>If you want to play let’s pretend with dice, that’s fine. just be honest about the kind of game that you’re running from the get go so I know not to join your table. That is the game of DnD, Pathfinder, or really any other TTRPG. What it sounds like you want is war games. Go play that. Just because the only parts of the books you've bothered to read/remember are combat rules, does not make that the majority of the books. I feel like video games calling themselves RPGs have ruined entire swaths of people to what an RPG means. These are games about telling a story, not who can do the most damage. You sound like an awful person to have at the table. You aren't "being punished for being good at the game", I'd argue you actually aren't good at the game because you only care about or focus on one aspect of the game and ignore the rest of it. Stop looking at TTRPGs as video games, as a means to make big numbers go brrrrr, and (re-)read the core rulebook. You'll find a lot more of it than you are suggesting has nothing to do with combat when you aren't looking at it through a lens of "how to combat".

The person you're replying too explicitly said that not playing the game the way they do is fine, yet you're here telling them that they're playing it wrong and should play something else. That is psycho shit. Just don't play with each other.

> Metagaming is fine, actually. To some degree, this is why Knowledge Checks exist. If you're going to Troll Canyon and you make your Know(Local) check to have an idea about what a troll is and does and you get a high enough roll, you know. If you don't, maybe you forgot. Maybe trolls aren't common to your neck of the woods. Roleplay your reasons. That said, I believe DMs reserve the right to mix it up a bit. As an anecdote, I had a friend play in a game in which they were hunting a White Wyrm in the glaciers of the north. The experienced players, knowing that White Dragons breath frost, fully stocked up and pre-buffed with anti-cold gear. When they arrived, they positioned themselves on a large ice-flow and pushed off towards the mouth of the cave. But the cracking of the ice awoke the dragon. Dragon came flying out, spotted the players, and immediately engulfed them in a plume of fire. The ice flow melted, the party floundered in the freezing water, and two of them died to a happy dragon who'd just been offered an easy meal. The players were initially upset, but the DM tisk-tisked. "Everyone knows that dragons breath fire". > If you want to play let’s pretend with dice, that’s fine. just be honest about the kind of game that you’re running from the get go so I know not to join your table. If you're not playing "Let's Pretend" with dice, I'm not sure what kind of D&D game you're actually playing. A dumb-as-rocks barbarian should presumably see the troll as some big meat sack to be repeatedly bludgeoned into a fine paste. And that may possibly work, at least to the degree that the threat is neutralized for the purposes of the combat. A savvy Bard probably has a song or two about the proper remedy for persistent trolls - and a clever player might even dash off a cute little poem or song to help the rest of the party recall. The dice keep the game spicy, but you shouldn't be shy about leaning into the cinematics of the situation.

> So arbitrarily, I’m not allowed to use fire damage on the trolls until some npc tells me that trolls are weak to fire? You say arbitrarily but it's not arbitrary. It is dependant on the situation. If trolls aren't super common and your characters have never dealt with a troll? It makes zero sense that you would know that they're weak to fire damage. Question. Do you know how to escape a car that's upside down and submerged in water? Because if you don't, there are a lot of things that are going to get you killed due to not being aware of what the issue is. Now, you might have learned it in the past due to some particular event or due to reading it in something or being aware due to work stuff or whatever else. But the point is that it's a danger that not everyone on the earth is familiar with despite the fact that it is a hyper common vehicle and water covering the vast majority of the earth's surface. Now instead of cars and water being everywhere, it's a specific monster in a specific location you've probably never visited and the internet doesn't exist. Want to explain to me how it's "arbitrary" that your character would know the vulnerabilities of a specific creature that is from an area you're not from? That you've got no crossover with? That your character has no experience with? Your perspective comes from that of a player that is frustrated but not of someone who is looking at the world as a whole. Your whole comment talks about how angry you get from being prevented to do certain things but none of it reflects anything from how the world would work internally. You call it asinine but it's way more ridiculous to think that as a lower level character from the middle of nowhere that you'd have intimate adventuring knowledge of a creature that isn't super common in most situations. > If you want to play let’s pretend with dice, that’s fine. I mean that is literally the game... Fun fact on the definition of metagaming. > Metagame thinking means thinking about the game as a game. It’s like when a character in a movie knows it’s a movie and acts accordingly. For example, a player might say, “The DM wouldn’t throw such a powerful monster at us!” or you might hear, “The read-aloud text spent a lot of time describing that door — let’s search it again!” For a lot of us this isn't a game first. It's a Roleplaying Game first. The way that you want to play is rejecting a lot of the roleplay aspect of it in favor of mechanical benefit. Phrasing that as "play lets pretend with dice" just feels bizarrely tone deaf considering that is *literally the entire core concept of the game.* The thing about your comment here that is frustrating to me as a DM is that it doesn't factor in anyone else. It's all about how your plan was ruined and about how things prevent you from doing various things but there's no consideration or reference to anyone else in the party. How enjoyable do you think it is for other players if someone in the party is consistently saying "I would know the thing" and providing no reasonable explanation for why you'd know the thing?

I think there's allowable degrees, and that it's table-dependant. In general, knowing trolls are vulnerable to fire *is* fairly common player knowledge. I'll also point out that even in The Hobbit, when the trolls petrified in the sunlight, the narrator says "for trolls, *as you probably already know*, must be underground before dawn." This troll vulnerability is common knowledge in middle earth! I think that if a GM wants a little known vulnerability, they can do a little extra work to make that easier for the players to respond appropriately to. Trolls work far better as a fairly tough monster with a fairly well known vulnerability. If you want that to be different, I'd use a troll variant, and make it clear that *these* creatures don't fear fire!

