you enter we cut away to...

A torchlit hall with the trappings of a chapel or temple dedicated to Orcus. A tall figure with an ornate mask stands by the altar as a guard enters and salutes smartly.

"My lady," says the guard. "We have intruders. The bodies of the goblins guarding the south entry have been discovered."

"This is the work of these adventurers, no doubt!" The leader's voice is muffled by the ornate mask. "Alert the guards, and summon Albraic the Red from his laboratory. I want him to deal with these interlopers personally."

Ok, so now the players know that the alarm is sounded, there is a female leader figure, and a lab technician or something is coming for them. Is this too much information? Maybe. Is it actionable? Sure, the players now know that there is an actual benefit to staying cautious, that the difficulty just got higher.

Also, the players now know that bad guys are organized, a fact that will prove to be important to the plot but perhaps easy to miss, and led by an as-yet-unidentified female character that has some sort of prior knowledge of the PCs. Maybe they can make some educated guesses as to whom that might be. If they need to follow this up with an investigation, this information can eliminate a whole lot of false leads and misunderstandings. Sure, meta-gaming. But not necessarily ​bad meta-gaming.

-DF

[Danielqueue1]

This has been discussed back and forth for several pages but I just wanted to add my perspective. Metagaming isn't inherently bad, how it is used makes all the difference.

Consider if A DM homebrewed a creature, or modified an existing one. Bad metagaming will sometimes manifest by a player declaring what abilities damage and weaknesses the creature has, and then if it is particularly bad, they might argue with the DM "That's not how that creature's ability works!"

Under the same situation good metagaming can have a similar situation, and when fire damage doesn't stop the regeneration effect, a character may call out, "watch out! This isn't a normal troll."

In my experience everyone metagames to some degree, but for me it crosses the line when it gets too precise. "I think this guy is pretty low, I'm going to use burning hands instead of chromatic orb so I can take him out and hit the guy next to him ," vs "he has 2 hp. I know because the monster manual says their HP average is 18 and our DM only rolls HP for boss monsters and named characters and he's s already taken exactly 16 damage so far. Also their dexterity is a 14 so..."

Both have the same result. Both involve metagaming, but one is so much worse than the other. There is a whole spectrum and each person will draw the line in a different place.

[Garimeth]

As the GM I will sometimes give the players information that their characters could not possibly know, but that explains stuff and allows them to put things into context. Cut-scenes of other important NPCs interacting, discussing PCs that are not present, often serves to emphasize to the players the role of those NPCs and illustrate the consequences of their actions, be they triumphs or misdeeds.

For example, I could do something like this.

GM: You successfully force open the grate to access the chute leading down to the dungeon's lower level. As you enter we cut away to...

A torchlit hall with the trappings of a chapel or temple dedicated to Orcus. A tall figure with an ornate mask stands by the altar as a guard enters and salutes smartly.

"My lady," says the guard. "We have intruders. The bodies of the goblins guarding the south entry have been discovered."

"This is the work of these adventurers, no doubt!" The leader's voice is muffled by the ornate mask. "Alert the guards, and summon Albraic the Red from his laboratory. I want him to deal with these interlopers personally."

Ok, so now the players know that the alarm is sounded, there is a female leader figure, and a lab technician or something is coming for them. Is this too much information? Maybe. Is it actionable? Sure, the players now know that there is an actual benefit to staying cautious, that the difficulty just got higher.

Also, the players now know that bad guys are organized, a fact that will prove to be important to the plot but perhaps easy to miss, and led by an as-yet-unidentified female character that has some sort of prior knowledge of the PCs. Maybe they can make some educated guesses as to whom that might be. If they need to follow this up with an investigation, this information can eliminate a whole lot of false leads and misunderstandings. Sure, meta-gaming. But not necessarily ​bad meta-gaming.

-DF

I can see the appeal for this in certain games, but I know that in the types and tones of campaigns I run I would never use this personally. It feels a little... idk, Saturday Morning Cartoon, to me.

Not saying its BAD, but its certainly not for everyone.

[Danielqueue1]

Also in reference to DM metagaming, more important than whether the DM is metagaming there's the question why the DM is metagaming. It is impossible for the DM to not metagame.

Lets say a party decides to infiltrate a guarded location with disguises tomorrow. A hostile DM metagaming may put the location on high alert for intruders even though they would have no reason to know that things weren't business as usual. while another DM may choose to have the Guard captain suddenly decide to do spot checks of the location making it harder for the players, but still letting them overcome through various means at their disposal, while another DM may decide that tomorrow is the day that Johny 'not-getting-paid-enough-for-this' Johnson is in charge of checking papers at the rear gate.

In any of the above cases, the DM changed the situation of the game with knowledge the NPCs wouldn't have. How that information is used and implemented makes all the difference. An infiltration where the party not only bluff past the guards but also sneak past the much more capable captain can be a more fulfilling game.

For a DM when you metagame, ask yourself, are you doing it to make the player's plans more interesting, or just to get in their way?

[Garimeth]

Also in reference to DM metagaming, more important than whether the DM is metagaming there's the question why the DM is metagaming. It is impossible for the DM to not metagame.

Lets say a party decides to infiltrate a guarded location with disguises tomorrow. A hostile DM metagaming may put the location on high alert for intruders even though they would have no reason to know that things weren't business as usual. while another DM may choose to have the Guard captain suddenly decide to do spot checks of the location making it harder for the players, but still letting them overcome through various means at their disposal, while another DM may decide that tomorrow is the day that Johny 'not-getting-paid-enough-for-this' Johnson is in charge of checking papers at the rear gate.

In any of the above cases, the DM changed the situation of the game with knowledge the NPCs wouldn't have. How that information is used and implemented makes all the difference. An infiltration where the party not only bluff past the guards but also sneak past the much more capable captain can be a more fulfilling game.

For a DM when you metagame, ask yourself, are you doing it to make the player's plans more interesting, or just to get in their way?

Great post. Sometimes I will roll randomly to determine things like that, but I usually do it ahead of session so I can plan accordingly.

Your closing statement really cuts to the heart of it, and I would add - do your players agree that what you find interesting is interesting?

I have a member in my group that tries to model his games' difficulty off of Dark Souls. As a result he lost all but me and another dude as players in his game. It wasn't bad, but he didn't really communicate his intent in session 0 well, and everyone thought they were joining a more narrative game. Me an the other guys that stayed were like... "Oh, meatgrinder? Cool here's Paladin Bob the 2nd."

[whateew]

That's definitely a variant understanding of the term.

The DMG defines it as "using knowledge that is a game to govern character actions". Knowing that you rolled a 2 on your trap check, so you ask someone else to try
.

I dislike this interpretation of metagaming heavily. While this is of course game knowledge - you are seeing a dice roll a 2 - this is an RPG, your rolls represent something and are our main way of putting ourselves in the shoes of our characters. Surely a trained survivalist who roles a 2 to track animals can tell they are having no luck picking up tracks, just as a chef making a batch of soup can taste it to realise it's gone awry.

Armour class is a big example of the numbers being important. To us, combat is merely hit or miss, no ambiguity, but to a player character who is in the midst of a battle, when what they expect to be a good strike (a 14 on the 20, for example) glances off the dragons hide, they know that this is a particularly tough foe. Realising that a creature has an AC of 15 when a 14 misses yet a 15 hits represents, over the course of the battle, learning how capable a creatures defences is. However, how else can we represent this knowledge other than using numbers? This isn't metagaming, this is the game as intended imo.

Further, take tracking damage dealt. Your DM tells you when a creature is "bloodied," so you get your calculator and figure out an approximate range for its hp. Is this boring? Maybe. Is this, however, metagaming? I would argue not - your experience mage knows how much harm a fireball typically causes, a barbarian practiced with her axe can tell how much damage it does to an enemy. To your player characters, a monster being bloodied after 5 swings of a sword is a meaningful estimation of its hardiness, and a quantifiable one too. A wizard who is now weighing up using sleep and can tell that their spell will affect monsters who aren't strong enough to take 5 further sword hits. To us as players, however, how else can we represent such a practical, in world knowledge without numbers?

[Avonar]

I dislike this interpretation of metagaming heavily. While this is of course game knowledge - you are seeing a dice roll a 2 - this is an RPG, your rolls represent something and are our main way of putting ourselves in the shoes of our characters. Surely a trained survivalist who roles a 2 to track animals can tell they are having no luck picking up tracks, just as a chef making a batch of soup can taste it to realise it's gone awry.

