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

[Bill Zebub]

Yes. Especially, under the circumstances you set up to try and make your point. They broke the social contract for when I DM.

Except that he didn't actually break the social contract in the game...remember he was just telling you that he did, because he thought it would yank your chain. (I mean, in my experience this is a downright mild prank between brothers...)

 

[Greg K]

Except that he didn't actually break the social contract in the game...remember he was just telling you that he did, because he thought it would yank your chain. (I mean, in my experience this is a downright mild prank between brothers...)

It would not be an issue. It is not the type of pranks we pull on one another (the same for any of my gaming friends).

 

[R_J_K75]

I have no problem telling a player that their character would not know something based upon the character's culture and background and where they are in the world just as I would hand out free information to characters based upon the same.

I agree. This is exactly how I feel. As a DM Im always wondering how much information a character has is either too much or too little. Im not a fan of a character potentially having unlimited knowledge if the player can make an argument in any situation why they should know something. For instance Id say a character from the FR who is a Rashemi Berserker who suddenly finds themselves in Calimshan would have no knowledge of the culture, customs and ettiquette of that country let alone the history of the Shoon Empire.

 

[Charlaquin]

Thus, far better to simply not give them campaign-specific info* that their characters wouldn't know.

Only if your goal is for players never to make decisions involving that information.

Then if they somehow end up with this info anyway you know it didn't come from you; you've got a cheater on your hands, and you can take the appropriate steps.

It’s only cheating if it’s against the rules. Which it isn’t at my table.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe by trying to police player thoughts you are just encouraging them to be deceptive.

I don't care about their thoughts per se. But when they do that kind of stuff where its blatantly obvious there's no reason but the naked technical advantage that doesn't relate to anything in character, that's breaking the kind of social contract I expect, and if they want to try and game me about it, I'm going to be pretty blunt about that too.

The only exception is if they're deceptive enough I really don't notice. And if that's the case? As far as I'm concerned, that's a win. I expect everyone in the game to pay some attention to how others are feeling about what they do, and that includes me (in both directions).

 

[Cadence]

Actively worrying about metagaming is something outside my experience. Metagaming feels like a lot of other things in life that I don't actively worry about - what the person next to me at the restaurant ordered or how fast the car in the lane to the next of me is going, or what the kids on the other side of the park are doing. But even if I don't worry about it, at some point I'll notice if the person next to me orders 25 hamburgers - hold the pickles, the car to the left of me is going 10 mph under or 40 mph over the speed limit, or I catch in the corner of my eye that the kids appear to be standing around a body or looking at kite caught somewhere I could reach but they couldn't.

I think that's how metagaming is for me - it's when it actively catches my attention that it bothers me. So, the daily recharges in 13th age didn't bother me -- until I started to notice them because we were stuck on a boat for a week and the day hadn't passed yet. The character going down the particular side of the caves of chaos and on the particular level to get to the particular bad guys is just one choice among many -- but passing all the other doors to go to the exact one and then using the correct passages, would seem out there. Knowing to use fire on random things that regenerate or knowing some common thing regenerates seems like a whatever, having studied up on some technical engineering things so your 6 INT Druid knows exactly how to solve an issue with some machinery not so much.

I know there are folks on here who stopped policing metagaming because they couldn't stop worrying about it - and that seems an entirely reasonable response. I wonder how many people super notice it in everything if they enforce it, and how many others just have a line somewhere above which it becomes noticeable and annoying and where it very rarely gets to that point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, that's the thing; I actually have a fairly high tolerance there. A lot of things that will work people up I just don't really care about because they either don't matter or don't come up that often.

But that doesn't mean my tolerance is unlimited, and I'm not going to pretend it is. So I suspect I'm pretty much in your bucket, Cadence.

 

[Aldarc]

Given how many people disagree with you, and yet who call what they do "roleplaying", do you think maybe it's possible your definition isn't universally shared?

Or, as Inigo Montoya would say....

...you killed my father. Prepare to die.

Am I doing this correctly?

 

[Imaculata]

My players are free to presume the troll is weak to fire, just as they are free to find out that their presumption was wrong.

 

[Aldarc]

Edit: Somehow a delayed double-post.