Player metagaming

[Herremann the Wise]

I doubt not that it was, indeed, a deliberate ploy to up the Leadership Score.

However, cynical social maneuvering is a perfectly legitimate roleplaying choice:

"Yes Pinky, opening 'Brain's Home for Wayward Kneebiters' is the perfect move: increasing my standing in the community, establishing my reputation as a dogoodnik, and, if my calculations are correct, providing a tidy tax write off as well... All part of tonight's plan to TAKE OVER the WORLD!!!"

Ahem. Bit of a flashback there...

A'Mal

LOL

If only the player in question had of made use of such role-playing potential. The above would have been funnier than you could imagine. Unfortunately, they did not. It became a thing of 'got the bonus so move on' type thing.

I suppose it's a case of doing something to achieve a particular mechanic of the game rather than doing it because a PC would.

FWIW I wouldn't consider a fighter taking the straightest route out of an acid cloud (or whatever) to be any more metagaming than a wizard carefully choosing which vertex to land his fireball on to cause maximum damage - they are both artefacts of the "wargame" aspect of 3e combat with miniatures on a board. The alternative for the fighter (and all the other guys) in the acid cloud is what... roll randomly each round to see which direction they manage to move 5ft in? I rather think that would seriously overpower solid fog, acid fog etc!

Rolling randomly would be a bit extreme - although reasonable for vermin or mindless creatures affected. The way how we play it is that the player or monster keeps doing what they would have been doing as they last saw things. For example, if they were running to battle an opponent, they would keep running in that direction.

The Solid Fog suite of spells are fairly powerful - no save, no spell resistance. Teleporting or Dimension Dooring out are reasonable options for those with the ability but for the rest, they are kind of stuck. It is difficult not to metagame. It is either a case of either you are metagaming or you are deliberately "anti-metagaming" {where you deliberately take the poorer option rather than the optimal to represent your character's inability of handling such things}. There seems to be no middleground with this particular spell concept. Perhaps the thing to do is have the DM say that a spell is cast and you simply describe the effects rather than delineating the limits on the playmat. Alternatively you could just do the standard 20+spell level Spellcraft check to work out the spell and thus specific effects - even 25+spell level even though the spell has not been directly targetted upon that person. For some however, such checks will represent automatic failure. The power of magic I suppose.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Hypersmurf]

Characters do not have this; even ones with great spellcraft rolls do not have all the rules of magic at their fingertips.

My wizard went to Wizard School.

He observed that the wizards who were skilled enough to cast Fireball, but not skilled enough to cast Wall of Fire, could all cast between one and three Fireballs per day, or between two and four if they were Evokers. In all cases, their Magic Missile spells produced three missiles; their Unseen Servant spells lasted exactly five hours or exactly six hours, always progressing from five to six until, when they were eventually able to evoke a Wall of Fire, increasing to seven hours (at which point they also acquired a fourth Magic Missile).

These correlations and more have been noted and recorded over the years the School has been in existence.

Since they are all observable, repeatable in-game phenomena, why should they not be in-character knowledge to someone who has put ranks in Spellcraft and Knowledge (Arcana), and who has studied around people who know such things?

-Hyp.

 

[Zen]

Indeed. Extensive research to determine the level, class and other details of your opponents in rulebook terms, then translating it into in-game terms, is an perfectly acceptable alternative to such in-game tactics such as searching the nearby buildings for the killers, which my players did not do.

That's the danger of metagame thinking; a player looks to what they understand of the rules to solve the riddles of gameplay, when doing so can easily clutter up the issue and make things less clear. Once the idea dawned, they were more interested in trying to figure out what level the caster was than where he was.

So my point is, their mistake came the moment they stopped thinking as if they were standing in a dark street with a magic-murdered corpse before them, and started thinking like a bunch of guys sitting around a table with a pile of books in front of them, believing that the answers were somewhere in those books, instead of with their own actions.

I complain about such thinking because it has the power to knock the game out of the moment and turn it into some kind of page-flipping scavenger hunt. It also doesn't find the guy who killed the NPC.

 

[shilsen]

My wizard went to Wizard School.

He observed that the wizards who were skilled enough to cast Fireball, but not skilled enough to cast Wall of Fire, could all cast between one and three Fireballs per day, or between two and four if they were Evokers. In all cases, their Magic Missile spells produced three missiles; their Unseen Servant spells lasted exactly five hours or exactly six hours, always progressing from five to six until, when they were eventually able to evoke a Wall of Fire, increasing to seven hours (at which point they also acquired a fourth Magic Missile).

These correlations and more have been noted and recorded over the years the School has been in existence.

Since they are all observable, repeatable in-game phenomena, why should they not be in-character knowledge to someone who has put ranks in Spellcraft and Knowledge (Arcana), and who has studied around people who know such things?

-Hyp.

As he said, I don't view spell levels as a purely metagame concept. If I'm playing or DMing in a campaign world where magic has been in existence for centuries, it significantly strains my disbelief to assume that nobody ever sat down and worked out the mechanical aspects of spell levels and different classes having access to different spells. In my last Greyhawk and current Eberron campaign, spellcasters had in-character knowledge about spell levels (I used different terminology, of course) and were expected to use it.

 

[FireLance]

Because the heroes who aren't ideally suited to the task turn into yesterday's news?

