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Where can I get the green figure on the stack of books behind pruitt at 4:07 as well as the orange cyclops in the book shelf at 4:14 also behind Pruitt.
Hey just want to say I am a huge fan of what you guys do and it's really helped be improv my games for my players. I have a question though. Have you ever put thought into a modern day setting for D&D?
We played a bit of d20 modern and other systems like it back in the day, but you're right, we haven't talked about modern settings much on the channel!
I’m not opposed to the “are you sure” question because there are certain things that the character should know that maybe the player doesn’t. It’s the reverse of meta gaming. For example, if the player is about to cast that Fireball and take out half his party you might say “Are you sure you want to do that?” Because the Wizard who is trained in magic would know that’s a bad idea even if the player didn’t stop to think about it.
as a newer game i was also somewhat curious about this, the way i see metagaming is that it goes both ways, your character doesnt know everything you know, and he might know stuff that you dont know. I had a dude in my party that wanted to use scorching ray on tiny pixies, i asked him "Are you sure, you can see that these creatures are barely bigger then your hand, and your character knows that this decision means he has less power against the giant ogre zombie right infront of you", if he said "yes" then sure, i would let him do it, but he was a new player too. The way i understand it is if its something horredeously dumb then you ask "are you sure" because otherwise they might blame you for "not enough knowledge", that if they are about to do something absolutely insane i assume they are missing information that i didnt convey "are you sure you want to cross the bridge with the rotten planks and a rope that are held together by a couple of threads due to decay?" which jim also mentions about pruitts lavachute jump, so he seems to be contradicting himself from what he normally says which is... odd.
I think that the guys are more of a mind that instead of saying are you sure, that you should instead be doing something else to point it out. Like for the tiny pixies, have the player roll a knowledge arcana roll and anything short of a nat 1 tell him the logical side of your mind is telling you that this might be a bad idea because of Y. For something you might not have described well enough, before you actively have them move over have them do a perception check; and then depending on how well they roll you appropriately describe condition of the bridge. I don't think Jim is contradicting himself. In this case he is referring specifically to DMs putting in some item, event, or whatever and then when the group chooses to interact with it as intended the DM decides that the event will negatively affect the group so does the "Are you sure?" to make the player rethink what they are doing because the DM changed their mind about wanting to do the event. Pruitt's lavachute jump on the other hand was something that he had not planned on happening at all, it was just something that a player did unexpectedly which would have had a high probability of turning out badly.
See that is the issue that he seems to assume that the players interacting with something bad is just because you put it in the game and "regret" it without going into the nuances of "Maybe its there as scenery, maybe its there as unsolvable, etc" looking at guy's from "how to be a great dm" talking about metagaming he also suggests that if players are about to do something because they think they are invulerable or that everything HAS to have a solution he would say "are you sure? it might not have a solution". Forexample if i say they see a giant brazier with smoke coming up from it, some players might assume there arent fire in it if i doesnt specify it, and some might think there are fire in it. people might have different images from the description so i think its better to ask "are you sure, there seems to be burning hot coal at the bottom that are fire in" and they go "oh i thought it was just burned out embers", i agree on the whole "add tips" parts, if something is dangerous there should be a sign, or have heard rumours or see corpses lying around something
The way i handle that kind of thing is I just say for example 'You know you will hit half your party, you can, I'm just checking', just to make sure I don't sound like the 'are you sure?', as web dm are talking about
I always make a quick consideration about if their character would know they're about to blast their allies. If they have never seen or used the spell before, I let it happen. If they have used or seen it though, I straight up just tell them "hey check the area of effect on that, just in case" then they have the choice to do so or not. I'm there to help my players have a good time, not look like a moustache twirling asshole who sees them all die and go "goooood"
When I was young and totally believed the me vs them. Now: "I think I forgot to put another potion in my inventory" "Okay, then write it down" "You trust me? " ". . . We're grown men playing a game of pretend . . ." Now that I think about it, it wasn't much of a response. But they understood and we laughed.
Hopefully something similar doesn't happen to me. I'm gonna start a campaign soonish and for a bit, a lot of the monsters are going to have maximized HP and hit slightly harder (basically they are all on a super soldier serum created by one of the big bads), then some magical DNA effecting will start happening and monsters with tweaked powers/weaknesses will happen, and then full on fusions where it would be 2 monsters combined to create new species and sub species. The goal isn't even to combat player knowledge, its just an idea that stemmed from me thinking "you know what would be cool? a steam elemental. just a blob of living steam. i guess it'd be kind of a fusion between a fire and water elemental...huh, monster fusions...in smell inspiration."
Hahonryuu I think a good way to prevent the problem is to have some indication that there's something different with the monster. Just the appearance of the ability to have figured it out beforehand is often enough.
i have had this ones from one player who didnt like i have a new ability to one monster. i just told him that i didnt want him to be able to look up all monster and just Meta game tho it. he get upset but the group agreed with me, i think its really a question about what most of the group wants, in my case it was only one person that didnt like it. i am not sure if i did the right thing or not but at the end of the day every monster/encounter in the books are mostly only a template for a general idea about what the monster does
Yeah. I think that players can feel that you're cheating if you build expectations and then suddenly break them without warning. They can quickly learn, however, to expect the unexpected.
Last time it happened, they were overt about it and complained that the combat was 'Deadly' during the fight. I didnt play with that group again after that. Clearly there was a miss match.
... In high school, I use to know 2nd editions basic monster manual completely... And believe me : 1 - a good player rolls with the DM (if the statistics are off, respect thd DM modification and smile at how they were modified for your group : it,s flatering and it tell how much the DM wants to work for the group to be surprised) 2 - a good player helps discreetly the DM (whisper powers & abilities the DM oversees while dealing with both the group of players and the monsters, again, smilling at hiw much a DM sometime needd to modify &/or ignore said power & abilities) 3 - a good player knows the book is playground, the players/monsters are the ones making the actions and as such, looking up at deadlines, CR, etc. can be funny but should never be the center of attention (smile! It's a compliment from the DM when he confronts your team with harsh challenge, as long as he isn't playing DM VS players... And again, smile... And leave if it keeps being that kind of games)
This is a great viewpoint that I will try to remember in the future. I've played in games where that is an issue to some players who it feels like the DM is out for blood.
The main kind of metagaming I dont like is this. Player A and Player B have a private scene between their characters to do something on the down-low, perhaps shady, which isn't anything to do with the rest of the characters. All of the players watch this scene, but their characters are not privy to this knowledge. Then as soon as Player C is in a scene with them again, Player C has their character ask them all kinds of details like: "Where ya been? Doing anything shady? Can you explain where you've been?". I can't stand this kind of behavior ... its a complete abuse of metagaming, not to mention the fact that it shows the Spotlight Jealousy of Player C. Basically I hate it when players use metagaming at the expense of other players and/or to ride alpha-dog over other players.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. If a Player is using OOC Knowledge in-game that their own Character didn't actually know or is using the OOC Knowledge to be a detriment/dick/arse/etc, then both aren't & should NOT be allowed.
There are some OOC Knowledge that would/could be allowed, if that OOCK helps the Player WITHOUT being a detriment/dick/arse/etc to other Players. Example, Player F's Character doesn't trust Player B's Character & B's Character has a feeling that F's Character doesn't trust them, then B's Character had been tasked with doing whatever and B's Character needs his fellow companions [the Characters of the other Players, including Player F's Character] to be part of the activity but has a internal struggle as to whether to invite F's Character. Then this would be an instance in which OOCK would be permissible.
I had to ask about something another player said in a scene where our characters were in a tavern. He was a paladin who...divine sensed, I think? I don't remember and I'm a newbie...and was told he senses undead but nothing evil, rather good. The player said something about thinking it was the ghost of an NPC mentor following us and I wasn't sure if that was his internal thoughts or something he said, because I was all set to respond saying my character agrees with that thought. But it ended up being internal and I was kind of disappointed.
Started a campaign about 2 months ago and we are on session 10 now, these videos and others have been such massive helps to assuage concerns that I've been paranoid about but I basically get shown I don't need to worry and just chill, to have fun.
I'll tell you meta: Jim and Pruitt actually don't have legs. They are being held hostage at the table with a greenscreen in the background to make it look like they change location.
I might ask my table if they wanna try speedrunning "Lost Mines of Phandelver." Players will come with their own copy of the adventure, and must metagame their way through as quick as humanly possible.
I would actually love this since I have never played it all the way through. Everyone gets through the goblin camp and gets to the town, but the farthest I've gotten is the side adventurers way outside the town with the banshee and the wizard and stuff NO ONES Actually GOT TO THE MINES
There's good meta gaming and bad meta gaming. Your character would have an understanding of the range of their spells. That's fine. Bad meta gaming is playing your barbarian with an int and Wis of 4 that seems to know the weaknesses of everything you ever encounter because you memorized the MM
I'm with you to a point. Thing is, no character can know nothing, maybe they have Int/Wis4 because of whatever capabilities they lack but that doesn't make them devoid of sentience. Maybe the fact they're unburdened by perception, investigation or a sense of danger, they can see things others can't. Maybe because they love just hitting things with axes SO MUCH, classical and operant conditioning have caused very animal-like learning of the best places to hit stuff with axes. Perhaps he's so dumb that he accidentally finds himself easily charmed by bards telling stories of how heroes killed beasts and he just passively, dumbly absorbs it all (adding fun rp options to feed him incorrect information). For sure, I think you should hand some of the burden to the player like "hey if you want your barbarian to know that, fine but let's hear the rp" and they'll come up with a reason like one of mine and it will add flavour to the character. If the character's a lazy lil shit then this burden of rp will eventually discourage them from bringing too much MM knowledge to his character's choices. A sort of opposite example I have is a 10 Int, 9 Wis character I have who behaves like he has faaaar less but his encyclopedic knowledge of history, traditions, nobles, complex social rituals, rules of sports, sporting tactics, historical accounts of sporting achievements, coaching capabilities etc are those of a player with reasonably high Int/Wis. Often his unintelligent choices are based on intelligent interpretation of absurdly strict codes of honour. Essentially he's a posh idiot who has low Int/Wis in most situations and high in others. What I'm trying to say is, the numbers should describe (not define) the character and if you wanna 'describe' your Barbarian with 4 on those stats, you can perhaps describe a single attack roll as, not a swing of an axe but 3 good swings (due to high Con), 2 of which failed, 1 of which found the weakness.
Lmao it's all good. This is a game we all love so its easy to get carried away. Been on vacation and I think I've made like 6 characters and built a race.
Stats are really hard to qualify because what does a 5,10,15, and 20 int look like. Its best to leave it at a quantitve measure for the DCs and avoid assigning qualities to each.
I once rolled for metaknowledge and got a nat 20 and all that happe ed was I realized i was a character in a game and I spent the rest of the campaign trying ti prove it to everyone else but no one ever believed me lol
I think the difference lies in metagaming (which is just using out of game knowledge) and breaking versimilitude (using said knowledge to in someway ruin the fiction the table is aiming for i.e. knowing about all the dangers of mindflayers in a game where you just ran into their first advance guard)
Holy crap! This is an AMAZING video, it should be required watching for new (and some older players). I'm fortunate to run a game for friends which is just the BEST fun, we all get so involved and whisked away that we do forget stuff, I as DM (mentioned in the part around 28:20) forget stuff and the players remind me as they also know that that time the rogue got crit smashed by one guy i reminded him he had uncanny dodge that literally saved his life. With so many moving parts the collaboration to have fun is strongest.
I really, really like this one. On many occasions, I've had to remind players that, just because their character is level 1, with no experience points, that doesn't mean that they have no experience. A lot of training goes into becoming a Player Character, level 1. A player making assumptions that their character must have learned a few basic things about their profession is not untoward. If there are exceptions, then it's up the the GM to point it out.
While running a group through a published adventure, I noticed that one of the players only checked for traps and treasure in spots where the published adventure had placed them. I didn't take action at that time, but did spend prep-time to move stuff around for future sessions.
Ran into issues just recently with metagaming. I told my players that I'm doing a lot of custom work, and they had already run into custom monsters, but someone decided that the stories they heard matched up with a monster from the book that I didn't know about. This leads the group into treating the monsters differently, which lead one character to think he was safe to get close as long as he followed certain protocols and he was then almost 1shot and the group left their fortified location to fight the deadly encounter a man down without any of the help I had set up for them. They got mad at me for setting up such a difficult encounter, I responded by pointing out all the advantages I gave them and how they ignored them completely and then split the group up to tackle the monsters seperately instead of together
The guy that was almost 1 shotted asked if I was going to kill him, I told him "No, but I will just let you die". Same play session they tried to bypass a magic staircase that teleported them down a flight of stairs every time they tried to go up by just breaking the stone ceiling above them... I feel like they're trying to die
What helps for me is I give all my players 1 free death at the start of the campaign, then get merciless for the first few sessions. If they get crushed by a ceiling or turned to stone or swallowed by a giant I tell them something like "You feel like you should have died, it was a miracle that you pulled through!" Then they are officially MORTAL, and they start acting more cautiously. Amazingly, giving them a free life will make them value it more... because it lets you give them a taste of death!
