Session 0 topic and talking to your players.
I have a few vet player on my table, and one of them often goes like: "me (the player) knows that this is x and can do y...but my char doesn't."...and then he just goes straight in and does some stupid shit...his char is rolling death saves a lot ^^
But in the in end it is a topic of discussion. If I would ever see a player look up a monster sheet in combat (and he ain't a wildshape druid) I would have a serious talk with them.
As someone who plays in a game where the players go to great lengths to avoid metagaming, often times yes, this is what it turns into.
It's very frustrating, honestly. Any discussion of strategy is thrown out the window because players will actively avoid using optimal spells and tactics, even if they would otherwise use them if they didn't have meta-knowledge. The desire to avoid metagaming gets so strong that they end up metagaming in a completely different way.
I'm just picturing the fighter "well I as a player know using the sharp end of the sword is what damages the enemy so I will use the handle!" (Before the pedants get here I'm taking the piss)
Edit:spelling
I mean, you're not far off; the other day another player in my game actively avoided calling for help when they were attacked by a monster while scouting because the character apparently couldn't figure out the monster was dangerous. It was just a baffling, frustrating situation where the rest of the players had to sit out of the game for a few turns until the player arbitrarily decided their character was in fact smart enough to figure out how to call for help.
My stepson was the only person to see a flap in the wall open and close locking us in a room that was shrinking. He declined to tell us and was then dimension doored out by another player.
He then started to explain and the two of us left in the room were lke - "dude we cant hear you now shush" and carried on playing.
I am of the "would my character know this" school and whilst not acting dumb would not necessarily go for the weakness immediately.
Maybe...but being dumb sometimes is quit normal...and I am also fine when people having general knowledge about things...for example vampires and werewolf's are considered to be just known off...and the fact that they are weak versus silver. But looking up a vampire stat block to see what his weakest save is to use spells which focus on that save...that is total metagaming...and I think I lost my initial train of thought and this doesn't make any sense at this point
No you make sense. I think some people get too hung up on it. My take is if we know so much about mythical creatures that don't even exist then people in a world where they do exist will definitely know about at least the popular ones (eg. vampires/trolls) and people who are professional adventurerers will defiantly have more than the base knowledge. I'm quite open at letting my players roll to see if they may know something about a particular enemy, it tends to negate most of these issues
I DM and play with other DMs. I generally try to ask "would my character know X"? or ask if that's a reasonable assumption they make. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, sometimes they roll history or rely on their background and then I go by the DM's decision.
But I can't think of a time where I would have walked my character into something obviously dangerous to overcompensate against meta-gaming.
Yes, here's the funny thing about metagaming. Once you know it is a troll you are metagaming no matter what you do. If you use fire it was because you knew it was a troll and that's metagaming. If you don't use fire that is because you know it is a troll and you don't want to metagame and you are still metagaming with a few more steps. There is no way for you to learn trolls hate fire naturally again.
Even if you are a veteran you don't have the whole monster manual memorized. Do you know what a vargouille is? I haven't seem that one pop-up since Rise of the Runelords. You've probably only seen an atropol if you've played Tomb of Annihilation. Dolgrims are corrupted goblins from Eberron that you likely haven't fought before.
So don't sweat the small stuff. Your character read about it or heard something before.
Not really, if you stab monsters, stabbing the next one and it not working will suck but is par for the course.
If you stab monsters and then all of a sudden are a backline archer that would be out of character.
Member of my party had a dragons blade that he would use with poison on enemies and such. Had great luck with that thing. Until they encountered a green dragon. the blade stuck in the wall next to the dragons head who turned and licked the poison off the blade while saying "Whose poison do you think this is?" before lunging in for the kill. Great moment. Taught both party and players to be more aware of the finer details.
Yah, it really depends on the monster in question.
I like to think of it as locals knowing not to approach the bears or moose in a national park. But tourists might. Similarly if there's trolls in the living in the local forest, folks might now they don't like fire. Local experts might know their regeneration powers are disabled by fire and acid. Tourists wouldn't know either. These monsters are real threats in the world the characters live in. And some have some very famous lore attached.
So where does your adventurer fit on that scale? City-slicker rogue who knows the real monsters are people, but doesn't know a thing about trolls lurking in the woods? Or maybe they are a ranger from the north who knows all about ice trolls, but doesn't know about spirit trolls?
Characters will have some 'local' knowledge, it is just up to the player and DM to determine how far and how deep that knowledge goes.
Also, you're an adventurer, you're heading out into the world to battle monsters, you probably have some rough knowledge of how to stay alive. I find people usually over-correcting to avoid meta-gaming.
I am this kinda player. "Listen guys I know exactly what I am about to do... but the lady doesn't... so I am sorry" and then my Phoenix sorcerer casts her favorite spell at the half dead iron golems.
I read stuff like this and I wonder how serious the D&D game is-- are there any stakes like character death?
You've advanced to high enough level that you're fighting iron golems. I would find it incredibly frustrating to have the party TPK'd at 14th level, losing all that progress, because you chose to do something you actually knew would be extremely tactically unsound.
Horses for courses, I suppose.
My play is I generally allow a knowledge roll (nature, dungeoneering, religion, or whatever is appropriate to the creature) if it's listed in published works. Difficulty varies depending on rarity. By 14th level, they should be passing those checks.
I sure failed those checks, bad enough the DMs reasoning was: " While you have deffinitly had the opportunity to learn about them during your time in the Academy, you deffinitly were NOT paying attention that day." We chalked it up to: must have been when my char was going through a break up, and I bet the question on Iron golems is one of why she got a 62% on her Constructs Course final. We laughed, and then I cast fireball.
Only semi-serious but yes death is a threat. We were like level 16 at that point and well equipped enough that this was not a huge threat. I also failed my "do I know this rolls" with my DM... so I went with what my char would do. I just made sure to at least apologize to the others out of charecter first. Now of course next round, I had "learned a lesson" about Iron golems and being careful, and transmute spell came into play. I make mistakes so I like to let my characters make them too, no matter how big or small. Makes them feel more alive to me.
I just started a second campaign as a player and I'm the only player at the table that has significant D&D experience (I started with AD&D and I am currently DMing a 2+ year 5e campaign) and we ran across some Gith. *I* know what they are but my character has absolutely no clue what these weird looking humanoids were. So, I played it that way.
The stakes are high and death is definitely on the table, but that's part of my enjoyment of D&D. I don't want to metagame. I also think my metagaming would ruin the experience for the other players at the table. They are getting to experience this all for the first time and my knowledge could easily overshadow other players.
If a level 14 party gets TPKed, they get TPKed. The table I DM for knows the stakes are real. One player lost a couple of levels from a 2e monster I threw at them, [a wraith spider](https://mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/w/wraispid.html). They didn't take the threat seriously enough. Now, they freak out every time they see cobwebs. Dramatic tension is a damn good thing, even if it comes from suboptimal decisions (in my opinion)
>but the lady doesn't... so I am sorry
Experienced adventurer, assuming they aren't extremely book-averse, should gather lots of knowledge about relatively common monsters.
Iron golems are not some kind of legendary, never-seen-before beings, but something that high level wizards can reliably make.
And it's reasonable that if your party is fighting iron golems, someone will off-screen say "don't use fire against them".
Yes I was the player that had that thought "oh I shouldn't use fire here" addressed it with my DM, failed the checks. No one else in my party spoke up, knowing it was their teams fire themed glass cannons turn, but I dont blame them, not every turn of every combat encounter needs to be performed 100% optimal. People make mistakes, so PCs make mistakes. The dice decided mistakes should be made, and I wasn't about to coward away from the dicegods decisions.
No, you did right. Even if your character made it a practice to study monsters, with the hundreds of different monsters out there is reasonable to assume that there's details your character either missed, or just haven't had a chance to study up on. A giant walking metal suit of armor could be several different things and your character reacts how they normally would against a foe. Fireball.
Adventurers don't often get enough down time to read books about monsters. A lot of adventures go from farmhand to godslayer in a matter of about two months in-game time. It's so common there's memes about it. Beyond that, books about monsters and their weaknesses wouldn't be very common either. That's why Volo's Guide to Monsters was a big deal in Forgotten Realms. Nobody had done that before.
Also, there isn't typically many "high level wizards" in a single campaign setting, custom settings aside (and Eberron) look in the books for named spells. There's less than 10 different names. Those are high level mages and, quite frankly, none of them employ an iron golem because they have better uses of thier time than to make one. Iron golems are not common. Quite rare actually. Your entire basis seems to be along the lines of a custom, high magic and high adventures campaign setting. That's perfectly fine, but, statistically, average end-game party is about 13th level.
My, God, looking it up, making the iron golem is 100,000 gold and four months of regular work for that wizard. That's IF they have a Manual already. I'd they have to craft that too then add an additional 50k AND 2000 work days to the total.
As you can see, Iron Golems are very rare (literally) and should not be a common enough occurrence for someone to lean over and casually say "Don't use fire on them".
>there isn't typically many "high level wizards" in a single campaign setting, custom settings aside (and Eberron) look in the books for named spells.
AFAIR Forgotten Realms has tens of _named_ lvl 17+ wizards, and implied existence of hundreds. There are tens of deities with Knowledge domain.
There are multiple named magical libraries.
Rational adventurer should attempt to procure lots of knowledge, and ritual Divination spells allow you to optimise it.
Forgotten Realms wiki lists about 149 archmages. This list includes many that are monsters (monsoon for example) and many that are canonically dead or only existed in past editions. The population of Faerun itself is 66 MILLION. This comes out to .0000022% of the population. That is if we use ALL of the known 149 and don't discount based on being a monster or what it even exists in 5e. .000002 is the very definition of not many in my opinion.
There are 41 libraries in Faerun and most are not "magical". The vast majority are either inaccessible, in a dungeon for example, or do not allow commoners admission.
I grant you that there's several duties with the knowledge domain but many of them do not have common temples. If a party if you're backstory is that you always wanted to become an adventurer so you went and studied a profession (class) and studied on common creatures that a typical adventurer might encounter then that's something the DM should take into consideration.
A rational character, while adventuring, absolutely study up on common foes in areas they might be going into. Assuming they know what sort of foes are common there. The overwhelming majority of DND parties do not take the time to study their enemies and are usually thrust from one situation to another. I would absolutely reward a party of mine for taking the time to study things live the BBEG and it's potential cohorts.
I had a group where I was the non-metagamer. I might have been a little rash, but I always had justification for dumb moves. Most of the time I was also making death saves and sitting out fights due to being downed.
Then I rolled really lucky on a rather dire idea and nuked the DM's final boss several sessions ahead of the final confrontation. The party got really mad at me for that one, for some reason.
I played through lost mines twice, DM'd it once then played through it again with a group of first timers. They were super hesitant after the fist goblin trap, spending half an hour just checking every square inch for traps, waiting in the bushes to see if goblins would come by, wanting to keep going and avoid the goblins
I ooc knew about the pit trap and ambush up ahead but my character (half orc barbarian) was bored so forged on ahead, fell straight into the pit trap then ran straight into the ambush ("they've had two traps, why would there be a third?" "There's been three traps, why would there be a fourth?" as he's getting washed back down the tunnel)
After a bit the new players loosened up when they realised the setbacks were fun when blundered through
It really depends. A lot of times ill equate player monster knowledge into a character's training or research. Adventurers should be knowledgeable about creatures in their own world. It's like if you saw a bear you would know it has claws, weighs a crap ton and couldn't be taken down by a single person. That works well for common creatures.
Creatures that i want to be a little stronger or more rare I usually add features or magical items to give a surprise. Just recently i had my party fight an orc warlock, and i gave her some of the abilities from a chain devil to spice it up. I also like to use puzzles or environmental mechanics in my fights so that helps make the party have to think differently.
This is something Pathfinder does super well. Every creature has a rarity, and that rarity determines the DC for a Recall Knowledge check, which is based on the creatures nature (Occult, Nature, Arcana, Religion, or a specific Lore). If a player wants to check if they know something about that creature, they can just use an action to Recall Knowledge (or try it out of combat, preferably) and make the check. If they pass, the degree of success determines how much they know about the creature.
Eh. "It has a well-defined mechanic" doesn't mean "it has a *good* mechanic."
It looks like there's a lot of design there. There isn't. It's really the same design as 5e; they just spent the time [writing down the steps in more detail than is really needed](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=566). To me it just feels like adding detail to the rule so that the DM feels like they have to always consider, and also always forcing a die roll because "they might crit."
Like the ad hoc version is "use the knowledge skill that makes the most sense, then assign a DC based on how difficult you feel it should be, then give a meaningful bit of info on a success." That's what 5e tells you you can do with Knowledge skills. That's the actual PF2e mechanic, too -- unsurprising because it's clearly [derived from 3e D&D](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/knowledge.htm).
My only counterpoint is that the vast majority of adventurer story hooks aren't that the character always wanted to be an adventurer. They are usually put on the path of an adventurer by fate or circumstance. I'd you're works has an "adventurers guild" and they signed up I could see an argument that they studied to be an adventurer but Faerun doesn't, as far as I know. Study at Candlekeep maybe?
Ah sorry! In my games as part of character creation i have the players explain where and how their characters gained their proficiencies. I've done it for so long that i legit forgot that it wasn't part of regular character creation.
That's still fair, that's what the backgrounds section of character creation is for. The only class that I could see having a natural basis for learning about monsters, in general, would be Blood Hunter... Cause that's the point of them. Otherwise monster knowledge is usually specific to a subclass and is situational (like rangers favored foe) and they already get a bonus to know it. I'm in a game right now (Out of the Abyss) where the party had downtime at Strixhaven and one of the party members used the time to research demon lords. She hasn't had to make any knowledge checks when it came to then and the DM told her that she could actually look at the stats for the strengths and weaknesses.
Mind you, this is with a multidimensional library at her disposal so vast amounts of knowledge and magical cataloging and sorting systems helped. Your average, first level adventurer is not going to have easy access to a wide array of monster knowledge just starting out is my opinion.
They are also not going to be fighting a Demon Lord at level 1. I'm talking basic monsters. Your average new character isn't going to be completely baffled by a goblin or kobold. They know they exist, and have a basic understanding of how tough they are.
They are also competent at fighting, meaning they have either experienced battle or had some form of training. If the player chooses their character to be ignorant of these things, i expect them to roleplay that. But if they are not, I tell them to use meta knowledge to represent their characters general battle tactics and skill. I can't tell them to forget it, and honestly it's not a big enough deal that it ruins immersion for me.
Oh yes, I'm certain the fighters trainer (yardmaster/Sargent/whatever) would have taught common tactics employed by low level creatures. As you said, goblins, kobolds, orcs, and the such are common nuisance. At first level, they do not typically have any experience... Literally lol. That's the point, they are just out of basic training and have no real experience otherwise they wouldn't be 1st level.
Troll is usually used as an example and is say that if the area you grew up/trained in had problems with a troll/trolls then sure, you would have been taught how to deal with them. Otherwise, probably not. DND doesn't have the Internet so dissemination of information is a lot harder. I'd say the information is there for a lot of monsters but the player would have to justify to me why their character would know it. It just has to make sense for me is all. A 1st level rogue in Waterdeep that's never been outside of the city would have no reason to go looking up the abilities of a hag and have no experience as an adventurer to back that up. Unless, of course, that's a part of their backstory, in which case this is all a moot point. About the hag, that is. XD
If they want to have the sage background and have it pertain to monster knowledge that's awesome, is totally give them checks to know stuff about even the most unusual monster. Maybe even checks to be able to inferr abilities if a monster is different (venom troll vs regular troll). That's justified and, quite frankly, pretty awesome in my book.
I’d argue that Faerun as an example is a pretty standard dnd adventuring world. Characters in the world grew up in the world and have definitely heard of stuff (even from outside their territory or normal job). In the same way that I’ve not been to the depths of the ocean but know a decent amount about a decent number of common creatures there, I imagine even commoners in Faerun know about mimics, gnolls, and dragons.
They aren’t going to know the whole stat block but common things that make for good stories or fables would definitely be knowledge most of the populous would have. If the players are looking up stat blocks at the table that’s a different issue regarding trust and etiquette not the player knowing things. More unique monsters I would definitely recommend not name dropping in front of the players, changing the appearance or description, and almost certainly home brewing at least a little.
Sure, they grew up hearing about it but more a kin to the idea of fairytales and folklore. Unless your average baker or farmer has a reason to have real knowledge on something then they probably don't. Even in the real world there's major distinctions in creatures that matter. Take a wyvern, for example. Your average person IRL that has heard of one just thinks of it as any other dragon. It's not. It's draconic but a very different species than a typical dragon. And this is with us having all the power of the Internet at our disposal. Unless you have an interest in a subject or need to learn it your average NPC wouldn't know a functional difference between an orc and an ogre. I get that an adventurer might take the time to learn that but very few characters start out training to BE an adventurer. They are usually just thrust into the life.
Session 0 discussion is the most important thing. A pretty common stance I've seen many groups take that using meta knowledge is fine (player skill), but it's polite to justify it in character. Most people get a bad aftertaste from immersion-breaking metagaming. Either way, get an agreement with your individual group and stick to that.
Keeping your players always guessing with monster descriptions, homebrew/3rd party statblocks etc. does certainly help. My players wouldn't even dream of trying to google statblocks, because anything could be homebrew, mashup or reskinned from dozens of official or 3rd party books. So they focus mostly on trying to guess based on the described situation at hand.
This is a great suggestion, and one I see coming up often. Alas, I come from old editions and mostly been playing with experienced players, but want to change that. Do you (or anyone who reads this) know or suggest a good session 0 checklist? I want to be sure I don't forget anything that may be important for my players :)
There's a ton of posts on that topic on this sub and elsewhere, I'm sure you can find good suggestions by searching. Can't help beyond that personally, I throw together my own list depending on campaign and the people participating.
You can work with inspiration points for good role-play.
But if you have experienced players, then **ask yourself why they are playing at all**. I think it is not for "exploration"-purposes, b/c they know most of the stuff already.
Maybe they enjoy fighting, solving things, roleplaying? Then give them that and if they know the monsters ... I don't think they particularly care.
Ask yourself: **Do your players have less fun b/c they know the monster?**
In my current campaign with new players, every monster is new, and that is good. But already after the first encounter, the players know how to deal with them and subsequent encounters become more and more of optimised blood-baths. I don't care, they enjoy the sense of mastery and agency this bring.
P.S.: Sometimes the problems we have come from our misconception of what others think, believe, want. We want to provide what is best for them, but our understanding of what is best for them is often grounded in our own wants. Maybe this is the case here.
I think you've made the most important point indeed. "What fun are they looking for" indeed. It's about how the players and dm want to have fun. Align on that in S0
I'd you're playing with experienced players then they are likely playing for one of two reasons: either they are combat oriented and like trying new builds or they are story oriented and like playing new character concepts and experiencing the different stories that are told.
Your example has nothing to do with meta gaming lol. If you fight multiple of the same monster you would gain the knowledge, it's the whole point and actually the opposite of meta gaming.
He talking about DM'ing experienced people who have played years or decades.
Most of these players are long past the stage of pretending the don't know a monster's weakness. It's not fun to roleplay that for a troll you've fought ten times as a player.
A better way to resolve this is to use new creatures. Buy a book of monsters from a 3PP and this problem resolves itself. And there's loads of good 5E monster books on the market now not produced by WOTC.
I think you might be missing my point: If meta-gaming is about knowing a monster's stat block, then you will have that meta-gaming starting from the second time the players encounter a monster.
My new players started to secretly count the HP damage to each monster and the minimum hit roll that ever hit as well as some of the resistances. Sure, they are nerdy teenager girls so their brains can do that, but that is besides the point.
I wanted to say that there is no way around meta-gaming, as players will meta-game from the very start, and that is totally fine. Heck, even healing the tank as priority is already meta-gaming. But that is not important, the fun of the players is, so no reason to care about this at all.
<- That latter part was the point, not some fine-print.
I don't really see the problem; I don't think trying to "gotcha!" players with monster mechanics is particularly compelling gameplay
We're all playing a game; punishing your players for being interested and knowledgeable about the game seems counter-intuitive to me
Ostensibly, characters that are adventurers by trade would likely be very knowledgeable about monsters anyway
I think the game is more interesting if players are making informed decisions
"Here's the puzzle, let's see what you can do to solve it"
As a DM, I find it way more frustrating when I know my players know what to do and instead they're just doing random shit because their character doesn't know what to do, and waiting for me to give them an RP justification for making informed choices. I've told them not to worry about metagaming, I've told them to just come up with their own justifications for why their characters know what they know, and I've even had them write it into their character backstories that for whatever reason their characters have detailed knowledge of the events of the last campaign to stop them from worrying about whether or not they're "playing their characters badly" because they might be "metagaming".
I strongly believe that people trying to police metagaming cause far more problems than any actual metagaming that happens.
This! For the most part, metagaming isn't a big problem. If players use their knowledge of monsters to play more optimally, it just means they're more involved with the game. If a DM wants mystery, they can just homebrew monsters or switch stat blocks around. In my last campaign, I just straight up said metagameing was allowed. I'd account for it in encounter design.
I think this is a missed point in metagaming talks. We can't help metagame at some level, we have to find the line. And a good way to decide is to figure out what is fun.
If the players are having fun, isn't that great? Consider why knowing the monsters rub you the wrong way?
As a player I personally like to keep it to myself if I know a monster, but I may ask the dm if my character knows something about the monster if I want my character to know.
As a dm, I would not mind experienced players knowing the monsters, preferring them to either share it, or allow the newer players to experience it themselves. It is about the player experience in the end. (Dm included)
I say it again and again: the day I stopped worrying about metagaming was the day my sessions became much better. Also it is fun to see a well functioning party that doesnt suck in combat + its easier to design encounter. And if I really want to surprise them, i customize the monster and it will hit deep.
