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

[GMforPowergamers]

But one is something that cannot be undone... knowing the details of the game... and another is something that can be avoided... don't look at the other player's screen.

Would you tell the other player "Pretend to not know that my elite unit has a slow speed, okay?"

That would seem utterly absurd. Whereas "Hey, don't look at my screen!" seems perfectly reasonable.

hey don't use knowladge your character doesn't have
sounds more like don't look at my screen to me

 

[hawkeyefan]

hey don't use knowladge your character doesn't have
sounds more like don't look at my screen to me

You can't not know what you know. That's the point. Any decision you make... to use the knowledge or not, is influenced by the fact that you have the knowledge. It's unavoidable. Trying to avoid it only highlights it.

If you don't look at someone's screen, then you don't know what's on their screen. You can avoid this knowledge.

I think it's a pretty important distinction and is pretty key to the whole meta concept, and displays why metagaming and cheating are different things.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It seems to me that what might really be going on for some people is that they don’t like the “unfair advantage” granted in certain situations, and what those situations seem to have in common is the player knowledge vs character knowledge thing, so rather than enumerate the list of problematic behaviors…which would be lengthy and incomplete…they generalize to “metagaming is bad”. But that is too broad, and sweeps up a lot of behaviors that are not only fine but even necessary to the game.

Anybody think that may be what is going on?

 

[Redneckomancer]

This whole video game analogy is kinda bunk from the start because, unless you're doing an old school con tournament, D&D isn't a 1 vs all competitive game? Maybe use Overcooked! or World of Warcraft raids or something.

Also 'metagaming is an unfair advantage'. Unfair for who, advantage against who? Unless you're a very adversarial DM I don't really understand this idea at all.
Anyway, back to the OP, I've been running a multitude of games for about 20 years and really this idea of "no secret rolls, player knows every roll right in front of them by default" is something I've only seen from people who started and only play 5e. Not saying its bad or anything, it's just interesting. It's also very interesting to me that this idea is also coupled with the idea of Metagaming being inherently bad.
Sorry if this has been brought up already (38 pages in 3 days tells me there's probably a lot of nonsense like this current video game tangent so) but can you, CreamCloud, personally explain in your own words why Metagaming is inherently bad? If you can't I'd probably stop worrying about it and just roll stuff based on what keeps the game moving and playable.
I used to believe that too because I'd seen so many general and hypothetical examples of metagaming being bad, but every time someone brought up a specific from-the-table example of metagaming being bad, it always turned out to be just someone (player or DM) being a dick, and metagaming was just one vector for them to be a dick. Or it just didn't look like a problem to me at all, for example the Troll vs Fire thing: What's the worst that happens? The players kill the troll 2 rounds earlier than expected? Oh nooooooo game ruined
That's when I, personally, stopped caring if someone metagamed, specifically, and just thought about why they did something and if it actually ruined the game for everyone involved.
Personally yeah, I use a lot of secret rolls and passive stats (not just perception either, you can add 10 to any skill and it becomes a Passive score fancy that). I also noticed that in general I call for way less rolls than my 5e players expect anyway and just let them have info or whatever, with particular emphasis on what's trained vs untrained, backgrounds, origin, and what things the player specifically says they're doing (you can't get away with just asking "can I roll Insight?" in my games, sorry. I need specific actions to adjudicate.)
Also, as I get older, I'm just too tired to care. We're all stressed out and have so little time to play, If you know there's a magic sword down the left hallway, sure bud, go grab that, it'll come in handy. Gotta keep things moving.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Of course we filter out sensory data. I said the baring can’t ignore relevant information when making a decision. You can try to decide differently than the relevant information you have would lead you to do, but that is a decision influenced by said information.

And again, I think your definition of "relevant" is faulty here. You filter that out too, by prioritization. If you learn to prioritize what's character-visible, the same applies here.

What you’re doing is trying to imagine what choice you might have made if you lacked that information, and making that choice. But by doing so, you are still acting in a way that has been influenced by that information.

I disagree with this characterization. It implies a far more conscious process than what I'm talking about.

I don’t know what this means.

it means you're applying my statements well beyond how I intended them to be applied. I don't know a better way to express that without getting into the weeds in a way I'm uninterested in pursuing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've never used traps very often for a simple reason. Most of the time they're dumb. If you have a trapped corridor, how do people use your facility?

There's a couple answers to this.

1. They don't. You place them in areas you do not expect to regularly use, but want to keep available if events change. The classic here is traps in tombs; no one is expected to regularly use that area.

2. The traps are easy to avoid if you know the trick. A secret corridor with a door that has to be opened in a particular way, that the small number of people who use it know, or a trapped chest that's perfectly safe to open when you know the trick.

Now, traps in heavily travelled areas that a lot of people would be required to know to use, I agree with, but that's not the routine use of traps IME.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It seems to me that what might really be going on for some people is that they don’t like the “unfair advantage” granted in certain situations, and what those situations seem to have in common is the player knowledge vs character knowledge thing, so rather than enumerate the list of problematic behaviors…which would be lengthy and incomplete…they generalize to “metagaming is bad”. But that is too broad, and sweeps up a lot of behaviors that are not only fine but even necessary to the game.

Anybody think that may be what is going on?

I think that's part of it.

I also think that this goes back to the DM being at fault. They're presenting the players with a challenge... if the challenge is such that things the players already know gives them an unfair advantage, then that's a flawed challenge. Come up with another way to challenge the players.

Expecting them to pretend not to know the thing they know... what does that challenge? Their ability to play dumb?

It's just silly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think what they're doing is choosing the option that is more fun and engaging to them which may happen to be not losing. Which is not to say they will never lose even if "metagaming." It's not a reliable tactic unless the DM makes it so.

Yeah, the truth is I think there's a lot of people who don't find failure fun. They want it to be possible (because what's the point otherwise) but particularly doing so in some circumstances is unattractive. So they'll lean in on things that minimize that.

(In particular, people tend to dislike failure that makes them and/or their character look incompetent).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I think that's part of it.

I also think that this goes back to the DM being at fault. They're presenting the players with a challenge... if the challenge is such that things the players already know gives them an unfair advantage, then that's a flawed challenge. Come up with another way to challenge the players.

Expecting them to pretend not to know the thing they know... what does that challenge? Their ability to play dumb?

It's just silly.

At least to me it is not really not about advantage, at least not mainly. I think the point of roleplaying is to get immersed and inhabit a viewpoint of a fictional person, and part of doing that is to accept that this person will have different amount of knowledge than you the player. If you're incapable of doing that, what's even the point of playing?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sorry if you've already addressed this but there's been a lot of posts so... here goes:

• if a player knows the troll is weak to fire and
• the PC doesn't know that for... reasons... and
• the PC has the cantrip fire bolt

If the PC uses fire bolt against the troll in round 1 of combat, is it metagaming?

As I've noted before it can go either way; after all, maybe the player pretty regularly uses fire bolt anyway, and it seems as good a choice as anything else. That's why I say it turns into a case of GMs making assumptions to jump on ones like that (and why I've strongly distinguished it from the "coincidental joining the group in trouble" case).