If your party loves to metagame, just switch stuff around. That dragon with a goblin servant? That's now a high level goblin with class levels and Dragon Cohort. So they'll focus on the dragon up until the goblin runs up and smacks their teeth out. That sword you know is hidden in the alcove? Yeah, that was hidden because it's cursed. Roll on these tables to see what it does. That usually fixes things right quick.
thats why my campaigns are the perfect counter to this because even i don't know wtf is going on, all my enemies and npcs are made up as I introduce them, mwahahahaha I am invincible.
The story about the guy showing favoritism to his girlfriend who helped write the campaign hit home for me. Currently dealing with that exact situation with my DM and her husband..
You see, I'm in the same issue with my fiance. I dont try to do it, but I accidentally overdo it with her. Then I over compensate by overdoing it more for everyone. No one seems to have a problem with it, however it still feels unfair to me
I'm in two campaigns at the moment. One my husband runs, one that I run. If anything our respective PCs get the short end of the stick, as after every session the other gets to hear about what was irrecoverably missed.
i once played with a dude who would look up every monster we encountered, it got so bad the DM needed to start making home brew variants of monsters with completely different stats and additional abilities to throw the guy off, but that also made the game harder for everyone else
Honestly i do this in my campaign even without people metagaming. I think its more fun to have a few enemies of the same kind with varying hp, AC and stats, although nothing too extreme. Adds some nice variety
I was the kind of player/DM who read every supplement cover-to-cover just because I found the things in them fascinating. An unfortunate side-effect was that I knew pretty much everything a DM would throw at me and had a good idea of what all their stats/immunities/weaknesses were. I kept it to myself, but I never got the satisfaction of going, "What the hell is that?!"
My players were told in the beginning of our campaigns that there might allways be a bigger fish in ghe sea, or to be more precise: Just because you have seen 10 orcs, does not mean that the next 10 orcs have exactly the same knowledge and/or stats! (Might be the chaos mutated Black Orcs, or some Wild-Orcs or just deserters... and yes we play Warhammer Fantasy) I have created a lot of homebrewed enemies for my players as the rulebook has not really a big variety, just some examples of "how could race XYZ be put like" or sth like that...
I only play online right now and when that happens we give them a warning. If they ignore the warning, if we feel generous they get a second warning. If not... they are kicked from the discord server and banned.
I started doing this with my DM mostly after getting into a dispute over invisible stalkers also having no scent. My character has smell and said that you couldn't smell something that was invisible. Oh also having failed a will save when my will save was 38. (This was a pathfinder game and we were level 8.)
Its not really meta gaming but the DM i had a few years ago was so worried that we were going to end up cheating that he called us out for almost everything we did, even if it was unintentional. I was playing a rogue going to assassinate a sleeping bandit and i rolled something like a 27 stealth check. The DM said he woke up instantly and started shooting at me with his bow in like 3 seconds of waking up. After that rugged encounter we found a cave where some bandits were hanging out. I said i would like to roll to see if i can see any traps or trip wires and the DM just glared at me, took a long sigh and said "You don't have to make this game so un-fun for everyone, You know that right?". Because apparently using actual smarts in game is meta gaming and rude to him
This is why rolls are a thing, he wanted it to wake up? roll WIS Also, since when checking for traps is rare? it's common sense when you arrive at a new location, but i guess that it was the kind of DM who enjoyed killing PCs
For that story where the person explicitly says "Im metagaming and don't care"... My response would have been to give the boss a super-move. "Yeah...you can't survive this..."
I did that .... someone at the table had read the encounter and stated the bbeg would lose his invisibility if it attacked ... so I made it GREATER Invisibility and spawned extra guards.....👿
If someone metagamed that bad in a session with me as DM, that is instant grounds for either death by falling rocks, just telling them to leave, or everything in the encounter to go after that particular character and if the character dies tell them politely to leave. Depends on how sadistic and annoyed I feel.
@@darkfire9749 AHH it litterly just happened again.... one player googled the monster and told everyone what its stats was !!!! I just ended the session there.
Just have the offending character suffer a stroke or heart attack, with the reason being that they couldn't handle the sudden knowledge they obtained from nowhere.
@@MrBizteck I have no problem with a person having prior knowledge of the creature out of game and ooc but when they blurt it out and ruin the build up and the uncertainty of winning the fight it's grounds for capital punishment
to the mimic one, if i was the dm i'd have said: "as dm i can tell you in this world, mimics can be a lot more than chests and doors" use it once as, like, a table just to get my point across, and then never use them as anything aside from chests again
@@KyleSage35 i had a concept for a "golden mimic" (never came up with stats for it) that was small and would often take the form of gold coins and sit within normal chests. when they attacked, they'd sprout legs and teeth and an eye and look like some golden spider thing. probably make them a swarm creature
Exactly. I once had a couch mimic. The players thought the room was clear, and they sat down to take a short rest. Boy, were they in for a surprise. Killed one of them too.
@@evangrescol7772 ikr! imagine after checking the chest to see if its a mimic or trapped and finding it ok you open it up and see its full of gold coins. then, as you reach in to grab some, they all open their eye and look at you a sec. startled, you freeze in place for a moment... that brief moment is all it takes for them to sprout legs and leap onto you.. hundred then thousands of them swarm over your body, sinking sharp teeth into your flesh.. >=D truely nightmare fuel indeed. lol
reminds me of a gag in the online comic "order of the stick": one of the main character s is a dwarf cleric. he misunderstood something he heard as a boy, about tree roots causing problems, and thought ALL trees are evil.
"You shout as your brain is suddenly filled with forbidden arcane knowledge from nowhere. As the knowledge pounds in your brain you feel a splitting headache that turns literal as your head splits open unable to contain so much forbidden knowledge leaving you dead on the floor" As someone who doesn't actually know dnd, that would be my solution to a metagaming player. You could even make it a gradual process with each shout pushing a player closer to headsplitting depending on importance of the information revealed.
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reminds me of a VERY old Incredible HUlk comic book, where something like that happened to an early version of The Leader.
I'd change their class to commoner and reset their level. "You suddenly wake up in a cold sweat and you go out to the farm to contemplate that weird dream."
I know I'm 3 yrs late but THAT is exactly what I've done in the few occasions I ran into this behavior as a DM.... although my go to line is, as your head fills up with arcane and forbidden knowledge you feel it swell from the inside, you feel dizzy as blood starts dripping from your eyes and ears, till with a ripping cracking sound your head explodes and you die in a horrible explosion of blood and gore. Apparently this is me as a DM cheating and being horribly unfair according to players who openly looked up stuff online or in monster books in front of me at the table even though I asked them not to do it.
For the DMs dealing with the guy calling out the NPC being a dragon in disguise, or having to fight Frankenstein's monster. The advice I offer is to subvert your tropes by one more step. The disguised dragon is cliche, instead, in that moment switch it out for a Deva which has similar change shape. Or in the instance of Frankenstein's monster reveal, the monster is the Doctor trying to being back the original doctor that he accidently killed after being brought back himself. Always think about an alternative, or a second layer of obfuscation. To do this natively, once you land on your first thought, merely go one step further.
Good lord, that one with the abusive DM was awful. I can't imagine having a DM like that and I would have walked as soon as they forced the player to feel like shit in the Carnival game.
I would have walked off that campaign after three sessoins max. Seriously, there are few things that upset me more than DMs who don't allow their players to do anything or, you know, have fun.
And what a pathetic “contest,” anyway. Like, it’s not hard to “beat” the players. Lvl 2 fighter with a 16 strength? Put him against a lvl 8 fighter with 18 strength. It’s not like this required some skill or cleverness. FFS If she needed to establish the guard captain as a badass, he could have beaten the PC and then been ENCOURAGING. “You show promise, new blood, but you’re not there yet” and then gifts him some special ammo or something (idk how gunslingers work). I understand having the overarching villain of the campaign maybe show up and humble the players early on. That way it’s more satisfying when they beat him/her/it at the end. But that’s something you do one time, maybe twice in a very long campaign. In between those unwinnable scenarios you have to give them things to do that they can succeed at.
I had a moron DM who showed up at my college job to "get me for game" as I had to work on game night. He insisted that I get in his car to go to "HIS game" or there would be hell to pay. My manager had to call the police to get the idiot to leave.
@@m03 “you’re wasting my time” is from chapter 4 of The Socially Awkward People’s Handbook’s list of mean things to say so that you sound like a “total badass.” It’s the kind of half assed, not quite appropriate to the scenario line you’d expect to hear in a video game. Some people aren’t very good at making words sound like good things.
I was DM in this situation. I had a group of rather new players, and one veteran player who I inducted to help move the plot along. I was trying to add mystery to the campaign via a False Hydra. For those unaware, a False Hydra is a homebrew creature capable of altering and removing one's memory of its existence using it's voice. To people effected by it, this could mean losing all memory of friend. There are some ways to see it however, being deafened prevents it from effecting you, and you are capable of remembering what you see in reflections. Very first time they came into contact with the location effected by the False Hydra was, I started off with the hint of a large standing mirror, standing in the middle of the gatehouse to this castle. Immediately, the veteran player, who I trusted, called out. "Guys, there is a freaken False Hydra is. We are leaving." Player began describing literally everything about False Hydra, in character, and spoiling the entire mystery of this location. Literally eight sessions of build up and three sessions of planned content completely went to waste because of a lone standing mirror standing in the middle of the and a metagaming idiot.
Probably an unpopular opinion but i applaud the metagamer here. False Hydras are just too often a cheap way to mindscrew the players and take agency away from them. Ok for an experienced group who you know well but not a nice thing to pull on new players
@@Michaeljack81sk I suppose I should explain a little further. These new players aren't new to Roleplaying, just new to the game. The group of us have been roleplaying on World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online for years now, and the Quarantine had given us enough time to actually atart up a a full blown campaign. We've founded large RP guilds on both games. We've had plotlines on World of Warcraft with Mind Altering Mushroom Spores and plots in ESO with Memory Erasing Skooma called Blue Skooma. I, however, still completely understand your point of view and respect it. False Hydras are rather delicate matter, and are not meant to be used lightly. The idea behind it was that the players were forming a guild, and while the renown of the guild was spread throughout the country, the guild never increased pass the initial 5 players. The newer players were already suspecting something was up as I wasn't secretive or cryptic that something unusual was happening in the events leading up to the reveal as we've known each other for so long. It was only a matter of time before they likely made the connections. In short, if they were new to Roleplay in general, I wouldn't have used the False Hydra, but as we've known each other for years, I decided it was probably the only time I would have been able to use one.
@@MaRaX93 Clearly you do not understand the concept of Metagaming and are completely in favor for people ruining the experience and mystery for everyone else at the table. Your friends must of loved you when you spoiled the end of Endgame for them.
These stories make me feel so lucky to have my D&D group where the DM can accidentally reveal that our employer is a dragon that's going to try to kill us eventually and our characters just go on like normal.
God I hate metagaming, one time...I had this gm who misused a mind reading spell and used that as justification to metagame...this was pathfinder...(Infinite uses of detect thoughts and kept using it until the bbeg knew exactly what our plan was) I called him out on the issue and he then promptly said the one phrase that all horrible gms say "I'm the gm, I do whatever I want"
Can gm or dm metagame? To a certain degree they do if they plan encounters to make difficult fights by targeting the weaknesses of the party Or if they decide to play with their backstories
@Arlesmon that's the thing, he only really pulls this stunt on me and never anyone else....He spammed the heal spell every time I get close to finishing the foe off, using the spell "Freedom of movement" stating that it ignores being stunned. Freedom of movement in the Pathfinder system states that it stops effects that prevent movement and not prevents actions. The character at the time utilized a stun lock crit combo.
While generally true, its not always true. Sometimes the other players, or the GM, need a hand and either don't know they do or don't know how to ask for help. The rule of thumb should be to ask yourself "Is this going to make the game a better time for most, if not all, players involved?" and if your already asking your self this and still causing problems then your in the wrong group.
The succubus one is unfortunately in line. Succubi/incubi can jaunt over to the ethereal plane as an action. That wasn't metagaming, but it IS unfortunate that the DM did them dirty like that at every turn.
Nope. You cannot take any other action other than making an opposed grapple check when you are pinned. This includes spells or spell-like abilities. Ethereal Jaunt would not have worked.
@@_motho_ Are you certain about this one? I checked the grappler feat and the restrained condition and there's nothing about being unable to take any other action. I've heard of house ruling that you can't cast spells with somatic components while locked in hancuffs, but other than that, I'm pretty sure you can take other actions like dodge and abilities that take an action to activate that don't require your hands. I was also assuming it was 5e.
I had a DM in a guild I was running on tabletop simulator and discord. I was playing his first DM session and I explained clearly the rules and that our policy is the DM is a narrator, players tell the story (line of thought to encourage letting players derail your "plans"). We ran into a vampire and it was running away to tell the other vampires. The wizard successfully used Tasha's Hideous Laughter, but rather than stop her in the her tracks... The DM decided she fell down the staircase and rolled to the bottom escaping. During this whole time she was falling down the stairs we had no actions, no movement, no reactions, nothing to do but let it happen. That was the first incident. The second was the vampire boss fight in which we had immobilized him and the vampire was going to lose. He somehow, without explanation, turned into mist (which we had prevented him from doing) and escaped. I reprimanded the DM after the session saying the players aren't here to live out your fantasy and your stories. You provide a world for the players to tell their own story, and not to force players to stay on a linear path. Well, of course that didn't stick. Two following sessions he did similar things before we decided he has a pathological need for things to go his way, and we banned him from being a DM. He had three strikes and blew every one ignoring all advice.