It's really as simple as asking your GM if your character would know this. "Hey GM, would my character know if the troll is weak to fire?" and you'll either get "No, your character is unfamiliar with this region and it creatures" or "Yes, your friend in the town guard recited his tale of falling such a beast at your last posting". A lot of people enjoy this game to role-play, and using knowledge your character wouldn't have can take the fun out of it.

>Forcing a whole table full of people to deliberately be ignorant and *pretend* to "discover" things that they already know isn't fun, it's tedious That's like, your opinion man. Seriously, that is an opinion yet you write it as a general truth. Please don't do that. There are tables that enjoy the role-playing aspect more, including "my character wouldn't know that". I would know, I'm part of one table like that.

"The read-aloud text spend a lot of time descrribing that door-" fuck yeah we're searching that bitch again. We call that media literacy, and that's a good thing.

Wat? They absolutely are belittling people that play the game as it is written... You think "play let’s pretend with dice" is not meant in a derogatory way just because they said "that's fine" after? Even then followed up with basically "you won't catch me doing that". Their entire post is absolutely "yucking the yums" of everyone that doesn't play DnD as a combat only tactical board game.

I won't deny that I'm being an ass, but I will point out that the conversation started with the original post effectively calling me a bitch. Me being somewhat of an ass is a measured and proportionate response.

I won't deny that I'm being an ass, but I will point out that the conversation started with the original post effectively calling me a bitch. Me being somewhat of an ass is a measured and proportionate response.

Forcing a whole table full of people to deliberately be ignorant and *pretend* to "discover" things that they already know isn't fun, it's tedious. Even most "roleplay over gaming" types are still there to roleplay being a heroic skilled figure, not a dribbling moron that knows nothing about their own world. Pretending to be a moron can be fun for some players, if they're freely choosing to do it themselves. Being forced into it, especially if it happens multiple times, isn't fun for most people. The guy on the right in that meme does not look like someone who's having fun, just someone who's briefly tolerating some bullshit so he can get on with the rest of the game. This is the DM being thin-skinned about the fact that they wanted the players to have a challenge, and when it turned out not to be, wanting them to pretend like it was anyway so that they can tell themselves it was a good game. > Question. Do you know how to escape a car that’s upside down and submerged in water? Because if you don’t, there are a lot of things that are going to get you killed due to not being aware of what the issue is. > it’s a danger that not everyone on the earth is familiar with despite the fact that it is a hyper common vehicle This is a bad example. The point of the fire thing is that all experienced RPG players or readers of common fantasy literature know "trolls -> fire". You've picked a scenario that would also be obscure outside of a hypothetical game outside of the real world.

If your playing a dumb character, then rolling through troll canyon without doing research first is exactly what that character would do... Respect for the RPing...

because I love being told "your character knows nothing about subject that you personally are intimately familiar with". Makes for fun game play, I promise.

in the remaster trolls have the humanoid trait, so they use society. GM can rule to change that, though.

EXACTLY. People in this thread keep saying that they should be expected to keep the information that they as a player have because it's obvious No one is really giving an argument other than the fact that it hurts my phone No one else who is making that argument is thinking about how the fact that that hurts other players fun because it makes it all about them. You are hitting the nail on the head. You are able to have your cake and eat it too if you combine the roleplay with learning the information. You know you're going to a place called Troll Canyon? Go do the research. Suddenly you now do know that they are weak to fire. No one can argue that fact, and everyone can prepare. Moreover, you're also going to be in an area where you could probably get some extra fire stuff to help take care of them. It's also the type of cleverness that a DM will actually reward instead of just going. Oh yeah, of course you would know the thing for no reason.

I really don't know what is so hard to understand about this. You are playing a role-playing game. Part of the role-playing game is that you are playing a role due to, you know, it being role-playing game. One of those roles is that you are an inexperienced adventurer. The expectation is that you as an inexperienced adventurer would not know the detail of a monster that an experienced adventurer would know. No one is saying you cannot use fire. Everyone is saying you cannot prepare only fire spells when going to this area because that would be you having information to knowledge that your character does not have. But do you want to know what every single DM would reward? You go into a library to look up trolls. If you know that they're supposed to be trolls in a specific area because it's called troll canyon, do some research. I guarantee you that the DM will actually reward you. What you want is a reward given for no effort. You want to say that your character has the information because you as a player have the information, but again, this is a role-playing game and you are playing a role that doesn't have the information that your player has. The limitations on you being an inexperienced character and not having access to that information is something that you should probably ask the DM at the start, but it also does mean that you're going to be limiting pretty severely the role-playing aspect of the role-playing game. If you would like to have your cake and eat it too, then I highly recommend trying to do something in the game that would actually demonstrate that your character is trying to learn something about the various creatures, so that way you could not only get vulnerabilities from that, but also be rewarded in general and look like a good player. Just a general hint and tip from a DM who is tired of this shit.

> Just a general hint and tip from a DM who is tired of this shit. Try being a better DM that doesn’t unnecessarily put their players into unsatisfying situations where they have to play against themselves. Make the thing their characters learn actually be something the player has to learn. It’s not difficult.

> Just a general hint and tip from a DM who is tired of this shit. Try being a better DM that doesn’t unnecessarily put their players into unsatisfying situations where they have to play against themselves. Make the thing their characters learn actually be something the player has to learn. It’s not difficult.

In my experience, knowledge checks are for "My character has a high int stat and I can't be bothered to think about this puzzle, solve it for me".