The fight, you're right about; but I don't see any problem with them breaking the ceiling; or at least attempting to. That sounds like you're kind of forcing them down one path rather than letting them choose their own.
I have no issue with that method other than dropping a ton or two of stone on top of your own head. The plan was literally put the barbarian on that guys shoulders so he can hit the ceiling
A type of metagaming not touched on in the video: Players being aware of things that happen on the battlemat that their characters have no way of knowing about. For instance, there was a chase encounter in Baldur's Gate that my cleric did not participate in as he stayed behind to tie up and heal a defeated adversary (LG cleric of Ilmater), but watching the chase, at one point I thought about casting Sending to confuse one of the fleeing enemies. I chose not to because I was doing other things (like casting mending on broken household objects) and because my character wouldn't know if any of them were still alive or whatever. In the preceding fight, I had to remind people in my group that the shadow monk's darkness spell was cutting off line of sight for certain things, particularly my healing, but also some of their assumptions about what was happening on the other side of it. Was I being a wet blanket?
A lot of what you described as 'meta-gaming' is just Roleplaying. Your character has some understanding of what they can do, and when is a good idea to use their abilities. The players are.'playing' their 'character', after all.
Sure, but a fight is chaotic and messy and the characters don't have the birds eye view of the battlefield that their players have. The PCs might not know that behind the three orks that they can see, there aren't any more, and they might not really see that behind the rock to the right there are additional goblins who try to flank them, but they throw their fireball - based on the players, not the characters knowledge - farther to the right of the orcs all the same. We're ok with allowing this kind of behaviour because the game is only an approximation of a coherent reality, but it definitely can be defined as a kind of meta gaming.
No phones or other electronics at my table. Two PH are available. Solves the problem with no angst and no ambiguities. Vanilla and modified monsters are 50/50 .... believe what's in the MM at your own risk ...
Laventhros -- fully agreed. There is a need for a certain amount of what can be called "metagaming" as there's no good other way for the players/DM to converse on what the PCs know. This is my first time on this podcast, so I don't know JIm's background. My first reaction is that he needs to DM -- it will change his perspective.
I’ve always found that the people who REALLY want to win, need that win, whether it’s work or their home life that’s kicking their ass. but in D&D you can succeed unequivocally and sometimes you just need to feel in control, or a sense of accomplishment.
Yush a new video, great as always, My biggest issue with a metagame discussion i had with another guy on reddit was that his attitude boiled down to "well if you dont want me to know every weakness for a monster YOU should just change it up" as if the whole burden for the fun of the party lies SOLELY on the dm, especially since im a new dm i am mainly going by monsters from the book, which my players are lovely to play in character. Another thing i believe iffs me most about the concept of metagaming is that in this huge world there are so many ways to get information hence why sage background exists, alongside talking to people in the area (who would know the weaknesses), lying in wait to see how it attacks and engages the enemy, or even just doing checks to see if the character realizes it or not. Forexample i have a medusa encounter planned and there will be tons of clues, an entire room full of eerily humanoid statues, the characters might not know that it is a medusa, however i would think they know the general concept of "some creatures and spells can turn people to stone" and be weary of it, however if the first thing they do is go grab a mirror as they approaches it... well.... Or if there are no statues and they simply see a woman with a veil on then would they knows? I also often see the argument of "but we would have heard the stories in taverns" but for some reason people never assume that people are making stuff up? what are the chances that its a true hero tale as opposed to a drunken merchant who wants to brag without having anything to brag, and i can understand that if you grew up in an area but for me looking at the stats its just like "if a small tribe of goblins attacked a village with their coward tactics a single arrow would kill the villagers" I really appreciate the video because it gives a wider perspective, and i think what guy said about metagaming being more about "good and bad sportsmanship also rings true"
Hey Web DM. Long time viewer, first time commenter. I just wanted to thank you for making this video. I got into the hobby of D&D not but 8 months ago. Mostly from Critical Role. Kinda got pushed into the role of the DM because no one else wanted to be one in my group. It was an acquired taste, but I'm really loving it. Thanks in no small part to you guys. But this video in particular was really helpful. Specifically your perspective to the "Did you forget your ability and were reminded of it after the fact? Tough luck. Remember it next time" situation. I'm super guilty of that as a DM. Not to try and justify it, but I used it under the pretense of "They'll learn from this if I punish them for not paying attention and not tracking what they can do". I realize now after your talk about it that that's a super dick move. And if I want them to learn, I can do that in a less abrasive/aggressive way. TL;DR Thanks for Improving my game with your experience and knowledge. I'm forever grateful.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Derick. I'll keep that as my golden rule. (Not sarcasm, BTW. I have a terrible problem IRL where all my compliments sound like a passive aggressive jab. Dont want that to bleed over into the internet.)
Good move, it's okay to use the stick rather than he carrot to teach players sometimes, but at the very least you should recognize it as a stick, and that your players might not like it. And good luck on DMing! It's quite a bit more work than being a player, but man oh man when you make a cool encounter or series of encounters, and the players love it, and even though you did all this planning the players still surprise you and figure out some clever way to solve a problem that you didn't even think of... it's just the best feeling in the world.
You will have tons of fun with it in the right group. And don't worry about worry about making early mistakes (my first DM session was a disaster, but now my campaign is my group's favorite), they only allow you to grow from the experience and learn.
hey guys, I watch your show every week. I heard that yall had an emergency last week, and I hope that everybody is sane, safe, healthy, and ok! I was really interested in the group initiative for players. Could you touch on that sometime in a future video? Thanks! Have a great week!
Thanks! Much better this week. Have you checked out this ep? Can't remember if we cover group initiative specifically but I'd be surprised if we didn't th-cam.com/video/QODTZR_nkC4/w-d-xo.html
WebDM is honestly the greatest part of my week. I agree. I don't want my players to look at monster stats or try and tell if they should fight by looking at CR. Otherwise I generally don't bother. I just rule that big information is relayed to the party unless there's a reason it can't be such as not alerting people etc.
You guys are great! I loved the intro, and no matter what I know I'm always going to hear well-thought out discussions on a hobby we all love. I will slightly disagree about the "Are you sure?" Question. With the groups I've been all the way back to middle school I've had GMs, who would say it with delightful, evil smiles. Such an innocuous little phrase sends tense shivers through the party, and everyone's attention grows and sharpens. We know something is about to happen. It can be used as a tool to set a mood, to heighten dramatic anticipation, and sometimes to even undercut it for the sake of a joke. And, yes generally players follow through, but in my experience at least I follow through in tense anticipation of what great new horror will be visited upon me next. Now your mileage may vary, and it might well be that it doesn't go over well in other groups, but I wanted to share my own history and positive experiences with "Are you sure?"
As someone who just got into DnD, and living overseas, you guys have made just learning the game more fun, interesting, and overall exciting! My friends and I all watch you guys religiously and regularly refer to your shows while we play. Thanks so much for these videos. Keep it up!
I think there's a lot of implausible meta-gaming. In general, I don't have too many problems with it because I have either new players, or other players that don't use meta-game knowledge. If any of my players that already know a thing ask for whether they know it in-game, I think about their backstory, generalized world-knowledge, or I ask them to roll a skill check deemed reasonable for what they ask. Pruitt was saying, that they can yell to each other and discuss strategies in combat, but it's completely unreasonable for the characters 50+ feet away from each other to 1. Be able to focus and comprehend what one of many people on the battlefield is saying flawlessly. 2. For them to be able to get more than a 15 word sentence out. And 3. Know everything about other people's abilities and be able to recall it in an instant in the middle of battle after being hit with a ball of fire and to then advise how to use it. I will agree with the concept of easing new players into the game, I think that's good, but after a couple sessions once people get a hang of it, if you want a narrative-driven campaign that makes in-game sense, then meta-gaming has to go away in almost all forms. You might label me a cherry picker or some kind of stickler, but it just doesn't make sense.
If you are DMing, you should set the level of metagaming that is best for YOU. Players are there to have fun, and so are you, but it is your responsibility to MAKE that fun, and you have a harder job than players do.
That degree of realism is perfectly manageable in DnD, so long as the DM is able to set boundaries and players are respectful of them. DnD is a great game for for what @Seth Sybrandy wants. Once you start thinking about what elements of the game are arbitrary, the whole thing unravels. It's okay to play different ways, and despite what the video says, Jim and Pruitt's way of playing is not for everyone.
I'm sorry you disagree, but unfortunately my experience with playing tabletop games is that there is some value to mitigating "realism" when it helps to create a more engaging experience. The realism helps to foster the fun, they are not mutually exclusive, and sometimes just a touch of extra detail can really help. That's not arbitrary, that's craft.
I use knowledge abilities to establish what a player knows about an enemy. Say the party enounters a hydra. They would be able to use some kind of int check in this case nature/arcana. If they make the check they get to know something about the creature. Say resistance or weaknesses, if they roll very high they know everything they want about it. One this makes use of some under used abilities. If the party plays well and scouts the hydra before the encounter they could get knowledge to help plan the fight. I also use quite a bit of custom or re flavored creatures if I don't want them to have prior knowledge.
My philosophy has always been if they can come up with a reason they might have that knowledge. And it's compelling and something I can call back to myself at a later date I let it pass
Joshua Reynolds I use this but also INT, nature, arcana and religion checks! Setting the DC based on how obscure or common the knowledge should be on this world.
Damn I would love to play a game with Jim as the DM. Your stance on metagaming is ludicrously level-headed and well thought out, and shows your passion and true care for the game and for the player's experience.
As a DM, I typically give every character the benefit of the doubt based on their race/class/background. A Dragonborn Ranger automatically knows the relative strengths/weaknesses/elements of dragons and most beasts, a Rock Gnome Lore Bard will sometimes just know how a basic magic item works without needing to roll or Identify, a Fighter with the Noble or Soldier background automatically gets respect from most guards/soldiers and can get info from them, etc. It makes the game go much faster than trying to test them through rolls for every little thing and objecting to them knowing something they should obviously know. I'm running a Planar campaign and my players know very little about D&D cosmology, so their characters know a little more about the places/creatures than they do (so they basically can't metagame anyway) which gives me a chance to explain things.
Knowing a troll's weakness is something common folk would know. Knowing more obscure monsters weaknesses from reading the monster manual and using said knowledge when one's pc has no way of knowing it are two very different things.
this is one of the most helpful resources I've ever seen or read on the subject. as someone who is currently communicating with a dm who just outright gored a new player because they think the player was "metagaming too much", thank you
This video is actually much more relative to learning how to run a campaign than it sounds from the outside. This is some basic stuff that we should all be paying attention to. So thank you so much!
As a GM, I'm kind of a fan of "stoopey switches" as my Table often calls them... It's basically a lever or switch or some mechanical remnant that no longer does anything... Some even look relatively complete (functional) in-game, but they don't do anything... (lolz) SO I reserve a fair fraction of the "Are you sure?" bluff for those times when the Players have already had an argument about whether or not to "pull the stoopey switch"... and someone volunteers. BUT these are all basic storytelling techniques... and perfectly useful. Whether it's a bluff, just to tease the Player(s) in question or an outright bluff to raise tension... AND that's okay too. I've rolled dice in a bowl behind the screen for no reason at all, particularly before answering a question. I've scratched a pen or pencil on a pad behind the screen for no purpose at all, and even doodled while the rest of the table was busy "theorizing" about whatever they were planning for "the mission"... only occasionally taking notes about whatever they were dubiously "just in case..." about. GM'ing is at least partly a theatrical effort, and bluffing is entirely part of that. It also lends you the chance to "read the Players" for their reactions, to see how invested they are in this particular or that particular part of the story... Once in a while having that bluff turn out not to be a bluff... well, of course you have to keep 'em on their toes! ;o)
@@nuclearchezburgr3857 As you turn the lock, there's a click... *everyone gasps and gets tense* and the door opens. No traps. *everyone sighs with relief or goes "fuck you" to the DM*
Wow, guys, you never stop upping your game! Best intro ever, followed by the most logical, balanced, useful look at metagaming across the board. As always, thanks for your great work and inspiration!
I think The Angry GM made the best case for why metagaming is something GMs need to sush about: it's really, really hard to play a fool. It's why lying is a skill, lawsuits can get thrown out over improper conduct, etc. And that comes from a GM. Just be chill. Release some control. Read 4e and remember that being in control isn't all there is to being a GM.
