If my character fail a knowledge check about trolls, how many spell slots do I have to waste so I'm not metagaming?

The thing is if your character fails a check you don't suddenly avoid the right answer like the plague. You look at the situation and think "What would my character do in this situation". Fire is a common form of damage. If your character's first resort is NORMALLY fire then default to it as always.

If you fail the check you do not even know what regeneration is (or how it works). And thus you won't care until the troll doesn't stay dead.

>That's nonlethal damage though

Wut? What book are you playing with?

Or when it's wounds start closing. Not a very large leap of logic to then try out burning it's regeneration

Yes it is because regeneration is not always shut off by fire. "The wounds are closing" isn't a "then we have to burn it" situation. Hell, if it was a rock troll fire doesn't turn off their regeneration, should you just assume acid with them? Or would you not know and thus have to guess and check?

There are five elements, likely you'll be able to produce 2, maybe 3. Fire is the most common element so going for burning first may be simple enough. Commonality in spells goes:
Fire > Acid > Cold > Electricity > Sonic

Honestly it just depends on what you produce. A character shouldn't suddenly do something they wouldn't normally to stop something when they don't know what that something is, especially if they "happen" to get the right answer.

3.5. Regeneration is not just Fast Healing: it converts all damage except for the types that defeat the regeneration into nonlethal damage. Thus while you can beat a troll into unconciousness with a sword or even cut it into pieces, it will not die: the pieces, unless burned in fire or acid, will regenerate back into a troll.

Or if the pieces are separated and placed into too small of containers to grow a troll. That is what happened when my players ended up all failing their checks for a troll. They hacked it into 6 pieces and placed them into separate chests.

Luckily one of the PCs was the assassin PrC and trolls are not immune to death effects so he ended up assassinating them until they had one left (the head) which they kept in a crate stuffed full of saw dust.

Well that's fine. They can see that shit and then figure out a solution from there. DM might even give re-rolls at that point.

That troll not having toes is bothering me so much for some reason...

I just assume that everything someone who is reasonably pop-culture aware would know is common knowledge in a fantasy world. Silver kills werewolves. Vampires hate garlic. Trolls hate fire. Don't chop off a hydra's head. Shit like that. I'm not going to expect my players (or my characters, when I'm playing) to be so unaware of the world they're *actually living in* that they'd know less about it that I would from watching Disney movies and Turner Classic.

Is your character smart enough to be aware that burned flesh doesn't heal normally on humans, and to extrapolate from that, "hey, what if I hold my torch to the wound I made with my sword so it won't heal?"

If so, then you can figure it out that way.

>fail knowledge check
>don't know common variety troll weaknesses
>also don't realize this is a Azarol troll that suffers no extra ill effects from fire
>in fact it's regeneration is stopped only by extreme cold
>metagaming rollplay faggot gets mad that all his slots are "wasted" on fire spells

D&D is a game of player skill. If your character dies because you made him or her make a bad choice, you've lost the game. If you can come up with an in-game reason your character might know or figure out that trolls are hurt by fire, then you can make your character do it. Hell, burn tissue doesn't heal normally on humans so it makes sense to give it a shot.

>not realizing D&D is a game that is about winning or losing rather than "telling a story"
>not realizing the best stories are those that emerge from trying to overcome challenges

I bet you fudge dice rolls, too.

>>not realizing D&D is a game that is about winning or losing rather than "telling a story"

Scorching memes, baitbot.

No, it's true. If you want to emphasize story, play a storygame. They tend to be better at it than games where 99% of the rules are centered around resource management and cleverly not dying while you're stuck in a hole full of monsters.

Fudging dice rolls is cheating. Metagaming is cheating. You want to cheat on a game of skill. Player skill is the ability to construct a character. Metagaming is specifically something that is against the game's rules (spoken out against as general practice by developers, gynax himself, and been called out in the DMG before).

You're the cheating faggot here user.

If your character does not know he should not go out of his way as if he knew the right answer. This is why I use enemies with weaknesses that are not commonly known, to thwart metagaming faggots like you.

