What is the limit of metagaming?

lolwut

How can you possibly think that such a meta rule would apply to a POKEMON based game?

Isn't a pokedex literally item 1 every player should have in their inventory? Wouldn't that allow all meta gaming handwaving possible?

What the fuck are you doing?

Its not an instant use item, and in trainer battles its VERY much frowned upon. Not to mention that thing makes an ass load of noise and requires you to be fairly close, so hope you weren't hiding from that territorial carnivore. And it isnt perfect info, might give type and a couple other feature of the pokemon, but you'll miss out on a lot of the finer details like abilities and moves.

Finally who said they even had them? Sure the exsist, but they are hella expensive.

>Pokemon world

So what, you just go around catching pokemons?

Literally every game:

> I wander through the tall grass hunting new pokemon.

You hear a rustling sound. Make a perception check.

> I roll a 9. Plus 2 is 11.

You don't see it in time, and a wild pokemon appears, getting a drop on you!

. . . but that's OK since pokemon won't attack humans, only other pokemon.

> Do I know what type of pokemon it is?

Make a knowledge check. It's a high DC since you don't have a pokedex since I arbitrarily decided to not equip with one from the start and made them prohibitively expensive to purchase for some reason.

> I roll an 18. + 4 to grass or flying types.

It's a pidgey.

> AGAIN???

Bit closer to the games than that. Gym challenge, besting rivals, hanging with the pokebros, gambling on fights or doing odd jobs to keep up with wandering trainer life style, all that.

We basically voted on which region we liked best and ran there. I've extrapolated on the hows and whys that arent really covered or brought up in the games, and just in general added fluff to things that needed it. Theyre having a blast, and despite the fact the story is mostly the same, theyve said they like the new perspective on it.

>voted on which region we liked best
so how's johto treating you?

Not quite. Pretty low on our groups list honestly.

GET OUT.

Hey man its their list. Not like they hate it, just not their top.
However i have thought up a couple concepts for Johto if they want to run one there. Nothing too crazy, mostly tid bits on big NPCs like gym leaders.

Everytime my players metagame I give them 2d8 physic damage.

Each subsequent time it goes up by 1 dice.

I think there are games that are meant to be played like a JRPG on SNES and it's more of a mechanical challenge. Looking up reference material and conversing on strategy outside of the game is totally fine.

However, most of the games I personally run are intended to be a little more about the story or a sense of discovery, which is why I will reskin monsters or very lightly change descriptions so my players can't immediately recognize something as a rust monster and instead need to put together clues like all the rust and shit around.

Bottom line is that there is a limit to metagaming, but the limit is "when does it keep the game from being fun"?

Uh, in pretty much every pokemon media, Pokedex's dont come pre-loaded with readouts of all the pokemon. You have to actually encounter them before they're like OH HEY THIS IS A ________

Player knowledge = Character knowledge

If it's mentioned by name, it's something that we're supposed to know.

Lastly, if it's something that the player doesn't know, a knowledge check can give hints.

>Commoner knowing simple and notable weakness about famous monster
> Expert on MM
Sure man

>So every peasant should be an expert on the MM.
Sure, of the monsters commonly living in the area. Why shouldn't they know their habits and how to deal with them? They'd be long since dead if they didn't.

Peasants don't deal with monsters senpai.

They hire adventurers read: witchers to do it for them.

Peasants are stupid and illiterate most of the time. They think crazy shit about spooky things in the night from garlic to lines of salt to gnolls stealing babies.

A player character, regardless of its class, knows everything that they'd need to survive against most encounters that they're expected to survive against.

If someone's playing a commoner, then he's the one commoner out of a sizable population who has enough knowledge to survive against giant crabs. Trying to split hairs serves no purpose when you're playing a game like D&D where combat is the only thing that matters.

Alright dm, I'll make it easy for you.

Your game is your responsibility. If you want it to work a certain way, you are responsible for making it work.

Don't tell the players they're playing wrong. Fuck you dude, I'm doing what I want.

Instead, set up the game in such a way that the players will succeed by approaching problems with the correct attitude.