@@maltt8715 I am the head DM in a guild that ran one-shots mostly and a core campaign. Have you heard of discord west march style guilds? You need some consistency and general rules if you want characters to be transferable between sessions with different DMs. Its a different way to play DnD, almost MMO-like, and a lot of people love it.
[sighs] I'm guilty of it. There was an RP I was in where I once created a character purely to save other people's characters. I would wait for someone to get in way over their head in their sessions, as in, on the verge of death in RP, and then ask if I could join their session. My character would then pop in to save them with no other explanation other than he just showed up. I called this character Bob, Bat-Bob, because he acted like Batman. The GM eventually put me and another character into a debatably unwinnable fight when we showed up to save a third player... and Bat-Bob died. Yeah, we failed a lot of perception rolls on this encounter, but the GM in question never ever balanced encounters on the fly so we died.
@@newsance2u well yeah I get that many specific creature would be immune to fire if they became undead after they already had the immunity. But it was a troll. Our run of the mill trolls are not immune to fire, or anything else for that matter, so making them undead wouldn't grant fire immunity as far as I know. Though, the DM in the situation could have made a homebrewed troll that was immune to things, and maybe undead in that campaign are immune to fire. 🤷🏻♀️
I’ve only DMed one campaign, and I’ve already had two separate players look up and announce the random tables, effects and charge rules (the crumbling to dust bit) of the Wand of Wonder.
see this isn't really meta-gaming depending on how they came by the item, if they found it randomly, have no arcane knowledge what-so-ever and don't have identify? then yes, but basically any other situation where theres plausibility of working out or knowing it, or identify then yea no they know it's effects and they'd probs know them from attuning to it aswell
"Hello my sparking, glimmering, spirits of infinite cosmic wonder..." Me, feelin' like a potato: :> ♥ Edit: That guy, praying to the Chaos God Tzeentch: *accidentally mispronounces name* The True Chaos God Tzeentach: "Hey hey people, Sseth here."
A good way to advoid meta gaming in a homebrew campaign is ether make the bad guy someone part of the party or do it online with no one that could look at your notes
It was 3.5, and I was playing a spellthief who had a magic eye. This was a big secret from the rest of the party because certain types of magic were illegal (the players did know he had an eye, but most were good about playing as if they didn't) and he didn't want to be turned over to the guard. The thing is, even my character didn't fully understand what his eye could do and was still learning. He got into a 'disagreement' with the paladin and let's say they didn't get along. Later on in the campaign, the paladin dies so that player made a new character. An artificer. We enter a vampire's fort where his new character is found and FIRST thing he does is cast 'Detect Magic' on my character and said out loud, "Hey, you with the magic eye...." Everything that the DM had been planning about my character to be revealed to me and the rest of the party was ruined in that scene.
As someone who is currently playing a 3.5 Artificer, yeah, that was bull. Firstly, Artificers don't even get Detect Magic, as the spell. Sure, we have a class feature that works identically to it, but it requires a special knowledge check and can only even be attempted if the Artificer holds the item for one minute. Then you have to pass a DC 15 artificer knowledge check, with a bonus equal to your Intelligence mod plus your artificer level. And even THEN, you can only tell if the item is magical or not, it does not reveal what type of magic it is or even what the item does. You also cannot take 10 or 20 on this check, you must roll it every single time. Moreover, if you fail the check, you can never attempt it again with that particular object. In order for him to tell what your magic eye did, he'd have to either cast Identify on the item, which Artificers do get, or have an Artificer's Monocle (1500gp), which allows an artificer, or anyone with Detect Magic and at least 5 ranks in Knowledge (arcana), spend an additional minute inspecting the item. Should they do this, then they learn the abilities of the item as if they'd just cast Identify. Keep in mind, however, for an artificer, this requires the artificer to have passed the DC 15 artificer knowledge check earlier. If they failed that check, the Artificer's Monocle doesn't function.
My favorite form of checking for mimics is any spell/cantrip that specifically targets a creature, if it's just a regular chest it won't work, it's like in tf2 being the pyro just giving everyone a cursory flamethrower blast to make sure they're not a spy
@@scribblerstudios9895 Though I would say always ask your dm first because that's one of those things that could be seen as metagaming even if it really isn't, for example if I use acid splash targeting a chest if it's just a normal chest the spell should fail because the chest is an invalid target, then again your dm may just rule that you couldn't target the chest in the first place regardless, Because a Chest is an object, not a creature. In retrospect the better way to check for mimics is not to use a cantrip that only effects creatures, but one that only effects objects, for example "You make a color, a small mark, or a symbol appear on an object or a surface for 1 hour." From the Prestidigitation cantrip. If it's a normal object it will be marked as described, but if it's a mimic it wouldn't be marked, as a mimic is a creature, not an object.
High level evocation wizard finally learned a conjure spell. Spent five minutes on his turn trying to decide what to summon. When we asked what the hold up was he stated (please do the annoying voice where you sort of have to chew on your tongue to get the annoying just right) "Hold on, I'm still looking through all the stat blocks to find a creature with a high enough wisdom modifier to make the save."
I mean... I get that this would be annoying, but I'm on the fence about this one. If the PC knows what they're summoning a creature for and knows they need high wisdom or "resistance to psychic effects" or whatever the save in question was, then wouldn't they choose a summon that matched the situation? I mean if they know those creatures then that's fair. I would assume a druid is allowed to look through stat blocks of creatures for wildshape, right? Kind of new to D&D, so if this is a cardinal sin I apologise.
@@samjeffrees "if they know those creatures" yeah, in game, makes sense. At that point, the main annoyance is that the player is holding up the game by not knowing what they want to do.
@@samjeffrees He looked up the stats of what we were fighting, & took up all our time searching for something his PC had very little to no knowledge there of.
Well, I got reminded of a series of bad events with me. I have a bad habit of making jokes, like "wouldn't this be just the sort of thing an illuminati faction would use as a base" well on multiple occasions I was right and the DM just madly redid his notes while cursing me out
Worst metagaming for me so far was the cleric and wizard taking my cursed sword from me. I intentionally bought it because it seemed like something my crazy old monk would do without realizing it, and it was legitimately funny for him to switch from blasting elemental powers and whacking people in the shins with his walking stick to suddenly going barbarian with the sword because he took 1 point of damage. I can understand the characters wanting to take it from me, but it wasn't roleplayed with any real effort. And their reasons were completely crap, including "if someone just bumps into him he's going to go on a rampage" even though that isn't how getting pushed works and our dm isn't a jerk.
Depending on how it was played, it makes sense, sadly. "Cursed" items are potentially detrimental to the party. So, if they knew it were cursed, then it stands to reason they wouldn't let you keep it. How well it's roleplayed seems kinda arbitrary to complain about considering that not everyone is an immaculate roleplayer
@@mr.alpaca2663 they had zero in character reason, and only actually knew it was cursed because I was courteous enough to let them know about it so to avoid any accidents.
Wait... they just TOOK it? IDK, but that seems like stealing to me... My monk would beat the shit out of them for stealing his possessions, and then remain coldly indifferent to them for a LOOOONG time unles they explained with a valid reason AND compensated him. (I don't care if its cursed. It is MINE by right. And i am willing and able to bear this burden.)
@@metatron76 I left out some details, but I wasn't upset at how they went about doing it because it was a humor focused character and they roled with how I played him to get the sword away from him. So that was fine. What upset me was that they didn't know in character that it was cursed.
The story about the party and the mimic makes me laugh. I had a dungeon with a bunch of enchanted archways that did different things to the characters who walked through them. XD The players never felt safe walking through an archway again without some serious checks and examinations.
I lay out the map (fork in the road, forest) ask for passive perception. Everyone passes, so I place the markers for two people. To which one guy shouts excitedly, “It’s an Ambush!” The try to set up an ambush for my planned ambush, but fail the second passive perception. Never saw kobolds of unusual size coming.
The thing about mimics and monsters in general, though? DM's discretion. What is legit or not is entirely up to the DM. I've read about one instance of an entire manor being a giant mimic, as well as baby mimics taking the form of bottles, chairs, scrolls, and coins. That instance with the metagaming player remarking about mimic doors could have either been brushed off or punished fairly easily. "In the master bedroom you find a small iron box full of gold coins." "I take them!" (Several weeks later) "I'll buy the potion of greater healing." "As you hand over the coins for the potion- roll for initiative." "Wait, what?!" "You remember that iron box full of gold you took coins from in the nobleman's house? The gold you took without question even though you KNEW there were several mimics inside? They were all dwarf-breed mimics. They've since consumed the gold in your wallet and made more of themselves. Now roll to see who's going first: you or the coin-mimic swarm trying to devour your hand."
DnD is just full of fun people it seems. I see so many stories of DMs and players being complete pricks I sometimes wonder why I want to get into this hobby so badly. It just seems like I am guaranteed to come across a pedo/rapist sociopath that insists on me being ok with their ridiculous behavior I also expect the aforementioned garbage excuse for a human would get mad when my lawful anything actively tries to get their mary sue psychopath killed.
Im curious and worried. Is it metagaming for a character I have to have the ultimate goal of creating a powerful magical item that doesn't yet exist in our world, and would be perfect for him, stat-wise? Like, if it makes sense for his character to make such an item and is something I started out as a goal of his, but it's inarguably powergaming to want it?
I wouldn't consider it metagaming as there have been rules in place for creating wondrous and magical Items. hell in 3.5 if you wanted to enchant something to have an ability score improvement, it listed the exact spell you need to put that effect on. 5e as far as i know is limited in the rules for creating these items but hey, work with your DM. Also factor in the you could easily justify it in-game, wizards want something to increase their intellect? makes sense. You also mentioned it being a goal right? Well hey that's an entire story arc of you getting strong enough to make it. It is not metagaming to want to optimize your character, including magic items.
And actually, I just looked up the spells. To add ability score improvements, you just need to know one of the 6 spells that increase that score, so Fox's Cunning increases INT, well to make a Headband of Intellect you need to know that spell. Also you spend gold AND exp to make the object in addition to needing the feat to create the object. Now 5e has a different leveling and feat system and I honestly wish we'd get a book or two for 5e with full magic item creation rules to clear it up.
@@Flameboythest well there's some basic rukes in xanifar's. It says the cost and time it takes to make an item based on rarity, and says that you may have to go questing for the right materials
@@mindlessscientist3772 Ah, I see. But you've also somewhat answered your question there, it's not metagaming if you need to work in-game to get the object you want.
i HAVE a player who's a really good guy and he's got a lot of annoying and negative querks to him but...we can't boot him because he's a necessary evil. RPs well, comes up with insane builds, gets really into character, and actually tries to play even if he's literally screaming in our ears over discord. his negatives? screams in our ears, is unreliable when it comes to scheduling, will make excuses and leave call when things dont go his way, gets pissy because of DIGITAL DICE KARMA, makes builds that nuke things, burns his resources in one turn on a tiny enemy, tries to get other players to follow his instructions n suggestions, min/maxes like a mofo, is an insane spotlight hogger, and is not against PVP. he also likes to number crunch and understand things. so during encounters he'll read the creatures bio and spoil their traits out of "shock". currently we're going through the agonizingly slow process of getting through a chapter-finale dungeon. this big pandemic has everyone stressed and tired. wizard tries to open a door that has a specific lock using 'knock'. doesn't work. so they....burn a hole through a wooden door to reveal the butt of a massive metallic golem. immediately he starts yelling, in our ears, to the spell casters that fire will heal it and to use other methods. wizard (a player i greatly enjoy DMing for) ignores him entirely and coaxes the golem out. my good friend and fellow DM is in call listening to this guy meta game hardcore about this golem. politely steps in when the stress has overtaken me, and changes how the golem works. we havent played since mid July due to schedules and the need for a break. i, personally, do NOT want to kill or hurt the party but...the cleric is currently dying because SOMEONE meta-gamed thus turning the danger level up to 11. thanks dude...please knock it the fuck off with the meta gaming. at least, when i look things up, i keep it to myself and play the game via character knowledge. i dont ruin the experience.
I may not know your relationship with "Meta McMikescreamer" but he sounds like he really should get the boot if he is ruining everyone else's fun. He sounds like a total That Guy: Spotlight hog, main character syndrome, meta gamer.
@@starkiller1289 our other DM, who's his fiancé, actually booted him from a DIFFERENT campaign because he continuously and conveniently had migraines on gameday n was more than happy to cuss out the barbarian (my character who died off camera. it actually felt like he was cussing ME out) just because we told him to stop complaining about something so petty. he could only join if he apologized. again he really is a good person and i enjoy playing VIDEO GAMES with him and chatting with him when things are slow but it's not fun playing TTRPGs with him around. we've all decided that he's not joining anymore of my campaigns unless it's absolutely necessary.
The only thing I don't get is how is this guy a "necessary" evil rather than just, you know, evil? Sounds like an absolute nightmare to have around, even if he doesn't behave like that outside of D&D. I also have a friend who I think is a great guy, but a lousy DM. I literally stopped attending his games because I'd end up stop being friends with him, it was that bad. He checked pretty much every box of being a bad DM. Right now he's a player in the group I DM for and is still a bit problematic as a player, but pretty manageable overall.