I really don't give a shit.

If you can give me a sensible or convincing justification for your knowledge, then I won't give you any grief for it.

For something like trolls, I consider that common knowledge that any serious adventurer would know, so you don't even have to justify it.

What exactly is the problem here?

I know in the real world there are very few things which are not "weak" to fire. A fire is essentially rapid oxidation in the combustion process, which means u need fuel and an oxidant. If the troll even remotely looks like fuel, and is an oxygen rich atmosphere, then it will probably burn. Good bye hydrocarbons, hello carbondioxide and water. You should be trying to burn almost fucking everything if "dealing damage" is the game you are playing. In fact, it makes sense for you to always try fire first (except in the rare but obvious cases of things which are obviously made of fire, or where it cannot get an oxidant/no fuel such as trying to burn water). Fucking fire man
Burn shit

Here's another (you). Don't spend it all at once.

The example becomes more obvious when you use something that has regeneration where fire does not shut it off.

Let us say a theoretical monster, Carl. Carl has regeneration that is only stopped by sonic damage. In a previous game one of the players encountered a Carl and thus knows sonic damage kill it. Carls are not common monsters, and it likely the first time any person have seen one, but maybe they read about it (knowledge checks). However they all fail and thus no character knows how to stop a Carl's regeneration. Except the player who knows it is sonic damage.

Should they immediately use a sonic damaging spell even if they character normally uses acid?

In D&D and Pathfinder at least, fire is the single most common resistance among monsters. If it has resistances, more often than not fire will be among them, so it usually pays to use a less common element. Sonic damage in particular is almost totally unresisted.

But that's CharOp stuff, so even using damage spells is considered less effective than other things. I still like fire.

Having no knowledge of the creature, but knowledge of fire, and understanding that most things burn in the world,... I would probably try fire, and if that somehow didn't work, then explosions. If you can't burn shit down, you blow it up. Explosions make sense for anyone. Explosions produce a lot of pressure waves so there you have sound damage up the ass and Carl can RIP in pieces. Also explosions often contain fire, so fuck it I'm going to try fiery explosions every time now if I can. Throw a fucking dynamite stick at everything I encounter.

see
explosions man. You try explosions.

Explosions would make a rock troll stronger. All the bits would turn into more trolls.

Why is the GM telling the players they're fighting a troll before they make their knowledge check?

I don't think I've ever just said to my players "suddenly a Troll pops out!" without figuring out that my players would recognize a Troll first. If it's anything besides the core player classes being encountered, I usually say "You encounter a seven-foot tall humanoid with rough looking skin and a lumbering gait, dragging a crude club across the ground," which could be any variety of large humanoid, or "you encounter a pack of diminutive humanoids - they are thin, and as they bark orders at each other in a strange language you can see their sharp teeth in the darkness" which could be any number of small humanoids.

You only should know you're fighting "a troll" or "goblins" or anything of that sort once you've passed the knowledge check to begin with. There's no metagaming if the wizard doesn't realize he's up against a troll, because then the player character doesn't get to know he's up against a troll either.

Pretty much everything that isn't on fire, made of fire, or some fireproof substance, is weak or at least very annoyed by fire.
Now if his weakness wasn't one of the most common elements to summon and one of the most popular spells to cast, that'd be different.

>That picture

"The arrows just made it madder!"

"I TOLD YOU THE ARROWS WOULD MAKE IT MADDER KEEP PADDLING"

Explain to me how I'm supposed to actually know what I would do in a world where I don't know, without either intentionally using information too early or intentionally avoiding figuring out when I might.

I absolutely agree DMs should use stuff people don't recognize, and create their own situations, but it DOES make sense to use fire if you don't want a human to heal, and likewise to use it if you don't want something else to heal. If you give me something that doesn't look at all like a troll, and it heals fast, and I want to kill it, I'm likely to try to cut off a hand, for instance, and burn the stump so it can't heal. That's why Hercules figured out to use fire for the hydra. He didn't try icewater and pissing on it first.

