Quote from: Aos;244893I was asked "the troll question" by a fuming gamer buddy a couple of years ago. He had been hosed by the GM for trying to use metagame knowledge, and then got frustrated when he was barred from burning the troll up because his characer wouldn't know what was going down.
He asked me how I would deal with such a situation.
My answer: I wouldn't because it is never going to come up in one of my games. Never.
It comes down to one thing, poor, lackluster GMing- at best, or at worst actively antagonistic GMing. either way the players are NOT at fault.

Allow me to elaborate- a skeleton is obviously a skeleton, BUT a troll is a big slobbering green humanoid thing. If the characters know enough to call it a troll, they should probably be hip to the regeneration. If they don't know enough to call it a troll, then they probably aren't going to be hip to the regeneration thing either. In the latter case the GM shouldn't say "it's a troll!" he/she should use a little imagination and just give description- or give the thing a local name. I think, "A gaint green manthing covered with leaking boils and stinking of rotten meat, lumbers towards you out of the darkness," or "Seek you Greenfang the Maneater who lives in the blackened stump of the Blood Tree on the Bone Mound," is better than  "uh... there's a troll and he lives up on a hill just outside of town. You guys want to go after him?" in a whole bunch of different ways.

As usual it comes down to imagination.

You make a very awesome point, sir!

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;244891"Meta-gaming" is a very broad category. When it comes to monster special powers and the like, though, I can tell you:

When you play the game the first time, really not knowing is fun. After that, I'd find it kind of boring trying to play-act not-knowing stuff.

OTOH, and this kind of borderline with other types of "meta-gaming", I wouldn't care for having a player take a character whose background suggests "no experience with trolls", and then load that character up with vials of acid because they expect to run into trolls.

But, really, in D&D, I expect characters to be "adventurers", and a lot of that stuff is reasonably common knowledge for rough types. I'm afraid you can only lose your innocence once--but the upside of it is, world-mastery supports immersion in the sense of really absorbing yourself and taking part in the web of meaning of the campaign. It can be social, too, as "veteran" players take newbs under their wing and show them the ropes.

I'm inclined to go with this kind of thinking, and include "real world" knowledge, generally speaking, as acceptable as well. I once played in a AD&D game where my 20th level fighter didn't know that vampires could be killed by stakes, which was intensely frustrating, the rational being, "You're a fighter," and therefore an ignoramus, and "You've probably never heard of vampires." In a large combat, fighting mostly vampires, it became pretty tedious, and felt unneccessarily dicked over by the DM.

Of course, my caveat (probably unspoken in Elliot's post,) is that use of metagame knowledge is not acceptable, in some cases. For instance, players flipping through the Monster Manual or equilivant, looking for weaknesses, or, say, a GM playing with new players who is so familiar with the adversaries of the game, and their weaknesses who can simply spill the beans to everyone else. It is, after all, easier to keep a secret yourself, and just play dumb, then have a whole table of gamers pretned the same thing when they all know better.

Quote from: Jackalope;244896You make a very awesome point, sir!

Thanks, sorry if i came off as a dick.

I can't stress the local name thing enough as a device. I have a monster in my setting called a Devilgoat. It's an super evil, intelligent, carnivores elephant sized goat thing. The locals (good guy road warrior orcs) refererred to it only as "The Unkillable." My players obsessed over this. After one disasterous encounter they actually started using the name themselves, and openly wondered whether or not it could be killed. After it was finally dead, they talked about it all the time.

Quote from: Jackalope;244895But see, here's the issue -- and I've watched my players struggle with this -- it's almost impossible to not backwards engineer the right answer when you know, and that is metagaming.

So?

What you're basically saying there is "The heroes are very likely to happen upon some clue that will lead them to the monster's weakness."

That doesn't really strike me as that much of a problem.  Like I said, as long as I can backfill a reasonable human story ("Oh what luck!  We happened to set this tree on fire, and look how it fears the fire!") I really don't have a problem with the meta-knowledge.

Quote from: Jackalope;244895I should mention that the encounter occurred in an area that could best be described as "never-ending, trackless rolling moors shrouded in fog and gloom."