Just think of the Hobbit when the dwarves come to Bilbo's and they're talking about smaug and he says yes I know what a dragon is. So ya I mean like even in stories people have an understanding of what's out there so knowing a troll is weak to fire and acid or things like that shouldn't be far feched. Also thank you Pruitt snakes are awesome. Anyways great show guys have a wonderful day.
I would still have players make a DC 5 Intelligence (Nature) check, because although most people would know what a troll is like, it's not a guarantee. Maybe they were out sick on the day their school covered it?
I had a falling out with two of my players, a husband and wife, during Rise of the Runelords in Pathfinder. He ran the first chapter and handed the second chapter over to me because he thought that I’d have a better mind for it. I caught on quickly though that he was reading ahead and skewing not only his own character’s progression but that of his wife do that they would be as effective as possible. In response I started altering the adventure and monsters within it because, to mean, the enemies were reacting to these overly capable warriors. That deviation caused a complete childish meltdown from them and they left the group shortly after.
To prevent too much talking during combat (since play over a 6 second timeframe in-game) we devised the 'three-word-shout' rule. Like a reaction, once outside of their turn they can shout up to three words at any point in time, whether it be between a monsters attacks or before an allies movement action. This has really helped us find common ground between 'no crosstalk' players and 'pause the combat and lets talk for five minutes' players. It's gotten to the point that players are getting creative with how to formulate sentences to stick to the three word rule. Stuff like 'GO UP NOW!' 'DON'T DO IT' 'SHOOT THE LEG' or 'DONT USE FIRE'.
I've asked my players "Are you sure?" over trivial decisions just to sow a seed of doubt in their minds. It always results in everyone at the table laughing - including the decision maker. It's fun to do as a joke from time to time. Just like any other joke, though - if you do it too much, it gets old.
I would love to hear a discussion about building towns and villages. Maybe a camp of centaur or minotaur. But how an experienced DM would go about creating a memorable scene like that.
If you have proficiency in ALL martial weapons of course you know the weaknesses of enemies. If a soldier today was proficient in all modern weapons like rifles, grenades and rocket launchers... of course they'd know of a weakness of modern threats like how a tank can be destroyed by a molotov cocktail on the engine deck.
I think you guys really nailed this. I don't think that meta-gaming is bad; I think that annoying or unfair narrative choices are bad. Like you say, meta-gaming is done badly when it makes things unfair or boring, but those things are bad by default. So much of the time though, players can really justify a lot of things that would be considered, "meta-gaming," simply by pointing out that their characters do not have Intelligence or Wisdom scores lower than a 6. I'm fighting this monster that continually regenerates? Maybe fire, you know, the most stereotypically consumptive and destructive element which has spawned the meme, "Kill it with fire," could be useful. Oh, we need to convince someone to help us, maybe our Bard, whom we have continually witnessed acting as a magically-powered rock-star, should take point on this matter. And yes, the party will definitely try to, "Geek the Mage," because the old man with a walking stick sure looks like the easiest target. It's really a simple matter of understanding that characters who have lived in this world as veteran adventurers probably know or at least have some idea about game mechanics.
I just finished my first session as a DM with my friends from school and it was awesome. You're videos helped me create an epic campaign for my friends
I would say there's two definitions of metagaming; one good and one bad. You kind of address that, despite the title saying otherwise... I'll just chalk that up to making an eye-catching title. Fine metagaming: players making characters that will work in certain campaign, players that simply know stuff about a monster because they are learned in that system. You can't control that and you shouldnt try to control that. Bad metagaming: players who do stuff like running 10 rooms down to where another player found treasure for no discernible reason right after the DM revealed there was treasure Other than that, I felt like a lot of examples given didn't even fit into the criteria of metagaming. Not sure how I felt about this one. I will say that as usual, you were very thorough with examples and while I would disagree with you defining certain things as metagaming.(Which, is simply semantics) I agreed 100% on what you deemed okay and not okay.
@Ezeckel Reichert Nah I think they're either being clickbaity or hyperbolic. They are good guys and I like their advice but they really do have a habit of assuming that everyone should be playing like them - like they can admit that its okay to do your own thing but in the same sentence they will say how everything will be better if everyone does this thing exactly like them. @Shitposter-kun I agree with you, but I have to admit that I started the video with very strong views, but by the end had softened quite a bit, and I don't think I'll ever say metagaming is good/bad again, it's too broad a statement.
Gnarleston Gnu I mean, clickbait is almost necessary to succeed with the TH-cam algorithm being the way it is, and with that being the case I don't mind as long as what is titled or shown in a thumbnail is actually discussed/present in the video. On the other hand, while I get what you're saying, I don't think they feel as you say. I just think it's tiresome and kind of pointless to start every sentence with, "Now this is just my opinion". That's generally a given if you're discussion subject matter which is in the realm of opinion mattering.
The part where you're talking about the "need to win" as a primary motivation for metagaming... I totally agree, and I really think that D&D is a REALLY great opportunity for cultural training. We live in a culture of distrust and competition. D&D is a great chance to learn to trust... The DM and players both, can learn to trust each other, and the first part of that is to let each other play their own role. I can even see the "never" list going away as trust is built. Not that D&D is a unique thing, there are lots of similar opportunities. But this is a prime one...
Personally I couldn't play in a campaign where ALL metagaming was accepted. It would be impossible for there to be any secrets between party members, which would take out so much potential for surprise and drama. Imagine you find an item or learn a piece of knowledge that your character would want to keep secret from the party for whatever situational reason, and someone just turns to you and says "hey lets see that dagger you just found". They are using knowledge that their player does not know (metagaming), killing all immersion, and basically ruining the game. Of course some amount of metagaming should be accepted, but definitely not all, imo.
Well what's the alternative? texting the player what they find every time they roll perception or investigation? I don't think it's asking too much to not act on knowledge your character has no way of knowing.
As a new player it was pretty annoying to me when other players would explain in-depth the weaknesses and strengths of a monster none of our characters have ever seen before.
Love your videos! I would say for the "Are you sure?" that sometimes characters don't pick up all the clues, and it can feel like they have been duped if they miss a small line. So I'll reiterate what may happen, such as "Remember, this giant that you are wanting to insult to is no friend to you, so it could offend them." But I try not to steer them any one way. It goes back to another vid yall had about players not knowing what their character would. So while a character might know there could be an alarm, a player might not. For instance, a player in my group chose to use a horn that gives everyone lightning. I informed them the horn may be loud and reinforcements may arrive if they hear it. They still wanted to, and it was badass! The only other time I will curb is if 1 or 2 players are pulling the group into a situation they do not want to be a part of. If the bard wants to get smart with the villain and his thugs, or the paladin wants to fight rather than parley, the rest of the party might not be okay with risking their lives. Or the other players may really want to know what the NPC has to say. So I usually at least make sure the group is okay with the more impactful decisions.
Some of my most enjoyable moments came from metagaming. I remember once our party was fighting a couple groups of goblins who would sometimes blow themselves up with grenades when they where close to death or in a bad situation. While we where clearing up one such group we had one surrounded but where just not able to make hits connect. So i did the smart thing and grappled him so the party could cut him to pieces. Right before the gobbos initiative i remembered and said out loud "Oh shit, i just grappled him and these guys have grenades". DM- "Now that you mention it..."
If you as a person living in the real world know what a troll's weakness would be, it shouldn't be that much a stretch to imagine that someone living in a world where troll's are actual beings would know as well.
Fakjbf except we live in a world with internet. Your characters live in medieval history. You think a random schmuck from the 1500's even knows what, for instance, a snakes venom is as how to defeat that, let alone what a trolls weakness would be if it were a real thing
Evan Gregory You're equating different things. A peasant in the 1500's would not know how a snake's venom actually works, but they would damn well know that certain snake bites would be lethal. That level of knowledge is all that needs to be passed around, not the deeper explanation. For thousands of years humans have used certain molds to treat infections, we now know it was effective because those molds produced antibiotics. The only limitation on mundane NPCs in a fantasy setting should be that their knowledge should be region specific. If they live in an area where trolls are a potential problem, it's totally reasonable for them to have a vague idea on a troll's weakness. But someone living in a fantasy version of medieval England shouldn't know much if anything about monsters who live in deserts.
One of my favorite episodes yet, and def a sort of wake up call for myself as a DM... to be more conscious of my action and rule setting. Can't thank you enough, dudes.
I really enjoy your candid way of communicating the various topics in gaming. It's approached from an a well thought out perspective which is very appreciated. After two decades I've only recent come back to RPGs. From a more mature perspective, I've become more observant of the contributions players make to the game. And I realize that all people bring a bit of themselves to the game. Synergy between players seems to be the "glue" that keeps them together. I would say that developing synergy is analogous to dating. And it may take several meetings to determine if players are compatible.
I really needed to hear this as much as I was hurt by it. I have been a peeved DM about metagaming, but now that I see some good arguments for it, I should just relax and take it easy. It's about them having fun, even if it's not my idea of fun.
I think I was playing a Shadowrun campaign when the GM quality checked a story idea with me. It really pleased me he would trust me that much, but it also meant I could use my character's natural choices to encourage the story, and ...ahem, keep the story on rails. As a player I'd rather see the story progress, and this trust let me move it forward quickly while maintaining my character and immersion. It's one of my favorite experiences from any game I've played.
on topic. metagaming only becomes a real problem when playing in a game like LARP Vampire the Masquerade, which can be veeeeerrry competitive. very. very very.
This is honestly the best insight I've ever seen anyone give about meta-gaming. I used to consider myself largely against meta-gaming, but this really highlights a lot of the hypocrisy that many gamers display when discussing it. I honestly feel that the DMs that are so sensitive about meta-gaming are actually adversarial DMs themselves.
This is a wild topic for me. I've been GMing for 3 years now, and definitely have a preferred playstyle by now. Normally I'm very hard against egregious metagaming, but I've noticed that since I've played with the same group or people for the length of time I've run games, there's some behaviors and habits my players have that I've learned to just let be. It definitely falls into the category of the player really just engaging with the game the way they want to most, and me, as the GM, not getting too much in the way of that. This video definitely has changed my perspective, and I'm interested in letting some slack in the chain so my players can have more opportunities to enjoy the game their own way. I will say I am the player that reminds my GM when they forget effects specific to my character. One of our players has just started DMing, and I've been very helpful for him in that regard. I play a Barbarian that's always recklessly attacking, and he often forgets that attacks against me have advantage. The first time I reminded him he showed a look of surprised I'd never seen him make, but I could immediately feel the trust building. Afterwards, he expressed his appreciation, and told me how that really helped him feel a lot better about his game, knowing that at least one player was trying to be as fair as possible given the circumstances.
From a fan and fellow East Texan I would Like to say great video guys! Watching ur videos is part of my weekly prep for my current campaign, you guys always provide me with unique ideas and points of view. Sorry for my horrible grammar lol.
Just wanna say I didnt know you guys had a TH-cam channel set up for your twitch streams. That is fantastic! Cuz I use TH-cam for downloading videos to listen to during work and yea glad I can watch stuff that I normally would miss cuz of work bs.
Something that I didn't hear mentioned but I use a lot when I'm DMing: your characters have an intelligence stat. They also have skills which may afford them special knowledge - let players use that! If a PC with particularly low INT starts acting as though they know something or using a highly complex strategy, I might pull a player up on that. On the flipside if my player running a bookish wizard with 19 intelligence happens to know lots about the monsters they're facing, I'd encourage them to share that knowledge with other players.
I will start this by saying I love the work you guys do. So please don't take this as anything but criticism of a fan that wishes you both well and success. I have complained many times about players metagaming as a fellow player. If they are going to see an NPC because an NPC revealed their true self to another player but not them....players asking questions or acting a certain way to other players because of meta knowledge they have about something another player has thought/dreamed/done but they have no way of knowing about it in character. Players who know the Monster Manual inside and out and call out what a monster does or its weaknesses are even though, and unlike the common Troll, their character would have no idea about it. Sorry but all of those issues are meta gaming that I have experienced as a fellow player and complained about as it is terrible for the game. For you two to not acknowledge this means you have been blessed at your tables or are just ignoring it because you are fine with all of these forms of meta gaming. Either means you are speaking on very limited knowledge and didn't do research prior to the video which is not the norm for you all, or you all are just those types of gamers and I highly doubt you are.
I love battle mastering as a veteran player. It can be massively helpful to let a squishier character get away from melee, you can have characters use additional attacks, and since you are a super tactician battle strategist giving advice to people really isn't out of character. That really helps you apply meta gaming knowledge and raise the party as a whole to a higher level, without hoarding all the cool achievements for yourself.