Armour class is a big example of the numbers being important. To us, combat is merely hit or miss, no ambiguity, but to a player character who is in the midst of a battle, when what they expect to be a good strike (a 14 on the 20, for example) glances off the dragons hide, they know that this is a particularly tough foe. Realising that a creature has an AC of 15 when a 14 misses yet a 15 hits represents, over the course of the battle, learning how capable a creatures defences is. However, how else can we represent this knowledge other than using numbers? This isn't metagaming, this is the game as intended imo.

Further, take tracking damage dealt. Your DM tells you when a creature is "bloodied," so you get your calculator and figure out an approximate range for its hp. Is this boring? Maybe. Is this, however, metagaming? I would argue not - your experience mage knows how much harm a fireball typically causes, a barbarian practiced with her axe can tell how much damage it does to an enemy. To your player characters, a monster being bloodied after 5 swings of a sword is a meaningful estimation of its hardiness, and a quantifiable one too. A wizard who is now weighing up using sleep and can tell that their spell will affect monsters who aren't strong enough to take 5 further sword hits. To us as players, however, how else can we represent such a practical, in world knowledge without numbers?

But how do you tell if you failed a perception check? There's no fail state there other than not noticing a hidden thing. I mean suppose the DM could say that something distracts you so you can't look properly but I'm yet to see any DM run perception like that.

And it isn't that severe. Someone fails a perception, doesn't find a trap. Someone then triggers the trap. The party then know "Hey, this person missed that trap. Maybe we should be looking as well to make sure."

[whateew]

But how do you tell if you failed a perception check? There's no fail state there other than not noticing a hidden thing. I mean suppose the DM could say that something distracts you so you can't look properly but I'm yet to see any DM run perception like that."


I recently ran a game set in a forest, where players noticed an illusive creature watching them - I had them roll perception checks to try and make out what said creature was, but with a failure I simply told them "you are unable to make it out, it's green form blending in and out of the trees." Of course, this is not the same thing as a binary "do you notice X vs do you not notice X," but typically I think passive skills better reflect such yes-or-no questions - and you can hide those from your players!

Imagine, for instance, the DM asks you to make a perception check when you ask to try and make out anything through the thick fog that rolled over the hills early in the morning. I personally think a 2 better represents a failure to succeed in seeing rather than a failure in seeing something - and that's what a character can understand. The difference between a 2 failing and a 15 failing is a palpable difference too - I like to think the numbers represent a mix of luck and effort.

This is part of an idea about "abortive" actions Vs failed actions - when you made your 4 on your investigation check, I think it represents the former, not the latter - the former being "I failed to properly investigate this area, but I am unable to do any better" vs the latter "I gave this a once over and know its clear (but it was not!)." A skilled adventurer knows what failure is as much as they know what success is.

There is of course still lots of room to metagame - "you asked me to roll a check, so whatever I roll I will be cautious" is clearly using a games system to cheat it. However, "I tried to investigate this room but I didn't do a good job, so procede with caution" is not metagaming.

Of course, this is personal preference, but I dislike robbing players of agency by making decisions for them. It feels bad to be told "this room is clear" when you know it isn't, and be forced to walk blindly into a trap. I think "you cannot tell" is much more interesting.

[Avonar]

I recently ran a game set in a forest, where players noticed an illusive creature watching them - I had them roll perception checks to try and make out what said creature was, but with a failure I simply told them "you are unable to make it out, it's green form blending in and out of the trees." Of course, this is not the same thing as a binary "do you notice X vs do you not notice X," but typically I think passive skills better reflect such yes-or-no questions - and you can hide those from your players!

Imagine, for instance, the DM asks you to make a perception check when you ask to try and make out anything through the thick fog that rolled over the hills early in the morning. I personally think a 2 better represents a failure to succeed in seeing rather than a failure in seeing something - and that's what a character can understand. The difference between a 2 failing and a 15 failing is a palpable difference too - I like to think the numbers represent a mix of luck and effort.

This is part of an idea about "abortive" actions Vs failed actions - when you made your 4 on your investigation check, I think it represents the former, not the latter - the former being "I failed to properly investigate this area, but I am unable to do any better" vs the latter "I gave this a once over and know its clear (but it was not!)." A skilled adventurer knows what failure is as much as they know what success is.

There is of course still lots of room to metagame - "you asked me to roll a check, so whatever I roll I will be cautious" is clearly using a games system to cheat it. However, "I tried to investigate this room but I didn't do a good job, so procede with caution" is not metagaming.

Of course, this is personal preference, but I dislike robbing players of agency by making decisions for them. It feels bad to be told "this room is clear" when you know it isn't, and be forced to walk blindly into a trap. I think "you cannot tell" is much more interesting.

Your example is very different though, it seems that the party already knew something was there and were looking to get details. In that case I would have done it exactly as you did. But let's take a different example. The party is going down a corridor in a dungeon. One player checks for traps, rolls a 6 on their perception check. Did they not see anything? Did something distract them from seeing anything? If it's the latter, then I just feel that it will lead to a cycle of every character checking every corridor one after the other. Something like that I can see slowing down a game a lot as each character goes up to a door, checks it, then stands back for the next person to check it. To me that just seems a little...weird?

If the party has reason to believe there are traps, but no traps are found, that is a reasonable excuse for multiple people checking granted. So just do that, don't always make the DM introduce some weird thing that stopped you perceiving well at just the wrong moment.

[whateew]

Your example is very different though, it seems that the party already knew something was there and were looking to get details. In that case I would have done it exactly as you did. But let's take a different example. The party is going down a corridor in a dungeon. One player checks for traps, rolls a 6 on their perception check. Did they not see anything? Did something distract them from seeing anything? If it's the latter, then I just feel that it will lead to a cycle of every character checking every corridor one after the other. Something like that I can see slowing down a game a lot as each character goes up to a door, checks it, then stands back for the next person to check it. To me that just seems a little...weird?

If the party has reason to believe there are traps, but no traps are found, that is a reasonable excuse for multiple people checking granted. So just do that, don't always make the DM introduce some weird thing that stopped you perceiving well at just the wrong moment.

You make a fair point: perception isn't really a skill that someone can meaningfully fail outside of a binary yes or no without some third party. However, perception is the outlier here surely? Every other skill is just that, a skill - surely a poor knowledge roll represents not knowing, not a mistake. A professional assassin would know what it's like to fail hide well, indicating that some other approach is best. An animal handler who has no clue what a certain beast is communicating isn't mistaken, just out of their depth. So why shouldn't an investigation check be like this? Why should a rogue be told "you think it is clear" and expected to act on it when they know they have done poorly, and not "you don't find anything" but know they rolled a 2.

Notably, I think there is room for nuance here - a roll of 2 and a roll of 15, if they have bother failed, would both reveal "you don't find anything." One, however, inspires caution while the other (misplaced!) confidence. I think this is important for any skill in DnD - players should be able to use their dice to understand degrees of success. A bard rolling 2 on persuasion knows she made a faux-pas, but a 15 was a well made speech that simply wasn't enough - why shouldn't other skills be like this, with the outlier being purely instinctual things?

[JoeJ]

Your example is very different though, it seems that the party already knew something was there and were looking to get details. In that case I would have done it exactly as you did. But let's take a different example. The party is going down a corridor in a dungeon. One player checks for traps, rolls a 6 on their perception check. Did they not see anything? Did something distract them from seeing anything? If it's the latter, then I just feel that it will lead to a cycle of every character checking every corridor one after the other. Something like that I can see slowing down a game a lot as each character goes up to a door, checks it, then stands back for the next person to check it. To me that just seems a little...weird?

If the party has reason to believe there are traps, but no traps are found, that is a reasonable excuse for multiple people checking granted. So just do that, don't always make the DM introduce some weird thing that stopped you perceiving well at just the wrong moment.

That seems like a textbook example of when to use a passive ability check.

[Reynaert]

Your example is very different though, it seems that the party already knew something was there and were looking to get details. In that case I would have done it exactly as you did. But let's take a different example. The party is going down a corridor in a dungeon. One player checks for traps, rolls a 6 on their perception check. Did they not see anything? Did something distract them from seeing anything? If it's the latter, then I just feel that it will lead to a cycle of every character checking every corridor one after the other. Something like that I can see slowing down a game a lot as each character goes up to a door, checks it, then stands back for the next person to check it. To me that just seems a little...weird?

