D&D 5E player knowlege vs character knowlege (spoiler)

[Blue]

How do you reconcile the goal of "staying in character" with the approach of players stopping to ask the DM what their characters know about trolls?

That's perfectly in character.

If I see something I don't understand, I often think about it. I have a lot of experiences that pertain to, oh let's say IT infrastructure and science fiction. I can directly access those experiences.

If my character sees something they don't understand, I often have them think about it. They have a lot of experience that pertains to, oh let's say living in a fantastical world filled with magic and monsters. I access the DM as my interface everything in that world including what happens "off camera". The description of Intelligence Checks explicity describes it's used when I am calling on things such as education or memory - not that a check would always be needed, but as an example that this is the type of thing a player can expect from a DM.

 

[Burnside]

Sure, there's often more than one way to succeed. And it sounds like you telegraph some things, which is good.

But is what I described what happens at your table, albeit abstractly?

Yes. But with the caveat that, in practice, I have never really seen characters flailing for a non-fun amount of time in performed ignorance.

Because hopefully by the time a given encounter arises, story beats will have been hit and in-game information will have been learned to mitigate that sort of thing OR the solution to a problem (like the troll example) is very, very likely going to arise organically when one or more players rolls out their go-to bread-and-butter tactics.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

In such a scenario, I think it would be appropriate to establish as part of the social contract of the game that players not act on any prior knowledge about the module, without first taking steps in-character to establish how the character might have access to such knowledge. And if that is an established part of the social contract, it would certainly be rude to violate it.

Indeed. In my current groups, that sort of thing would be taken as an implicit part of the social contract. Or possibly it would not occur to us that something like that would need to be in there in the first place.

It was a good point, made earlier in the thread, that sometimes social contracts need to be made explicit when gaming with strangers.

 

[Hriston]

The DM is the interface between the world (including the characters) and the player. History, nature, arcana, religions are skills for a reason - the character lives int he world and experiences it, but the player does not. So there's a way to determine what the character knows that the DM has not yet shared with the player. Just like perception might share with the character that their character is getting pickpocketed - something else they wouldn't know without the DM.

Characters experience much more then the DM tells the player, ad sometime the player wants to draw on that knowledge. "Hey, we just spent a week of downtime in this city, have I come across a place I could buy healing potions?"

Yeah, I find those kinds of questions very annoying. I'd much rather a player attempt to establish that type of resource through an action declaration. I'd probably turn the question around on the player and say, "That depends. What did you do during your week of downtime?" and then we could resolve the player's action. Now, if the party was going to take a week of downtime, I'd ask them what they're doing beforehand rather than do it as a flashback, but that's also a viable option.

I disagree with your first sentence, though. The DM's job is to describe the environment and the results of the PCs' actions. What a PC knows is not part of the environment. If a player wants to establish that their character knows some piece of information, s/he's free to do so by deciding that's the case. If s/he wants to verify that the information is correct, however, then s/he needs to take some sort of action to do so, which can then be adjudicated. Then we're playing D&D, not 20 questions.

 

[iserith]

That's perfectly in character.

If I see something I don't understand, I often think about it. I have a lot of experiences that pertain to, oh let's say IT infrastructure and science fiction. I can directly access those experiences.

If my character sees something they don't understand, I often have them think about it. They have a lot of experience that pertains to, oh let's say living in a fantastical world filled with magic and monsters. I access the DM as my interface everything in that world including what happens "off camera". The description of Intelligence Checks explicity describes it's used when I am calling on things such as education or memory - not that a check would always be needed, but as an example that this is the type of thing a player can expect from a DM.

I wouldn't call having a sidebar between player and DM as staying in-character, in either an active or descriptive roleplaying sense, but then it looks to me you define staying in-character as something closer to how Burnside clarified his meaning upthread.

You're right on what Intelligence checks cover, but asking the DM what your character knows isn't an action the DM can adjudicate. And it's not in-character in my view. It's very clearly occurring in the metagame, a place that some folks say they want to avoid as much as possible but seem to do everything in a way that interacts with it. As I see it, to stay in character and out of the metagame, the side bar with the DM needs to replaced with a reasonably specific action to, for example, recall lore.

 

[Charlaquin]

You're describing a grotesque situation but I can assure you that at my table it works perfectly well and is fun and smooth. I have no idea why this seems to bother you so much.

I can’t speak for @Elfcrusher specifically, but some folks have had bad gameplay experiences where DMs have disallowed certain actions on the basis of them being “metagaming” and are thus wary of DMs admonishing “metagaming” in general. And some of us have been the DMs who created negative gameplay experiences for our players in the name of preventing “metagaming,” and found our games to have improved immeasurably when we, on the advice of other DMs, decided to stop policing such behavior. And by “some of us” I mean me. I’ve been that DM.

 

[ccs]

Pretty sure Valindra Shadowmantle is not in ToA as published, so this must be something your DM has decided to add in.

You are wrong.

 

[Burnside]

I can’t speak for @Elfcrusher specifically, but some folks have had bad gameplay experiences where DMs have disallowed certain actions on the basis of them being “metagaming” and are thus wary of DMs admonishing “metagaming” in general. And some of us have been the DMs who created negative gameplay experiences for our players in the name of preventing “metagaming,” and found our games to have improved immeasurably when we, on the advice of other DMs, decided to stop policing such behavior. And by “some of us” I mean me. I’ve been that DM.

Got it. I don't think I would flatly disallow an action on that basis. However, if I as DM couldn't readily see how a character's in-game behavior could be explained or justified without metagame knowledge, I think I would probably ask the player to offer an in-game explanation for why their character is doing that thing. And I would certainly accept a reasonable explanation. If the player couldn't contribute anything to the story beyond "I read it in the Monster Manual" then yeah I think I would probably disallow the action OR help them figure out an in-game explanation - kinda depending on the individual case.

But again, this is a hypothetical because this hasn't actually come up for me.

 

[Guest 6801328]

You're describing a grotesque situation but I can assure you that at my table it works perfectly well and is fun and smooth. I have no idea why this seems to bother you so much.

Oh, I know. I played that way for years.

 

[Blue]

So what your feedback loop (or social contract) does is, effectively, take some amount of reasonable action declarations in context off the table until someone basically asks questions that likely result in an ability check at which point they may or may not be able to put those action declarations back on the table, depending on the result of said check. If the ability check is failed, then they have the option to play at experimentation for an undetermined amount of time before the gated action declarations are judged as acceptable. Or as @Charlaquin mentions, they can play at ignorance.

Do I have that right?

I'm not Charlaquin, but I can answer for my table.

It sounds like it takes some unreasonable action declarations made without context off the table. The seems good. And "time" is not the only measure of experimentation, and there are other solutions as well (chopping them down and running away, pushing their remains off a cliff, etc.)