Very mild meta, and partially an accident, and partially me using that info, plus a bit of slapstick comedy. Playing LMoP. DM is describing the interior of interior of an abandoned house. During which, he accidentally reads "'Under the floorboards, is a chest that contains-' Whoops! Wasn't supposed to read that part." Since it was my turn, I enter the house, and I go, "Um, what's that check one uses to look for things?" (I was a newbie then.) "Investigation." "Okay." (Rolls the dice.) "That good enough?" "You find a loose floorboard." I pull up the chest, get some money. Then - "A twig blight swings its claws at you" (Rolls d20) "Does a 17 hit?" (Dragonbloodline sorcerer with like 15 for the AC) "Yes." (Rolls a d4.) "5 points of damage." "Scratched by Groot." I muttered. (Had Inspiring Leadership, so no actual damage, but it was annoying.)
What the DM could've done, when he realized he wasn't supposed to read that part: "OR AT LEAST, YOU HEAR A VOICE, SAYING THOSE WORDS." When you fuck up, improvise! If the encounter's been spoiled, make a new encounter out of it.
Worst metagaming I've seen was in VTM: guy who left the group returns with a Malkavian televangelist, who believed he was truly a prophet of god. We were on a mission to shut down a massive ring of holy ground. The reverend, who is new to town, refuses to cross it, playing directly against the delusion he chose when rolling his character. To be fair the second worst was when I manipulated him into posing as me to meet up with an angry, mind controlling inquisitor who wanted me to "answer some questions." I didn't know he had the ability to shapeshift in character so I pumped the information from him to justify the metagamy plan in game.
I too have dealt with a DM that meta-gamed. I built an artificer, an amoral Tony Stark/David Xanatos type who was a business man first and an adventurer second. Variant human, started with the linguist feat. He spoke Common, Draconic, Dwarves, Elvish, Orcish, and even Giant. Any language he thought would help him secure a deal, or help him in his travels. DM ran Storm King's Thunder, my artificer talked us out of combat with a group of orcs that were apparently on the run from some wood elves. Ended up giving them shelter, had saved the survivors of an attack on a city (early game stuff), and then the elves came. Talked the elves down too, because they were very hostile right away. Had secretly agreed to smuggle the orcs out of the city in the carts we'd acquired, which we were also using to get the displaced townsfolk put of the city. All going smooth, may have a small orc tribe remnant to call in a favor with later for down-time stuff (hired muscle for business ventures and such, you know?) The elves: "Oh, and leave your carts." That's the most recent example, but he does that all the time. Strahd is absolutely all knowing and all powerful so no matter what you do during Curse of Strahd, he knows and sends everything he's got at you (to be fair, we kept blowing up everything he sent at us). Make a deal with some orcs? They were in conflict with a group that is bigger, badder, and you will die if you resist them. You do anything outside the specific adventure path? You will get tied to those tracks. Worst thing was that as a player, he was the opposite. He did everything he could to break the game. Joke was on him during a puzzle in ToA that basically tells the person running the game that there is no way around doing the puzzle the way it is meant to be done (and I was running that game, and didn't stop him from trying to brute force it. It just couldn't succeed). Rant done
My first campaign. Was a open end kind of run round. Me (paladin, warlock) and my party come to a town. And our artificer decides to shoot at an old man. The old man dodges it entirely, i grow fond of a dark elf in the town square. So naturally seducion. Success. Later found out the entire town was dragons impersonating humans. And now im smitten to a black dragoness.
I have a player in my group that's constantly questioning the DM, double checks everything the other players try to do (even trying to overrule the DM if he disagrees), and at level 4 has the ability to re-roll multiple times a day on top of having +12 to initiative.
I once DMed for other DMs who had burned out and wanted to be PCs. The problem was they never turned off their DM brains. Case and point, one PC had to make a long jump check of 20ft. They knew the DC from the book by heart.
My first time DMing, it was a group of friends people I new through assocation. I was running the Essential Kit for a group of 5 PCs. We met as a group IRL for the first time at game story private room and they picked the quest to talk to the old lady in the windmill. I begin to describe a large creature banging on the door of the windmill looking like a lion with wings. A couple minutes later, one player lays his copy of the monster manual and starts reading the stats of the manticore. What I learned from that point is to be comfortable tweaking the stats of certain monsters to keep PCs on their toes. For this one, I described that there were large claw marks on the side of the Manticore that they could investigate. That player never came back.
i had an experience with that same quest. the party negotiated with the manticore to get it to leave peacefully but a player who had thoroughly read it before shot it in the back and only justified it by exclaiming that it would return later in the adventure if spared. very subtle
Two things: 1) I’m running my first campaign session as DM tomorrow! I’ve done a oneshot but never a campaign, and I have a good idea for a session 1. Any advice to a new DM? 2) When I started playing D&D, I inadvertently did a lot of metagaming. As someone so fascinated by this new thing, I read a lot of rules and asked a lot of clarifying questions. But every time something went against what I expected, I’d ask about it. “Wait, aren’t gelatinous cubes large creatures?” “Doesn’t that spell do THIS and not THAT?” And so on. I was just curious, but eventually my DM called me out for metagaming and I realized, oh shoot, I was metagaming.
Gonna be perfectly honest here... I disagree with the second one, at least from the information I have. Asking how a spell works is figuring out how the game works; just because you read an ability doesn't mean you're sure you read it right, especially as a new player. (Also GM's can misread things too. Some GM's will thank you for pointing out a mistake and play by the rules, some will quickly rule 0 it, and some will get mad at you for metagaming. I like the first two, personally.) As for GMing advice, I know I'm late to that one, but hey, maybe it will help someone else. Basically, don't be a jerk and make sure everyone including you is having fun to the best of your ability. As for more specific things that I, at least, find important: 1. discuss any house rules with the party beforehand if you can, preferably by posting them for comment and discussion (A. There is a fine line between making a ruling during play on a rule no one can remember, or that would get in the way of the fun, and house ruling that sneak attack ONLY works while hidden because of the word sneak in the name, WHILE THE ROGUE IS TRYING TO SNEAK ATTACK BY FLANKING. B. If a player shows up to your no magic campaign with a wizard or a +3 sword, you want it to be THEIR fault for not reading/listening, not YOURS for not saying there's no magic. C. Players may hate or have valid suggestions for your house rules, and feedback can help you either winnow out players who don't want to be in the campaign you want to run, or fix completely busted house rules that might ruin the game for some, e.g. one time I showed my DM how his house rule combined with the third party he had already allowed would allow me to summon a black hole in every single unoccupied square in the universe every round as a standard action. Of course, that GM loves off the wall goofy minmaxed builds like that, so he encouraged me to make the character, but I found another idea I liked better and made that, but if the GM HADN'T been cool with that option, it would have been really important for him to know that consequence of his house rule before a player hands in a full character sheet for that build.). 2. try to make sure all the players are on the same page with you about what kind of game it will be (A game where everyone has super deep backstories that play out with almost no combat, a game with all combat and no RP where everyone plays hyper-optimized builds, and a campaign where every player is a walking pile of jokes can all be fun, as can pretty much every combo thereof, if everyone wants to play that kind of game, but the player who wants to play in the hyper optimized death campaign, even if he has a super good backstory, isn't going to be happy if there's almost no combat and everyone is constantly RPing, because he spent time and effort making a combat build and wants to use it sometimes, while most of the RP players likely won't be happy during combat if it's too frequent, both because they signed up to RP and because hyper optimized combat death build player will be throwing the encounter balance off like crazy.) 3. When designing encounters, CR is unreliable, don't trust it. For example, in pathfinder, the lesser shadow is CR 1/2, which means it should take less than 1/4 of a level 1 party of 4's daily resources to deal with it. Except it's incorporeal, meaning that you need magic weapons or special abilities that few classes have (or one specific trait) to hit it with weapons, and it takes half damage from magic, and it can go through walls. On top of that it has a 40 foot fly speed, which is faster than the standard PC. All this adds up to: Several party compositions can't even hurt the darn thing, few party compositions can successfully run away from it without someone pulling a heroic sacrifice, and even if your party does have the right classes to beat it, if they already used those resources for something else, e.g. if this is the second or third encounter and the party already used the cleric's channel energy and a spell slot or two, and the wizard's down to 0 or 1 spell slots, they're still screwed. Always verify that a monster IS something YOUR party can handle with the difficulty the monster manual/bestiary says. (And this isn't just a pathfinder problem, the shadow in 5e resists or is immune to damn near everything, possibly everything but radiant, I didn't check too thoroughly, has 16 HP, and hits like a great sword that ALSO reduces your strength by 1d4 and kills you if that reduces your strength to 0. It, too, is CR 1/2.Even with its sunlight weakness, if you're even in a position to take advantage of that, giving it disadvantage to basically everything, it's still a solid threat.) 4. Communication is key. Talk to your players. You want to know whether they're having fun in the campaign you're running BEFORE you or a player you maybe didn't realize was a problem end up in a horror story post/video, and work things out, where possible, if they aren't having fun.
@@chosenonea2992 The rules are ultimately up to the DM. Sometimes the DM would do something neat for flavor or cool plot stuff and I’d ask, out loud in front of the rest of the party, “wait, the spell does that?” Most times the DM would thank me, but one time I forgot about squeezing rules (the gelatinous slime) and inadvertently metagamed. As for the DM advice, I appreciate it. I’ve already learned that CR is unreliable when my party dealt with a wyvern easily then struggled severely with a black slime. And I discussed house rules at the start to make sure everything was right. Something tells me I’m figuring out the balance a bit better as I go.
I recognized a creature my party was fighting as an otyugh and unintentionally started calling it that, but caught myself part way. I ended up saying something like “otyubleppthshh” to mask my metagaming as pure stupidity. 😎👍
You know what, I'm gonna say the first one isn't that bad, once the player figured out they couldn't use the light spell, they would certainly try a torch next. I don't think the google changed the game all that much
I counter-metagame'd by walking into a mimic because my character was under a spell that made her afraid of everything so she was trying get away from a ghast She died in two crits
Our party split up into 2 groups. Me (a paladin who likes cooking) and my friend (a monk that thinks like a traditional southern u.s man for some reason)went into some fields to start foraging for goods. The other half of the party went into a mine that turned out to be a giant stone creature. My friend obviously wanted in on the fight, so he wanted to randomly start trying to check up on the other part of the party, eventually trying to meditate to figure out a location. Even if the dm let him, we were miles away from the other part of the party, so he wouldn’t be able to find them
i think the most obvious time someone meta-gamed at my table was when we were fighting a troll, our PC's hadnt encountered one before so didnt know that fire stopped it regenerating, fair enough, we fight this thing, suddenly the storm sorcerer who up to this point had only used ice and lightning spells went 'i cast fireball', we all gave disapproving grunts, the DM let him do it as it wasnt a big deal but we all shouted at him for meta gaming after
I DM online for a group of friends. When a friend of one in the group got to join, i quickly suspected that he was looking up stats in combat. This guy had no previous experience with 5e so I cut him some slack. Then came a mimic which he, after the first attack, said “does this one not grapple?” I then asked how he knew and straight up told me he looked it up. He got a quick note about zero tolerance and ended up not showing up for next session because of “work reasons”
Playing a 4E Encounters game and had a player, who was also a DM for another encounters game, go through and "pre loot" rooms, doing so after combat had ended and before anyone had a chance to make it to the treasure areas
Well my gm got annoyed in our decent into avernus campaign, because we tried to loot a room of dead cultists which was having an orgy and we slaughtered them in the act. so he made the gross sticky bed a mimic, nearly lost my greataxe to it, and tried to set it on fire with oil while a party member was stuck in its belly. Good times
To be fair, I have tried "beating" my players before, but used the manual's suggested CR for a hard encounter, not a godlike npc that had no business being a guard in a rando ass town when he could be slaying dragons for fun and earning a king's ransom every time.
Playing Champions, a player proudly declared that 'I'm not using (this attack) because I know he has (this defense)!" before even trying it hand having no reason to know ... more egregious in that he actually quoted numbers and game mechanics.
Our DM out right told us "I won't let you guys stuff your clunky party members in a bag of holding because they'll fail the stealth check. He also made them take damage and roll a bunch of con saves for motion sickness, in a pocket dimension
Running a pre-made module and had a player open the book up at the table during a session to show me that a NPC was being run wrong. He claimed that he should have been able to get a bonus to his damage rolls because of a class ability that he had. But I had changed the NPC up because I had watched them meta game the previous session.
Ulg. The girlfriend thing really annoys me. I'm playing with my fiance in a current campaign and he accidentally let slip something he did that my character doesn't know and I haven't even told the other player much lest my character. It's possible to play with significant others without making things awful for everyone else.
I did a game of thrones RP once. I got so mad at one guy who was a massive GoT nerd just making plans for future events(that made no sense to do otherwise) that he should have known nothing about to set his character up for big things. And the GM did absolutely nothing to stop it, just shrugged his shoulders and accepted it.
I have also done the bag of devouring trick with a sorcerer too. Did it to a big bad during a mini adventure and the paladin got very uppity about it. "Heroes aren't supposed to do that" "I never offered myself as a hero, just as a problem solver. Problem solved" Obviously that wasn't good enough and the other player started trying to apprehend then attack my character. I ended up paralysing then bag of devouring them too, the other players didn't get involved since a dead bad guy is a dead bad guy and didn't join in with the outrage of the other player when i killed their character, so they quit and left the game (This was online on Roll20 BTW). The rest of the mini adventure went on without further incident from there.
the god of nat 20s has abandoned me. dave has decided i am unworthy. please tell me what would a good offering be for dave who makes noises. please, dave, i beg you. bless me with your nat 20ness.
