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

[R_J_K75]

I ask the player to make the case why they think the character had access to this knowledge such that they could remember it. I then decide, based on that and other context clues, whether the PC recalls the lore, fails to recall the lore, or whether there's a roll to decide.

This is how I do things 99% of the time too but there's lots of scenarios in the other 1% where the its a hard no.

 

[R_J_K75]

I don't know that "common folk" and "D&D wizard" have any meaningful overlap from where I sit, and as I said I'm not convinced its much better with cleric, ranger (especially the old-school ones) or paladin. Even if they started as common folk, by the time you get to being those, you aren't any more.

All depends on your campaign, DM style and how the players play their character. IMO opinion 1st level characters know the fundamentals and have to figure things out as they adventure and progress in levels and initially their knowledge of the world outside of where they started are rather limited.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Absolutely, but some players will still ask "can I make some sort of check to see if I know any of the monster's weaknesses?" Thankfully I've never had anyone try the "with a (uncalled for) roll of 21, what do I know about the monster?" bit.

In 5e, if you deem something is impossible in the game world as DM you just say something like "this monster is unknown among civilized folk." You control the dice as DM and you simply don't offer a check (in 5e) , right? In a sense, 5e has "de-metagamed" checks b/c they are squarely in the DM's purview.

 

[Cadence]

Two things:
1. Again, that's the DM's fault. If I, as DM, take a canonical D&D monster and decide that in my world this monster is incredibly rare, and I don't expect my players to know about it...then why the $%@& did I use a canonical monster and not change it? Why would I do that to my players?

This seems good. It just makes it so that in every world everything in the MM is well known (and possibly only as accurate as the internet).. So if you want any mystery or surprise you need to basically make something new (maybe just a change, or maybe an entire new monster).

I wonder if one of the problems for some people who hate it, is they played back when some of these classics were first introduced (or at least when you didn't know about them without the right book that most people didn't have). And now they want to both recreate that feeling of running into the new thing -- but also want it to be the particular thing that was new to them.

2. Even if they are incredibly rare, it's still possible for any given individual to know about it. You would think D&D players of all people who know that some people carry around esoteric facts. (Exhibit A: the constant debates about historically accurate sword types.)

I wonder if there's a change when the given individual in question knows everything about everything.

 

[Bill Zebub]

What color is the bear? Brown? Play dead (both brown bears and grizzlies). Black? DO NOT PLAY DEAD, fight the bear, hard. White? Doesn't matter what you do.

Dirty metagamer. There's no way your character would know that.

 

[Cadence]

As a GM, I don't need to make metagaming a problem, so I don't. You can read the MM, have it open in front of you, and it's not going to change the level of difficulty in the encounter or help you much get done what you need to get done. Once I started designing encounters with the assumption that players will know things, it became trivially easy to avoid having metagaming be any kind of problem. And my games do not resemble the players trying to win at all -- largely because just knowing things doesn't really help all that much.

Is it not a problem because the knowledge doesn't help with the way you set it up? Or would it now become a problem for a party where the players didn't go study everything?

 

[Cadence]

All depends on your campaign, DM style and how the players play their character. IMO opinion 1st level characters know the fundamentals and have to figure things out as they adventure and progress in levels and initially their knowledge of the world outside of where they started are rather limited.

It feels like everyone who disses bards continually should have to act like their characters never paid attention to them...

 

[R_J_K75]

It feels like everyone who disses bards continually should have to act like their characters never paid attention to them...

Hey I like bards, the class concept at least even if the 5E version isnt the best.

 

[Greg Benage]

My line is when a player metagames another player.

 

[Lanefan]

Not as long as you have things like D&D spellcasters in it it isn't. And I'm not sold even with things like paladins and rangers (especially the early versions where the latter were more heavy magic-oriented).

In early D&D Rangers didn't get spell access until 8th/9th level, by which point you're far past "everyman" status anyway.

A 1st-level mage in 1e is a commoner (same h.p., same fighting skills) who's gone to school and learned some spellcraft. a 1st-level fighter is a commoner who's learned to wave a weapon around and defend itself just a bit.

Contrast this with a 1st-level anything in 4e or 5e who is already miles above a commoner in every metric.