Oh man, it's like the setting is demanding that they scurry away and hide from the creature and tend their wounded, while it shambles around menacing and terrorizing them, until they get enough information to make a reasonable counter-attack.

It's a Hammer horror film, right down to the fog (to hide the walls of the sound-stage).

Now if you didn't want a Hammer horror film then it's just flat-out bad GMing:  You threw in a set of rolls (i.e. whatever rolls they failed to be given the clue to how to finish the creature) where group failure led to complete stupid for your game.  Just looking at those rolls, you had to know that they were "Roll to get permission to do the absolutely necessary thing without breaking character."  If you're going to ask for rolls like that, you gotta have a plan for getting them permission to do the absolutely necessary thing:  The plan can be lots nastier (as, for instance, "Hide in the swamp while the critter hunts and scares you!") but there still has to be a plan.

Quote from: TonyLB;244900So?

What you're basically saying there is "The heroes are very likely to happen upon some clue that will lead them to the monster's weakness."

That doesn't really strike me as that much of a problem.  Like I said, as long as I can backfill a reasonable human story ("Oh what luck!  We happened to set this tree on fire, and look how it fears the fire!") I really don't have a problem with the meta-knowledge.

But in that case, why jump through the hoops and just kill it with fire in the first place?

Quote from: TonyLB;244900Now if you didn't want a Hammer horror film then it's just flat-out bad GMing:  You threw in a set of rolls (i.e. whatever rolls they failed to be given the clue to how to finish the creature) where group failure led to complete stupid for your game.  Just looking at those rolls, you had to know that they were "Roll to get permission to do the absolutely necessary thing without breaking character."  If you're going to ask for rolls like that, you gotta have a plan for getting them permission to do the absolutely necessary thing:  The plan can be lots nastier (as, for instance, "Hide in the swamp while the critter hunts and scares you!") but there still has to be a plan.

In my defense it was my first 3.5 campaign after a decade of running 2E.

Quote from: Jackalope;244904In my defense it was my first 3.5 campaign after a decade of running 2E.

I certainly don't think you need a defense.  We've all had sessions where we sit there afterwards and play "What if," because the rules ambushed us, or we misjudged the flow of the game, or just were having a bad night.  I know I have.  My bad for not phrasing things in a more explicitly constructive manner.  Let me try again:

Now that you've had this valuable (if painful) experience, you're not likely to put yourself in a situation again where the dice can throw you down a dead end in which there's no way for the game to go forward without people sacrificing their character integrity in order to use utterly necessary meta-knowledge.  As a matter of GMing craft, you've learned the value of having a back door to getting that kind of information into player hands in a way that helps the story, rather than derails it.

Which is, I think, my general response to all these questions:  If there's information that the players want to be using, and you want them to be using it, you've got similar goals.  That means you can reasonably work together to make that stuff happen.  If there's a little external coincidence, and a little player guiding of character behavior, and it all adds up to the information believably getting into the fiction, I think everyone's likely to be happy with that.

Certainly, it's no more gimmicky and unnatural than the various ways that characters in movies get handed the information they'll later need to find the monster's secret weakness.

Quote from: andar;244902But in that case, why jump through the hoops and just kill it with fire in the first place?

But isn't that less fun and interesting? "Oh it's a troll. Let's set it on fire. Snore..."

Well, it depends.

The opposite, the GM expecting you to know stuff that your character should and penalizing you is probably the bigger, undiscussed problem.  In a recent Trail of Cthulhu session my character, a homeland security agent with lots of intrusion skill, tripped a silent alarm while investigating a building.  With a flawlessly successful roll. The GM's justification was that I hadn't mentioned checking for silent alarms.  

Even more so when the players aren't rangers and wizards living in the GM's private fantasy world and fail to know vital trade details or which monsters exist in folklore.  I've always liked Dark Conspiracy's approach.  Yes there are blood sucking vampires.  No, they aren't what you're expecting.  My Runequest campaign, back in the day, was built entirely on the notion that common folklore described a very generic fantasy world, but in reality most of it was far more wierd and alien.

