D&D 5E Oops, Players Accidentally See Solution to Exploration Challenge

[Tony Vargas]

... a beach on which we were landing to pursue some pirates who are led by my character's nemesis, Captain Whiskers, the nefarious tabaxi pirate...

That's just more fun than the whole thread put together, right there.

Surely, if we're chasing the nefarious Cpt Whiskers, we can let any 'metagaming' issues slide and just enjoy?


If not, well, the DM could scrap the map and go goal-and-approach on you, instead. Instead of looking at the Google-Earth top-down view of the beach you're standing on and deciding which dune to go 'round based on that, you declare actions for your character that might lead them in the right direction, like, IDK, looking for tracks?
The DM calls for checks, and off you go.

Don't even really need the map, a few evocative descriptions should be fine, but it's nice to have on the DM's side of the screen.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think where we may be running into friction here is that the original proposal, “all metagaming is the DM’s fault” presupposes that metagaming is a blameworthy act. I think under that presupposition, yeah, there are situations where the blame lies with the player. But I don’t agree with that presupposition. I don’t think metagaming is a bad thing, and therefore I don’t see any meaning in asking who’s “fault” it is. Deceiving your DM and fellow players is a bad thing. Breaking your group’s social contract is a bad thing. Those are things the player is at fault for. But it’s not the metagaming part that’s the problem, so I don’t think it makes sense to blame anyone for that.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I think where we may be running into friction here is that the original proposal, “all metagaming is the DM’s fault” presupposes that metagaming is a blameworthy act. I think under that presupposition, yeah, there are situations where the blame lies with the player. But I don’t agree with that presupposition. I don’t think metagaming is a bad thing, and therefore I don’t see any meaning in asking who’s “fault” it is. Deceiving your DM and fellow players is a bad thing. Breaking your group’s social contract is a bad thing. Those are things the player is at fault for. But it’s not the metagaming part that’s the problem, so I don’t think it makes sense to blame anyone for that.

The point I was making is that if "metagaming" is a problem in a game, it's entirely due to how the DM is presenting the game to the players. It's not a player-side problem in that case. Obvious bad faith play being a different beast altogether.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Obviously I'd require the players to roleplay stumbling into the trapped squares, and I'd keep track of how many times they do this and if the number didn't correlate to at least the first standard deviation from what you'd expect from random (that is, pre-map-exposure) play, I'd have to tell them what their characters would really do, and warn them that if they keep up this behavior they can go back to playing Fortnite.



Ha! Not really.

 

[pemerton]

This thread is weird, to me at least.

How many traps were on this map? How many encounters does the marked trail avoid?

Unless the answers to those questions are many and most I don't really see any resemblance between this situation and attacking a troll with fire. The difference are too many to be worth listing, but the first is that attacking a troll according to usual procedure won't go any way towards achieving the goal of killing it, whereas taking a suboptimal route from A to B is still making progress in the journey from A to B.

 

[Hriston]

This thread is weird, to me at least.

How many traps were on this map? How many encounters does the marked trail avoid?

Unless the answers to those questions are many and most I don't really see any resemblance between this situation and attacking a troll with fire. The difference are too many to be worth listing, but the first is that attacking a troll according to usual procedure won't go any way towards achieving the goal of killing it, whereas taking a suboptimal route from A to B is still making progress in the journey from A to B.

I think it’s not so much that the map was revealed to the players, which I think is pretty usual for this type of gameplay, but that the encounter key markers were revealed, allowing the players to circumvent the entire “dungeon”, from a skilled-play perspective. Without knowing what the markers indicated, however, it’s impossible to know whether this was of any benefit. I think to be truly analogous to the knowledge that fire defeats trolls, more detailed information would need to be revealed, such as which locations contained treasure and what type of monsters were guarding it, if any. Such information could reasonably be acquired by characters through reconnaissance, however.

 

[Ovinomancer]

This thread is weird, to me at least.

How many traps were on this map? How many encounters does the marked trail avoid?

Unless the answers to those questions are many and most I don't really see any resemblance between this situation and attacking a troll with fire. The difference are too many to be worth listing, but the first is that attacking a troll according to usual procedure won't go any way towards achieving the goal of killing it, whereas taking a suboptimal route from A to B is still making progress in the journey from A to B.

