A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[Bedrockgames]

How is knowing about trolls because I've played the game and/or read the rulebook the same as using my knowledge of real-world chemistry?

I never said it was.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It's never been obvious to me that the troll thing is a secret - because the first version of D&D I played was Moldvay Basic, and as per the instructions to new players I read the monster section. And I did the same when I got the Expert book.

The idea that players who know about the troll weakness, but whose characters have never encountered a troll, would pretend to be ignorant about the troll weakness, is not one I encountered until I saw people advocating it on ENworld. Back when I played D&D in a club and at tournaments, part of the job of an experienced player was to bring knowledge to the table like how to beat trolls.

This is something I've seen from when I started playing in the mid-80s. I don't think it needs to extend to the early days of the hobby though to be a clearly visible thing in the gaming culture.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For my part I try to understand why people play this things even if their games collapse in the long term (if lucky), again and again. All IME.
I'd really like to play a trad/Gm driven fantasy game, but I find either slow railroads or clueless sandboxes, with no player inputs considered, and Gm fiat or freeform endless downtime outside combat encounters.

With this attitude, you are never going to understand what you are examining.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, for the most part. There are plenty of games that have similar arcs. The zero to hero arc you describe is pretty particular to level progression games such as D&D. But I think the idea of a "hero" has enough flexibility to it to work in a variety of games. I tend to think of it in the literary sense of "protagonist" rather than the concept of someone who performs heroic deeds.

Yeah, same here, but "hero" as a generic term meaning "the later stages of protagonist development" is a lot shorter to type!

No idea, really. Who knows how many versions of the story he went through, or if he wrote it in chronological sequence or what. Either way, I'm sure there were some things that surprised even Tolkein during the writing.

I wonder if he was more surprised by things he found in his research, than by what he wrote using it. Guess we'll never know.

And I think that's part of the disconnect here. You seem to want the players to get as close to being the actual characters as possible, from a mental standpoint. Think like them, act like them, and so on. I kind of view it as being an observer and also a writer.....like I get to watch and enjoy a show that I'm also helping to write. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] had a recent post about this that I think explained it really well.

To me-as-player the observer part comes later, when I read the game log. To me-as-DM the observer part comes both during play and then later when I write the game log.

Well, it depends on the system, right? In D&D, I don't think there are existing rules for allowing such on the fly content creation, so if people wanted this in their game, they'd have to kind of homebrew it, or port it from other systems and tweak accordingly.

But in other games, it's just part of the assumed mode of play. If that's the case, then yes, it should always be allowed, right?

Yes...except for this...

Well, I meant that there would indeed be many questions, all summarized by "how could this be so".

But I think there is nothing harder and certainly not impossible about what has already happened. The answer is that everything that happened still happened. Nothing changes. You just work to understand how it could have happened that way. Why did no one recognize the secret noble? Why didn't he use his status to get them out of that jam? And so on. If you answer these questions, then there's no need to retcon a retinue that's been traveling with the party all along. That would be absurd.

Instead of changing the fiction, this simply sheds new light on the fiction.

I don't think it's fair to assume that people are doing this to be an asshat. Maybe this would be frustrating to you as a DM....okay, that's fine. But are you not able to understand how other players and DMs may actually enjoy this kind of emergent fiction? That they don't think it's a headache, but instead is a source for inspiration to propel the story forward or maybe in some new direction?

Not just as a DM; this sort of thing would bug the hell out of me as a player as well because I'd still be asking the same question: does something only just now being learned or introduced, that in theory was present all along, possibly cause any retcons or change any previously-done actions and-or roleplay?

Which also means that were I playing in a situation where players could introduce major elements of the fiction, one top-of-mind consideration for me would always be whether anything I was planning on introducing on the fly would cause these same issues - an example being the "my PC is a high noble" declaration - and if it would I wouldn't introduce it.

Huge red flag goes up the second someone says "Had we known this earlier {xxx} would have been done differently!", where what's just now been revealed is something that should have been known earlier. The noble isn't the best example here as there may be valid reasons to have kept it secret (though the noble PC's player and the GM should still have known all along), so I'll use an example that happened to me way back when:

A friend was writing an adventure module - great big thing - and I was DMing it kind of as it got written*. Party is out in the wilderness following a road (the only road in the area) to an important assassin's hideaway. Eventually it comes out in the module that the assassins use wagons to get their supplies in from civilization - and on hearing this the players quite rightly ask me "Well, why didn't we see any wagon tracks in the dirt, all the way along the road? Things might have been different if we had!". The meta-game answer, which I openly told the players, was that the wagons hadn't yet been written into the module at the time and so I couldn't read ahead and factor them in. They were understanding, if a bit annoyed, and on we went; but it stuck with me as something both as player and DM to watch out for and never to repeat.

