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A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7577568" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>As far as trolls are concerned, the whole "metagaming" thing is the obvious result of a collision of play expectations.</p><p></p><p>When the game was invented, learning and remebering monster vulnerabilities was a player skill, much like becoming better at counting the cards and following the play in bridge. The fact that players would start new campaigns in new worlds with new PCs, and the implications this might have for the player/PC knowledge and experience interface, had barely been thought of. You can see the evidence of this in Gygax's DMG, where he hems and haws over whether experienced players starting a new campaign should start at 1st level, or whether it's OK for them to start with PCs whose mechanical prospects are more aligned with their player expertise.</p><p></p><p>Over the past 40 years, the "replay"/start-new-campaigns-at-1st-level paradigm has become predominant. But it's obvious that this paradigm is a poor fit for a design based aroudn <em>reusing puzzles</em> in those new campaign, which is what is going on with trolls and fire.</p><p></p><p>I mean, just look at it practically - what is a player who knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire, but who is playing a notionally ignorant PC, meant to do. How do you "roleplay" the process of solving a puzzle that you've already solved? The whole idea is ridiculous.</p><p></p><p>4e addressed this issue by changing the challenge: even if a group of players know that fire is needed to properly hurt the troll, the play of the game makes it non-trivial to deliver the right damage-type, because the PC buiild rules mean that it's unlikely that every PC will have the ability to do meaningful amounts of fire damage, and so their is a tactical challenge in bringing the right sort of damage to bear against the right target.</p><p></p><p>Another obvious approach would be to make the whole thing mechanically more abstract: a character has to succeed at some sort of knowledge or inspiration check in order to then generate a change in the game state which enhances attacks against the troll (the change could simply be a changed status, or perhaps a bonus die like an asset in Cortex+ Heroic).</p><p></p><p>But this isn't consistent with D&D's approach to knowledge, equipment, etc - which assumes players are free to choose what their PCs are doing (subject to what's on their equipment list), rather than gating those choices behind successful checks. Which takes us back to the general territory of the contrast between D&D and something like DW's Spout Lore and Discern Realities moves.</p><p></p><p>EDIT: I think there's some overlap, and synergy, between this post and [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION]'s just upthread of it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7577568, member: 42582"] As far as trolls are concerned, the whole "metagaming" thing is the obvious result of a collision of play expectations. When the game was invented, learning and remebering monster vulnerabilities was a player skill, much like becoming better at counting the cards and following the play in bridge. The fact that players would start new campaigns in new worlds with new PCs, and the implications this might have for the player/PC knowledge and experience interface, had barely been thought of. You can see the evidence of this in Gygax's DMG, where he hems and haws over whether experienced players starting a new campaign should start at 1st level, or whether it's OK for them to start with PCs whose mechanical prospects are more aligned with their player expertise. Over the past 40 years, the "replay"/start-new-campaigns-at-1st-level paradigm has become predominant. But it's obvious that this paradigm is a poor fit for a design based aroudn [I]reusing puzzles[/I] in those new campaign, which is what is going on with trolls and fire. I mean, just look at it practically - what is a player who knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire, but who is playing a notionally ignorant PC, meant to do. How do you "roleplay" the process of solving a puzzle that you've already solved? The whole idea is ridiculous. 4e addressed this issue by changing the challenge: even if a group of players know that fire is needed to properly hurt the troll, the play of the game makes it non-trivial to deliver the right damage-type, because the PC buiild rules mean that it's unlikely that every PC will have the ability to do meaningful amounts of fire damage, and so their is a tactical challenge in bringing the right sort of damage to bear against the right target. Another obvious approach would be to make the whole thing mechanically more abstract: a character has to succeed at some sort of knowledge or inspiration check in order to then generate a change in the game state which enhances attacks against the troll (the change could simply be a changed status, or perhaps a bonus die like an asset in Cortex+ Heroic). But this isn't consistent with D&D's approach to knowledge, equipment, etc - which assumes players are free to choose what their PCs are doing (subject to what's on their equipment list), rather than gating those choices behind successful checks. Which takes us back to the general territory of the contrast between D&D and something like DW's Spout Lore and Discern Realities moves. EDIT: I think there's some overlap, and synergy, between this post and [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION]'s just upthread of it. [/QUOTE]
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