D&D General Should players be aware of their own high and low rolls?

[Maxperson]

Everything? No, but most stuff -- absolutely! It would be a weird world where the guild of fighters doesn't have library containing multiple copies of "Basic Monsters and their Abilities". Even in our world, those kind of books were best seller in the medieval and ancient world for people who were just curious!

Basic monsters would be orcs and goblins, maybe trolls and ogres. Anything more is rare and not basic. And that's if there's a fighter's guild and if you happen to be a member, rather than Joe the Farmer adventurer who picked up a sword and went out to seek his fortune.

If you were a specialist, you would not only know the MM, MM2, MM3 and every other book possible, but would have studied variants of all of them, misprints, notes on each of them by reknowned authorities -- a huge amount more.

Not in D&D. You seem to be under the misapprehension that all of the monsters are roaming the world in packs or something and people are putting the info on some magical internet. The PCs encounter monsters at a rate that is incredibly higher than the world at large(including fighter's guilds). If it wasn't, then the world died to monster invasions millennia ago.

There aren't enough high level people in the world, even in the Forgotten Realms, to handle all the monsters in the books if encountered at the rate that PCs encounter them. The PC's are special that way in order to make the game playable.

Knowing the contents of the MM is pretty trivial. How long would it take you personally to memorize it well enough to pass a basic exam. Two weeks? A month?

Decades of specialized study like a non-combat sage.

 

[Maxperson]

Man, I love how my players metagame. They don't wait for death saves to tick up before healing, they discuss what spells they're going to take so they don't double up, they push on in to danger instead of resting after every battle, they plead earnestly with the agent of the Zhentarim they just met, they stay committed to their course of rescuing their employer rather than abandoning him because it's only 10 gold, they don't steal from each other even though they steal from everyone else, the list goes on.

I don't allow metagaming and my games run the same way.

 

[iserith]

Again, how do you verify assumptions? You do it by using something to verify in the case of vulnerabilities it or by ignoring it in the case if resistances and immunities. So if I'm assuming a devil is immune or resistant to fire, I'm not going to waste a round casting firebolt at it to see if it really is immune. I'm going to use something else. If I assume that an earth elemental is vulnerable to thunder, I'm going to verify by using thunder. The assumptions are the metagaming. And yes, verifying or ignoring(depending on the metagaming) is a no brainer.

You're better off trying to recall lore about the devil or elemental first than potentially wasting a turn and/or a spell slot finding out it doesn't work. You said earlier, if I recall correctly, that when in doubt about whether a character knows something, players ask the DM what they know (or words to that effect). This is the same thing, but without the necessity of a social contract that declares "metagaming" forbidden or any sort of policing thereof. Players tend to mitigate risk and this is a typically a low-cost/low-risk mitigation method that, so far as I can tell, plays directly into what you want to see at the table. It has the added benefit of being actual doubt in the player's mind which would seem to align with the character's doubt in a way that someone with a "no metagaming" position would seemingly embrace. So why the objection?

 

[Xamnam]

I don't allow metagaming and my games run the same way.

But those are all metagaming actions. They're considerations borne out of acknowledging the game is the game and choosing actions based on external knowledge.

 

[overgeeked]

What about that it's not fun?

The players I've had in 5E seem to think it's fun to win. They can't abide any failure of any kind. Fail a check, dogpile to get a success. Run an official monster, they look up the stats. Run an official module, they look up the text. Anything less than hyper-optimal choices all the time every time and you suck. It's exhausting. Relax. The game is so drastically weighted in your favor that you're all but guaranteed to win with even the most suboptimal build imaginable. There's no achievements to be had. If you miss a single gold piece you haven't failed. You don't need to try so hard. Relax. It's a game.

 

[Maxperson]

You're better off trying to recall lore about the devil or elemental first than potentially wasting a turn and/or a spell slot finding out it doesn't work.

Is that a bonus action or "free" thing? If it is, then yes you're better off doing it. If no, then you're wasting a round that would be better spent being successful 7 out of 8 times.

 

[Xamnam]

The players I've had in 5E seem to think it's fun to win. They can't abide any failure of any kind. Fail a check, dogpile to get a success. Run an official monster, they look up the stats. Run an official module, they look up the text. Anything less than hyper-optimal choices all the time every time and you suck. It's exhausting. Relax. The game is so drastically weighted in your favor that you're all but guaranteed to win with even the most suboptimal build imaginable. There's no achievements to be had. If you miss a single gold piece you haven't failed. You don't need to try so hard. Relax. It's a game.

That's a real bummer. I've never seen a player like that.

 

[Lanefan]

Anyone who didn't know much about D&D, but read one of these threads, would think that the most interesting thing that happens in D&D play is deciding whether or not to attack trolls with fire. It's like the game has become a parody of itself:

I think that ship sailed many years ago and has long since found the sunset...

 

[iserith]

Is that a bonus action or "free" thing? If it is, then yes you're better off doing it. If no, then you're wasting a round that would be better spent being successful 7 out of 8 times.

The D&D 5e rules don't have any action cost to trying to recall lore to my knowledge.

 

[overgeeked]

Not in D&D. You seem to be under the misapprehension that all of the monsters are roaming the world in packs or something and people are putting the info on some magical internet. The PCs encounter monsters at a rate that is incredibly higher than the world at large(including fighter's guilds). If it wasn't, then the world died to monster invasions millennia ago.

I think that goes back to what was said earlier. It's almost impossible to separate player from character knowledge. The player knows all these things so they can't help but assume their common knowledge as a D&D player is common knowledge to the inhabitants of the in-game world. That's where the roleplaying comes in. And not giving the player more knowledge about the game world than their character would have.