For mister "Mimics can be doors" I would have done a fun lil room to single him out in and set a trap that shows two weapons, one being neat and pristine while the other is surrounded by bones and maybe a skeleton reaching for it, the pristine one being a mimic ready to attack and upon leaving the words "Looks can be deceiving, why not leave surprises be for the world" on the wall
The worst meta gaming I've seen is when I was playing AL and our party found a bag of beans that I took and when we hit a town we needed to get into we got in and I gave the guard a bean (not knowing what they did). They planted it and it spawned a few treeants. Our barbarian proceeded to look up the stat block in his monster manual. I was kinda pissed at this guy for a while.
Last session, our party arrived at the *big city* of the world (we somehow got ourselves hired by the inquisition) and we were taken to one of the best blacksmiths. She apparently was mute and the gus who took us there didn't tell us much either so we didn't really know what would happen, the smith just started measuring everyone's hand. We figure we'd get new weapons and such, so our monk was kind of confused what he'd get out of it. Ranger speaks up about homebrewing brass knuckles like he did in a different game. Turns out that was exactly the surprise the DM had planned for the monk. It was an honest mistake/ attempt to help and our DM wasn't angry, just a little disappointed that the surprise was spoiled.
Had an issue with an old roommate where he'd tell me his character would stop mine from doing stuff before I'd do it such as trying to join a theives guild etc. Not really a fan now of actual role playing because of this.
I remember my friend made a SCP campaign and I know some stuff. At one point we heard some distressed voices from the forest, I played stupid and stayed behind while the others walked in an ambush by SCP 939, they are wolves who can imitate distressed people to lure them. The BBEG was SCP 173, a statue that will snap your neck when you break eye contact. I knew, so I started saying that I blink at the end of the turn. The DM countered by saying that was our bonus action and we could go 2 turn without blinking.
Playing motw, as the celestial archetype. I roll what equates to a critical success with my abilities/the dice to try and convince an npc to consider a non-violent option so we (the party) can question a different evil guy npc and catch our breath after a whirl wind of events. GM looks at me and goes, “I’m so sorry, but characters have Motivations that are critical to their being, and that would go against his goals too much to work.” Like, okay. That’s fair. People in real life wouldn’t be swayed from their position if they really believed it so easily. But on a perfect role, with such good numbers and an ability to influence people, did you have to NEG the entire effort and waste my turn? Even just a little “yes, and” or even “no, but” would have been okay
The everything is against you could be interesting as an ark or a challenge in a normal session, like you fell into someone's trap or a a nightmare version of reality. The whole "why is everything going against me and how do I fix it" could be fun if done correctly
See if I've read a module beforehand I usually just make up for it through sheer roleplay and act EXACTLY as my character would with zero input from me. If I get some treasure I know it's there, it's through believable and understandable circumstances. If I miss a thing due to a bad roll, so what that's how it is and I can't fix that.
There was a campaign where one of the players would try to meta alot so everyone decided to treat it as if his character had dementia so they would just ignore everything he said (he went along with it and made it part of his lore)
When you have a metagamer you ever so unexpectedly replace that particularly important story driven item with certain death so when they throw open the door thinking they're going to lay claim to the prize with little to no effort they aren't prepared for when their character is absorbed by a gelatinous cube and the party that wasn't metagaming finds the item tucked away in a little nook on the other side of the hall.
My ranger character had been arrested for mentioning the dms characters name {a problem in and of itself} , they were thrown in a cell and the other members ran back to inform the dms other character {yes he was playing 2} that id been arrested. As soon as the words were out of their mouths the dm says "you hear a voice behind you" his character who we had not seen in a few in game days suddenly appeared and destroyed their plan to break me out. i was devastated.
One of my first times DMing, someone brought the monster manual. Luckily, most all of the monsters I bring are modified in some way and I make it a point for myself never to name them as they are officially. For example, instead of a troll it is "A ravenous green giant with rubbery skin and sharp looking claws."
I've done some unfortunate meta-gaming as a DM. Session 1, PC tried to sneak up on a seer character. I gave the seer +2000 perception... Yeah. I regret it. it was my first time dming, I've learned since then
This isn't particularly big, but my character was thinking about robing a shop in the town we were in for some potions. The shop keeper was rude and was over charging us a lot, despite us saving the town hero, and getting ready to take on the bandits that had been robing the town and him blind (disrespect is something my character doesn't deal with. Though he's sneaky about how he gets revenge) This was a new campaign, and so far, I'd been the responsible one in our group of adventurers, and had been completely honest with everyone we'd met. So my friend's character had no reason to know, or even suspect I was a thief, and when looking at the potions, that I was doing anything but waiting for everyone else to finish. So when my friend had tried to have his character pick mine up to bring me outside the shop so I couldn't rob the place, it kind of annoyed me as well as our DM who had my tail smack him for a few points of bludgeoning damage.
The hardest thing about D&D is the metagaming we all do, but no one talks about. That, often, you know exactly what you're fighting, how to fight it, and we all do little things that just so happen to work out. Like using slashing weapons against zombies, bludgeoning on rock golems, fire against trolls, etc. Not all of us are walking encyclopedias of the monsters of D&D, but we all know certain things. It's called 'experience'. Unless you're playing for the first time and know nothing, it can be hard to force that meta-knowledge back, like when you play through a module you already know because you've played through it before. Even the best players may try to act like they don't know what's going on, but you still do. You know where the traps are, what monsters are around, where the treasure is, etc. The best way I've found to fight this meta knowledge is to ask myself "What would my character know?" and run with that. When it comes to monsters, I'll even ask my DM if I can make knowledge checks about the creatures, to see if my character would know anything about them, then play out what she would know. My current character, for example, is a Fighter/Artificer in a Gestalt 3.5 game. So, a lot of her knowledge, I play out as if she learned about it while learning how to fight. Like she knows to use slashing weapons on zombies because it came up in fighter's college, so she'd know many of the more common creatures' physical weaknesses, like golems, zombies, skeletons, and lycanthropes. But a lot of the rarer creatures, she doesn't know about, so I pretend like she's ignorant. And even if I roll well enough that the DM basically hands me a stat block, I'll still pick and choose what she would know. Physical weaknesses? Sure. General toughness and strength? Sure. Spell resistance? She actually wouldn't know anything about that, unless it's super obvious, like a fire mephit being immune to fire or a troll being weak to fire. Of course, I always clear this with the DM before I do anything. Only one time did I use a weakness without clearing it and it was a total accident. I was fighting lycanthropes and a devil suddenly rushes passed me. Obviously, I was using a silvered weapon against the wererat I just killed, so I used my attack of opportunity on the devil, striking with my silvered longsword. I actually had no idea devils had damage reduction that could be bypassed with a silvered weapon, I was only using my current weapon until my next turn, where I'd switch to my better, non-silvered bastard sword. When the DM accused me of metagaming, I told him I honestly had no idea the devil was weak to silver, I'd just used the silvered weapon because I couldn't switch weapons until my next turn. I actually still switched weapons on my turn, playing as if I didn't know about the silver weakness, and the DM allowed the party to make perception checks to see if we noticed we were doing less damage with non-silvered weapons. I'm glad my DM is otherwise cool with metagaming, since there's some aspects of it we can't help. I've been playing 3rd edition for nearly 20 years, so there's a lot of things I know just from exposure to a lot of campaigns. It's hard to just turn off our brains and pretend we don't know things, like ghasts being bad news or how to fight some of the more intimidating monsters, like liches. Even things like character building, as some feats are just plain worthless and there's tons of items you'd want to have and some that're just a waste. Even things like what dirty tricks a player should be packing, like my Fighter/Artificer always carries a bag of sand, several empty sacks, several rocks, and several alchemical items, like alchemist's fire, holy water, smokesticks, and sunrods. Not a lot of them, but she always carries a few of each, especially the fire, just in case a troll ever shows up. We just can't unlearn habits and wisdom. A good DM, and a good player, will recognize these habits and try to address them. You don't have to resist using these things, like being really prepared, but just recognize you're doing it for a reason.
3:02 tbf that sounds like a good solution. Sure you had to wait 1 hour for them, but if they dont have to wait for you then its a win - neutral, not a win - lose.
Normally for us, after we beat whatever it was, I would look it up later. Mostly because we had already killed the beast, and I was curious of just how over or under leveled our DM made it. But I never really did this when in game, it was more fun that way to try and figure it out. Unless it was that one DM who was just an ass and made everything super hard to 'test' us. Yeah, mmhm? Making your players frustrated to the point they don't like showing up for sessions... sure.
I was playing with a group and the dm put us against a blue dragon. After a few rounds the dragon shot fire from its mouth which surprised everyone. One person started to yell at the dm that the dragon couldn't do that and the dm has to follow the rules and not change stuff. Everyone said if he doesn't like it he can leave. He sat down and got on his phone. The battle continues and the dragon is doing weird things that everyone was trying to figure out. The guy jump up and says its a wizard using illusionary magic. Non of our characters could find that out so we asked how he knew. He said that he looked behind the dm screen without us knowing which ruined the session and then the guy decided that he knew dispel magic (he was a kobold champion fighter at level 3) so he trys to cast it but gets mad when i say he can't and says that if the dm is able to cheat so can he. He also loved to look up monsters learn there lore in the middle of fighting them.
This guy openly admitted to metagaming but this one stands out. A player in the first D&D group I was a part of played a sorcerer and abused the fact that he was the only player that had teleport and counterspell to abandon the party and complete the political intrigue part of the story. At one point where the rest of the party found the door to the awesome ancient Gith city under the Dwarf city during one of these abandoning My character was sent to go find his. Getting back to the Dwarf city and failing to scry on his character three times I'm at a loss how to find this individual who could literally be anywhere in the world. Which he butts in and says "[His character] is walking down the street calling out [my] name!" I wish I had said something at the time but at that point I was so used to his metagaming that it didn't even phase me at the time. What's worse is that he as a DM later accused me of Metagaming even after I explained to him how I might be suspicious of one of his NPC's who was acting suspicious but another one of my characters knew had done said thing.
I remember during my first ever campaign I was guilty of metagaming, but not intentionally. about halfway through that campaign I realized and changed up my ways. People who know they are metagaming and yet still continue to metagame are among the worst types of players to me
I love that one of the groups just collectively suicided and left.
The best way to deal with toxic dms indeed
That DM sounds like an arsehole.
@@vincentstark4496 a tried and true tradition of telling the dm "fuck you and the campaign you rode on"
@@superdude9192 lol
@@bezerkoid it just sounds like he doesn't get the idea of DMing. The whole point is to write an adventure with your players, not compete
If your party loves to metagame, just switch stuff around. That dragon with a goblin servant? That's now a high level goblin with class levels and Dragon Cohort. So they'll focus on the dragon up until the goblin runs up and smacks their teeth out.
That sword you know is hidden in the alcove? Yeah, that was hidden because it's cursed. Roll on these tables to see what it does.
That usually fixes things right quick.
thats why my campaigns are the perfect counter to this because even i don't know wtf is going on, all my enemies and npcs are made up as I introduce them, mwahahahaha I am invincible.
@@ratman-f1b my goodness, he’s unstoppable
@@googuygaming3635 He's too dangerous to be kept alive!
@@googuygaming3635 you could say he’s “fuckin invincible!!!”
@@drunkengibberish1143 when the wind is slow and the fire's hot~
The story about the guy showing favoritism to his girlfriend who helped write the campaign hit home for me. Currently dealing with that exact situation with my DM and her husband..
Zachery Dauzat try calling them out for it. If they kick you from it then they shouldn’t have been a dm
Yea, I spoke with her about it after last session, and told her if tjings don't start changing I'm out. I'm already in 2 other groups anyway.
Thankfully my DM isn't like that. His wife plays with us and he just laughs at her when she asks for favoritism lol
You see, I'm in the same issue with my fiance. I dont try to do it, but I accidentally overdo it with her. Then I over compensate by overdoing it more for everyone. No one seems to have a problem with it, however it still feels unfair to me
I'm in two campaigns at the moment. One my husband runs, one that I run. If anything our respective PCs get the short end of the stick, as after every session the other gets to hear about what was irrecoverably missed.
i once played with a dude who would look up every monster we encountered, it got so bad the DM needed to start making home brew variants of monsters with completely different stats and additional abilities to throw the guy off, but that also made the game harder for everyone else
Honestly i do this in my campaign even without people metagaming. I think its more fun to have a few enemies of the same kind with varying hp, AC and stats, although nothing too extreme. Adds some nice variety
I was the kind of player/DM who read every supplement cover-to-cover just because I found the things in them fascinating. An unfortunate side-effect was that I knew pretty much everything a DM would throw at me and had a good idea of what all their stats/immunities/weaknesses were. I kept it to myself, but I never got the satisfaction of going, "What the hell is that?!"
My players were told in the beginning of our campaigns that there might allways be a bigger fish in ghe sea, or to be more precise: Just because you have seen 10 orcs, does not mean that the next 10 orcs have exactly the same knowledge and/or stats! (Might be the chaos mutated Black Orcs, or some Wild-Orcs or just deserters... and yes we play Warhammer Fantasy)
I have created a lot of homebrewed enemies for my players as the rulebook has not really a big variety, just some examples of "how could race XYZ be put like" or sth like that...