If the party has reason to believe there are traps, but no traps are found, that is a reasonable excuse for multiple people checking granted. So just do that, don't always make the DM introduce some weird thing that stopped you perceiving well at just the wrong moment. (emphasis mine)

If you run it as a 'binary no metagaming', then the characters will start doing that anyway after the first trap they failed to spot. So no difference there. Except, in that case you would expect them to have all other characters also check if the first one rolled high.

So the difference between the two methods is that in one method, each character will always roll (maybe this will slip if they get bored and then they runinto a trap, feel gotcha-d and start al rolling again). And in the other method they will only roll until one of them rolls high enough they feel confident. So to me, the "metagaming" method slows the game down less.

[Telok]

I think the metagaming that annoys me is the stuff like jumping off cliffs because climbing is slow and a pc has enough hp to not care. But that's more an artifact of hp inflation and weak falling damage, easily fixed by making falls do d20s instead of d6s. Skill metas I handle by having a wide range of DCs (like using the full range evenly instead of mostly average DCs), not making everthing binary pass/fails, and reasonably frequent rolls. In a murder-hobo & spontaneous undead generating world most reasonable people have a trap or two hanging around the basement, attic, and trash pit. Have you seen the size of those spiders?

But for, gosh, must be twenty years or more now... well, I haven't had any issues with "know a monster" metas. I include in equipment lists a book called "Captain Wembley's Monster Atlas", which is basically a birding book for the usual monsters. If they buy one I just point as the MM and say it's all the pictures and fluff, no dice numbers or stats. They quickly learn meta info is imperfect since I mostly use weaker (-50% all numbers, double vulnerability) or stronger (+50% all numbers, half or no vulnerability) monsters. Plus the worst monsters are always people. Monsters are usually just hungry or territorial, but people can be wicked and cruel.

[Jakinbandw]

Re: The party doesn't know x monster can only be hurt by weakness x.

I think I might be fine with such a ruling if the players could also call out the gm. Imagine the hilarity:

Gm: the blue dragon let's out a blast of lightning striking the wizard

Player 1: Hold up, that's metagaming. The wizard hasn't gone yet, so the dragon can't know that he's a threat, and there are no obvious tells that he's a wizard, so shouldn't he ignore him?

Player 2: Yeah, and I've attacked the dragon 8 times, shouldn't it see me as a threat?

Gm: fine, I target player 2 with the lightning breath.

Player 2: good thing I have that amulet of lighting immunity!

Some rounds later

Gm: the dragon now breathes lightning on the mage

Player 1: hold up, that's metagaming!

Gm: *groan* how so? I know the mage is a mage now!

Player 2: yeah, but the last time it used lighting its target was immune, and my character obviously isn't magical, so the only logical solution is that the mage is buffing the party to be immune to lightning. Your using out of character knowledge to know where my character's immunity is coming from.

Gm: kill me.

[KorvinStarmast]

Gm: kill me.
IIRC, the correct GM response is "rocks fall and everybody dies" :smallbiggrin:
(Really enjoyed that post ...)

[Tanarii]

Player 1: Hold up, that's metagaming. The wizard hasn't gone yet, so the dragon can't know that he's a threat, and there are no obvious tells that he's a wizard, so shouldn't he ignore him.
All Wizards are required to wear alignment-color-codes robes or hats that say "Wizzard". Duh!

[JoeJ]

Re: The party doesn't know x monster can only be hurt by weakness x.

I think I might be fine with such a ruling if the players could also call out the gm. Imagine the hilarity:

Gm: the blue dragon let's out a blast of lightning striking the wizard

Player 1: Hold up, that's metagaming. The wizard hasn't gone yet, so the dragon can't know that he's a threat, and there are no obvious tells that he's a wizard, so shouldn't he ignore him?

GM: You're right, the dragon doesn't know that he's a wizard. What I should have said is that the dragon lets out a blast of lightning striking the figure in the back row who isn't wearing armor or wielding a weapon and also isn't fleeing in terror from an angry dragon. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Jakinbandw]

GM: You're right, the dragon doesn't know that he's a wizard. What I should have said is that the dragon lets out a blast of lightning striking the figure in the back row who isn't wearing armor or wielding a weapon and also isn't fleeing in terror from an angry dragon. Thank you for pointing that out.

Player 3: So its targeting our monk?

[JoeJ]

Player 3: So its targeting our monk?

No, the monk has already taken his turn. The dragon has seen what he is.

[cookieface]

No, the monk has already taken his turn. The dragon has seen what he is.

And "what he is" is "impossible to hit".

This comes from your friendly neighborhood "Monks are underrated"-man.

(This conversation backs up what I was saying about INT on creatures before ... a blue dragon has only 16-18 INT, but I think that is easily high enough to notice "Hey, that one in the back has a staff/wand/other spellcasting focus and also seems like the weakest one here -- maybe the best idea is to kill it first and deal with these other ones after." Players with INT that high or lower still know enough to go for squishies first to balance out action economy, so a solid INT score like that on a creature should allow them to make similar decisions.)

[Jakinbandw]

And "what he is" is "impossible to hit".

This comes from your friendly neighborhood "Monks are underrated"-man.

(This conversation backs up what I was saying about INT on creatures before ... a blue dragon has only 16-18 INT, but I think that is easily high enough to notice "Hey, that one in the back has a staff/wand/other spellcasting focus and also seems like the weakest one here -- maybe the best idea is to kill it first and deal with these other ones after." Players with INT that high or lower still know enough to go for squishies first to balance out action economy, so a solid INT score like that on a creature should allow them to make similar decisions.)

So if one player in the party has high int, we should be able to know weaknesses of monsters. Unless this isn't about consistency of setting, and more about gms wanting to disempower pcs.

[JoeJ]

So if one player in the party has high int, we should be able to know weaknesses of monsters. Unless this isn't about consistency of setting, and more about gms wanting to disempower pcs.

Absolutely. I don't allow players to have the MM open at the table, but whatever the player remembers, they can have their character know as well.

[Darth Credence]

All Wizards are required to wear alignment-color-codes robes or hats that say "Wizzard". Duh!
One of my players really wanted a hat of wizardry. I found a cheap "wizard's hat" from Amazon and spelled "WIZZARD" on it with glue on rhinestones, and let him have it. He treasures it to this day, wearing it at most sessions.

[JoeJ]

One of my players really wanted a hat of wizardry. I found a cheap "wizard's hat" from Amazon and spelled "WIZZARD" on it with glue on rhinestones, and let him have it. He treasures it to this day, wearing it at most sessions.

LOL! The gaudier it is, the better. Wizards, as everybody knows, have the taste of a deranged magpie.

[cookieface]

So if one player in the party has high int, we should be able to know weaknesses of monsters. Unless this isn't about consistency of setting, and more about gms wanting to disempower pcs.

For one thing, that's not what I said. This isn't about taking power away from PCs, and it is about consistency of setting: smart creatures get the same advantages in tactics that smart PCs get (though I'm generally fine if the INT 8 fighter still RPs with not-terrible tactical decisions, whereas an orc NPC would never make the same choices and rather attack whatever hit it last).

Players can look at a group of, say, Hobgoblins and likely guess which one is the strongest, which one is the magic-est, etc, and assess tactics based on that info.

The monsters, if they are intelligent (which dragons are) can do the same. They see a party with one PC in full plate with a sword, one PC carrying a staff and minimal armor, and one with a giant shield with a divine symbol on it? Sure the platemail PC will attack it first, mostly likely, but that dragon is going to go after the staff-wielder or the divine one. It's smart enough to go after the squishy magic users first, since they can likely do the most damage to it or prolong the fight.

But also, yes. I let characters roll relevant skills to learn about monster details. "I'd like to figure out of I can look at the creature and determine what kind of weaknesses or resistances it might have" ... "Okay, roll a Nature/Arcana/History/Religion check" ... "Good, I have 16 INT so there's a better chance I will succeed!" So yes, higher INT is definitely more capable of knowing weaknesses of monsters.

