D&D 5E Average damage or rolled damage?

[Miladoon]

Max damage ye sissies!

Or roll like me...

 

[Maxperson]

This is in contradiction with your disallowance of me having my character guess something that you would let a player without my knowledge have their character guess.

Only if you ignore that I've said in prior discussions about this that you are absolutely free to guess in my game. There just has to be a reasonable in game explanation for that guess. Without a reasonable in game explanation, a player without your knowledge would never guess that trolls have a weakness to fire. Not only do I not disallow you doing what players without that knowledge do, I require that you do what they do.

 

[Maxperson]

At tables where I am forced to be thought-policed to the point that my character isn't allowed to make a guess, no matter how obvious, about anything I know about out-of-character... I find the only character concept I can play is an "I know literally everything about everything" scholarly sort so that at least whenever the DM says "hey, you can't do that because your character doesn't know it will work" I at least have the best chance of succeeding at the skill check needed to jump through his time-wasting hoop, which is easier than convincing the DM "nevermind what I know or don't - my character is guessing, so it doesn't matter that he doesn't know" as this thread makes evident.

Nobody has said that, though. That's you inventing your own problems and then attributing it to others. Otherwise known as a man made of straw.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm actually claiming that if you didn't already have the concept of metagaming in your head, that you'd not find yourself pissed off nearly as often as you think you would.

You're wrong. Years before I ever heard of metagaming, people who cheated and had their characters use knowledge that those characters didn't have, ruined the fun for me. Cheating is cheating.

 

[Jaelommiss]

Um... you realize that "blatantly metagaming" is only possible if people observing are actually already convinced that metagaming exists, right?

In a group of players that had never heard of metagaming, or a group of players that had absolutely no idea what the dice rolls were, your example of the Malkavian saying "that guy at the door is some badass lupine or a methuselah or soemthing" and another character reacting by saying "Nope, that's goofy as a duck in pudding, I don't believe it," does not have the same "don't do that, dude, not cool," result.

False.

Since it takes only a single example to disprove a blanket statement, I will put forward my own experience when I started playing D&D.

For the first three months, I played D&D loosely following 4e rules with my brother. It was just the two of us, both without any previous experience. Between sessions we would discuss what needed to be improved and how to prepare what was coming next in the module. From time to time, we would control the characters based on that knowledge of what was coming up. Without fail, the amount of fun we had would nose dive when using this information. We ended up deciding that using out of character knowledge was bad and to be avoided because the game stopped being fun when we did it.

Neither of us knew what metagaming was, or had even heard of it. Both of us recognized immediately that utilizing player knowledge that the character would not have (something I would later learn is called metagaming) directly caused us to have less fun.

Your statement that "metagaming is only possible if people observing are actually already convinced that metagaming exists" is laughably incorrect. If completely new players can recognize the problems caused by metagaming despite not having a name to put to such behaviour, it can not, within any realm of logic, be concluded that metagaming and the issues it causes only exist to those who believe in it. Metagaming cannot be a matter of faith.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Do I really need to repeat myself?

No, you don't. Though I'd appreciate it if you read what I actually wrote, which was not asking you to repeat yourself, but to entertain the thought of whether or not you'd be pissed at a brand new completely unknowledgeable player that couldn't possibly be meta-gaming, blatantly or otherwise, playing their character, guessing about something, and happening to guess correctly - and then explaining to me how that is different for your immersion in the game when compared to an experienced and knowledgeable player role-playing their character in the exact same way.

What else do I need to explain?

If you can give me a concrete, non-circular logic, reason why an experienced player playing the same character in the same way as you would be perfectly accepting of a brand-new doesn't-know-squat player playing their character causes any harm to your enjoyment of the game, that'd be great.

Is really goes far beyond the lucky guesses a newb might come up with. Anybody might figure out that burning stops regeneration or that devils will be immune to fire. But demons immune to electricity? Or that foo creatures have a limit number of times they turn to stone? That's not something a newb would guess.

That's precisely why I divided my statement that there is no such thing as metagaming into two categories: those things which can be guessed, luckily stumbled upon, or attempted without any kind of knowledge about how they will turn out (i.e. attacking what happens to be a troll with fire) which can't be metagaming because they don't actually rely on knowledge that the character doesn't have - and those things which cannot be guessed, cannot be luckily stumbled upon, and cannot be attempted without specific knowledge (which are difficult to provide an example of because they are very much scenario specific... but knowing what a coded message says without finding the decryption cypher comes to mind).