If a player always reads the rules, make rules up. Its the easiest shit in the world. I tell my players not even to bother reading the rules, because my system is designed so they don't need to know everything.

If a player looks up the damage a monster can do, have it do more damage. When they call you out on it, look in your notes and say "it says that right here!"

Promote a fun table, not a conflict between the players and the dm. Have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously. LOL!

No way. Peasants are better played where the ones who survived monsters and shit will be the old people who hand down wisdom to the next generation. There's a reason age was viewed as something to be highly respected, both because lasting that long was impressive and that they were essentially walking stores of knowledge that (typically) worked. Farmer Ted absolutely would know how to deal with some local monsters, it's one of the key parts of his survival, and he'd be sure to teach his kids that as well.

At the same time though, if Farmer Ted was meant to be an oldfag who just gave unsolicited advice to errant youths, he wouldn't be an adventurer in the first place.

That's kinda the defining aspect of a player character chief, they have levels. Ordinary dirt farmer would count as a level 0 nobody who dies to a goblin attack but if they had 1 level in peasant, that automatically places them on a higher echelon than people without that level.

Is this fucking stupid? Yes, but if the game recognizes the fact that you can earn a level in an NPC class then that's none of my fucking business if a GM allows a player to pull it off.

I meant Farmer Ted as an NPC, not a PC. If the players spoke with him and he said, "be careful, usually around this season the trolls are a bit more active. Make sure you keeps some big fires lit" I would say that's completely valid in world advice from an NPC like that

metagame.

does it alter the player's choice? should the character not know about it? then the character can only act upon it on a knowledge roll or a wisdom check, when appropiate.

if you think something is metagaming argue with your player whetever or not it would make sense.

" i hit the troll with my fire spell even if i don't know it's weak to fire because it's my most damaging spell anyway". that makes sense for example.

As a side note i am quite fucking sick of DMs putting knowledge rolls that require 15 to suceed at for fucking everything. Everyone knows trolls are weak to fire from bedtime stories and just by looking at the aspect of most creature you can guess what is resistant/weak to most of the times.

>just by looking at the aspect of most creature you can guess what is resistant/weak to most of the times.

>i am sure this sword will be perfect to fight those freaking skeletons!

>We live in a world where magic is almost 100% demonstrably nonexistent and the average citizen is almost guaranteed to know vampires can't stand sunlight or garlic.
The counterpoint to this is that people know more about popular fiction than they do about "regular" stuff. Ask any expert in a complicated but common field, like health or cooking or (in modern times) IT, regular people will try to get by on some astoundingly stupid "intuitive" solutions in everyday life.

Joe Peasant could well tell you that the way to ward off trolls is to recite your family tree backwards before locking the door and keep a sprig of nettles under your pillow, because hey, he's been doing that his entire life and he hasn't been eaten yet.

IT/medicine etc are rapidly evolving fields and even those that are experts in them don't really know much/everything.

Medical advice 100, 50 and 5 years ago differs. Vampires, on the other hand, are always vulnerable to garlic. In most fantasy settings knowledge of supernatural never becomes obsolete, unlike IT or medicine or any other field literally, especially considering most of the supernatural was around for thousands of years.

Metagaming is simple;

You make decisions about what you will do/how you will act based on information your character does not have access to.

>Continuing to search a room or for a trap after rolling a low Perception Check.

>Targeting an enemy based on what you know as a player, even if you've never seen it before.

It's not complicated.

Simple rule: If you do it, you are a failure and no one should ever play a game with you.

Be a man, let your DM roll your checks for you.

>We live in a world where magic is almost 100% demonstrably nonexistent and the average citizen is almost guaranteed to know vampires can't stand sunlight or garlic

And when that never, ever works because it's just a dumb superstition created by tavern tales, you know what will happen?

Nothing. People will still trying & use garlic & sunlight.

None of these are okay.

