Part of roleplaying is not metagaming. Even if the players suspect something is wrong, you play like you don’t because your character would not know that. At least I find it more fun to play that way. I’m not there to min/max my adventure.
I wouldn’t even akin meta gaming to min-maxing, I’d say its closer to cheating. Not everyone plays the same obviously, and I’m sure some are fine with it. But your character is acting on information they couldn’t possibly know.
I get that it’s not technically cheating at a lot of tables, which is why we call it meta gaming instead, but still… it’s kinda BS.
It’s only cheating if you know for sure what the DM is going to do and they are not just messing with you. This situation could totally just be an actual dog that only the Paladin thinks is a monster due to DM nonsense.
The players may know something is up, but the characters do not, so for the sake of roleplay there should be a conflict between the paladin and the rest of the group.
Do the characters know the stats of the other characters and can they factor that into descissons? Like the wizard is smart, the barbarian is strong and the paladin has high perception, so I trust him.
It depends on a lot of things. Typically you don’t want to use “outside” knowledge. So if you and the group are bullshitting before the session and you learn your paladin has high af perception you’d try not to let that knowledge bleed over into your character. But if it naturally comes up in the game “my paladin keeps passing perception checks that I keep failing” it’d be similar to noticing you have a really perceptive friend and you begin to trust their instincts a bit more and more.
The characters probably shouldn’t know the exact stats, but I mean, some things are reasonably obvious. For example if the barbarian pc turned an enemy into mush with a single hit in the last battle, the character can assume that they’re very strong. And so on.
Not metagaming is harder than it seems, and harder for some than others.
I think if I were going to send out private messages like this, I’d send everyone their own picture. So everyone else gets normal dog picture, Craig gets skinwalker dog picture.
I have onky played with a handful of people who will go help the poor hurt doggo, knowing full well that Craig has seen something different but also knowing their character wouldn’t stop to listen to “that dog is secretly a eldritch horror from ages past and you don’t want to try and help it, your eyes are deceiving you!”
I remember one time when a woman in the player group went to make her move a bit early, then realized she skipped someone, we got the other turn out of the way, and because the person who went first saw something the others didn’t, she changed her move to suddenly being very curious about the thing he saw. Which he had no time to tell anyone about.
So you want to metagame with knowledge you literally can’t have yet that relies on perception? Enjoy your orbs of darkness, I guess.
Although I really like the Anti-Metagaming Dragon idea where it just pops into existence wherever metagaming occurs and devours everything in sight.
Wouldn’t it be obvious that it’s not a dog though. You don’t need to see the image to know it’s not gonna be a dog, given the setup
Part of roleplaying is not metagaming. Even if the players suspect something is wrong, you play like you don’t because your character would not know that. At least I find it more fun to play that way. I’m not there to min/max my adventure.
I wouldn’t even akin meta gaming to min-maxing, I’d say its closer to cheating. Not everyone plays the same obviously, and I’m sure some are fine with it. But your character is acting on information they couldn’t possibly know.
I get that it’s not technically cheating at a lot of tables, which is why we call it meta gaming instead, but still… it’s kinda BS.
It’s only cheating if you know for sure what the DM is going to do and they are not just messing with you. This situation could totally just be an actual dog that only the Paladin thinks is a monster due to DM nonsense.
The players may know something is up, but the characters do not, so for the sake of roleplay there should be a conflict between the paladin and the rest of the group.
Do the characters know the stats of the other characters and can they factor that into descissons? Like the wizard is smart, the barbarian is strong and the paladin has high perception, so I trust him.
It depends on a lot of things. Typically you don’t want to use “outside” knowledge. So if you and the group are bullshitting before the session and you learn your paladin has high af perception you’d try not to let that knowledge bleed over into your character. But if it naturally comes up in the game “my paladin keeps passing perception checks that I keep failing” it’d be similar to noticing you have a really perceptive friend and you begin to trust their instincts a bit more and more.
The characters probably shouldn’t know the exact stats, but I mean, some things are reasonably obvious. For example if the barbarian pc turned an enemy into mush with a single hit in the last battle, the character can assume that they’re very strong. And so on.
Two things:
As a DM, giving players false positives when they try to metagame is HILARIOUS.
Players are generally expected to act “in-character”. D&D isn’t a game about winning or losing, it’s about making a story.
Not metagaming is harder than it seems, and harder for some than others.
I think if I were going to send out private messages like this, I’d send everyone their own picture. So everyone else gets normal dog picture, Craig gets skinwalker dog picture.
I have onky played with a handful of people who will go help the poor hurt doggo, knowing full well that Craig has seen something different but also knowing their character wouldn’t stop to listen to “that dog is secretly a eldritch horror from ages past and you don’t want to try and help it, your eyes are deceiving you!”
I remember one time when a woman in the player group went to make her move a bit early, then realized she skipped someone, we got the other turn out of the way, and because the person who went first saw something the others didn’t, she changed her move to suddenly being very curious about the thing he saw. Which he had no time to tell anyone about.
So you want to metagame with knowledge you literally can’t have yet that relies on perception? Enjoy your orbs of darkness, I guess.
Although I really like the Anti-Metagaming Dragon idea where it just pops into existence wherever metagaming occurs and devours everything in sight.
Part of what’s so funny about RPGs is being able to anticipate things that your character can’t, and so they do stupid things for stupid reasons
The players know that. Their characters don’t.