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Only if you ignore that I've said in prior discussions about this that you are absolutely free to guess in my game. There just has to be a reasonable in game explanation for that guess. Without a reasonable in game explanation, a player without your knowledge would never guess that trolls have a weakness to fire. Not only do I not disallow you doing what players without that knowledge do, I require that you do what they do.

You say I am free to guess, yet that is obviously not true because you say I have to have an in-game explanation for guessing, which is patently ridiculous especially in the scenario you and I know so well where you know it's a troll and all my character knows is that he is trying to push this unknown monster into a fire.

Explain why I guessed something? No - stop trying to tell me what I can and can't think and let me play my character. If you have a problem with anyone ever taking that action in the scenario, then that is a different discussion all together, but if there is some way in which what my character is doing is fine and some other way in which you consider it cheating, just assume I'm doing it the first way and lets actually keep playing the game rather than taking a break to demand that I explain why my character is doing cool stuff instead of boring stuff.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

You're wrong. Years before I ever heard of metagaming, people who cheated and had their characters use knowledge that those characters didn't have, ruined the fun for me. Cheating is cheating.

Yes, cheating is cheating... but me having my character do something that you'd be perfectly fine with someone else who doesn't know as much about D&D as I do having an identical character do in the same circumstances can't possibly be cheating.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

False.

Since it takes only a single example to disprove a blanket statement, I will put forward my own experience when I started playing D&D.

For the first three months, I played D&D loosely following 4e rules with my brother. It was just the two of us, both without any previous experience. Between sessions we would discuss what needed to be improved and how to prepare what was coming next in the module. From time to time, we would control the characters based on that knowledge of what was coming up. Without fail, the amount of fun we had would nose dive when using this information. We ended up deciding that using out of character knowledge was bad and to be avoided because the game stopped being fun when we did it.

Neither of us knew what metagaming was, or had even heard of it. Both of us recognized immediately that utilizing player knowledge that the character would not have (something I would later learn is called metagaming) directly caused us to have less fun.

Your statement that "metagaming is only possible if people observing are actually already convinced that metagaming exists" is laughably incorrect. If completely new players can recognize the problems caused by metagaming despite not having a name to put to such behaviour, it can not, within any realm of logic, be concluded that metagaming and the issues it causes only exist to those who believe in it. Metagaming cannot be a matter of faith.

Again, it seems that the distinction between using knowledge the character can't possibly have (which I call cheating and others call metagaming) and using knowledge that maybe the character has, maybe they don't, or maybe isn't even necessary in order to do what the character did (which I say isn't metagaming and others say is) has failed to be realized. When I say "metagaming" I am referring only to the later, not the former.

The game not being as much fun because you know what is coming up (which probably included impossible to have knowledge) is not a guarantee of the game not being as much fun because my fighter decides to light a monster on fire (and that happens to be beneficial) or other similar instances of me (experienced and knowledgeable player) playing a character who has lucky guesses from time to time and tries "crazy" things which manage to work out often.

 

[Lanefan]

Yes, cheating is cheating... but me having my character do something that you'd be perfectly fine with someone else who doesn't know as much about D&D as I do having an identical character do in the same circumstances can't possibly be cheating.

Though it is undeniably taking the joy of discovery away from said guessworthy newbie who actually guesses right if you just roll in and say "sit down in that chair right there and let me show you how it's done"; and it's also undeniably taking away the chance of failure from said newbie when the guesses are wrong.

Sometimes, if a game is all experienced players who know way more than their characters do, the guesswork and learning experience can be simulated (not well, but it's a start) with a die roll, as in this low-level party meeting their first troll:

Player: it sounds like a troll - does my character know about their problems with fire and-or acid?
DM: roll a d4, on '1' you've either heard something to that effect or think to randomly try it
Player: <rolls 3> nope, I'll just chop it with my sword <rolls a hit, rolls some damage>
DM: you chopped into its rubbery skin alright but you're wondering if that wound is already starting to heal itself [...]
Same player on her next turn: <rolls 1> I'll try poking it with my lit torch <rolls a hit, rolls some damage>
DM: nicely done! Now, a general perception check: do any of you notice anything odd about the damage that torch just did? ...

And this sort of thing - the learning that characters do - is why they are called experience points.

Lan-"I can't remember the last time I used trolls as opponents in my game"-efan