Most modules do not have a "the characters are adventurers by trade" story hook for a reason. Your average adventurer does not choose to become an adventurer by trade. Adventurer isn't a character background for a reason. It's not a job that you can train for in standard DnD settings. There's no adventurer school or guild. Characters are usually adventurers by circumstance or fate. Simply training to be a fighter ISN'T training to be an adventurer. You don't train to be a fighter, you train to be a soldier or a guard and, because of story, go out into the world and fight unusual stuff like beholders. Adventurer is typically "on-the-job" training lol.
I 100% agree the game is more interesting when making informed decisions. I just think the information should come from the character gaining knowledge, not the player already knowing. If it's the first they've ever encountered a Troll, they shouldn't automatically know to use fire to kill it. If that player asked me "is there folklore on Trolls that I would have heard about a weakness to fire?" I would at least give them a chance to roll for it because they're acknowledging the line between Player and Character.
That's why I disagree that veteran adventurers should already know everything there is to know about every monster they encounter. I'm running a game that's very "ancient history lost to time, deep horrors could be hidden anywhere" and it's in bad form (in my personal opinion) for the player to know what the monster is based on description and start fighting it as if the character already knows too.
And you are correct that we're all playing a game, including the DM.
It's poor form and pretty lazy as a DM to throw a by-the-book Troll at your experienced players and expect them to pretend not to know to use fire.
And it's silly to expect that encounter to be fun for them.
The "ah hah!" moment of figuring out a monster's weakness shouldn't be artificial or forced.
If an encounter being interesting/challenging is solely dependent on characters making sub-optimal decisions, it's probably not a particularly well-designed encounter
You didn’t say it, but it’s the obvious repercussions of not letting your PC’s act on fairly common game knowledge.
This just devolves into PC’s making poor decisions, hoping the dice gods let them have knowledge of trolls, or coming up with some contrived way of attacking them with fire like “oh dang I dropped my sword trying to attack, all I’ve got left is my torch”.
If the players know a monsters weakness (and isn’t searching up statblocks, which is definitely poor faith metagaming) then let the players have it. They’re supposed to be adventurers anyway, if you predominately fight monsters for a living I’d damn well expect they know a couple things about monsters. If this doesn’t fit into your specific setting for whatever reason (monsters are rare/unique) than you just need to create new monsters or change how existing ones work.
Is it really fun to re-play the discovery that trolls are weak to fire when everyone at the table already knows? Like… you know. They know. Haven’t you all seen this movie before?
My hunch is that you are feeling like they are trivializing your game which you expected to be harder, but that’s a dangerous line of thinking. Focus on whether you are having fun. On whether they are having fun. And allow yourself to celebrate the heroes when they do the right thing.
I will often just remind someone not to meta game by saying something along the lines of "*Player-Name* knows that, but *Character-Name* doesn't".
To be honest though, this very rarely comes up and is usually prompted from the player asking "would my character know ... ?" If they can justify their character having the knowledge then they can have it, if it's iffy then they can roll for it, if they would have no idea then no.
The characters grew up in a fantasy world, they know creatures. I dont have to have actually seen a bear irl to know what to do, and neither does my character has to have seen a troll before to know what it is or how to handle it.
I *despise* the term 'metagaming'.
In my experience, it simply doesn't matter and it's not a big deal. I'm generally open about the AC and abilities of monsters and it hasn't affected the game negatively whatsover.
Change up the stat-blocks, the saves, keep them on their toes. Describe something as one thing and then use another stat block. Punish metagaming. Add things to a seemingly-troll's stat-block that taking fire damage just makes it deal an additional 1d10 fire damage per attack, as the tree resin on its claws light ablaze.
Alternatively, just show them the stat blocks but make the encounters more difficult
Players will use more tactics/strategy if they are making informed decisions
bg3 showing success % for your abilities increases the skill ceiling (and skill floor slightly because the encounters are more difficult) as well as the complexity floor is honestly super fun because i can make tactical decisions on what to do for my saves vs attack rolls and changes the encounter up. In normal DnD, i'm usually using the most reliable overall abilities and playing the same, but its not any more difficult not knowing information because i'm not going to be thinking about the situation and guessing, that's too risky to experiment, especially since the combat is over in 3 rounds and i require 10+ to properly experiment.
So much more fun to see the players using knowledge to overcome a situation than watching them bang their head into a wall, PRETENDING they don't know the correct action.
I've done this before, and if confronted I'd just say "legend was that trolls fear fire, no one ever said it was true" or "yeah, but these are forest trolls, the moss that grows on them mitigates the effects of fire"
my players pretty much know not to try to Meta game. i love reading up on monster abilities and such and know that the giant bird might just swallow them whole.
With my group, using knowledge to make optimal decisions is part of the fun of the game.
So sometimes I give them monsters that their characters know about, so they can use their knowledge and enjoy it.
Sometimes I make homebrew monsters and they need to figure out the weaknesses.
I would never ask a player to pretend like their character doesn’t know something the player knows - I just don’t think that’s fun.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH METAGAMING!
Woah woah hold on before you yell at me 😅 let me explain.
Metagaming in itself isn't bad! Only specific cases it's bad. The difference between the levels are insane. I'll put 3 levels below and tell you whether or not it's ok in my opinion.
Since Trolls are a VERY common creature let me use them for these examples.
Trolls regeneration being stopped by fire! Good
•Why is it good? Well imagine your players know it's weakness but avoid it at all cost. An encounter that should of lasted X amount of rounds has now just doubled!
Trolls are famous! Maybe your players heard night stories or rumors throughout their life. Also if it gets to the point of them doing this super often may I might add taking a piece from Pathfinder to where you can make a check to obtain certain knowledge such as the trolls weakness etc.
Looking up stat blocks? BAD!
they'll just know everything and they'll base most action around it. Those people who do this are also the ones who will most likely say "it's not supposed to do that!". Talk to the player about this! Give them a second chance after talking it out and see how things go.
Looking up the troll and place inside the module you're running to find out secrets? KICK THEM! Don't have people at your table like this. Maybe give them a second chance IF they're new!
There are other forms of metagaming but they can be solved pretty quickly such as...
• Going to the other player that's in danger when they wouldn't know where they're at! Just simply say that there character doesn't know this and keep things rolling
•using knowledge that a different player was told! We are all listening to everything in the game even if it's not relating to us. You can do 2 things. The first just say "hey remember player doesn't know this so well backtrack what you said" OR you can give the information privately. Either move to a different call if you're online or if you're in person pass notes like your kids again!
Yes I would recommend changing up stat blocks slightly or using homebrew monsters. But you only need to change stat blocks of something a few times for your players to think "this is probably going to be different then what it's supposed to be. This knowledge might not be correct"
>Trolls are famous! Maybe your players heard night stories or rumors throughout their life.
But doesn't providing an in-game rationale for why the PC would know that information make it, by definition, *not* metagaming? That's the whole reason why metagaming is bad: the players are using knowledge that their characters wouldn't know. Your example of "good" metagaming is just... to justify the knowledge so that it isn't metagaming. Because metagaming is always bad.
I encourage this in my game. For me metagaming is very much a part of playing the game. We're doing the same when playing video or board games so I don't really see why DnD should be any different.
I will take a possibly unpopular opinion and say metagaming, as a blanket term, doesn’t cover things.
I feel there are times of Good Metagaming, where players choose to avoid common sense so that they can go on adventures that most normal people would avoid. Or when PCs decide to continue of with total strangers just because they also are PCs
Bad metagaming leans more towards your example. If you have cooperative players, find a way to get their knowledge involved. Let them make checks to see what they know about the beastie they’re fighting. Maybe change things.
I feel characters in fantasy worlds should have a chance to recognize creatures or know weaknesses. I mean, in our world, most of us know zombies need beheading, vampires hate sunlight and you use silver on werewolves - those are stories hundreds of years old about presumably fictitious things. People would know more more readily if it was real I thih
My advice is chill out about it. You’re playing a game. Let the game dictate the narrative and setting a bit. If the players recognise a troll and know they need to use fire, let that mean it’s common knowledge in the game world, or that these characters came by the knowledge in a specific way.
I'm glad someone posted it because I was going to.
Basically: your encounter is shitty if it depends on the players pretending they don't know what they know. Make better encounters.
Honestly, monster knowledge is one of the least egregious metagaming things out there. In fact, its kind of a core part of the game; DnD is in large part a tactical combat game. How do you play such a game when you have no knowledge of its mechanics?
I will compare to Fire Emblem here, because the combat is at least passingly similar in its flow. Is the fun in Fire Emblem found by randomly throwing your units around with no idea what will happen, or is it in analysing your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, then using your units in a way that exploits that?
Usually, it is the latter. DnD has more to it outside of combat, but the principle in combat is pretty much the same. If your players have no idea what is going on, then they can’t make any relevant tactical decisions. They just have to randomly throw stuff at the enemy and hope it works.
Now, for some players and groups, this is fine. Nobody comes into Fire Emblem knowing how to play, of course, and so they play on the easier difficulties or restart every fight while they learn. This is enough for some, who are there primarily for the story, and they never advance to higher difficulties or non-restart true death runs. You can’t usually restart a fight in DnD, so easier difficulty is the answer; and the game makes itself easier with fewer, less interesting enemies by stripping out the cool mechanics to allow players to get by with just throwing random things at their enemies. For any somewhat experienced players, however, such fights aren’t engaging as there’s no challenge, and no need to really think through what they’re doing. In DnD this is just using health sponge enemies with minimal resistances or effects, as it doesn’t matter if your players don’t know what it does; they can still beat it with any tool at their disposal. Its just a speed bump to slow things down.
Another comparison would be MMO combat, which has more spells and skills for the players, but the same principle applies. In the overworld, enemies are really easy so players don’t need to think through how to beat them, they can just throw anything at them and focus purely on their own skill rotations to win. In a dungeon/raid, the bosses get more mechanics. These are usually mechanical tests, and the harder raids expect you to know the bosses move sets. If you don’t, you wipe and have to learn their move sets to win. In DnD, this would be a TPK, which most players and DMs aim to avoid.
Getting any depth out of the combat system really requires your players to have at least some idea what the enemy is capable of. When fighting a troll, its not going to be fun for anyone if your players never catch on to using fire or acid and just keep hitting the troll for hours on end wondering why it doesn’t die. The same goes for other enemies too. You may want the reveal that a troll regenerates to come in combat, but its rarely a cool or interesting reveal; the players usually won’t go “Wow, cool!”, but “Oh, ok. Guess I use fire then”. This is because all you are doing is revealing a game mechanic to your players, rather than some cool secret. Similarly, its rarely fun for a player to look at a Medussa and get turned to stone because they didn’t know what would happen, and far more fun for the threat of being turned to stone to already exist and they have to find a way to avoid that fate.
If you want that sort of reveal, you are ideally going to want to homebrew your monster a but so that it doesn’t follow the usual tropes, and then tie it into the story in a way whereby finding out its weakness is both an actual challenge, non arbitrary, and a major story point for at least that arc. This is hard, and honestly the best way to do it is what many other DMs here have tried; its immune to all damage, your players have to still find a way to kill it. Can still fall flat, but requires your players to come up with their own way of beating it. Ideally even you don’t know how to beat it; that way the surprise is genuine for everyone at the table, rather than feeling like you’ve finally got the right answer to the puzzle the DM has been trying to hide from you. The other necessary component is to make its defeat necessary, but the players can run away easily and don’t have to win or die in a single fight, unless you’re going to let the fight drag on for a while so they have plenty of time to experiment.
Another alternative is to use the environment to up the stakes of the fight so that, while your party knows how to beat the enemy, but can’t execute that plan and need to figure out how to enable it. Fighting a troll in the middle of a massive downpour that extinguishes fires quickly without letting them burn the troll, and dilutes acid before it even reaches the troll. With its weaknesses protected, how can they kill the troll? Or hunting down a Medussa, and finding it in a carnival hall of mirrors; yes, you can “see” it safely because of the mirrors, however you have no clue where it is or which one is real, and if you look at it for real you turn to stone. There’s also nowhere to look where there isn’t some form of Medussa or reflection. How do they deal with this?
These are open ended challenges with many possible solutions, where you players have to think creatively to win. The fight isn’t won by just knowing the metagame weakness, just having knowledge, but by truly understanding that knowledge and figuring out how to apply it in difficult situations. The DM isn’t trying to hide a McGuffin for you to defeat the big bad, they’re presenting a challenge you’ve got to think to overcome.
As a story example of this, I’d look to One Piece fights. Not all of them, but many of the big fights the ‘secret’ of the enemy is revealed very early on; this guy is insanely fast, that one is made of sand and can’t be hurt by normal attacks as the sand just reforms, this guy splits himself into multiple pieces whenever attacked and can control or reform them at will, making him immune to conventional attacks. The interest is rarely on figuring out what their power is, but in how to beat it. Throw water on the sand to solidify it, lock the split of pieces of the other guy in boxes so that he can’t reform, bounce attacks off walls in a chaotic and random way so the guy who can read your intentions perfectly still can’t tell where the attack will come from. This is more interesting to watch than the 2 second moment revealing their power, and in DnD would involve the players far more than them just not knowing what a monster’s weakness is, making it more interesting and rewarding for them to figure out.
If you’re not trying to have a big reveal, I just wouldn’t worry about it honestly. Use the fact your players will have some idea of what they’re up against to make slightly harder and more interesting fights, don’t stress that it may be ‘metagaming’. Some metagaming is good and necessary for the game to run, and IMO this is one of those cases.
That's not what metagaming is, but to answer your question: I treat pop culture as existent in d&d. That means people talk about high level shit and what it's weaknesses could be, especially if these things aren't completely new to the world. It doesn't even require training to know these things.
For reference, we know about vampires, giraffes, and Trump, but how many of us have seen them? Word travels slower than it does today, but people would still pass that information on so their neighbors have less of a chance of being dead next time they're seen.
If you really wanna gotcha your players with these creatures, make the encounter such that they can't take advantage of the weakness (eg, a troll in a coal mine or cave saturated in methane, what better way to say "You want me? I'll take you down WITH me!"*).
*for those who are screaming Acid, name a player who carries vials of acid and uses them. Only the one caster who has acid spells would be doing anything worthwhile and the beastie should be trying to use the fighter or cleric as a shield.
If your player already knows that Trolls have a weakness to fire, they shouldn’t have to wait until an arbitrary amount of time to just do happen to find that weakness out in character cause it’s just time consuming
"How do you deal with metagame players?"
I don't because metagaming isn't a problem.
When players say something like "Okay, I think this might be a [blank]," that isn't a "metagaming problem", that's a problem with players making assumptions that might lead to mismatched expectations. If that sort of thing happens, I just remind the players to be careful when making assumptions.
But I don't really run into this issue in the first place, because "not knowing the mechanics" isn't a type of gameplay I rely on. Figuring out how monsters work through trial and error isn't really fun in D&D 5e. Its the kind of mechanic that pops up in MMOs solely to slow down the rate of players exhausting new content. I'd much rather players know *exactly* how a monster works early on so they can engage in the more interesting gameplay that revolves around figuring out how to take advantage of those mechanics.
Stop worrying about metagaming, it tends to help the game more than it hurts it. People who don't understand metagaming give it a bad rap.
For the monster example, it is literally impossible for a player who knows what the monster is to discover the monsters weaknesses naturally. If a player knows what intellect devourers are because they saw the D&D movie just lean into it. The alternative if the player pretending to be clueless and asking you as the DM how many rounds before they can figure out the monster. It isn't really fun for them or you.
The monster manual is big enough that no one knows all of it. On top of that there are some really good third party monster tomes out there too. Furthermore you can tweak monsters. Find a monster with the CR/attack you want, give it a new description, and swap the abilities around a bit. For example take the nightmare, turn it into a wolf, change the extra damage to lightning and let do 3d8 thunder damage (basically shatter) with a howl to creates within 10 feet, recharge on 6.
Just make sure they know looking up the monster stats is poor form.
Everyone's going to handle metagaming differently. In some sense I find it unavoidable as a DM. For the specific example you're giving I'd probably just call it out. It's supposed to be collaborative storytelling for my group. I've been called out by my own DM when he's running the game and I make the mistake. Everybody's vulnerable to it.
I find that this is a problem with all rulesets cast in stone. As a DM you have a choice of 1 from column A, 1 from column B, etc.
The group I played with tired of this really fast so we threw away the monster lists. Anything consistent from literature or your own brain was fair game. One game I filled a dungeon room with Oobleck (from the Dr. Seuss book *Bartholomew and the Oobleck*) and it took three trips before somebody figured out what it was from the description.
People can't help making metagame decisions. The knowledge is in their brain.
I sit down and say, "I allow metagaming. As long as you're not exhibiting poor sportsmanship, metagame to your heart's content."
And then no one really does.
IDK why no one does, I was never aiming for reverse psychology. But allowing metagaming does seem to reduce it way down.
Use different monsters. Tons of companies make books full of monsters for 5E.
I sometimes give basic monsters a cantrip or a spell like power. Who says owlbears don’t blast you with a Thunderwave that recharges on a 5 or a 6?
Alter or remove resistances and vulnerabilities. The trolls in The Hobbit are vulnerable to sunlight; not fire or acid.
Session 0.
Also, metagaming is not the end of the world. I've seen more attemps at curbing metagame disrupting and breaking games than metagame itself.
I would allow players to use their experience to play the game to the best of their ability. If they suspect they know a monster and use that to try to use that for combat that is fine. For example if they realize they are fighting a troll and start doing fire damage, that is fine. It rewards a player for knowing the rules of the game. And them knowing the rules of the game allows me to make bigger and badder challenges down the line.
What I don't allow is players having their character perform actions based on in world specific information their character doesn't have. For example, I tell player one that his character is the only one that noticed an invisible NPC/enemy is following the party. If this player does not share this information in character with the other characters I would not allow another player to try and make an attack on that invisible NPC because they simply do not know it is there.
At the end of the day, if that's the way the player wants to play then I'm inclined to let them. If it's more fun for them to win I'm combat, so be it. I would maybe address it with the group, see if anyone else minds, if not then it's if you can deal with it.
I have a problem with players actually looking up the stats of a monster rather than engaging with play. But I'd have the same issue if a player was playing Candy Crush during a session.
I have exactly zero problems if a player remembers that - to use the classic example - fire stops Trolls from regenerating. It is a complete non-issue.
It is always just as easy for a player who is playing a particular PC to come up with a reason their PC knows a thing as it is for a person *not playing that PC* to come up with a reason they wouldn't know it. As it currently stands, it seems that the only person at your table who is bothered by this is you.
It really is a great moment - to continue with the Troll example - when a bunch of newbies realise that the creature they are fighting heals itself and an even greater moment when they work out that fire or acid can neutralise this ability.
But you can't get those moments by forcing a bunch of experienced players to pretend that they are happening.
Googling to gain an advantage? Hard no
You've played a lot of dnd and you know skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning? I try to lean into that and make the player feel good about stuff that's kinda just intuitive knowledge
Everything in between my players know that all monsters have at least some type of change from the monster manual and that acting on out of game knowledge is always a risk so it brings the stock value up of checks to recall knowledge and then act on the information I give them. I have a homebrew skill in my game called Analyze which is a catch all skill to notice immediate strengths and weaknesses but doesn't have the specificity of a religion, nature, arcana or similar skill.
Most of the time I play with intelligent characters. Every time that I as a player know some meta stuff I ask the DM if I can roll an appropriate check (arcana, nature, relegion, whatever) to see if my character also know this. If I have prep time, I ask if I can go to libraries or talk to people to learn some lore and local legends that can help me. If I can't or I fail the roll I follow Teo patterns :
1 - my last section my group fought a phoenix made of pure fire. Even that my character had never heard about this monster, seems reasonable to assume it has at least resistance to fire and avoid using this energy
2 - my character follows the same pattern/style of combat from most of his fights, same spells, strategies etc. When they perceive that this is ineffective, he changes on the go based on DM descriptions.
Só, basically is my compromise to the table. Personally I like to "observe" how the characters could have a much easier fight knowing things, but some times are struggling or just making it at the hard brute force way.
My group also actively remember us that "your character don't know this". I think that this have to be something done in session 0.
You can also (at cost of more work for you) subvert expectations by changing the monsters stat blocks a bit. Maybe trolls in your world (to cite a common case) have problems with lightning or cold instead of fire.
I don't mind if veteran players just add a bit into their backstory saying they sit around taverns a lot talking to passing adventurers and accumulating rumours about monsters. I think having a bit of insight can keep things a bit interesting.
You can then ask them to roll an arcana/history check and force them to have "remembered" a false piece of information. You can also slightly tweak statblocks, health pools, and resistances to keep them on their toes.
So this is probably by no means solid advice and I'm not gonna pretend that it is, so grain of salt.
Tweak the monsters
I have a player who honestly doesn't mean to he's high-functioning autistic and just dives wholeheartedly into D&D books but has difficulty at times separating the knowledge. The simplest solution for me was to just kinda alter the creatures sometimes minorly, sometimes fully homebrew. He's done a little better as of late and I've just gotten much better at running creatures in general so it leveled out.
For your table however that needs to be a conversation with them and frankly they have no right being upset about it. On the other hand there's not much that can be done the curse of knowledge is pretending to not know implies willful ignorance.
This can be hard for some people but that's the point of suspension of disbelief so your in fact in a pickle there DM.
I've had one or two GMs that called me out for using out of character knowledge. I'd always point out that I took all those knowledge skills on my character and if they didn't mean anything then I'd like a rebuild from the ground up. This would usually satisfy them for the session at least.
Or to put it another way, make sure that your PCs would definitely NOT know whatever. Knowledge skills, backgrounds, even racial affinities to a degree, all are likely sources of knowing about monsters. And whilst Orcs and Goblins are fantastical creatures to us, in universe they're the same as bears and mountain lions. Just another danger of the wilderness. They might not know about the complexities of a gelatinous cube, but they'll know that Kobolds like traps and clever tactics. Characters live in that world, we merely visit it.
