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

[Charlaquin]

I change settings to make them better, not to solve out of game issues.

Me too, but incidentally, doing so happens to disincentivize acting on assumptions based on out of character information without taking steps to verify those assumptions.

 

[Maxperson]

Or a desire to be accepted within the group. There’s a lot of shaming around metagaming, which encourages a lot of folks to go to great lengths prove that they’re not bad metagamers.

Or else, you know, the group just doesn't like it and doesn't do it. No shaming involved.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Are wishes a traditional location for maximal adjudication?



I just wished for "a pair of F-14s". Would the proper DM response be to interpret that as it would be in world. A sheet of paper with the words F14 written twice maybe?

If you hadn't read the Silmarillion as the DM and I wished for the Vingilot to come to the rescue, how would you adjudicate that?

In 5e the wish spell has a strict definition that wouldn’t let you get F-14s anyway.

But, yes, intentional DM misinterpretation of wishes, especially in response to gonzo wishes, has a long and glorious history. I seem to recall that at least one edition has given very explicit advice to that effect.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Right. So this sort of crap is the reason for my questioning the 'roleplaying' of the people engaging this. Referring modern tech or modern pop culture as an inhabitant of some pseudo-medieval fantasy world is to me blatantly terrible roleplaying unless we were intentionally aiming for some pythonesque absurd comedy.

Sure. I agree with that. This is an extreme example.

And I think a better way to handle it is to stay in character and play through it.

If somebody wants to doing it, you don’t want to keep gaming with them anyway. Right?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Sure. I agree with that. This is an extreme example.

And I think a better way to handle it is to stay in character and play through it.

If somebody wants to doing it, you don’t want to keep gaming with them anyway. Right?

If the terrible roleplaying disrupts the mood of the game and thus impacts the enjoyment of the rest of the players, then I definitely think it is the GM's responsibility to tell the player doing it to knock it off. But of course if it is a continuing problem then indeed the solution is to not play with such people.

 

[Charlaquin]

Or else, you know, the group just doesn't like it and doesn't do it. No shaming involved.

Sure. That just hasn’t been my experience. Obviously everyone’s experience is unique.

 

[Guest 6801328]

If the terrible roleplaying disrupts the mood of the game and thus impacts the enjoyment of the rest of the players, then I definitely think it is the GM's responsibility to tell the player doing it to knock it off. But of course if it is a continuing problem then indeed the solution is to not play with such people.

Sure. I just think it’s less disruptive to play through it in character, rather than stop the game to make a “correction.” But YMMV.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If it is about not everyone agreeing how to play then yes, It is not an issue to be solved within the game. I have said this many times. But these situation in practice are not about that, they're about the player having misunderstood or didn't know of something and the GM clarifying. It is literally no different than the player thinking that the orc was closer than it actually was.

Oh, okay, if you were just talking about making sure the players and the GM are on the same page about what's going on in the scene, we're in agreement -- this should happen. This doesn't have anything to do with "metagaming" though, as it's the GM updating the players' understanding (or vice versa) and not anything to do with characters -- except that the downstream effect would be that players can now direct their characters without the misunderstanding of what's happening in game. This doesn't appear to implicate the GM telling players what their character is allowed to think.

No, it's not about that.

Okay, good, then we can dispense with worrying about a player knowing a trap in in a place or whether or not an NPC is lich, then, right? Because, fundamentally, the only problem with considering these poor roleplaying doesn't come from the player declaring their character thinks something, but that the player declares their player thinks something that is both true and uncovering something secret in the game. If these are not the issues, we can focus more tightly on those that remain. I will confess, though, that the only things I see that remains is an aesthetic desire for play to look a certain way.

Certainly the physical possibility of gunbowder existing but knowledge of it not is trivially true for any pre-gunpowder historical setting? Or any setting that would be defined to be similar to one that this would still apply? Furthermore, don't get hung up on gunpowder, the same applies to many purely mechanical tasks where it it would be super hard to imagine how it would not work even in fictional setting. Ancient Romans most likely had required metallurgy to physically produce full plate, but they didn't.

Oh, I'm not hung up on gunpowder. Or on the other things you're vaguely waving at -- these aren't problems I have in my games, largely because I don't make the blanket assumption to start with that these things could exist exactly as they do in the real world. As I noted, if you do this as a GM, then you're already creating the problem you care about. Don't, and you won't. If you allow that gunpowder exists, but work to prevent any realization of gunpowder, then I'm not sure what your goal is, but it's not terribly coherent.

But, even if you do, you still get to adjudicate the actions necessary to bring these things to life. I'm fine with a player asserting that gunpowder can exist and it's a precise mixture of elements. I can also test any attempt by that PC to implement this via the resolution mechanics, or any attempt to tell others that it exists via the resolution mechanics. If I'm allowing for gunpowder to exist, I damn well better be onboard with PCs discovering/inventing/creating it.

Oh, and the thing about the GM knowledge is rather interesting. So if the GM doesn't know what the thing the PC is doing would logically result they can say it doesn't happen, but if they do know they can't? Whoa!