I agree so much. There is a new level of challenges you can give players with knowledge that is so much more satesfying for me, than the troll "look for right damage type".
I started just cause half my players have played for so many years we all have the MM almost memorized, and I noticed two of my new players were keeping track of HP and AC of enemy types so I figured it would solve one problem and spice things up a bit
Skills an d DCs. At session zero, as the DM give what each skill actually provides info on and then provide DCs for common, uncommon, rare, legendary info. Great Video!
I don't think that the details need to be ironed out to that extent in session zero; but the general idea that if you're going to meta-game something then you're going to have to make a roll for it to work and to see how well it works or is communicated depending on what you're trying to do.
There's a DM that plays in my game.. He's actually tried calling me out for monsters not falling when taking the hp listed in the book (I rolled hp)... I now reflavor and change names of all my monsters so he can't keep looking everything up.
Great vid guys. I'm that guy that was 3v1ing hill giants as a lvl10 battlemaster Paladin, got them down to 1 hill giant standing and the DM forgot to attack me and I said "Wait you forgot about attacking me". He thought I was just saying it so I could Riposte but I was out of superiority die and just wanted to see if I could beat them fairly. The attacks missed but it could have also been crits (had Adamantine Plate though ;) #tanky Paladin). Walked out of the fight having been hit once by a crit for 22 damage despite flanking rules. The DM was impressed and sad at the same time :P
I have opinions about what degree/kind of meta-gaming I want to exclude and want to actively enforce in my game. Still, this video brings up a separate topic that I really hope can become non-controversial: If you have a problem with how your players play the game, _don't_ use the game itself to punish them. Talk it over with them outside the game. You can use the game to punish player _characters_ and their behavior, but even that shouldn't be punishment as much as it should be natural consequence intended to make your players appreciate the game more because it provides depth/integrity to your world.
That's a good point about the nursery rhymes. A lot of low to mid level creatures would be common knowledge or at least talked about. You could even work it into the campaign where some stories aren't exactly correct...or at least not obviously so. This might also make more exotic creatures more interesting to fight since the party has no clue what it can do.
The idea of local folktales existing about dangers in the region reminds me of a video I watched just yesterday about griffins. The video had a mention that griffins do not do well in the same area as horses - more like a griffin will tear apart anything that gets between it and a horse, because it wants the horse as a meal. I would imagine a region that has griffins living wild in some cliffs would have a song or folktale about the knight who had to walk home after he ran into a griffin and had to abandon his horse, for survival.
Dice, Camera, Action! handles meta-knowledge pretty well, I think. The more experienced players are always asking things like "Do I know if these giants tend to be evil?" and the DM may or may not call for a roll depending how common the knowledge is. Of course, the players are really honest about playing to the knowledge given, like mentioned in the vid.
for the group i dmging i set a custom world up: there is a organisation: the order of wanderers, they go around as taveling teachers, healers, helping hands. mostly consitend out of druids and clerics, but also all the others classes becasuse i set it up as a custom background. its ment for player who want to go knowledge heavy. so because of that order most people know the common monsters and i did give every citizen magic initate. basicly the order teaching people stuff like mending, light, cure wounds and other usefull every day cantrips and lvl 1 spells. for more specific information i let the players roll history, nature or whatever fits. for my players i got 1 veteran, 2 complete newbies and 1 player who played a bit of 3rd edition and DSA (another role play game) the probably most knowlegable characters are the druid (parents belong to the order) and my fighter (scholar background, going eldrich knight, obsest with magic) those are not my veteran player so 1 reason more for me to let them roll for knowlegde my least knowledgeable character is my borhter thief. he loves catmen, so he choose tabaxi, and i was like: "uhm ok they dont exist on this continent (didnt have the book for them at the point i worte the world but he gave it to me), so you come from the second continent ok? think about how that continent looks like, because i havent realy thought about that continent yet" but in regards to hte continent we play on he only knows what he met on hte streets. i also gave every player my file with the world setup so they can read it i also sometimes talk to them of what could have happend, because sometimes they dont just derail 1 train, they derail the whole train depo and then i have to figure out from there.
One of the players in our group was trying to say that I wouldn’t know that a vampire was weak to sunlight... “ well I know that and in our world they aren’t even real” was my response. I very much dislike when players and dms alike get petty and/or nitpicks about meta gaming and phrasing. I also ran into a problem with the dm when I asked a blacksmith for a finesse weapon. Finesse is a real word that could be used to describe the kind of weapon I was looking for. It is not like I walked in and asked for a weapon that attacks off dexterity! Lol, so I raised my voice “ I would like to buy a weapon that requires more finesse!” “ a non bulky weapon “
This video was very useful for as a DM. I will definitely try to improve some of the aspects of my game. Not to harp on metagaming from the player side (Well no I like to harp on metagaming from the player side) I still don't don't really know what to do when a player will go online to find some broken combination of of abilities and rules. For example a brand new player's character summoning specific animals to do a very specific series of actions to get out of a situation at the start of a new session. In that case there was no possible way that player thought up that solution. I tried to let them know that that indepth game mechanic research between sessions might be fun for them but all the rest of the players don't get to do anything. I dunno. It makes me not want to do any cliffhanger endings for sessions. It just seems like there are just some players that are incompatible for my style of game.
Hey, guys. I only found your videos recently and am super happy I did. I've been playing RPGs for 18 years, but have hardly ever seen tables actually talk about issues like the ones in this video, and it's refreshing to have insights on these topics from other gamers. Hope to see more like these, not just 'how to play D&D the Game' but also 'how to play D&D the Group Activity That Affects People.' Specifically, do you have ideas on how to keep combat engaging but not take two hours?
I have always considered cross board talk as the little internal voice advising, everyone has had a situation where they think, "well, what would X do?". I used to restrict cross chatter about active situations, like knowing what's going on in another room, or that a trap has you dominated, but even that could be justified as a sign from your patron deity, or perhaps the fact that the group has been adventuring so long there is a momentary flicker of a spontaneous Rary's bond going on. One group I'm in, we use speaking stones almost as cellphones, including jokes about roaming charges, signal interference, and call waiting. More than one time one character inadvertently tipped off guards because their speaking stone was "ringing".
I'm very thankful for this video because I thought of it when a player lied about the duration of a spell for a social encounter and I just looked at him and told him what he did was wrong and fucked up and he looked at me and just said he was sorry and it didn't have an impact on the game but he and I added on to the unwritten rules of the game in that moment and I was relieved to have it happen amicably. Thanks jim and Pruitt.
Hey, I love your show! Of course, that is a lead in to a negative comment. But first, more positive ones! I really like that you brought up the GM metagaming of the 'battle plan'. I think that that is a form of metagaming that is basically required. One concept that is often overlooked is that your characters may know more than the players. The characters are the ones actually hanging out with the others for months on end, the characters probably practice with one another, the characters understand what each other can do (for the most part). I think the strategy sessions should be looked at as trying to catch up to what the characters expect each other to do, know how to follow up on that opening, or know what to do when that doesn't pan out. Even among close friends who spend a lot of time together, you don't always need to declare what you are doing to know how the next person will respond. The characters, usually, spend a lot of time together, the minimal amount we spend running them is only a bit of their lives. (Also a response to the comment later that if the players are announcing their plans the characters are also declaring their plans in battle. That is the negative bit.) Second, I would like to share my favorite quote(s) from this series so far (at least from what I have seen, which is most of them.) Jim - "It's an element of play that you've clearly communicated to the players. Now, it's on the party to see how much they want to test that danger..." Pruit - "You take a ride on a tiger, you're gonna get bit." I think that quote should be on the first page of a DM guide. It clearly establishes the responsibilities of both the players and DMs better than a series of videos might.
My players are really good, if they're not sure if they're pc would know something they just ask me and if we're all ready not sure we typically leave it to a role
I cannot completely agree. I am playing in a Curse of Strahd game where one of the players has admitted reading the adventure. So he knows what's coming and what's where. In fact, he must be rereading it before each session, because he knows it in really fine detail (like how much treasure is in a given place to the coin, which he'll tell us in advance). One session, he got increasingly upset because the DM (his best friend) changed monsters and other details in several encounters; the DM explained that he changed them so that this player wouldn't know what to expect. The player called that "bullshit" and sulked at the DM's meta-metagaming. So, in later sessions, the DM went back to running the adventure straight. To be honest, from my perspective the metagaming player does too often detract from the experience, telling us what's coming if we do X, Y or Z and unraveling "mysteries" (or puzzles) that I think would have been fun for me, as a player, to speculate about. My headcanon is that my character accepts that his character is a prophet who can see the past and future. He loves this and plays into it and that can be fun. Still, it would, I think, be *more* fun for me to be surprised by things occasionally (and sometimes it feels like the rest of the party are sidekicks to his prophetic "Chosen One").
Wait, the player called the DM out for metagaming? That's rather ironic. From what I've seen, the DM wasn't even metagaming. They were just doing the job of the DM, to design the world (which can come with varying levels of help from premade modules and adventures).
+discoandherpes And not to mention I think their point is that the problem here is the misalignment of player expectations (antagonistic and hyper-metagamey) vs DM expectations (normal play). They made the point in the video that in the hypothetical situation where all the players and the DM expect to be maximally metagamey and cutthroat that would be okay (it just never plays out that way in practice)
The troll example isn't what bothers me as a player. It's that moment when a character has no way of knowing something but the player acts on that information: I.E. our more magically inclined companion was doing some detective work on his own, deciphered the villain's plot / identified the villain / found out his weakness but promptly got incapacitated/kidnapped before communicating to the party what he discovered. Then the halforc barbarian that was on the other side of town haggling the price of some gear suddenly knows everything for no reason. And acts on out of game knowledge. He 'knows' the wizard was kidnapped, knows where he was taken, and knows who the villain is and how to defeat him. Even when all the other players at the table were playing along and trying to find him in the confides of the story. That's when it breaks the game - when it's along the lines of playing a PC multiplayer game with friends, but one of them decided to load up a wall hack. You can come up with reasons for knowing a troll's weakness - folk lore, word of mouth from other adventures or town's folk. But knowing everything that happens all across the world at once get real lame real fast. Imagine running Tomb of Annihilation and one person at your table decided between sessions to buy and read the whole book and then his character knows where everything is hidden, how to solve every puzzle and where all the traps are placed. - I know it's an extreme example - but i've seen people do this. This is the kind of behavior we refer to as 'meta gaming' in a derogatory way.
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Where can I get the green figure on the stack of books behind pruitt at 4:07 as well as the orange cyclops in the book shelf at 4:14 also behind Pruitt.
Thos are Mythic Legions Trolls by Four Horsemen Toys
Hey just want to say I am a huge fan of what you guys do and it's really helped be improv my games for my players. I have a question though. Have you ever put thought into a modern day setting for D&D?
Web DM thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment.
We played a bit of d20 modern and other systems like it back in the day, but you're right, we haven't talked about modern settings much on the channel!
I’m not opposed to the “are you sure” question because there are certain things that the character should know that maybe the player doesn’t. It’s the reverse of meta gaming. For example, if the player is about to cast that Fireball and take out half his party you might say “Are you sure you want to do that?” Because the Wizard who is trained in magic would know that’s a bad idea even if the player didn’t stop to think about it.
as a newer game i was also somewhat curious about this, the way i see metagaming is that it goes both ways, your character doesnt know everything you know, and he might know stuff that you dont know. I had a dude in my party that wanted to use scorching ray on tiny pixies, i asked him "Are you sure, you can see that these creatures are barely bigger then your hand, and your character knows that this decision means he has less power against the giant ogre zombie right infront of you", if he said "yes" then sure, i would let him do it, but he was a new player too. The way i understand it is if its something horredeously dumb then you ask "are you sure" because otherwise they might blame you for "not enough knowledge", that if they are about to do something absolutely insane i assume they are missing information that i didnt convey "are you sure you want to cross the bridge with the rotten planks and a rope that are held together by a couple of threads due to decay?" which jim also mentions about pruitts lavachute jump, so he seems to be contradicting himself from what he normally says which is... odd.
I think that the guys are more of a mind that instead of saying are you sure, that you should instead be doing something else to point it out. Like for the tiny pixies, have the player roll a knowledge arcana roll and anything short of a nat 1 tell him the logical side of your mind is telling you that this might be a bad idea because of Y. For something you might not have described well enough, before you actively have them move over have them do a perception check; and then depending on how well they roll you appropriately describe condition of the bridge.
I don't think Jim is contradicting himself. In this case he is referring specifically to DMs putting in some item, event, or whatever and then when the group chooses to interact with it as intended the DM decides that the event will negatively affect the group so does the "Are you sure?" to make the player rethink what they are doing because the DM changed their mind about wanting to do the event. Pruitt's lavachute jump on the other hand was something that he had not planned on happening at all, it was just something that a player did unexpectedly which would have had a high probability of turning out badly.