That said, it's easy to deal with.
"Stop looking up spells or I will kick you out." x2
>It's actually not a troll, after a few rounds you let the players roll some knowledge checks, one of them realises that this is a fire oni or something, and they get some RAGE bonuses when attacked by foreign fire!
>Your players are gonna make fun of the metagamer for a month because he jumped to conclusions

>you need to bend the rules.
That's a dangerously general statement.

It's physically impossible for the human mind not to act upon information that it has learned, if it wasn't the case then diseases like PTSD wouldn't exist in the first place.

If you continue searching the room because you know you rolled low, that's meta-gaming but if you stop searching the room even if you'd otherwise use stuff like detect magic, then that's also meta-gaming because the character has no reason not to scan the room for magic after searching for something with his ordinary senses.

If the player knows that they're fighting a werewolf, and they have a silver weapon of some sort, either they use that weapon, which is meta-gaming, or they don't use that weapon, which is still meta-gaming since they have no reason not to use said weapon.

This is why if you genuinely don't want your players to know something, you keep them in the dark as much as possible until the information becomes relevant enough to be discussed.

BUT BUT BUTU MUSBMSKDJFKSDKFK I NEED MY CWUUUUUUUUUSSS! ITS NOT FAIR WITHOUT MY CWUUUUUUUUUUUS!!

If you call it a troll, the players know it's a troll, and what makes it a troll.

If only I hadn't failed that bear lore check I wouldn't be dead in the back of this cave

Why would the party make fun of someone for upon a description that generally matches what a troll is supposed to look like in D&D? If anything, they'd probably make fun of the metagamer if he DIDN'T use fire against it or they'd make fun of the DM for trying to subvert expectations in the most ham-fisted way possible because the players weren't pretending to be retards for a few rounds.

I had a DM like you once, every vampire turned out to be buffed by sunlight, every troll was immune to fire, every werewolf was resistant to silver, etc. and let me tell you, it didn't really add anything to the game and it eventually fell through because everyone was sick of not knowing a damn thing about anything because the DM would always flip the script on us to be """""different""""""

Exactly, if you don't want it to be a troll, use a description instead of calling it out by name.

>That brings up another point. If a player wants to cast counterspell and needs to know the spell level to decide what level to cast it at, should they?

No, because spell level is more a game mechanic and you have no clue what slot it's being cast from. Did that to one of my players who kept a list of spell levels from common monsters. I'd start using lower levels scaled high to make him burn his counter spells for metagaming.

He stopped when they almost tpked because fireballs are a bitch.

>>Monster casts a spell
>>Player looks up that spell
How does he know what the spell is?

also
>monsters using the same spells as players

>because spell level is more a game mechanic
Nada, spell levels are actually a part of the D&D universe.

>Player takes the time to learn how the game works
>THAT DM punishes the player for being smart by almost causing a TPK.
People like you are why D&D gets a bad name.

I mean, what are the odds that someone living in a standard D&D setting wouldn't know what a troll looks like?

Not that user, but isnt the real problem here a combination of DMs recycling the same monsters all the time (or over reliance on beastiary, take your pick) and players bringing in previous knowledge dispite being in a spot it shouldnt apply?

Perhaps in the world the GM is running with in their setting, a troll isnt similar to the standard "kill with fire" kind. I think players should take time to learn from the setting they are in and see about getting clues to a monster's weakness that way as apposed to just jumping to "oh, the villiger name dropped 'troll', better prep fire spells and lots of torches". At least IMO, sound like more fun to have more non-combat interaction researching your foes before just charging in once you hear what the villigers call the beast.

It's all in the hands of the DM telling the players what their characters know or have concluded.
Search the room, roll a 4, "You scan the room high and low and can't find the key you are looking for, it doesn't seem to be here"

Pretty high if they
A) dont live in an area with a troll problem.
B) dont live in/have lived in a major city where much commerce takes place AND have job where they interact with those coming to trade .
C) are literal peasants who's major concerns in life are farming and keeping livestock/vermin out of their crops. Might have knowledge on those matters but not much else besides over fluffed stories the bards tell them

You cannot expect someone to just forget information as pertinent as monster weaknesses, especially in a game like D&D where inexperience goes hand-in-hand with a grisly, yet avoidable, death.