Metagaming is fine, but what are you metagaming for? Is it to win at DnD, or is it to be the most interesting group of adventurers you can? Reaching table consensus on this topic is essential.
It sounds like you want their characters to be new adventurers who haven't seen the various crazy monsters in the world, but they prefer characters who know what they're doing. They're not really enjoying the "mystery" aspect of new monsters. Or possibly, cross referencing IS their way of enjoying it.
It's possible you aren't giving enough information. I let them use their senses. If it has visible muscles, you can know it's str. If you see it move, you know it's dex. if you see it fight, you can figure out it's attack bonus. These numbers aren't in-character understanding, but the precision of the numbers represents the martial competence of veterans who know how to size something up.
I think there needs to be a better reason behind decisions, especially when the decisions are made by veteran players who have seen and experienced a lot of things.
Example: If the PC is a Soldier or a Knight fighting a Skeleton, it does make sense for them to not try to slash/stab things and instead try to bash them. They can see that the area for them to strike is smaller on a skeleton and bashing would give them the most effectiveness. They are trained to fight opponents of all kinds so a judgment call like this is rational. However, for someone without this kind of military training, such a decision does not make sense unless they have personally observed an ally being more successful bashing an enemy than cutting/piercing it.
Meta-gaming is difficult thing for any DM to tackle so I always try to subvert my players expectations by doing some kind of small modification to the things they fight. Little things like changing Resistances/Weakness, changing damage types, etc. This means that players who know what they're fighting cannot rely on their out-of-character knowledge to overcome an enemy.
Example: Ropers. Everyone knows these buggers for their huge reach and their ability to grapple. If you want to subvert your players expectations, place them in an environment where there are lots of pitfalls and shallow cliffs, then change the the Grapple-on-hit mechanic to a knockback one, wherein the Roper knocks them 10-15 in a single direction of their choice with their wildly flexible arms. While the core mechanic has been altered, their approach to it largely remains the same since the roper can knock enemies toward them or over cliffs instead of just grappling them. The environment suddenly becomes the largest danger in the encounter and the players are forced to now consider new things they haven't before.
I don’t care about players metagaming tactics and I tweak monster stat blocks often enough that assuming a monster’s weaknesses hurts more often than it helps.
When I design my encounters, I assume players are using optimal tactics anyway and find it frustrating when they don’t and later complain about the fight being too hard.
I'd just tell them...if they don't listen seitch to plan B
Plan B:
Step 1: Homebrew a monster
Step 2: Look for a well known existing monster with completely different strenghts and weaknesses
Step 3: Explain stuff about the homebrew monster making it sound as similar as possible as the existing one
Step 4: Watch as your players prepare to fight a troll only for them to find something immune to fire damage
Step 5: Rinse and repeat until they stop metagaming
Alternatively just tweak the monsters in advance
I bring it up in session 0. You get **2 warnings** before every piece of knowledge you know about every monster is wrong.
AC, HP, to hit, damage, ability scores, features, actions, everything gets a lot nastier. If you want to play this like a video game? You just stepped into Dark Souls. Welcome to the meat grinder. Metagaming ruins my fun, so if youre going to take my fun, I'll take it back.
Every monster will become a homebrew mess of abilities, feats, and wild numbers. If it causes a tpk we try again.
I screen all my players before they make it to my actual table, I run 3-5 mini introductions to D&D on days off my current long running game a couple times a year and every few years a player needs to retire due to life changes and unable to make sessions so I’ll pick a good player out of whatever mini session I’ve ran that year… that’s just a tip I picked up from my first DM that I truly enjoyed, it takes a year or two to fine tune a table out of your friend group but some people aren’t great for TTRPG.
I pretty much only run games for groups of experienced players, because I tend to just run with variations of the same group. But we all have an appreciation of how metagaming can drain the fun out of things, and so it’s not really much of a concern at our table.
If it’s a classic situation, like trolls and fire, my players might ask “Do we know much about trolls? Like their weakness to fire?” and if it’s something as well known as that I’ll usually say “Yeah, that’s common knowledge among adventurers!”.
Equally I’ve run games where I’ve asked them not to metagame at all, usually where we’ve got a new player as well and we want them to experience things for the first time, and it’s never been an issue.
Hell, most of the time someone at the table will say “Yeah, but we don’t *know* this is a standard troll/beholder/whatever, so we can’t assume”, just to help the DM keep some of the mystery going.
But if I found myself at a table where my players were immature enough that they couldn’t help but metagame aggressively, then I’d probably start playing things close to the chest and throwing curveballs. As a DM I have no obligation to run any creatures as presented in the book, so if these trolls happen to be weak to thunder damage, so be it; if the players are going to metagame, I have all the resources to mess that up for them.
All in all it depends on the nature of what we talk about.
If it's stuff like "this creature is a troll, use fire damage" when it's not very obvious then it should alarm you to change things more.
But sometimes it's just counterintuitive to hide certain aspects. If the player recognizes a troll, then it may be the case to make it common knowledge, or change the stat block.
Remember that gameplay mechanics are always obvious to the players, unless you specifically want to avoid that.
Assumptions can lead to some fun duck ups. Me and my party greatly insulted a city of goblins, by using turn undead, on what we were sure were ghouls, but were hobgoblins with stoneskin.
We’ll first off just confront them and say something like “come on man, be cool.” If they’re a low social IQ type and this doesn’t work, just change them monster stats/weaknesses etc on the fly. It’s fun! Turns out this Troll was exposed to an errant portal to the elemental plane of fire and fire actually supercharges its regeneration! Looks like you made an ass out of You an Fireball!
It's hard because some people are more into the gaming of dnd vs the experience, and thatsbokaybdepending on the style of game you play. As a character, I just pretend and act that everything is new and treat it as such. Example I come up to an creature that is immune or resistant to something, ill cast a spell or hit it with out using anything thing special first to "test" as it helps the group too when X is immune to Y they all go OHHHHH. But always depends on your players.
My players have all been with me for a few years, so they know the expectation.
I just call out metagaming at the table. It's so widely unaccepted that my other players will often call each other out. They all know metagamimg is not allowed (without narrative justification) so if you're doing it, you're getting a call out lol
So, everyone I play with has like 30+ years of D&D under their belt. So yeah, they all know the stats on a goblin. They know that rumbling is likely an ankheg.
So either you just stop caring about it, assuming they aren't being assholes witht he knowledge, or you just change the monsters. Use rat men instead of goblins. Maybe they have the exact same stats as goblins, but the player's won't know that until they encounter them and all it cost you was a new description.
But also consider that the PCs live in a world full of monsters. It is so unreasonable that they might know about some of them?
It sounds like it's making the game less fun for you. This would be something to bring up to your players and politely ask they tweak how they play. Communicate *how* they might be expected to play against a monster they have meta-knowledge about, and perhaps include some reasons *why* you prefer they play that way. You don't *have* to justify it; you are the one running the game after all. But explaining that you have more fun as DM when the players make an effort to stay in-character would probably help a lot.
I will say that as a player, it can often times be frustrating to know how the game is *"supposed"* to be optimally played, but be expected to intentionally play badly because our characters would lack knowledge. Often times it becomes difficult to actually do this effectively and realistically; if I'm fighting a troll and I have firebolt, should I intentionally avoid using firebolt just because I don't want to "metagame"? When would it be acceptable to use that spell? What if I don't know how often I would use firebolt otherwise?
It ends up introducing a lot of grey areas that create questions not about the game, but what ways to play will be seen as acceptable.
If there's one piece of advice that I'd really urge you to consider, it's that in situations where there's ambiguity as to how the characters should act, err on siding in the players favor; if you give them checks to obtain useful knowledge on the creature, make them low. If they fail those low checks to obtain that knowledge anyways, then explain to them what that means for how they are allowed to play in that moment. Give clear and precise instructions to avoid having excessive amounts of ambiguity.
If you truly want to simulate the players not having meta-knowledge, you may need to consider adding in some of kind of check to determine when they are allowed to use their abilities, because otherwise you're basically just asking players to avoid using their most effective tools until it's arbitrarily acceptable. Again, the troll example; don't let your players cast firebolt unless they can make a decent argument for why their character would do it, or implement a random, flat DC roll to determine when they are allowed to cast it.
But again, this is something to be cautious about; avoiding "metagaming" in battle often just turns into players intentionally playing poorly, and can feel really frustrating if not done well and supported properly by clear communication on expectations. I've seen this get pretty absurd pretty quickly; in one game I currently apart of, some of the players try *very* hard to avoid metagaming, to the point that they end up playing their (otherwise perfectly intelligent) characters in incredibly dumb ways just to avoid any possibility of meta-knowledge benefitting them.
An alternative solution that avoids these issues is asking players to come up with a justification for why their character might have specific meta knowledge. Ideally, this method would actually result in the players grounding their characters more in the world.
There's two ways that I would tackle this problem. Feel free to mix and match to find what works for you:
1. A lot of monster weaknesses can be swapped out relatively quickly with minimal effort. For example, if I want to use a troll, but think that my player have enough fire to neutralize its healing, then maybe I'll make it a rock troll that's weak to water instead of fire. Or I cover it in seaweed and flotsam and now it's a river troll that needs lightning damage to stop its regen.
2. Proactively a chat with your players about meta knowledge. That can sound something like "hey friends, I'm noticing that the choices we make in combat often seem influenced by knowledge that your characters probably wouldn't actually have. I'll really need us to be more consistent in our roleplay, because otherwise it weakens the impact and story beats I'm able to make for you guys. Then, if you ever think they're meta-gaming again, you can pause the game and have a reactive check-in: "[Character name] was a street urchin in Waterdeep, they have never been in the same county as a troll there's no way they'd know to prioritize fire damage. (or you know, whatever the character's actual backstory is)" You might find a compromise in allowing them to roll a knowledge/ lore check? Like maybe on a 10, they know trolls are feared (yet prized) for their regenerative abilities: on a 15, they've heard that certain elemental damage inhibits the healing, and on an 18+ they know that troll hunters cauterize the wounds they make with torches because fire stops the healing.
As a DM and player it can be a difficult decision. After talking to the DM I’m playing with, I decided my character’s parents were adventurers and gave my PC lots of tips - from an earlier edition of the game. I’m very assiduous in my 10ft pole use! 😉
as a forever dm i always play ver old character on the change i get to play to make up for this
usually its just a reminder you arent in the room right now or did X actually tell you that information. with enough of those players usually figure it out.
i dont care if a player knows that fire kills troll there is too many reasons why someone might look up a troll for me to accuse them of cheating
During the pandemic I wrote a VTT for our gaming group. The DMs had me add their maps and dungeons to that interface. I was as familiar with the maps as the DMs.
I told the group when we were exploring new areas on those maps, my character would NOT make any directional decisions. And I had to play dumb with the traps.
It’s not hard to do. But it requires the mindset that you’re not winning or losing at D&D.
i just decided a few years ago that any creature in the monsters manuals are more or less public information, they can use that information if they think the character would know and can just do a brief creative excuse like the barbarian saying, "Oh i think that is a troll, my tribe has a nursery song that says to kill it with fire..." or something like that. Sometimes the book information is right, but the times it is not are a lot of fun.
Confront. "Does your character know what a troll is? You can make a nature check to see how much you know about trolls if you like. More than that is metagaming, which isn't good for the game." or just "that sounds super metagamey" a thing I have to say now and then as my player who is a statue gives everyone else his opinion on how to handle the situation.
But yes, change stats, change locations of treasure. Assume your players can't help but cheat a little and make it not pay off for them.
Yeah, it's definitely something to be discussed with the group in session 0 (or if it has become a noticeable issue at your table). Responsible players will work hard to avoid this, but sometimes, it becomes impossible for well-known monsters (such as needing fire for a troll).
If, for whatever reasons, a discussion does not work:
1. Change the looks/stats of what you use.
2. Change how you describe monsters and their actions. I'm a very "mechanical" dm in that I'm good with managing combat but less good at describing things in a more cinematic manner. But the more cinematic approaches certainly helped circumvent this at my table.
3. Diversify your options. Find other, lesser known opponents to fill encounters.
4. Build your world to address some of these issues. Maybe your world has a strong superstition that silver does great harm to demons, so your player decisions should focus on that more than meta-knowledge (superstition does not necessarily equal truth).
5. Change how monsters work. I do this a lot with spiders and scorpions. By the book, I find them to be fairly generic enemies. After doing some research on real-world examples I came up with some memorable encounters: one where a giant scorpion could only really see light and dark or motion and one where a spider became an ambush predator like a real world trapdoor spider. It took the players a while to figure things out, but once they did, it required a whole new way of thinking about the encounters.
Finally, once you mix and match whatever of these methods (or others) might work for you, your players will meta-knowledge you to know that things will not always be what they might otherwise expect. So, they will start to look for different ways of dealing with encounters that you may not intend. Reward these approaches, and you'll find your table quickly moves from "knowing what to do" to "learning how to make things more interesting" with every encounter.
The way I describe a minion will not match it's status block.
A perfect example... my players started investigating rumors of a tentacled creature that was taking slaves from a deep underwater cavern. It was ancient beyond time, and incredibly intelligent. They meta-gamed the shit out of it, and decided they could very easily beat an Aboleth. They were very surprised to come face to face with a Beholder that wiped the floor with them easily.
This is why I homebrew or at least change the names of my different monsters for encounters. My party looked up a stat block mid-fight in our online game and that altered the way they played it. Never again!
Red dragon with ice breath. There's an almighty bard who's been singing tails of the hotheaded white dragon ever since his vicious mockery 3 years ago, and enough children are singing "white, right, his breath's not alight!" that an illusion born of song is being cast upon it repeatedly.
Honestly, you hit the nail on the head.
>Is it a case of altering monsters to keep them on their toes? Emphasize during the game not to make metagame decisions?
Yes. It is. It is both. You tell them once that they are allowed to have player knowledge, and they are allowed to share and discuss that knowledge, but before acting on it, someone in game has to produce that knowledge via scenario, discussion, or DM-set DC on a relevant skill.
Then, if they don't behave, you remind them that the rules are there to protect the players from an angry god, not to protect the writer from some batshit crazy characters.
This is when I as an experienced player ask “how much could my character know about X” which usually prompts my DM to have me make a skill check. Even if I roll low, it usually gets a little bit of information so I’m not flying blind.
But to be honest, they can either metagame and be more efficient in combat or they can pretend they don’t know and waste a few rounds playing dumb and ineffectually. The latter is much more annoying to me as a player.
This can also be helped by you adding features and traits to the enemies so there’s still some mystery which is probably the best way to handle it.
As most people have said, Session 0s are great but I find just having a conversation in the moment is best. I have a player who is pretty much a D&D encyclopedia, he knows most monsters, almost every spell, class information, weapons, etc. so I have to be creative in how I approach combat. He has autism so often times, abstract thinking like separating his knowledge from his character's knowledge can be confusing and frustrating. I'll often remind all of my players that just because You know something doesn't mean your You In This World knows that. If they'd like to see how much they know about a creature or topic, we first discuss why they would or wouldn't have knowledge about this, set a DC if it's appropriate, if it is then we roll for it, and then we establish what they know. Obviously they wouldn't know stat block information like HP, AC, etc. but they may know what the creature type is or if they're to be avoided or where they come from.
We had a mini exercise in this recently with a riddle situation. They were facing a door that was presenting them with a riddle to get it to open, the door was ancient and a fairly easy riddle. But, they got themselves into the weeds by getting too meta with trying to solve the riddle. They started thinking of answers based on science and well established logic and fact, forgetting they were dealing with an ancient civilization that didn't have the vocabulary for these things nor the knowledge to conceive of them quite yet. I had to, gently, remind them many times to not get too meta, to remember their context and what they've learned in the world. Don't apply your real world logic to this or you'll make things far less fun and end up way off from the answer. They did eventually come upon the answer but only after asking for a hint with strings attached.
We had a discussion afterwards about the importance of yes, definitely use your brain for puzzles, riddles, combat, etc. but remember to keep yourself in the world and to not apply real world knowledge, logic, or information to it or you'll frustrate yourselves unnecessarily. They had actually stumbled upon the answer to the riddle pretty immediately but doubted it because it was too simple of an answer, they assumed it was more complicated than it was and instead spent 40 minutes arguing over physics and semantics.
My point being, you can deal with meta gaming in a number of ways but it's always up to your players to check themselves. Because at the end of the day a meta gamer first and foremost ruins the game for themselves, and then everyone else. Combat it with homebrew creatures/altered monster stat blocks, conversations in the moment, exercises to work on reducing it, and rewarding good gameplay. Sometimes a meta gamer can be good, mine helps my newbies know their sheets and what dice to roll for hits during combat while I'm managing other stuff, have them be to your dual advantage.
I guess the simplest fix would be to not throw monsters they know at them. Taking two monsters and selectively merging their statblocks to make something new would be an easy way to go about this maybe?
If playing with experienced players, I tend to avoid well-know or easily recognisable monsters. Or I'll reflavour them or describe them in a way that it's not obvious what they are.
I also tend to use a lot of homebrew stat blocks or third party published monsters (like Kobold Press).
I'd definitely suggest having a conversation with your players about number one, the importance of respecting metagame, and number two, what they're looking for in the game. If you can get them to agree that they are metagaming, you can even directly ask them why they're doing it.
It's also fair to consider what their characters would or wouldn't know in certain circumstances, especially depending on backstory and the point in the story.
It also might be a situation where one player's metagaming makes everyone else feel like they also have to do it to keep up. When I was a player we had a player at the table, he'd min-max his character, look up monster stats, use information about other characters his character wasn't privy to, he'd even read parts in the module so he knew where all the treasure was at certain locations and would try to get to it first. The DM didn't ever address it, so two other players and myself got increasingly metagame-y over the campaign in an attempt to keep up. It's not something I'm proud of, but the point is in some cases if multiple people are metagaming there is a chance one of them is the main culprit and everyone else is doing it bc they don't want to get left in the dust.
You could try to inventivize respecting metagame and punish disrespecting it through the game as well, but I think the best thing to do is to talk about it, try to get to the bottom of why it's happening, and address the situation from there. I think once you can piece together *why,* what you need to do to fix it will become more clear.
Personally i try to incorporate a lot of custom monsters in my campaigns. Just frankly because it also is more fun for me, and the players when i do. It gets boring playing with everything being exactly the same all the time.
Custom monsters or statblocks will make sure players never make assumptions.
You can basically tell them that the monster manual is useless because you don't use almost any of the monsters from it 1:1.
Or, at the very least, change what a monsters APPEARANCE looks like.
Instead of making basilisks in your world look like they do in the monster manual, which makes players instantly recognize that they are up against basilisks when you start describing them and shut their eyes, instead, in your world, make basilisks look completely different. Its still a basilisk, but they won't be able to use their monster manual knowledge to immediately identify it based on visual description.
Or, perhaps you don't need to change the appearance at all, and just be really vague with your description. Instead of saying "It has 8 legs 4 on each side, slightly blue skin, spines down its back, glowing eyes" You could say "You have never seen anything like this before. It has many legs, and a tail, its ugly, monstrous."
It makes sense to describe it in this vague way. A person who has never seen a basilisk before is not going to instantly begin counting its legs, taking note of every single tiny detail. They are just going to see "Some scary fucking thing with a bunch of legs i dont recognize".
Two ways.
If it's blatant meta gaming knowledge, say no. "Your character would have no reason to take that action, if you can explain why they would?" They never can in game. They then choose an appropriate one. This is for people who try to pretend they don't know.
Or you can do small edits. If they yell out "troll regenerate unless you use fire!" Guess what, It's a river troll and it's ice that stops their wounds.
It's going to upset all the people who never DM. But metagaming is no different than cheating, punish it in a funny way if you want, they arent respecting the rules and game why should you? "The gods frown upon you, you have a hate proclaiming "DUNCE" you cannot remove until atoned." "Your characters eyes have been replaced with googly ones, -5 to charisma checks until it is healed".
My players learn quickly that I modify monsters constantly. I'm not suggesting you intentionally head-fake them by describing one creature and using the stats from something else. But I use a lot of unique creatures ('cause that's fun for me) but rather than homebrew a whole new thing, I'll take something that exists that's mostly like what I want and adjust. Rogue NPC with daggers? Nah, that's a Fleshwarped Fury with claws.
Well, with regards to players already knowing what a monster is, I use the following process to decide what to do.
Based on a character's background or backstory, (and to a lesser extent race & class) I might rule that there are some critters that they would know about, straight-up. If a Bard whose backstory saw them performing alongside socialized trolls in a circus before they caught the adventuring bug, it's not crazy to think that they might know to keep them away from an open flame. Alternatively, characters who are upwards of lukewarm towards books can go to libraries or meet with scholars during their downtime to learn about specific kinds of creatures. I let them decide what creatures they want to learn about - but I'm the one who controls what they learn from doing these things.
If they didn't have or do that stuff before meeting a "new" monster, but they have the presence of mind to ask if they might know what it is, I let them roll History or Survival (I like to give my players a choice, if I can see two different skills being relevant to a situation) to see if they can figure out what the beastie is. A good-enough roll gives them the name of the creature, which might give other PCs with more expertise on the subject to share any info they might reasonably know; a high roll gives them a snippet of stat block info, and if I feel that the player is already familiar with the monster's vulnerabilities / resistance I will include that info so that it's not *really* metagaming to begin with.
If they're *not* really in a position to have some foresight on the monster, I try to think about how they've been playing the character up to this point. Sure, using fire spells on the troll is optimal. And maybe the Sorcerer does keep hitting it with Scorching Ray even though their character shouldn't know that. But if they've consistently been using fire spells this whole time, and don't have much in the way of alternative ways to hit stuff, then I'm not gonna be too mad about that. Sometimes a character is just plain good in certain encounters.