See that is the issue that he seems to assume that the players interacting with something bad is just because you put it in the game and "regret" it without going into the nuances of "Maybe its there as scenery, maybe its there as unsolvable, etc" looking at guy's from "how to be a great dm" talking about metagaming he also suggests that if players are about to do something because they think they are invulerable or that everything HAS to have a solution he would say "are you sure? it might not have a solution".
Forexample if i say they see a giant brazier with smoke coming up from it, some players might assume there arent fire in it if i doesnt specify it, and some might think there are fire in it. people might have different images from the description so i think its better to ask "are you sure, there seems to be burning hot coal at the bottom that are fire in" and they go "oh i thought it was just burned out embers", i agree on the whole "add tips" parts, if something is dangerous there should be a sign, or have heard rumours or see corpses lying around something
The way i handle that kind of thing is I just say for example 'You know you will hit half your party, you can, I'm just checking', just to make sure I don't sound like the 'are you sure?', as web dm are talking about
I always make a quick consideration about if their character would know they're about to blast their allies. If they have never seen or used the spell before, I let it happen. If they have used or seen it though, I straight up just tell them "hey check the area of effect on that, just in case" then they have the choice to do so or not. I'm there to help my players have a good time, not look like a moustache twirling asshole who sees them all die and go "goooood"
When I was young and totally believed the me vs them.
Now: "I think I forgot to put another potion in my inventory"
"Okay, then write it down"
"You trust me? "
". . . We're grown men playing a game of pretend . . ."
Now that I think about it, it wasn't much of a response. But they understood and we laughed.
Web Dm is metagaming, giving us videos we want to watch!
ive seriousely had players complain that ive tweaked and created monsters so they were a unique unseen foe....because they couldnt metagame
Hopefully something similar doesn't happen to me. I'm gonna start a campaign soonish and for a bit, a lot of the monsters are going to have maximized HP and hit slightly harder (basically they are all on a super soldier serum created by one of the big bads), then some magical DNA effecting will start happening and monsters with tweaked powers/weaknesses will happen, and then full on fusions where it would be 2 monsters combined to create new species and sub species.
The goal isn't even to combat player knowledge, its just an idea that stemmed from me thinking "you know what would be cool? a steam elemental. just a blob of living steam. i guess it'd be kind of a fusion between a fire and water elemental...huh, monster fusions...in smell inspiration."
Hahonryuu
I think a good way to prevent the problem is to have some indication that there's something different with the monster. Just the appearance of the ability to have figured it out beforehand is often enough.
i have had this ones from one player who didnt like i have a new ability to one monster. i just told him that i didnt want him to be able to look up all monster and just Meta game tho it. he get upset but the group agreed with me, i think its really a question about what most of the group wants, in my case it was only one person that didnt like it. i am not sure if i did the right thing or not but at the end of the day every monster/encounter in the books are mostly only a template for a general idea about what the monster does
Hahonryuu great idea the monster manual is the starting point not the finish line!
Yeah. I think that players can feel that you're cheating if you build expectations and then suddenly break them without warning.
They can quickly learn, however, to expect the unexpected.
Generally, the only thing that really annoys me is when players look through the monster manual in the middle of combat.
Quothcraft oh god as a player if i looked through the monster manual during an encounter I'd feel like I was straight up cheating
Last time it happened, they were overt about it and complained that the combat was 'Deadly' during the fight. I didnt play with that group again after that. Clearly there was a miss match.
What The Fuck.
That's an obvious unwritten rule.
... In high school, I use to know 2nd editions basic monster manual completely... And believe me :
1 - a good player rolls with the DM (if the statistics are off, respect thd DM modification and smile at how they were modified for your group : it,s flatering and it tell how much the DM wants to work for the group to be surprised)
2 - a good player helps discreetly the DM (whisper powers & abilities the DM oversees while dealing with both the group of players and the monsters, again, smilling at hiw much a DM sometime needd to modify &/or ignore said power & abilities)
3 - a good player knows the book is playground, the players/monsters are the ones making the actions and as such, looking up at deadlines, CR, etc. can be funny but should never be the center of attention (smile! It's a compliment from the DM when he confronts your team with harsh challenge, as long as he isn't playing DM VS players... And again, smile... And leave if it keeps being that kind of games)
This is a great viewpoint that I will try to remember in the future. I've played in games where that is an issue to some players who it feels like the DM is out for blood.
The main kind of metagaming I dont like is this. Player A and Player B have a private scene between their characters to do something on the down-low, perhaps shady, which isn't anything to do with the rest of the characters. All of the players watch this scene, but their characters are not privy to this knowledge. Then as soon as Player C is in a scene with them again, Player C has their character ask them all kinds of details like: "Where ya been? Doing anything shady? Can you explain where you've been?". I can't stand this kind of behavior ... its a complete abuse of metagaming, not to mention the fact that it shows the Spotlight Jealousy of Player C.
Basically I hate it when players use metagaming at the expense of other players and/or to ride alpha-dog over other players.
Damn right.
Hard to control that stuff, I try to keep "secret" conversations exclusively in email threads between sessions.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. If a Player is using OOC Knowledge in-game that their own Character didn't actually know or is using the OOC Knowledge to be a detriment/dick/arse/etc, then both aren't & should NOT be allowed.
There are some OOC Knowledge that would/could be allowed, if that OOCK helps the Player WITHOUT being a detriment/dick/arse/etc to other Players. Example, Player F's Character doesn't trust Player B's Character & B's Character has a feeling that F's Character doesn't trust them, then B's Character had been tasked with doing whatever and B's Character needs his fellow companions [the Characters of the other Players, including Player F's Character] to be part of the activity but has a internal struggle as to whether to invite F's Character. Then this would be an instance in which OOCK would be permissible.
I had to ask about something another player said in a scene where our characters were in a tavern. He was a paladin who...divine sensed, I think? I don't remember and I'm a newbie...and was told he senses undead but nothing evil, rather good. The player said something about thinking it was the ghost of an NPC mentor following us and I wasn't sure if that was his internal thoughts or something he said, because I was all set to respond saying my character agrees with that thought. But it ended up being internal and I was kind of disappointed.
Started a campaign about 2 months ago and we are on session 10 now, these videos and others have been such massive helps to assuage concerns that I've been paranoid about but I basically get shown I don't need to worry and just chill, to have fun.
Best. Intro. Yet.
Stellar intro
Had me rolling.
Scrolled down here to say this, so have a like.
I'll tell you meta: Jim and Pruitt actually don't have legs. They are being held hostage at the table with a greenscreen in the background to make it look like they change location.
I might ask my table if they wanna try speedrunning "Lost Mines of Phandelver."
Players will come with their own copy of the adventure, and must metagame their way through as quick as humanly possible.
That's an amazing idea
I would actually love this since I have never played it all the way through. Everyone gets through the goblin camp and gets to the town, but the farthest I've gotten is the side adventurers way outside the town with the banshee and the wizard and stuff NO ONES Actually GOT TO THE MINES
That sound awesome.
I recently ran a group through it, its a fun starter adventure. And my party even managed to finish it and only nearly died a couple times.
What a great way to make content playable again! Finish the adventure in the fewest in game time!
There's good meta gaming and bad meta gaming. Your character would have an understanding of the range of their spells. That's fine. Bad meta gaming is playing your barbarian with an int and Wis of 4 that seems to know the weaknesses of everything you ever encounter because you memorized the MM
I'm with you to a point. Thing is, no character can know nothing, maybe they have Int/Wis4 because of whatever capabilities they lack but that doesn't make them devoid of sentience. Maybe the fact they're unburdened by perception, investigation or a sense of danger, they can see things others can't. Maybe because they love just hitting things with axes SO MUCH, classical and operant conditioning have caused very animal-like learning of the best places to hit stuff with axes. Perhaps he's so dumb that he accidentally finds himself easily charmed by bards telling stories of how heroes killed beasts and he just passively, dumbly absorbs it all (adding fun rp options to feed him incorrect information). For sure, I think you should hand some of the burden to the player like "hey if you want your barbarian to know that, fine but let's hear the rp" and they'll come up with a reason like one of mine and it will add flavour to the character. If the character's a lazy lil shit then this burden of rp will eventually discourage them from bringing too much MM knowledge to his character's choices.
A sort of opposite example I have is a 10 Int, 9 Wis character I have who behaves like he has faaaar less but his encyclopedic knowledge of history, traditions, nobles, complex social rituals, rules of sports, sporting tactics, historical accounts of sporting achievements, coaching capabilities etc are those of a player with reasonably high Int/Wis. Often his unintelligent choices are based on intelligent interpretation of absurdly strict codes of honour. Essentially he's a posh idiot who has low Int/Wis in most situations and high in others. What I'm trying to say is, the numbers should describe (not define) the character and if you wanna 'describe' your Barbarian with 4 on those stats, you can perhaps describe a single attack roll as, not a swing of an axe but 3 good swings (due to high Con), 2 of which failed, 1 of which found the weakness.
Jack Bentley you went way too far into this lmao. It was just a basic example.
Yeah I really don't know why I did. There was probably a concise way of saying what I was saying but I have low Wis :P
Lmao it's all good. This is a game we all love so its easy to get carried away. Been on vacation and I think I've made like 6 characters and built a race.
Stats are really hard to qualify because what does a 5,10,15, and 20 int look like. Its best to leave it at a quantitve measure for the DCs and avoid assigning qualities to each.
I once rolled for metaknowledge and got a nat 20 and all that happe ed was I realized i was a character in a game and I spent the rest of the campaign trying ti prove it to everyone else but no one ever believed me lol
The problem with rolling for metaknowledge is you have to use you metastats and irl me is like 10s all round.
Gnarleston Gnu lmao same
I think the difference lies in metagaming (which is just using out of game knowledge) and breaking versimilitude (using said knowledge to in someway ruin the fiction the table is aiming for i.e. knowing about all the dangers of mindflayers in a game where you just ran into their first advance guard)
Holy crap! This is an AMAZING video, it should be required watching for new (and some older players). I'm fortunate to run a game for friends which is just the BEST fun, we all get so involved and whisked away that we do forget stuff, I as DM (mentioned in the part around 28:20) forget stuff and the players remind me as they also know that that time the rogue got crit smashed by one guy i reminded him he had uncanny dodge that literally saved his life. With so many moving parts the collaboration to have fun is strongest.
I really, really like this one. On many occasions, I've had to remind players that, just because their character is level 1, with no experience points, that doesn't mean that they have no experience. A lot of training goes into becoming a Player Character, level 1. A player making assumptions that their character must have learned a few basic things about their profession is not untoward. If there are exceptions, then it's up the the GM to point it out.
While running a group through a published adventure, I noticed that one of the players only checked for traps and treasure in spots where the published adventure had placed them. I didn't take action at that time, but did spend prep-time to move stuff around for future sessions.
Nice, that's how it's done. I hope you replaced the first chest with a Mimic.
Ran into issues just recently with metagaming. I told my players that I'm doing a lot of custom work, and they had already run into custom monsters, but someone decided that the stories they heard matched up with a monster from the book that I didn't know about. This leads the group into treating the monsters differently, which lead one character to think he was safe to get close as long as he followed certain protocols and he was then almost 1shot and the group left their fortified location to fight the deadly encounter a man down without any of the help I had set up for them. They got mad at me for setting up such a difficult encounter, I responded by pointing out all the advantages I gave them and how they ignored them completely and then split the group up to tackle the monsters seperately instead of together
And that's not punishing players, that players being overconfident in their guesses!
The guy that was almost 1 shotted asked if I was going to kill him, I told him "No, but I will just let you die". Same play session they tried to bypass a magic staircase that teleported them down a flight of stairs every time they tried to go up by just breaking the stone ceiling above them... I feel like they're trying to die
What helps for me is I give all my players 1 free death at the start of the campaign, then get merciless for the first few sessions. If they get crushed by a ceiling or turned to stone or swallowed by a giant I tell them something like "You feel like you should have died, it was a miracle that you pulled through!" Then they are officially MORTAL, and they start acting more cautiously. Amazingly, giving them a free life will make them value it more... because it lets you give them a taste of death!
The fight, you're right about; but I don't see any problem with them breaking the ceiling; or at least attempting to. That sounds like you're kind of forcing them down one path rather than letting them choose their own.
