D&D General DMs: where's your metagaming line?

Ralif Redhammer said:

Because it's mechanics. I'm totally fine with them making an investigation check and being told "the creature's skin looks unarmored and soft, and it doesn't seem that quick on their feet." But I suppose I should've stuck with the usual example of what people ask for with monster lore checks - vulnerabilities and resistances, to be clearer.

I wouldn't be okay with them making a check to know that a relatively obscure monster like an Obyrith is immune to poison. Unless the PC has something like the sage background or the ranger's favored enemy ability that would apply to the situation. There are abilities that specifically apply to this sort of thing, and lacking those, I want to maintain some degree of surprise and mystery about the world - not everything can be learned with a dice check.

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In 5e, if you deem something is impossible in the game world as DM you just say something like "this monster is unknown among civilized folk." You control the dice as DM and you simply don't offer a check (in 5e) , right? In a sense, 5e has "de-metagamed" checks b/c they are squarely in the DM's purview.

Lanefan said:

For the most part this is exactly my assumption; and you're right in saying modern D&D (particularly 4e) doesn't do this well. It's do-able enough with 0e-1e though, and early-era 2e.

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Not as long as you have things like D&D spellcasters in it it isn't. And I'm not sold even with things like paladins and rangers (especially the early versions where the latter were more heavy magic-oriented).

Bill Zebub said:

Then just change the description and don't call them trolls? It's just simply not hard to change things.

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Calling them trolls may be part of the point; its a term that both predates D&D and has associations, and that may be what you're looking for.

Bill Zebub said:

I sort of get what you're saying, but it all just seems like unnecessarily complicated overhead. Would this character know such a thing? What's the likelihood? Well, what's their background and where are they from?

Which gets us back to my first point, above: ultimately, if secrecy of the fact in question is so vital to the balance of the game that the DM absolutely must have it, make sure you use an actual secret.

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It isn't about balance (at least not to me) its about jarring inappropriateness.

R_J_K75 said:

As I said said it depends on a characters background and backstory. In some cases PCs with a class are common folk.

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I don't know that "common folk" and "D&D wizard" have any meaningful overlap from where I sit, and as I said I'm not convinced its much better with cleric, ranger (especially the old-school ones) or paladin. Even if they started as common folk, by the time you get to being those, you aren't any more.

R_J_K75 said:

Maybe I am missing the point but if a player actually randomly guessed a lock combination, A) Im giving him money to play the lottery, B) declare the player has won D&D forever.

As a DM I think that I wouldn't pre-determine a combination for a lock, or ever give it one. Id just go through the process of the player either gaining the "combination", them picking it or forcing the safe open. Nothing to metagame there as there's no combo to begin with.

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I suspect he's assuming a combination mentioned in a published adventure (that may be specific for reasons of clues provided elsewhere--but that the PCs in-game may have well bypassed).

iserith said:

The rules changes are not made for that purpose. That it may introduce a variable that makes "metagaming" an unreliable tactic is a byproduct. Players don't necessarily only engage in reliable tactics though, so it's not like this stops "metagaming" altogether. However, if someone is the sort of person that dislikes "metagaming," one could do far worse than just making the odd change and telling players you do that sometimes.

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Sure. It's just a happy accident that it sets a perfect trap for metagaming.

iserith said:

That's probably a much better solution than trying to police the thoughts of players.

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I don't think worrying about metagaming is about policing the thoughts of the players. It's about preventing their characters from acting on information the character wouldn't have. I don't care what the player knows or thinks. I only care if they try to get their character to act on that info as a means to gain some advantage in the game. It just makes it much easier to deal with running a game that's enjoyable for everyone at the table if the players don't try to pretend that their characters (miraculously all their characters) somehow have this weird perfect recall of the entirety of the monster manuals of every edition of the game and every published adventure ever written. It's adversarial play. It's the player trying to "win" a game that doesn't have a win condition.

To borrow from Colville, it's bad sportsmanship. I dislike that phrase used in this context because it suggests that playing D&D is a sport and that there are winning and losing sides. Which is fundamentally not the case. But the idea holds. It's bad sportsmanship to read the monster manual for clues on how to beat monsters the DM has put in front of you. It's bad sportsmanship to leverage player knowledge to try to win the game against the DM. Players that are that invested in winning are entirely missing the point of the game.

overgeeked said:

Sure. It's just a happy accident that it sets a perfect trap for metagaming.