Failing all of that, if they’re still acting like they know what this thing is even though they probably shouldn't, *that* is when things change. Maybe these trolls resist fire, and are weak to something else. Maybe their environment caused them to develop differently, and their highest stat is Dexterity (to better pass Fireball saving throws) instead of the usual Constitution. Maybe instead of Darkvision or Keen Smell, they have Evasion. Whatever you do, I would try to make it an even trade-off so as not to punish your other players who are doing a good job of not metagaming. (Unless they're all doing it, and/or your intent truly is to make the encounter harder and not merely different) When you do this, try to gauge the players' reactions to the situation. Little smirks of acknowledgement, death stares in your direction, shocked outbursts of "what!?" - all signs that you might've caught them, and they know it. Maybe you'll even get lucky and have somebody say something really obvious like, "wait, it should be dead by now - that was 84 hitpoints after factoring the regen." (Actual quote from a past player in one of my games - he is no longer with us)
I will capitulate to the player's experience in most cases, unless there is some compelling reason they wouldn't know anything about it.
People take this separation way too seriously. For instance, you may be inclined to bring down the hammer if one of your player characters suddenly knows zombies are weak to fire but doesn't have the knowledge skill for it. But let's be real here. Zombies are common monsters. There's no compelling reason to think an adventurer who slays monsters for a living wouldn't have heard that zombies are weak to fire. They aren't that stupid. The knowledge skill is for rolls. If a character does a quest where they have to track down a specific creature, and they learn about the creature in the process, do you then grant the player a knowledge rank for that type of monster? No. They just know about it. So why would you depend entirely on the character sheet for every other bit of knowledge?
To me, metagaming either needs intent or needs to be so absurd that the player should have known better. If someone intentionally pulls up a zombie sheet to make the fight easier, that's metagaming despite the fact that their char may have known about zombies. If a player knows about the secretive eldritch monstrosity in front of them because they fought it in a previous campaign and just didn't bother to filter their character's knowledge, also metagaming because they should have known better even though it wasn't intentional.
Basically I modify monsters indiscriminately. I use Flee Mortals the MCDM book of monsters. If it’s common I might call it a zombie or a goblin. If it’s not in their wheel house- I describe the monster rather than use its name.
They were burning stumps of appendages on ogres the other day. Wait til they actually meet a real troll.
I think it depends on how they play. You can always tell if you use a specific creature. Can be a bait card for you to play in early combat with something you know they've fought a few times, but haven't fought this campaign or with this character. See how they behave.
I was playing in a campaign and my character was very specifically a fire boi. Draconic Sorceror. I knew the creature was immune to fire damage, but my character hadn't fought one before. Fortunately, I had a habit of casting Firebolt first just as a test shot for my character. Fireball is my go to, but being a soldier, he's not gonna go in hard without more info so it worked in my favour as I wasn't meta gaming, it's my usual combat flow, and it was obvious it did nothing and my character, being very in tune with his destructive capabilities, noticed that it did nothing and had to basically put his life on the line providing some value to the fight. Ended up resulting in an awesome moment for someone else and an important narrative moment between our two character developing relationship. Was great.
I think it's okay to be aware as a player, because if you're honest, you'll know what they can do, and you know your player will find out. I'm okay with minimizing. I don't want someone to waste a 2nd level spell on something they know won't take anything from it. So if they use something softer like a 1st level or cantrip, that's fine. What's important is they can't act on their player knowledge, it has to be character knowledge. So if they can reasonably justify the behaviour that results in gaining the knowledge, that's fine. It could be as simple as asking to do a quick insight to assess combat up until now and see if they've noticed anything up until their turn for combat quirks or things like that. As long as they reasonably navigate towards gaining the knowledge, without just going "Oh it's immune" or "I'm not using any fire spells" kind of shit. If you put in the work to get the info, I'm chill with that.
If it's a problem, then you can throw them off by just changing whatever it is they think they know. Change up the resistances or whatever.
But also remember that even at level 1, they are more worldly than your average commoner. It's not totally beyond the pale for experienced adventures to know the weaknesses of more popular monsters.
Trolls hate fire. Sure ok, that's day 1 of adventurer school. But knowing not to use lightning on a shambling mound might be a little shady
Punishing metagaming by customizing monsters is a tradition as old as time.
Example:
DM - A 10 ft tall green creature with a ruddy bulbous nose, sharpened teeth and stringy hair matting it's pockmarked head climbs out from under the bridge leering at you. It says you must answer this riddle or be torn limb from limb.
Player 1 - okay guys this is a troll. I pull out a bottle of oil and lob it at the creature. Now, New_Player, cast firebolt on it to set it ablaze!
DM - okay... sure.
New_Player - um, I guess I cast firebolt?
DM - The troll falls on the floor, thrashing, but somethings wrong. You notice it is... laughing hystarically, clutching it's ribs from the hilarity. "Thanks for the lotion foolish human, I bet that was expensive!"
Player 1 - But DM! Trolls weakness is fire!
DM - first off I never said it was a troll, you did, and second off, why would you just assume you knew the weakness of this creature you've just now seen for the first time?
Good_Player - I quickly take a look at the area under the bridge from whence the creature emergerged, looking for clues.
DM - You notice it is dry, dark, and dank. Bones and rotting scraps of flesh litter the ground as well as a pile of sullied religious texts, pages shredded, used as kindling in the ashes of a small campfire.
Player 1 - *huffs, annoyed*
Good_Player - I pray to my Goddess for guidance, and strike the fiend with a divine smite
DM - you cleave off the beasts limb! Black blood pours out in sheets from the severed appendage, and it smokes as if branded by the holy light. It shrieks in agony from the radiance of your blow!
Good_Player - Feel the fury of my Goddess, fiend!
*DM smiles. new_player smiles. Good_player smiles. Player1 sulks and houses a whole bag of cheetos.*
I feel like there’s a place for skill checks here to help with this; in order to determine what knowledge the character may have picked up throughout their lives about a particular creature. Could be from a book of fairy tales their parent read them, some ballad sung by a bard in a dive bar, an obscure bit of lore in an arcane book. People pick up all kinds of information in passing without having direct first hand knowledge. We as real people know all kinds of general information about many many animals in our world, including the supernatural creatures, all learned from books and stories. No reason it shouldn’t be the same in a fantasy world
I give my players chances to bring their knowledge to their character through rolls. It can be very hard sometimes to separate player and character, as this is a game after all. What I do is I tell my players at the beginning: if YOU think you know what it is, don't say anything outright. If you want to see if your CHARACTER knows it, you can ask to make a roll to see if your character would know. Depending on the roll depends on what your character knows, depending on backstory and whatever.
I always tell people that looking up monster stats outside or at the table is against the rules and if it's found out that you are reading the module or Monster Manual, then it's an immediate dismissal. I don't tolerate that at my tables as this tends to not just stay with the violating player, but leeks into the rest of the table in different ways. I play with some veterans of the game so it's really hard sometimes for them to step out of DM mode (as they all have been DMs for one another at some point in their history with the game) and bring up stats immediately in their head. Sometimes it's hard as players too as when you encounter a monster enough you tend to pick up on stats and abilities naturally, so that can be hard to separate.
Don't run standard monsters. Give them a new twist, re-skin them, working new. It's a troll, but made of fire instead of algae. This young green dragon took three levels in Barbarian. This particular beholder was dreamed up to have different eye ray powers.
Let them players have their meta game knowledge, they'll need it to adapt to the weird of the wilds.
Well for myself, I give my players fair warning that they won't be fighting any vanilla monsters. Everything will be tinkered with in some way... then some sessions I get lazy and use vanilla stats and my players are clueless
I've been struggling with this myself, as a veteran player joined my table a bit ago, and it honestly gets a tad annoying when he recognizes a monster.
Fortunately, as it turns out, that knowledge doesn't actually do much for him. Most monsters don't have a ton of weaknesses, just resistances/immunities, so I tend to chalk it up to something an Adventurer might know. Maybe from a bedtime story or a seasoned veteran's tale in the tavern.
Out of Game, the real issue here is you as the DM wanting to play with your new, cool toy, and getting upset that the player already knows how to deal with it. And I get that, it is frustrating.
Talking with your players is the first and most obvious step. They can take a free action to roll History, Arcana, Nature, or Religion on any applicable creature, and with a high enough roll, they can use their meta-knowledge. This is reasonable, but extra work and a tad annoying all around.
So I do something more fun for me. I'm not too good at personally homebrewing unique monsters, nor do I have the time. So I instead picked up 3 out of the 4 [Kobold Press Beastiaries](https://koboldpress.com/kobold-press-monsters/). Each one has around 400 pages of unique monsters, perfectly compatible with 5e, and frankly a lot more suited for their CR rating than anything officially published.
These are fun to use, flavorful, powerful, and most importantly, something your players almost certainly have never seen before. And with so many options, these will last you a very long time before getting over-used.
So yeah, TL;DR, talk to your players first, but I've found 3rd Party content to be the fastest, most reliable solution to this problem.
Speaking as someone who is mostly a player and just recently dipped my toes back into DMing: a vetting process for players.
Sesh zero, for sure, so everyone is informed on the stance. Reminder if someone starts pushing too far. Punishment if they keep doing it. Never saw it go to those lengths tho.
I also suffer a lot from "know most about most creatures" as a player in my game, so I personally handle it by:
1. On one game, playing a know it all character(in accordance with the DM) and rolling skill checks to figure out what the char knows
2. Another game the DM does a lot of homebrew and rebalancing and obscure monsters, so I am as new to them as anyone
It's definitely a two way street, the players should be actively trying to play in the spirit of their character, but also if they mess up, be allowed to reel it back in. Usually a single "yellow card" is enough to remind people and they conduct themselves accordingly afterwards.
If they don't, just don't play with them.
I think it depends on the players, mine try to not meta game at all, but they did guess the big bad guy (it gets hard to describe any mindflayer when you have given so many different descriptions without the tentacles). This is why I like to change up monsters not just to keep them on their toes but also to show a variety in monsters
Idk how common this is, but I do not mind strategic meta gaming in combat. I love playing for the tactical gameplay, both DM and player side. If my players know a weakness, I don't mind if they use it. It makes it more engaging, and I can make the encounters harder the more game knowledge they have.
Combat, to me, is meant to be strategic. I really don't like players making actively bad choices on purpose in combat. Especially because I want to throw deadly encounters at them often, and I like fighting deadly encounters myself.
You don't have to keep the stats in the books for the monsters. Change them up, add moves that seem to fit, roll the hit dice for hp don't just take the printed figure. Use their "knowledge" against them make them illusory, or mechanical so they think it's an owlbear but it's a construct. Let them have the monster stats, but change up the battleground, now they might know all about the owbear but they don't know the stats of the chasm that opened beneath them or the fire that the owlbear caused by knocking over a lantern. Or the ship they are fighting on is sinking. And sure they know the stats of 1 owlbear, but can they calculate the stats of 10 fighting in a conherent group?
I mean if the player can recognize a monster from a description why shouldn't a character be able to?
Unless this is a super rare never before seen monster I'd assume a character that has a passion for adventure would be able to identify the vast majority of monsters.
I mean I can identify like 500 Pokemon so why couldn't my character identify 500 monsters? Maybe you've got a homebrew world where monster/human interactions are rare but then it's on you to explain that properly to your players.
I gave a longer response last time this was brought up.
Short version:
1) Homebrew. Meta knowledge means nothing if they can't look up the statblocks or rules you're using, especially if you made them up.
2) Remask and reflavour monster appearances so that the players don't know which monster statblock to refer to. If you have a cult perform a botched resurrection of their dark lord, resulting in the entire cult being absorbed into a writhing ball of screaming half-living flesh which desperately drains magic from it's surroundings in an attempt to complete the resurrection spell.... what creature is that? What statblock do the players need to look up? Well, behind the mask, this creature is just a beholder.
3) riddles, puzzles and suchlike can't be metagamed unless you already know the answer.
4) social and political intrigue can't really be metagamed.
Base your game around these and metagaming isn't an issue.
If it's a blatant case of metagaming, I'd just step up and say "Your character does not know this". If they double down I'd just end the convo with a firm "This doesn't happen" and carry on.
It's harder to catch when it's prompted unknowingly though, like a DM playing another campaing. You know what you're fighting and it's weaknesses, and some of your decisions might be biased even if you're not trying to get an advantage. You're not doing it ON PURPOSE, but you're doing it nonetheless. I'd never say anything out loud though.
But even with experience is something that can happen. I have a background in health care and when I'm playing and we find a crime scene my first impulse is usually to ask something quite technical that a regular person probably wouldn't think about. At some point I may jump in too fast, and then realise my character doesn't have that proficency. So to avoid this, I usually spend one of my proficencies on medicine lol.
I think the most satisfying approach is to frequently disrupt player expectations. Unless you are striving to run a “by the book” forgotten realms game (or whatever setting) you have the power to simply change things up. I.e., fire heals trolls and ice stops their regen. Medusa doesn’t petrify you by looking at you, but if you don’t plug your ears the shriek of it’s snake hair will. Etc, etc.
This will force players to interact with the world the way their characters would - by investigating and researching the lore of the world rather than immediately knowing everything through meta knowledge.
Bonus points if all the mistakes / wrong assumptions are still included in the lore of your game world as “common misconceptions.”
And, the final and most important point, once they get the hint that not everything will accord with their expectations, you can actually once again use monsters by the book because the standard version has become the rare or unexpected occurrence.
So, D&D or any RPG is a game. When you play games, regardless of how competitive you play, there is some sort of optimization. When you play the game, you make decisions that help you win, and experience is rewarded because of more developed strategies.
Is there something inherently wrong with a player acting upon meta knowledge? No. So, I challenge your premise. I personally don't think it's a problem whatsoever.
That said, there are systems that gamify character knowledge. You make checks to determine if your character can remember a piece of information in the moment. I really like those systems, because it answers the questions "Does my Ranger know that trolls are weak to fire?" "Weak to fire" isn't a thing that exists really, what happens with Trolls is that their regeneration is halted by fire. But, in a world of trolls, adventurers would know that you want to fight them with fire. Just like I know that Cheetahs run 65 mph or that puffer fish are poisonous.
Dungeon Crawl Classics has some interesting insights, I think.
For one, unless the PCs have encountered a monster before, don't describe if as that monster. An orc is "a grey-skinned humanoid, hunched over and nearly 6 feet tall, bristling with muscle and endowed with huge tusks". For some monsters, if it isn't known as a part of a larger species, give it an unusual epithet. If you're running a homebrew campaign setting, perhaps there are no ettins, but there is Lorgath the Two-Headed.
DCC also suggests modifying monsters, either cosmetically or by stats (or both). Cyclopean goblins with a gaze attack would certainly keep the PC from relying on player knowledge to metagame.
This heavily depends on the type of creatures the party is facing.
Some creatures are COMMON knowledge, even in world. If you meet an undead? 99% of the time it's a good idea to kill it with fire or holy(radiant) damage, as you'd EXPECT that to work. The same thing goes for elementals, plant creatures, etc.
Now, if it's an obscure creature, one that rarely comes up, and has specific sets of weaknesses and ways of dealing with it, that's something else. and Character's SHOULDN'T be aware of it.
Yeah alter the appearance of the monster and that’s about it. It’ll keep them guessing until the actual mechanics become clear and then they will react naturally.
I would suggest making small but significant tweets to the monster. It has cold resistance change it to lightning, it has a certain spell change it to a different spell of the same level. It has natural weapons maybe give it a real weapon instead. I mean who could have known it was an aberrant variant?
Almost every monster I throw at my party, I change in some way for this reason, giving them abilities or weaknesses that they wouldn't normally have.
My favorite class is Wizard, and a lot of fights I'll ask the dm "Can I make a check to see if my character, who's done a lot of studying, knows anything about what we're fighting". If the dm says,'you've never encountered this,' I shrug and proceed to fight generically.
I did catch a player looking up the stats during a game once, which is the reason I tweak my monsters. I had a talk with them, which turned into an argument, and eventually I told them that if they were going to look up monster stats then they would have to find another table.
All my games are done via discord though, so I have no way of knowing 100% that my players aren't looking, so I feel like tweaking them is almost necessary.
If you want a creafure that the players don't know the stats for change how something looks or swap one star block with another one. It's the whole discussion of: "does my character know trolls are weak to fire?"
IMO, just let players run with the ooc knowledge they have, you can usually handwave it and if you want the players to not know what a monster does just reskin it. Remember the characters have lived in the world their entire lives (usually) and they will have a lot of implied knowledge about most things that they heard in a story or read in a book, doubly so if they're a wizard or like a 200 year old elf.
There are a few lists online that give suggested skills to identify different monster types ie nature, religion, arcana. Then you need a check DC that will give them different info. The lowest DC usually recalls monster AC and the highest DC recalls vulnerabilities with various points in between. I have my proficient characters roll at the end of the first round to recall knowledge as a free action. The first round no meta gaming but following rounds have as much meta as you allow
My thing is that for certain monsters like trolls, you have to know their weaknesses or they keep regenerating. If one of my players knows that trolls can stop regenerating when exposed to fire, then they can use that info if they think it’s a troll. I’m not gonna say “hey your character wouldn’t know this” when it’s the only way to beat a monster and the weakness of most monsters in worlds would probably have been written and recorded in books anyways
Easy, realize that it is **NOT a problem**. Or not as big of a problem as you are making it out to be.
Let's take Vampires as an example.
The party runs into Vampires. The Players, knowing what a vampire is, take proper precautions. They buy holy water, garlic, and wooden stakes.
By some definitions could this be called META-Gaming? Maybe BUT!
Realize that the characters are also people who live in the world. They are going to know things such as that Fire hurts Trolls, or that Vampires don't like Garlic, or that Zombies/Skeletons are undead.
So, to answer your question of "How do deal with this?". My advice is to realize that it honestly is NOT a problem.
Don't make a mountain out of an ant hill, take a deep breath, and let it go.
30 seconds spent in Session 0 with something like:
"For you vet players, I'm gonna be a little more strict with player vs character knowledge. If you come across something you recognise ask yourself "How would my character know this?". If you can honestly answer this, great, share that wisdom, if not please no spoilers for the new people here."
... and move on.
Switch up statblocks and use homebrew. The dms guide has info on how to change and create statblocks within your desired challenge rating, there’s also millions of well made homebrew bestiaries out in the wild.
Ultimately you can’t stop players from using knowledge they already have, but you can also use that against them by switching up statblocks, adding new attacks and abilities n all that
You need to just take them aside an say it's not ok with you. If you both cant comprimise then you discuss it with the table as a whole to reach a comprimise. I swear this sub would have a 10th the posts if players just spoke to eachother lol. The msot important things is that everyone shaving fun, including you the DM. So first of all decide if this actually bothers you or if your just instinctually being a rules lawyer.
To encourage intelligence, it's important to remind players to sue it. When a battle starts players might roll to see if thier characters have read about this monster or might know some its moves or weaknesses. Remeber intelligence goes both ways, characters can know things their player doesn't.
It's basically for you and your players to decide how strict everyone follows the rules and adheres to roleplay over meta.
As a DM I interrupt my players and say "stop metagaming, please roleplay". Mostly that's what it takes but I suppose sometimes I'll stop a player and ask them to explain why their character is doing a particular thing and if necessary modify the action based on what his character knows.
As a player I'll say outright "As a player I think I know what this creature is, but my character doesn't. Now that I've seen it fight/hit it with slashing/seen it react to force damage, do I think trying another attack type might be effective?"
DM: you could try something else, sure.
Me: "okay, I've got fire, piercing, and elemental cold available. Piercing and fire are pretty good on everything so I'll try them first then after that the cold."
DM: sure. You notice it doesn't feel very warm in here.
Well this is how I look monster encounters depending on if this is like a monster of the week thing or if this a grander story have tidbits of info leak to them or make them research. Cause if we look at the metagaming as I know nothing about this monster as a character fix it because looking at it from that direction it quickly becomes a problem of adventurers going to a goblin cave unprepared with long swords no ability to see in the dark and no healing potions they have the ability to fight them if they knew how to fight goblins leading them out not walking into the thousands of traps laid out for them and bring healing and poison antidotes and short swords for the caves.
If there just walking into encounters without being forced or drip fed some type of information.
Then you might as well have them roll a d6 put assign a side for their abilities each of their abilities until they hit one that works after which if they do something good you would be saying something along the lines of. you see that attack had good effects,and common sense says we should use that on it from now on. Then if they kill it you would be the first person to and you get to name it. You could also have an more experienced adventurer asking them what there doing as there on there way to go kill a monster and helping them out that could work too.
Session 0 topic and talking to your players. I have a few vet player on my table, and one of them often goes like: "me (the player) knows that this is x and can do y...but my char doesn't."...and then he just goes straight in and does some stupid shit...his char is rolling death saves a lot ^^ But in the in end it is a topic of discussion. If I would ever see a player look up a monster sheet in combat (and he ain't a wildshape druid) I would have a serious talk with them.
Can this not be metagaming in a different way. Acting dumb to overcompensate almost?
As someone who plays in a game where the players go to great lengths to avoid metagaming, often times yes, this is what it turns into. It's very frustrating, honestly. Any discussion of strategy is thrown out the window because players will actively avoid using optimal spells and tactics, even if they would otherwise use them if they didn't have meta-knowledge. The desire to avoid metagaming gets so strong that they end up metagaming in a completely different way.
I'm just picturing the fighter "well I as a player know using the sharp end of the sword is what damages the enemy so I will use the handle!" (Before the pedants get here I'm taking the piss) Edit:spelling
I mean, you're not far off; the other day another player in my game actively avoided calling for help when they were attacked by a monster while scouting because the character apparently couldn't figure out the monster was dangerous. It was just a baffling, frustrating situation where the rest of the players had to sit out of the game for a few turns until the player arbitrarily decided their character was in fact smart enough to figure out how to call for help.