I have no issue with that method other than dropping a ton or two of stone on top of your own head. The plan was literally put the barbarian on that guys shoulders so he can hit the ceiling
Why can’t I put a heart on your videos? I don’t just like them - I love them
A type of metagaming not touched on in the video: Players being aware of things that happen on the battlemat that their characters have no way of knowing about. For instance, there was a chase encounter in Baldur's Gate that my cleric did not participate in as he stayed behind to tie up and heal a defeated adversary (LG cleric of Ilmater), but watching the chase, at one point I thought about casting Sending to confuse one of the fleeing enemies. I chose not to because I was doing other things (like casting mending on broken household objects) and because my character wouldn't know if any of them were still alive or whatever. In the preceding fight, I had to remind people in my group that the shadow monk's darkness spell was cutting off line of sight for certain things, particularly my healing, but also some of their assumptions about what was happening on the other side of it.
Was I being a wet blanket?
Nope, you were thinking about things in a slightly different way than the others
A lot of what you described as 'meta-gaming' is just Roleplaying.
Your character has some understanding of what they can do, and when is a good idea to use their abilities. The players are.'playing' their 'character', after all.
Sure, but a fight is chaotic and messy and the characters don't have the birds eye view of the battlefield that their players have. The PCs might not know that behind the three orks that they can see, there aren't any more, and they might not really see that behind the rock to the right there are additional goblins who try to flank them, but they throw their fireball - based on the players, not the characters knowledge - farther to the right of the orcs all the same.
We're ok with allowing this kind of behaviour because the game is only an approximation of a coherent reality, but it definitely can be defined as a kind of meta gaming.
with SOME metagaming. If you start googling monster and spell stats on your phone during combat, you're a bit of an ass.
No phones or other electronics at my table. Two PH are available. Solves the problem with no angst and no ambiguities.
Vanilla and modified monsters are 50/50 .... believe what's in the MM at your own risk ...
Laventhros -- fully agreed. There is a need for a certain amount of what can be called "metagaming" as there's no good other way for the players/DM to converse on what the PCs know.
This is my first time on this podcast, so I don't know JIm's background. My first reaction is that he needs to DM -- it will change his perspective.
Bryan Fazekas as I always say "The Monster Manual is useful, but not canon"
I’ve always found that the people who REALLY want to win, need that win, whether it’s work or their home life that’s kicking their ass. but in D&D you can succeed unequivocally and sometimes you just need to feel in control, or a sense of accomplishment.
Yush a new video, great as always, My biggest issue with a metagame discussion i had with another guy on reddit was that his attitude boiled down to "well if you dont want me to know every weakness for a monster YOU should just change it up" as if the whole burden for the fun of the party lies SOLELY on the dm, especially since im a new dm i am mainly going by monsters from the book, which my players are lovely to play in character.
Another thing i believe iffs me most about the concept of metagaming is that in this huge world there are so many ways to get information hence why sage background exists, alongside talking to people in the area (who would know the weaknesses), lying in wait to see how it attacks and engages the enemy, or even just doing checks to see if the character realizes it or not.
Forexample i have a medusa encounter planned and there will be tons of clues, an entire room full of eerily humanoid statues, the characters might not know that it is a medusa, however i would think they know the general concept of "some creatures and spells can turn people to stone" and be weary of it, however if the first thing they do is go grab a mirror as they approaches it... well.... Or if there are no statues and they simply see a woman with a veil on then would they knows?
I also often see the argument of "but we would have heard the stories in taverns" but for some reason people never assume that people are making stuff up? what are the chances that its a true hero tale as opposed to a drunken merchant who wants to brag without having anything to brag, and i can understand that if you grew up in an area but for me looking at the stats its just like "if a small tribe of goblins attacked a village with their coward tactics a single arrow would kill the villagers"
I really appreciate the video because it gives a wider perspective, and i think what guy said about metagaming being more about "good and bad sportsmanship also rings true"
Hey Web DM. Long time viewer, first time commenter. I just wanted to thank you for making this video.
I got into the hobby of D&D not but 8 months ago. Mostly from Critical Role. Kinda got pushed into the role of the DM because no one else wanted to be one in my group. It was an acquired taste, but I'm really loving it. Thanks in no small part to you guys.
But this video in particular was really helpful. Specifically your perspective to the "Did you forget your ability and were reminded of it after the fact? Tough luck. Remember it next time" situation. I'm super guilty of that as a DM. Not to try and justify it, but I used it under the pretense of "They'll learn from this if I punish them for not paying attention and not tracking what they can do". I realize now after your talk about it that that's a super dick move. And if I want them to learn, I can do that in a less abrasive/aggressive way.
TL;DR
Thanks for Improving my game with your experience and knowledge. I'm forever grateful.
Casimir Lawnicki it's all about learning and having fun keep it up.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Derick. I'll keep that as my golden rule.
(Not sarcasm, BTW. I have a terrible problem IRL where all my compliments sound like a passive aggressive jab. Dont want that to bleed over into the internet.)
Is it Thursday yet!?
WHAT TIME IS IT?!
It's 5:18 on a Wednesday
(So close...)
Good move, it's okay to use the stick rather than he carrot to teach players sometimes, but at the very least you should recognize it as a stick, and that your players might not like it. And good luck on DMing! It's quite a bit more work than being a player, but man oh man when you make a cool encounter or series of encounters, and the players love it, and even though you did all this planning the players still surprise you and figure out some clever way to solve a problem that you didn't even think of... it's just the best feeling in the world.
God I love you guys' content, its actually gotten me confident enough to try moving from player to DM. Thanks for that!
You will have tons of fun with it in the right group. And don't worry about worry about making early mistakes (my first DM session was a disaster, but now my campaign is my group's favorite), they only allow you to grow from the experience and learn.
You won’t want to go back. I’ve been bitten hard by the DM bug.
hey guys, I watch your show every week. I heard that yall had an emergency last week, and I hope that everybody is sane, safe, healthy, and ok!
I was really interested in the group initiative for players. Could you touch on that sometime in a future video? Thanks! Have a great week!
Thanks! Much better this week. Have you checked out this ep? Can't remember if we cover group initiative specifically but I'd be surprised if we didn't th-cam.com/video/QODTZR_nkC4/w-d-xo.html
What happened?
Web DM good sir was that surprise round pun intentional?
WebDM is honestly the greatest part of my week. I agree. I don't want my players to look at monster stats or try and tell if they should fight by looking at CR. Otherwise I generally don't bother. I just rule that big information is relayed to the party unless there's a reason it can't be such as not alerting people etc.
You guys are great! I loved the intro, and no matter what I know I'm always going to hear well-thought out discussions on a hobby we all love. I will slightly disagree about the "Are you sure?" Question.
With the groups I've been all the way back to middle school I've had GMs, who would say it with delightful, evil smiles. Such an innocuous little phrase sends tense shivers through the party, and everyone's attention grows and sharpens. We know something is about to happen. It can be used as a tool to set a mood, to heighten dramatic anticipation, and sometimes to even undercut it for the sake of a joke. And, yes generally players follow through, but in my experience at least I follow through in tense anticipation of what great new horror will be visited upon me next.
Now your mileage may vary, and it might well be that it doesn't go over well in other groups, but I wanted to share my own history and positive experiences with "Are you sure?"
As someone who just got into DnD, and living overseas, you guys have made just learning the game more fun, interesting, and overall exciting! My friends and I all watch you guys religiously and regularly refer to your shows while we play. Thanks so much for these videos. Keep it up!
I think there's a lot of implausible meta-gaming. In general, I don't have too many problems with it because I have either new players, or other players that don't use meta-game knowledge. If any of my players that already know a thing ask for whether they know it in-game, I think about their backstory, generalized world-knowledge, or I ask them to roll a skill check deemed reasonable for what they ask.
Pruitt was saying, that they can yell to each other and discuss strategies in combat, but it's completely unreasonable for the characters 50+ feet away from each other to 1. Be able to focus and comprehend what one of many people on the battlefield is saying flawlessly. 2. For them to be able to get more than a 15 word sentence out. And 3. Know everything about other people's abilities and be able to recall it in an instant in the middle of battle after being hit with a ball of fire and to then advise how to use it.
I will agree with the concept of easing new players into the game, I think that's good, but after a couple sessions once people get a hang of it, if you want a narrative-driven campaign that makes in-game sense, then meta-gaming has to go away in almost all forms.
You might label me a cherry picker or some kind of stickler, but it just doesn't make sense.
If you are DMing, you should set the level of metagaming that is best for YOU. Players are there to have fun, and so are you, but it is your responsibility to MAKE that fun, and you have a harder job than players do.
That degree of realism is perfectly manageable in DnD, so long as the DM is able to set boundaries and players are respectful of them. DnD is a great game for for what @Seth Sybrandy wants. Once you start thinking about what elements of the game are arbitrary, the whole thing unravels. It's okay to play different ways, and despite what the video says, Jim and Pruitt's way of playing is not for everyone.
I'm sorry you disagree, but unfortunately my experience with playing tabletop games is that there is some value to mitigating "realism" when it helps to create a more engaging experience. The realism helps to foster the fun, they are not mutually exclusive, and sometimes just a touch of extra detail can really help. That's not arbitrary, that's craft.
I use knowledge abilities to establish what a player knows about an enemy. Say the party enounters a hydra. They would be able to use some kind of int check in this case nature/arcana.
If they make the check they get to know something about the creature. Say resistance or weaknesses, if they roll very high they know everything they want about it.
One this makes use of some under used abilities. If the party plays well and scouts the hydra before the encounter they could get knowledge to help plan the fight.
I also use quite a bit of custom or re flavored creatures if I don't want them to have prior knowledge.
My philosophy has always been if they can come up with a reason they might have that knowledge. And it's compelling and something I can call back to myself at a later date I let it pass
Joshua Reynolds I use this but also INT, nature, arcana and religion checks! Setting the DC based on how obscure or common the knowledge should be on this world.
Damn I would love to play a game with Jim as the DM. Your stance on metagaming is ludicrously level-headed and well thought out, and shows your passion and true care for the game and for the player's experience.
As a DM, I typically give every character the benefit of the doubt based on their race/class/background. A Dragonborn Ranger automatically knows the relative strengths/weaknesses/elements of dragons and most beasts, a Rock Gnome Lore Bard will sometimes just know how a basic magic item works without needing to roll or Identify, a Fighter with the Noble or Soldier background automatically gets respect from most guards/soldiers and can get info from them, etc. It makes the game go much faster than trying to test them through rolls for every little thing and objecting to them knowing something they should obviously know.
I'm running a Planar campaign and my players know very little about D&D cosmology, so their characters know a little more about the places/creatures than they do (so they basically can't metagame anyway) which gives me a chance to explain things.
Knowing a troll's weakness is something common folk would know. Knowing more obscure monsters weaknesses from reading the monster manual and using said knowledge when one's pc has no way of knowing it are two very different things.
I love your gaming philosophy so much!
this is one of the most helpful resources I've ever seen or read on the subject. as someone who is currently communicating with a dm who just outright gored a new player because they think the player was "metagaming too much", thank you
Don't comment often but your probably my favorite dnd channel. Your information is always extremely accurate and helpful.
Is knowing the video will be a huge success metagaming?
cougar71624 It's a prediction, unless you're clairvoyant...
It's just common sense, really
Just being privy brah'
This video is actually much more relative to learning how to run a campaign than it sounds from the outside. This is some basic stuff that we should all be paying attention to. So thank you so much!
Ok I'm a new dm, but I love bluffing the "are you sure?" So much that my party hasn't let it sway their decisions.
The relief/letdown of them realizing there was no danger is the best feeling. Bluff check: Success
Yeah, you drop enough bluffs no body bats an eye. You only need it to be true once to throw everyone off.
As a GM, I'm kind of a fan of "stoopey switches" as my Table often calls them... It's basically a lever or switch or some mechanical remnant that no longer does anything... Some even look relatively complete (functional) in-game, but they don't do anything... (lolz)
SO I reserve a fair fraction of the "Are you sure?" bluff for those times when the Players have already had an argument about whether or not to "pull the stoopey switch"... and someone volunteers.
BUT these are all basic storytelling techniques... and perfectly useful. Whether it's a bluff, just to tease the Player(s) in question or an outright bluff to raise tension... AND that's okay too.
I've rolled dice in a bowl behind the screen for no reason at all, particularly before answering a question. I've scratched a pen or pencil on a pad behind the screen for no purpose at all, and even doodled while the rest of the table was busy "theorizing" about whatever they were planning for "the mission"... only occasionally taking notes about whatever they were dubiously "just in case..." about.
GM'ing is at least partly a theatrical effort, and bluffing is entirely part of that. It also lends you the chance to "read the Players" for their reactions, to see how invested they are in this particular or that particular part of the story...
