D&D General My Metagame Rule

[aco175]

Well the trouble is that stories grow for drama & get confused over time in retelling.

I was going to insert the movie clip from Band of Brothers where Captain Spears was talking to the First sergeant about how stories grow over time and everyone says they heard it from someone and when you talk to that person, they heard if from someone. You could go back 2,000 years and a couple centurions would be talking about Dyneris chopping a couple heads off of a few Carthaginians.

 

[jgsugden]

I handle this differently.

There is a book in my world called Librum Magicum. It was first written by the first Archmage, and it essentially contains everything you'd find tin the PHB Spells section, the Monster Manual, and the DMG magic item section. It describes them much the way an Encyclopedia would describe them. It also describes my planar structures, the Gods, the other Powers (Archfey, Archfiends, Demon Lords, etc...)

It costs 2 gold and there are copies everywhere. Any PC that can cast spells or has an education is deemed to have been widely exposed to it. Thus, there is an in game reason for PCs to know a lot of things.

The caveat: This is generally old information, and the world changes. The information on the spells is sufficient for a spell caster to figure out that spell when they have the capability to learn it, but there are far more spells out there in the world - and there are variations on many of the PHB spells. The same is true of monsters and magic items - you may know the general lore, but that doesn't mean you'd recognize the orcs and centaurs that form the basis of the horde that sweeps the Great Plain. It doesn't mean that dragons are just as they are described in the tome.

When PCs encounter monsters and magic, there is a good chance that I've modified it. I have thousands of homebrew monsters, spells and magic items. If you ask my players about the more iconic monsters from my setting, they'll describe beasts like my Axemorph Demon (based upon the Dreamblade figure), My Bunnyfish (an entirely surprising and distinct homebrew monster), and the hordes of dwarven and gnomish constructs that are used as war engines. If you ask about the magic items that they treasure, they'll tell you about the Crysteel Axe (a Crystal Metal axe made of the hardest substance in existence and capable of mighty war magic), Platform Boots (that summon a 15 foot tower beneath the wearer - but fasten him to the tower for 1 minute ... items that have saved and taken many a life), and the Staff of the Archmage (designed when I was still a teenager, this staff does things I still have not seen in any official product). If you talk about spells, they'll mention Deflection (like Counterspell, but instead of negating the spell you change the target), Wraithform (based on an old 2E spells, this gives you the best of flight, invisibility, and gaseous form), and Ar-mage-edon (a 12th level spell - It is to Meteror Swarm what Meteor Swarm is to Fireball.

So in the end - yeah - players generally have access to what is in the core books ... but it might not be right ... and it is all in game knowledge that makes sense.

 

[cranberry]

IMO, the PC's should only know what they would know from their own experiences.

I admit however, as someone who has played for years, it can be really challenging to intentionally be ignorant, and avoid using meta knowledge.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I admit however, as someone who has played for years, it can be really challenging to intentionally be ignorant, and avoid using meta knowledge.

IMO, not just challenging but un-fun. "Have we role played long enough? Can we burn the trolls now?"

I truly enjoy genuine ignorance about the game world. I love that feeling when I don't know what's going on and I think we've gotten in over our heads and a TPK is imminent. And when I feel that way, it's a blast to roleplay my character freaking out (in whatever way 'freaking out' is appropriate to that character.)

What I don't enjoy is play-acting that I think that, when all the players actually know what's going on. UNLESS it's for the benefit of a new player who doesn't know the ins and outs of the game.

 

[Redwizard007]

Combining lineage, class, background, and backstory should give every PC a much broader base of knowledge than I tend to see from casual players.

The idea that a former mercenary wouldn't have a grasp of basic tactics for dealing with common monsters, or that a mountain dwelling hermit isn't familiar with rocs, yetis, and red dragons is just baffling. Likewise, a former guard of Silverymoon is probably pretty familiar with drow, trolls, blights, and lots of arcane magic. I shouldn't need to specify this in my backstory. Heck, even a pampered noblewoman in Waterdeep should be vaguely familiar with the half dozen major dragons in the area. Literally, every single background on D&D beyond should have some knowledge of a fair number of monsters, important NPCs, major events, and even spell effects. That is just how a well developed world functions.

The flipside of this, is of course, those of us who delve to deeply into lore and rulebooks. There has to be a momentary pause while we consider, is there a realistic reason that I would know this? Is it something the bards might sing about? Might I have read it somewhere (and do I read?) Is this an appropriate bedtime story? Did grandfather ever face something like this? Did Al Bundy really score 4 touchdowns in the 1966 City Championship game, and is that relevant? Sometimes, the answer is yes.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My rule is that players are only allowed to know what their characters know.

Admittedly, it does make ordering pizza rather difficult.

 

[cranberry]

IMO, not just challenging but un-fun. "Have we role played long enough? Can we burn the trolls now?"

I once heard an argument that a first level character would know about trolls and fire because it's part of the in game world mythology in their stories that would be told to children. Just like in our world where everyone "knows" that you can kill a witch with a bucket of water.

