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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 8404097" data-attributes="member: 1465">Usually, when I talk about metagaming, I have something else in mind than reading monsters stats or even the whole adventure...The bad metagaming for me, is when the players think in terms of &quot;the DM has done this, so it has to be so that there is...&quot; (add anything such as a trap, a battle or something else) despite the evidence the characters are seeing.The most typical example is a player making a roll during exploration or investigation, getting a low dice result, and pretend to keep on trying.The common argument goes &quot;my character would sense that he didn't do a good job, and try again&quot;. While this might make sense under a certain approach to the rules, it almost always spells doom to the game mechanics, either making stuff irrelevant (why bothering rolling to force a door open if you can just keep trying until you get a 20?) or forcing the DM introduce more complicated rules such as increasing time cost or a chance of drawbacks. So my chosen approach is &quot;no, your characters NEVER know what you rolled on the dice, they only know about visible results (and those are up to me)&quot;.On the other hand I don't care if players look up the monster manual. I do change monsters often, first of all because I like rolling random HP (and I would also roll random stats if I didn't have to re-calc other stuff) and treating MM entries as &quot;average/typical&quot; specimens, and secondarily because sometimes I enjoy adding class levels or just bonus abilities to specific individuals.I do get pissed off if my players read an adventure in advance after I told them we're going to play it, but if by chance they had already read it or even played it in the past, I don't even mind too much, as no 2 runs of the same adventures will ever be the same.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 8404097, member: 1465"] Usually, when I talk about metagaming, I have something else in mind than reading monsters stats or even the whole adventure... The bad metagaming for me, is when the players think in terms of "the DM has done this, so [I]it has to be so[/I] that there is..." (add anything such as a trap, a battle or something else) despite the evidence the characters are seeing. The most typical example is a player making a roll during exploration or investigation, getting a low dice result, and pretend to keep on trying. The common argument goes "my character would sense that he didn't do a good job, and try again". While this might make sense under a certain approach to the rules, it almost always spells doom to the game mechanics, either making stuff irrelevant (why bothering rolling to force a door open if you can just keep trying until you get a 20?) or forcing the DM introduce more complicated rules such as increasing time cost or a chance of drawbacks. So my chosen approach is "no, your characters NEVER know what you rolled on the dice, they only know about visible results (and those are up to me)". On the other hand I don't care if players look up the monster manual. I do change monsters often, first of all because I like rolling random HP (and I would also roll random stats if I didn't have to re-calc other stuff) and treating MM entries as "average/typical" specimens, and secondarily because sometimes I enjoy adding class levels or just bonus abilities to specific individuals. I do get pissed off if my players read an adventure in advance after I told them we're going to play it, but if by chance they had already read it or even played it in the past, I don't even mind too much, as no 2 runs of the same adventures will ever be the same. [/QUOTE]

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