I know, right? So why is it a required assumption for your case? That's what you postulated -- that a PC declaration to invent gunpowder could be easily foiled by the GM, but a step-by-step delineation of the process in detail would prevent the GM from foiling it. I mean, the assumption that the GM would want to foil it is shaky, as I talk to above, but here you've clearly made it the case that the GM cannot know what the actual process is because the GM can't recognize or stop it until it's too late. This assumption is necessary because you've skipped any step where the GM can adjudicate an action, leaving the GM at the mercy of the methodological player. It's weird -- the GM has set that gunpowder exists exactly as in the real world, and you have the GM adjudicating as if they know the formula for your first case, but then set up the second where the GM is powerless in the face of the exact formula. It's just odd, I agree!

Yeah, GM can totally do that. Sometimes that is the most sensible course of action, sometimes it isn't. And sometimes some thoughts are effectively 'fictional positioning.' If no one, or at least their character. cannot know someting then the GM is fully within their rights to tell the player that.


I don't worry about it or 'police' it either because I don't have to. Players understand that their characters are people in fictional setting and that puts some limitations on their knowledge, not do their resent if Gm sometimes has to clarify their understanding. Similarly as a player I am merely thankful if the GM clarifies something I had misunderstood or assumed wrongly.

Oh. You meant clarifying the situation as the GM telling the player what their character is allowed to know. Yeah, I suppose we are in violent disagreement here, as well. I thought you meant clarifying things like how far the orc is from the PC, which is a player confusion, not a PC confusion, but you mean something more, like telling the player that their PC doesn't even know it's an orc, so they can't call it an orc. Yeah, good on that first bit, not good on the second.

All it seems to be here is that you've taken monitoring and controlling PC play and lumped it into clarifying the flow of game information between GM and player. This is a category error, in that the kinds of information flowing here aren't the same. One is physical information about the game world, the other is the GM telling the player how to play their character.

I have playd a lot of other games, freeformed, LARPed and written my own homebrew games and then ran them. D&D is probably not among my most played games. This is really not just about the D&D.

My apologies, then. It's unusual, in my experience, to encounter someone with a lot of experience in playing different games that also insists that you use rules and understandings from one game in another. You've been very consistent in applying previous edition thinking to 5e, so it seemed that you might lack a wider experience.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Are wishes a traditional location for maximal adjudication?



I just wished for "a pair of F-14s". Would the proper DM response be to interpret that as it would be in world. A sheet of paper with the words F14 written twice maybe?

If you hadn't read the Silmarillion as the DM and I wished for the Vingilot to come to the rescue, how would you adjudicate that?

This thread keeps running away when I'm not at the keyboard, so I'm late here, but I'd like to weigh in. The issue here, to me, isn't that the player asks for an F-14, but rather how the GM decides to operate on that. It is literal? Is the GM forced to only consider the request as a literal ask for a literal F-14 (metaphorically within the fiction of the game, of course)? I contend no. The ask is based on the reference frame of the player, and, like many asks, needs to be translated into the game. We do this all the time in play -- turn "I move 25' towards the Giant to get in range and swing my axe at it." This is similar to what's happening in the fiction, but filtered through the player's understanding and frame of reference. The character doesn't move exactly 25' and swing the axe, the character moves, likely dodging around, and then swings the axe. We automatically translate between frames here to achieve the goals of play.

So, then, what's the difference? Magnitude. Asking for an F-14 is a pretty big departure from the game fiction so it confounds our normal translation because of this and because we haven't trained ourselves in translating F-14s the way we have the more common statements. So, we evaluate it not in need of translation into the fiction, but as something that breaks the fiction. And, in most fantasy games, I'll agree a literal F-14 breaks the fiction to a greater or lesser degree. What to do about it? Declare that impossible and demand a different action, or work harder to translate? I say work harder.

The ask for an F-14 is almost never going to be for the physical reality of an F-14, but for what that represents. You can talk with the player and find out what they're actually asking for in terms of abilities that they initially presented as an F-14 because that was their understood frame of reference. Once you do that, you can find a way to implement that into the fiction in a way that doesn't break the fiction -- and, usually, it requires very little change! For example, you could implement an F-14 in the fiction as something with a very similar form factor but powered not by electronics and aviation kerosene, but magictech. The effect achieves what the player is asking for, via their reference frame, but now translated into the fiction in a way that doesn't break the fiction.

The only real questions, then, as if the ask is commiserate with the power of the effect granting it, and also if this is the kind of game you want to play. The former is a rules question, adjudicated within the framework of the game, the latter is a table question, adjudicated at the table as to what genre expectations the table wants to entertain.

 

[Cadence]

My apologies, then. It's unusual, in my experience, to encounter someone with a lot of experience in playing different games that also insists that you use rules and understandings from one game in another. You've been very consistent in applying previous edition thinking to 5e, so it seemed that you might lack a wider experience.

I'm not sure I've ever experienced someone picking up a new D&D family game (D&D, AD&D, PF, 13A) and waiting to play until they had read all the rules. It feels like they typically skim for what look like big differences and then go with what they used before in other versions of D&D until they come across a reason to double check or someone who has. I don't think I've ever seen them, for example, use an interpretation from Fate or Toon or Traveller or Vtm2e to fill in for a new-version rule they haven't double checked.

Edit: Updated quote attribution. Doh!