this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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I feel like sometimes people refuse to "meta game" in a way that is also metagaming, except targeting bad outcomes instead of good.
Like your characters live in a world with trolls. They're not a secret. Choosing to intentionally avoid fire because "that's metagaming" is also metagaming. You're using your out of character knowledge (fire is effective) and then avoiding it.
Usually cleared up with a "hey dm, what are common knowledge and myths about this stuff? or whatever.
Yes. It's so annoying. A lot of good roleplaying is imagining a way your character would have/know something. Obviously you can take it too far, but it's an important skills for keeping the game moving. Like, say one character is obviously falling for some sort of trap by a doppelganger. OOC you either know or are suspicious, but IC you don't. You want to go with them so they aren't alone. But you can't just say that. Say something like, "I'll tag along, I'm getting stir crazy and could go for a walk." It's technically metagaming but it's a very different situation than doing something like telling that character not to go because the other person is suspicious when you genuinely have no reason to think they are.
Another good example of metagaming that so many people view as okay that they don't even view it as metagaming is telling your party OOC how many hit points you have remaining the healer choosing who to heal and with what spells based on the information. Your character doesn't know that number. A lot of times all you really know IC is if someone has less than half of their hit points remaining and a vague idea that barbarians can take more hits than wizards.
Obviously there are scenarios where this doesn't hold but I find in general that metagaming which benefits everyone, doesn't completely ruin encounters, and is done with an excuse that your character would actually reasonably do is typically okay.
Another example. I remember in one game we were trying to open a creaky rusty door quietly. Someone asked if anyone had oil. We all checked our inventory and nobody did. He explained that my character in heavy armor would likely have some because regular maintenance of it would require that. Which seemed fine. The DM agreed. So my character hands his character some oil.
I quite like this when characters are in relatively safe spaces, cities and the like, especially in sci fi settings with little or no magic, so they leave their laser proof armour and serious guns behind and have only a pistol and effectively 1 hit point against serious weapons.
Makes the trap triggering exciting. Hope your mind state backup is recent in case of a couple of bad rolls
"Dude, you took a big hit, How're you feelin'?"
"On a scale of 1 to 57, I'd say I'm about a 35"
It's funny. I know a lot of players who think like you, but I and many others go in the completely opposite direction. The tension in my combat encounters has increased significantly since my group and I started to only give vague health info. Suddenly, it's a surprise agin when a character goes down and you can almost feel the tension every round when another hidden death save is rolled!
Combat damage is random and it's still dramatic and exciting knowing everyone's health. I think hiding death saves is better than hiding health though. Because in reality everyone would act super urgently seeing a friend collapse. When I'm DMing I explicitly say when things are bloodied (less than ½) and double bloodied (less than ¼) in addition to qualitative explanations.
I think there are numbers worth hiding, I just don't think character health is one. Like I think stealth rolls should be hidden. You shouldn't have an idea that you're not hiding well.
I don't have the players actually make the stealth roll until something opposes it. They're doing the best they can. Here comes the guard. Roll, please.
That's how I did it when I DMed. On the off chance they need to make a check and I don't want to alert them I just use passive or roll for them.
Eh, I know nothing about how to handle most dangerous animals, even ones that live in my area; I'd imagine that even in a world with trolls, regular people wouldn't know anything about them.
If your character is a seasoned adventurer or monster enthusiast, sure, light it up, but if your backstory places you as the village baker for most of your life, running in with alchemist's fire at the ready seems a bit strange.
Ultimately I'd consider it to be on the GM's shoulders - if the only way your group is going to survive the troll encounter is with fire, then put an NPC in the local tavern who warms newcomers of a troll in the area, recommending that they have a lit torch at the ready.
You have other people to manage wildlife, often times, and are probably not likely to encounter said animals. If you are then you know to carry bear spray, for example.
Now imagine you’re in a world where bandits on the road are threat you actually have to consider. Trolls might live down the road and your town sends out memos saying “if you see these signs, run, and if you absolutely must then fire is the only thing that will be effective.” It’s perfectly plausible, you just need to be the littlest bit creative/steal stuff like wildlife advisories from the real world.
You don’t even need an NPC. My first character was a sorceror who didn’t know what he could cast but his will, muscle-memory, and being in certain situations brought it out of him. Any “puzzle fight” should have enough room for players/characters to realize there’s a problem and the discover the solution. You can’t plan ahead, maybe, but there’s no reason you can’t have one roleplay turn and then “get lucky” choosing a fire spell next to see what happens.
