D&D 5E How to deal with Metagaming as a player?

[Corwin]

Most whims aren't suicidal. When a large, green, warty creature with big teeth is bearing down on you, you generally don't grab something far less effective than your sword. A stick, even with fire on it, ESPECIALLY with fire on it, isn't going to do much damage and is likely to break after a swing or two.

IMO, cinematically/literarily speaking, there is a long, storied tradition of normal schmoes fighting, or fending off, such creatures as Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and countless other supernaturally powerful creatures, with nothing more than a fiery stick. So I'm not sure what basis you have to make such a claim.

 

[Uller]

As Arial Black suggested above, about a druid in his party, let's pretend you are the DM. Every day the druid in the group casts water breathing on the whole party. For little or no apparent reason. Other than because he can and has the spell slot to waste.

Now, again remember, you're the DM who has seen this day-in-day-out. Did you ever even think to put a water trap in your adventure in the first place? Or did you metagame and come up with something else?

I have a warlock in my group that does this. We play mostly published adventures so it's not a problem for me. But if we were running homebrew adventures I would definitely through some water related hazards in the party's way to reward him for that.

 

[Corwin]

I have a warlock in my group that does this. We play mostly published adventures so it's not a problem for me. But if we were running homebrew adventures I would definitely through some water related hazards in the party's way to reward him for that.

Metagamer!

 

[Uller]

Metagamer!

Yep. And if a magic item is in a published adventure that is useless to the party or useful to a PC that already has more magic items than the others I've been known to change it. Not always. But sometimes.

 

[TwoSix]

Metagamer!

Unclean! Burn the heretic! (Unless you knew he was vulnerable to fire!)

 

[Uller]

And...if you live in a world where trolls are not terribly rare and make your living as an adventurer, why wouldn't you know that you need fire to kill 'em? Or silver for lycanthropes? Or radiant for wampyrs? Do fantasy worlds not have legends and stories?

Sent from my SCH-I535 using EN World mobile app

 

[Ovinomancer]

Oh, my bad. I didn't mean to imply you meant something else. I know what you meant. You are just mistaken.

It doesn't have to be a "breach of the social contract" (unless you are intentionally being both arcane and expansive in the definition). It could just be different people with different presuppositions and expectations about the game, unaware that others prefer a different gaming style. It could be lack of clarity about definitions, and where those subjective thresholds lie. The 'social contract' might simply be, "Hey I got this game for Christmas...wanna play?"

People with different expectations is a breach of the social contract. This doesn't apply blame, but given the social assumptions of all parties are not in alignment where they were previously thought to be so, the social contract has been breached. The evidence is that the solution to such a breach is to amend the social contract -- someone has to change playstyles, or an accommodation in playstyles must be reached, or someone leaves the game.

Social contracts are often unstated and assumed. This is why the advice of a session zero, where you explicitly cover portions of the social contract and achieve buy in, is so widespread and helpful. It avoids these kinds of breaches.

More often than not, when one person thinks the other is being a jerk, the feeling is reciprocated.

"But they're a jerk, too," is rarely a winning or useful argument. Aside from the fact that your statistic is made up, this seems like an attempt to excuse being a jerk so long as someone else can be claimed to be a jerk.

 

[Corwin]

And...if you live in a world where trolls are not terribly rare and make your living as an adventurer, why wouldn't you know that you need fire to kill 'em?

Always brings to mind the notion that some people must think Gandalf's player was a cheating, filthy metagamer. Was there established fact that he knew Middle Earth trolls would turn to stone when exposed to sunlight, prior to it happening? Yet, he stalled long enough for the sun to rise and save everyone.

 

[Ovinomancer]

[MENTION=6701872]AaronOfBarbaria[/MENTION]'s argument is an example of the continuum fallacy. He's arguing that you cannot tell the difference between someone engaged in metagaming (a term used here to mean 'acting on player knowledge that the character does not have) and someone not engaged in metagaming because there exist scenarios between the two ends where it is difficult to determine. Basically, that because there exists grey areas, there are no black or white ones.

The interesting part of this is that he does say that there are definitely places where acting on information that character cannot have is cheating or playing in bad faith. This conflicts with his definition of acceptable play as being any declared action that the character is capable of taking. Presumably, there's some as yet unstated test that he uses to determine the difference between 'cheating' and an action that is possible.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Well I guess that's on way to put it. I find it fun to role-play and I assume that's what the group is there to do. Other people have fun being jerks who happen to have no concept about what role-playing means. Just because they're having fun while being inconsiderate to other players at the table and oblivious to the concept of role-playing doesn't make them equally right.

You are assuming that your one, narrow, definition of "role-playing" is the only one. But now we're risking a serious thread derailment.