 

[Xamnam]

The flipside of this, is of course, those of us who delve to deeply into lore and rulebooks. There has to be a momentary pause while we consider, is there a realistic reason that I would know this? Is it something the bards might sing about? Might I have read it somewhere (and do I read?) Is this an appropriate bedtime story? Did grandfather ever face something like this? Did Al Bundy really score 4 touchdowns in the 1966 City Championship game, and is that relevant? Sometimes, the answer is yes.

I really appreciate you calling this consideration out. It's easy to think of the information we know about myths, but not extend that consideration to the fact that we come to it in a world where information spreads farther and faster, and the stores of it are both vast and attempt to be permanent in a way that wildly dwarfs the experience of an "adventurer."

 

[cranberry]

My rule is that players are only allowed to know what their characters know.

Admittedly, it does make ordering pizza rather difficult.

But you can still get beer and mead with no problem.

 

[amethal]

I did once run a game where a player had his character cast Glitterdust on a bat in an attempt to blind it ...

I was also in a 3.5e game where the player of an elven wizard tried to cast Sleep on a group of Drow ...

So I've no idea what PCs should or shouldn't know!

 

[Cadence]

Combining lineage, class, background, and backstory should give every PC a much broader base of knowledge than I tend to see from casual players.

The idea that a former mercenary wouldn't have a grasp of basic tactics for dealing with common monsters, or that a mountain dwelling hermit isn't familiar with rocs, yetis, and red dragons is just baffling. Likewise, a former guard of Silverymoon is probably pretty familiar with drow, trolls, blights, and lots of arcane magic.

I have the same trouble reconciling what first level characters are like in D&D with their backgrounds. "Sure, I was a soldier, but the army doesn't do squat for training. I improved more yesterday as an adventurer than any of my former colleagues will in the next few years!"

 

[Redwizard007]

I have the same trouble reconciling what first level characters are like in D&D with their backgrounds. "Sure, I was a soldier, but the army doesn't do squat for training. I improved more yesterday as an adventurer than any of my former colleagues will in the next few years!"

Valid-ish complaint, or at least a common one.

There really isn't much difference between a CR 0 commoner, CR 1/8 guard, CR 1/2 soldier, or a 1st level character. It's not really until level 5 that we see a dramatic increase in effectiveness. Up to that point, we are mostly adding HP.

I can also point you towards statblocks for things like the Veteran, which demonstrates that some soldiers actually do advance similarly to PCs, and if we look at the various Githyanki statblocks we see more extreme versions of the same concept.

So now we have evidence that "Soldiers" are actually the 3rd evolution of the Pokémon that started life as "Commoner," and has further evolutions to at least "Veteran," or could use the rare item "Plot Armor" to begin evolving along the PC class chart.

So, it's not that soldiers don't gain in skill, it's that they don't gain in skill at the same rate as PCs, and if you were to spend a few years in the service seeing how little combat training actually happens for most people, I think you would find that absolutely plausible.

 

[Clint_L]

Yeah, I should clarify that meta-gaming in the sense of working together to make the story work is fine. It's specifically when players have their characters make choices based on knowledge those characters wouldn't believably have that really bugs me, or when players use their knowledge of game rules to create strategies that don't make sense in the story. Or when they try to have a conference to work out a complicated strategy in the middle of a round of combat (e.g. "You do this, and then on my turn I'll do that, and then on her turn Carmen will do this other thing...").

 

[Bill Zebub]

But you can still get beer and mead with no problem.

And slow-roasted gnome.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Or when they try to have a conference to work out a complicated strategy in the middle of a round of combat (e.g. "You do this, and then on my turn I'll do that, and then on her turn Carmen will do this other thing...").

I understand the verisimilitude argument behind that, but it severely limits the complexity of tactics available, at least to players who aren’t interested in “practice sessions” doing combat drills. (That is, normal people.).

Personally I’d rather break verisimilitude in those cases in order to have challenges that require well thought out teamwork.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Combining lineage, class, background, and backstory should give every PC a much broader base of knowledge than I tend to see from casual players.

I'm very much in the school of thought that characters can know anything that they might reasonably have picked up as a result of their prior experiences - most of the time, unless a particular fact or bit of information is something I feel should be either secret or otherwise obscure I don't bother to roll to see if a character might know something as long as the player can give me a decent answer to "How does the character know that?"... (I love it when a player inserts things about their character into the game that tie them to the campaign world.) If the answer seems to be a bit of a stretch, then I might have them roll for it.

But if the character says the legends of their people tell stories about certain monsters, the character probably knows basic facts about them. (Assuming, of course, that the monster in question can be found in the place where the character's people come from...) Rangers, druids and barbarians will usually be aware of the general characteristics of the sorts of creatures that inhabit the areas that they're from, and anyone with proficiency in Arcana/Religion/Nature will probably know some general things about fey, elementals, outsiders or undead depending on their skills.
What they know will depend on how common either the creature or its reputation is.