Because the ones who do things that are illogical and out of character and turn out to be one of the many wrong things to do never make it home to relate that story.

The fact that all those worlds where the band of heroes didn't show up went "Poof!"

It's quite simple, really

Exactly. And so the invisible, inexplicable hand of Fate gets a metagamey assist in my game worlds because my players and I both agree that these aren't the stories we want to play through.

 

[Zen]

In my original post about the summoned scorpion, there's more in play than just what is known about magic. Also in question is size definitions, such as small, medium, etc, as. It seems to me that a line is crossed when characters begin using the strict definition these terms in their metagame sense (that is, a giant scorpion isn't just much larger than an average scorpion, but in fact encompasses certain specific dimensions that distinguish it from a huge or gargantuan scorpion) to determine metagame results, such as caster level.

Is a player saying that a big scorpion measures such and such and is then and was therefore summoned by a 4th level caster that much different than a player saying a black dragon of such-and-such a length is huge and therefore has such-and-such a will save? Am I off base in thinking that such rationalizations are metagame thinking?

 

[Saeviomagy]

Is a player saying that a big scorpion measures such and such and is then and was therefore summoned by a 4th level caster that much different than a player saying a black dragon of such-and-such a length is huge and therefore has such-and-such a will save? Am I off base in thinking that such rationalizations are metagame thinking?

No, it's not. And they're NOT metagame thinking. If the character has the appropriate skills to know this sort of stuff he should be allowed to use that knowledge. Otherwise he just doesn't get to read the MM...

Size categories are pretty broad - each one is almost a doubling of the previous one. To say that an Xth level caster can summon a creature that's around 15 feet tall is hardly metagaming.

To say that said caster must therefore be within, say, 50 feet (because of the limitations of the spell) is also perfectly sensible.

 

[Storyteller01]

As he said, I don't view spell levels as a purely metagame concept. If I'm playing or DMing in a campaign world where magic has been in existence for centuries, it significantly strains my disbelief to assume that nobody ever sat down and worked out the mechanical aspects of spell levels and different classes having access to different spells. In my last Greyhawk and current Eberron campaign, spellcasters had in-character knowledge about spell levels (I used different terminology, of course) and were expected to use it.

But I find it unlikely that this is the case, unless there is a mystical Internet or communication service...

'levels', 'circles', and other forms of advancement via school or traing are not always distinct. One school may cast fifth level spells and concider them the most powerful (I am a Master of the Fifth circle, or some such). He's in for a suprise if he takes on Elminster, but in his world he's the king. Assuming that the standards used for our rules are the same in-game as well as out is, IMO, incorrect thinking. It does simplify matters though.

What can a black belt in one martial arts school do? Why doesn't the other do it? Why do some moves used by lesser students in one
school look like advanced movements in another school?

The above situation is only effective if every caster in every land sat down and determined what spells are what level. Sure, all magic works the same (for us , the players), but not everyone views it the same way. Then again, it is the DM's responsibilty to work with this in the campaign...

This situation may not be so much a case of metagaming as players thinking from their view point instead of the characters, but not cheating outright (with cell phones, we DO have libraries at our finger tips...)

 

[Victim]

But I find it unlikely that this is the case, unless there is a mystical Internet service...

'levels', 'circles', and other forms of advancement via school or traing are not always distinct. One school may cast fifth level spells and concider them the most powerful (I am a Master of the Fifth circle, or some such)

What can a black belt in one martial arts school do? Why doesn't the other do it? Why do some moves used by lesser students in one
school look like advanced movements in another school?

The above situation is only effective if every caster in every land sat down and determined what spells are what level. Sure, all magic works the same, but not everyone views it the same way. Then again, it is the DM's responsibilty to work with this in the campaign...

Well, among different casting traditions, spells are different levels. Suggestion is 3rd for Wiz/Sor and 2nd for Bards and Psions. Therefore, the observed minimum durations and such will also be different. But in most cases, observed correlations will be fairly accurate.

 

[eris404]

OK, funny metagaming story. The worst metagaming that happened in the history of our group was a mistake most of the players made at the beginning of a new campaign. As a disclaimer, we're a pretty balanced bunch who like both role-playing and some hack-n-slash in our games. We're not too much on the powergaming side, not too much on the metagaming side, not too much on the drama side, we don't care too much about the game simulating reality, we just want to have fun.

So, the DM tells us he has always wanted to run an all evil PC campaign. Our Star Wars campaign was winding down, so we thought, "sure, why not?" He decides to start us at 12th level with the appropriate amount of equipment (with a few caveats).

Our eyes lit up with greed; the last D&D game we played in was on the low magic side, so we were quite piggy with the magic items. We eagerly made mortal slayers, assassins with unholy short swords, etc., etc., etc. We were evil, we were armed to the teeth against good and if you pardon the pun, good to go...

...only to find that there are no good-aligned creatures in his world. Not one. We have been up against demons, devils, undead, giants, monstrosities of nature, aberrations, evil NPCs and yes, even slaad, but not so much as a single goodly peasant has crossed our path.

I got my revenge though. When my character died, my replacement character was a ranger/wizard/arcane archer with undead and evil outsider as her favored enemies. With a mighty composite long bow of evil outsider bane.

Sometimes it's good to be bad.