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   "Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game. In other words, sometimes using out-of-game information, or resources, to affect one's in-game decisions." - Wikipedia

There are a lot of different issues that could fall under the rubric of meta-gaming, but I want to consider a specific subset of meta-gaming: the use of player knowledge to guide character actions in the game reality.

I'll give an example of metagaming from a Core 3.5 Pathfinder Society campaign I am playing in:   Our party is battling some robed skeletons, the "Black Echelon."  The thief is firing her light crossbow at them, and my fighter (http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/8475/elarstravansmallcolorhk4.jpg) (who wields a large hammer) tells her character "Don't waste your time with the crossbow, use a bludgeoning weapon to smash them!"

This provokes an accusation of metagaming from another player.  My character does not have Knowledge (Religion), and thus cannot possibly know of the skeleton's damage resistance.  I don't argue the point.
But is it really metagaming?  I could easily justify my fighter understanding skeletons weaknesses:

• They are incredibly common creatures, and their weaknesses may be so commonly know as to be included in children's rhymes.
• In medieval societies people frequently ate the marrow from bones. Anyone who has attempted this knows that trying to stab a bone with something pointy is impractical, and that a hammer works better for cracking open bones.  It's a simple intuitive leap to recognize how this applies to battling a skeleton.

There are many commonly encountered monsters in D&D with well-known abilities and weaknesses.  Trolls are an excellent example.  Everyone knows that trolls are harmed by fire and acid.  Being forced to role-play ignorance of this fact is, in many ways, simply obnoxious.

The Pathfinder Chronicles: Classic Monsters Revisited entry on Trolls even includes a snippet of a child's nursery rhyme about disposing of trolls.  The point being that one doesn't necessarily need Knowledge (nature) to know not to run away from a bear, or to play dead if it attacks you.

I generally think that using player knowledge of routinely encountered creatures is fair game, especially if a character has spent any time hanging around other adventurers in their youth (my character has, and has a rank in Knowledge (Dungeoneering) to represent that).  DMs who want an encounter to be mysterious and unpredictable should avoid using the standards.

Another good reason to be lax about this sorts of metagaming is the simple failure of skill systems to accurately model the breath of human knowledge.  Regardless of the game, every system must trade off some degree of realism for usability.  The more accurate a skill system is, the more cumbersome and difficult to use it also becomes.  And no skill system can really account for the human ability to accumulate random trivia.  

There are also benefits to other forms of metagaming.  If players recognize that the DM will only steer them towards level-appropriate encounters with level appropriate treasure, then this can have a real positive effect on their decision making process that is genre encouraging.  Heroes who sit around a tavern quaking in their boots and have to talk themself into facing a challenge -- usually after demanding more gold -- is...not very heroic.

Stories, as in fictional narratives, tend to rely heavily on coincidence, on the protagonists making intuitive leaps or happening to be in the right place at the right time.  Allowing players to make use of player knowledge to guide their character's actions can be a useful tool for the DM...especially if he controls the information the player's have access to.

The idea here is to allow the players to be both participants and audience to the story they are helping create.  One example would be using "cut scenes" -- prewritten handouts with an account of events absolutely beyond player knowledge, such as scenes in the villain's headquarters.  Such scenes can reveal things about villain motivations and desires that open up entirely new avenues of action.  Rewarding skillful and subtle usage of player knowledge, such as role-playing out a character's reasoning out of the villain's plan by backwards engineering to an end he already knows, can serve to keep a plot on track -- essential for anything other than pure simulationist sandbox play.

How do you deal with this sort of meta-gaming in your games?

Well, I certainly don't see any sane objection to a fighter saying "Crossbow bad, big whacky thing good" vis-a-vis skeletons.  I'd think that most times a crossbow bolt would go right through a skeleton, even with a direct shot to the body.  They got holes in!

Knowing in-character about stuff like "level appropriate encounters" strikes me as a dicier proposition.  I'm fine with people knowing it out of character, and steering their character toward being more easy to motivate, as a result ... but a hero who says "Well, sure, I'll go face this dungeon, because I have complete and total faith that it will not be unreasonably dangerous" doesn't actually strike me as all that heroic either.  I like the guy who says "Who knows what's down there?  It could be so bad that our souls will shrivel and our bodies disappear in a blast of raw evilness ... but the princess needs us, so let's go!"

I pretty much always prefer to backfill a reasonable human motivation to justify what my player-knowledge tells me is a good course.

I think its more of an issue post 3E than it was before. In 2e if the players were overusing their metagame knowledge you could change up the encounter or monsters and not break the game or create a meta-knowledge shit storm when you change a werewolf weakness from silver to bronze (or something similar)

Back in the early days of the hobby everyone mud wrestled with clowns; now we just shoot them. Something has been lost along the way.

Quote from: TonyLB;244800Well, I certainly don't see any sane objection to a fighter saying "Crossbow bad, big whacky thing good" vis-a-vis skeletons.  I'd think that most times a crossbow bolt would go right through a skeleton, even with a direct shot to the body.  They got holes in!

But what about the troll example?  There's nothing inherent in the troll that makes it obvious you should burn it or pour acid on it.

