Player: My uncle told me (player consults the module the DM is running) that if we go down the left corridor and open the second door, under the rug is a secret compartment with 85gp and 2 potions of healing inside.
You don't see anything wrong with that? Weak justifications for metagaming are just that. Weak justifications. There absolutely does need to be something further in order for the character to have that knowledge.
Come on now. If you don't see the difference between the example I gave and the one you decided to come up with, then I don't think there's any reason in discussion, is there? It's like we have two gunshot victims, and you want to treat the guy whose pinky toe was shot off the same as the one who was hit in the head. "But they're both gunshot wounds!!!"
I said "veteran players" for a reason. If you've played D&D for any significant length of time, you know trolls are vulnerable to fire. For a veteran player to come up with an excuse why his character knows that is perfectly fine in my game. I can understand why it may not be for your game. But doing so means that such authority is in the hands of the DM. Which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on what the DM and players want from the game. D&D is meant to be a largely DM driven game, so I don't think it would typically be a problem.
When I said that such a DM was being a jerk, it's because he ignored the cue that his veteran players didn't want to play the "pretend not to know" game. The player came up with a way to bypass it. To me, this is a player contributing....he's come up with an element that helped explain his character's actions, and also cued teh DM to the type of stuff he'd like to do in the game....or at least the type of stuff he'd rather not do, in this case. To me, that's helpful; I want to know what my players want out of a game. If the DM chooses to thwart that and forces the players to play out the scenario in some arbitrary "when-is-it-okay-to-use-fire" encounter, then yeah, I'd say that DM is forcing a "Mother May I" situation, and he's possibly ignoring his players' desires for play.
The players have to ask "Mother May I use Fire?" and the DM sits back and says "No" until some arbitrary point where he then decides "Okay, yes, you can use fire."
Denial does not equal "Mother May I" and never has. It takes for more than the DM saying no to a weak justification for metagaming.
It certainly can. You have a binary view that just doesn't seem to allow for any nuance or gray area.
Also, this is your opinion, correct? Because mine is clearly different. There is no objective definition of the term as it relates to RPG play, as this thread has proven.
Maybe your unyielding opinion on what the term means is the obstacle to actually listening to what others are saying? Would you say that you see why I use the term Mother May I, and it's just a case of you wish I'd use another term? Or are you unclear of what the actual issue I'm describing may be?
Once again, denial does not equal "Mother May I" and never has. It takes for more than the DM saying no to a weak justification for metagaming.
The thing you are also overlooking is that there are two possibilities here. 1) the DM allows metagaming. If that's the case, the DM won't deny the blatant metagaming going on in your example. 2) the DM does not allow metagaming, in which case metagaming is cheating. A DM saying no to cheating is not "overriding player input" as players don't get to provide input that is cheating.
What about the non-binary third option; the DM allows some metagaming? I mean, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of D&D games fall into this category, so it seems odd to leave it out.
Metagaming is bringing in knowledge that the player has that the character doesn't and having the character act on it. That's the definition. My example is no different than a player reading the Monster Manual and using the puzzles attached to the monsters in game. In both cases the player is going to books that the DM is supposed to use, learning knowledge, and then bringing it in for the PC to use.
No, not necessarily. All of my players except one have been a DM at some point. Some for quite some length of time and to quite a large amount of people. And all of them, with the one exception, have been gaming since we were kids in the 80s. So even if they've never read the MM or DMG or whatever other book you want to mention, they all know about trolls and fire. Even the new gamer who hasn't read any DM aimed books.
It's not surprising to any of them, and that's why I'd never bore them by having them play an encounter where they had to "guess" about fire. I'd actually be glad that the player came up with a way to justify the use of fire if we did wind up in such a scenario.
Yep. Sort of like how monster weaknesses are established in advanced, not announced to the players, such that the player might take extra steps like reading the Monster Manual to learn it.
Do your players need to read the MM to know about trolls? Stop it.
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hawkeyefan has said that the player should be allowed to do this and that the DM is a jerk for not allowing it. He has also made the claim that it's "Mother May I" to say no.
Yes, in this instance....absolutely.
It's odd to me that in these discussions, you always advocate for the DM using their judgement, that D&D works because you have a DM who is acting on "behalf of the game" and so on. Here I give an example of the DM using their judgement, and you declare it wrong.
It doesn't matter where the player got the outside knowledge. Bringing it in via a weak justification is still no different than bringing in knowledge of a module you know that the DM is running.
Let's go with a personal example. I've run the Desert of Desolation series at least 3 times. Well after that, a DM I used to play with decided to run it. I remembered many of the secrets. According to what you are saying here, it would have been okay for me to bring in my Uncle Cheap Justification to let me know all of those secrets via talks he had with me in my youth.
No. You know the differences between these two examples, so stop treating them the same. Yes, they are similar in that they use player knowledge. But they are also different, and the differences are more important than the similarity.
In a case like you're describing, where a player who's previously run an adventure finds himself as a player in that adventure, there are any number of ways that his knowledge can be handled. The first is that you simply ignore it; just play the game as best you can without spoiling things for the other players. Nothing wrong with that, although it may be difficult at times. Another way would be for the DM and player to discuss this and address it in the fiction; "your character has previously been to the adventure site, but was struck in the head before wandering off and being found by merchants, so his memory of things may be a bit fuzzy".
The player has the knowledge in both of these cases. So why not go with the second? Where it's acknowledged and incorporated into the game rather than having to pretend you don't know what you know?
Again, I don't want to get too bogged down in the metagame discussion because that was only the example I used about MMI. The fact is that D&D is a largely DM Authoritative game....and although there's nothing at all wrong with that, it is what it is. My example would play out radically differently in other games because they are not set up the same way. For many other games, the dice are what determines the outcome of any check. For others, the GM and players may openly discuss the fiction and the characters and decide what's best as a result.