If they use metagame knowledge that's inappropriate, use it to mess with them.  Burn the troll?  The troll lives by a pool and dives into it when threatend by adventurers.  Then he starts throwing big rocks.  Or, maybe burning trolls emit toxic vapours.  In Warhammer, I'd just have had him eat a guy the day before, powder horns and all, I'd let a PC notice a musket bent double, lying in the dust as a warning.

The barbarian decides to use craft skills to build an internal combustion engine?  Well, that's fine but they're going to need a lot of Intelligence rolls and years to get it right.  After all they don't even have the tools to get the precision required.  Okay, yes, "I make gun powder." is a much more common move.  But even then, for all they know, in your world that might be the recipe for a potion of extravagant flatulance.

Quote from: TonyLB;244800I pretty much always prefer to backfill a reasonable human motivation to justify what my player-knowledge tells me is a good course.

I personally consider this a core roleplaying skill.


Most of the time I'm more likely to encounter players knowing a lot less than the GM figures their characters should. I remember a couple times our GM did something descriptive like what Aos mentioned, only to eventually just tell the players what it was after several rounds of them flailing helplessly when brute force failed.

Another time a GM berated us and retconned the entire scene sans monster encounter after it somehow occurred to none of us fighting next to the huge blazing fireplace that our undead opponents might be weak against fire. (Why are undead supposed to be weak against fire anyway? Dead meat isn't weak against fire, it just sorta gets flame-kissed...)

A lot of times it isn't even the GM being a dick (which sounds like the silent alarm thing), so much as just leaving things unsaid without fully accounting for the fact that he's read several times more on the setting than the players who didn't grow up with it and couldn't afford the books or the time to read them. Or the GM is imagining something so vividly they assume some important detail or other is an obvious given when the players wouldn't infer its existence at all without considerable further prompting.

One solution I've tried was to leave a lot of the setting open and let players add to it (possibly with some kind of knowledge roll, with success meaning that their contribution as stated becomes "canon"). I like it as both GM and player, but some people really don't take to this as it either breaks immersion or makes them feel like the GM is shirking their duties.

Quote from: Vaecrius;245326Why are undead supposed to be weak against fire anyway? Dead meat isn't weak against fire, it just sorta gets flame-kissed...

Maybe old, old, papery-skin-and-dust undead?  I'm with you that the fresher, juicier kind would be all but immune to fire.  Not like pain or tissue trauma is gonna bother 'em.

I prefer my zombies medium-rare.

I distinguish between two kinds of meta-game knowlege.  That which the Character *could* know, and that which he absolutely could *not* know.  Things the Character could know are anything having to do with common world knowledge, or things which could be figured out with intuition, observation or common sense, such as how to bash a skeleton.   Things that could *not* be known by a specific character would include secrets, such as Who Killed Larraby in the Castle of Rain, or things that no one could intuit, such as the weak spot on the Smaug's belly, whether or not there's another continent that's been undiscovered, or why the King of the Dwarves decided to smelt down the Axe of Gorund, which only he knows.  That sort of thing.

If there is ever a meta-game challenge by the players then I would resort to this distinction, and if it's something the Character *could* know then I usually let it slide.   However, if it really makes some sort of difference to a particular Player then I could roll for it using the Character's Intelligence and the level of difficulty I think the piece of knowledge would have.   So Skeleton bashing, pretty easy - I'd give it a 75% chance for an average intelligence Character.   If he's dumb as dirt then 25%.   Something along those lines.   In either case if the question comes up - "How did he know that?"  the answer is "He heard it in a tavern from a drunk outlaw".   Something along those lines.  

If it's something that the Character could not know, then of course, I'd overrule the player and say "Your Character doesn't know that".

Quote from: David Johansen;245017The opposite, the GM expecting you to know stuff that your character should and penalizing you is probably the bigger, undiscussed problem.  In a recent Trail of Cthulhu session my character, a homeland security agent with lots of intrusion skill, tripped a silent alarm while investigating a building.  With a flawlessly successful roll. The GM's justification was that I hadn't mentioned checking for silent alarms.  

Your GM was a bit of a dick.

Anyway, I don't care about metagaming, unless is totally unbelievable that the PC could know that.