[KorvinStarmast]

LOL! The gaudier it is, the better. Wizards, as everybody knows, have the taste of a deranged magpie. Are you referring to the PC class or the company that makes the game? :smallcool:

[MaxWilson]

Your example is very different though, it seems that the party already knew something was there and were looking to get details. In that case I would have done it exactly as you did. But let's take a different example. The party is going down a corridor in a dungeon. One player checks for traps, rolls a 6 on their perception check. Did they not see anything? Did something distract them from seeing anything? If it's the latter, then I just feel that it will lead to a cycle of every character checking every corridor one after the other. Something like that I can see slowing down a game a lot as each character goes up to a door, checks it, then stands back for the next person to check it. To me that just seems a little...weird?

If the party has reason to believe there are traps, but no traps are found, that is a reasonable excuse for multiple people checking granted. So just do that, don't always make the DM introduce some weird thing that stopped you perceiving well at just the wrong moment.

Why would you put a player in a position of having to metagame by having them roll Perception? If you want them not to know there's anything to notice, why not roll it as DM without explaining what you're rolling, and just let them know if the roll indicates they notice anything? The value of having the player roll is to give them knowledge, but if it's important to you that they not act on that knowledge, why give it to them?

[stoutstien]

Why would you put a player in a position of having to metagame by having them roll Perception? If you want them not to know there's anything to notice, why not roll it as DM without explaining what you're rolling, and just let them know if the roll indicates they notice anything? The value of having the player roll is to give them knowledge, but if it's important to you that they not act on that knowledge, why give it to them?

Aye. I can't understand the angle of a DM giving a players information and then expecting them not to use it.

[JoeJ]

Why would you put a player in a position of having to metagame by having them roll Perception? If you want them not to know there's anything to notice, why not roll it as DM without explaining what you're rolling, and just let them know if the roll indicates they notice anything? The value of having the player roll is to give them knowledge, but if it's important to you that they not act on that knowledge, why give it to them?

Or use a passive check. Preventing a player from gaining information that their character couldn't have is explicitly given as one of the purposes of passive ability checks.

[MrStabby]

And "what he is" is "impossible to hit".

This comes from your friendly neighborhood "Monks are underrated"-man.

(This conversation backs up what I was saying about INT on creatures before ... a blue dragon has only 16-18 INT, but I think that is easily high enough to notice "Hey, that one in the back has a staff/wand/other spellcasting focus and also seems like the weakest one here -- maybe the best idea is to kill it first and deal with these other ones after." Players with INT that high or lower still know enough to go for squishies first to balance out action economy, so a solid INT score like that on a creature should allow them to make similar decisions.)

I don't think you need that high an int.

How hard is it to teach people to do this? It seems like something you learn by about day 3 of being a soldier; I imagine it is a lesson you can learn well when your life depends on it. Int 8 or higher or any kind of martial training should know to prioritise softer targets.

They should be asking if it comes from a race/species known for int/wis/cha that would give it an advantage in a career in a casting class, what armour is it wearing, any holy symbols/arcane focii, what weapons is it holding, where they are standing, a rough estimate of their physique (but no more than you can tell of someone in the street, though anything above a str 15 is probably showcasing some pretty damn broad shoulders)

[cookieface]

I don't think you need that high an int.

How hard is it to teach people to do this? It seems like something you learn by about day 3 of being a soldier; I imagine it is a lesson you can learn well when your life depends on it. Int 8 or higher or any kind of martial training should know to prioritise softer targets.

They should be asking if it comes from a race/species known for int/wis/cha that would give it an advantage in a career in a casting class, what armour is it wearing, any holy symbols/arcane focii, what weapons is it holding, where they are standing, a rough estimate of their physique (but no more than you can tell of someone in the street, though anything above a str 15 is probably showcasing some pretty damn broad shoulders)

I think we agree.

Others were giving examples of why a dragon going straight for the magic-user would be unfair, especially when the magic-user has not attacked yet. That's ridiculous. Any "average intelligence" and above creature would be able to tell a wizard from a barbarian, unless they were specifically attempting to trick them (in which case, Perception, Insight, or Investigation, depending on how they try to trick them, needs to occur).

Sure, a Hill Giant (INT 5) might just go after the thing that most recently attacked it, but most things that have some semblance of planning are going to know they need to kill the weakest thing fast and work from there.

[Azuresun]

While this can work, this is something you have to be very careful and sparing with; while once it will present possibly quite a unique and memorable encounter, if leaned on too often, it can just lead to annoyance and resentment.

I remember a game of Mage: The Ascension where we could never ever get one over on the GM's pet NPC because "he's seen the future and knows everything you're going to try".

Not a very long game.


I think you avoid high INT creatures because you've got an interpretation of INT that's causing issues for you. High INT means nothing more or less than "can remember facts easily and can perform abstract reasoning very well." It's entirely academic capability. It has nothing to do with planning or playing 5D Xanatos chess or out-thinking other people. At least by the stock settings. As such, playing a high INT creature who is normal in other respects is easy. Anything academic comes up? They got this. They can design whizbang blueprints. But are as likely as anyone else to leave big gaping holes for things like social engineering.

Thank you! I'm very very sick of the "high Intelligence makes you a cheating precognitive super genius" trope.

[Witty Username]

Re: The party doesn't know x monster can only be hurt by weakness x.

I think I might be fine with such a ruling if the players could also call out the gm. Imagine the hilarity:

Gm: the blue dragon let's out a blast of lightning striking the wizard

Player 1: Hold up, that's metagaming. The wizard hasn't gone yet, so the dragon can't know that he's a threat, and there are no obvious tells that he's a wizard, so shouldn't he ignore him?

Player 2: Yeah, and I've attacked the dragon 8 times, shouldn't it see me as a threat?

Gm: fine, I target player 2 with the lightning breath.

Player 2: good thing I have that amulet of lighting immunity!

Some rounds later

Gm: the dragon now breathes lightning on the mage

Player 1: hold up, that's metagaming!

Gm: *groan* how so? I know the mage is a mage now!

Player 2: yeah, but the last time it used lighting its target was immune, and my character obviously isn't magical, so the only logical solution is that the mage is buffing the party to be immune to lightning. Your using out of character knowledge to know where my character's immunity is coming from.

Gm: kill me.

My response would be: That is because you have an int of 11 not 18.

[MaxWilson]

Or use a passive check. Preventing a player from gaining information that their character couldn't have is explicitly given as one of the purposes of passive ability checks.

It is, but I think those particular RAW are bad advice. It flattens the probability distribution for no good reason, compared to rolling without telling the player. It's too all-or-nothing.

[Nifft]

It is, but I think those particular RAW are bad advice. It flattens the probability distribution for no good reason, compared to rolling without telling the player. It's too all-or-nothing.

IIRC the key difference between passive and active is who rolls.

Passive perception means the DM rolls vs. the player's static number.

Active perception can mean the player rolls vs. a static number, so that's the same probability distribution.

(It can also mean two opposed rolls, which would be a different distribution, but that's not always the case.)

[JoeJ]

IIRC the key difference between passive and active is who rolls.

Passive perception means the DM rolls vs. the player's static number.

Active perception can mean the player rolls vs. a static number, so that's the same probability distribution.

(It can also mean two opposed rolls, which would be a different distribution, but that's not always the case.)

No, a passive check means the die isn't rolled at all. You simply assume a result of 10 + all modifiers that would normally apply. Advantage/disadvantage adds another +/- 5.

[Tanarii]

It is, but I think those particular RAW are bad advice. It flattens the probability distribution for no good reason, compared to rolling without telling the player. It's too all-or-nothing.
Worst result when it changes roll vs static DC into passive vs static DC. Roll vs roll to roll vs passive isn't particularly terrible, except at the very thresholds where is changes a chance into a certainty. But changing to static vs static is especially egregious the nearer you are to the same bonus. (E.g 1d20+4 vs DC 13, to PP 14 vs DC 13)

Honestly, the rule should have been the DM rolls "stealth" for hidden things like traps or secret doors or secret compartments. I agree that Passive Perception, while absolutely fantastic for hidden creatures, is pretty terrible for static DC hidden things.

Unfortunately the DM rolling dice also gives things away.

[MaxWilson]

Worst result when it changes roll vs static DC into passive vs static DC. Roll vs roll to roll vs passive isn't particularly terrible, except at the very thresholds where is changes a chance into a certainty. But changing to static vs static is especially egregious the nearer you are to the same bonus. (E.g 1d20+4 vs DC 13, to PP 14 vs DC 13)

Honestly, the rule should have been the DM rolls "stealth" for hidden things like traps or secret doors or secret compartments. I agree that Passive Perception, while absolutely fantastic for hidden creatures, is pretty terrible for static DC hidden things.

