Tony Vargas
Legend
That's fair, as far as it goes. If the DM creates an NPC, and decides the NPC doesn't have any reason to know the PC's typical spell selections, and the spells the do have aren't comparatively common things to guard against in the setting (which given the rules-as-laws-of-physics style you generally advocate as the OneTrueWay, seems unlikely), it would make a lot of sense for that NPC to be prepared for the PCs to use that spell. OTOH, if the DM decides the NPC has heard rumors of the PCs exploits or kept tabs on them, it's another story.Saelorn said:It's meta-gaming whenever any character (PC or NPC) makes use of knowledge which it should not otherwise possess, such as knowing which spells the party had cast upon itself earlier in the day (for the purpose of bypassing those spells with an appropriate effect), or guessing that there must be a secret passage in a certain area based on the way the DM has oriented the map.
Utter nonsense. Until the DM decides to have a band of goblins attack that village, that particular band of goblins might not have even definitively existed. Campaign worlds can be huge places, the DM isn't obliged to place, let alone stat out, every creature living in them.When a goblin decides to kidnap the PCs mom instead of some unrelated person, or even to attack the PC's home village instead of some other village, that is a meta-game decision which the DM is not allowed to make.
The campaign necessarily follows the PCs, no NPC attacks the PCs because he knows they're PCs (if he did, he most certainly /wouldn't attack them, if he was smart), the NPCs motivation is something else, perhaps even a chance meeting - the DM may have created and placed than NPC specifically to attack the PCs, but the NPC has no knowledge of his sole reason for existing.Any action by any character, if it takes into consideration that the PCs are PCs, is invalid. That is information which cannot be possessed by anyone within the game world.
Do you even run for the PCs in such a campaign? Would everyone show up some week, and watch you run a combat between a paladin and a dragon on the next continent over, because that's what's happening in the setting, at the moment? Or, no, because how would the PCs know it's happening, of course.After all, we cannot design adventures based on the PC's levels (which D&D has done since day 1), cannot design adventures based on character backgrounds (which D&D has done since day 1) and cannot have the NPC's pro-actively thwart the PC's (again, done since day 1) since all of those are based on the consideration that the PC's are PC's. We cannot even attack the PC's home town, unless it occurs randomly, because doing so will always take the PC's into consideration.
Actually, now that I think of it, there was one time in my long gaming experience when I actually saw a GM take it to the kind of extremes that Saelorn is advocating. It must have been c1988, the GM was a GURPS fanatic, and was running GURPS Space. Our party needed a navigator. There was a new player, so he built a navigator. But, our brilliant GM decided it'd be unrealistic (because it was the 80s, and euphemisms like 'process sim' and 'verisimilitude' and 'immersion' weren't being used that way, yet) to just bring in the new PC, so we hat to go through the motions of 'recruiting' a navigator. We got several candidates, that the GM described and RPd interviews with, picked the most capable/interesting one - and it wasn't the new PC. Obviously the new player, after sitting out his first session, and not even being allowed to play his own character, never returned, and the campaign never really got off the ground.I would love to watch your campaigns. It would be such an eye opener for me to see how you can possibly pull this off.
Last edited: