D&D 5E DMs: How Do You Handle Metagaming?

[Mishihari Lord]

In general I dislike metagame. Setting expectations before play "please try to act according to your PC's knowledge" seems to avoid most problems. Roughly half of the monsters I use are custom, which helps. Some knowledge is going to be common, and a lot is available via lore check, and even more is available if the PCs have a chance to stop and scout the monster and actually do it.

All this said, I want to let the players play. Jumping into a sphere of annihilation because your PC didn't know what it was isn't fun. Neither is losing an easy fight because of knowledge that should be common. In the latter case I will give increasingly obvious clues as to what the PCs should be doing.

Differing from other posters above, I don't mind counting squares. Since a wizard's life depends on placing spell effects where he wants them, I expect he's put in a lot of practice in correct placement. I don't mind intra-round player conferences either, since they seem to add to everyone's fun.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I don't like square counting but I tolerate it. I will however ask a player how he is talking to the PC on the other side of the castle when two players who are not even in the same fight start detailed planning.

 

[Piratecat]

Since a wizard's life depends on placing spell effects where he wants them, I expect he's put in a lot of practice in correct placement.

Fun memory from 1e, roughly 1989: our one sort of irritating player is counting fireball squares. "Are you sure you can do that so accurately?" I ask him. "Of COURSE!" he answers snottily. "I'm a master wizard!" He picks the exact square to center the spell on, the square that hits almost every enemy on the map. "You sure?" I ask. "YES!" he answers with a gloat. "THAT ONE. Of course I'm sure. Watch and learn," and he rolls huge damage.

He was off by one square.

Turns out, his wizard was jusssssst inside the blast radius by one square. It dropped him unconscious from full hp! And then we took a break until we could stop laughing. Oh, the look on his face.

So yeah. I'm fine with counting squares.

 

[was]

Always modify your monsters to keep players guessing. Maybe this troll is immune to fire and it's vulnerable to electricity.

 

[prosfilaes]

If a common militiaman from 13-14 century would suddenly encounter a lion on a forest road, would he recognize it as such?

Maybe, maybe not. But the nearest lion to London was at least 1,500 miles away. I'm pretty sure the militiaman of England could recognize the seal or the bison or the wild boar, the dangerous animals of their country. I'm sure the Maasai, who lived in a country with lions, could recognize them pretty well.

Likewise, in D&D reality an unexperienced fighter on encounter with a massive beast wouldn't necessarily put it as a troll, or an ogre, or maybe a hill giant? Sorry, too busy soiling undies.

People in D&D reality aren't any more stupid then those in ours. If trolls and ogres wander into the area around town, then everyone in the area will know the details about them. I know "red and yellow kill a fellow" or "leaves of three, let them be", even though neither has really been a concern of mine. You don't think kids in D&D worlds would be told that someday a tall green rubbery humanoid might attack, and you'd have to use fire? (Ogres and hill giants, on the other hand, are tall piles of hit points, which is why they never come up in these discussions.)

 

[FireLance]

I just assume that the Monster Manual physically exists in my game world and any PC who uses knowledge from it to his advantage must have read it and memorized it like Fishlegs from How to Train Your Dragon.

 

[Iosue]

If the player's enjoy planning out/coordinating their tactics, why stop them?

In general, I don't, unless it's dragging down the game. But it's not how I like to play, it's not how I grew up playing, and it's not fun for me. Inasmuch as I try not to prioritize my fun over my players', I also do not prioritize their fun over mine. Also, this doesn't tend to be a total group thing, but rather a few people, and I certainly don't want to prioritize their fun over the other players'. So, ugh.

They're engaged with the game. Isn't that a worthy goal?

They're engaged with the metagame. I'd rather they were engaged with the game itself.

Would you rather their attention be drifting away, perhaps to their phones?

Why must we go there? Look at all that middle you've excluded. The line between "engaged with the game by conferencing combat tactics" and "totally disengaged, looking at phone" is not fine, it's a gulf the size of an ocean. A player can be entirely engaged with the game, planning ahead, listening to what the other players are doing, while still keeping his mouth shut about what some other player should do on their turn. Back in the day, that was just etiquette. Getting back in the game after a long break, the biggest shock was not at-will spells, point-buy chargen, or any other rule change. It's that people would tell me what to do on my turn.

