D&D 5E I reject your reality and substitute my own!

[Mort]

Yes and no - you have to think as a PC without the knowledge and do your best, with integrity, to try to play it out accordingly.You know. Your PC doesn't. When can they make the conclusion? When they have a reason to do so.

In my game: PCs meet a troll for the first time. I have them roll a knowledge check to see what lore their PCs know. Let's say they all get horrible results. Nobody knows the troll's regeneration triggers on acid/fire. They fight it and 'kill' it only to see it get back up as nobody used fire or acid. They knock it down again and keep hacking it apart to keep it from regenerating. They do medicine/investigation/knowledge rolls to figure it out. Nope. Horrible. They may need to run and do some research.That depends upon the relationship between player and DM. If the player has evidenced integrity, and tells me that they think they'd try fire, I'd allow it. If the player has shown a lack of integrity with a history of metagaming, I would say that they rolled their knowledge checks and failed ... so no, they should not use fire.
People talk about this as an inevitable problem, but in my experience, it is only inevitable with problem players. When we have a mutual goal of honoring the fiction, it resolves itself and the story is preserved.

But is it fun? I mean some groups may have fun playacting ignorance, but mine certainly isn't among them!

I prefer the approach of integrating player knowledge into the fiction. the group meets a (bog standard) troll - these PCs have never encountered one before. One of the players whips out a torch (or a firebolt or whatever) and yells "I'm from the Highlands, we KNOW how to deal with trolls in the highlands!" You now have a a fun bit of setting fiction in addition to everything else.

And the nice thing is - this can be subverted. The group encounters a troll the players "know" to use fire. But what they don't know (unless they've already found out) is that this troll has been mutated by the environment, he's no longer that affected by fire - you need to hit him with electricity (ideally there are some clues to this effect leading up to the encounter).

 

[jgsugden]

...
How do you know my PC doesn't (know)?

One method is knowledge checks, as I'd just shown.

Uncle Bob, renowned troll slayer, told him all about it while bouncing him on his good knee and complaining that his missing one doesn't grow back like a troll's.

That might be an explanation for a positive knowledge check.

This is the problem with this assertion -- it's the GM telling the players what their characters can and can't know and can and can't do based on this. It's the GM playing the character for the player, and doing so not for the betterment of the game, but the preservation of the GM's expected outcomes.

I disagree. We have intelligence ability scores which cover knowledge, and this is an absolutely appropriate use to determine what they know headed into the game. Once in the situation, we can also use investigation rolls, or further knowledge rolls, to determine if it can be figured out.

The idea that a player knowing means a PC should know doesn't hold when we transition it to a discussion of strength instead of intellience. If I can bench press 250, should my 8 strength wizard?

Cool, I have reason immediately because I find pretending to not know things to be hella tedious and frustrating. Since this is a fun activity, we should avoid this stuff, right?

'They' means the character, not the player. In a discussion about PC versus player knowledge, you should be picking that up from context.

As for you finding it hella tedious and frustrating to be forced to role play your character's level of knowledge, I'd suggest you might consider looking at a different lens for role playing because you are inherently missing out on some wonderful elements of the game based upon that statement.

Why are you dictating what the PC's know? This is absolutely the opposite of immersion -- my PC is an alien and I have to see if he knows anything about the world at any given moment. The PC is unable to be fleshed out by the player without permission of the GM. And the reason for this is that the GM is lazy and just wants the troll to be a gimmick monster and bat around the characters until he allows them to succeed. Ugh, gross. Why do we play like this? It's utterly trivial, as it a piece of cake, no real extra work, to just make scenarios that don't rely on preventing of "metagaming." Then you don't even have to worry about it, your players identify better with their characters because they aren't strange aliens, and the game world gets that much more vivid and lived in.

This is a straw man argument. Overwhelmingly, my players do not complain as you suggest they would. The rare times I have experienced this type of resistance have been from players that are new to my table, but once they're there for a while, these complaints go away as they tend to join with the other players and approach the game without using metagaming to have their character exceed the knowledge they believe the character would have.

D&D is not a strategy game. It is not a wargame. It is not a video game. It is a table top role playing game. Put yourself in the shoes of your PC to the best of your ability and you'll get the most out of the role playing game elements. This inherently involves some determinations to 'fill in the gaps' about what your player may or may not know that the player does know - but there are rules in the books for how to handle the situation (as I noted above) and it isn't hard to role play it out with a modicum of effort and a bit of integrity.

If you want to just use the majority of the D&D rules to play a strategy game, you surely can do so. It isn't really the full D&D experience described by the books, but it can be rewarding and fun. But, if you do, you are missing out on other elements of the full D&D experience under the RAW that many people find incredibly wonderful.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

As for player knowledge, much of the time I reward player knowledge as good play. But my players (long established group) know that I'll occasionally throw a knuckleball in there and that "unverified" player knowledge is a dangerous thing to rely on.