I don't think worrying about metagaming is about policing the thoughts of the players. It's about preventing their characters from acting on information the character wouldn't have. I don't care what the player knows or thinks. I only care if they try to get their character to act on that info as a means to gain some advantage in the game. It just makes it much easier to deal with running a game that's enjoyable for everyone at the table if the players don't try to pretend that their characters (miraculously all their characters) somehow have this weird perfect recall of the entirety of the monster manuals of every edition of the game and every published adventure ever written. It's adversarial play. It's the player trying to "win" a game that doesn't have a win condition.

To borrow from Colville, it's bad sportsmanship. I dislike that phrase used in this context because it suggests that playing D&D is a sport and that there are winning and losing sides. Which is fundamentally not the case. But the idea holds. It's bad sportsmanship to read the monster manual for clues on how to beat monsters the DM has put in front of you. It's bad sportsmanship to leverage player knowledge to try to win the game against the DM. Players that are that invested in winning are entirely missing the point of the game.

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Trying to discern the reason and motivation for a player to make a particular decision for their character in search of evidence of "metagaming" is the very definition of policing thoughts in my view. That's definitely not for me. I don't see any benefit to it. I expect that players are going to want to overcome challenges and leverage whatever tools they have at their disposal to do so. This includes knowledge of monsters, modules, tropes, setting lore, and anything else. I don't see any good reason to demand the players take those off the table because of some calculation about what the character may or may not know, nor would I expect them to. If they do, great. If they don't, that's fine too. It's their character.

Bill Zebub said:

We all know trolls are vulnerable to fire and they don't even exist. I would think in a world where they actually exist this would be known.

Have you ever been attacked by a bear? But I bet you know what common wisdom says to do if attacked by a bear.

(And that's where it gets interesting, right....are you really supposed to play dead? In all circumstances? Likewise, maybe the thing about trolls and fire isn't completely true...)

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What color is the bear? Brown? Play dead (both brown bears and grizzlies). Black? DO NOT PLAY DEAD, fight the bear, hard. White? Doesn't matter what you do.

overgeeked said:

Sure. It's just a happy accident that it sets a perfect trap for metagaming.

I don't think worrying about metagaming is about policing the thoughts of the players. It's about preventing their characters from acting on information the character wouldn't have. I don't care what the player knows or thinks. I only care if they try to get their character to act on that info as a means to gain some advantage in the game. It just makes it much easier to deal with running a game that's enjoyable for everyone at the table if the players don't try to pretend that their characters (miraculously all their characters) somehow have this weird perfect recall of the entirety of the monster manuals of every edition of the game and every published adventure ever written. It's adversarial play. It's the player trying to "win" a game that doesn't have a win condition.

To borrow from Colville, it's bad sportsmanship. I dislike that phrase used in this context because it suggests that playing D&D is a sport and that there are winning and losing sides. Which is fundamentally not the case. But the idea holds. It's bad sportsmanship to read the monster manual for clues on how to beat monsters the DM has put in front of you. It's bad sportsmanship to leverage player knowledge to try to win the game against the DM. Players that are that invested in winning are entirely missing the point of the game.

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I think it's a bad mistake to confuse what you're calling metagaming with the idea that it's being done to "win". You've already said there's no winning and losing, but then you're making an argument that doing this is trying to win. It's hard to follow.

I don't want to be bothered by metagaming as a player because it means I have to constantly consider if I can or can't act on something I already know, and then try to decide when I have to let bad things happen to my character in an attempt to pretend my character doesn't know things. I'd rather make that choice and then explain why my character knows things -- this keeps me in the character and I don't have to worry about if I've pretended I don't know long/hard enough to please the GM. That's my approach to metagaming as a player -- I'd rather have a brutal, knockdown fight where I can deploy my knowledge about trolls being harmed by fire because that's okay rather than what should be an easy encounter where I have to pretend I don't know for the umpteenth time to preserve why this one troll keeps getting back up. The latter yanks me right out of the game.

As a GM, I don't need to make metagaming a problem, so I don't. You can read the MM, have it open in front of you, and it's not going to change the level of difficulty in the encounter or help you much get done what you need to get done. Once I started designing encounters with the assumption that players will know things, it became trivially easy to avoid having metagaming be any kind of problem. And my games do not resemble the players trying to win at all -- largely because just knowing things doesn't really help all that much.

I have no line. I straight up tell my players the stats of the monsters if they want to know.