D&D General Should players be aware of their own high and low rolls?

[iserith]

Nobody is perfect and some fights end up as difficult ones when maybe they shouldn't be. That's not incentive not to make 7 out of 8 fights much easier by metagaming.

Again, you can't reliably know the frequency and the cost and risk for verifying one's assumptions is usually so low that it's a no-brainer to do it. I'm not really sure why you argue against this, particularly as it effectively gets you to where you want to be with the players acting in-character to recall lore before acting.

 

[overgeeked]

That's not really different from I've been saying. That's very close to the 50% number I said would be needed to maybe stop metagaming, and which you say MAY work.

We're saying the exact say thing.

If you gain an unearned advantage in even one fight in 100, there's no reason not to metagame. So either the DM homebrews all the monsters or the players metagame. Homebrewing monsters is not adversarial DMing. It's a way for the DM to prevent adversarial players from gaming the system and cheating.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I have to agree with Max... but with a bit of a different solution... if you front load those changes you MAY be able to pull it off...

game 1- all normal monsters, game 2- 3 normal fights 1 homebrew swap, game 3- all homebrew swap, game 4- 3 homebrew swap 1 normal, game 5- all normal monsters, game 6- 2 normal 2 homebrew

that is if we average 4 fights a night 24 fights 10 of them homebrew... even if your next 5 games are all normal monsters you may have them 'worried' enough... or if you throw 1 in 8 after that you would 'keep them on there toes'

The difference is that one poster is a hard core anti-metagamer predicting what would happen if people played a certain way.

The other poster is somebody who has actually been playing that way for a long time and is describing what happens.

(And the further irony is that the first poster bases their play style on the claim that we can know what people "would" do in various situations.)

 

[Xamnam]

I don't understand how metagaming affects that. The DM is still being creative and we're still enjoying a new monster or version of a monster when it shows up.

This came from me answering your question.

Why would I treat every encounter as if it could be different just because you occasionally change one?

I know the DM can, and enjoys it, so it's always a possibility, so assumptions are always dangerous. My point was that negative metagaming behaviour isn't necessarily relevant here.

 

[GrahamWills]

Why would knowledge spontaneously poof into your head just because you're smart.

Not everything in the MM is known or even well known. It's not all written about.

Everything? No, but most stuff -- absolutely! It would be a weird world where the guild of fighters doesn't have library containing multiple copies of "Basic Monsters and their Abilities". Even in our world, those kind of books were best seller in the medieval and ancient world for people who were just curious!

And it would take decades to learn it all like it does in real life. The professors with doctorates and research papers specialize in very narrow knowledges over a lifetime to become as knowledgeable as you're saying the average 16 int adventurer would be.

If you were a specialist, you would not only know the MM, MM2, MM3 and every other book possible, but would have studied variants of all of them, misprints, notes on each of them by reknowned authorities -- a huge amount more.

Knowing the contents of the MM is pretty trivial. How long would it take you personally to memorize it well enough to pass a basic exam. Two weeks? A month?

The problem is that 1) PCs aren't that old, 2) they haven't devoted the years and decades to learn it, 3) they aren't specializing in monster knowledge, they are specializing in their class, and 4) knowledge isn't accumulated in D&D as it is in the modern world.

There's no way that a PC could be that good. So no, your claim is not correct from a realism point of view unless the PC is some sort of non-combat sage class and doesn't adventure, but rather just studies at libraries and/or colleges, talks to peers and writes papers on the subject.

Monster-manual level of knowledge is really not that hard. Seriously.

 

[Maxperson]

Again, you can't reliably know the frequency and the cost and risk for verifying one's assumptions is usually so low that it's a no-brainer to do it. I'm not really sure why you argue against this, particularly as it effectively gets you to where you want to be with the players acting in-character to recall lore before acting.

Again, how do you verify assumptions? You do it by using something to verify in the case of vulnerabilities it or by ignoring it in the case if resistances and immunities. So if I'm assuming a devil is immune or resistant to fire, I'm not going to waste a round casting firebolt at it to see if it really is immune. I'm going to use something else. If I assume that an earth elemental is vulnerable to thunder, I'm going to verify by using thunder. The assumptions are the metagaming. And yes, verifying or ignoring(depending on the metagaming) is a no brainer.

 

[Bill Zebub]

If you gain an unearned advantage in even one fight in 100, there's no reason not to metagame. So either the DM homebrews all the monsters or the players metagame. Homebrewing monsters is not adversarial DMing. It's a way for the DM to prevent adversarial players from gaming the system and cheating.

That's truly terrible game theory.

You are leaving out a critical component: the number of times your assumed but incorrect knowledge left you worse off. For example, exploding trolls. And even if there's isn't a negative consequence, in a game based on action economy, wasting a turn on an ineffective strategy is a cost.

 

[Maxperson]

If you gain an unearned advantage in even one fight in 100, there's no reason not to metagame. So either the DM homebrews all the monsters or the players metagame. Homebrewing monsters is not adversarial DMing. It's a way for the DM to prevent adversarial players from gaming the system and cheating.

No. I don't agree with that. If 99 times out of 100 the monster is different, then it's not only a waste of time 99% of the time, but will hurt you more often than that one time you get a stock monster if you pick the wrong thing and waste a round.

 

[Xamnam]

Man, I love how my players metagame. They don't wait for death saves to tick up before healing, they discuss what spells they're going to take so they don't double up, they push on in to danger instead of resting after every battle, they plead earnestly with the agent of the Zhentarim they just met, they stay committed to their course of rescuing their employer rather than abandoning him because it's only 10 gold, they don't steal from each other even though they steal from everyone else, the list goes on.

 

[Xamnam]

If you gain an unearned advantage in even one fight in 100, there's no reason not to metagame.

What about that it's not fun?