Very much this. The players, through their PCs, should engage with the game world to verify their assumptions. Blindly acting on player knowledge can be costly to the PCs! In this way, the DM does not need to ever police the "player-character" separation - and especially needn't ever utter the words "that's not something your character would do".

On that note, in the 5e PHB, roleplaying is defined as "a player determining how [their] character thinks, acts, and talks." Those things are squarely the player's responsibility. The DM, meanwhile, has enough on their plate with describing the environment and running NPCs and monsters - they don't also need to tell the players how to play their characters.

IMO, we can also draw a fine distinction between what a character thinks and what a character knows. The former can be anything the player wants and can be justified with any story the player likes. The latter may or may not line up with the game world, however, in which case we are back to players needing to verify certain ideas in the game world via their PCs before leaping to conclusions that lead to sad trombone noises. And that, I feel, addresses the OP since, yeah, sometimes the players can successfully substitute their own reality if something a player deems the PC knows lines up with the DM's general conception of the world, even though the DM didn't come up with said idea previously.

 

[Flamestrike]

Rather bluntly, this is a crutch, and it's actually adversarial to boot. If the GM is doing things at their whim to players just to make them paranoid or waste resources or maintain uncertainty, that's absolutely adversarial -- there's no reason to do it for the sake of the game. And that gets to the crutch part -- if you need these tricks to keep up tension or interest, then it's because your game isn't doing it on it's own. Up your game.

Excuse me? I nearly got infracted the other day for far less. Dont talk down to me and tell me my game isnt working.

And you're wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a DM rolling for no reason at all. To quote Gygax:

''A DM only rolls dice for the sound they make.''

Part of being a DM is being an entertainer, not a boring numbers man. There tons of tricks to keep your players engaged, and maintaining suspense and so forth.

I wont have you (or anyone else) telling me 'I can only roll a dice when the results matter'. As the DM I can use whatever techniques I want to keep my players engaged, entertained, suspenseful and so forth.

Such tricks shouldn't be expected at my table.

Cool. Whatever works for you.

I have pre-ordained 'random' encounters that I roll for and then happen regardless of the roll, dice rolls and pretending to look something up from time to time (in addition to actually looking stuff up other times), secret rolls, open rolls and more.

I have the best interest of the game at heart. If you (as a player) want to complain about that because you dont trust me then fine, find another table. It's no skin of my back. Im doing what I do as a participant and showman, not just as a random number generator.

I also expect DMs to do the same when I'm playing as well.

Each to their own.

 

[Oofta]

Excuse me? I nearly got infracted the other day for far less. Dont talk down to me and tell me my game isnt working.

And you're wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a DM rolling for no reason at all. To quote Gygax:

''A DM only rolls dice for the sound they make.''

Part of being a DM is being an entertainer, not a boring numbers man. There tons of tricks to keep your players engaged, and maintaining suspense and so forth.

I wont have you (or anyone else) telling me 'I can only roll a dice when the results matter'. As the DM I can use whatever techniques I want to keep my players engaged, entertained, suspenseful and so forth.


Cool. Whatever works for you.

I have pre-ordained 'random' encounters that I roll for and then happen regardless of the roll, dice rolls and pretending to look something up from time to time (in addition to actually looking stuff up other times), secret rolls, open rolls and more.

I have the best interest of the game at heart. If you (as a player) want to complain about that because you dont trust me then fine, find another table. It's no skin of my back. Im doing what I do as a participant and showman, not just as a random number generator.

I also expect DMs to do the same when I'm playing as well.

Each to their own.

There's a lot of one-true-wayism when it comes to this general topic. Want to never roll the dice as a DM ever for non-combat scenarios? You can do that. Want to roll the dice for every situation where there's uncertainty no matter what the PCs do? Go for it. Want to roll the dice or ask for dice rolls to set tone and mood? If it works for your group, fantastic.

At least we haven't gotten to the "Thou must state your intentions and actions thus, and no referencing proficiencies ever! If you do, thou art playing wrong, and carrying baggage from lost editions! Sacrilege!"

 

[Ovinomancer]

Excuse me? I nearly got infracted the other day for far less. Dont talk down to me and tell me my game isnt working.

And you're wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a DM rolling for no reason at all. To quote Gygax:

''A DM only rolls dice for the sound they make.''

Part of being a DM is being an entertainer, not a boring numbers man. There tons of tricks to keep your players engaged, and maintaining suspense and so forth.