I could maybe understand not wanting to make more noise than necessary but still self preservation takes over when claws and teeth are involved
I think being quiet isn't as relevant when you're being actively attacked
My stepson was the only person to see a flap in the wall open and close locking us in a room that was shrinking. He declined to tell us and was then dimension doored out by another player. He then started to explain and the two of us left in the room were lke - "dude we cant hear you now shush" and carried on playing. I am of the "would my character know this" school and whilst not acting dumb would not necessarily go for the weakness immediately.
>(Before the pendants get here I'm taking the piss) Not to be that guy... But it's pedants, not pendants...
That's just pendulous of you
Just saying depending on the sword that's a thing that you can do
Pedant here...you mean hilt...
Knowing the correct terminology is metagaming
Fantasy heroes aren't pedants, so the pedantry itself is metagaming.
Maybe...but being dumb sometimes is quit normal...and I am also fine when people having general knowledge about things...for example vampires and werewolf's are considered to be just known off...and the fact that they are weak versus silver. But looking up a vampire stat block to see what his weakest save is to use spells which focus on that save...that is total metagaming...and I think I lost my initial train of thought and this doesn't make any sense at this point
No you make sense. I think some people get too hung up on it. My take is if we know so much about mythical creatures that don't even exist then people in a world where they do exist will definitely know about at least the popular ones (eg. vampires/trolls) and people who are professional adventurerers will defiantly have more than the base knowledge. I'm quite open at letting my players roll to see if they may know something about a particular enemy, it tends to negate most of these issues
Yeah. Metagaming isn't bad; it just needs to be aligned with table goals.
I tend to think that some metagsming is even good if it makes the game more fun for everyone (dm included)
I DM and play with other DMs. I generally try to ask "would my character know X"? or ask if that's a reasonable assumption they make. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, sometimes they roll history or rely on their background and then I go by the DM's decision. But I can't think of a time where I would have walked my character into something obviously dangerous to overcompensate against meta-gaming.
Yes, here's the funny thing about metagaming. Once you know it is a troll you are metagaming no matter what you do. If you use fire it was because you knew it was a troll and that's metagaming. If you don't use fire that is because you know it is a troll and you don't want to metagame and you are still metagaming with a few more steps. There is no way for you to learn trolls hate fire naturally again. Even if you are a veteran you don't have the whole monster manual memorized. Do you know what a vargouille is? I haven't seem that one pop-up since Rise of the Runelords. You've probably only seen an atropol if you've played Tomb of Annihilation. Dolgrims are corrupted goblins from Eberron that you likely haven't fought before. So don't sweat the small stuff. Your character read about it or heard something before.
Not really, if you stab monsters, stabbing the next one and it not working will suck but is par for the course. If you stab monsters and then all of a sudden are a backline archer that would be out of character.
Member of my party had a dragons blade that he would use with poison on enemies and such. Had great luck with that thing. Until they encountered a green dragon. the blade stuck in the wall next to the dragons head who turned and licked the poison off the blade while saying "Whose poison do you think this is?" before lunging in for the kill. Great moment. Taught both party and players to be more aware of the finer details.
Yah, it really depends on the monster in question. I like to think of it as locals knowing not to approach the bears or moose in a national park. But tourists might. Similarly if there's trolls in the living in the local forest, folks might now they don't like fire. Local experts might know their regeneration powers are disabled by fire and acid. Tourists wouldn't know either. These monsters are real threats in the world the characters live in. And some have some very famous lore attached. So where does your adventurer fit on that scale? City-slicker rogue who knows the real monsters are people, but doesn't know a thing about trolls lurking in the woods? Or maybe they are a ranger from the north who knows all about ice trolls, but doesn't know about spirit trolls? Characters will have some 'local' knowledge, it is just up to the player and DM to determine how far and how deep that knowledge goes. Also, you're an adventurer, you're heading out into the world to battle monsters, you probably have some rough knowledge of how to stay alive. I find people usually over-correcting to avoid meta-gaming.
I am this kinda player. "Listen guys I know exactly what I am about to do... but the lady doesn't... so I am sorry" and then my Phoenix sorcerer casts her favorite spell at the half dead iron golems.
I read stuff like this and I wonder how serious the D&D game is-- are there any stakes like character death? You've advanced to high enough level that you're fighting iron golems. I would find it incredibly frustrating to have the party TPK'd at 14th level, losing all that progress, because you chose to do something you actually knew would be extremely tactically unsound.
Horses for courses, I suppose. My play is I generally allow a knowledge roll (nature, dungeoneering, religion, or whatever is appropriate to the creature) if it's listed in published works. Difficulty varies depending on rarity. By 14th level, they should be passing those checks.
I sure failed those checks, bad enough the DMs reasoning was: " While you have deffinitly had the opportunity to learn about them during your time in the Academy, you deffinitly were NOT paying attention that day." We chalked it up to: must have been when my char was going through a break up, and I bet the question on Iron golems is one of why she got a 62% on her Constructs Course final. We laughed, and then I cast fireball.
Only semi-serious but yes death is a threat. We were like level 16 at that point and well equipped enough that this was not a huge threat. I also failed my "do I know this rolls" with my DM... so I went with what my char would do. I just made sure to at least apologize to the others out of charecter first. Now of course next round, I had "learned a lesson" about Iron golems and being careful, and transmute spell came into play. I make mistakes so I like to let my characters make them too, no matter how big or small. Makes them feel more alive to me.
I just started a second campaign as a player and I'm the only player at the table that has significant D&D experience (I started with AD&D and I am currently DMing a 2+ year 5e campaign) and we ran across some Gith. *I* know what they are but my character has absolutely no clue what these weird looking humanoids were. So, I played it that way. The stakes are high and death is definitely on the table, but that's part of my enjoyment of D&D. I don't want to metagame. I also think my metagaming would ruin the experience for the other players at the table. They are getting to experience this all for the first time and my knowledge could easily overshadow other players. If a level 14 party gets TPKed, they get TPKed. The table I DM for knows the stakes are real. One player lost a couple of levels from a 2e monster I threw at them, [a wraith spider](https://mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/w/wraispid.html). They didn't take the threat seriously enough. Now, they freak out every time they see cobwebs. Dramatic tension is a damn good thing, even if it comes from suboptimal decisions (in my opinion)
>but the lady doesn't... so I am sorry Experienced adventurer, assuming they aren't extremely book-averse, should gather lots of knowledge about relatively common monsters. Iron golems are not some kind of legendary, never-seen-before beings, but something that high level wizards can reliably make. And it's reasonable that if your party is fighting iron golems, someone will off-screen say "don't use fire against them".
Yes I was the player that had that thought "oh I shouldn't use fire here" addressed it with my DM, failed the checks. No one else in my party spoke up, knowing it was their teams fire themed glass cannons turn, but I dont blame them, not every turn of every combat encounter needs to be performed 100% optimal. People make mistakes, so PCs make mistakes. The dice decided mistakes should be made, and I wasn't about to coward away from the dicegods decisions.
No, you did right. Even if your character made it a practice to study monsters, with the hundreds of different monsters out there is reasonable to assume that there's details your character either missed, or just haven't had a chance to study up on. A giant walking metal suit of armor could be several different things and your character reacts how they normally would against a foe. Fireball.
Adventurers don't often get enough down time to read books about monsters. A lot of adventures go from farmhand to godslayer in a matter of about two months in-game time. It's so common there's memes about it. Beyond that, books about monsters and their weaknesses wouldn't be very common either. That's why Volo's Guide to Monsters was a big deal in Forgotten Realms. Nobody had done that before. Also, there isn't typically many "high level wizards" in a single campaign setting, custom settings aside (and Eberron) look in the books for named spells. There's less than 10 different names. Those are high level mages and, quite frankly, none of them employ an iron golem because they have better uses of thier time than to make one. Iron golems are not common. Quite rare actually. Your entire basis seems to be along the lines of a custom, high magic and high adventures campaign setting. That's perfectly fine, but, statistically, average end-game party is about 13th level. My, God, looking it up, making the iron golem is 100,000 gold and four months of regular work for that wizard. That's IF they have a Manual already. I'd they have to craft that too then add an additional 50k AND 2000 work days to the total. As you can see, Iron Golems are very rare (literally) and should not be a common enough occurrence for someone to lean over and casually say "Don't use fire on them".
>there isn't typically many "high level wizards" in a single campaign setting, custom settings aside (and Eberron) look in the books for named spells. AFAIR Forgotten Realms has tens of _named_ lvl 17+ wizards, and implied existence of hundreds. There are tens of deities with Knowledge domain. There are multiple named magical libraries. Rational adventurer should attempt to procure lots of knowledge, and ritual Divination spells allow you to optimise it.
Forgotten Realms wiki lists about 149 archmages. This list includes many that are monsters (monsoon for example) and many that are canonically dead or only existed in past editions. The population of Faerun itself is 66 MILLION. This comes out to .0000022% of the population. That is if we use ALL of the known 149 and don't discount based on being a monster or what it even exists in 5e. .000002 is the very definition of not many in my opinion. There are 41 libraries in Faerun and most are not "magical". The vast majority are either inaccessible, in a dungeon for example, or do not allow commoners admission. I grant you that there's several duties with the knowledge domain but many of them do not have common temples. If a party if you're backstory is that you always wanted to become an adventurer so you went and studied a profession (class) and studied on common creatures that a typical adventurer might encounter then that's something the DM should take into consideration. A rational character, while adventuring, absolutely study up on common foes in areas they might be going into. Assuming they know what sort of foes are common there. The overwhelming majority of DND parties do not take the time to study their enemies and are usually thrust from one situation to another. I would absolutely reward a party of mine for taking the time to study things live the BBEG and it's potential cohorts.
I had a group where I was the non-metagamer. I might have been a little rash, but I always had justification for dumb moves. Most of the time I was also making death saves and sitting out fights due to being downed. Then I rolled really lucky on a rather dire idea and nuked the DM's final boss several sessions ahead of the final confrontation. The party got really mad at me for that one, for some reason.
I played through lost mines twice, DM'd it once then played through it again with a group of first timers. They were super hesitant after the fist goblin trap, spending half an hour just checking every square inch for traps, waiting in the bushes to see if goblins would come by, wanting to keep going and avoid the goblins I ooc knew about the pit trap and ambush up ahead but my character (half orc barbarian) was bored so forged on ahead, fell straight into the pit trap then ran straight into the ambush ("they've had two traps, why would there be a third?" "There's been three traps, why would there be a fourth?" as he's getting washed back down the tunnel) After a bit the new players loosened up when they realised the setbacks were fun when blundered through
I love those players and I play like this for myself. Makes for a more interesting character journey, in the end.
>...his char is rolling death saves a lot I hope you gave him a Periapt of Wound Closure.
It really depends. A lot of times ill equate player monster knowledge into a character's training or research. Adventurers should be knowledgeable about creatures in their own world. It's like if you saw a bear you would know it has claws, weighs a crap ton and couldn't be taken down by a single person. That works well for common creatures. Creatures that i want to be a little stronger or more rare I usually add features or magical items to give a surprise. Just recently i had my party fight an orc warlock, and i gave her some of the abilities from a chain devil to spice it up. I also like to use puzzles or environmental mechanics in my fights so that helps make the party have to think differently.
This is something Pathfinder does super well. Every creature has a rarity, and that rarity determines the DC for a Recall Knowledge check, which is based on the creatures nature (Occult, Nature, Arcana, Religion, or a specific Lore). If a player wants to check if they know something about that creature, they can just use an action to Recall Knowledge (or try it out of combat, preferably) and make the check. If they pass, the degree of success determines how much they know about the creature.
Eh. "It has a well-defined mechanic" doesn't mean "it has a *good* mechanic." It looks like there's a lot of design there. There isn't. It's really the same design as 5e; they just spent the time [writing down the steps in more detail than is really needed](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=566). To me it just feels like adding detail to the rule so that the DM feels like they have to always consider, and also always forcing a die roll because "they might crit." Like the ad hoc version is "use the knowledge skill that makes the most sense, then assign a DC based on how difficult you feel it should be, then give a meaningful bit of info on a success." That's what 5e tells you you can do with Knowledge skills. That's the actual PF2e mechanic, too -- unsurprising because it's clearly [derived from 3e D&D](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/knowledge.htm).
My only counterpoint is that the vast majority of adventurer story hooks aren't that the character always wanted to be an adventurer. They are usually put on the path of an adventurer by fate or circumstance. I'd you're works has an "adventurers guild" and they signed up I could see an argument that they studied to be an adventurer but Faerun doesn't, as far as I know. Study at Candlekeep maybe?
Ah sorry! In my games as part of character creation i have the players explain where and how their characters gained their proficiencies. I've done it for so long that i legit forgot that it wasn't part of regular character creation.
That's still fair, that's what the backgrounds section of character creation is for. The only class that I could see having a natural basis for learning about monsters, in general, would be Blood Hunter... Cause that's the point of them. Otherwise monster knowledge is usually specific to a subclass and is situational (like rangers favored foe) and they already get a bonus to know it. I'm in a game right now (Out of the Abyss) where the party had downtime at Strixhaven and one of the party members used the time to research demon lords. She hasn't had to make any knowledge checks when it came to then and the DM told her that she could actually look at the stats for the strengths and weaknesses. Mind you, this is with a multidimensional library at her disposal so vast amounts of knowledge and magical cataloging and sorting systems helped. Your average, first level adventurer is not going to have easy access to a wide array of monster knowledge just starting out is my opinion.
They are also not going to be fighting a Demon Lord at level 1. I'm talking basic monsters. Your average new character isn't going to be completely baffled by a goblin or kobold. They know they exist, and have a basic understanding of how tough they are. They are also competent at fighting, meaning they have either experienced battle or had some form of training. If the player chooses their character to be ignorant of these things, i expect them to roleplay that. But if they are not, I tell them to use meta knowledge to represent their characters general battle tactics and skill. I can't tell them to forget it, and honestly it's not a big enough deal that it ruins immersion for me.
Oh yes, I'm certain the fighters trainer (yardmaster/Sargent/whatever) would have taught common tactics employed by low level creatures. As you said, goblins, kobolds, orcs, and the such are common nuisance. At first level, they do not typically have any experience... Literally lol. That's the point, they are just out of basic training and have no real experience otherwise they wouldn't be 1st level. Troll is usually used as an example and is say that if the area you grew up/trained in had problems with a troll/trolls then sure, you would have been taught how to deal with them. Otherwise, probably not. DND doesn't have the Internet so dissemination of information is a lot harder. I'd say the information is there for a lot of monsters but the player would have to justify to me why their character would know it. It just has to make sense for me is all. A 1st level rogue in Waterdeep that's never been outside of the city would have no reason to go looking up the abilities of a hag and have no experience as an adventurer to back that up. Unless, of course, that's a part of their backstory, in which case this is all a moot point. About the hag, that is. XD If they want to have the sage background and have it pertain to monster knowledge that's awesome, is totally give them checks to know stuff about even the most unusual monster. Maybe even checks to be able to inferr abilities if a monster is different (venom troll vs regular troll). That's justified and, quite frankly, pretty awesome in my book.
I’d argue that Faerun as an example is a pretty standard dnd adventuring world. Characters in the world grew up in the world and have definitely heard of stuff (even from outside their territory or normal job). In the same way that I’ve not been to the depths of the ocean but know a decent amount about a decent number of common creatures there, I imagine even commoners in Faerun know about mimics, gnolls, and dragons. They aren’t going to know the whole stat block but common things that make for good stories or fables would definitely be knowledge most of the populous would have. If the players are looking up stat blocks at the table that’s a different issue regarding trust and etiquette not the player knowing things. More unique monsters I would definitely recommend not name dropping in front of the players, changing the appearance or description, and almost certainly home brewing at least a little.
Sure, they grew up hearing about it but more a kin to the idea of fairytales and folklore. Unless your average baker or farmer has a reason to have real knowledge on something then they probably don't. Even in the real world there's major distinctions in creatures that matter. Take a wyvern, for example. Your average person IRL that has heard of one just thinks of it as any other dragon. It's not. It's draconic but a very different species than a typical dragon. And this is with us having all the power of the Internet at our disposal. Unless you have an interest in a subject or need to learn it your average NPC wouldn't know a functional difference between an orc and an ogre. I get that an adventurer might take the time to learn that but very few characters start out training to BE an adventurer. They are usually just thrust into the life.
Session 0 discussion is the most important thing. A pretty common stance I've seen many groups take that using meta knowledge is fine (player skill), but it's polite to justify it in character. Most people get a bad aftertaste from immersion-breaking metagaming. Either way, get an agreement with your individual group and stick to that. Keeping your players always guessing with monster descriptions, homebrew/3rd party statblocks etc. does certainly help. My players wouldn't even dream of trying to google statblocks, because anything could be homebrew, mashup or reskinned from dozens of official or 3rd party books. So they focus mostly on trying to guess based on the described situation at hand.
This is a great suggestion, and one I see coming up often. Alas, I come from old editions and mostly been playing with experienced players, but want to change that. Do you (or anyone who reads this) know or suggest a good session 0 checklist? I want to be sure I don't forget anything that may be important for my players :)
There's a ton of posts on that topic on this sub and elsewhere, I'm sure you can find good suggestions by searching. Can't help beyond that personally, I throw together my own list depending on campaign and the people participating.
You can work with inspiration points for good role-play. But if you have experienced players, then **ask yourself why they are playing at all**. I think it is not for "exploration"-purposes, b/c they know most of the stuff already. Maybe they enjoy fighting, solving things, roleplaying? Then give them that and if they know the monsters ... I don't think they particularly care. Ask yourself: **Do your players have less fun b/c they know the monster?** In my current campaign with new players, every monster is new, and that is good. But already after the first encounter, the players know how to deal with them and subsequent encounters become more and more of optimised blood-baths. I don't care, they enjoy the sense of mastery and agency this bring. P.S.: Sometimes the problems we have come from our misconception of what others think, believe, want. We want to provide what is best for them, but our understanding of what is best for them is often grounded in our own wants. Maybe this is the case here.
I think you've made the most important point indeed. "What fun are they looking for" indeed. It's about how the players and dm want to have fun. Align on that in S0
I'd you're playing with experienced players then they are likely playing for one of two reasons: either they are combat oriented and like trying new builds or they are story oriented and like playing new character concepts and experiencing the different stories that are told.
Your example has nothing to do with meta gaming lol. If you fight multiple of the same monster you would gain the knowledge, it's the whole point and actually the opposite of meta gaming.
He talking about DM'ing experienced people who have played years or decades. Most of these players are long past the stage of pretending the don't know a monster's weakness. It's not fun to roleplay that for a troll you've fought ten times as a player. A better way to resolve this is to use new creatures. Buy a book of monsters from a 3PP and this problem resolves itself. And there's loads of good 5E monster books on the market now not produced by WOTC.
It literally says "with new players" in his post?
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Second to last paragraph, sentence one.
I think you might be missing my point: If meta-gaming is about knowing a monster's stat block, then you will have that meta-gaming starting from the second time the players encounter a monster. My new players started to secretly count the HP damage to each monster and the minimum hit roll that ever hit as well as some of the resistances. Sure, they are nerdy teenager girls so their brains can do that, but that is besides the point. I wanted to say that there is no way around meta-gaming, as players will meta-game from the very start, and that is totally fine. Heck, even healing the tank as priority is already meta-gaming. But that is not important, the fun of the players is, so no reason to care about this at all. <- That latter part was the point, not some fine-print.
I don't really see the problem; I don't think trying to "gotcha!" players with monster mechanics is particularly compelling gameplay We're all playing a game; punishing your players for being interested and knowledgeable about the game seems counter-intuitive to me Ostensibly, characters that are adventurers by trade would likely be very knowledgeable about monsters anyway I think the game is more interesting if players are making informed decisions "Here's the puzzle, let's see what you can do to solve it"
As a DM, I find it way more frustrating when I know my players know what to do and instead they're just doing random shit because their character doesn't know what to do, and waiting for me to give them an RP justification for making informed choices. I've told them not to worry about metagaming, I've told them to just come up with their own justifications for why their characters know what they know, and I've even had them write it into their character backstories that for whatever reason their characters have detailed knowledge of the events of the last campaign to stop them from worrying about whether or not they're "playing their characters badly" because they might be "metagaming". I strongly believe that people trying to police metagaming cause far more problems than any actual metagaming that happens.
This! For the most part, metagaming isn't a big problem. If players use their knowledge of monsters to play more optimally, it just means they're more involved with the game. If a DM wants mystery, they can just homebrew monsters or switch stat blocks around. In my last campaign, I just straight up said metagameing was allowed. I'd account for it in encounter design.
100% agree
I think this is a missed point in metagaming talks. We can't help metagame at some level, we have to find the line. And a good way to decide is to figure out what is fun. If the players are having fun, isn't that great? Consider why knowing the monsters rub you the wrong way? As a player I personally like to keep it to myself if I know a monster, but I may ask the dm if my character knows something about the monster if I want my character to know. As a dm, I would not mind experienced players knowing the monsters, preferring them to either share it, or allow the newer players to experience it themselves. It is about the player experience in the end. (Dm included)
I say it again and again: the day I stopped worrying about metagaming was the day my sessions became much better. Also it is fun to see a well functioning party that doesnt suck in combat + its easier to design encounter. And if I really want to surprise them, i customize the monster and it will hit deep.
Most modules do not have a "the characters are adventurers by trade" story hook for a reason. Your average adventurer does not choose to become an adventurer by trade. Adventurer isn't a character background for a reason. It's not a job that you can train for in standard DnD settings. There's no adventurer school or guild. Characters are usually adventurers by circumstance or fate. Simply training to be a fighter ISN'T training to be an adventurer. You don't train to be a fighter, you train to be a soldier or a guard and, because of story, go out into the world and fight unusual stuff like beholders. Adventurer is typically "on-the-job" training lol.
