Unusual Metagaming you've dealt with

[SnowleopardVK]

What are the weirdest ways you've seen players metagame I wonder?

There's normal stuff of course, like "the DM's got her book open to the page on traps, we'd better roll to search for traps every step". But I'm wondering about the weirder, or the funnier, or the just-plain-illogical.

I gave my players a math puzzle in an old game once. They took one look at the numbers and declared "Hey wait, Melissa (me) is no good at math so this obviously can't be a math puzzle."

They spent about 50 minutes looking for some type of riddle or pattern. Eventually I gave up (despite their protesting, because they wanted to figure it out themselves) and told them the answer.

It was just a math puzzle.

It was relatively simple math too, and I'm sure they could have gotten it if they hadn't been so quick to eliminate all possibility that math would help them.

Apparently they didn't realize it's not that hard, for anyone, to Google up some tricky puzzles and problems.

 

[Rechan]

The PCs were in a desert town. They found a door in a house going down into the earth.

One player declares, "They don't make basements in this climate, so whatever must be down there must be sinister!"

Meanwhile I had no clue of such. It was just a storage cellar.

 

[SiderisAnon]

I had an entire adventure derail because apparently my setup was similar to a movie someone had seen recently, the assumed I had seen the same movie, and the entire party decided that this must be what is really going on and went with it.


Sadly, more than once I've had someone's "accurate real world knowledge" about a place, activity, or other aspect of an adventure prevent the party from completing the task at hand or make then run off on a complete wild goose chase. Nowadays, I just tell the players when they're about to pull a Benny Hill because they're making false assumptions based on out of character knowledge. (I'll let them run around crazy based on bad character knowledge or in-game assumptions, but not when it's purely because of player knowledge.)

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Two that involved the novels -

A player who had read the Birthright novels, who expected them to be accurate to the ongoing game, despite the DM not having read the novels.

A DM who expected the characters in a Dragonlance game to do the same thing as the characters in the books, despite telling us not to read the books. He got pissed when Raistlin, the character that I was handed, turned lawful good rather than do what the mysterious evil voice in his head told him to do. Sorry, I have a mysterious voice in my head telling me to do evil things? Time for either an exorcist or a psychiatrist....

The Auld Grump

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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[RangerWickett]

One of my DMs had a small dungeon with a hallway that had a 12 foot section that was covered in water.

Can we jump over it?

Probably not.

What happens if I poke it with my staff?

You create some ripples.

Is the floor solid?

It feels solid.

I cast detect magic.

There's no magic here.

I gather stones and toss them into the pool every few feet, to see how deep it is in different spots.

Make attack rolls.

10, 14, 8, 4, 19. Do I hit?

Yes, you splash a lot of water.

How deep is the water?

Well, you don't see the stones, so deeper than a few inches.

I poke it with my staff again.

Okay.

I shoot an arrow into the water.

It bounces off something under the water.

Something?

Yeah.

Can we climb along the wall next to the pool?

Eh, it's a pretty flat stone wall. Climb DC 20.

Nevermind. Wait, I have gust of wind in my spellbook. If we wait here for an hour I can prepare it.



And so on.

It was a puddle of water.

 

[Thagdal]

The PCs were in a desert town. They found a door in a house going down into the earth.

One player declares, "They don't make basements in this climate, so whatever must be down there must be sinister!"

Meanwhile I had no clue of such. It was just a storage cellar.

Heh. I find that funny as they do make underground storage in desert town. Most famous here by Coober Pedy Coober Pedy - Home - Tourism - Opal Capital of The World

 

[SnowleopardVK]

Just remembered another one.

I've had players who freeze up whenever I describe anything with big words that they don't know. Apparently most things with more than three syllables are synonymous with "dangerous, let's slow down the game and use every tactic we can think of to avert danger."

Heh. And to think they make fun of me for my English major...

 

[Stormonu]

Characters were in a dungeon that consisted of an ancient temple that had been buried hundreds of years ago.

One room had a crack in the wall from which cold air was blowing into the room. The room had been abandoned and blocked up, everything inside was covered in thick dust. The cold air was a randomly rolled feature to create atmosphere.

"Knowledgable" player announce that a cold room wouldn't collect dust, and thus there had to be a ghost in the room. Best of all, the player also tells the party said ghost would be tied to the room by some sort of item they were attached to in life, and convinces the rest of the party to destroy everything in the room to banish the non-existent ghost.

Gee guys, as if the room couldn't have been dusty before the crack developed.

 

[Wik]

Just remembered another one.

I've had players who freeze up whenever I describe anything with big words that they don't know. Apparently most things with more than three syllables are synonymous with "dangerous, let's slow down the game and use every tactic we can think of to avert danger."

Heh. And to think they make fun of me for my English major...

I can't be the only one thinking of Eric and the Dread Gazebo, here.