I wont have you (or anyone else) telling me 'I can only roll a dice when the results matter'. As the DM I can use whatever techniques I want to keep my players engaged, entertained, suspenseful and so forth.


Cool. Whatever works for you.

I have pre-ordained 'random' encounters that I roll for and then happen regardless of the roll, dice rolls and pretending to look something up from time to time (in addition to actually looking stuff up other times), secret rolls, open rolls and more.

I have the best interest of the game at heart. If you (as a player) want to complain about that because you dont trust me then fine, find another table. It's no skin of my back. Im doing what I do as a participant and showman, not just as a random number generator.

I also expect DMs to do the same when I'm playing as well.

Each to their own.

I didn't know that the options were to use random dice rolls that don't matter or just generate random numbers. I was under the impression that you could actually craft an interesting game that is neither random numbers nor relies on parlor tricks to maintain excitement. I labor under this misunderstanding because that's how my game works -- very engaged players and interesting content that isn't about me.

I was also mistaken for thinking that maybe the players should have a say in what's good for the game, but you've made a strong point that you're the only one with the proper insight and understanding to state this. And the extensive polling you've done of players to find out if this is actually what they want? Amazing stuff, man.

You've really turned me around on this -- randomly rolling dice but NOT letting them mean anything is the absolute best way to avoid the only other alternative -- actually generating random numbers! Yuck! Horrible!

 

[Ovinomancer]

There's a lot of one-true-wayism when it comes to this general topic. Want to never roll the dice as a DM ever for non-combat scenarios? You can do that. Want to roll the dice for every situation where there's uncertainty no matter what the PCs do? Go for it. Want to roll the dice or ask for dice rolls to set tone and mood? If it works for your group, fantastic.

At least we haven't gotten to the "Thou must state your intentions and actions thus, and no referencing proficiencies ever! If you do, thou art playing wrong, and carrying baggage from lost editions! Sacrilege!"

Nope, again a bad take. If you're rolling for everything, roll for it, but let it matter! If you roll for nothing, cool, let it matter! The argument isn't that you can't roll, but that rolls should mean something -- play should mean something. The idea that you can, as GM, just randomly decide that it matters now (HEY, YOU CAN'T METAGAME!) but doesn't matter later (hey, it's cool, I'm going to roll this die to make the players metagame and be paranoid something bad is happening, yay me!). Be consistent in approach.

 

[Oofta]

Nope, again a bad take. If you're rolling for everything, roll for it, but let it matter! If you roll for nothing, cool, let it matter! The argument isn't that you can't roll, but that rolls should mean something -- play should mean something. The idea that you can, as GM, just randomly decide that it matters now (HEY, YOU CAN'T METAGAME!) but doesn't matter later (hey, it's cool, I'm going to roll this die to make the players metagame and be paranoid something bad is happening, yay me!). Be consistent in approach.

When I roll it does matter. It's setting the tone or serving some other purpose. Just like I'll occasionally bluff when looking at my notes and mutter something under my breath like "Ooh that's ... umm ... bad".

But hey, feel free to report me to the D&D style police because I'm running a game that my players enjoy immensely because I'm "doing it wrong".

 

[Ovinomancer]

When I roll it does matter. It's setting the tone or serving some other purpose. Just like I'll occasionally bluff when looking at my notes and mutter something under my breath like "Ooh that's ... umm ... bad".

But hey, feel free to report me to the D&D style police because I'm running a game that my players enjoy immensely because I'm "doing it wrong".

It doesn't matter to the game, it matters only to your metagame of manipulating your player's emotional state. Your roll to instill paranoia does nothing for the game -- it's aimed only at the players at the table.

You can have engaging content, where the players are paranoid because of the content of the game -- the players are paranoid not because of the GM's dice rolling, but because of the fictional state that their characters are in.

I mean, I guess it's okay, though, that there's a difference of opinion where I'm on the side saying "make your game better, and more exciting" and others are on the "we prefer to use tricks to manipulate the players." I'm good with this positioning. I don't feel the need to con my players so they have a good time.

 

[Oofta]

It doesn't matter to the game, it matters only to your metagame of manipulating your player's emotional state. Your roll to instill paranoia does nothing for the game -- it's aimed only at the players at the table.

You can have engaging content, where the players are paranoid because of the content of the game -- the players are paranoid not because of the GM's dice rolling, but because of the fictional state that their characters are in.

I mean, I guess it's okay, though, that there's a difference of opinion where I'm on the side saying "make your game better, and more exciting" and others are on the "we prefer to use tricks to manipulate the players." I'm good with this positioning. I don't feel the need to con my players so they have a good time.

Okay, you got me. As a DM I use a variety of tools to get emotional responses from my players.

I guess I shall now hang the sackcloth and ashes in shame for trying to entertain people.