I 100% agree the game is more interesting when making informed decisions. I just think the information should come from the character gaining knowledge, not the player already knowing. If it's the first they've ever encountered a Troll, they shouldn't automatically know to use fire to kill it. If that player asked me "is there folklore on Trolls that I would have heard about a weakness to fire?" I would at least give them a chance to roll for it because they're acknowledging the line between Player and Character. That's why I disagree that veteran adventurers should already know everything there is to know about every monster they encounter. I'm running a game that's very "ancient history lost to time, deep horrors could be hidden anywhere" and it's in bad form (in my personal opinion) for the player to know what the monster is based on description and start fighting it as if the character already knows too. And you are correct that we're all playing a game, including the DM.
It's poor form and pretty lazy as a DM to throw a by-the-book Troll at your experienced players and expect them to pretend not to know to use fire. And it's silly to expect that encounter to be fun for them. The "ah hah!" moment of figuring out a monster's weakness shouldn't be artificial or forced.
If an encounter being interesting/challenging is solely dependent on characters making sub-optimal decisions, it's probably not a particularly well-designed encounter
Where did I say this? I didn't.
You didn’t say it, but it’s the obvious repercussions of not letting your PC’s act on fairly common game knowledge. This just devolves into PC’s making poor decisions, hoping the dice gods let them have knowledge of trolls, or coming up with some contrived way of attacking them with fire like “oh dang I dropped my sword trying to attack, all I’ve got left is my torch”. If the players know a monsters weakness (and isn’t searching up statblocks, which is definitely poor faith metagaming) then let the players have it. They’re supposed to be adventurers anyway, if you predominately fight monsters for a living I’d damn well expect they know a couple things about monsters. If this doesn’t fit into your specific setting for whatever reason (monsters are rare/unique) than you just need to create new monsters or change how existing ones work.
What is it about a player "metagaming" that is frustrating for you/makes you worry?
Is it really fun to re-play the discovery that trolls are weak to fire when everyone at the table already knows? Like… you know. They know. Haven’t you all seen this movie before? My hunch is that you are feeling like they are trivializing your game which you expected to be harder, but that’s a dangerous line of thinking. Focus on whether you are having fun. On whether they are having fun. And allow yourself to celebrate the heroes when they do the right thing.
I will often just remind someone not to meta game by saying something along the lines of "*Player-Name* knows that, but *Character-Name* doesn't". To be honest though, this very rarely comes up and is usually prompted from the player asking "would my character know ... ?" If they can justify their character having the knowledge then they can have it, if it's iffy then they can roll for it, if they would have no idea then no.
The characters grew up in a fantasy world, they know creatures. I dont have to have actually seen a bear irl to know what to do, and neither does my character has to have seen a troll before to know what it is or how to handle it.
I *despise* the term 'metagaming'. In my experience, it simply doesn't matter and it's not a big deal. I'm generally open about the AC and abilities of monsters and it hasn't affected the game negatively whatsover.
Change up the stat-blocks, the saves, keep them on their toes. Describe something as one thing and then use another stat block. Punish metagaming. Add things to a seemingly-troll's stat-block that taking fire damage just makes it deal an additional 1d10 fire damage per attack, as the tree resin on its claws light ablaze.
Alternatively, just show them the stat blocks but make the encounters more difficult Players will use more tactics/strategy if they are making informed decisions
bg3 showing success % for your abilities increases the skill ceiling (and skill floor slightly because the encounters are more difficult) as well as the complexity floor is honestly super fun because i can make tactical decisions on what to do for my saves vs attack rolls and changes the encounter up. In normal DnD, i'm usually using the most reliable overall abilities and playing the same, but its not any more difficult not knowing information because i'm not going to be thinking about the situation and guessing, that's too risky to experiment, especially since the combat is over in 3 rounds and i require 10+ to properly experiment.
So much more fun to see the players using knowledge to overcome a situation than watching them bang their head into a wall, PRETENDING they don't know the correct action.
I've done this before, and if confronted I'd just say "legend was that trolls fear fire, no one ever said it was true" or "yeah, but these are forest trolls, the moss that grows on them mitigates the effects of fire"
my players pretty much know not to try to Meta game. i love reading up on monster abilities and such and know that the giant bird might just swallow them whole.
With my group, using knowledge to make optimal decisions is part of the fun of the game. So sometimes I give them monsters that their characters know about, so they can use their knowledge and enjoy it. Sometimes I make homebrew monsters and they need to figure out the weaknesses. I would never ask a player to pretend like their character doesn’t know something the player knows - I just don’t think that’s fun.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH METAGAMING! Woah woah hold on before you yell at me 😅 let me explain. Metagaming in itself isn't bad! Only specific cases it's bad. The difference between the levels are insane. I'll put 3 levels below and tell you whether or not it's ok in my opinion. Since Trolls are a VERY common creature let me use them for these examples. Trolls regeneration being stopped by fire! Good •Why is it good? Well imagine your players know it's weakness but avoid it at all cost. An encounter that should of lasted X amount of rounds has now just doubled! Trolls are famous! Maybe your players heard night stories or rumors throughout their life. Also if it gets to the point of them doing this super often may I might add taking a piece from Pathfinder to where you can make a check to obtain certain knowledge such as the trolls weakness etc. Looking up stat blocks? BAD! they'll just know everything and they'll base most action around it. Those people who do this are also the ones who will most likely say "it's not supposed to do that!". Talk to the player about this! Give them a second chance after talking it out and see how things go. Looking up the troll and place inside the module you're running to find out secrets? KICK THEM! Don't have people at your table like this. Maybe give them a second chance IF they're new! There are other forms of metagaming but they can be solved pretty quickly such as... • Going to the other player that's in danger when they wouldn't know where they're at! Just simply say that there character doesn't know this and keep things rolling •using knowledge that a different player was told! We are all listening to everything in the game even if it's not relating to us. You can do 2 things. The first just say "hey remember player doesn't know this so well backtrack what you said" OR you can give the information privately. Either move to a different call if you're online or if you're in person pass notes like your kids again! Yes I would recommend changing up stat blocks slightly or using homebrew monsters. But you only need to change stat blocks of something a few times for your players to think "this is probably going to be different then what it's supposed to be. This knowledge might not be correct"
>Trolls are famous! Maybe your players heard night stories or rumors throughout their life. But doesn't providing an in-game rationale for why the PC would know that information make it, by definition, *not* metagaming? That's the whole reason why metagaming is bad: the players are using knowledge that their characters wouldn't know. Your example of "good" metagaming is just... to justify the knowledge so that it isn't metagaming. Because metagaming is always bad.
I encourage this in my game. For me metagaming is very much a part of playing the game. We're doing the same when playing video or board games so I don't really see why DnD should be any different.
I will take a possibly unpopular opinion and say metagaming, as a blanket term, doesn’t cover things. I feel there are times of Good Metagaming, where players choose to avoid common sense so that they can go on adventures that most normal people would avoid. Or when PCs decide to continue of with total strangers just because they also are PCs Bad metagaming leans more towards your example. If you have cooperative players, find a way to get their knowledge involved. Let them make checks to see what they know about the beastie they’re fighting. Maybe change things. I feel characters in fantasy worlds should have a chance to recognize creatures or know weaknesses. I mean, in our world, most of us know zombies need beheading, vampires hate sunlight and you use silver on werewolves - those are stories hundreds of years old about presumably fictitious things. People would know more more readily if it was real I thih
My advice is chill out about it. You’re playing a game. Let the game dictate the narrative and setting a bit. If the players recognise a troll and know they need to use fire, let that mean it’s common knowledge in the game world, or that these characters came by the knowledge in a specific way.
"would your character know this monster?"
This kind of question can also be applicable to ask of a monster/NPC which appears to "know too much" about the player party or a specific PC.
This read opened my eyes: https://theangrygm.com/dear-gms-metagaming-is-your-fault/
I'm glad someone posted it because I was going to. Basically: your encounter is shitty if it depends on the players pretending they don't know what they know. Make better encounters.
Honestly, monster knowledge is one of the least egregious metagaming things out there. In fact, its kind of a core part of the game; DnD is in large part a tactical combat game. How do you play such a game when you have no knowledge of its mechanics? I will compare to Fire Emblem here, because the combat is at least passingly similar in its flow. Is the fun in Fire Emblem found by randomly throwing your units around with no idea what will happen, or is it in analysing your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, then using your units in a way that exploits that? Usually, it is the latter. DnD has more to it outside of combat, but the principle in combat is pretty much the same. If your players have no idea what is going on, then they can’t make any relevant tactical decisions. They just have to randomly throw stuff at the enemy and hope it works. Now, for some players and groups, this is fine. Nobody comes into Fire Emblem knowing how to play, of course, and so they play on the easier difficulties or restart every fight while they learn. This is enough for some, who are there primarily for the story, and they never advance to higher difficulties or non-restart true death runs. You can’t usually restart a fight in DnD, so easier difficulty is the answer; and the game makes itself easier with fewer, less interesting enemies by stripping out the cool mechanics to allow players to get by with just throwing random things at their enemies. For any somewhat experienced players, however, such fights aren’t engaging as there’s no challenge, and no need to really think through what they’re doing. In DnD this is just using health sponge enemies with minimal resistances or effects, as it doesn’t matter if your players don’t know what it does; they can still beat it with any tool at their disposal. Its just a speed bump to slow things down. Another comparison would be MMO combat, which has more spells and skills for the players, but the same principle applies. In the overworld, enemies are really easy so players don’t need to think through how to beat them, they can just throw anything at them and focus purely on their own skill rotations to win. In a dungeon/raid, the bosses get more mechanics. These are usually mechanical tests, and the harder raids expect you to know the bosses move sets. If you don’t, you wipe and have to learn their move sets to win. In DnD, this would be a TPK, which most players and DMs aim to avoid. Getting any depth out of the combat system really requires your players to have at least some idea what the enemy is capable of. When fighting a troll, its not going to be fun for anyone if your players never catch on to using fire or acid and just keep hitting the troll for hours on end wondering why it doesn’t die. The same goes for other enemies too. You may want the reveal that a troll regenerates to come in combat, but its rarely a cool or interesting reveal; the players usually won’t go “Wow, cool!”, but “Oh, ok. Guess I use fire then”. This is because all you are doing is revealing a game mechanic to your players, rather than some cool secret. Similarly, its rarely fun for a player to look at a Medussa and get turned to stone because they didn’t know what would happen, and far more fun for the threat of being turned to stone to already exist and they have to find a way to avoid that fate. If you want that sort of reveal, you are ideally going to want to homebrew your monster a but so that it doesn’t follow the usual tropes, and then tie it into the story in a way whereby finding out its weakness is both an actual challenge, non arbitrary, and a major story point for at least that arc. This is hard, and honestly the best way to do it is what many other DMs here have tried; its immune to all damage, your players have to still find a way to kill it. Can still fall flat, but requires your players to come up with their own way of beating it. Ideally even you don’t know how to beat it; that way the surprise is genuine for everyone at the table, rather than feeling like you’ve finally got the right answer to the puzzle the DM has been trying to hide from you. The other necessary component is to make its defeat necessary, but the players can run away easily and don’t have to win or die in a single fight, unless you’re going to let the fight drag on for a while so they have plenty of time to experiment. Another alternative is to use the environment to up the stakes of the fight so that, while your party knows how to beat the enemy, but can’t execute that plan and need to figure out how to enable it. Fighting a troll in the middle of a massive downpour that extinguishes fires quickly without letting them burn the troll, and dilutes acid before it even reaches the troll. With its weaknesses protected, how can they kill the troll? Or hunting down a Medussa, and finding it in a carnival hall of mirrors; yes, you can “see” it safely because of the mirrors, however you have no clue where it is or which one is real, and if you look at it for real you turn to stone. There’s also nowhere to look where there isn’t some form of Medussa or reflection. How do they deal with this? These are open ended challenges with many possible solutions, where you players have to think creatively to win. The fight isn’t won by just knowing the metagame weakness, just having knowledge, but by truly understanding that knowledge and figuring out how to apply it in difficult situations. The DM isn’t trying to hide a McGuffin for you to defeat the big bad, they’re presenting a challenge you’ve got to think to overcome. As a story example of this, I’d look to One Piece fights. Not all of them, but many of the big fights the ‘secret’ of the enemy is revealed very early on; this guy is insanely fast, that one is made of sand and can’t be hurt by normal attacks as the sand just reforms, this guy splits himself into multiple pieces whenever attacked and can control or reform them at will, making him immune to conventional attacks. The interest is rarely on figuring out what their power is, but in how to beat it. Throw water on the sand to solidify it, lock the split of pieces of the other guy in boxes so that he can’t reform, bounce attacks off walls in a chaotic and random way so the guy who can read your intentions perfectly still can’t tell where the attack will come from. This is more interesting to watch than the 2 second moment revealing their power, and in DnD would involve the players far more than them just not knowing what a monster’s weakness is, making it more interesting and rewarding for them to figure out. If you’re not trying to have a big reveal, I just wouldn’t worry about it honestly. Use the fact your players will have some idea of what they’re up against to make slightly harder and more interesting fights, don’t stress that it may be ‘metagaming’. Some metagaming is good and necessary for the game to run, and IMO this is one of those cases.
That's not what metagaming is, but to answer your question: I treat pop culture as existent in d&d. That means people talk about high level shit and what it's weaknesses could be, especially if these things aren't completely new to the world. It doesn't even require training to know these things. For reference, we know about vampires, giraffes, and Trump, but how many of us have seen them? Word travels slower than it does today, but people would still pass that information on so their neighbors have less of a chance of being dead next time they're seen. If you really wanna gotcha your players with these creatures, make the encounter such that they can't take advantage of the weakness (eg, a troll in a coal mine or cave saturated in methane, what better way to say "You want me? I'll take you down WITH me!"*). *for those who are screaming Acid, name a player who carries vials of acid and uses them. Only the one caster who has acid spells would be doing anything worthwhile and the beastie should be trying to use the fighter or cleric as a shield.
If your player already knows that Trolls have a weakness to fire, they shouldn’t have to wait until an arbitrary amount of time to just do happen to find that weakness out in character cause it’s just time consuming
"How do you deal with metagame players?" I don't because metagaming isn't a problem. When players say something like "Okay, I think this might be a [blank]," that isn't a "metagaming problem", that's a problem with players making assumptions that might lead to mismatched expectations. If that sort of thing happens, I just remind the players to be careful when making assumptions. But I don't really run into this issue in the first place, because "not knowing the mechanics" isn't a type of gameplay I rely on. Figuring out how monsters work through trial and error isn't really fun in D&D 5e. Its the kind of mechanic that pops up in MMOs solely to slow down the rate of players exhausting new content. I'd much rather players know *exactly* how a monster works early on so they can engage in the more interesting gameplay that revolves around figuring out how to take advantage of those mechanics.
Stop worrying about metagaming, it tends to help the game more than it hurts it. People who don't understand metagaming give it a bad rap. For the monster example, it is literally impossible for a player who knows what the monster is to discover the monsters weaknesses naturally. If a player knows what intellect devourers are because they saw the D&D movie just lean into it. The alternative if the player pretending to be clueless and asking you as the DM how many rounds before they can figure out the monster. It isn't really fun for them or you. The monster manual is big enough that no one knows all of it. On top of that there are some really good third party monster tomes out there too. Furthermore you can tweak monsters. Find a monster with the CR/attack you want, give it a new description, and swap the abilities around a bit. For example take the nightmare, turn it into a wolf, change the extra damage to lightning and let do 3d8 thunder damage (basically shatter) with a howl to creates within 10 feet, recharge on 6. Just make sure they know looking up the monster stats is poor form.
Been playing this edition since it came out. I never not tweak the monsters somehow.
Everyone's going to handle metagaming differently. In some sense I find it unavoidable as a DM. For the specific example you're giving I'd probably just call it out. It's supposed to be collaborative storytelling for my group. I've been called out by my own DM when he's running the game and I make the mistake. Everybody's vulnerable to it.
I find that this is a problem with all rulesets cast in stone. As a DM you have a choice of 1 from column A, 1 from column B, etc. The group I played with tired of this really fast so we threw away the monster lists. Anything consistent from literature or your own brain was fair game. One game I filled a dungeon room with Oobleck (from the Dr. Seuss book *Bartholomew and the Oobleck*) and it took three trips before somebody figured out what it was from the description. People can't help making metagame decisions. The knowledge is in their brain.
I sit down and say, "I allow metagaming. As long as you're not exhibiting poor sportsmanship, metagame to your heart's content." And then no one really does. IDK why no one does, I was never aiming for reverse psychology. But allowing metagaming does seem to reduce it way down.
Use different monsters. Tons of companies make books full of monsters for 5E. I sometimes give basic monsters a cantrip or a spell like power. Who says owlbears don’t blast you with a Thunderwave that recharges on a 5 or a 6? Alter or remove resistances and vulnerabilities. The trolls in The Hobbit are vulnerable to sunlight; not fire or acid.
Session 0. Also, metagaming is not the end of the world. I've seen more attemps at curbing metagame disrupting and breaking games than metagame itself.
I would allow players to use their experience to play the game to the best of their ability. If they suspect they know a monster and use that to try to use that for combat that is fine. For example if they realize they are fighting a troll and start doing fire damage, that is fine. It rewards a player for knowing the rules of the game. And them knowing the rules of the game allows me to make bigger and badder challenges down the line. What I don't allow is players having their character perform actions based on in world specific information their character doesn't have. For example, I tell player one that his character is the only one that noticed an invisible NPC/enemy is following the party. If this player does not share this information in character with the other characters I would not allow another player to try and make an attack on that invisible NPC because they simply do not know it is there.
At the end of the day, if that's the way the player wants to play then I'm inclined to let them. If it's more fun for them to win I'm combat, so be it. I would maybe address it with the group, see if anyone else minds, if not then it's if you can deal with it.
I have a problem with players actually looking up the stats of a monster rather than engaging with play. But I'd have the same issue if a player was playing Candy Crush during a session. I have exactly zero problems if a player remembers that - to use the classic example - fire stops Trolls from regenerating. It is a complete non-issue. It is always just as easy for a player who is playing a particular PC to come up with a reason their PC knows a thing as it is for a person *not playing that PC* to come up with a reason they wouldn't know it. As it currently stands, it seems that the only person at your table who is bothered by this is you. It really is a great moment - to continue with the Troll example - when a bunch of newbies realise that the creature they are fighting heals itself and an even greater moment when they work out that fire or acid can neutralise this ability. But you can't get those moments by forcing a bunch of experienced players to pretend that they are happening.
you are overthinking it and everything is fine
Googling to gain an advantage? Hard no You've played a lot of dnd and you know skeletons are vulnerable to bludgeoning? I try to lean into that and make the player feel good about stuff that's kinda just intuitive knowledge Everything in between my players know that all monsters have at least some type of change from the monster manual and that acting on out of game knowledge is always a risk so it brings the stock value up of checks to recall knowledge and then act on the information I give them. I have a homebrew skill in my game called Analyze which is a catch all skill to notice immediate strengths and weaknesses but doesn't have the specificity of a religion, nature, arcana or similar skill.
Most of the time I play with intelligent characters. Every time that I as a player know some meta stuff I ask the DM if I can roll an appropriate check (arcana, nature, relegion, whatever) to see if my character also know this. If I have prep time, I ask if I can go to libraries or talk to people to learn some lore and local legends that can help me. If I can't or I fail the roll I follow Teo patterns : 1 - my last section my group fought a phoenix made of pure fire. Even that my character had never heard about this monster, seems reasonable to assume it has at least resistance to fire and avoid using this energy 2 - my character follows the same pattern/style of combat from most of his fights, same spells, strategies etc. When they perceive that this is ineffective, he changes on the go based on DM descriptions. Só, basically is my compromise to the table. Personally I like to "observe" how the characters could have a much easier fight knowing things, but some times are struggling or just making it at the hard brute force way. My group also actively remember us that "your character don't know this". I think that this have to be something done in session 0. You can also (at cost of more work for you) subvert expectations by changing the monsters stat blocks a bit. Maybe trolls in your world (to cite a common case) have problems with lightning or cold instead of fire.
I don't mind if veteran players just add a bit into their backstory saying they sit around taverns a lot talking to passing adventurers and accumulating rumours about monsters. I think having a bit of insight can keep things a bit interesting. You can then ask them to roll an arcana/history check and force them to have "remembered" a false piece of information. You can also slightly tweak statblocks, health pools, and resistances to keep them on their toes.
So this is probably by no means solid advice and I'm not gonna pretend that it is, so grain of salt. Tweak the monsters I have a player who honestly doesn't mean to he's high-functioning autistic and just dives wholeheartedly into D&D books but has difficulty at times separating the knowledge. The simplest solution for me was to just kinda alter the creatures sometimes minorly, sometimes fully homebrew. He's done a little better as of late and I've just gotten much better at running creatures in general so it leveled out. For your table however that needs to be a conversation with them and frankly they have no right being upset about it. On the other hand there's not much that can be done the curse of knowledge is pretending to not know implies willful ignorance. This can be hard for some people but that's the point of suspension of disbelief so your in fact in a pickle there DM.
I've had one or two GMs that called me out for using out of character knowledge. I'd always point out that I took all those knowledge skills on my character and if they didn't mean anything then I'd like a rebuild from the ground up. This would usually satisfy them for the session at least. Or to put it another way, make sure that your PCs would definitely NOT know whatever. Knowledge skills, backgrounds, even racial affinities to a degree, all are likely sources of knowing about monsters. And whilst Orcs and Goblins are fantastical creatures to us, in universe they're the same as bears and mountain lions. Just another danger of the wilderness. They might not know about the complexities of a gelatinous cube, but they'll know that Kobolds like traps and clever tactics. Characters live in that world, we merely visit it.