For me, to the greatest degree possible, I want players to act, react, and interact "in character". That doesn't mean they always have to talk in a voice, or have to totally ignore any player knowledge. It just means that in any given situation, their first question is, "What would my character do or say?" So the problem is not players coordinating tactics, it's them coordinating tactics as the players, not the characters. Especially when it slows down the game.

That's how I like to play, and how I like to run my games. Whatever floats anyone else's boat, awesome. Go do that thing.

 

[KarinsDad]

I don't like square counting but I tolerate it.

That's pretty much my stance as well.

I rarely played 4E, but back in the 3E days, I would sometimes move my PC as close as possible to an enemy and then fire off a spell. And then I would tell the DM that it did not work because it was 5 feet short. Although I myself can count the squares pretty easy, it didn't make sense for my PC to know exactly the difference between 60 feet and 65 feet. This didn't happen a lot since the situation does not happen a lot, but it bugs me when players count out squares to find the most optimal travel route around foes, or the absolute maximum distance where a spell still works, so that the PC can be as far away as possible.

I used to play golf a lot more than I do now and I know that if it were not for the little markers on the course, I would be off by quite a bit with my distance estimations. When you absolutely know that a marker about 15 feet away is 60 yards from the cup, it's not hard to do the math and only be off by a couple of feet. Without the marker? No clue.

 

[Lanefan]

A few thoughts:

1. The only time character knowledge can equal player knowledge is when the player is brand new to the game with a 1st-level character; always the most delightful of times. After that, every now and then an argument breaks out as to whether the character doesn't know what the player does know. My own preference is that character knowledge takes precedence, meaning players are expected to ignore what they-as-players know when running low-level characters meeting a particular monster for the first time. I've also found that even changing just the names of common monsters both a) keeps the players guessing for a while, and b) adds greatly to the flavour of a specific campaign.

2. Mid-combat strategizing can be a pain, though telling people that all this talking is causing them to skip their initiative often curtails it. Worse to me is players trying to make meta-game suggestions. One rule I and others have used now and then in the past to stop people making suggestions relating to things their characters couldn't possibly know about is that such a suggestion immediately bans the suggested action from happening. Example: party is trying to sneak into a city. Joe's Thief has climbed over the city wall while the rest of the party hides outside the gate. Behind the gate are two guards, one with an obvious set of keys hanging from her belt. Thief can either try to sneak past the guards and quietly pick the gate lock, or sneak up and try to backstrike the guards, or try to pick-pocket the keys from the one guard, or wander off elsewhere and leave the party hanging for a while, or whatever. If Joe decides to go for the pick-pocket idea (or just can't make up his mind what to do) and Steve - whose character has no idea what's become of the Thief after seeing it go over the wall - says player-to-player "No, you should pick the gate lock! You'll never get those keys quietly!" then picking the gate lock becomes a banned action even if otherwise it would be the best plan. It took a while, but this rule eventually stopped a few frequent offenders from doing this sort of thing; and now it's not really an issue very often at all.

3. Casters can count squares and line up enemies all they like, in my game they still have to roll to hit the spot they're aiming at.* It's usually pretty easy to get it close enough, but trick shots or blind shots aren't always easy at all; and anything requiring a roll to aim can always cause a fumble if the rolls are bad enough.

* - I can't recommend this highly enough as a way of reining in casters a bit

Lan-"best spell fumble I ever saw was the wizard whose fireball went off inside the cloak of fire resistance he was wearing...what a mess"-efan

 

[Sailor Moon]

If you look at the rules and the way they are written, you do not have knowledge of any creature unless a class or ability gives you that knowledge, until you have rolled a knowledge check. That is what the ability is there for. You are not assumed to have knowledge of anything until the dice is rolled and the outcome is a success. Now the DM can determine what you know ahead of time but that isn't rule related. If you see a troll then the first thing you should be doing is roll to identify it. I have made that the first roll everyone does, then initiative.