In the book that literally inspired D&D trolls, law/chaos alignment, paladins, and swanmays, the protagonist was a Danish engineer shipped into fantasyland.

Guess how much metagaming he did. Go on, I dare you.

I like you.

I agree. It's reptilian, and almost certainly swamp-dwelling. It should have toes, and webbed toes at that.

Biology is descriptive you want-to-be intellectual.

he's right though. look at the split of the character sheets. the vast majority is given to combat-related areas rather than skills
then compare that to the FATE character sheet

the DMG even says that the ideal game still has a fair amount of combat, because that's just how the exp system is built to work

I don't follow. I'm just trying to think of any turtles, alligators or similar I've ever seen that had feet like that.
Nothing comes to mind except tortoises, which still have the semblance of toes.

Something got you on edge?

Biological taxonomy is used to describe life in its various forms, and try to categorize it. It is not some rigid structure handed down from god that tells us what to call each thing.

If [thing] is discovered that doesn't fit into the established categories, that's 'cause the established categories are wrong, or not all-encompassing, and need revision.
It's not because [thing] can't exist, or was badly designed.

In that vein, saying a dragon has to be a reptile because it has scales (for example) is pretty dumb. Bizarre fantasy creatures don't necessarily have to comply with current-day precepts of modern biology, and it's dumb to think they should.

The prescriptivist vs descriptivist language is from grammar and language, though. Initially the split was on whether dictionaries should prescribe how language is supposed to be used, or describe how it is actually used. (Proper English vs slang, drift, and loan words.)

One that really bothers me is I have a DM who wont let me know if I'm doing any damage in general for some enemies. I get that I don't inherently know how much damage reduction or what it is bypassed by, but he insists that there would be no visible clues for if what we do would show any damage half the time. I blame you fucks who think HP is luck or some shit instead of meat points.

Thank god there are other games to play

I think trolls are common enough that knowledge about them is like knowledge of bees.

Dont fuck with them and if youre a learned man, use fire and smoke.

One thing a lot of monster manual could benefit from is clarifying just what common knowledge of a creature is

I mean yeah.

Its not a dragon or avoleth, motherfuckers should be common enough for housewives going " oh you watch yourself boy, if you meet a troll on the road then a torch is a life saver" or something.

I hate it when fantasy games dont handle its monsters like just more natural innhabitants of the world.

What
said. Fire is my go to spell generally unless I know better of I'm fighting something that obviously has an immunity of sorts, like breathing fire is already on fire.
Even then, fire is good for attacting attention so o
the group's more combat focused members had time to get into a good position.

> is already on fire

It's disturbing how much of a common occurrence this is.

I don't mind not treating monsters as just another natural inhabitant of the world so long as they are genuinely a rare, unique or legendary thing

I hate posting on my phone. Dropped and subtituted words, an unnecessary line break and I can't scroll back to check what I wrote.

The vast majority of people are shit at descriptions and use commonly shared assumptions about things to relate ideas and images to each other. You can't expect humans to function otherwise

They look like hooves to me.

>be wizard
>fail int check

yeah no

>be druid
>don't know the produce flame cantrip

>be cleric
>don't know the sacred flame cantrip

etc.

fire is always usefull on any character.

What kind of game are you playing that wizards are capable of maxing all knowledges? And fire is a terrible damage type in general, as points out.

Fire cantrips are literally magical lighters. How do you intended to cook while traveling? Flint and steel? Don't make me laugh.

So one of the things that influenced D&D is essentially isekai bullshit.

What does that have to do with anything? Fireball is still a terrible spell to use if you suspect the enemy has resistances, because more often than not one of those resistances is fire.

Read the post you're replying to more closely next time.
>be druid
>don't know how to produce flame cantrip
>be cleric
>don't know the sacred fire cantrip
>etc.

Come on.

Literally nothing to do with my point, retard.

I don't think we're on the same page. At all.