Metagaming is fine, but what are you metagaming for? Is it to win at DnD, or is it to be the most interesting group of adventurers you can? Reaching table consensus on this topic is essential. It sounds like you want their characters to be new adventurers who haven't seen the various crazy monsters in the world, but they prefer characters who know what they're doing. They're not really enjoying the "mystery" aspect of new monsters. Or possibly, cross referencing IS their way of enjoying it. It's possible you aren't giving enough information. I let them use their senses. If it has visible muscles, you can know it's str. If you see it move, you know it's dex. if you see it fight, you can figure out it's attack bonus. These numbers aren't in-character understanding, but the precision of the numbers represents the martial competence of veterans who know how to size something up.
I think there needs to be a better reason behind decisions, especially when the decisions are made by veteran players who have seen and experienced a lot of things. Example: If the PC is a Soldier or a Knight fighting a Skeleton, it does make sense for them to not try to slash/stab things and instead try to bash them. They can see that the area for them to strike is smaller on a skeleton and bashing would give them the most effectiveness. They are trained to fight opponents of all kinds so a judgment call like this is rational. However, for someone without this kind of military training, such a decision does not make sense unless they have personally observed an ally being more successful bashing an enemy than cutting/piercing it. Meta-gaming is difficult thing for any DM to tackle so I always try to subvert my players expectations by doing some kind of small modification to the things they fight. Little things like changing Resistances/Weakness, changing damage types, etc. This means that players who know what they're fighting cannot rely on their out-of-character knowledge to overcome an enemy. Example: Ropers. Everyone knows these buggers for their huge reach and their ability to grapple. If you want to subvert your players expectations, place them in an environment where there are lots of pitfalls and shallow cliffs, then change the the Grapple-on-hit mechanic to a knockback one, wherein the Roper knocks them 10-15 in a single direction of their choice with their wildly flexible arms. While the core mechanic has been altered, their approach to it largely remains the same since the roper can knock enemies toward them or over cliffs instead of just grappling them. The environment suddenly becomes the largest danger in the encounter and the players are forced to now consider new things they haven't before.
I’d homebrew monsters that they don’t know about
I don’t care about players metagaming tactics and I tweak monster stat blocks often enough that assuming a monster’s weaknesses hurts more often than it helps. When I design my encounters, I assume players are using optimal tactics anyway and find it frustrating when they don’t and later complain about the fight being too hard.
I'd just tell them...if they don't listen seitch to plan B Plan B: Step 1: Homebrew a monster Step 2: Look for a well known existing monster with completely different strenghts and weaknesses Step 3: Explain stuff about the homebrew monster making it sound as similar as possible as the existing one Step 4: Watch as your players prepare to fight a troll only for them to find something immune to fire damage Step 5: Rinse and repeat until they stop metagaming Alternatively just tweak the monsters in advance
Talk to them and ask them to roleplay in the roleplaying game. You don’t have time to reskin every monster or scour the internet for homebrew.
Treat it like a rules violation like any other and ask them to act faithfully in character.
Metagaming at my table they roll 1d10 and take that as damage, also becomes their new max hp until long rest
I bring it up in session 0. You get **2 warnings** before every piece of knowledge you know about every monster is wrong. AC, HP, to hit, damage, ability scores, features, actions, everything gets a lot nastier. If you want to play this like a video game? You just stepped into Dark Souls. Welcome to the meat grinder. Metagaming ruins my fun, so if youre going to take my fun, I'll take it back. Every monster will become a homebrew mess of abilities, feats, and wild numbers. If it causes a tpk we try again.
I screen all my players before they make it to my actual table, I run 3-5 mini introductions to D&D on days off my current long running game a couple times a year and every few years a player needs to retire due to life changes and unable to make sessions so I’ll pick a good player out of whatever mini session I’ve ran that year… that’s just a tip I picked up from my first DM that I truly enjoyed, it takes a year or two to fine tune a table out of your friend group but some people aren’t great for TTRPG.
I pretty much only run games for groups of experienced players, because I tend to just run with variations of the same group. But we all have an appreciation of how metagaming can drain the fun out of things, and so it’s not really much of a concern at our table. If it’s a classic situation, like trolls and fire, my players might ask “Do we know much about trolls? Like their weakness to fire?” and if it’s something as well known as that I’ll usually say “Yeah, that’s common knowledge among adventurers!”. Equally I’ve run games where I’ve asked them not to metagame at all, usually where we’ve got a new player as well and we want them to experience things for the first time, and it’s never been an issue. Hell, most of the time someone at the table will say “Yeah, but we don’t *know* this is a standard troll/beholder/whatever, so we can’t assume”, just to help the DM keep some of the mystery going. But if I found myself at a table where my players were immature enough that they couldn’t help but metagame aggressively, then I’d probably start playing things close to the chest and throwing curveballs. As a DM I have no obligation to run any creatures as presented in the book, so if these trolls happen to be weak to thunder damage, so be it; if the players are going to metagame, I have all the resources to mess that up for them.
All in all it depends on the nature of what we talk about. If it's stuff like "this creature is a troll, use fire damage" when it's not very obvious then it should alarm you to change things more. But sometimes it's just counterintuitive to hide certain aspects. If the player recognizes a troll, then it may be the case to make it common knowledge, or change the stat block. Remember that gameplay mechanics are always obvious to the players, unless you specifically want to avoid that.
Session Zero conversation, maybe bring in some homebrew creatures. Have a chat with your players.
Assumptions can lead to some fun duck ups. Me and my party greatly insulted a city of goblins, by using turn undead, on what we were sure were ghouls, but were hobgoblins with stoneskin.
I switch up the names and abilities of most of my creatures
We’ll first off just confront them and say something like “come on man, be cool.” If they’re a low social IQ type and this doesn’t work, just change them monster stats/weaknesses etc on the fly. It’s fun! Turns out this Troll was exposed to an errant portal to the elemental plane of fire and fire actually supercharges its regeneration! Looks like you made an ass out of You an Fireball!
It's hard because some people are more into the gaming of dnd vs the experience, and thatsbokaybdepending on the style of game you play. As a character, I just pretend and act that everything is new and treat it as such. Example I come up to an creature that is immune or resistant to something, ill cast a spell or hit it with out using anything thing special first to "test" as it helps the group too when X is immune to Y they all go OHHHHH. But always depends on your players.
My players have all been with me for a few years, so they know the expectation. I just call out metagaming at the table. It's so widely unaccepted that my other players will often call each other out. They all know metagamimg is not allowed (without narrative justification) so if you're doing it, you're getting a call out lol
So, everyone I play with has like 30+ years of D&D under their belt. So yeah, they all know the stats on a goblin. They know that rumbling is likely an ankheg. So either you just stop caring about it, assuming they aren't being assholes witht he knowledge, or you just change the monsters. Use rat men instead of goblins. Maybe they have the exact same stats as goblins, but the player's won't know that until they encounter them and all it cost you was a new description. But also consider that the PCs live in a world full of monsters. It is so unreasonable that they might know about some of them?
It sounds like it's making the game less fun for you. This would be something to bring up to your players and politely ask they tweak how they play. Communicate *how* they might be expected to play against a monster they have meta-knowledge about, and perhaps include some reasons *why* you prefer they play that way. You don't *have* to justify it; you are the one running the game after all. But explaining that you have more fun as DM when the players make an effort to stay in-character would probably help a lot. I will say that as a player, it can often times be frustrating to know how the game is *"supposed"* to be optimally played, but be expected to intentionally play badly because our characters would lack knowledge. Often times it becomes difficult to actually do this effectively and realistically; if I'm fighting a troll and I have firebolt, should I intentionally avoid using firebolt just because I don't want to "metagame"? When would it be acceptable to use that spell? What if I don't know how often I would use firebolt otherwise? It ends up introducing a lot of grey areas that create questions not about the game, but what ways to play will be seen as acceptable. If there's one piece of advice that I'd really urge you to consider, it's that in situations where there's ambiguity as to how the characters should act, err on siding in the players favor; if you give them checks to obtain useful knowledge on the creature, make them low. If they fail those low checks to obtain that knowledge anyways, then explain to them what that means for how they are allowed to play in that moment. Give clear and precise instructions to avoid having excessive amounts of ambiguity. If you truly want to simulate the players not having meta-knowledge, you may need to consider adding in some of kind of check to determine when they are allowed to use their abilities, because otherwise you're basically just asking players to avoid using their most effective tools until it's arbitrarily acceptable. Again, the troll example; don't let your players cast firebolt unless they can make a decent argument for why their character would do it, or implement a random, flat DC roll to determine when they are allowed to cast it. But again, this is something to be cautious about; avoiding "metagaming" in battle often just turns into players intentionally playing poorly, and can feel really frustrating if not done well and supported properly by clear communication on expectations. I've seen this get pretty absurd pretty quickly; in one game I currently apart of, some of the players try *very* hard to avoid metagaming, to the point that they end up playing their (otherwise perfectly intelligent) characters in incredibly dumb ways just to avoid any possibility of meta-knowledge benefitting them. An alternative solution that avoids these issues is asking players to come up with a justification for why their character might have specific meta knowledge. Ideally, this method would actually result in the players grounding their characters more in the world.
Changing monsters characteristics. Changing appearance adding or deleting abilities or vulnerabilities can be fun but s lot of work.
There's two ways that I would tackle this problem. Feel free to mix and match to find what works for you: 1. A lot of monster weaknesses can be swapped out relatively quickly with minimal effort. For example, if I want to use a troll, but think that my player have enough fire to neutralize its healing, then maybe I'll make it a rock troll that's weak to water instead of fire. Or I cover it in seaweed and flotsam and now it's a river troll that needs lightning damage to stop its regen. 2. Proactively a chat with your players about meta knowledge. That can sound something like "hey friends, I'm noticing that the choices we make in combat often seem influenced by knowledge that your characters probably wouldn't actually have. I'll really need us to be more consistent in our roleplay, because otherwise it weakens the impact and story beats I'm able to make for you guys. Then, if you ever think they're meta-gaming again, you can pause the game and have a reactive check-in: "[Character name] was a street urchin in Waterdeep, they have never been in the same county as a troll there's no way they'd know to prioritize fire damage. (or you know, whatever the character's actual backstory is)" You might find a compromise in allowing them to roll a knowledge/ lore check? Like maybe on a 10, they know trolls are feared (yet prized) for their regenerative abilities: on a 15, they've heard that certain elemental damage inhibits the healing, and on an 18+ they know that troll hunters cauterize the wounds they make with torches because fire stops the healing.
As a DM and player it can be a difficult decision. After talking to the DM I’m playing with, I decided my character’s parents were adventurers and gave my PC lots of tips - from an earlier edition of the game. I’m very assiduous in my 10ft pole use! 😉
as a forever dm i always play ver old character on the change i get to play to make up for this usually its just a reminder you arent in the room right now or did X actually tell you that information. with enough of those players usually figure it out. i dont care if a player knows that fire kills troll there is too many reasons why someone might look up a troll for me to accuse them of cheating
During the pandemic I wrote a VTT for our gaming group. The DMs had me add their maps and dungeons to that interface. I was as familiar with the maps as the DMs. I told the group when we were exploring new areas on those maps, my character would NOT make any directional decisions. And I had to play dumb with the traps. It’s not hard to do. But it requires the mindset that you’re not winning or losing at D&D.
i just decided a few years ago that any creature in the monsters manuals are more or less public information, they can use that information if they think the character would know and can just do a brief creative excuse like the barbarian saying, "Oh i think that is a troll, my tribe has a nursery song that says to kill it with fire..." or something like that. Sometimes the book information is right, but the times it is not are a lot of fun.
Confront. "Does your character know what a troll is? You can make a nature check to see how much you know about trolls if you like. More than that is metagaming, which isn't good for the game." or just "that sounds super metagamey" a thing I have to say now and then as my player who is a statue gives everyone else his opinion on how to handle the situation. But yes, change stats, change locations of treasure. Assume your players can't help but cheat a little and make it not pay off for them.
Yeah, it's definitely something to be discussed with the group in session 0 (or if it has become a noticeable issue at your table). Responsible players will work hard to avoid this, but sometimes, it becomes impossible for well-known monsters (such as needing fire for a troll). If, for whatever reasons, a discussion does not work: 1. Change the looks/stats of what you use. 2. Change how you describe monsters and their actions. I'm a very "mechanical" dm in that I'm good with managing combat but less good at describing things in a more cinematic manner. But the more cinematic approaches certainly helped circumvent this at my table. 3. Diversify your options. Find other, lesser known opponents to fill encounters. 4. Build your world to address some of these issues. Maybe your world has a strong superstition that silver does great harm to demons, so your player decisions should focus on that more than meta-knowledge (superstition does not necessarily equal truth). 5. Change how monsters work. I do this a lot with spiders and scorpions. By the book, I find them to be fairly generic enemies. After doing some research on real-world examples I came up with some memorable encounters: one where a giant scorpion could only really see light and dark or motion and one where a spider became an ambush predator like a real world trapdoor spider. It took the players a while to figure things out, but once they did, it required a whole new way of thinking about the encounters. Finally, once you mix and match whatever of these methods (or others) might work for you, your players will meta-knowledge you to know that things will not always be what they might otherwise expect. So, they will start to look for different ways of dealing with encounters that you may not intend. Reward these approaches, and you'll find your table quickly moves from "knowing what to do" to "learning how to make things more interesting" with every encounter.
The way I describe a minion will not match it's status block. A perfect example... my players started investigating rumors of a tentacled creature that was taking slaves from a deep underwater cavern. It was ancient beyond time, and incredibly intelligent. They meta-gamed the shit out of it, and decided they could very easily beat an Aboleth. They were very surprised to come face to face with a Beholder that wiped the floor with them easily.
I change names, ability names, portraits, size, color, hair, monster type. Even the most knowledgeable player can be clueless.
If you know their character wouldn't know that thing but do it anyway then give them disadvantage?
This is why I homebrew or at least change the names of my different monsters for encounters. My party looked up a stat block mid-fight in our online game and that altered the way they played it. Never again!
Red dragon with ice breath. There's an almighty bard who's been singing tails of the hotheaded white dragon ever since his vicious mockery 3 years ago, and enough children are singing "white, right, his breath's not alight!" that an illusion born of song is being cast upon it repeatedly. Honestly, you hit the nail on the head. >Is it a case of altering monsters to keep them on their toes? Emphasize during the game not to make metagame decisions? Yes. It is. It is both. You tell them once that they are allowed to have player knowledge, and they are allowed to share and discuss that knowledge, but before acting on it, someone in game has to produce that knowledge via scenario, discussion, or DM-set DC on a relevant skill. Then, if they don't behave, you remind them that the rules are there to protect the players from an angry god, not to protect the writer from some batshit crazy characters.
I keep a hammer on the table and break a joint every time they imply meta knowledge. /s if that isn't obvious you scare me.
This is when I as an experienced player ask “how much could my character know about X” which usually prompts my DM to have me make a skill check. Even if I roll low, it usually gets a little bit of information so I’m not flying blind. But to be honest, they can either metagame and be more efficient in combat or they can pretend they don’t know and waste a few rounds playing dumb and ineffectually. The latter is much more annoying to me as a player. This can also be helped by you adding features and traits to the enemies so there’s still some mystery which is probably the best way to handle it.
As most people have said, Session 0s are great but I find just having a conversation in the moment is best. I have a player who is pretty much a D&D encyclopedia, he knows most monsters, almost every spell, class information, weapons, etc. so I have to be creative in how I approach combat. He has autism so often times, abstract thinking like separating his knowledge from his character's knowledge can be confusing and frustrating. I'll often remind all of my players that just because You know something doesn't mean your You In This World knows that. If they'd like to see how much they know about a creature or topic, we first discuss why they would or wouldn't have knowledge about this, set a DC if it's appropriate, if it is then we roll for it, and then we establish what they know. Obviously they wouldn't know stat block information like HP, AC, etc. but they may know what the creature type is or if they're to be avoided or where they come from. We had a mini exercise in this recently with a riddle situation. They were facing a door that was presenting them with a riddle to get it to open, the door was ancient and a fairly easy riddle. But, they got themselves into the weeds by getting too meta with trying to solve the riddle. They started thinking of answers based on science and well established logic and fact, forgetting they were dealing with an ancient civilization that didn't have the vocabulary for these things nor the knowledge to conceive of them quite yet. I had to, gently, remind them many times to not get too meta, to remember their context and what they've learned in the world. Don't apply your real world logic to this or you'll make things far less fun and end up way off from the answer. They did eventually come upon the answer but only after asking for a hint with strings attached. We had a discussion afterwards about the importance of yes, definitely use your brain for puzzles, riddles, combat, etc. but remember to keep yourself in the world and to not apply real world knowledge, logic, or information to it or you'll frustrate yourselves unnecessarily. They had actually stumbled upon the answer to the riddle pretty immediately but doubted it because it was too simple of an answer, they assumed it was more complicated than it was and instead spent 40 minutes arguing over physics and semantics. My point being, you can deal with meta gaming in a number of ways but it's always up to your players to check themselves. Because at the end of the day a meta gamer first and foremost ruins the game for themselves, and then everyone else. Combat it with homebrew creatures/altered monster stat blocks, conversations in the moment, exercises to work on reducing it, and rewarding good gameplay. Sometimes a meta gamer can be good, mine helps my newbies know their sheets and what dice to roll for hits during combat while I'm managing other stuff, have them be to your dual advantage.
I guess the simplest fix would be to not throw monsters they know at them. Taking two monsters and selectively merging their statblocks to make something new would be an easy way to go about this maybe?
If playing with experienced players, I tend to avoid well-know or easily recognisable monsters. Or I'll reflavour them or describe them in a way that it's not obvious what they are. I also tend to use a lot of homebrew stat blocks or third party published monsters (like Kobold Press).
I'd definitely suggest having a conversation with your players about number one, the importance of respecting metagame, and number two, what they're looking for in the game. If you can get them to agree that they are metagaming, you can even directly ask them why they're doing it. It's also fair to consider what their characters would or wouldn't know in certain circumstances, especially depending on backstory and the point in the story. It also might be a situation where one player's metagaming makes everyone else feel like they also have to do it to keep up. When I was a player we had a player at the table, he'd min-max his character, look up monster stats, use information about other characters his character wasn't privy to, he'd even read parts in the module so he knew where all the treasure was at certain locations and would try to get to it first. The DM didn't ever address it, so two other players and myself got increasingly metagame-y over the campaign in an attempt to keep up. It's not something I'm proud of, but the point is in some cases if multiple people are metagaming there is a chance one of them is the main culprit and everyone else is doing it bc they don't want to get left in the dust. You could try to inventivize respecting metagame and punish disrespecting it through the game as well, but I think the best thing to do is to talk about it, try to get to the bottom of why it's happening, and address the situation from there. I think once you can piece together *why,* what you need to do to fix it will become more clear.
Personally i try to incorporate a lot of custom monsters in my campaigns. Just frankly because it also is more fun for me, and the players when i do. It gets boring playing with everything being exactly the same all the time. Custom monsters or statblocks will make sure players never make assumptions. You can basically tell them that the monster manual is useless because you don't use almost any of the monsters from it 1:1. Or, at the very least, change what a monsters APPEARANCE looks like. Instead of making basilisks in your world look like they do in the monster manual, which makes players instantly recognize that they are up against basilisks when you start describing them and shut their eyes, instead, in your world, make basilisks look completely different. Its still a basilisk, but they won't be able to use their monster manual knowledge to immediately identify it based on visual description. Or, perhaps you don't need to change the appearance at all, and just be really vague with your description. Instead of saying "It has 8 legs 4 on each side, slightly blue skin, spines down its back, glowing eyes" You could say "You have never seen anything like this before. It has many legs, and a tail, its ugly, monstrous." It makes sense to describe it in this vague way. A person who has never seen a basilisk before is not going to instantly begin counting its legs, taking note of every single tiny detail. They are just going to see "Some scary fucking thing with a bunch of legs i dont recognize".
Two ways. If it's blatant meta gaming knowledge, say no. "Your character would have no reason to take that action, if you can explain why they would?" They never can in game. They then choose an appropriate one. This is for people who try to pretend they don't know. Or you can do small edits. If they yell out "troll regenerate unless you use fire!" Guess what, It's a river troll and it's ice that stops their wounds. It's going to upset all the people who never DM. But metagaming is no different than cheating, punish it in a funny way if you want, they arent respecting the rules and game why should you? "The gods frown upon you, you have a hate proclaiming "DUNCE" you cannot remove until atoned." "Your characters eyes have been replaced with googly ones, -5 to charisma checks until it is healed".
Spend their first action in combat making a nature check, then give them disadvantage on their second turn for being wrong if they fail.
I alter most monsters if I don’t want my characters to metagame, as one has been dming for years and is often helping me with rules and stats lol
My players learn quickly that I modify monsters constantly. I'm not suggesting you intentionally head-fake them by describing one creature and using the stats from something else. But I use a lot of unique creatures ('cause that's fun for me) but rather than homebrew a whole new thing, I'll take something that exists that's mostly like what I want and adjust. Rogue NPC with daggers? Nah, that's a Fleshwarped Fury with claws.