Even if we assume that these aren't your grandpappy's trolls, why the fuck would anyone say that trolls are weak to fire if the trolls in this hypothetical setting get rage bonuses from fire instead?

It's a copout that most DM's use to make themselves feel clever, even when it sacrifices basic logic and makes their entire world feel artificial, that anything you learn changes the way the world works, so the best way to play is to go in blind like you're playing a forgotten realms game as a level 1 character because everything scales to your level.

>Player takes the time to learn how the game works

Having had no contact with these enemies before he would have no knowledge other than metagaming. He literally made the list having an idea of what they were going to be facing, and tried it more than once in that campaign.

You want to roll a check fine ask, but don't go and look up the monsters prior then making a sheet to know they're exact abilities are when you're character has no fucking clue what they are or can do.

I stand corrected then, it was my understanding that spell slots weren't an IC thing.

>Player: "its a troll everyone cast fire spells"

And disallowing this metagame knowledge is incredibly tedious outside of your first D&D campaign

dms should be prepared to metagame anyway. the game system is so old its perfectly fine to do this. thats like saying "WOW DUDE WERE PLAYING MONOMPOLY AND YOU DREW THE CHANCE CARD BUT YOU ALREADY KNOW WHATS GOING TO HAPPENS AS A RESULT OF THAT U TDff

What? Make him use his Knowledge (Arcane) stat, that's pretty much the only reason it exists. Enemy starts casting a spell, he rolls knowledge to see if he can identify it, and then chooses whether he wants to try and counterspell it. Low rolls mean he can't identify the level or misidentifies it, mid levels and he just knows the spell level, and then high rolls tell him the level and specific spell so he can make sure it's a spell worth countering.

>Having had no contact with these enemies before he would have no knowledge other than metagaming. He literally made the list having an idea of what they were going to be facing, and tried it more than once in that campaign.
So you're saying that libraries don't exist in your setting? You're saying that nobody in the entire world ever tried publishing the in-game equivalent of a bestiary because someone found these monsters to be fascinating or some shit?

You could've just hand-waved it and rewarded the player for giving a shit about the campaign to plan for an upcoming encounter or something but then again, that would require you to be a good DM and unfortunately, those tend to be in short supply nowadays.

Monopoly isn't a roleplaying game you sperg.

A question for and every player from a person who never played.

How would giving players a time limit in where they need to perform the action sit with them?
E.g.
Its players turn to attack and the DM gives them a certian amount of time (2min, or something). If they don't decide on what to do you say that they are frozen in fear or something and did nothing this turn.

stupid fucker, you rol the dice u play the game. #englishishard #firstworldproblems #autism

>>Player: "its a troll everyone cast fire spells"
stop it from happening. If his character doesn't know that its a troll and doesn't know they are weak to fire then make throw every spell except fire before getting to it.
Or just roll a dice to decide what spell he is using

I'd be ok with that, the problem was he came in with a sheet of all the enemies abilities and didn't ask or roll for anything.

So I finally got fed up after asking him not to and to make checks in character, it led to a couple high level fireballs after he burned a couple counter spells. He almost did it again but the others at the table were fed up because even they knew it was metagaming.

I say characters should have a general feel for what the results of a die roll are. When I do a shitty job looking for something in my apartment, I know I didn't look as hard as I could have. However, when I search every cranny and can't find the damn thing I know I put in a good effort.

Again, if the player has a means to double-check the room even though he found nothing the ordinary way, there's still nothing stopping them from checking the room using extraordinary means, such as detect magic, locate object, scent, etc. beyond meta-gaming knowledge that they already failed a roll and cannot check the room again, even if there's no logical reason why they wouldn't.

You honestly sound like THAT DM and you deserve one another.

Im not saying forget what previous campaigns tought you. Im saying recall it, then take a step back to look futher into the matter and confirm if what you know holds true once again.