The conversation that I'm in concerns the fact that fire is easily available, simply by using a cantrip on a branch to make an improvised torch.
You don't need fireball to have fire against trolls.

Moreover, fire is always useful. Human history should be evidence enough of that, simply for cooking food and staying warm.

Anything popculture related seems ok to me. Basically if you know it off the top then odds are your character would know it. Medusa, hydra, the bread n butter of fantasy settings basically.

Anything obscure is a no-go imo, you'd have to have read the monster manual to infer it's weaknesses.

>The conversation that I'm in concerns the fact that fire is easily available, simply by using a cantrip on a branch to make an improvised torch.

We're talking about failing a knowledge check and therefore not knowing that you NEED to use fire.

Outside D&D, how often do trolls have a specific weakness to fire?

The only correct way to handle this is for the DM to concede that this information is as common knowledge in his fantasy world as it is in our world.

Not him, but there's a second plane to this question:

"within the D&D setting (presumably Forgotten Realms), how common is knowledge that trolls are weak to fire?"

The inhabitants of Nesme certainly are aware that trolls are weak to fire, since every year they ride into the swamp burning it back to secure their borders. Anyone living in the area or at all familiar with Nesme should be aware that trolls are weak to fire therefore, while a dockrat from one of the great coastal cities like Deepwater would have no clue.

Nah. Just use the meta knowledge against the players. See It's the same as WoD making garlic and crosses not work against vampires.

If you look at how people used to play D&D, you'll realise that what people call Metagaming isn't metagaming, it's roleplaying. Pretending to not know stuff about the game world is something players could do to accomodate a bad game master, but that's it.

On the other hand, all those ideas about balance, builds, whether something is over/under-powered and the notion that there are story arcs to follow, those are all what could reasonably be called meta-gaming.

Depends ENTIRELY on the specifics of the setting and the background of the characters - that is, assuming they even recognize the said monster as a troll. It's not modern world, someone who lived their entire life in a desert would almost certainly have no idea what a bear looks like.

Yeah that works just fine. I said it under the assumption that the DM wants to keep the troll as is.

That's true, but i think about it this way: it's my job as a DM to accomodate the game world in order to justify that at least one of the players has this knowledge (assuming they have it IRL).
There are a number of ways to do it organically even if they come from a completely different locations where troll are unheard off.

To me every other solution is still metagaming and unfun for the players.

Just use fire you fucks, I didn't plan for the encounter to take this long or be this lethal.

>That's true, but i think about it this way: it's my job as a DM to accomodate the game world in order to justify that at least one of the players has this knowledge (assuming they have it IRL).

I disagree. If they fail the knowledge check to identify it, then they fail the knowledge check. "Oh fuck, it's some sort of ogre thing that keeps healing itself. What do we do?" is much more interesting that "Oh, a troll. I fireball it. How much XP do we get?"

Further, if you think it's your job to make sure at least one of the players has that knowledge no matter what, then why are you using a system that even has knowledge skills?

That's not right though, because its become so widely know that the players know how this is going to end. It's like a romcom, it's only interesting at this point if they don't get together.

It's only interesting if you're not actually using a troll.

Not everyone is as jaded as you are.

see how does the party know it's a troll if they fail the knowledge check to identify it?
Or, if trolls are common enough knowledge that no check is required, why should their legendary weakness to fire remain unknown behind a skill check?

Well that's reserved for very common knowledge that the player is likely to act upon even if the does not want to metagame.

In the situation OP is describing if they fail the knowledge check the game devolves into either tricking the DM into thinking you're not acting out of metagame knowledge or genuinely trying to ignore such knowledge which is frustrating for the player and almost impossible to do correctly due to the way the brain works.

sacred flame does radiant damage

The GM already fucked up for referring to the monster as a troll if none of the PCs already know what a troll is. IMO if the GM refers to an enemy by its name straight out of the Monster Manual then he probably doesn't care about metagaming.

>because more often than not one of those resistances is fire
Now you are meta gaming.

The simplest solution is to change the names of trolls

The only question is in what?
I suggest in Carl.