I only play online right now and when that happens we give them a warning. If they ignore the warning, if we feel generous they get a second warning. If not... they are kicked from the discord server and banned.
I started doing this with my DM mostly after getting into a dispute over invisible stalkers also having no scent. My character has smell and said that you couldn't smell something that was invisible. Oh also having failed a will save when my will save was 38. (This was a pathfinder game and we were level 8.)
Its not really meta gaming but the DM i had a few years ago was so worried that we were going to end up cheating that he called us out for almost everything we did, even if it was unintentional. I was playing a rogue going to assassinate a sleeping bandit and i rolled something like a 27 stealth check. The DM said he woke up instantly and started shooting at me with his bow in like 3 seconds of waking up. After that rugged encounter we found a cave where some bandits were hanging out. I said i would like to roll to see if i can see any traps or trip wires and the DM just glared at me, took a long sigh and said "You don't have to make this game so un-fun for everyone, You know that right?". Because apparently using actual smarts in game is meta gaming and rude to him
This is why rolls are a thing, he wanted it to wake up? roll WIS
Also, since when checking for traps is rare? it's common sense when you arrive at a new location, but i guess that it was the kind of DM who enjoyed killing PCs
@@rompevuevitos222 I roll for magic sense every time I see a wall lol
@@darioschottlender I've only have played 5e so far, so i'm not sure what magic sense is, i guess it's just what the name says :p
@@rompevuevitos222 Arcane check, or something like that
@@darioschottlender Oooh, Arcana, yeh i know that one, never done a check for that tho, so far i've had Detect Magic at hand everytime i've needed it
For that story where the person explicitly says "Im metagaming and don't care"...
My response would have been to give the boss a super-move. "Yeah...you can't survive this..."
I did that .... someone at the table had read the encounter and stated the bbeg would lose his invisibility if it attacked ... so I made it GREATER Invisibility and spawned extra guards.....👿
If someone metagamed that bad in a session with me as DM, that is instant grounds for either death by falling rocks, just telling them to leave, or everything in the encounter to go after that particular character and if the character dies tell them politely to leave. Depends on how sadistic and annoyed I feel.
@@darkfire9749 AHH it litterly just happened again.... one player googled the monster and told everyone what its stats was !!!!
I just ended the session there.
Just have the offending character suffer a stroke or heart attack, with the reason being that they couldn't handle the sudden knowledge they obtained from nowhere.
@@MrBizteck I have no problem with a person having prior knowledge of the creature out of game and ooc but when they blurt it out and ruin the build up and the uncertainty of winning the fight it's grounds for capital punishment
to the mimic one, if i was the dm i'd have said: "as dm i can tell you in this world, mimics can be a lot more than chests and doors" use it once as, like, a table just to get my point across, and then never use them as anything aside from chests again
My exact thoughts, they can be anything the dm feels like, its just chests are easier then most objects
@@KyleSage35 i had a concept for a "golden mimic" (never came up with stats for it) that was small and would often take the form of gold coins and sit within normal chests. when they attacked, they'd sprout legs and teeth and an eye and look like some golden spider thing. probably make them a swarm creature
@@darcraven01 Nightmare fuel
Exactly. I once had a couch mimic. The players thought the room was clear, and they sat down to take a short rest. Boy, were they in for a surprise. Killed one of them too.
@@evangrescol7772 ikr! imagine after checking the chest to see if its a mimic or trapped and finding it ok you open it up and see its full of gold coins. then, as you reach in to grab some, they all open their eye and look at you a sec. startled, you freeze in place for a moment... that brief moment is all it takes for them to sprout legs and leap onto you.. hundred then thousands of them swarm over your body, sinking sharp teeth into your flesh.. >=D truely nightmare fuel indeed. lol
Why is a mimic that imitates a tree bad at catching adventurers?
Everyone already distrust trees cause they are so damn shady!
Ouch. That one caused some psychic damage
reminds me of a gag in the online comic "order of the stick":
one of the main character s is a dwarf cleric. he misunderstood something he heard as a boy, about tree roots causing problems, and thought ALL trees are evil.
That "Hell World" is brilliant. Fantasy Fighter-Bomber, and a Priest singing Bill Nye the Science Guy
Farid Athar I want to be part of a game like that lmao
Inertia is a property of matter.
"You shout as your brain is suddenly filled with forbidden arcane knowledge from nowhere. As the knowledge pounds in your brain you feel a splitting headache that turns literal as your head splits open unable to contain so much forbidden knowledge leaving you dead on the floor"
As someone who doesn't actually know dnd, that would be my solution to a metagaming player. You could even make it a gradual process with each shout pushing a player closer to headsplitting depending on importance of the information revealed.
reminds me of a VERY old Incredible HUlk comic book, where something like that happened to an early version of The Leader.
That sounds about right
THIS is why psychic damage exists.
I'd change their class to commoner and reset their level.
"You suddenly wake up in a cold sweat and you go out to the farm to contemplate that weird dream."
I know I'm 3 yrs late but THAT is exactly what I've done in the few occasions I ran into this behavior as a DM.... although my go to line is, as your head fills up with arcane and forbidden knowledge you feel it swell from the inside, you feel dizzy as blood starts dripping from your eyes and ears, till with a ripping cracking sound your head explodes and you die in a horrible explosion of blood and gore.
Apparently this is me as a DM cheating and being horribly unfair according to players who openly looked up stuff online or in monster books in front of me at the table even though I asked them not to do it.
For the DMs dealing with the guy calling out the NPC being a dragon in disguise, or having to fight Frankenstein's monster. The advice I offer is to subvert your tropes by one more step. The disguised dragon is cliche, instead, in that moment switch it out for a Deva which has similar change shape. Or in the instance of Frankenstein's monster reveal, the monster is the Doctor trying to being back the original doctor that he accidently killed after being brought back himself.
Always think about an alternative, or a second layer of obfuscation. To do this natively, once you land on your first thought, merely go one step further.
Good lord, that one with the abusive DM was awful. I can't imagine having a DM like that and I would have walked as soon as they forced the player to feel like shit in the Carnival game.
I would have walked off that campaign after three sessoins max. Seriously, there are few things that upset me more than DMs who don't allow their players to do anything or, you know, have fun.
And what a pathetic “contest,” anyway. Like, it’s not hard to “beat” the players. Lvl 2 fighter with a 16 strength? Put him against a lvl 8 fighter with 18 strength. It’s not like this required some skill or cleverness. FFS If she needed to establish the guard captain as a badass, he could have beaten the PC and then been ENCOURAGING. “You show promise, new blood, but you’re not there yet” and then gifts him some special ammo or something (idk how gunslingers work).
I understand having the overarching villain of the campaign maybe show up and humble the players early on. That way it’s more satisfying when they beat him/her/it at the end. But that’s something you do one time, maybe twice in a very long campaign. In between those unwinnable scenarios you have to give them things to do that they can succeed at.
I had a moron DM who showed up at my college job to "get me for game" as I had to work on game night. He insisted that I get in his car to go to "HIS game" or there would be hell to pay.
My manager had to call the police to get the idiot to leave.
@@Newnodrogbob gotta love how the captain said the gunslinger was wasting his time when it was the captain who challenged him in the first place.
@@m03 “you’re wasting my time” is from chapter 4 of The Socially Awkward People’s Handbook’s list of mean things to say so that you sound like a “total badass.”
It’s the kind of half assed, not quite appropriate to the scenario line you’d expect to hear in a video game. Some people aren’t very good at making words sound like good things.
I was DM in this situation. I had a group of rather new players, and one veteran player who I inducted to help move the plot along. I was trying to add mystery to the campaign via a False Hydra.
For those unaware, a False Hydra is a homebrew creature capable of altering and removing one's memory of its existence using it's voice. To people effected by it, this could mean losing all memory of friend. There are some ways to see it however, being deafened prevents it from effecting you, and you are capable of remembering what you see in reflections.
Very first time they came into contact with the location effected by the False Hydra was, I started off with the hint of a large standing mirror, standing in the middle of the gatehouse to this castle.
Immediately, the veteran player, who I trusted, called out. "Guys, there is a freaken False Hydra is. We are leaving."
Player began describing literally everything about False Hydra, in character, and spoiling the entire mystery of this location.
Literally eight sessions of build up and three sessions of planned content completely went to waste because of a lone standing mirror standing in the middle of the and a metagaming idiot.
Probably an unpopular opinion but i applaud the metagamer here. False Hydras are just too often a cheap way to mindscrew the players and take agency away from them. Ok for an experienced group who you know well but not a nice thing to pull on new players
@@Michaeljack81sk I suppose I should explain a little further.
These new players aren't new to Roleplaying, just new to the game. The group of us have been roleplaying on World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online for years now, and the Quarantine had given us enough time to actually atart up a a full blown campaign. We've founded large RP guilds on both games.
We've had plotlines on World of Warcraft with Mind Altering Mushroom Spores and plots in ESO with Memory Erasing Skooma called Blue Skooma.
I, however, still completely understand your point of view and respect it. False Hydras are rather delicate matter, and are not meant to be used lightly. The idea behind it was that the players were forming a guild, and while the renown of the guild was spread throughout the country, the guild never increased pass the initial 5 players.
The newer players were already suspecting something was up as I wasn't secretive or cryptic that something unusual was happening in the events leading up to the reveal as we've known each other for so long. It was only a matter of time before they likely made the connections.
In short, if they were new to Roleplay in general, I wouldn't have used the False Hydra, but as we've known each other for years, I decided it was probably the only time I would have been able to use one.
@@Eddiember Ahh, sorry for the misunderstanding. I assumed these were first time roleplayers
So what was he supposed to do, pretend that you tricked him?
@@MaRaX93 Clearly you do not understand the concept of Metagaming and are completely in favor for people ruining the experience and mystery for everyone else at the table.
Your friends must of loved you when you spoiled the end of Endgame for them.
Some of these go beyond meta gaming and are just straight up _being terrible people_
These stories make me feel so lucky to have my D&D group where the DM can accidentally reveal that our employer is a dragon that's going to try to kill us eventually and our characters just go on like normal.
God I hate metagaming, one time...I had this gm who misused a mind reading spell and used that as justification to metagame...this was pathfinder...(Infinite uses of detect thoughts and kept using it until the bbeg knew exactly what our plan was) I called him out on the issue and he then promptly said the one phrase that all horrible gms say "I'm the gm, I do whatever I want"
Can gm or dm metagame?
To a certain degree they do if they plan encounters to make difficult fights by targeting the weaknesses of the party
Or if they decide to play with their backstories
@Arlesmon that's the thing, he only really pulls this stunt on me and never anyone else....He spammed the heal spell every time I get close to finishing the foe off, using the spell "Freedom of movement" stating that it ignores being stunned. Freedom of movement in the Pathfinder system states that it stops effects that prevent movement and not prevents actions. The character at the time utilized a stun lock crit combo.
Can’t wait to get into my first DND game, life is just so busy!
Have fun, you the dm or the player
Wish you luck and don’t die
It will be completely worth it. Welcome to the club!
Is your name perhaps “Chris” or “kadie” or “Alec”
Hope you get into them, I finally got around and it’s a blast!
Morale of the story: don't metagame, it's not fun
While generally true, its not always true. Sometimes the other players, or the GM, need a hand and either don't know they do or don't know how to ask for help. The rule of thumb should be to ask yourself "Is this going to make the game a better time for most, if not all, players involved?" and if your already asking your self this and still causing problems then your in the wrong group.
The succubus one is unfortunately in line. Succubi/incubi can jaunt over to the ethereal plane as an action. That wasn't metagaming, but it IS unfortunate that the DM did them dirty like that at every turn.
Nope. You cannot take any other action other than making an opposed grapple check when you are pinned. This includes spells or spell-like abilities. Ethereal Jaunt would not have worked.
@@_motho_ Are you certain about this one? I checked the grappler feat and the restrained condition and there's nothing about being unable to take any other action.
I've heard of house ruling that you can't cast spells with somatic components while locked in hancuffs, but other than that, I'm pretty sure you can take other actions like dodge and abilities that take an action to activate that don't require your hands.
I was also assuming it was 5e.
I had a DM in a guild I was running on tabletop simulator and discord. I was playing his first DM session and I explained clearly the rules and that our policy is the DM is a narrator, players tell the story (line of thought to encourage letting players derail your "plans"). We ran into a vampire and it was running away to tell the other vampires. The wizard successfully used Tasha's Hideous Laughter, but rather than stop her in the her tracks... The DM decided she fell down the staircase and rolled to the bottom escaping. During this whole time she was falling down the stairs we had no actions, no movement, no reactions, nothing to do but let it happen. That was the first incident. The second was the vampire boss fight in which we had immobilized him and the vampire was going to lose. He somehow, without explanation, turned into mist (which we had prevented him from doing) and escaped.
I reprimanded the DM after the session saying the players aren't here to live out your fantasy and your stories. You provide a world for the players to tell their own story, and not to force players to stay on a linear path.
Well, of course that didn't stick. Two following sessions he did similar things before we decided he has a pathological need for things to go his way, and we banned him from being a DM. He had three strikes and blew every one ignoring all advice.
how do you ban someone else from being a dm? They do all the work.
