A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

I think the easiest way to deal with "metagaming" is to just set the expectation that the DM (and other players) shouldn't care how another player makes decisions for his or her character - it's nobody's business but that player's. However, the player is forewarned that his or her assumptions may not be correct and that it's smart play to verify one's assumptions by taking action in the game. A troll might best be defeated with fire - but maybe not this troll. Act upon your assumptions at your own peril. Maybe you're correct. Maybe you're dead wrong. (And hopefully the DM telegraphed this possibility when describing the environment.)

This is how I handle it in my games and, in my view, and is more in line with how modern versions of D&D treat "metagame thinking," that is, it's an issue of assumptions leading to bad play experiences rather than any particular concern about what a character may or may not know. For example, a TPK occurring because the players think "the DM would never throw such difficult monsters against us at this level" or wasting valuable session time searching an otherwise unimportant door because the DM described it in more detail than usual.

Maxperson said:

Yeah. It's VERY nice to take off the DM hat once in a while and just play one character.


LOL A lot of people would. I've just done sandbox for so long that it doesn't bother me. Besides, some the specifics of what was prepped can be salvaged for later use as encounters if I want to, so it hasn't all gone to waste.



90% of the time we have a session zero where we all brainstorm ideas, putting the top 10 in the pool. Then we all individually rank them from 1-10, with 10 being the most desired, and 1 being the least. Then we add up the top 3(or occasionally 4 if there is a tie) and discuss which of those 3 will be the next campaign for me to prep. However, sometimes they just ask me to come up with something, like I did with the demons. And equally rare, I will have an idea that I know they will like and want to surprise them with and ask them to trust me. They haven't been disappointed with that and gone off to do something else yet.

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Very good Your table is way less Gm-centric/driven than those I played in, or run, and been complaining about all the time.

I see that you and [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], who advocate for no-metagame at all, have both "unusual" games (IME), like multiple Gms, or multiple parties under same Gm/Setting. I guess avoiding meta is functional for you in having a fair standard among different combination of tables, Gms, timelines, plots.
[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION], regarding open mindness and attitude on my part

iserith said:

I think the easiest way to deal with "metagaming" is to just set the expectation that the DM (and other players) shouldn't care how another player makes decisions for his or her character - it's nobody's business but that player's. However, the player is forewarned that his or her assumptions may not be correct and that it's smart play to verify one's assumptions by taking action in the game. A troll might best be defeated with fire - but maybe not this troll. Act upon your assumptions at your own peril. Maybe you're correct. Maybe you're dead wrong. (And hopefully the DM telegraphed this possibility when describing the environment.)

This is how I handle it in my games and, in my view, and is more in line with how modern versions of D&D treat "metagame thinking," that is, it's an issue of assumptions leading to bad play experiences rather than any particular concern about what a character may or may not know. For example, a TPK occurring because the players think "the DM would never throw such difficult monsters against us at this level" or wasting valuable session time searching an otherwise unimportant door because the DM described it in more detail than usual.

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"Telegraphed" being the bare minimum; better a clear and transparent phase to describe the situation, or, if not appropriate, at least a check to bring some light, or whatever. Otherwise we go back to the Outguessing-the-Gm minigame, bordering on ... I dare not say it... starts with M...

Numidius said:

"Telegraphed" being the bare minimum; better a clear and transparent phase to describe the situation, or, if not appropriate, at least a check to bring some light, or whatever. Otherwise we go back to the Outguessing-the-Gm minigame, bordering on ... I dare not say it... starts with M...

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In a D&D 5e context, the DM describes the environment (which would include the necessary telegraphing, one hopes) then the player can describe what he or she wants to do. That might include some attempt to recall lore about trolls, or make a deduction about this troll in particular, which the DM can then adjudicate into success, failure, or uncertainty, the latter of which would call for an ability check. Even if the DM decides that the result of that action is failure (or the roll indicates the same), the player is still free to have the character act as he or she sees fit. He or she just wouldn't have anything concrete to confirm any assumptions.

Maxperson said:

So if I'm understanding you, the DM is a jerk if he ignores the players' signaling when they want to use knowledge of weaknesses they have, but he's not a jerk if he ignores the players' signaling that they want to know the weaknesses of unique monsters. So now you've established that the DM isn't automatically a jerk if he ignores player signaling. Now I have to ask, though, where's the line drawn? Is there a list of what player signals the DM cannot ignore without being a jerk?

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No, I think you're still missing a vital bit; the signal in the scenario I described is not "we want to know this monster's weakness" it's "we don't want to pretend we don't know this monster's weakness, please don't make us".

If the DM says "too bad, you all have to pretend you don't know about their fire vulnerability until something happens that makes me think 'okay you can use fire now'" then I think that DM is being a bit of a jerk. He's ignoring what the players want, and it isn't even over something vital or essential to the story....it's a minor factor in one encounter.

Is that clearer? It's not about the players trying to get an "unfair advantage", it's about the players being able to have input in some way on where the game goes and how it's played.

As for where the line is drawn, I would expect it would be different for everyone, given varying tastes and preferences.

Maxperson said:

No.

1. The DM is not the player, so he cannot be bringing in player knowledge to the character.

2. The DM is has the authority to grant boons like that.

3. Presumably Uncle Elmo is already a part of the PC's background and there's a reasonable change he knows about that.

However, I wouldn't do that, because a description is no substitute for the real thing, and it was a long time ago. Elmo might not have even met a troll, and even if Elmo did meet trolls and tell the PC about it, remembering isn't guaranteed, so the best I would do is give the player a roll to remember. And since it's something in doubt, I wouldn't bring it up as an idea the PC might have. That goes dangerously close to me playing the PC for the player and that's not something I would do. It would be his job to remember that Elmo might have said something and then make the roll.