Once in a while having that bluff turn out not to be a bluff... well, of course you have to keep 'em on their toes! ;o)
@@nuclearchezburgr3857 As you turn the lock, there's a click... *everyone gasps and gets tense* and the door opens. No traps. *everyone sighs with relief or goes "fuck you" to the DM*
I just don’t use it and it is wonderful
My Dad taught me two things which have stuck with me. 1) Don't start a land war in Asia. 2) Trolls are vulnerable to fire
Wow, guys, you never stop upping your game! Best intro ever, followed by the most logical, balanced, useful look at metagaming across the board. As always, thanks for your great work and inspiration!
I think The Angry GM made the best case for why metagaming is something GMs need to sush about: it's really, really hard to play a fool. It's why lying is a skill, lawsuits can get thrown out over improper conduct, etc.
And that comes from a GM. Just be chill. Release some control. Read 4e and remember that being in control isn't all there is to being a GM.
"*hissss*" 4e. XD
Just think of the Hobbit when the dwarves come to Bilbo's and they're talking about smaug and he says yes I know what a dragon is. So ya I mean like even in stories people have an understanding of what's out there so knowing a troll is weak to fire and acid or things like that shouldn't be far feched. Also thank you Pruitt snakes are awesome. Anyways great show guys have a wonderful day.
I would still have players make a DC 5 Intelligence (Nature) check, because although most people would know what a troll is like, it's not a guarantee. Maybe they were out sick on the day their school covered it?
I had a falling out with two of my players, a husband and wife, during Rise of the Runelords in Pathfinder. He ran the first chapter and handed the second chapter over to me because he thought that I’d have a better mind for it. I caught on quickly though that he was reading ahead and skewing not only his own character’s progression but that of his wife do that they would be as effective as possible.
In response I started altering the adventure and monsters within it because, to mean, the enemies were reacting to these overly capable warriors. That deviation caused a complete childish meltdown from them and they left the group shortly after.
This really opened my eyes as both a DM and player. Watching your videos has enhanced my experience with the game tremendously, I'm very grateful.
To prevent too much talking during combat (since play over a 6 second timeframe in-game) we devised the 'three-word-shout' rule. Like a reaction, once outside of their turn they can shout up to three words at any point in time, whether it be between a monsters attacks or before an allies movement action.
This has really helped us find common ground between 'no crosstalk' players and 'pause the combat and lets talk for five minutes' players.
It's gotten to the point that players are getting creative with how to formulate sentences to stick to the three word rule. Stuff like 'GO UP NOW!' 'DON'T DO IT' 'SHOOT THE LEG' or 'DONT USE FIRE'.
“No ones out to screw others over,” clearly you have not played Vampire the Masquerade
Riley Chute They did say meta gaming should be controlled in PvP situations.
Everything I hear about Vampire makes me glad no one in my group is interested in playing it
I've asked my players "Are you sure?" over trivial decisions just to sow a seed of doubt in their minds. It always results in everyone at the table laughing - including the decision maker. It's fun to do as a joke from time to time. Just like any other joke, though - if you do it too much, it gets old.
I would love to hear a discussion about building towns and villages. Maybe a camp of centaur or minotaur. But how an experienced DM would go about creating a memorable scene like that.
If you have proficiency in ALL martial weapons of course you know the weaknesses of enemies. If a soldier today was proficient in all modern weapons like rifles, grenades and rocket launchers... of course they'd know of a weakness of modern threats like how a tank can be destroyed by a molotov cocktail on the engine deck.
I think you guys really nailed this.
I don't think that meta-gaming is bad; I think that annoying or unfair narrative choices are bad. Like you say, meta-gaming is done badly when it makes things unfair or boring, but those things are bad by default.
So much of the time though, players can really justify a lot of things that would be considered, "meta-gaming," simply by pointing out that their characters do not have Intelligence or Wisdom scores lower than a 6.
I'm fighting this monster that continually regenerates? Maybe fire, you know, the most stereotypically consumptive and destructive element which has spawned the meme, "Kill it with fire," could be useful. Oh, we need to convince someone to help us, maybe our Bard, whom we have continually witnessed acting as a magically-powered rock-star, should take point on this matter. And yes, the party will definitely try to, "Geek the Mage," because the old man with a walking stick sure looks like the easiest target.
It's really a simple matter of understanding that characters who have lived in this world as veteran adventurers probably know or at least have some idea about game mechanics.
I just finished my first session as a DM with my friends from school and it was awesome. You're videos helped me create an epic campaign for my friends
I would say there's two definitions of metagaming; one good and one bad. You kind of address that, despite the title saying otherwise... I'll just chalk that up to making an eye-catching title.
Fine metagaming: players making characters that will work in certain campaign, players that simply know stuff about a monster because they are learned in that system. You can't control that and you shouldnt try to control that.
Bad metagaming: players who do stuff like running 10 rooms down to where another player found treasure for no discernible reason right after the DM revealed there was treasure
Other than that, I felt like a lot of examples given didn't even fit into the criteria of metagaming. Not sure how I felt about this one. I will say that as usual, you were very thorough with examples and while I would disagree with you defining certain things as metagaming.(Which, is simply semantics) I agreed 100% on what you deemed okay and not okay.
i can agree to this
Shitposter-kun
I think what is meant by the title is that there's nothing so wrong with metagaming that it becomes it's punishment-worthy.
@Ezeckel Reichert Nah I think they're either being clickbaity or hyperbolic. They are good guys and I like their advice but they really do have a habit of assuming that everyone should be playing like them - like they can admit that its okay to do your own thing but in the same sentence they will say how everything will be better if everyone does this thing exactly like them.
@Shitposter-kun I agree with you, but I have to admit that I started the video with very strong views, but by the end had softened quite a bit, and I don't think I'll ever say metagaming is good/bad again, it's too broad a statement.
Gnarleston Gnu
I mean, clickbait is almost necessary to succeed with the TH-cam algorithm being the way it is, and with that being the case I don't mind as long as what is titled or shown in a thumbnail is actually discussed/present in the video.
On the other hand, while I get what you're saying, I don't think they feel as you say. I just think it's tiresome and kind of pointless to start every sentence with, "Now this is just my opinion". That's generally a given if you're discussion subject matter which is in the realm of opinion mattering.
The part where you're talking about the "need to win" as a primary motivation for metagaming... I totally agree, and I really think that D&D is a REALLY great opportunity for cultural training. We live in a culture of distrust and competition. D&D is a great chance to learn to trust... The DM and players both, can learn to trust each other, and the first part of that is to let each other play their own role. I can even see the "never" list going away as trust is built. Not that D&D is a unique thing, there are lots of similar opportunities. But this is a prime one...
Personally I couldn't play in a campaign where ALL metagaming was accepted. It would be impossible for there to be any secrets between party members, which would take out so much potential for surprise and drama. Imagine you find an item or learn a piece of knowledge that your character would want to keep secret from the party for whatever situational reason, and someone just turns to you and says "hey lets see that dagger you just found". They are using knowledge that their player does not know (metagaming), killing all immersion, and basically ruining the game. Of course some amount of metagaming should be accepted, but definitely not all, imo.
Well what's the alternative? texting the player what they find every time they roll perception or investigation? I don't think it's asking too much to not act on knowledge your character has no way of knowing.
That may be how it is in your games, but not in mine. Agree to disagree
As a new player it was pretty annoying to me when other players would explain in-depth the weaknesses and strengths of a monster none of our characters have ever seen before.
Thank you for fixing the volume on the intro. It used to blow my face away more than the THX intro.
Love your videos! I would say for the "Are you sure?" that sometimes characters don't pick up all the clues, and it can feel like they have been duped if they miss a small line. So I'll reiterate what may happen, such as "Remember, this giant that you are wanting to insult to is no friend to you, so it could offend them." But I try not to steer them any one way. It goes back to another vid yall had about players not knowing what their character would. So while a character might know there could be an alarm, a player might not. For instance, a player in my group chose to use a horn that gives everyone lightning. I informed them the horn may be loud and reinforcements may arrive if they hear it. They still wanted to, and it was badass!
The only other time I will curb is if 1 or 2 players are pulling the group into a situation they do not want to be a part of. If the bard wants to get smart with the villain and his thugs, or the paladin wants to fight rather than parley, the rest of the party might not be okay with risking their lives. Or the other players may really want to know what the NPC has to say. So I usually at least make sure the group is okay with the more impactful decisions.
Some of my most enjoyable moments came from metagaming. I remember once our party was fighting a couple groups of goblins who would sometimes blow themselves up with grenades when they where close to death or in a bad situation. While we where clearing up one such group we had one surrounded but where just not able to make hits connect. So i did the smart thing and grappled him so the party could cut him to pieces. Right before the gobbos initiative i remembered and said out loud "Oh shit, i just grappled him and these guys have grenades". DM- "Now that you mention it..."
If you as a person living in the real world know what a troll's weakness would be, it shouldn't be that much a stretch to imagine that someone living in a world where troll's are actual beings would know as well.
Fakjbf except we live in a world with internet. Your characters live in medieval history. You think a random schmuck from the 1500's even knows what, for instance, a snakes venom is as how to defeat that, let alone what a trolls weakness would be if it were a real thing
Also your mother what a trolls weak too, they likely wouldn't know.
Evan Gregory weak to fire? If so Skyrim taught me well
Evan Gregory You're equating different things. A peasant in the 1500's would not know how a snake's venom actually works, but they would damn well know that certain snake bites would be lethal. That level of knowledge is all that needs to be passed around, not the deeper explanation. For thousands of years humans have used certain molds to treat infections, we now know it was effective because those molds produced antibiotics. The only limitation on mundane NPCs in a fantasy setting should be that their knowledge should be region specific. If they live in an area where trolls are a potential problem, it's totally reasonable for them to have a vague idea on a troll's weakness. But someone living in a fantasy version of medieval England shouldn't know much if anything about monsters who live in deserts.
The problem is when players use metagaming knowledge to fight an aberration or something very much uncommon to the world.
One of my favorite episodes yet, and def a sort of wake up call for myself as a DM... to be more conscious of my action and rule setting. Can't thank you enough, dudes.
I really enjoy your candid way of communicating the various topics in gaming. It's approached from an a well thought out perspective which is very appreciated.
After two decades I've only recent come back to RPGs. From a more mature perspective, I've become more observant of the contributions players make to the game. And I realize that all people bring a bit of themselves to the game. Synergy between players seems to be the "glue" that keeps them together. I would say that developing synergy is analogous to dating. And it may take several meetings to determine if players are compatible.
I really needed to hear this as much as I was hurt by it. I have been a peeved DM about metagaming, but now that I see some good arguments for it, I should just relax and take it easy. It's about them having fun, even if it's not my idea of fun.
I think I was playing a Shadowrun campaign when the GM quality checked a story idea with me. It really pleased me he would trust me that much, but it also meant I could use my character's natural choices to encourage the story, and ...ahem, keep the story on rails. As a player I'd rather see the story progress, and this trust let me move it forward quickly while maintaining my character and immersion. It's one of my favorite experiences from any game I've played.
Thank you for stating the obvious about meta gaming. Let's just play the game and not worry about it.
on topic. metagaming only becomes a real problem when playing in a game like LARP Vampire the Masquerade, which can be veeeeerrry competitive. very. very very.
So, according to the intro, is it safe to assume that you guys are playing a D&D game, about talking about D&D, all the time?
Meta.
This is honestly the best insight I've ever seen anyone give about meta-gaming. I used to consider myself largely against meta-gaming, but this really highlights a lot of the hypocrisy that many gamers display when discussing it. I honestly feel that the DMs that are so sensitive about meta-gaming are actually adversarial DMs themselves.
This is a wild topic for me. I've been GMing for 3 years now, and definitely have a preferred playstyle by now. Normally I'm very hard against egregious metagaming, but I've noticed that since I've played with the same group or people for the length of time I've run games, there's some behaviors and habits my players have that I've learned to just let be. It definitely falls into the category of the player really just engaging with the game the way they want to most, and me, as the GM, not getting too much in the way of that. This video definitely has changed my perspective, and I'm interested in letting some slack in the chain so my players can have more opportunities to enjoy the game their own way.
I will say I am the player that reminds my GM when they forget effects specific to my character. One of our players has just started DMing, and I've been very helpful for him in that regard. I play a Barbarian that's always recklessly attacking, and he often forgets that attacks against me have advantage. The first time I reminded him he showed a look of surprised I'd never seen him make, but I could immediately feel the trust building. Afterwards, he expressed his appreciation, and told me how that really helped him feel a lot better about his game, knowing that at least one player was trying to be as fair as possible given the circumstances.
From a fan and fellow East Texan I would Like to say great video guys! Watching ur videos is part of my weekly prep for my current campaign, you guys always provide me with unique ideas and points of view. Sorry for my horrible grammar lol.
Just wanna say I didnt know you guys had a TH-cam channel set up for your twitch streams.