@@maltt8715 I am the head DM in a guild that ran one-shots mostly and a core campaign. Have you heard of discord west march style guilds? You need some consistency and general rules if you want characters to be transferable between sessions with different DMs. Its a different way to play DnD, almost MMO-like, and a lot of people love it.
I'm so happy there is a part 2
Same
I am, but I'm not. I love to hear it, but I hate it happened.
Lod1989 best story was where there was a character made tpk. That dm stinks and would hate to play with him
I am so happy that you are happy
[sighs] I'm guilty of it. There was an RP I was in where I once created a character purely to save other people's characters. I would wait for someone to get in way over their head in their sessions, as in, on the verge of death in RP, and then ask if I could join their session. My character would then pop in to save them with no other explanation other than he just showed up. I called this character Bob, Bat-Bob, because he acted like Batman. The GM eventually put me and another character into a debatably unwinnable fight when we showed up to save a third player... and Bat-Bob died. Yeah, we failed a lot of perception rolls on this encounter, but the GM in question never ever balanced encounters on the fly so we died.
I've...never heard of undead being immune to fire.
In fact, I've heard of the opposite.
Right right, same here..
In D&D undead immunties and resistances vary quite heavily from the creature it was before death and how it become undead
@@newsance2u well yeah I get that many specific creature would be immune to fire if they became undead after they already had the immunity. But it was a troll. Our run of the mill trolls are not immune to fire, or anything else for that matter, so making them undead wouldn't grant fire immunity as far as I know.
Though, the DM in the situation could have made a homebrewed troll that was immune to things, and maybe undead in that campaign are immune to fire. 🤷🏻♀️
I’ve only DMed one campaign, and I’ve already had two separate players look up and announce the random tables, effects and charge rules (the crumbling to dust bit) of the Wand of Wonder.
see this isn't really meta-gaming depending on how they came by the item, if they found it randomly, have no arcane knowledge what-so-ever and don't have identify? then yes, but basically any other situation where theres plausibility of working out or knowing it, or identify then yea no they know it's effects and they'd probs know them from attuning to it aswell
"Hello my sparking, glimmering, spirits of infinite cosmic wonder..."
Me, feelin' like a potato: :> ♥
Edit: That guy, praying to the Chaos God Tzeentch: *accidentally mispronounces name*
The True Chaos God Tzeentach: "Hey hey people, Sseth here."
Ah, another patron of the Merchant Guild I see. :3
reminds me of a scene in a fantasy novel: a wizard tries to summon an Imp named Talkarsh, and winds up with a HUGE demon named Thalkarsh...
Tzeentch: pronounced, "zee-ch" or "zeen-ch".
Or some people pronounce it "heresy".
I like to pronunce it "hey hey people, sth here"
It is written T Z EE N CH but actually you pronounce it BIG FU**ING HERETIC
Its pronounced: tit-nits
@@hullumarko no that is slaanesh
Can we all agree Khorne is the best chaos god? Blood for the blood god anyone?
Oh yes another video! Just want to say you're amazing! Keep up the great work!
A good way to advoid meta gaming in a homebrew campaign is ether make the bad guy someone part of the party or do it online with no one that could look at your notes
It was 3.5, and I was playing a spellthief who had a magic eye. This was a big secret from the rest of the party because certain types of magic were illegal (the players did know he had an eye, but most were good about playing as if they didn't) and he didn't want to be turned over to the guard. The thing is, even my character didn't fully understand what his eye could do and was still learning. He got into a 'disagreement' with the paladin and let's say they didn't get along. Later on in the campaign, the paladin dies so that player made a new character. An artificer. We enter a vampire's fort where his new character is found and FIRST thing he does is cast 'Detect Magic' on my character and said out loud, "Hey, you with the magic eye...." Everything that the DM had been planning about my character to be revealed to me and the rest of the party was ruined in that scene.
As someone who is currently playing a 3.5 Artificer, yeah, that was bull. Firstly, Artificers don't even get Detect Magic, as the spell. Sure, we have a class feature that works identically to it, but it requires a special knowledge check and can only even be attempted if the Artificer holds the item for one minute. Then you have to pass a DC 15 artificer knowledge check, with a bonus equal to your Intelligence mod plus your artificer level. And even THEN, you can only tell if the item is magical or not, it does not reveal what type of magic it is or even what the item does. You also cannot take 10 or 20 on this check, you must roll it every single time. Moreover, if you fail the check, you can never attempt it again with that particular object.
In order for him to tell what your magic eye did, he'd have to either cast Identify on the item, which Artificers do get, or have an Artificer's Monocle (1500gp), which allows an artificer, or anyone with Detect Magic and at least 5 ranks in Knowledge (arcana), spend an additional minute inspecting the item. Should they do this, then they learn the abilities of the item as if they'd just cast Identify. Keep in mind, however, for an artificer, this requires the artificer to have passed the DC 15 artificer knowledge check earlier. If they failed that check, the Artificer's Monocle doesn't function.
I was playing one game as the rouge and every chest we find I'm saying "It's trapped! It's a mimic!" I go to open a door... it's a mimic.
My favorite form of checking for mimics is any spell/cantrip that specifically targets a creature, if it's just a regular chest it won't work, it's like in tf2 being the pyro just giving everyone a cursory flamethrower blast to make sure they're not a spy
That's smart
@@scribblerstudios9895 Though I would say always ask your dm first because that's one of those things that could be seen as metagaming even if it really isn't, for example if I use acid splash targeting a chest if it's just a normal chest the spell should fail because the chest is an invalid target, then again your dm may just rule that you couldn't target the chest in the first place regardless, Because a Chest is an object, not a creature.
In retrospect the better way to check for mimics is not to use a cantrip that only effects creatures, but one that only effects objects, for example "You make a color, a small mark, or a symbol appear on an object or a surface for 1 hour." From the Prestidigitation cantrip. If it's a normal object it will be marked as described, but if it's a mimic it wouldn't be marked, as a mimic is a creature, not an object.
@@joshuahendershot196 noooted
High level evocation wizard finally learned a conjure spell. Spent five minutes on his turn trying to decide what to summon. When we asked what the hold up was he stated (please do the annoying voice where you sort of have to chew on your tongue to get the annoying just right) "Hold on, I'm still looking through all the stat blocks to find a creature with a high enough wisdom modifier to make the save."
what was the player's wisdom modifier?
I mean... I get that this would be annoying, but I'm on the fence about this one. If the PC knows what they're summoning a creature for and knows they need high wisdom or "resistance to psychic effects" or whatever the save in question was, then wouldn't they choose a summon that matched the situation? I mean if they know those creatures then that's fair. I would assume a druid is allowed to look through stat blocks of creatures for wildshape, right? Kind of new to D&D, so if this is a cardinal sin I apologise.
@@samjeffrees "if they know those creatures" yeah, in game, makes sense. At that point, the main annoyance is that the player is holding up the game by not knowing what they want to do.
"the wizard waste his turn standing there considering what to summon, who's next?"
@@samjeffrees He looked up the stats of what we were fighting, & took up all our time searching for something his PC had very little to no knowledge there of.
Well, I got reminded of a series of bad events with me. I have a bad habit of making jokes, like "wouldn't this be just the sort of thing an illuminati faction would use as a base" well on multiple occasions I was right and the DM just madly redid his notes while cursing me out
Worst metagaming for me so far was the cleric and wizard taking my cursed sword from me. I intentionally bought it because it seemed like something my crazy old monk would do without realizing it, and it was legitimately funny for him to switch from blasting elemental powers and whacking people in the shins with his walking stick to suddenly going barbarian with the sword because he took 1 point of damage.
I can understand the characters wanting to take it from me, but it wasn't roleplayed with any real effort. And their reasons were completely crap, including "if someone just bumps into him he's going to go on a rampage" even though that isn't how getting pushed works and our dm isn't a jerk.
Depending on how it was played, it makes sense, sadly. "Cursed" items are potentially detrimental to the party. So, if they knew it were cursed, then it stands to reason they wouldn't let you keep it.
How well it's roleplayed seems kinda arbitrary to complain about considering that not everyone is an immaculate roleplayer
@@mr.alpaca2663 they had zero in character reason, and only actually knew it was cursed because I was courteous enough to let them know about it so to avoid any accidents.
Wait... they just TOOK it? IDK, but that seems like stealing to me... My monk would beat the shit out of them for stealing his possessions, and then remain coldly indifferent to them for a LOOOONG time unles they explained with a valid reason AND compensated him. (I don't care if its cursed. It is MINE by right. And i am willing and able to bear this burden.)
@@metatron76 I left out some details, but I wasn't upset at how they went about doing it because it was a humor focused character and they roled with how I played him to get the sword away from him. So that was fine.
What upset me was that they didn't know in character that it was cursed.
The story about the party and the mimic makes me laugh. I had a dungeon with a bunch of enchanted archways that did different things to the characters who walked through them. XD The players never felt safe walking through an archway again without some serious checks and examinations.
I lay out the map (fork in the road, forest) ask for passive perception. Everyone passes, so I place the markers for two people. To which one guy shouts excitedly, “It’s an Ambush!” The try to set up an ambush for my planned ambush, but fail the second passive perception. Never saw kobolds of unusual size coming.
The thing about mimics and monsters in general, though? DM's discretion. What is legit or not is entirely up to the DM. I've read about one instance of an entire manor being a giant mimic, as well as baby mimics taking the form of bottles, chairs, scrolls, and coins. That instance with the metagaming player remarking about mimic doors could have either been brushed off or punished fairly easily.
"In the master bedroom you find a small iron box full of gold coins."
"I take them!"
(Several weeks later)
"I'll buy the potion of greater healing."
"As you hand over the coins for the potion- roll for initiative."
"Wait, what?!"
"You remember that iron box full of gold you took coins from in the nobleman's house? The gold you took without question even though you KNEW there were several mimics inside? They were all dwarf-breed mimics. They've since consumed the gold in your wallet and made more of themselves. Now roll to see who's going first: you or the coin-mimic swarm trying to devour your hand."
8:00 BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL!
BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY!
DnD is just full of fun people it seems. I see so many stories of DMs and players being complete pricks I sometimes wonder why I want to get into this hobby so badly. It just seems like I am guaranteed to come across a pedo/rapist sociopath that insists on me being ok with their ridiculous behavior I also expect the aforementioned garbage excuse for a human would get mad when my lawful anything actively tries to get their mary sue psychopath killed.
Im curious and worried. Is it metagaming for a character I have to have the ultimate goal of creating a powerful magical item that doesn't yet exist in our world, and would be perfect for him, stat-wise? Like, if it makes sense for his character to make such an item and is something I started out as a goal of his, but it's inarguably powergaming to want it?
I wouldn't consider it metagaming as there have been rules in place for creating wondrous and magical Items. hell in 3.5 if you wanted to enchant something to have an ability score improvement, it listed the exact spell you need to put that effect on. 5e as far as i know is limited in the rules for creating these items but hey, work with your DM. Also factor in the you could easily justify it in-game, wizards want something to increase their intellect? makes sense. You also mentioned it being a goal right? Well hey that's an entire story arc of you getting strong enough to make it. It is not metagaming to want to optimize your character, including magic items.
And actually, I just looked up the spells. To add ability score improvements, you just need to know one of the 6 spells that increase that score, so Fox's Cunning increases INT, well to make a Headband of Intellect you need to know that spell. Also you spend gold AND exp to make the object in addition to needing the feat to create the object. Now 5e has a different leveling and feat system and I honestly wish we'd get a book or two for 5e with full magic item creation rules to clear it up.
@@Flameboythest well there's some basic rukes in xanifar's. It says the cost and time it takes to make an item based on rarity, and says that you may have to go questing for the right materials
@@mindlessscientist3772 Ah, I see. But you've also somewhat answered your question there, it's not metagaming if you need to work in-game to get the object you want.
i HAVE a player who's a really good guy and he's got a lot of annoying and negative querks to him but...we can't boot him because he's a necessary evil. RPs well, comes up with insane builds, gets really into character, and actually tries to play even if he's literally screaming in our ears over discord. his negatives? screams in our ears, is unreliable when it comes to scheduling, will make excuses and leave call when things dont go his way, gets pissy because of DIGITAL DICE KARMA, makes builds that nuke things, burns his resources in one turn on a tiny enemy, tries to get other players to follow his instructions n suggestions, min/maxes like a mofo, is an insane spotlight hogger, and is not against PVP. he also likes to number crunch and understand things. so during encounters he'll read the creatures bio and spoil their traits out of "shock".
currently we're going through the agonizingly slow process of getting through a chapter-finale dungeon. this big pandemic has everyone stressed and tired. wizard tries to open a door that has a specific lock using 'knock'. doesn't work. so they....burn a hole through a wooden door to reveal the butt of a massive metallic golem. immediately he starts yelling, in our ears, to the spell casters that fire will heal it and to use other methods. wizard (a player i greatly enjoy DMing for) ignores him entirely and coaxes the golem out. my good friend and fellow DM is in call listening to this guy meta game hardcore about this golem. politely steps in when the stress has overtaken me, and changes how the golem works.
we havent played since mid July due to schedules and the need for a break. i, personally, do NOT want to kill or hurt the party but...the cleric is currently dying because SOMEONE meta-gamed thus turning the danger level up to 11. thanks dude...please knock it the fuck off with the meta gaming. at least, when i look things up, i keep it to myself and play the game via character knowledge. i dont ruin the experience.