Never did i say the hypothetical trolls become enraged by fire nor did i say in that situation that an NPC told you they were weak to fire just to lie to later in the fight, i just said they might not operate on the same rules.

And no i dont think its a cop out. If at the first mention of a troll problem your PC immediately starts gathering fire, despite it not being mentioned as a weakness in game ornot having had previous IC knowledge of trolls or not making some check to see if you do know, then yes you earned getting fucked over. How hard is it to stop and gather more information before going into combat?

Okay then that's fair, once you tell him not to use his monster list the first time and he keep going against it he's trampled upon the fundamental basics of the DM-player interaction which D&D is based upon.

I'm confused by this situation. How can the player look at a table and just know what an enemy is casting? Even if it is a monster, they generally have several Spell-Like Abilities, so he'd have to guess what the opponent is casting. Unless you just told him what they were casting, instead of asking for a Knowledge(Arcana) like you should have.

>All these assumptions

Jesus if they had bothered doing any of that before the encounters or IC yes they would have had a chance to find that knowledge. However the group tends to fly by the seat of their pants, so none of them bothered doing any of what you assume they'd try.

They went in blind ran into these things and we had to wait till next game, next game rolls around and he's brought in a sheet based on the description I gave.

How hard is it for you just to either a) let trolls be weak to fire and plan around the fact that we aren't a party of fucktards or b) not mention the creature by name so we don't automatically start grabbing torches the moment we hear about something big, green, and scary wrecking shit across the countryside?

If you don't want us to grab torches to murder trolls, stop mentioning them by name. If you don't want us to figure out that it's a troll based on a description, stop using trolls. If you don't want your party to utilize their experience as players to overcome the challenges that you set before them, then get a new group comprised of people who haven't played the game and will still be dumbfounded once you throw a troll at them.

What you're basically doing is saying "well hey, I know you've already beaten this video game on the highest possible setting and all, but can you please go through this tutorial so I can teach you how to play the game?"

It gets old.

If they have an extraordinary means to search the room and for some reason didn't use it the first time, I can't see anything wrong with letting them use the extraordinary tool to search the room after failing to find anything.
They obviously believe something was hidden in the room to begin with, or they wouldn't have searched it in the first place, so finding nothing while having the tools to do a more thorough search is a good reason to use those tools.
What's not okay is constantly searching over and over until you get a good roll before moving on, because there's no reason the character would want to search the room repeatedly despite finding nothing.

I'd give a description of what the enemy was doing, when he said I'd like to counter spell I told him ok and have him either make the roll for counter, cancel it out, or have no effect because it was an ability.

Not sure how'd that go over assuming what Veeky Forums postulates is a typical game group. I'd imagine butthurt would insue and immediatley someone would demand the same rule apply to the GM controlling NPCs.

As a GM ive never had a set timer, but if we pause midround to talk out another characters options for to long i will stop them and demand an action or forfiet their turn. When this happens they do get to roll insight and learn something before they act next round, be it some environmental clue or wether one enemy has a weak point.

My main issue is does your character know this? For trolls I assume it's a a general knowledge things, especially among smaller towns.

>Jesus if they had bothered doing any of that before the encounters or IC yes they would have had a chance to find that knowledge. However the group tends to fly by the seat of their pants, so none of them bothered doing any of what you assume they'd try.
Does it really matter how his character accessed this information though? Does it really require a "rocks fall, everyone dies" just because the player utilized knowledge to overcome an obstacle?

Look man, the only people making assumptions here is you and these hypothetical players were talking about. Never at any point does it make sense that a thing's name instantly conveys all possible information about something when youve never heard of the thing before. The arguements youve prwsented basically point down to
>just let us meta game
And everything im asking is is just to invest a little more in your setting and have your character's actions have a reasoning behind them that exists WITHIN their knowledge, not just your own.

My DM lets players get an auto 20 on the dice if we're not in a hurry
Basically he says we take a few minutes more than normal but really look things through

Well what's the difference between searching the room utilizing an extraordinary means and rerolling a search check until they get a good number?

As long as there's no time crunch or anything, there's no reason why a player couldn't search the room as many times as they need just to make 100% sure that they didn't miss anything important.