Unfortunately the DM rolling dice also gives things away.

Yes, static number vs. static number is too binary for my taste, if used repeatedly. It harms my suspension of disbelief if what Bob the +3 to Arcana knows is always a strict subset of what Susan the +4 to Arcana knows. Surely they've read different books?

I don't mind having the DM roll dice, but then again I roll for lots of things, sometimes including rulings (if I don't feel strongly one way or the other, e.g. "should animated skeletons get the racial bonuses and penalties of the race whose bones they were made from?"). At worst it just signals "something significant is happening," and might make someone start casting Mage Armor or whatever, but that's not always the appropriate response to what is really happening so I don't mind chalking that up to "instincts" which are sometimes wrong.

[Tanarii]

Yes, static number vs. static number is too binary for my taste, if used repeatedly. It harms my suspension of disbelief if what Bob the +3 to Arcana knows is always a strict subset of what Susan the +4 to Arcana knows. Surely they've read different books?
Or you could just not make pre-5e "state-of-my-character" Knowledge checks in the first place. :smalltongue:

However if the DM using passive lore to gate information she is handing out to the players, yes, that does become a problem. :smallamused:

[MaxWilson]

Or you could just not make pre-5e "state-of-my-character" Knowledge checks in the first place. :smalltongue:

I don't quite follow, maybe because I never played 3E and very little 4E. In AD&D2 terms this is like a nonweapon proficiency in, say, Mathematics. Two trained mathematicians may overlap a lot, but if they are close in skill each of them is still likely to know at least SOME things the other does not, and the roll of the die is to represent that variation in exactly which treatises have been read and remembered and which conversations have occurred with other scholars. The one with a higher score will know slightly more on average and be right more often, but not always.

In 5E terms I do like feeding my players info, especially about monsters, both via sages and via character background knowledge, e.g. I roll everyone's Arcana and based on the results hand everyone an index card summarizing what they've heard is true about vampires in this world. I secretly love it when the most ignorant guy (lowest bonuses) gets the best result and the most accurate info but nobody believes him because he's always wrong. ("Of course you don't need wooden weapons to harm them, Creed! We have magic weapons and those are better!")

[Glorthindel]

GM: You're right, the dragon doesn't know that he's a wizard. What I should have said is that the dragon lets out a blast of lightning striking the figure in the back row who isn't wearing armor or wielding a weapon and also isn't fleeing in terror from an angry dragon. Thank you for pointing that out.

To be fair, this was the crux of one of one of my characters main tactics.

I was the party Wizard. The Hackmaster version of Mage Armour said specifically in its text "while the spell is in effect, the recipient appears to be wearing full plate mail". To complete the look I wore a two handed sword slung over my shoulder. And I had a Faerie Dragon familiar (lucky roll on the random charts) whose standard postion in the party marching order was next to the light armoured Duellist Fighter, most definitely not next to me.

The DM played fair in that campaign - I looked like a fighter, so had the monsters treat me as such, at least until the fireballs started dropping.

[JoeJ]

To be fair, this was the crux of one of one of my characters main tactics.

I was the party Wizard. The Hackmaster version of Mage Armour said specifically in its text "while the spell is in effect, the recipient appears to be wearing full plate mail". To complete the look I wore a two handed sword slung over my shoulder. And I had a Faerie Dragon familiar (lucky roll on the random charts) whose standard postion in the party marching order was next to the light armoured Duellist Fighter, most definitely not next to me.

The DM played fair in that campaign - I looked like a fighter, so had the monsters treat me as such, at least until the fireballs started dropping.

That's fair. And on the other side, the dragon really should be trying to maneuver so as to hit as many enemies as possible with its breath weapon, not aiming at just one. And since dragons are not stupid, it's lair should be large enough for it to move around easily. That doesn't require any metagaming on the part of the DM.

[GloatingSwine]

Metagaming is where the players are playing a different game and not acting on the world of the first game.

The classic example is attempting to separate PC and player knowledge about things in the world. If the PC is not supposed to know things the player does know, then the player has to play a different game called "guess what I am allowed to know" which gets in the way of them playing the first game.

[Selion]

Recently i had a low level wizard who meet a enemy teleporting away.
I said to the other party members that we should avoid direct confrontation with such a powerful being, because he used powerful magic.
This is an out of game knowledge, which i had as a player, in this case I think it's fine thinking that even a novice in wizardry could have heard of such powerful spells.
A different thing would have happened if I had said "if he has access to teleport he probably can scry on us, so better buy some potions of nondetection".
But what if I did? It would have been bad roleplaying on my part and it would have break the immersion, but nothing worse than any other bad roleplaying behavior. There's no need to punish it or to prevent it IMHO, it's the same of a paladin telling jokes about a innocent who has just been killed, it doesn't usually require the master intervention, and I would be upset if the DM said "your character has not said these words because they are not respecting the character alignment".
The character is mine and I say whatever I want, if it's good or bad roleplaying it's another issue.

[stoutstien]

Recently i had a low level wizard who meet a enemy teleporting away.
I said to the other party members that we should avoid direct confrontation with such a powerful being, because he used powerful magic.
This is an out of game knowledge, which i had as a player, in this case I think it's fine thinking that even a novice in wizardry could have heard of such powerful spells.
A different thing would have happened if I had said "if he has access to teleport he probably can scry on us, so better buy some potions of nondetection".
But what if I did? It would have been bad roleplaying on my part and it would have break the immersion, but nothing worse than any other bad roleplaying behavior. There's no need to punish it or to prevent it IMHO, it's the same of a paladin telling jokes about a innocent who has just been killed, it doesn't usually require the master intervention, and I would be upset if the DM said "your character has not said these words because they are not respecting the character alignment".
The character is mine and I say whatever I want, if it's good or bad roleplaying it's another issue.

None of that is actually bad decisions on the PCs part. most of it's inference or assumptions. There's no way of knowing that the NPC teleporting is powerful magic, an innate magical ability or even from a magic item. it's not player knowledge for the character to assume somebody can teleport is somebody that probably be a bigger threat than face value. That's just common sense.

Divination is a whole school of magic that is well known and nondetection is on the wizards spell so unless wizards are only aware of spells that they can currently cast for some reason that's not even beginning to touch bad RP behavior.

[diplomancer]

None of that is actually bad decisions on the PCs part. most of it's inference or assumptions. There's no way of knowing that the NPC teleporting is powerful magic, an innate magical ability or even from a magic item. it's not player knowledge for the character to assume somebody can teleport is somebody that probably be a bigger threat than face value. That's just common sense.

Divination is a whole school of magic that is well known and nondetection is on the wizards spell so unless wizards are only aware of spells that they can currently cast for some reason that's not even beginning to touch bad RP behavior.

Good point; sure, the very same information could be conveyed in a more RP fashion, something like "there was this spell my old master used to cast every day, Nondetection he called it. Once I asked him why he did it, he'd answer, with a wild look in his eyes 'you never know who's watching, my lad'. I used to think he was a bit paranoid, but I see now maybe he had a point".

If you can say this, there's no reason to forbid saying "we should cast nondetection to avoid scrying from this powerful wizard"

[Tanarii]

I don't quite follow, maybe because I never played 3E and very little 4E. In AD&D2 terms this is like a nonweapon proficiency in, say, Mathematics. Two trained mathematicians may overlap a lot, but if they are close in skill each of them is still likely to know at least SOME things the other does not, and the roll of the die is to represent that variation in exactly which treatises have been read and remembered and which conversations have occurred with other scholars. The one with a higher score will know slightly more on average and be right more often, but not always.

In 5E terms I do like feeding my players info, especially about monsters, both via sages and via character background knowledge, e.g. I roll everyone's Arcana and based on the results hand everyone an index card summarizing what they've heard is true about vampires in this world. I secretly love it when the most ignorant guy (lowest bonuses) gets the best result and the most accurate info but nobody believes him because he's always wrong. ("Of course you don't need wooden weapons to harm them, Creed! We have magic weapons and those are better!")
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Knowledge checks are used to determine what you know and don't know. 5e ability checks in general, and Intelligence (Lore) checks in particular, are not designed to support that style of check.

Details per my post #35 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24945364&postcount=35)

Knowledge checks aren't even really part of 5e.