I may not know your relationship with "Meta McMikescreamer" but he sounds like he really should get the boot if he is ruining everyone else's fun. He sounds like a total That Guy: Spotlight hog, main character syndrome, meta gamer.
@@starkiller1289 our other DM, who's his fiancé, actually booted him from a DIFFERENT campaign because he continuously and conveniently had migraines on gameday n was more than happy to cuss out the barbarian (my character who died off camera. it actually felt like he was cussing ME out) just because we told him to stop complaining about something so petty. he could only join if he apologized.
again he really is a good person and i enjoy playing VIDEO GAMES with him and chatting with him when things are slow but it's not fun playing TTRPGs with him around. we've all decided that he's not joining anymore of my campaigns unless it's absolutely necessary.
@@hellhounds20 Fair enough some people just aren't for TTRPGs yet are fine anywhere else.
The only thing I don't get is how is this guy a "necessary" evil rather than just, you know, evil? Sounds like an absolute nightmare to have around, even if he doesn't behave like that outside of D&D.
I also have a friend who I think is a great guy, but a lousy DM. I literally stopped attending his games because I'd end up stop being friends with him, it was that bad. He checked pretty much every box of being a bad DM. Right now he's a player in the group I DM for and is still a bit problematic as a player, but pretty manageable overall.
Very mild meta, and partially an accident, and partially me using that info, plus a bit of slapstick comedy.
Playing LMoP. DM is describing the interior of interior of an abandoned house. During which, he accidentally reads "'Under the floorboards, is a chest that contains-' Whoops! Wasn't supposed to read that part."
Since it was my turn, I enter the house, and I go, "Um, what's that check one uses to look for things?" (I was a newbie then.)
"Investigation."
"Okay." (Rolls the dice.) "That good enough?"
"You find a loose floorboard."
I pull up the chest, get some money. Then -
"A twig blight swings its claws at you" (Rolls d20) "Does a 17 hit?"
(Dragonbloodline sorcerer with like 15 for the AC) "Yes."
(Rolls a d4.) "5 points of damage."
"Scratched by Groot." I muttered. (Had Inspiring Leadership, so no actual damage, but it was annoying.)
What the DM could've done, when he realized he wasn't supposed to read that part: "OR AT LEAST, YOU HEAR A VOICE, SAYING THOSE WORDS."
When you fuck up, improvise! If the encounter's been spoiled, make a new encounter out of it.
Worst metagaming I've seen was in VTM: guy who left the group returns with a Malkavian televangelist, who believed he was truly a prophet of god.
We were on a mission to shut down a massive ring of holy ground. The reverend, who is new to town, refuses to cross it, playing directly against the delusion he chose when rolling his character.
To be fair the second worst was when I manipulated him into posing as me to meet up with an angry, mind controlling inquisitor who wanted me to "answer some questions."
I didn't know he had the ability to shapeshift in character so I pumped the information from him to justify the metagamy plan in game.
7:51 I just imagined a bunch of priests chanting the theme to Bill Nye as a ressurection spell.
I too have dealt with a DM that meta-gamed. I built an artificer, an amoral Tony Stark/David Xanatos type who was a business man first and an adventurer second. Variant human, started with the linguist feat. He spoke Common, Draconic, Dwarves, Elvish, Orcish, and even Giant. Any language he thought would help him secure a deal, or help him in his travels.
DM ran Storm King's Thunder, my artificer talked us out of combat with a group of orcs that were apparently on the run from some wood elves. Ended up giving them shelter, had saved the survivors of an attack on a city (early game stuff), and then the elves came. Talked the elves down too, because they were very hostile right away. Had secretly agreed to smuggle the orcs out of the city in the carts we'd acquired, which we were also using to get the displaced townsfolk put of the city. All going smooth, may have a small orc tribe remnant to call in a favor with later for down-time stuff (hired muscle for business ventures and such, you know?)
The elves: "Oh, and leave your carts."
That's the most recent example, but he does that all the time. Strahd is absolutely all knowing and all powerful so no matter what you do during Curse of Strahd, he knows and sends everything he's got at you (to be fair, we kept blowing up everything he sent at us). Make a deal with some orcs? They were in conflict with a group that is bigger, badder, and you will die if you resist them. You do anything outside the specific adventure path? You will get tied to those tracks.
Worst thing was that as a player, he was the opposite. He did everything he could to break the game. Joke was on him during a puzzle in ToA that basically tells the person running the game that there is no way around doing the puzzle the way it is meant to be done (and I was running that game, and didn't stop him from trying to brute force it. It just couldn't succeed).
Rant done
My first campaign. Was a open end kind of run round. Me (paladin, warlock) and my party come to a town. And our artificer decides to shoot at an old man. The old man dodges it entirely, i grow fond of a dark elf in the town square. So naturally seducion. Success. Later found out the entire town was dragons impersonating humans. And now im smitten to a black dragoness.
Did your character survive that relationship?
I have a player in my group that's constantly questioning the DM, double checks everything the other players try to do (even trying to overrule the DM if he disagrees), and at level 4 has the ability to re-roll multiple times a day on top of having +12 to initiative.
Undead used to be immune to fire? How? Why? What?
If your fires can't destroy bones, you're using fireball wrong.
I once DMed for other DMs who had burned out and wanted to be PCs. The problem was they never turned off their DM brains. Case and point, one PC had to make a long jump check of 20ft. They knew the DC from the book by heart.
Great job again
"Golden love-child of consciousness and carbon." 11:48
That sounded so lovely.
My first time DMing, it was a group of friends people I new through assocation. I was running the Essential Kit for a group of 5 PCs. We met as a group IRL for the first time at game story private room and they picked the quest to talk to the old lady in the windmill. I begin to describe a large creature banging on the door of the windmill looking like a lion with wings. A couple minutes later, one player lays his copy of the monster manual and starts reading the stats of the manticore. What I learned from that point is to be comfortable tweaking the stats of certain monsters to keep PCs on their toes. For this one, I described that there were large claw marks on the side of the Manticore that they could investigate. That player never came back.
i had an experience with that same quest. the party negotiated with the manticore to get it to leave peacefully but a player who had thoroughly read it before shot it in the back and only justified it by exclaiming that it would return later in the adventure if spared. very subtle
Two things:
1) I’m running my first campaign session as DM tomorrow! I’ve done a oneshot but never a campaign, and I have a good idea for a session 1. Any advice to a new DM?
2) When I started playing D&D, I inadvertently did a lot of metagaming. As someone so fascinated by this new thing, I read a lot of rules and asked a lot of clarifying questions. But every time something went against what I expected, I’d ask about it. “Wait, aren’t gelatinous cubes large creatures?” “Doesn’t that spell do THIS and not THAT?” And so on. I was just curious, but eventually my DM called me out for metagaming and I realized, oh shoot, I was metagaming.
Gonna be perfectly honest here... I disagree with the second one, at least from the information I have. Asking how a spell works is figuring out how the game works; just because you read an ability doesn't mean you're sure you read it right, especially as a new player. (Also GM's can misread things too. Some GM's will thank you for pointing out a mistake and play by the rules, some will quickly rule 0 it, and some will get mad at you for metagaming. I like the first two, personally.)
As for GMing advice, I know I'm late to that one, but hey, maybe it will help someone else. Basically, don't be a jerk and make sure everyone including you is having fun to the best of your ability. As for more specific things that I, at least, find important:
1. discuss any house rules with the party beforehand if you can, preferably by posting them for comment and discussion (A. There is a fine line between making a ruling during play on a rule no one can remember, or that would get in the way of the fun, and house ruling that sneak attack ONLY works while hidden because of the word sneak in the name, WHILE THE ROGUE IS TRYING TO SNEAK ATTACK BY FLANKING. B. If a player shows up to your no magic campaign with a wizard or a +3 sword, you want it to be THEIR fault for not reading/listening, not YOURS for not saying there's no magic. C. Players may hate or have valid suggestions for your house rules, and feedback can help you either winnow out players who don't want to be in the campaign you want to run, or fix completely busted house rules that might ruin the game for some, e.g. one time I showed my DM how his house rule combined with the third party he had already allowed would allow me to summon a black hole in every single unoccupied square in the universe every round as a standard action. Of course, that GM loves off the wall goofy minmaxed builds like that, so he encouraged me to make the character, but I found another idea I liked better and made that, but if the GM HADN'T been cool with that option, it would have been really important for him to know that consequence of his house rule before a player hands in a full character sheet for that build.).
2. try to make sure all the players are on the same page with you about what kind of game it will be (A game where everyone has super deep backstories that play out with almost no combat, a game with all combat and no RP where everyone plays hyper-optimized builds, and a campaign where every player is a walking pile of jokes can all be fun, as can pretty much every combo thereof, if everyone wants to play that kind of game, but the player who wants to play in the hyper optimized death campaign, even if he has a super good backstory, isn't going to be happy if there's almost no combat and everyone is constantly RPing, because he spent time and effort making a combat build and wants to use it sometimes, while most of the RP players likely won't be happy during combat if it's too frequent, both because they signed up to RP and because hyper optimized combat death build player will be throwing the encounter balance off like crazy.)
3. When designing encounters, CR is unreliable, don't trust it. For example, in pathfinder, the lesser shadow is CR 1/2, which means it should take less than 1/4 of a level 1 party of 4's daily resources to deal with it. Except it's incorporeal, meaning that you need magic weapons or special abilities that few classes have (or one specific trait) to hit it with weapons, and it takes half damage from magic, and it can go through walls. On top of that it has a 40 foot fly speed, which is faster than the standard PC. All this adds up to: Several party compositions can't even hurt the darn thing, few party compositions can successfully run away from it without someone pulling a heroic sacrifice, and even if your party does have the right classes to beat it, if they already used those resources for something else, e.g. if this is the second or third encounter and the party already used the cleric's channel energy and a spell slot or two, and the wizard's down to 0 or 1 spell slots, they're still screwed. Always verify that a monster IS something YOUR party can handle with the difficulty the monster manual/bestiary says. (And this isn't just a pathfinder problem, the shadow in 5e resists or is immune to damn near everything, possibly everything but radiant, I didn't check too thoroughly, has 16 HP, and hits like a great sword that ALSO reduces your strength by 1d4 and kills you if that reduces your strength to 0. It, too, is CR 1/2.Even with its sunlight weakness, if you're even in a position to take advantage of that, giving it disadvantage to basically everything, it's still a solid threat.)
4. Communication is key. Talk to your players. You want to know whether they're having fun in the campaign you're running BEFORE you or a player you maybe didn't realize was a problem end up in a horror story post/video, and work things out, where possible, if they aren't having fun.
@@chosenonea2992
The rules are ultimately up to the DM. Sometimes the DM would do something neat for flavor or cool plot stuff and I’d ask, out loud in front of the rest of the party, “wait, the spell does that?” Most times the DM would thank me, but one time I forgot about squeezing rules (the gelatinous slime) and inadvertently metagamed.
As for the DM advice, I appreciate it. I’ve already learned that CR is unreliable when my party dealt with a wyvern easily then struggled severely with a black slime. And I discussed house rules at the start to make sure everything was right. Something tells me I’m figuring out the balance a bit better as I go.
I recognized a creature my party was fighting as an otyugh and unintentionally started calling it that, but caught myself part way. I ended up saying something like “otyubleppthshh” to mask my metagaming as pure stupidity. 😎👍
You know what, I'm gonna say the first one isn't that bad, once the player figured out they couldn't use the light spell, they would certainly try a torch next. I don't think the google changed the game all that much
That's wrong. Davemakesnoises is more like the David Hasselhoff of Dungeons and Dragons story time on UA-cam.
I counter-metagame'd by walking into a mimic because my character was under a spell that made her afraid of everything so she was trying get away from a ghast
She died in two crits
Our party split up into 2 groups. Me (a paladin who likes cooking) and my friend (a monk that thinks like a traditional southern u.s man for some reason)went into some fields to start foraging for goods. The other half of the party went into a mine that turned out to be a giant stone creature.
My friend obviously wanted in on the fight, so he wanted to randomly start trying to check up on the other part of the party, eventually trying to meditate to figure out a location. Even if the dm let him, we were miles away from the other part of the party, so he wouldn’t be able to find them
i think the most obvious time someone meta-gamed at my table was when we were fighting a troll, our PC's hadnt encountered one before so didnt know that fire stopped it regenerating, fair enough, we fight this thing, suddenly the storm sorcerer who up to this point had only used ice and lightning spells went 'i cast fireball', we all gave disapproving grunts, the DM let him do it as it wasnt a big deal but we all shouted at him for meta gaming after
For those watching, My name is Dave too, I make no noises.
Hi dave!
Man I can’t believe Dave blessed us with his presence!
I DM online for a group of friends. When a friend of one in the group got to join, i quickly suspected that he was looking up stats in combat. This guy had no previous experience with 5e so I cut him some slack. Then came a mimic which he, after the first attack, said “does this one not grapple?” I then asked how he knew and straight up told me he looked it up. He got a quick note about zero tolerance and ended up not showing up for next session because of “work reasons”
idk y but i just love the random things you say at the beginning of your videos
I'm grateful for a part 2
Playing a 4E Encounters game and had a player, who was also a DM for another encounters game, go through and "pre loot" rooms, doing so after combat had ended and before anyone had a chance to make it to the treasure areas
Your closing made me smile, you have my sub sir
Well my gm got annoyed in our decent into avernus campaign, because we tried to loot a room of dead cultists which was having an orgy and we slaughtered them in the act. so he made the gross sticky bed a mimic, nearly lost my greataxe to it, and tried to set it on fire with oil while a party member was stuck in its belly.