Sounds like you were butthurt you couldn't metagame

At the level where you're casting counterspell, you're already a seasoned adventurer that had to have at least heard about these creatures from other adventurers at some point during your journey.

>Look man, the only people making assumptions here is you and these hypothetical players were talking about. Never at any point does it make sense that a thing's name instantly conveys all possible information about something when youve never heard of the thing before.
If I know the thing's name, chances are I'm familiar with more information concerning what it is.

I mean what, you think people just read the word "Dog" or "Elephant" and close the book before seeing a picture and brief description of what those things are?

They tell you "Oh hey, this is a GRASS-TYPE POKEMON and if your dumb ass had been paying any attention you'd know that GRASS is weak to FIRE, BUG and FLYING. So use your FIRE-TYPE you fucking dolt."

>In a role-playing game does it matter if a character knows everything about these enemies
>Even if they've done nothing to learn it or encountered them before in the game

Yes it does matter

I'm more butthurt that valuable time is being wasted jumping through arbitrary hoops just so I don't get accused of meta-gaming when in any other game on the planet, I'm encouraged as a player to utilize information that I've gained in order to make informed decisions that would allow me to overcome the obstacles set before me.

Yet in tabletop RPG's, I'm supposed to pretend to be the noob and come up with a convoluted reason for why my character knows as much as I do as a player, when the focus of the game should be exploration, interacting with NPC's, and surviving combat.

Do you understand why this is a tad asinine in practice?

Depends on the game
I played some games that if you don't metagame hard you simply can't win, if you act "realistically" you already lost

It's the same thing as when in some games electricity harms machines, in others it heals them
I don't like the idea of needlessly subverting everything all the time, but doing it from time to time makes things interesting

It really doesn't. It only seems like it matters because you need everything to fit within the narrative, which coincidentally also requires that everyone involved is a dullard who was literally born yesterday.

Nobody gives a fuck if someone says "look out, it's a X! They'll Y at/to us but we can defend ourselves by using Z" and getting caught up in the how and why just slows the game down and breaks the immersion.

Again dude, thats player knowledge, which wont always line up with character knowledge.

>It's the same thing as when in some games electricity harms machines, in others it heals them
Why would electricity "heal" a machine? Is this given an actual reason that our characters would know about or is it just there to serve as a "gotcha" moment for when someone shoots lightning at it, hoping that it'd short circuit.

Also, I'd probably just shoot it with water if electricity didn't work since there are less machines that are water-proof than there are machines that are resistant to surges.

Why though? Why is it hard to just say "well, they're adventurers, they have X levels, they have at least one dude with decent INT, and they travel a lot, so who cares" or something to that effect?

In some games machine enemies are vulnerable to electricity because it short circuits them, in other they're weak to water but electricity charges them up and heals them
This
Just because a guy can read doesn't mean his illiterate barbarian can read

Except it does, if these characters have never run into these things and have done nothing to even try and prepare themselves, which I gave several hints to do, then why should I just allow them to metagaming that they always knew?

What breaks immersion is someone who has been unable to answer a single question about x to suddenly know how to counter x flawlessly with no check and no roll.

Assumptions assumptions. Who said we didnt start at lv 1? Who said anything about skimming travel and such?

You really want to meta game dont you?

Assuming you're the same user who said that he threw fireballs of higher level at someone for meta-gaming, a mage with access to counterspell would have to be level 5 at least since it's a 3rd level spell.

Also, unless you've been keeping them within the same area for five levels and just throwing progressively stronger enemies at their base of operations, it's generally assumed that they'll have to travel in order to accomplish whatever overarching quest you're sending them on.

Finally, they'd still be adventurers and at least one person would have high INT since they'd be capable of casting counterspell.

You really just want to punish people for being smart don't you?

Is that a motherfucking Gloamgloazer?

Loved those books, and I swear that remains one of the most interesting non generic fantasy creatures I've seen. Hell, those books in general were amazing for that

Ask your DM what your character knows.