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Your answers make me think that this may be more about preserving the DM as the authority to introduce elements to the game, and also to decide when they can be introduced. A player cannot decide what his character may know in the world, but the DM either has to determine it, or grant it as a boon.

I think the way that sounds seems a bit problematic for some.

I realize you go on to say that you wouldn't run things that way, so I get that and appreciate it. But I think that the DM authority angle is what people are taking issue with. Again, I think a game can run perfectly fine with the DM having such authority. However, I think one of the challenges of such a game is for the DM to not overdo it. This is how railroads and Mother May I happen. Things to be cautious about when running such a game.

You don't seem to share such concern, so I think that's what's causing some of the conflict, as well.

Maxperson said:

As long as the DM is trying to be as fair and impartial as he can be, he's not going to outright say no about the trolls. The answer will either be yes, or roll the die. The pre-established background already had Elmo as an adventurer who went to the Temple of Elemental evil and survived.

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I think this is a great solution, and one many have advocated for throughout the thread.

Bedrockgames said:

No. I am saying it is exceedingly common in real life. That is literally all I am saying.

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I don't know how common it is, but I can say that I have seen plenty of folks who play this way. I've been in games where this is the expectation. One of the reasons I decided not to run my own games that way was the fact that I found it really boring to play things out that way. It just took a fight with trolls and stretched it out so that it took longer. There seemed to be little point to it other than to "preserve" some sense of metagaming as cheating.

When people who are into this hobby meet and have discussions about what's so great about RPGing, and talk about some of their experiences, I can't ever imagine anyone giveing this example:

"One time I pretended my fighter didn't know trolls need to be burned to be killed, so I let him get knocked down until the thief in the party ran out of daggers to throw, so the DM let him throw a flask of oil, and we realized fire would hurt them. Was awesome."

hawkeyefan said:

There seemed to be little point to it other than to "preserve" some sense of metagaming as cheating.

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Having been steeped in this mode of play for more than half of my D&D life (but no longer), I think that it is really just a form of tribal identification, since the approach doesn't really seem to achieve its purported goals in my experience, at least not as well as other methods. "Our tribe thinks and does things this way. Other tribes do things some other way." This tribal loyalty would also explain why people will fight to the death over maintaining or defending it no matter how many different ways the approach is shown to be logically inconsistent or otherwise flawed. The more you point out the holes, the more entrenched its proponents become.

pemerton said:

But this is just poor management of the fiction: introducing an element which contradicts what's already established (in this case, the absence of tracks on a muddy road). (And as per [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]'s post, without introducing something else - like a magic spell or charm of traceless passage - to explain away the seeming inconsistency.)

If a player is going to write in new bits of fiction, it shouldn't be too hard to reconcile it with what's gone before. To reiterate a point made by [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] upthread, the established fiction of most RPG campaigns is pretty thin, meaning that the reconciliation task is not normally going to be that demanding.

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That depends, I suppose, on whether you're only looking at trying to make the new element fit in with what's established (which, as you say, is often not that hard to do) or whether - and here's my sticking point - you're looking deeper to see if the new element would or could have caused anything already established to have been established differently at the time, had the new element been in place all along. And this is where it can get difficult, if the new element is anything significant.

With the wagons, the players stopped at asking about tracks; but given the size of the place they ultimately found (and obliterated, but that's another tale) they'd have also been very justified in asking why they hadn't met quite a few empty wagons coming back from the place or passed full ones on their way up; never mind asking how the wagons could have got through one or two rather significant obstacles (written in as mini-adventure sites and challenges for the PCs) along the road. And had they seen wagons it's quite reasonable to think the idea of posing as a wagon train would have at some point occurred to the players/PCs as a means of getting into the hideout covertly...

Oh, and I just remembered why the enchanted-wagon idea wouldn't have occurred to me: it couldn't have worked over the long term given the setting parameters. Much of the outdoors area in that region was pretty much null-magic; magic only worked if you were underground or in a heavily-constructed building such that there was some solid stone between you and the outside. Cave entrances and such gave unpredictable results. (to Readers'-Digest a very long story: a built-in element of the setting from day 1 was that magic was unstable and getting worse, and areas of wild magic and null magic were a fact of life - this was one such, and was a large part of the reason the hideout was there in the first place; the assassins had found a place where magic worked more or less OK in the middle of a region where it didn't. And while travelling the PCs tried to sack out in caves or buildings each night, and each night did a quick inventory to see if anything they were carrying had been disenchanted during the day)

iserith said:

Having been steeped in this mode of play for more than half of my D&D life (but no longer), I think that it is really just a form of tribal identification, since the approach doesn't really seem to achieve its purported goals in my experience, at least not as well as other methods. "Our tribe thinks and does things this way. Other tribes do things some other way." This tribal loyalty would also explain why people will fight to the death over maintaining or defending it no matter how many different ways the approach is shown to be logically inconsistent or otherwise flawed. The more you point out the holes, the more entrenched its proponents become.

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Or they just see things differently than you and like different things. Maybe you have moved to a new style that doesn't do this. But that doesn't mean you are enlightened. It just means your tastes changed.

Bedrockgames said:

Or they just see things differently than you and like different things. Maybe you have moved to a new style that doesn't do this. But that doesn't mean you are enlightened. It just means your tastes changed.

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You will note that nowhere in my post do I say that I think I'm "enlightened." We're all subject to tribalism.