Good times
To be fair, I have tried "beating" my players before, but used the manual's suggested CR for a hard encounter, not a godlike npc that had no business being a guard in a rando ass town when he could be slaying dragons for fun and earning a king's ransom every time.
Playing Champions, a player proudly declared that 'I'm not using (this attack) because I know he has (this defense)!" before even trying it hand having no reason to know ... more egregious in that he actually quoted numbers and game mechanics.
Our DM out right told us "I won't let you guys stuff your clunky party members in a bag of holding because they'll fail the stealth check. He also made them take damage and roll a bunch of con saves for motion sickness, in a pocket dimension
7:59 "BILL! BILL! BILL! BILL"
That one player in the corner sneaking in to break the ritual:
"Bill Nye the.. oh shit i was sneaking...."
Running a pre-made module and had a player open the book up at the table during a session to show me that a NPC was being run wrong. He claimed that he should have been able to get a bonus to his damage rolls because of a class ability that he had. But I had changed the NPC up because I had watched them meta game the previous session.
Ulg. The girlfriend thing really annoys me. I'm playing with my fiance in a current campaign and he accidentally let slip something he did that my character doesn't know and I haven't even told the other player much lest my character. It's possible to play with significant others without making things awful for everyone else.
I did a game of thrones RP once. I got so mad at one guy who was a massive GoT nerd just making plans for future events(that made no sense to do otherwise) that he should have known nothing about to set his character up for big things. And the GM did absolutely nothing to stop it, just shrugged his shoulders and accepted it.
I have also done the bag of devouring trick with a sorcerer too. Did it to a big bad during a mini adventure and the paladin got very uppity about it. "Heroes aren't supposed to do that" "I never offered myself as a hero, just as a problem solver. Problem solved"
Obviously that wasn't good enough and the other player started trying to apprehend then attack my character. I ended up paralysing then bag of devouring them too, the other players didn't get involved since a dead bad guy is a dead bad guy and didn't join in with the outrage of the other player when i killed their character, so they quit and left the game (This was online on Roll20 BTW). The rest of the mini adventure went on without further incident from there.
the god of nat 20s has abandoned me. dave has decided i am unworthy. please tell me what would a good offering be for dave who makes noises. please, dave, i beg you. bless me with your nat 20ness.
For mister "Mimics can be doors" I would have done a fun lil room to single him out in and set a trap that shows two weapons, one being neat and pristine while the other is surrounded by bones and maybe a skeleton reaching for it, the pristine one being a mimic ready to attack and upon leaving the words "Looks can be deceiving, why not leave surprises be for the world" on the wall
The worst meta gaming I've seen is when I was playing AL and our party found a bag of beans that I took and when we hit a town we needed to get into we got in and I gave the guard a bean (not knowing what they did). They planted it and it spawned a few treeants. Our barbarian proceeded to look up the stat block in his monster manual. I was kinda pissed at this guy for a while.
i really just fricking love his strange compliments
They're the worst part of the video.
Aye, I legitimately cringe every time... And yes, I'm aware that word is overused, but it fits.
Last session, our party arrived at the *big city* of the world (we somehow got ourselves hired by the inquisition) and we were taken to one of the best blacksmiths. She apparently was mute and the gus who took us there didn't tell us much either so we didn't really know what would happen, the smith just started measuring everyone's hand. We figure we'd get new weapons and such, so our monk was kind of confused what he'd get out of it. Ranger speaks up about homebrewing brass knuckles like he did in a different game. Turns out that was exactly the surprise the DM had planned for the monk. It was an honest mistake/ attempt to help and our DM wasn't angry, just a little disappointed that the surprise was spoiled.
i just remembered a video: "worst campaign-breaking monsters".
Mimics and Doppelgangers were mentioned.
Had an issue with an old roommate where he'd tell me his character would stop mine from doing stuff before I'd do it such as trying to join a theives guild etc. Not really a fan now of actual role playing because of this.
I remember my friend made a SCP campaign and I know some stuff. At one point we heard some distressed voices from the forest, I played stupid and stayed behind while the others walked in an ambush by SCP 939, they are wolves who can imitate distressed people to lure them. The BBEG was SCP 173, a statue that will snap your neck when you break eye contact. I knew, so I started saying that I blink at the end of the turn. The DM countered by saying that was our bonus action and we could go 2 turn without blinking.
Playing motw, as the celestial archetype. I roll what equates to a critical success with my abilities/the dice to try and convince an npc to consider a non-violent option so we (the party) can question a different evil guy npc and catch our breath after a whirl wind of events. GM looks at me and goes, “I’m so sorry, but characters have Motivations that are critical to their being, and that would go against his goals too much to work.” Like, okay. That’s fair. People in real life wouldn’t be swayed from their position if they really believed it so easily. But on a perfect role, with such good numbers and an ability to influence people, did you have to NEG the entire effort and waste my turn? Even just a little “yes, and” or even “no, but” would have been okay
The everything is against you could be interesting as an ark or a challenge in a normal session, like you fell into someone's trap or a a nightmare version of reality. The whole "why is everything going against me and how do I fix it" could be fun if done correctly
See if I've read a module beforehand I usually just make up for it through sheer roleplay and act EXACTLY as my character would with zero input from me. If I get some treasure I know it's there, it's through believable and understandable circumstances. If I miss a thing due to a bad roll, so what that's how it is and I can't fix that.
There was a campaign where one of the players would try to meta alot so everyone decided to treat it as if his character had dementia so they would just ignore everything he said (he went along with it and made it part of his lore)
When you have a metagamer you ever so unexpectedly replace that particularly important story driven item with certain death so when they throw open the door thinking they're going to lay claim to the prize with little to no effort they aren't prepared for when their character is absorbed by a gelatinous cube and the party that wasn't metagaming finds the item tucked away in a little nook on the other side of the hall.
My ranger character had been arrested for mentioning the dms characters name {a problem in and of itself} , they were thrown in a cell and the other members ran back to inform the dms other character {yes he was playing 2} that id been arrested. As soon as the words were out of their mouths the dm says "you hear a voice behind you" his character who we had not seen in a few in game days suddenly appeared and destroyed their plan to break me out. i was devastated.
One of my first times DMing, someone brought the monster manual. Luckily, most all of the monsters I bring are modified in some way and I make it a point for myself never to name them as they are officially.
For example, instead of a troll it is "A ravenous green giant with rubbery skin and sharp looking claws."
I've done some unfortunate meta-gaming as a DM.
Session 1, PC tried to sneak up on a seer character. I gave the seer +2000 perception... Yeah. I regret it.
it was my first time dming, I've learned since then
This isn't particularly big, but my character was thinking about robing a shop in the town we were in for some potions. The shop keeper was rude and was over charging us a lot, despite us saving the town hero, and getting ready to take on the bandits that had been robing the town and him blind (disrespect is something my character doesn't deal with. Though he's sneaky about how he gets revenge) This was a new campaign, and so far, I'd been the responsible one in our group of adventurers, and had been completely honest with everyone we'd met. So my friend's character had no reason to know, or even suspect I was a thief, and when looking at the potions, that I was doing anything but waiting for everyone else to finish. So when my friend had tried to have his character pick mine up to bring me outside the shop so I couldn't rob the place, it kind of annoyed me as well as our DM who had my tail smack him for a few points of bludgeoning damage.
The hardest thing about D&D is the metagaming we all do, but no one talks about. That, often, you know exactly what you're fighting, how to fight it, and we all do little things that just so happen to work out. Like using slashing weapons against zombies, bludgeoning on rock golems, fire against trolls, etc. Not all of us are walking encyclopedias of the monsters of D&D, but we all know certain things. It's called 'experience'. Unless you're playing for the first time and know nothing, it can be hard to force that meta-knowledge back, like when you play through a module you already know because you've played through it before. Even the best players may try to act like they don't know what's going on, but you still do. You know where the traps are, what monsters are around, where the treasure is, etc.
The best way I've found to fight this meta knowledge is to ask myself "What would my character know?" and run with that. When it comes to monsters, I'll even ask my DM if I can make knowledge checks about the creatures, to see if my character would know anything about them, then play out what she would know. My current character, for example, is a Fighter/Artificer in a Gestalt 3.5 game. So, a lot of her knowledge, I play out as if she learned about it while learning how to fight. Like she knows to use slashing weapons on zombies because it came up in fighter's college, so she'd know many of the more common creatures' physical weaknesses, like golems, zombies, skeletons, and lycanthropes. But a lot of the rarer creatures, she doesn't know about, so I pretend like she's ignorant. And even if I roll well enough that the DM basically hands me a stat block, I'll still pick and choose what she would know. Physical weaknesses? Sure. General toughness and strength? Sure. Spell resistance? She actually wouldn't know anything about that, unless it's super obvious, like a fire mephit being immune to fire or a troll being weak to fire.
Of course, I always clear this with the DM before I do anything. Only one time did I use a weakness without clearing it and it was a total accident. I was fighting lycanthropes and a devil suddenly rushes passed me. Obviously, I was using a silvered weapon against the wererat I just killed, so I used my attack of opportunity on the devil, striking with my silvered longsword. I actually had no idea devils had damage reduction that could be bypassed with a silvered weapon, I was only using my current weapon until my next turn, where I'd switch to my better, non-silvered bastard sword. When the DM accused me of metagaming, I told him I honestly had no idea the devil was weak to silver, I'd just used the silvered weapon because I couldn't switch weapons until my next turn. I actually still switched weapons on my turn, playing as if I didn't know about the silver weakness, and the DM allowed the party to make perception checks to see if we noticed we were doing less damage with non-silvered weapons.
I'm glad my DM is otherwise cool with metagaming, since there's some aspects of it we can't help. I've been playing 3rd edition for nearly 20 years, so there's a lot of things I know just from exposure to a lot of campaigns. It's hard to just turn off our brains and pretend we don't know things, like ghasts being bad news or how to fight some of the more intimidating monsters, like liches. Even things like character building, as some feats are just plain worthless and there's tons of items you'd want to have and some that're just a waste. Even things like what dirty tricks a player should be packing, like my Fighter/Artificer always carries a bag of sand, several empty sacks, several rocks, and several alchemical items, like alchemist's fire, holy water, smokesticks, and sunrods. Not a lot of them, but she always carries a few of each, especially the fire, just in case a troll ever shows up.
We just can't unlearn habits and wisdom. A good DM, and a good player, will recognize these habits and try to address them. You don't have to resist using these things, like being really prepared, but just recognize you're doing it for a reason.
Meta gamming is annoying already. Even more if it’s the DM doing it.
3:02 tbf that sounds like a good solution. Sure you had to wait 1 hour for them, but if they dont have to wait for you then its a win - neutral, not a win - lose.
Tzeentch is pronounced Zeen-ch. He’s the chaos god of plots, knowledge, and deception in Warhammer
I think you mean the god of JUST AS PLANNED.
Ayyyye people of culture here
@@ragnarrahl That too.
I really want to get into DnD, and this video has certainly made me more prepared for that.
Normally for us, after we beat whatever it was, I would look it up later. Mostly because we had already killed the beast, and I was curious of just how over or under leveled our DM made it. But I never really did this when in game, it was more fun that way to try and figure it out. Unless it was that one DM who was just an ass and made everything super hard to 'test' us. Yeah, mmhm? Making your players frustrated to the point they don't like showing up for sessions... sure.
I was playing with a group and the dm put us against a blue dragon. After a few rounds the dragon shot fire from its mouth which surprised everyone. One person started to yell at the dm that the dragon couldn't do that and the dm has to follow the rules and not change stuff. Everyone said if he doesn't like it he can leave. He sat down and got on his phone. The battle continues and the dragon is doing weird things that everyone was trying to figure out. The guy jump up and says its a wizard using illusionary magic. Non of our characters could find that out so we asked how he knew. He said that he looked behind the dm screen without us knowing which ruined the session and then the guy decided that he knew dispel magic (he was a kobold champion fighter at level 3) so he trys to cast it but gets mad when i say he can't and says that if the dm is able to cheat so can he.
He also loved to look up monsters learn there lore in the middle of fighting them.
This guy openly admitted to metagaming but this one stands out. A player in the first D&D group I was a part of played a sorcerer and abused the fact that he was the only player that had teleport and counterspell to abandon the party and complete the political intrigue part of the story. At one point where the rest of the party found the door to the awesome ancient Gith city under the Dwarf city during one of these abandoning My character was sent to go find his. Getting back to the Dwarf city and failing to scry on his character three times I'm at a loss how to find this individual who could literally be anywhere in the world. Which he butts in and says "[His character] is walking down the street calling out [my] name!" I wish I had said something at the time but at that point I was so used to his metagaming that it didn't even phase me at the time. What's worse is that he as a DM later accused me of Metagaming even after I explained to him how I might be suspicious of one of his NPC's who was acting suspicious but another one of my characters knew had done said thing.
I remember during my first ever campaign I was guilty of metagaming, but not intentionally. about halfway through that campaign I realized and changed up my ways. People who know they are metagaming and yet still continue to metagame are among the worst types of players to me