Trolls only come out at night. As a city dweller who doesn't go out at night you may only know children's stories about how if you go out at night you may be eaten by a troll. If your monster lore roll is good enough, maybe you heard the story where the guard killed the troll with burning pitch when the child escaped back though the gate and the troll got too close to the city wall
Buddy we’re playing adventurers who are by their nature main characters. We can’t Dues-ex everything but we can know things. Also who’s to say we’re city dwellers? Both my last characters lived well outside city limits. And when you live in a world with actual trolls you don’t think their children’s stories would have key information like that? How many of our own children’s stories include warnings? How many myths and legends? Hell the bible likely said to not eat pig because it made people sick and everyone thought it was some will of god shit so they stayed away.
If I made a player roll for it, say their character really probably wouldn’t know, then I’d make that shit a DC 5. Like, “everyone else knows it but you missed that lesson, sorry.”
Making characters stupid for “realism” based in a misunderstanding of how either world works is just boring for nothing.
A lot of systems include character backgrounds. I'd definitely use your background to work out whether you might know stuff. In d&d I'd definitely look at how many ranks you have/whether you have proficiency in relevant skills
They do include them, but I only use backgrounds as ways to pad out the mechanics and that choice is heavily influenced by the background I’ve already created. My current character is using the custom option because none of the backgrounds really fit.
Debatable. You definitely know a Tigers greatest weakness, and a bears greatest weakness even if you don't know how to use them. >!Bullets!<
Id say that we don't know those things now because we live in modern technological times where you don't have to know those things to survive. If this was the middle ages and you were an adventuring type who could hold their own out in the wilds, you would almost definitely know all of those things.
Most people know about sucking venom from a snakebite, even if they're not clear on details. They also know you probably don't want to wave a red cape in front of a bull.
That will kill you if you're bitten by an Australian snake. For Australian snakes you need a compressive bandage long enough to bandage the entire limb that got bitten, and you need to bandage it tight, starting close to the trunk and working towards the foot (or hand if you were stupid enough to put your hand near a snake), then back up. Two layers of bandage. Then the casualty needs to relax as well as they can while their companion goes to the nearest phone signal and calls for emergency transport.
If you want to avoid all that hassle, make sure you see the snake so you can stop 3 or so metres away and it will move away - it doesn't want to mess with you, you're big and scary. It'll only bite you if you corner it or step on it, or get too close for it to feel like it can safely escape
But that advice might get you killed in India, their snakes might attack you if you stop near them, perhaps you should run away. I'm not sure though, I don't live near those snakes
And what I do know is about land snakes in the southern Australian states. I don't know much about sea snakes up north, nor the tropical snakes, aside from the bandaging which is snakebite first aid all over Australia
Those are both great examples of why a character might try to throw anti-troll paste (tar) at trolls.
spoiler
A red cape doesn't mean anything different than a black cape to a bull, and sucking venom from a snakebite isn't a thing outside of movies. It won't hurt, but it won't do much good either. One myth that will cause damage is putting ice on a pit viper bite though, so remember to avoid doing that.Huh, TIL on the snakebite thing. I was pulling that from an old boy scout manual, just remember something about cutting the wound site first.
The red of the cape setting off a bull is a myth, sure; but you still don't want to wave any capes around in front of a pissed off bull! I'll stand by how I phrased that claim :p
Funny that you use those examples, since they're both wrong. If anything, we should be running at the trolls with stinky socks because someone wanted to sound smart at a bar once and made up a factoid that spread like wildfire among the common folk.
The red is done for dramatic effect in rodeos; it's movement they react to. Especially if they're feeling agitated, as in a rodeo.
Yeah, after they stick them with banderillas to scare and anger them into aggression. Without all the prep work to weaken and anger the bull, the cape wouldn't provoke it at all.
Counterpoint, fire was historically used to drive away predators and is commonly depicted in movies as well. A random townsfolk may not know all the particulars, but put fire between the bad thing and yourself is a reasonable strategy for most monsters. It becomes a metagaming problem if it's only done against monsters that don't resist fire.
Oh, sure, you could absolutely make a case for your character accidentally stumbling on the right answer simply because fire is a good weapon, and a good roleplayer could use that to their advantage to metagame a bit more acceptably, but there's a difference between that and just automatically grabbing fire stuff because you the player know it's good against trolls.
Yeah, this is the way.
We just fought a Troll in a Pathfinder session I was in. I'm playing an Athamaru (fish person) new to dry land, so I don't have a ton of knowledge about stuff like fire. But the Druid hitting it with a fire spell, and the GM describing the way the Troll reacts is enough to naturally gain that knowledge on the spot. There are all kinds of reasons a character might not know even common monster weaknesses.
I think doing this kind of metagaming is important, because it gives opportunities for specific characters to stand out. If you have a party member with monster knowledge, it's cooler for them to yell a warning, than it is for everyone to just act like they already know