If I really don't know how to kill a troll, then trying different things does advance towards a correct solution by elimination.

If I don't know where B is or where the safe path is then wandering does, as noted, advance towards B by elimination.

If I do know about fire and trolls, but force play as if I don't, then play is just about how much I have to pretend to try options I know will fail before it's acceptable to succeed.

If I know where B and the safe path are, but force play to pretend I don't, then play is just about how much I have to pretend to wander and find encounters before it's acceptable to.succeed.

 

[pemerton]

I think it’s not so much that the map was revealed to the players, which I think is pretty usual for this type of gameplay, but that the encounter key markers were revealed, allowing the players to circumvent the entire “dungeon”, from a skilled-play perspective. Without knowing what the markers indicated, however, it’s impossible to know whether this was of any benefit. I think to be truly analogous to the knowledge that fire defeats trolls, more detailed information would need to be revealed, such as which locations contained treasure and what type of monsters were guarding it, if any. Such information could reasonably be acquired by characters through reconnaissance, however.

Two thoughts in response:

(1) Is it skilled play to circumvent the dungeon? How then does one get treasure, or XP? This doesn't seem quite analogous to getting the map and the key to (say) Tomb of Horrors.

(2) To push what seems to me the disanalogy to fire vs troll: if I know that only fire will beat the troll, but as a player do something else, I am (i) willingly risking my PC's death, and (ii) not getting any closer to being able to make a genuine guess at using fire. The whole thing is contrived.

But if, as per @Mistwell's initial post in this thread, I just have my PC continue through the dunes as I would have in any event, using some standard procedure or even just rolling a die, (i) I'm not taking any particular risk with my PC (for all I know there are healing potions or loot as much as random hit point loss in those encounters, and there's probably a reasonable chance the party has surplus healing available in any event), and (ii) the play experience isn't particularly contrived - the GM tells me what I find and I respond to that narration in a completely sincere way. It's true that, having seen the map, I know I'm going to encounter something - but that doesn't stop me being genuine in my response to whatever the something is. Which is quite unlike the troll case.

I think the general point is that choosing where to go is analogous to choosing what attack mode to use against the troll only in a narrow range of cases (eg the fiery death corridor in ToH). I don't know the recent Saltmarsh module but I don't get any overall impression that 5e modules are much like that.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Two thoughts in response:

(1) Is it skilled play to circumvent the dungeon? How then does one get treasure, or XP? This doesn't seem quite analogous to getting the map and the key to (say) Tomb of Horrors.

(2) To push what seems to me the disanalogy to fire vs troll: if I know that only fire will beat the troll, but as a player do something else, I am (i) willingly risking my PC's death, and (ii) not getting any closer to being able to make a genuine guess at using fire. The whole thing is contrived.

But if, as per @Mistwell's initial post in this thread, I just have my PC continue through the dunes as I would have in any event, using some standard procedure or even just rolling a die, (i) I'm not taking any particular risk with my PC (for all I know there are healing potions or loot as much as random hit point loss in those encounters, and there's probably a reasonable chance the party has surplus healing available in any event), and (ii) the play experience isn't particularly contrived - the GM tells me what I find and I respond to that narration in a completely sincere way. It's true that, having seen the map, I know I'm going to encounter something - but that doesn't stop me being genuine in my response to whatever the something is. Which is quite unlike the troll case.

I think the general point is that choosing where to go is analogous to choosing what attack mode to use against the troll only in a narrow range of cases (eg the fiery death corridor in ToH). I don't know the recent Saltmarsh module but I don't get any overall impression that 5e modules are much like that.

Let me try this on you then:

Is it better play to make real choices based on information provided and PC motivations or is it better play to choose known options against PC motivations but in line with a previous fixed pattern or even due to a random die roll?

You are arguing a position that has you advocating not for choice in play according to PC motivations but instead adherence to a standard play pattern or random roll. I strongly disagree with this premise.

 

[Umbran]

I'll just talk to the reasonable people ...

Mod Note:

So, this amounts to, "I'm not going to talk to you, but I'm going to spend time talking about not talking to you."

Folks, if you are going to disengage, that's fine. But, if you are going to propagate junior high school style drama about it, that's less fine.

Next time, just stop responding, okay? Thanks.