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

[Guest 6801328]

Just to be clearer, since my clear statement earlier in the thread apparently wasn't enough, I DO change some monsters. I just do it rarely and just to keep things fresh and exciting. @Charlaquin said that even a few such changes would alter how the players act. It doesn't in my experience, since it doesn't happen often enough to make a difference.



Since I DO actually play that way, my saying what my experience is is perfectly valid. It's cheeky of you to tell me that I'm being cheeky for it.

So, all this time that you’ve been arguing that it’s too much trouble to adjust encounters, now you’re telling us you do this anyway?

Now I’m confused. If player knowledge makes encounters easier but not trivial, by the same amount as if the players either pass a lore check OR encounter those creatures multiple times, AND you apparently don’t mind adjusting encounters...what exactly is your objection to player knowledge, other than the subjective reason that it feels wrong to you?

 

[iserith]

Has Max stated that he would actually change the declared action of a character, or simply try to resolve potential bad faith play with the player directly?

By way of the social contract and the conflation of distinct concepts, the DM at Max's table has power over the validity of action declarations in a way the game does not intend. My statement stands.

This DM can, and does.

Of course you do. Just don't assert that your approach is supported by RAW, as Max has done, and I won't gainsay you. There may have been rules to this effect in other games, but not this one. In this one, the "no 'metagaming'" stance is a table rule.

 

[iserith]

And yet, in my experience, it is what players will usually do.

Nothing in the rules suggests to me it's necessarily an action to recall lore or make deductions in combat either.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Nothing in the rules suggests to me it's necessarily an action to recall lore or make deductions in combat either.

If it were a rule it would lead to strange things. Maybe the first time monster X is encountered a player spends an action formally “recalling lore”.

Then later in the campaign another X is encountered, and the player says, “I remember last time we discovered they are vulnerable to spinach.” The DM could justifiably say, “Yes but if you want to use that knowledge your character will have to spend an action “recalling” that lore.”

Otherwise we are drawing a bizarre, artificial distinction between things our characters know from events that happened off-screen, and those that happened during play.

 

[Ovinomancer]

If it were a rule it would lead to strange things. Maybe the first time monster X is encountered a player spends an action formally “recalling lore”.

Then later in the campaign another X is encountered, and the player says, “I remember last time we discovered they are vulnerable to spinach.” The DM could justifiably say, “Yes but if you want to use that knowledge your character will have to spend an action “recalling” that lore.”

Otherwise we are drawing a bizarre, artificial distinction between things our characters know from events that happened off-screen, and those that happened during play.

DING!

 

[Charlaquin]

Nothing in the rules suggests to me it's necessarily an action to recall lore or make deductions in combat either.

Yeah, same.

 

[Maxperson]

So, all this time that you’ve been arguing that it’s too much trouble to adjust encounters, now you’re telling us you do this anyway?

No. I said you would do that IF you allow metagaming. My players don't metagame, so it's not an issue.

And that’s great that you wouldn’t give your players trivial encounters. That means you know how to tune your encounters to account for various factors.

No. What that means is that if I allowed metagaming, I would have to become an adversarial DM and adjust the encounters to negate the unfair player advantage over the monsters. As I said earlier, I don't want to be adversarial with the players, so I don't allow metagaming.

 

[Maxperson]

Otherwise we are drawing a bizarre, artificial distinction between things our characters know from events that happened off-screen, and those that happened during play.

Yep. I don't require them to use an action. I was responding to @Charlaquin I think who said it was an action. As an action, it becomes subpar to try lore instead of just attacking with the standard attack that the creature is weak to.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yep. I don't require them to use an action. I was responding to @Charlaquin I think who said it was an action. As an action, it becomes subpar to try lore instead of just attacking with the standard attack that the creature is weak to.

Sorry, I was unclear. I meant “action” in the sense of a declaration of goal and approach which describes an activity on the part of the character, not “Action” in the sense of a cost within the game’s action economy.

 

[Guest 6801328]

No. I said you would do that IF you allow metagaming. My players don't metagame, so it's not an issue.

No. What that means is that if I allowed metagaming, I would have to become an adversarial DM and adjust the encounters to negate the unfair player advantage over the monsters. As I said earlier, I don't want to be adversarial with the players, so I don't allow metagaming.

You just wrote this a few posts ago:

Just to be clearer, since my clear statement earlier in the thread apparently wasn't enough, I DO change some monsters. I just do it rarely and just to keep things fresh and exciting. @Charlaquin said that even a few such changes would alter how the players act. It doesn't in my experience, since it doesn't happen often enough to make a difference.

Since I DO actually play that way, my saying what my experience is is perfectly valid. It's cheeky of you to tell me that I'm being cheeky for it.

Can you help me understand the difference? Do you adjust encounters to keep them challenging, or don't you?

I don't really care about why you do it. But if you do it all the time for non-player knowledge reasons, but claim to be unwilling to do it for player knowledge reasons, then that just means you have an aesthetic bias against it (which is fine) not that it's actually a problem for the game.