* - at one point about halfway through I told my friend he'd better do some serious writing that coming week, as the previous session had played to within 9 words (!) of where he'd left off writing!

 

[Lanefan]

Plus there has to be the logic that if the PC and Troll exist together in the same world, the PC will have heard how to defeat the Troll.

You forgot to mention the more telling question: has (or should have) the Troll heard how to defeat the PC?

 

[hawkeyefan]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] Why not simply say that the assassins, keen on keeping their lair hidden, had somehow managed to obtain an enchantment that kept their wagon from leaving tracks?

There’s almost always a fictional way to address such concerns.

 

[Lanefan]

Not if its a Schrodinger's Gorge spanning a river (with egress into the safety of the forest on the other side) and you've got an overwhelming enemy force chasing you on horseback through the badlands (and the success or failure of the Skill Challenge is riding on this last action declaration/Group Check!)!

Schroedinger's Gorge is so going on a map somewhere in my game world!

I would also push back against the idea that D&D presents a "zero-to-hero" narrative. The earliest fantasy of D&D, IMHO, never really seemed to care about "heroes." Or zeroes. It seemed to be about "rags-to-riches". Or at the very least: the game words may have said one thing or referenced heroes on occasion, but the "meat" that propelled the game said something else entirely. You are not leveling up to become a hero. You are leveling up to gain riches, titles, and property.

So zero to hero then, only in a financial/capitalist way rather than social.

Perhaps a better term for a PC's progression might be "little fish to big fish".

 

[Lanefan]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] Why not simply say that the assassins, keen on keeping their lair hidden, had somehow managed to obtain an enchantment that kept their wagon from leaving tracks?

There’s almost always a fictional way to address such concerns.

Two reasons I can remember (this was 30 years ago!): one, that I simply didn't think of it; and two, that I was trying to run the module as written as closely as I could, and when the wagons finally appeared in the writing there was no mention of any enchantments on them.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Right. RPG's have this because precisely they are RPG's; there is no meta- in settlers or squad leader.

I think we're having a fundamental failure to communicate, here. Settlers and Squad Leader both have metagames. Granted, Settlers' meta is a bit light, but IIRC there are a few ways to use SL's rules to achieve unintended outcomes that allowed for a higher win rate. That's meta -- treating the game as something to be gamed rather than played.

Using the mechanics of the game is meta-but an acceptable meta vs an unacceptable; that is the only difference.

Again, playing the game cannot be metagaming.

I'll say it again, actually playing a game cannot be metagaming. Definitionally. Metagaming is gaming the game, ie, thinking outside of the rules of the game to find ways to twist/use/employ those rules in ways not intended to achieve a goal. MtG meta is about the current deck zeitgeist -- what decks are being played and how is not part of the game rules or actually playing the game, but building to take advantage or counter that meta is very much a big part of competitive play. This is acceptable and preferred for competitive MtG play.

In the scope of RPGs, planning out your party as you're making characters to ensure that you cover all of the basics is metagaming -- you're considering the game as a game and making choices to ensure the best outcome from most to all game situations possible. This isn't part of actually playing the game, though, so it's metagaming. Similarly, using your real-world knowledge of chemistry to try to force an outcome in game is metagaming, because real world chemistry is not part of the game.

Conversely, using your player knowledge of trolls being weak to fire is technically not metagaming because that is part of the game and knowledge of rules isn't usually considered a form of metagaming in most cases. However, there's a large set of playstyles that considers using knowledge of "secret" GM notes to be metagaming (and, in some cases it clearly is definitionally), but then what counts as "secret" GM notes varies widely. In some cases it's monster stats, although this is obviously not universally understood to be metagaming in RPGs as demonstrated by this very thread (and many others). Sadly, NOT using "secret" knowledge is also metagaming, as you're making choices for play using that knowledge by avoiding those choices that said knowledge implicates. It's a catch-22, really, but those that are worried about it seem to prefer the version of metagaming that preserves the danger of "secret" GM knowledge best. It's funny how it's almost always the danger that gets this treatment, though.

Really about the time when one hears about unacceptable meta, it's with mechanics such as Fate Points. As an aside, adversarial GM'ing is bad, imo; though I'm more learned my style from Classic Traveller which supports a neutral adjudicator of the universe style.

Sigh, Fate Points are not meta. They are a game mechanic. They are dissociated, often, but not meta.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You forgot to mention the more telling question: has (or should have) the Troll heard how to defeat the PC?

Usually claw/claw/bite/rend does the trick.