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

[Maxperson]

Nor am I. I'm responding to [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s claim that it is cheating to (i) impute my knowledge of troll weaknesses to my PC, and (ii) to explain this, within the fiction, as stuff I learned from my dear old uncle.

All "cheating" means here is that Maxperson doesn't like it. But he presents it as if it is something more. And his argument for the "something more" rests on a general critique of metagaming that encompasses practices that he himself engages in.

That's just plain wrong. Cheating means that it gives an unfair advantage to the player. Do I dislike metagame cheating? Yes. Because it gives an unfair advantage to the players. It's also a fact that it's cheating in my game. It's not a "claim."

No one in this thread, other than him, cares what his preferences are. But some do get frustrated with his presentation of essentially arbitrary preferences as hard-and-fast rules, especially when the formulation of those rules seems to have a strong element of special pleading if not outright hypocrisy.

So first, I've said at least a half dozen time, maybe more, that it's cheating for MY GAME, so it's pretty darn disingenuous for you to make the claim that I am presenting metagame cheating as "hard-and-fast rules.: Second, I've not said that metagaming is okay, so there's no hypocrisy going on at all.

If my character knows it then it is not "out of game knowledge". Maxperson has no objection to my PC knowing what a crossbow is, or a spear trap, even though it is quite conceivable that some people in the gameworld are ignorant of such things, just as in the real world there are people ignorant of such things. But he objects to my PC knowing what a troll's vulnerability is.

False Equivalences are false. Troll vulnerabilities are not even remotely as common knowledge as crossbows, or as easily reasoned out as "Look, it's a spear trap."

 

[Maxperson]

My knowledge of trees comes from the real world, does this mean that my character can't recognize trees with it being metagaming? Or how about a sword? Or how about what it's like being a peasant?

What part of metagaming being "Bringing in real world knowledge THAT THE PC DOESN'T HAVE." do you not understand?

 

[Maxperson]

The "a-ha!" moment just hit: the PC's uncle was a troll.....

And he taught me how to kill trolls dead, which is why I always carry a flask of apple juice on me.

 

[Maxperson]

But that's not what I'm saying. The DM doesn't have to provide the characters with knowledge that their players don't have in such a case. So if there's a new monster with weaknesses the players have no idea about, then unless the thing is meant to be something that the characters may have knowledge of in which case the DM could share it or could call for a roll, I'd play it out as is. This is the ideal situation in a case where you want such monster vulnerabilities to be secret knowledge and to matter to the encounter as such....both players and characters are ignorant of the info. Why would I change that?

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?

What if the DM said to the player of the fighter "You recognize these creatures as trolls. Your Uncle Elmo said he faced them in the Temple of Elemental Evil, and that they must be burned to be destroyed." Is this metagaming?

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.

I don't know if I'd say it's more player dependent. The players may come up with the ideas, but the DM has a huge say in if those ideas have a chance of succeeding, and what that chance may be. And obviously, has the ability to veto ideas outright, i.e. "No, your Uncle Elmo never told you about trolls".

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.

 

[Maxperson]

Saying this is like saying paying rent in Monopoly is metagaming. It's nonsensical. Actual elements of the game cannot be metagaming. Using actual elements if the game as they are intended to he used in the game cannot be metagaming. It's only RPGs that have this weird definitional crusis with the term metagaming, and then only because of the tradition of secret GM notes and who decides what's part of thise notes.

Hit points are for the player. The PC doesn't know what hit points are, or how many he has. So if the PC acts on knowledge the player has(hit points), and that the PC doesn't have(hit points), then that is metagaming.

 

[Sadras]

You forgot to mention the more telling question: has (or should have) the Troll heard how to defeat the PC?

From its uncle, who told it to go for the cleric first.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But they ate just talking about not being a jerk (i.e. killing another PC and saying 'that is what my character would'). You are stretching the meaning very far from the intent

But he isn't, really. There is a lot more too it than that. How often do 5 random people meet in a bar and suddenly become an indivisible team of highly cooperating members? How often do 5 rootless people (OK, usually) manage to even know how to cooperate well with others? I mean, its all HIGHLY implausible from the get go. Nothing about it strikes me as even faintly likely or reasonable given any kind of understanding I have of human nature (and as a Program Manager and someone with more than 50 years of life experience I suspect I am at least not totally clueless about how people behave).

I am sure we can devise situations where the creation of a party does seem plausible BTW, but they are mostly not anything like the "the characters are nobody special in the world" sort of assumptions that are being tossed around here. Nor is such an arrangement likely to persist for long, nor fail to end in acrimony a high percentage of the time (heck, I have problems getting 5 software developers not to decide to kill each other before the end of a project, and they're not ninjas, paladins, and warlocks!).

And parties go FAR beyond that, the PCs are expected to work with others of races they are culturally hostile to, sublimate their own best interests ALWAYS to the best interests of the group, often take long digressions from their own primary interests and motives to assist these others, trust them with their wealth and shares of vastly valuable treasures, etc. etc. etc. Many people wouldn't even consider treating their own families so well in reality.

 

[Maxperson]

You forgot to mention the more telling question: has (or should have) the Troll heard how to defeat the PC?

Troll #1: What are those things approaching us?

Troll #2: Those are PCs! My uncle once met an Elmo in the Temple of Elemental Evil, and he said the trick to killing one is...

 

[Sadras]

Hit points are for the player. The PC doesn't know what hit points are, or how many he has. So if the PC acts on knowledge the player has(hit points), and that the PC doesn't have(hit points), then that is metagaming.

Max you realise given your above relationship between knowledge of character hit points and metagaming, players will inadvertently metagame. The only way to realistically (with assurety) say that your players don't meta on this issue, is if the DM was the sole bookkeeper of the characters' hit point scores.

In a similar vain, some on Enworld (myself included) in an attempt to stamp out meta play have players roll for all their Death Saves at the time of rescue or at combat end, whichever may come first.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

These are really strong posts. They capture what I was trying to get at upthread with some remarks about "cargo cult" and similar. That is to say, particular design/play features that can work well as elements in a "skilled play" game simply don't make any sense in other RPGing contexts. Hence treating those particular design/play features as if they're part of what it means to roleplay makes no sense.

And the point extends beyond nobility and loot. @Lanefan asks whether the noble PC's entourage would come "out into the field". But the very notion of "the field" itself rests on an assumption about play which simply doesn't generalise across all of RPGing. In the Burning Wheel game that I GM, for instance, there is no "field".

Right, you might have some sort of resource(s) that represent (IE are explained as) 'being a noble', but they're still simply based on some dice pool or set of character distinctions, and the other players' PCs equally have 'stuff'. Some might actually work out to be more advantageous than others, or players might deploy them with greater or lesser skill at play, but they should have roughly similar 'plot power' notionally.

I think Champions was one of the early games to practice something like this. You simply built your character out of 'points' IIRC. One guy had an iron fist that did a lot of damage when he punched things. Another guy had a hallucinogenic drug habit that let him bend the bad guys minds. It didn't even matter how your 'power' came about, that was irrelevant and you were allowed to flavor it any way you wanted. As I recall some flavorings had a limited narrative and mechanical impact. So if your power was a 'gun' then the possibility existed it could get lost or broken or something and so maybe it was a bit cheaper. This was still pretty limited though compared with the deep mechanical and game process integration of aspects into FATE for example, or even moves into Dungeon World.

I don't really think Gygaxian player challenge games are less sophisticated than modern 'indie' games, particularly, or necessarily less interesting, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who literally cannot tell the difference between OD&D and role playing in general, and are carrying around a lot of baggage!