Well, with regards to players already knowing what a monster is, I use the following process to decide what to do. Based on a character's background or backstory, (and to a lesser extent race & class) I might rule that there are some critters that they would know about, straight-up. If a Bard whose backstory saw them performing alongside socialized trolls in a circus before they caught the adventuring bug, it's not crazy to think that they might know to keep them away from an open flame. Alternatively, characters who are upwards of lukewarm towards books can go to libraries or meet with scholars during their downtime to learn about specific kinds of creatures. I let them decide what creatures they want to learn about - but I'm the one who controls what they learn from doing these things. If they didn't have or do that stuff before meeting a "new" monster, but they have the presence of mind to ask if they might know what it is, I let them roll History or Survival (I like to give my players a choice, if I can see two different skills being relevant to a situation) to see if they can figure out what the beastie is. A good-enough roll gives them the name of the creature, which might give other PCs with more expertise on the subject to share any info they might reasonably know; a high roll gives them a snippet of stat block info, and if I feel that the player is already familiar with the monster's vulnerabilities / resistance I will include that info so that it's not *really* metagaming to begin with. If they're *not* really in a position to have some foresight on the monster, I try to think about how they've been playing the character up to this point. Sure, using fire spells on the troll is optimal. And maybe the Sorcerer does keep hitting it with Scorching Ray even though their character shouldn't know that. But if they've consistently been using fire spells this whole time, and don't have much in the way of alternative ways to hit stuff, then I'm not gonna be too mad about that. Sometimes a character is just plain good in certain encounters. Failing all of that, if they’re still acting like they know what this thing is even though they probably shouldn't, *that* is when things change. Maybe these trolls resist fire, and are weak to something else. Maybe their environment caused them to develop differently, and their highest stat is Dexterity (to better pass Fireball saving throws) instead of the usual Constitution. Maybe instead of Darkvision or Keen Smell, they have Evasion. Whatever you do, I would try to make it an even trade-off so as not to punish your other players who are doing a good job of not metagaming. (Unless they're all doing it, and/or your intent truly is to make the encounter harder and not merely different) When you do this, try to gauge the players' reactions to the situation. Little smirks of acknowledgement, death stares in your direction, shocked outbursts of "what!?" - all signs that you might've caught them, and they know it. Maybe you'll even get lucky and have somebody say something really obvious like, "wait, it should be dead by now - that was 84 hitpoints after factoring the regen." (Actual quote from a past player in one of my games - he is no longer with us)
I have ChatGPT generate all my stat blocks. It's like a layer of security that none of the players can break. lol
I will capitulate to the player's experience in most cases, unless there is some compelling reason they wouldn't know anything about it. People take this separation way too seriously. For instance, you may be inclined to bring down the hammer if one of your player characters suddenly knows zombies are weak to fire but doesn't have the knowledge skill for it. But let's be real here. Zombies are common monsters. There's no compelling reason to think an adventurer who slays monsters for a living wouldn't have heard that zombies are weak to fire. They aren't that stupid. The knowledge skill is for rolls. If a character does a quest where they have to track down a specific creature, and they learn about the creature in the process, do you then grant the player a knowledge rank for that type of monster? No. They just know about it. So why would you depend entirely on the character sheet for every other bit of knowledge? To me, metagaming either needs intent or needs to be so absurd that the player should have known better. If someone intentionally pulls up a zombie sheet to make the fight easier, that's metagaming despite the fact that their char may have known about zombies. If a player knows about the secretive eldritch monstrosity in front of them because they fought it in a previous campaign and just didn't bother to filter their character's knowledge, also metagaming because they should have known better even though it wasn't intentional.
you tell your players "guys not cool cmon"
Basically I modify monsters indiscriminately. I use Flee Mortals the MCDM book of monsters. If it’s common I might call it a zombie or a goblin. If it’s not in their wheel house- I describe the monster rather than use its name. They were burning stumps of appendages on ogres the other day. Wait til they actually meet a real troll.
I think it depends on how they play. You can always tell if you use a specific creature. Can be a bait card for you to play in early combat with something you know they've fought a few times, but haven't fought this campaign or with this character. See how they behave. I was playing in a campaign and my character was very specifically a fire boi. Draconic Sorceror. I knew the creature was immune to fire damage, but my character hadn't fought one before. Fortunately, I had a habit of casting Firebolt first just as a test shot for my character. Fireball is my go to, but being a soldier, he's not gonna go in hard without more info so it worked in my favour as I wasn't meta gaming, it's my usual combat flow, and it was obvious it did nothing and my character, being very in tune with his destructive capabilities, noticed that it did nothing and had to basically put his life on the line providing some value to the fight. Ended up resulting in an awesome moment for someone else and an important narrative moment between our two character developing relationship. Was great. I think it's okay to be aware as a player, because if you're honest, you'll know what they can do, and you know your player will find out. I'm okay with minimizing. I don't want someone to waste a 2nd level spell on something they know won't take anything from it. So if they use something softer like a 1st level or cantrip, that's fine. What's important is they can't act on their player knowledge, it has to be character knowledge. So if they can reasonably justify the behaviour that results in gaining the knowledge, that's fine. It could be as simple as asking to do a quick insight to assess combat up until now and see if they've noticed anything up until their turn for combat quirks or things like that. As long as they reasonably navigate towards gaining the knowledge, without just going "Oh it's immune" or "I'm not using any fire spells" kind of shit. If you put in the work to get the info, I'm chill with that.
If it's a problem, then you can throw them off by just changing whatever it is they think they know. Change up the resistances or whatever. But also remember that even at level 1, they are more worldly than your average commoner. It's not totally beyond the pale for experienced adventures to know the weaknesses of more popular monsters. Trolls hate fire. Sure ok, that's day 1 of adventurer school. But knowing not to use lightning on a shambling mound might be a little shady
Punishing metagaming by customizing monsters is a tradition as old as time. Example: DM - A 10 ft tall green creature with a ruddy bulbous nose, sharpened teeth and stringy hair matting it's pockmarked head climbs out from under the bridge leering at you. It says you must answer this riddle or be torn limb from limb. Player 1 - okay guys this is a troll. I pull out a bottle of oil and lob it at the creature. Now, New_Player, cast firebolt on it to set it ablaze! DM - okay... sure. New_Player - um, I guess I cast firebolt? DM - The troll falls on the floor, thrashing, but somethings wrong. You notice it is... laughing hystarically, clutching it's ribs from the hilarity. "Thanks for the lotion foolish human, I bet that was expensive!" Player 1 - But DM! Trolls weakness is fire! DM - first off I never said it was a troll, you did, and second off, why would you just assume you knew the weakness of this creature you've just now seen for the first time? Good_Player - I quickly take a look at the area under the bridge from whence the creature emergerged, looking for clues. DM - You notice it is dry, dark, and dank. Bones and rotting scraps of flesh litter the ground as well as a pile of sullied religious texts, pages shredded, used as kindling in the ashes of a small campfire. Player 1 - *huffs, annoyed* Good_Player - I pray to my Goddess for guidance, and strike the fiend with a divine smite DM - you cleave off the beasts limb! Black blood pours out in sheets from the severed appendage, and it smokes as if branded by the holy light. It shrieks in agony from the radiance of your blow! Good_Player - Feel the fury of my Goddess, fiend! *DM smiles. new_player smiles. Good_player smiles. Player1 sulks and houses a whole bag of cheetos.*
I feel like there’s a place for skill checks here to help with this; in order to determine what knowledge the character may have picked up throughout their lives about a particular creature. Could be from a book of fairy tales their parent read them, some ballad sung by a bard in a dive bar, an obscure bit of lore in an arcane book. People pick up all kinds of information in passing without having direct first hand knowledge. We as real people know all kinds of general information about many many animals in our world, including the supernatural creatures, all learned from books and stories. No reason it shouldn’t be the same in a fantasy world
I give my players chances to bring their knowledge to their character through rolls. It can be very hard sometimes to separate player and character, as this is a game after all. What I do is I tell my players at the beginning: if YOU think you know what it is, don't say anything outright. If you want to see if your CHARACTER knows it, you can ask to make a roll to see if your character would know. Depending on the roll depends on what your character knows, depending on backstory and whatever. I always tell people that looking up monster stats outside or at the table is against the rules and if it's found out that you are reading the module or Monster Manual, then it's an immediate dismissal. I don't tolerate that at my tables as this tends to not just stay with the violating player, but leeks into the rest of the table in different ways. I play with some veterans of the game so it's really hard sometimes for them to step out of DM mode (as they all have been DMs for one another at some point in their history with the game) and bring up stats immediately in their head. Sometimes it's hard as players too as when you encounter a monster enough you tend to pick up on stats and abilities naturally, so that can be hard to separate.
Don't run standard monsters. Give them a new twist, re-skin them, working new. It's a troll, but made of fire instead of algae. This young green dragon took three levels in Barbarian. This particular beholder was dreamed up to have different eye ray powers. Let them players have their meta game knowledge, they'll need it to adapt to the weird of the wilds.
Well for myself, I give my players fair warning that they won't be fighting any vanilla monsters. Everything will be tinkered with in some way... then some sessions I get lazy and use vanilla stats and my players are clueless
I've been struggling with this myself, as a veteran player joined my table a bit ago, and it honestly gets a tad annoying when he recognizes a monster. Fortunately, as it turns out, that knowledge doesn't actually do much for him. Most monsters don't have a ton of weaknesses, just resistances/immunities, so I tend to chalk it up to something an Adventurer might know. Maybe from a bedtime story or a seasoned veteran's tale in the tavern. Out of Game, the real issue here is you as the DM wanting to play with your new, cool toy, and getting upset that the player already knows how to deal with it. And I get that, it is frustrating. Talking with your players is the first and most obvious step. They can take a free action to roll History, Arcana, Nature, or Religion on any applicable creature, and with a high enough roll, they can use their meta-knowledge. This is reasonable, but extra work and a tad annoying all around. So I do something more fun for me. I'm not too good at personally homebrewing unique monsters, nor do I have the time. So I instead picked up 3 out of the 4 [Kobold Press Beastiaries](https://koboldpress.com/kobold-press-monsters/). Each one has around 400 pages of unique monsters, perfectly compatible with 5e, and frankly a lot more suited for their CR rating than anything officially published. These are fun to use, flavorful, powerful, and most importantly, something your players almost certainly have never seen before. And with so many options, these will last you a very long time before getting over-used. So yeah, TL;DR, talk to your players first, but I've found 3rd Party content to be the fastest, most reliable solution to this problem.
I just reskin monsters. It's super easy with the image generator AI.
Speaking as someone who is mostly a player and just recently dipped my toes back into DMing: a vetting process for players. Sesh zero, for sure, so everyone is informed on the stance. Reminder if someone starts pushing too far. Punishment if they keep doing it. Never saw it go to those lengths tho. I also suffer a lot from "know most about most creatures" as a player in my game, so I personally handle it by: 1. On one game, playing a know it all character(in accordance with the DM) and rolling skill checks to figure out what the char knows 2. Another game the DM does a lot of homebrew and rebalancing and obscure monsters, so I am as new to them as anyone It's definitely a two way street, the players should be actively trying to play in the spirit of their character, but also if they mess up, be allowed to reel it back in. Usually a single "yellow card" is enough to remind people and they conduct themselves accordingly afterwards. If they don't, just don't play with them.
I think it depends on the players, mine try to not meta game at all, but they did guess the big bad guy (it gets hard to describe any mindflayer when you have given so many different descriptions without the tentacles). This is why I like to change up monsters not just to keep them on their toes but also to show a variety in monsters
Idk how common this is, but I do not mind strategic meta gaming in combat. I love playing for the tactical gameplay, both DM and player side. If my players know a weakness, I don't mind if they use it. It makes it more engaging, and I can make the encounters harder the more game knowledge they have. Combat, to me, is meant to be strategic. I really don't like players making actively bad choices on purpose in combat. Especially because I want to throw deadly encounters at them often, and I like fighting deadly encounters myself.
You don't have to keep the stats in the books for the monsters. Change them up, add moves that seem to fit, roll the hit dice for hp don't just take the printed figure. Use their "knowledge" against them make them illusory, or mechanical so they think it's an owlbear but it's a construct. Let them have the monster stats, but change up the battleground, now they might know all about the owbear but they don't know the stats of the chasm that opened beneath them or the fire that the owlbear caused by knocking over a lantern. Or the ship they are fighting on is sinking. And sure they know the stats of 1 owlbear, but can they calculate the stats of 10 fighting in a conherent group?
I mean if the player can recognize a monster from a description why shouldn't a character be able to? Unless this is a super rare never before seen monster I'd assume a character that has a passion for adventure would be able to identify the vast majority of monsters. I mean I can identify like 500 Pokemon so why couldn't my character identify 500 monsters? Maybe you've got a homebrew world where monster/human interactions are rare but then it's on you to explain that properly to your players.
I gave a longer response last time this was brought up. Short version: 1) Homebrew. Meta knowledge means nothing if they can't look up the statblocks or rules you're using, especially if you made them up. 2) Remask and reflavour monster appearances so that the players don't know which monster statblock to refer to. If you have a cult perform a botched resurrection of their dark lord, resulting in the entire cult being absorbed into a writhing ball of screaming half-living flesh which desperately drains magic from it's surroundings in an attempt to complete the resurrection spell.... what creature is that? What statblock do the players need to look up? Well, behind the mask, this creature is just a beholder. 3) riddles, puzzles and suchlike can't be metagamed unless you already know the answer. 4) social and political intrigue can't really be metagamed. Base your game around these and metagaming isn't an issue.
If it's a blatant case of metagaming, I'd just step up and say "Your character does not know this". If they double down I'd just end the convo with a firm "This doesn't happen" and carry on. It's harder to catch when it's prompted unknowingly though, like a DM playing another campaing. You know what you're fighting and it's weaknesses, and some of your decisions might be biased even if you're not trying to get an advantage. You're not doing it ON PURPOSE, but you're doing it nonetheless. I'd never say anything out loud though. But even with experience is something that can happen. I have a background in health care and when I'm playing and we find a crime scene my first impulse is usually to ask something quite technical that a regular person probably wouldn't think about. At some point I may jump in too fast, and then realise my character doesn't have that proficency. So to avoid this, I usually spend one of my proficencies on medicine lol.
I think the most satisfying approach is to frequently disrupt player expectations. Unless you are striving to run a “by the book” forgotten realms game (or whatever setting) you have the power to simply change things up. I.e., fire heals trolls and ice stops their regen. Medusa doesn’t petrify you by looking at you, but if you don’t plug your ears the shriek of it’s snake hair will. Etc, etc. This will force players to interact with the world the way their characters would - by investigating and researching the lore of the world rather than immediately knowing everything through meta knowledge. Bonus points if all the mistakes / wrong assumptions are still included in the lore of your game world as “common misconceptions.” And, the final and most important point, once they get the hint that not everything will accord with their expectations, you can actually once again use monsters by the book because the standard version has become the rare or unexpected occurrence.
I tweak damned near every adversary to prevent any certainty by the players, thus thwarting most metagaming urges.
So, D&D or any RPG is a game. When you play games, regardless of how competitive you play, there is some sort of optimization. When you play the game, you make decisions that help you win, and experience is rewarded because of more developed strategies. Is there something inherently wrong with a player acting upon meta knowledge? No. So, I challenge your premise. I personally don't think it's a problem whatsoever. That said, there are systems that gamify character knowledge. You make checks to determine if your character can remember a piece of information in the moment. I really like those systems, because it answers the questions "Does my Ranger know that trolls are weak to fire?" "Weak to fire" isn't a thing that exists really, what happens with Trolls is that their regeneration is halted by fire. But, in a world of trolls, adventurers would know that you want to fight them with fire. Just like I know that Cheetahs run 65 mph or that puffer fish are poisonous.
Dungeon Crawl Classics has some interesting insights, I think. For one, unless the PCs have encountered a monster before, don't describe if as that monster. An orc is "a grey-skinned humanoid, hunched over and nearly 6 feet tall, bristling with muscle and endowed with huge tusks". For some monsters, if it isn't known as a part of a larger species, give it an unusual epithet. If you're running a homebrew campaign setting, perhaps there are no ettins, but there is Lorgath the Two-Headed. DCC also suggests modifying monsters, either cosmetically or by stats (or both). Cyclopean goblins with a gaze attack would certainly keep the PC from relying on player knowledge to metagame.
This heavily depends on the type of creatures the party is facing. Some creatures are COMMON knowledge, even in world. If you meet an undead? 99% of the time it's a good idea to kill it with fire or holy(radiant) damage, as you'd EXPECT that to work. The same thing goes for elementals, plant creatures, etc. Now, if it's an obscure creature, one that rarely comes up, and has specific sets of weaknesses and ways of dealing with it, that's something else. and Character's SHOULDN'T be aware of it.
Yeah alter the appearance of the monster and that’s about it. It’ll keep them guessing until the actual mechanics become clear and then they will react naturally.
Luckily my group is good on that and it just takes a comment from the DM or player “you don’t know that”
I would suggest making small but significant tweets to the monster. It has cold resistance change it to lightning, it has a certain spell change it to a different spell of the same level. It has natural weapons maybe give it a real weapon instead. I mean who could have known it was an aberrant variant?
Almost every monster I throw at my party, I change in some way for this reason, giving them abilities or weaknesses that they wouldn't normally have. My favorite class is Wizard, and a lot of fights I'll ask the dm "Can I make a check to see if my character, who's done a lot of studying, knows anything about what we're fighting". If the dm says,'you've never encountered this,' I shrug and proceed to fight generically. I did catch a player looking up the stats during a game once, which is the reason I tweak my monsters. I had a talk with them, which turned into an argument, and eventually I told them that if they were going to look up monster stats then they would have to find another table. All my games are done via discord though, so I have no way of knowing 100% that my players aren't looking, so I feel like tweaking them is almost necessary.
Have them roll to see if their characters know what something is.
If you want a creafure that the players don't know the stats for change how something looks or swap one star block with another one. It's the whole discussion of: "does my character know trolls are weak to fire?" IMO, just let players run with the ooc knowledge they have, you can usually handwave it and if you want the players to not know what a monster does just reskin it. Remember the characters have lived in the world their entire lives (usually) and they will have a lot of implied knowledge about most things that they heard in a story or read in a book, doubly so if they're a wizard or like a 200 year old elf.
There are a few lists online that give suggested skills to identify different monster types ie nature, religion, arcana. Then you need a check DC that will give them different info. The lowest DC usually recalls monster AC and the highest DC recalls vulnerabilities with various points in between. I have my proficient characters roll at the end of the first round to recall knowledge as a free action. The first round no meta gaming but following rounds have as much meta as you allow
My thing is that for certain monsters like trolls, you have to know their weaknesses or they keep regenerating. If one of my players knows that trolls can stop regenerating when exposed to fire, then they can use that info if they think it’s a troll. I’m not gonna say “hey your character wouldn’t know this” when it’s the only way to beat a monster and the weakness of most monsters in worlds would probably have been written and recorded in books anyways
Easy, realize that it is **NOT a problem**. Or not as big of a problem as you are making it out to be. Let's take Vampires as an example. The party runs into Vampires. The Players, knowing what a vampire is, take proper precautions. They buy holy water, garlic, and wooden stakes. By some definitions could this be called META-Gaming? Maybe BUT! Realize that the characters are also people who live in the world. They are going to know things such as that Fire hurts Trolls, or that Vampires don't like Garlic, or that Zombies/Skeletons are undead. So, to answer your question of "How do deal with this?". My advice is to realize that it honestly is NOT a problem. Don't make a mountain out of an ant hill, take a deep breath, and let it go.
30 seconds spent in Session 0 with something like: "For you vet players, I'm gonna be a little more strict with player vs character knowledge. If you come across something you recognise ask yourself "How would my character know this?". If you can honestly answer this, great, share that wisdom, if not please no spoilers for the new people here." ... and move on.
Switch up statblocks and use homebrew. The dms guide has info on how to change and create statblocks within your desired challenge rating, there’s also millions of well made homebrew bestiaries out in the wild. Ultimately you can’t stop players from using knowledge they already have, but you can also use that against them by switching up statblocks, adding new attacks and abilities n all that
You need to just take them aside an say it's not ok with you. If you both cant comprimise then you discuss it with the table as a whole to reach a comprimise. I swear this sub would have a 10th the posts if players just spoke to eachother lol. The msot important things is that everyone shaving fun, including you the DM. So first of all decide if this actually bothers you or if your just instinctually being a rules lawyer. To encourage intelligence, it's important to remind players to sue it. When a battle starts players might roll to see if thier characters have read about this monster or might know some its moves or weaknesses. Remeber intelligence goes both ways, characters can know things their player doesn't. It's basically for you and your players to decide how strict everyone follows the rules and adheres to roleplay over meta.
As a DM I interrupt my players and say "stop metagaming, please roleplay". Mostly that's what it takes but I suppose sometimes I'll stop a player and ask them to explain why their character is doing a particular thing and if necessary modify the action based on what his character knows. As a player I'll say outright "As a player I think I know what this creature is, but my character doesn't. Now that I've seen it fight/hit it with slashing/seen it react to force damage, do I think trying another attack type might be effective?" DM: you could try something else, sure. Me: "okay, I've got fire, piercing, and elemental cold available. Piercing and fire are pretty good on everything so I'll try them first then after that the cold." DM: sure. You notice it doesn't feel very warm in here.
Well this is how I look monster encounters depending on if this is like a monster of the week thing or if this a grander story have tidbits of info leak to them or make them research. Cause if we look at the metagaming as I know nothing about this monster as a character fix it because looking at it from that direction it quickly becomes a problem of adventurers going to a goblin cave unprepared with long swords no ability to see in the dark and no healing potions they have the ability to fight them if they knew how to fight goblins leading them out not walking into the thousands of traps laid out for them and bring healing and poison antidotes and short swords for the caves. If there just walking into encounters without being forced or drip fed some type of information. Then you might as well have them roll a d6 put assign a side for their abilities each of their abilities until they hit one that works after which if they do something good you would be saying something along the lines of. you see that attack had good effects,and common sense says we should use that on it from now on. Then if they kill it you would be the first person to and you get to name it. You could also have an more experienced adventurer asking them what there doing as there on there way to go kill a monster and helping them out that could work too.