In my first 3.5 campaign, I actually played the game straight by the rules and the group encountered a troll.  Everyone failed on the knowledge checks to know what it was, let alone know it's weaknesses.  So the character don't know what it is.  It won't go down because of it's regeneration.  No body has fire spells, so there is no observation

So here's the problem.  The die rolls have confirmed that the characters who by the rules could know its weakness don't know it, but all the players do know it.  There is no way for them to come to the right solution to the problem that won't appear to be meta-gaming.  But they have to come to inevitably, or they get stuck in a perpetual encounter with the troll until probability fails them and they all die.

This is where "no metagaming" becomes highly problematic.

QuoteKnowing in-character about stuff like "level appropriate encounters" strikes me as a dicier proposition.  I'm fine with people knowing it out of character, and steering their character toward being more easy to motivate, as a result ... but a hero who says "Well, sure, I'll go face this dungeon, because I have complete and total faith that it will not be unreasonably dangerous" doesn't actually strike me as all that heroic either.  I like the guy who says "Who knows what's down there?  It could be so bad that our souls will shrivel and our bodies disappear in a blast of raw evilness ... but the princess needs us, so let's go!"

That's why I'm suggesting rewards for players who follow the second path, rather than simply banning the practice.

QuoteI pretty much always prefer to backfill a reasonable human motivation to justify what my player-knowledge tells me is a good course.

And that, I think, is the happy medium between no-metagaming and overt-metagaming.

I think trying to rein in meta-game behaviour is a doomed and headache-inducing proposition. Therefore I don't worry about it.

Quote from: Jackalope;244854But what about the troll example?  There's nothing inherent in the troll that makes it obvious you should burn it or pour acid on it.

Well, toss 'em an in-character clue ... maybe even something as simple as "You chop off it's damn ARM and the arm just grows back!"

If they're even as smart as Hercules (not the brightest hero on record) they'll figure out:  "Ewww ... open wounds just heal.  Time to cauterize.  Fetch some torches!"

Or else they'll figure it's immortal, and rather than trying to kill it they'll trick it into falling down a very deep hole, or something similarly heroic and clever.

These riddles aren't really all that hard to figure out in game.  And if they are impossible to figure out in game then they're pretty dumb attributes for a creature to have, aren't they?

Quote from: Jackalope;244854So here's the problem.  The die rolls have confirmed that the characters who by the rules could know its weakness don't know it, but all the players do know it.  There is no way for them to come to the right solution to the problem that won't appear to be meta-gaming.  But they have to come to inevitably, or they get stuck in a perpetual encounter with the troll until probability fails them and they all die.

Radical concept: the players could just run away. Then they go and research about trolls in the Sage's Guild in the local city. Then they stock up on oil and head back to the troll's hideout...

Sometimes these problems aren't really problems. In fact they add to the game.

Quote from: droog;244863I think trying to rein in meta-game behaviour is a doomed and headache-inducing proposition. Therefore I don't worry about it.

Yeah, I just tell my players "it (meta-gaming) really doesn't bother me, no matter what, your characters never stood a chance anyway"....

Regards,
David R

It's somewhat difficult sometimes. I'd lean toward the fighter having a reasonable chance of knowing that skellies should be smashed and not poked. The troll example is more difficult without knowing, in the game world how common they are and the like.

As a player, it is difficult to play a character who doesn't know even if you do. In a life or death encounter (combat) doubly so.

Quote from: noisms;244867Radical concept: the players could just run away. Then they go and research about trolls in the Sage's Guild in the local city. Then they stock up on oil and head back to the troll's hideout...

That's cool...until it's the 50th campaign you've ever played and your 800th encounter with trolls as a player, and you're immersed in a culture where the mystery of troll weaknesses has been an open secret since at least '81.

Then the fact that you're jumping through hoops becomes painfully obvious.

"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 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.

Frankly, I'm surprised at the lot of you- and I hardly ever say anything like that.

Quote from: TonyLB;244865If they're even as smart as Hercules (not the brightest hero on record) they'll figure out:  "Ewww ... open wounds just heal.  Time to cauterize.  Fetch some torches!"

Or else they'll figure it's immortal, and rather than trying to kill it they'll trick it into falling down a very deep hole, or something similarly heroic and clever.

These riddles aren't really all that hard to figure out in game.  And if they are impossible to figure out in game then they're pretty dumb attributes for a creature to have, aren't they?

But 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 my players find themselves of knowing the troll's weakness by over-repetition of the troll in D&D, knowing that they know the troll's weakness as players but not characters, and knowing that using player knowledge that their character's didn't have was metagaming i.e. "cheating."

The net result is that they created a (I believe false) moral dilemma between doing the correct thing tactically (burn the troll) and the correct thing immersively (feign ignorance of the troll's weakness). Thus the conclusion they came to was that they could not burn the troll because that would be bad role-playing.  

It was only when I pointed out their conclusion, actually said it outloud (they had been skirting around it, sort of triangulating the position) that they recognized that it was ridiculous and burned the troll.

I 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."  No convenient holes, nearest town a day's hike away.  Oh, and their fighter died on the first round (my first exposure to the "rend" ability), and their cleric fell on the third round.  Plus the mage was out of spells by the time it fell.  It was literally like "In 24 seconds this thing will be back on it's feet, and will probably kill you both before you knock it down again."  Really suboptimal conditions for finding alternative solutions.

I actually invented my "regenerating creature coup de grace" rule on the spot at the resolution of that battle (the rules are very fuzzy if you can kill a regenerating creature with a coup de grace, my rule is you can if it is damage that can't be regenerated).

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_horror), 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. :o

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

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. :D


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.