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!
So just to recap. You posted a giant message saying your problems, I posted one of about the same length giving a rebuttal and you dismissed it all out of hand and gave a single line response?
Good luck on ever getting me to read one of your comments again.
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. I’m not questioning the possible existence of a world where professional mercenaries don’t know that trolls are vulnerable to fire, but I do question its value as a fun game setting.
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 team player trying to help out everybody by getting the information across to everyone instead of just assuming that they are allowed to have the thing themselves 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, instead of scolding them and calling them “bitches” when they don’t jump through your hoops.
Damn you really think that only your vision is the acceptable one. To the point where your “argument” devolves into insulting those that don’t see it like you do.
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.
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.
I mean that is literally the game… Fun fact on the definition of metagaming.
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!
The DM always has the right to throw curveballs at the players, and screwing with player precconception is part of what makes dming fun.
The player is responsible for figuring out how the setting is different from expectations, and plan accordingly.
“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.
So just to recap. You posted a giant message saying your problems, I posted one of about the same length giving a rebuttal and you dismissed it all out of hand and gave a single line response?
Good luck on ever getting me to read one of your comments again.
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.
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. I’m not questioning the possible existence of a world where professional mercenaries don’t know that trolls are vulnerable to fire, but I do question its value as a fun game setting.
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 team player trying to help out everybody by getting the information across to everyone instead of just assuming that they are allowed to have the thing themselves 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, instead of scolding them and calling them “bitches” when they don’t jump through your hoops.
Damn you really think that only your vision is the acceptable one. To the point where your “argument” devolves into insulting those that don’t see it like you do.
Stop it. Get some help.
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.
It’s an opinion that I agree with and therefore it is absolute fact and is not to be questioned. Please send all complaints to file 13.