Lore checks are, recalling information. In other words, based on how 5e ability checks are for things that require one roll vs automatically succeed if the PC takes ten times as long, and that PCs automatically fail things they cannot do:
Lore checks are for things your PC already knew, and is trying to recall in the heat of the moment.

Knowledge checks are just people carrying over the idea from previous editions. They are "randomly determine the state of my character" checks, where your character is a Schroeder's character prior to the check, both knowing and not knowing information.In particular, 5e allows you take 10 times as long to succeed as long as time is not a factor and you can succeed. That means Int checks are about things you already know, and just can't recall right now. Otherwise everyone would be able to recall everything instead of making a check, just by taking time.

[Witty Username]

I don't quite follow, maybe because I never played 3E and very little 4E. In AD&D2 terms this is like a nonweapon proficiency in, say, Mathematics. Two trained mathematicians may overlap a lot, but if they are close in skill each of them is still likely to know at least SOME things the other does not, and the roll of the die is to represent that variation in exactly which treatises have been read and remembered and which conversations have occurred with other scholars. The one with a higher score will know slightly more on average and be right more often, but not always.

In 5E terms I do like feeding my players info, especially about monsters, both via sages and via character background knowledge, e.g. I roll everyone's Arcana and based on the results hand everyone an index card summarizing what they've heard is true about vampires in this world. I secretly love it when the most ignorant guy (lowest bonuses) gets the best result and the most accurate info but nobody believes him because he's always wrong. ("Of course you don't need wooden weapons to harm them, Creed! We have magic weapons and those are better!")

I think what Tanarii is getting at is in 3/.5 knowledge checks had a clause that you could not retry them unless you gained an additional rank in the skill. Essentially, if you rolled a 1, that was your knowledge for that topic at least in the short term. It made it possible that more generally knowledgeable characters could still be beaten on specific topics sometimes, coupled with approximately 80 bazillion knowledge(subskills) it could make for a very diverse team of scholars.

[MaxWilson]

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Knowledge checks are used to determine what you know and don't know. 5e ability checks in general, and Intelligence (Lore) checks in particular, are not designed to support that style of check.

Details per my post #35 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24945364&postcount=35)
In particular, 5e allows you take 10 times as long to succeed as long as time is not a factor and you can succeed. That means Int checks are about things you already know, and just can't recall right now. Otherwise everyone would be able to recall everything instead of making a check, just by taking time.

This is only true if failure has no consequences. It does not apply to these kinds of one-time checks to determine what you know.


I think what Tanarii is getting at is in 3/.5 knowledge checks had a clause that you could not retry them unless you gained an additional rank in the skill. Essentially, if you rolled a 1, that was your knowledge for that topic at least in the short term. It made it possible that more generally knowledgeable characters could still be beaten on specific topics sometimes, coupled with approximately 80 bazillion knowledge(subskills) it could make for a very diverse team of scholars.

Huh. I skipped 3E and 3.5 so I really couldn't say.

[Tanarii]

This is only true if failure has no consequences. It does not apply to these kinds of one-time checks to determine what you know.
Yes, that's the usual circular justification that's made. :smallamused:

[PhoenixPhyre]

Yes, that's the usual circular justification that's made. :smallamused:

Wait, how is that circular? The only time you should be making checks is if
1. You can succeed. This means that any attempt to remember something the DM knows you don't know fails automatically. So your "they can remember anything and everything" objection fails. They can only remember things they've learned. What things those are are up to the DM and player to decide.
2. Failure is likely and interesting. This stops you from having to roll for things that the character would definitely know AND things for which you can try again without issue.

So the only time you make INT checks is for things where time matters and where failure has interesting consequences.

That's RAW as RAW can be. And has worked just fine for me for years now.

[MaxWilson]

Yes, that's the usual circular justification that's made. :smallamused:

Frankly I think you're the one making a circular argument. You're arguing (contrary to RAW) that skill checks apply only to things that can be retried indefinitely until success, therefore resolving uncertainty about past knowledge gathering cannot be done via skill checks. But in order to make that argument you must first assume your own conclusion, that knowing information isn't a skill check, because if it were that would disprove your ideas about all skill checks being infinitely repeatable until success.



Details per my post #35 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24945364&postcount=35)
In particular, 5e allows you take 10 times as long to succeed as long as time is not a factor and you can succeed. That means Int checks are about things you already know, and just can't recall right now. Otherwise everyone would be able to recall everything instead of making a check, just by taking time.

That's a misreading of the rules--you only get to autosucceed at some activities (the ones the DM rules make sense to retry repeatedly). Emphasis mine:


DMG 237: "Sometimes a character fails an ability check and wants to try again. In some cases, a character is free to do so; the only real cost is the time it takes. With enough attempts and enough time, a character should eventually succeed at the task. To speed things up, assume that a character spending ten times the normal amount of time needed to a complete a task automatically succeeds at that task. However, no amount of repeating the check allows a character to turn an impossible task into a successful one."
Also please remember that you don't "make a check" unless the DM directs you to do so to resolve some uncertainty. You can't just decide to "make a check" to "recall everything." That's not how it works.

[Tanarii]

It is circular because you've predefined Knowledge checks are something where you can only try once to know or not know. Therefore you can't keep trying until you succeed, the rule that you can't keep trying until you succeed doesn't apply.

Instead of asking: is there a reasonable way an Int (Lore) check something you can possibly succeed? If yes, can you then keep trying until you can possibly succeed? The answer to which is very much yes. Everyone does it every day IRL.

Randomly determining the state of a character goes against what "can you possibly succeed" and "can keep trying until you succeed given time and no chance of failure" represent. Redefining "can possibly succeed" to make your decision to use them, following the first rule, but not the second.

If you don't know the information, you can't make a check in the first place. You never get to the rule about ten times as long, because you don't get to make a check. If you do, you get to make the first check to see if you recall it, and can take ten times as long when there is no pressure.

[MrStabby]

I wonder if it would be better to roll the knowledge check against the player - i.e. determine the prevalence of the information in the world.

Some obscure esoteric knowlege has a DC of d20+17. Player tries to see if they know andthe die is cast. Another person can have a go but the DC remains the same.


I have used this for strength checks before - the "how stuck is this door?" roll.



I guess you could use DC=constant+d12 and ability=prof+stat+d12... this would give a similar variance on the first person to attempt a task as a single D20 would but would ensure that any other follow on attempts would not be independant of the first roll. i.e. probability of success given that you failed before is not equal to the probability of success with not other information.

[Darth Credence]

Frankly I think you're the one making a circular argument. You're arguing (contrary to RAW) that skill checks apply only to things that can be retried indefinitely until success, therefore resolving uncertainty about past knowledge gathering cannot be done via skill checks. But in order to make that argument you must first assume your own conclusion, that knowing information isn't a skill check, because if it were that would disprove your ideas about all skill checks being infinitely repeatable until success.

Hey! It's the correct meaning of begging the question! Assuming the conclusion as the basis for the argument to get that conclusion.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It is circular because you've predefined Knowledge checks are something where you can only try once to know or not know. Therefore you can't keep trying until you succeed, the rule that you can't keep trying until you succeed doesn't apply.

Instead of asking: is there a reasonable way an Int (Lore) check something you can possibly succeed? If yes, can you then keep trying until you can possibly succeed? The answer to which is very much yes. Everyone does it every day IRL.

Randomly determining the state of a character goes against what "can you possibly succeed" and "can keep trying until you succeed given time and no chance of failure" represent. Redefining "can possibly succeed" to make your decision to use them, following the first rule, but not the second.

If you don't know the information, you can't make a check in the first place. You never get to the rule about ten times as long, because you don't get to make a check. If you do, you get to make the first check to see if you recall it, and can take ten times as long when there is no pressure.

Generally, RAW is that you can't keep trying for any check. Your first attempt is your best shot. The "take 10x as long" is an exception for cases where time is the only pressure. Why? Because checks presume that

1) the action is possible. If you can't know, you fail and can't retry until you've learned. And the DM is the arbiter here.
2) the action is failable with reasonable probability. If there isn't pressure, or it's something the character should just know (their own name, etc), they just succeed. They don't make one check, they make zero.
3) failing the action has interesting consequences. This means that you don't make checks unless there's pressure. And if you are making checks, failing should move the narrative along just as much as succeeding. Just possibly in a different direction. "Retry until you succeed" in most cases means you shouldn't have had them make a check in the first place. And no, in most cases time is not a pressure by itself.

