D&D 5E player knowlege vs character knowlege (spoiler)

[Guest 6801328]

It's pretty much the default social contract not to take UNFAIR ADVANTAGE of a game. You want it to be otherwise, you need to explicitly okay the unfair advantage.

Unfair against whom? The DM? DM's are kind of omnipotent; it's pretty hard to have an unfair advantage there.

The other players? Last I checked, D&D is a cooperative game.

I do think there are some valid points in this debate about not spoiling surprises for people who don't know what you know, but when you start writing "UNFAIR ADVANTAGE" in all caps it seems like an emotional response, not a well-reasoned one.

 

[Maxperson]

Unfair against whom? The DM? DM's are kind of omnipotent; it's pretty hard to have an unfair advantage there.

The other players? Last I checked, D&D is a cooperative game.

The game is balanced around the weaknesses, resistances, immunities, special attacks, etc. for monsters. To use player knowledge to exploit those makes all of those encounters far easier than they are supposed to be. I supposed the DM could become adversarial and just knock all the CRs down by like 2 in order to compensate for the metagaming, but I don't like to be adversarial, so that doesn't work for me.

Edit: I also didn't write unfair advantage in all caps the first time, but it seemed to have been missed, so I made it larger.

 

[iserith]

Thank you for the references on active checks, they matched what I found after your prompting me to look!

For passive checks, pg. 240 of the DMG makes it sound a bit looser about when they get one. The Wizard who "is running, not paying attention to what's ahead of him" gets one, albeit with disadvantage.

Having read the section you're quoting now, I see now what it's saying: The wizard is moving at a fast pace which does impart disadvantage to passive Perception (see PHB, pg. 182). This is offset by the noise the monsters are making, advantage which wipes out the disadvantage.

This is in a section of the DMG that is trying to show DMs when to apply advantage and disadvantage and what it means when they cancel each other out. It has nothing to do with the nature of passive checks.

 

[Cadence]

Well it’s inconsistent either way. The question then becomes, what is the best way to resolve the inconsistency, and in my opinion, the answer is by interpreting the text in the way that invalidates the least amount of text, or that is most consistent with the text taken as a whole.

Can being too much of a stickler either way can end up with something that seems off? If a character is walking down a Dwarven steam engine track reading a book, it feels to me like they should get a passive check to hear the train whistle and feel the tracks rumble I can imagine some people generally being aware enough to hear it, while others would be so engrossed you need to snap your fingers between the pages and book. On the other hand (using a modern example) could an electric car driven by a bad guy take out the reader on a street pretty easily? Or is that thinking of giving a check to the readet but deciding the DC is in the impossible range ?

 

[Charlaquin]

The game is balanced around the weaknesses, resistances, immunities, special attacks, etc. for monsters. To use player knowledge to exploit those makes all of those encounters far easier than they are supposed to be.

Monsters with weaknesses, resistances, etc. are not designed around the assumption that players won’t take advantage of those things. On the contrary.

I supposed the DM could become adversarial and just knock all the CRs down by like 2 in order to compensate for the metagaming, but I don't like to be adversarial, so that doesn't work for me.

Nobody’s being adversarial. Some of us make changes to monsters and published adventures. It only takes the occasional such change to discourage players from assuming their preexisting knowledge of monsters and published adventures is always accurate. And, even if one does not make changes to adventures or monsters, the game won’t be ruined if players occasionally have an easy encounter. Anyway, I would argue that if an encounter is only challenging if the players either don’t know the trick to beating it or are compelled not to use the trick to beating it if they do know it, it’s not a very well-designed encounter.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The thread has me more convinced than ever that the "no player knowledge" stance is a house of cards built on a foundation of emotion and nostalgia, with maybe some reinforcing rods made of gatekeeping. As each of the arguments is dismantled, it always comes back to some variant of "But it's just WRONG". As if repeating their mindless assertions makes them valid.

As I said upthread, they sound just like the freestyle skateboarders of the late 70's, upset and offended that the newcomers were completely disrespecting their tradition of doing dorky tricks on flat pavement, and instead were doing freaking aerials out of empty swimming pools.

Or think about each of the major shifts in art history. It's always the old guard sticking their noses in the air saying the new stuff "isn't art", invoking their seniority as it provides validity to their arguments, but their only real defense is tautology. "It's not art because I am an artist and I say so." (Never mind when comic books became an art form.)

You see it over and over and over again, in every art, profession, academic discipline, sport, hobby, etc. The old guard, opposed to change (in business I've heard them referred to as the "root guards" because they think they are guarding the roots of the organization) try to discredit, not with logic but with insults, the changes that seem to threaten the traditions they hold dear. Even though those traditions don't provide any substantive benefit.

 

[Cadence]

Having read the section you're quoting now, I see now what it's saying: The wizard is moving at a fast pace which does impart disadvantage to passive Perception (see PHB, pg. 182). This is offset by the noise the monsters are making, advantage which wipes out the disadvantage.

This is in a section of the DMG that is trying to show DMs when to apply advantage and disadvantage and what it means when they cancel each other out. It has nothing to do with the nature of passive checks.

I just found it nice/interesting that "running, not paying attention to what's ahead of him" didn't mean the character was oblivious to the world. Just that they had a large penalty.

 

[iserith]

It's pretty much the default social contract not to take UNFAIR ADVANTAGE of a game. You want it to be otherwise, you need to explicitly okay the unfair advantage.

Nope. The social contract is what D&D 5e calls "table rules" which will vary from group to group. There is no "default."

 

[Guest 6801328]

Monsters with weaknesses, resistances, etc. are not designed around the assumption that players won’t take advantage of those things. On the contrary.


Nobody’s being adversarial. Some of us make changes to monsters and published adventures. It only takes the occasional such change to discourage players from assuming their preexisting knowledge of monsters and published adventures is always accurate. And, even if one does not make changes to adventures or monsters, the game won’t be ruined if players occasionally have an easy encounter. Anyway, I would argue that if an encounter is only challenging if the players either don’t know the trick to beating it or are compelled not to use the trick to beating it if they do know it, it’s not a very well-designed encounter.

Yeah, but think how satisfying it would be to have a TPK because nobody broke character to exploit player knowledge. People say you can't "win" at D&D, but this might qualify.

"Remember the time we roleplayed so masterfully that we died to the regenerating troll?"

 

[Charlaquin]

Can being too much of a stickler either way can end up with something that seems off? If a character is walking down a Dwarven steam engine track reading a book, it feels to me like they should get a passive check to hear the train whistle and feel the tracks rumble I can imagine some people generally being aware enough to hear it, while others would be so engrossed you need to snap your fingers between the pages and book. On the other hand (using a modern example) could an electric car driven by a bad guy take out the reader on a street pretty easily? Or is that thinking of giving a check to the readet but deciding the DC is in the impossible range ?

I’m not sure how useful specific examples will be here, but personally I don’t think I would require a check to determine if a character notices the vibrations of a steam engine coming down a track they’re walking down. That seems trivially easy to me. As for the electric car passing on the street, I think the DM would be justified in comparing to the character’s passive Wisdom (Perception) on the basis of wanting to determine the outcome secretly. I also think the DM would be justified in deciding that the dwarf fails to notice the electric car without a check, since he is not alert for danger. I’d say that comes down to a judgment call.