Soldiers will be generally knowledgeable about unit tactics, basic strategy, and the history of famous battles and the conflicts that their culture has been involved in. A horse archer from a roving horde wouldn't know what a catapult was until they saw one or it was explained to them, but even a grunt in the army of a city-state would know enough about various siege equipment to be able to describe something to an engineer so that they could build one.

If the character's background includes being widely traveled (caravan guard, merchant, traveling entertainer, etc.) and the player states that the character's been to a particular city before, I assume the character has some general knowledge about local geography, customs, government, etc. If they want to establish that they have a personal contact in the area, they can reasonably be expected to be able to gain more detailed knowledge in areas where that contact would be helpful.

In general, when deciding what a character might reasonably know, I break knowledge down into three categories - Personal Experience, Class/Cultural Knowlege, and Legends/Stories...
If the character has personal knowledge of the subject, either through direct experience or study, then they definitely know common things about it, probably know some lesser-known things about it, and there's a chance they might know some deep stuff about it.
When determining whether they know something isn't based on personal experience or study but on things commonly known by a person of their character class or culture, they'll probably know common things, and there's a chance they might know more uncommon things.
When the knowledge in question is mainly a matter of having heard some story or legend about something, any character might know some general things, with a better chance of knowing it if the story/legend in question is somehow relevant to some aspect of the character,


On the subject of planning things in combat, if the players are going to discuss strategy in the middle of a combat round, I give them about one minute of real time to talk about it, and require that whatever plan they come up with must be something that could realistically be described in a few short sentences... aka the "football huddle".
As a player, I always try to introduce strategic suggestions in combat as something done in character - the barbarian yells, "Vax, bunch 'em up! Korvar, fireball!", as he shoves the enemy over to the battlemaster who maneuvers them next to the other enemies in the area of effect of the wizard's spell...

 

[CleverNickName]

I haven't had to deal with much metagaming, fortunately. Not enough to require a house-rule anyway. I have had to change a few of my own game behaviors to account for it, though.

Soy bilingue (EDITAR: Eso es una exageracion. Se espanol, pero no lo hablo muy a menudo, asi que tengo poca practica. No es fluido.), pero mis jugadores no lo son...entonces en mis aventuras, a menudo uso la escritura en espanol en logar de los idiomas de los monstrudos en mis rompecabezas, acertijos y otras ofertas.

Esto funciono bien hasta que note que mis jugadores estaban usando Google Translate para interpretar el idioma sin coneccion (o peor aun, en la mesa en sus telefonos.)

So I placed a helm of comprehension in one of their treasure piles. Now they had an in-game, lore-friendly way to achieve what I knew they were already doing, and removed the metagaming aspect completely. Not a big deal at all.

 

[iserith]

Yeah, I should clarify that meta-gaming in the sense of working together to make the story work is fine. It's specifically when players have their characters make choices based on knowledge those characters wouldn't believably have that really bugs me, or when players use their knowledge of game rules to create strategies that don't make sense in the story. Or when they try to have a conference to work out a complicated strategy in the middle of a round of combat (e.g. "You do this, and then on my turn I'll do that, and then on her turn Carmen will do this other thing...").

This strikes me more as an objection to players interfering with game pacing via conversations at the meta level than actual "metagaming." Arguably, these conversations can be thought of as representative of the tactical experience and teamwork the party has developed from past encounters and isn't actually the characters talking tactics mid-battle. Still, if they are taking longer than is absolutely necessary, it's worth a discussion in my view on the basis of slowing the game down, not "metagaming."

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't like meta gaming; I think it's lame. If it makes sense for your character to know something in the story, then that's fine, and rolling a lore check if you think your character might know is fine, too. But I think the game is more fun when players try to act from the perspective of their characters, not themselves.

I also don't buy the argument that characters would automatically know the complete details of every creature in D&D because that would be necessary to survival. Yeah, they'd know that some dragons breathe fire. But would they really know the exact details of an aboleth or a green slaad, right down to the spell list?

I think this might be a slightly overblown concern. I don’t know the details of an aboleth or a green slaad down to the spell list, and I’m primarily a DM. I don’t think most players are going to have that information memorized, when half the time they can’t even remember their own spells. So unless a player is looking the monster up mid-fight (which is a problem for completely different reasons IMO), I don’t think there’s any need to worry about this. Especially if you make any custom changes to monster stats.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think this might be a slightly overblown concern. I don’t know the details of an aboleth or a green slaad down to the spell list, and I’m primarily a DM. I don’t think most players are going to have that information memorized, when half the time they can’t even remember their own spells. So unless a player is looking the monster up mid-fight (which is a problem for completely different reasons IMO), I don’t think there’s any need to worry about this. Especially if you make any custom changes to monster stats.

Overheard recently:

DM1: I can't believe it. I caught Chad cheating.

DM2: You're so lucky! I would KILL to have players invested enough to cheat!