The three together mean that in most cases where you're actually rolling something, the circumstances are such that you've already peeled off all the auto-success and auto-failure cases, as well as all the ones where it makes sense to retry. Sure, later, while relaxing in a tavern, they might be able to remember something about those runes. But right now? When it actually matters? Nope. They get their one shot and then something happens which changes the scenario.

Also remember that Intelligence checks also include more than just pure memory. They include reasoning things out from what you do remember. So yes, you can use an Intelligence (Arcana) check to figure out a magical puzzle that your character has never learned the answer to. By piecing together stuff you have learned. And since that set of things known is way larger (in this particular arena, although for others the reverse is true) for the character than for the player, you can't simply just say that if the player knows it the character knows it and vice versa. Because the player doesn't know all the intricate details of magical organizations--that's abstracted away by the game system behind proficiency and (generally) a lot of handwaving during exposition. A perfectly valid result of an Intelligence (X) check is "you remember that <thing the player has never heard but the character would have learned earlier>." To say otherwise is to say that a strong character can't lift something the player couldn't, unless we're putting in absolutely artificial, not-mentioned-in-the-text barriers between the different abilities.

[Telok]

If you don't know the information, you can't make a check in the first place. You never get to the rule about ten times as long, because you don't get to make a check. If you do, you get to make the first check to see if you recall it, and can take ten times as long when there is no pressure.

Doesn't that require the DM to constantly rule on what a character knows or doesn't? Potentially making characters anything from ignorant to omniscient without input from the players? None of the DMs I've seen in the past decade have ever bothered to read even three sentences of backstory, and several habitually made assumptions based on their own preferences (a fighter who picked up a single level of bard during play got a "when your character went to bard school as a kid" because the DM didn't remember that the level was gotten two sessions ago and only glanced at charavter sheets).

I'm sure you run it differently, but I've mostly had DMs that would use the ability to determine your character's knowledge as a railroading tool or wouldn't remember what they did two sessions ago and change your character's knowledge based on the plot of the week. I've found "state of character knowledge" to be less offensive to players than dictating their character to them.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Doesn't that require the DM to constantly rule on what a character knows or doesn't? Potentially making characters anything from ignorant to omniscient without input from the players? None of the DMs I've seen in the past decade have ever bothered to read even three sentences of backstory, and several habitually made assumptions based on their own preferences (a fighter who picked up a single level of bard during play got a "when your character went to bard school as a kid" because the DM didn't remember that the level was gotten two sessions ago and only glanced at charavter sheets).

I'm sure you run it differently, but I've mostly had DMs that would use the ability to determine your character's knowledge as a railroading tool or wouldn't remember what they did two sessions ago and change your character's knowledge based on the plot of the week. I've found "state of character knowledge" to be less offensive to players than dictating their character to them.

I generally only use it as a loose check for things the character couldn't know for setting reasons or for things that, based on backstory/previous history/culture the character would absolutely know without needing a check.

So generally I use it as an injection point for information/exposition the player doesn't know but the character would.

[MaxWilson]

It is circular because you've predefined Knowledge checks are something where you can only try once to know or not know.

You misunderstand, I've defined them as something you (the PC) don't "try" at all, at least in the present tense. It's a resolution of uncertainty about past learning and experiences, not something you're doing in the present. E.g. Bardic Inspiration and Guidance in the present don't apply.

[Zalabim]

I will not be reading this whole dumb argument, but I will chime in with support for the rules I prefer.


You misunderstand, I've defined them as something you (the PC) don't "try" at all, at least in the present tense. It's a resolution of uncertainty about past learning and experiences, not something you're doing in the present. E.g. Bardic Inspiration and Guidance in the present don't apply.
Then that's not an ability check and your argument really is circular.

Generally, RAW is that you can't keep trying for any check. Your first attempt is your best shot. The "take 10x as long" is an exception for cases where time is the only pressure. Why? Because checks presume that

1) the action is possible. If you can't know, you fail and can't retry until you've learned. And the DM is the arbiter here.
2) the action is failable with reasonable probability. If there isn't pressure, or it's something the character should just know (their own name, etc), they just succeed. They don't make one check, they make zero.
3) failing the action has interesting consequences. This means that you don't make checks unless there's pressure. And if you are making checks, failing should move the narrative along just as much as succeeding. Just possibly in a different direction. "Retry until you succeed" in most cases means you shouldn't have had them make a check in the first place. And no, in most cases time is not a pressure by itself.

The three together mean that in most cases where you're actually rolling something, the circumstances are such that you've already peeled off all the auto-success and auto-failure cases, as well as all the ones where it makes sense to retry. Sure, later, while relaxing in a tavern, they might be able to remember something about those runes. But right now? When it actually matters? Nope. They get their one shot and then something happens which changes the scenario.

Also remember that Intelligence checks also include more than just pure memory. They include reasoning things out from what you do remember. So yes, you can use an Intelligence (Arcana) check to figure out a magical puzzle that your character has never learned the answer to. By piecing together stuff you have learned. And since that set of things known is way larger (in this particular arena, although for others the reverse is true) for the character than for the player, you can't simply just say that if the player knows it the character knows it and vice versa. Because the player doesn't know all the intricate details of magical organizations--that's abstracted away by the game system behind proficiency and (generally) a lot of handwaving during exposition. A perfectly valid result of an Intelligence (X) check is "you remember that <thing the player has never heard but the character would have learned earlier>." To say otherwise is to say that a strong character can't lift something the player couldn't, unless we're putting in absolutely artificial, not-mentioned-in-the-text barriers between the different abilities.
That third one isn't a rule. It can't be a rule, or else the establishing rules for ability checks wouldn't include, "Otherwise, it's a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the GM." Players often can't know whether or not time is a pressure, but it should always count. Players are going to act different if the GM only ever counts time when there is something to count towards. By making that third rule, you actually peel off all the "success but the cost can vary" cases. The new meaning of failure becomes "The task is impossble," which doesn't make sense. The roll was only made in the first place because the task was deemed possible. There are things where making the attempt changes the situation and there are things where it doesn't. Both exist. Both are valid.

And no one usually suggests limiting the character to what the player knows or can do. They suggest not excluding what the player knows from what the character knows. Character knowledge > Player knowledge instead of Character knowledge =/= Player knowledge. With the exception of obvious situations, like not immediately knowing about events that they weren't present for, or knowledge that comes from reading ahead in the adventure book.

[PhoenixPhyre]

That third one isn't a rule. It can't be a rule, or else the establishing rules for ability checks wouldn't include, "Otherwise, it's a failure, which means the character or monster makes no progress toward the objective or makes progress combined with a setback determined by the GM." Players often can't know whether or not time is a pressure, but it should always count. Players are going to act different if the GM only ever counts time when there is something to count towards. By making that third rule, you actually peel off all the "success but the cost can vary" cases. The new meaning of failure becomes "The task is impossble," which doesn't make sense. The roll was only made in the first place because the task was deemed possible. There are things where making the attempt changes the situation and there are things where it doesn't. Both exist. Both are valid.

And no one usually suggests limiting the character to what the player knows or can do. They suggest not excluding what the player knows from what the character knows. Character knowledge > Player knowledge instead of Character knowledge =/= Player knowledge. With the exception of obvious situations, like not immediately knowing about events that they weren't present for, or knowledge that comes from reading ahead in the adventure book.

There's no contradiction. The interesting consequences for failure can come from the situation, rather than the task itself. Sometimes, making no progress is an interesting consequence in and of itself. What isn't interesting and should be avoided is "nothing changes, try again". Because that's a waste of everyone's time.

Let's take a particular task in a few different scenarios. The task is always the same: solve a riddle about magic (Intelligence (Arcana) DC 20). As is the question: Should the DM call for a check.

1. The character making the check has a -1 total modifier to Intelligence (Arcana) and has no assistance such as bless, guidance, etc.
2. The character has a piece of paper with the riddle and the answer written on it.
3. The character (with a positive modifier) is sitting at home, under no pressure what soever, with all the time in the world.
4. The character (with a positive modifier) is in a dungeon, in a room that is filling with poisonous gas. Every round spent in there incurs damage. Answering the riddle opens the door and allows escape.
5. The character (with a positive modifier) is in a game show. Each failed attempt deducts from their point total based on how badly they do, and they are rewarded at the end based on their points.
6. The character (with a positive modifier) is facing a sphinx. Either way, the sphinx will let them go onward. But on a success, the sphinx will assist them in some way.