That is fantastic! Cuz I use TH-cam for downloading videos to listen to during work and yea glad I can watch stuff that I normally would miss cuz of work bs.
Something that I didn't hear mentioned but I use a lot when I'm DMing: your characters have an intelligence stat. They also have skills which may afford them special knowledge - let players use that!
If a PC with particularly low INT starts acting as though they know something or using a highly complex strategy, I might pull a player up on that. On the flipside if my player running a bookish wizard with 19 intelligence happens to know lots about the monsters they're facing, I'd encourage them to share that knowledge with other players.
I will start this by saying I love the work you guys do. So please don't take this as anything but criticism of a fan that wishes you both well and success.
I have complained many times about players metagaming as a fellow player. If they are going to see an NPC because an NPC revealed their true self to another player but not them....players asking questions or acting a certain way to other players because of meta knowledge they have about something another player has thought/dreamed/done but they have no way of knowing about it in character. Players who know the Monster Manual inside and out and call out what a monster does or its weaknesses are even though, and unlike the common Troll, their character would have no idea about it. Sorry but all of those issues are meta gaming that I have experienced as a fellow player and complained about as it is terrible for the game.
For you two to not acknowledge this means you have been blessed at your tables or are just ignoring it because you are fine with all of these forms of meta gaming. Either means you are speaking on very limited knowledge and didn't do research prior to the video which is not the norm for you all, or you all are just those types of gamers and I highly doubt you are.
I love battle mastering as a veteran player. It can be massively helpful to let a squishier character get away from melee, you can have characters use additional attacks, and since you are a super tactician battle strategist giving advice to people really isn't out of character. That really helps you apply meta gaming knowledge and raise the party as a whole to a higher level, without hoarding all the cool achievements for yourself.
A real talk! Absolutely great episode guys the chemistry between you two is better than ever. Excellent points and so well laid out
I agree so much. There is a new level of challenges you can give players with knowledge that is so much more satesfying for me, than the troll "look for right damage type".
the way I always got around "meta gaming" when it cames to monster stats was I never used the monster manual stats.
My orcs are different every game.
I started just cause half my players have played for so many years we all have the MM almost memorized, and I noticed two of my new players were keeping track of HP and AC of enemy types so I figured it would solve one problem and spice things up a bit
This was my favorite video of you guys so far, just a laid back, meta and fun time.
Keep up the great vids!
Skills an d DCs. At session zero, as the DM give what each skill actually provides info on and then provide DCs for common, uncommon, rare, legendary info. Great Video!
I don't think that the details need to be ironed out to that extent in session zero; but the general idea that if you're going to meta-game something then you're going to have to make a roll for it to work and to see how well it works or is communicated depending on what you're trying to do.
There's a DM that plays in my game.. He's actually tried calling me out for monsters not falling when taking the hp listed in the book (I rolled hp)... I now reflavor and change names of all my monsters so he can't keep looking everything up.
Great vid guys. I'm that guy that was 3v1ing hill giants as a lvl10 battlemaster Paladin, got them down to 1 hill giant standing and the DM forgot to attack me and I said "Wait you forgot about attacking me". He thought I was just saying it so I could Riposte but I was out of superiority die and just wanted to see if I could beat them fairly. The attacks missed but it could have also been crits (had Adamantine Plate though ;) #tanky Paladin). Walked out of the fight having been hit once by a crit for 22 damage despite flanking rules. The DM was impressed and sad at the same time :P
I have opinions about what degree/kind of meta-gaming I want to exclude and want to actively enforce in my game. Still, this video brings up a separate topic that I really hope can become non-controversial:
If you have a problem with how your players play the game, _don't_ use the game itself to punish them. Talk it over with them outside the game. You can use the game to punish player _characters_ and their behavior, but even that shouldn't be punishment as much as it should be natural consequence intended to make your players appreciate the game more because it provides depth/integrity to your world.
That's a good point about the nursery rhymes. A lot of low to mid level creatures would be common knowledge or at least talked about. You could even work it into the campaign where some stories aren't exactly correct...or at least not obviously so. This might also make more exotic creatures more interesting to fight since the party has no clue what it can do.
The idea of local folktales existing about dangers in the region reminds me of a video I watched just yesterday about griffins. The video had a mention that griffins do not do well in the same area as horses - more like a griffin will tear apart anything that gets between it and a horse, because it wants the horse as a meal.
I would imagine a region that has griffins living wild in some cliffs would have a song or folktale about the knight who had to walk home after he ran into a griffin and had to abandon his horse, for survival.
Dice, Camera, Action! handles meta-knowledge pretty well, I think. The more experienced players are always asking things like "Do I know if these giants tend to be evil?" and the DM may or may not call for a roll depending how common the knowledge is. Of course, the players are really honest about playing to the knowledge given, like mentioned in the vid.
for the group i dmging i set a custom world up:
there is a organisation: the order of wanderers, they go around as taveling teachers, healers, helping hands. mostly consitend out of druids and clerics, but also all the others classes becasuse i set it up as a custom background. its ment for player who want to go knowledge heavy.
so because of that order most people know the common monsters and i did give every citizen magic initate. basicly the order teaching people stuff like mending, light, cure wounds and other usefull every day cantrips and lvl 1 spells.
for more specific information i let the players roll history, nature or whatever fits.
for my players i got 1 veteran, 2 complete newbies and 1 player who played a bit of 3rd edition and DSA (another role play game)
the probably most knowlegable characters are the druid (parents belong to the order) and my fighter (scholar background, going eldrich knight, obsest with magic)
those are not my veteran player so 1 reason more for me to let them roll for knowlegde
my least knowledgeable character is my borhter thief. he loves catmen, so he choose tabaxi, and i was like: "uhm ok they dont exist on this continent (didnt have the book for them at the point i worte the world but he gave it to me), so you come from the second continent ok? think about how that continent looks like, because i havent realy thought about that continent yet"
but in regards to hte continent we play on he only knows what he met on hte streets.
i also gave every player my file with the world setup so they can read it
i also sometimes talk to them of what could have happend, because sometimes they dont just derail 1 train, they derail the whole train depo and then i have to figure out from there.
One of the players in our group was trying to say that I wouldn’t know that a vampire was weak to sunlight... “ well I know that and in our world they aren’t even real” was my response. I very much dislike when players and dms alike get petty and/or nitpicks about meta gaming and phrasing. I also ran into a problem with the dm when I asked a blacksmith for a finesse weapon. Finesse is a real word that could be used to describe the kind of weapon I was looking for. It is not like I walked in and asked for a weapon that attacks off dexterity! Lol, so I raised my voice “ I would like to buy a weapon that requires more finesse!” “ a non bulky weapon “
This video was very useful for as a DM. I will definitely try to improve some of the aspects of my game.
Not to harp on metagaming from the player side (Well no I like to harp on metagaming from the player side) I still don't don't really know what to do when a player will go online to find some broken combination of of abilities and rules. For example a brand new player's character summoning specific animals to do a very specific series of actions to get out of a situation at the start of a new session. In that case there was no possible way that player thought up that solution. I tried to let them know that that indepth game mechanic research between sessions might be fun for them but all the rest of the players don't get to do anything. I dunno. It makes me not want to do any cliffhanger endings for sessions. It just seems like there are just some players that are incompatible for my style of game.
Hey, guys. I only found your videos recently and am super happy I did. I've been playing RPGs for 18 years, but have hardly ever seen tables actually talk about issues like the ones in this video, and it's refreshing to have insights on these topics from other gamers. Hope to see more like these, not just 'how to play D&D the Game' but also 'how to play D&D the Group Activity That Affects People.' Specifically, do you have ideas on how to keep combat engaging but not take two hours?
I have always considered cross board talk as the little internal voice advising, everyone has had a situation where they think, "well, what would X do?". I used to restrict cross chatter about active situations, like knowing what's going on in another room, or that a trap has you dominated, but even that could be justified as a sign from your patron deity, or perhaps the fact that the group has been adventuring so long there is a momentary flicker of a spontaneous Rary's bond going on. One group I'm in, we use speaking stones almost as cellphones, including jokes about roaming charges, signal interference, and call waiting. More than one time one character inadvertently tipped off guards because their speaking stone was "ringing".
As a side note it made me happy to see the old school dinosaur minis on the table.
Thanks a lot guys, I've had Gloryhammer stuck in my head for two weeks now. No seriously, thank you.
I'm very thankful for this video because I thought of it when a player lied about the duration of a spell for a social encounter and I just looked at him and told him what he did was wrong and fucked up and he looked at me and just said he was sorry and it didn't have an impact on the game but he and I added on to the unwritten rules of the game in that moment and I was relieved to have it happen amicably. Thanks jim and Pruitt.
Hey, I love your show! Of course, that is a lead in to a negative comment. But first, more positive ones! I really like that you brought up the GM metagaming of the 'battle plan'. I think that that is a form of metagaming that is basically required. One concept that is often overlooked is that your characters may know more than the players. The characters are the ones actually hanging out with the others for months on end, the characters probably practice with one another, the characters understand what each other can do (for the most part). I think the strategy sessions should be looked at as trying to catch up to what the characters expect each other to do, know how to follow up on that opening, or know what to do when that doesn't pan out. Even among close friends who spend a lot of time together, you don't always need to declare what you are doing to know how the next person will respond. The characters, usually, spend a lot of time together, the minimal amount we spend running them is only a bit of their lives. (Also a response to the comment later that if the players are announcing their plans the characters are also declaring their plans in battle. That is the negative bit.)
Second, I would like to share my favorite quote(s) from this series so far (at least from what I have seen, which is most of them.) Jim - "It's an element of play that you've clearly communicated to the players. Now, it's on the party to see how much they want to test that danger..."
Pruit - "You take a ride on a tiger, you're gonna get bit."
I think that quote should be on the first page of a DM guide. It clearly establishes the responsibilities of both the players and DMs better than a series of videos might.
My players are really good, if they're not sure if they're pc would know something they just ask me and if we're all ready not sure we typically leave it to a role
I cannot completely agree. I am playing in a Curse of Strahd game where one of the players has admitted reading the adventure. So he knows what's coming and what's where. In fact, he must be rereading it before each session, because he knows it in really fine detail (like how much treasure is in a given place to the coin, which he'll tell us in advance). One session, he got increasingly upset because the DM (his best friend) changed monsters and other details in several encounters; the DM explained that he changed them so that this player wouldn't know what to expect. The player called that "bullshit" and sulked at the DM's meta-metagaming. So, in later sessions, the DM went back to running the adventure straight.
To be honest, from my perspective the metagaming player does too often detract from the experience, telling us what's coming if we do X, Y or Z and unraveling "mysteries" (or puzzles) that I think would have been fun for me, as a player, to speculate about. My headcanon is that my character accepts that his character is a prophet who can see the past and future. He loves this and plays into it and that can be fun. Still, it would, I think, be *more* fun for me to be surprised by things occasionally (and sometimes it feels like the rest of the party are sidekicks to his prophetic "Chosen One").
Wait, the player called the DM out for metagaming? That's rather ironic. From what I've seen, the DM wasn't even metagaming. They were just doing the job of the DM, to design the world (which can come with varying levels of help from premade modules and adventures).
+discoandherpes And not to mention I think their point is that the problem here is the misalignment of player expectations (antagonistic and hyper-metagamey) vs DM expectations (normal play). They made the point in the video that in the hypothetical situation where all the players and the DM expect to be maximally metagamey and cutthroat that would be okay (it just never plays out that way in practice)
The troll example isn't what bothers me as a player. It's that moment when a character has no way of knowing something but the player acts on that information: I.E. our more magically inclined companion was doing some detective work on his own, deciphered the villain's plot / identified the villain / found out his weakness but promptly got incapacitated/kidnapped before communicating to the party what he discovered. Then the halforc barbarian that was on the other side of town haggling the price of some gear suddenly knows everything for no reason. And acts on out of game knowledge. He 'knows' the wizard was kidnapped, knows where he was taken, and knows who the villain is and how to defeat him. Even when all the other players at the table were playing along and trying to find him in the confides of the story.
That's when it breaks the game - when it's along the lines of playing a PC multiplayer game with friends, but one of them decided to load up a wall hack.
You can come up with reasons for knowing a troll's weakness - folk lore, word of mouth from other adventures or town's folk. But knowing everything that happens all across the world at once get real lame real fast.
Imagine running Tomb of Annihilation and one person at your table decided between sessions to buy and read the whole book and then his character knows where everything is hidden, how to solve every puzzle and where all the traps are placed. - I know it's an extreme example - but i've seen people do this. This is the kind of behavior we refer to as 'meta gaming' in a derogatory way.
Just found this channel last week and love Web DM!! Keep up the great work guys!!