1. No. Success is not possible. Rolling is a waste of time.
2. No. Failure is not plausible. Rolling is a waste of time.
3. No. Failure is not interesting. They can retry at will, with nothing changing after each attempt. They automatically succeed.
4. Yes. Success is possible, failure is possible, and failure has consequences. Not because the task itself imposes consequences, but because the situation in which the task is embedded has consequences.
5. Yes. Success is possible, failure is possible, and failure has variable consequences.
6. Yes. Success is possible, failure is possible, and failure has consequences by not getting the reward for success.


And note, the act of deciding whether to call for a check or not is entirely and intentionally meta. It's done by the DM based on game and rules considerations, not anything the characters could know generally. Mechanics are for resolving player uncertainty, not character uncertainty. The game, its rules, and everything else is definitionally meta. It's a game UI layer, not anything really present in either the player's universe or the game's (fictional) universe.

[MaxWilson]

Then that's not an ability check...


Frankly I'm not interested in arguing about whether asking players to roll a die and add their Int and Arcana bonuses is really an ability check or not (any more than I'm interested in arguing about whether rolling d20+Dex initiative in an ability check). I think you're wrong of course and I doubt you can support your opinion with rules quotes, but I'm not interested in arguing with you about it because what you name call it on the Internet doesn't change anything about what rules you use for it at the table (e.g. Jack of All Trades bonus clearly is allowed).

Bottom line, rolling dice that are influenced by what's written on the character sheet is a 100% normal way to determine how much info you're going to give the player, and has been since TSR days (nonweapon proficiencies). Don't like it? Then don't use it. But it's one way to give out info and I like it.

[KorvinStarmast]

Bottom line, rolling dice that are influenced by what's written on the character sheet is a 100% normal way to determine how much info you're going to give the player, and has been since TSR days (nonweapon proficiencies). Don't like it? Then don't use it. But it's one way to give out info and I like it. My brother still prefers that approach: degree of success informed by the die roll. Then again, he still has crit fails on ability checks and asks for additional rolls which I do not care for. But the game's fun so I don't get all in his business about it.

[Zalabim]

Frankly I'm not interested in arguing about whether asking players to roll a die and add their Int and Arcana bonuses is really an ability check or not (any more than I'm interested in arguing about whether rolling d20+Dex initiative in an ability check). I think you're wrong of course and I doubt you can support your opinion with rules quotes, but I'm not interested in arguing with you about it because what you name call it on the Internet doesn't change anything about what rules you use for it at the table (e.g. Jack of All Trades bonus clearly is allowed).

Bottom line, rolling dice that are influenced by what's written on the character sheet is a 100% normal way to determine how much info you're going to give the player, and has been since TSR days (nonweapon proficiencies). Don't like it? Then don't use it. But it's one way to give out info and I like it.
"An ability check tests a character’s or monster’s innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge. The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results." I'm not in a position to say whether it's better to say, "it's just like an ability check, but some modifiers (temporary, active, present bonuses) don't apply. It does/doesn't take your action." or, "It's not an ability check, but add your bonus to Int(arcana) checks to the d20 roll. It does/doesn't take your action." I'm just in a position to remind everyone that ability checks are generally used to resolve things that characters do. When it comes to knowledge about monsters, it isn't limited to what the character already knows about monsters. They could also be learning or guessing things about the monster based on what they can see right now. I otherwise have no objections to the concept of rolling to randomly see what the character already knows, whether you apply all the other rules for ability checks to that or not. I just happened to glance over one night and see "Here's my homebrew system. It's RAW." Which is just. No.

There's no contradiction. The interesting consequences for failure can come from the situation, rather than the task itself. Sometimes, making no progress is an interesting consequence in and of itself. What isn't interesting and should be avoided is "nothing changes, try again". Because that's a waste of everyone's time.
"Nothing changes, but you can try again," comes up most often in combat where the time spent trying, and the time spent trying again, is worth tracking round to round. Most often, the same check done out of combat is to determine if you get it right away (success), or you get it only if you spend sufficient time on it, but you don't have to keep rolling (success but extra time can be a setback determined by the DM.) As the DM, you offer the option every time so that players don't automatically know when the time spent does or does not matter.

Cutting the rest to save space, but 3 isn't interesting on success either. What happens when they succeed? How do they know? The existence of circumstances where the narrative goes in one direction or the other does not preclude the existence of circumstances where it doesn't. What if it's a puzzle box instead of a riddle. Are you going to take the puzzle away from them if they fail once? Are you not going to allow the possibility that sometimes it just clicks and sometimes it doesn't (allowing variance from party to party, for example?) Sure, you know it doesn't really matter if the wizard opens it in one minute or ten, but they don't and it takes barely any effort to resolve which result they get.

[MaxWilson]

"An ability check tests a character’s or monster’s innate talent and training in an effort to overcome a challenge. The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results." I'm not in a position to say whether it's better to say, "it's just like an ability check, but some modifiers (temporary, active, present bonuses) don't apply. It does/doesn't take your action." or, "It's not an ability check, but add your bonus to Int(arcana) checks to the d20 roll. It does/doesn't take your action." I'm just in a position to remind everyone that ability checks are generally used to resolve things that characters do.

That definition is flawed. Perception doesn't fit that model except when using the Search action or equivalent, nor does initiative, nor do passive checks, but casting Hold Person does. According to your quote that makes Hold Person require an ability check, but of course it does not.

Anyway, I insist that these things do benefit from things that benefit ability checks, such as Enhance Ability, but I'm not going to argue with you whether to call it an ability check or Almost Identical To An Ability Check. Either make a substantive point or don't, but I don't care about semantics. Do we have an actual substantive disagreement over what modifiers and rules apply to an Intelligence (Arcana) check? What's your actual point?

[PhoenixPhyre]

1) "Nothing changes, but you can try again," comes up most often in combat where the time spent trying, and the time spent trying again, is worth tracking round to round. Most often, the same check done out of combat is to determine if you get it right away (success), or you get it only if you spend sufficient time on it, but you don't have to keep rolling (success but extra time can be a setback determined by the DM.) As the DM, you offer the option every time so that players don't automatically know when the time spent does or does not matter.

2) Cutting the rest to save space, but 3 isn't interesting on success either. What happens when they succeed? How do they know? The existence of circumstances where the narrative goes in one direction or the other does not preclude the existence of circumstances where it doesn't. What if it's a puzzle box instead of a riddle. Are you going to take the puzzle away from them if they fail once? Are you not going to allow the possibility that sometimes it just clicks and sometimes it doesn't (allowing variance from party to party, for example?) Sure, you know it doesn't really matter if the wizard opens it in one minute or ten, but they don't and it takes barely any effort to resolve which result they get.

Let me adjust that third rule a little bit. In general, disfavor rolling when there are no interesting consequences for failure. Time is sometimes an interesting consequence--use your judgement.

1) something important happened there. You spent an action and the other guy gets to go again before you do. That's an important and interesting consequence.

Time sometimes matters to the characters. But in those cases where it really doesn't, it still does to the players. Wasting people's table time is, in my opinion, a cardinal sin of the game. And forcing a roll every time is a huge waste of table time in little increments. More pointless rolls = fewer meaningful ones per session.

To quote the DMG:


Remember that dice don't run your game--you do. Dice are like rules. They're tools to help keep the action moving. At any time, you can decide that a player's action is automatically successful....

That's the prime directive. Does it keep the action moving and the players happy? Do it. Otherwise, don't. This takes precedence over every other rule (especially the second clause).

2) true. That's why you shouldn't do a check there either. Although "you get what you wanted" is usually intrinsically interesting enough to not worry about that rule.

Circumstances matter. Circumstances decide when you call for a check and when you don't. There is no "always call for a check" rule. It were a puzzle box and success were possible, one of three things would happen

1) <failure on first attempt, under pressure> "You've given it your best shot under these circumstances. You can try again once the circumstances have changed to give you some room to think."
2) <failure on first attempt, time is only direct pressure> "Your first attempt to crack the puzzle box failed. Do you want to spend 10x as long to succeed?"
3) <no pressure, optional roll> "It takes you a while <influenced by the dice roll, although that isn't a real check>, but you crack the puzzle."