Like the title says. Obviously dealing with players metagaming is a different matter, but how do you deal with, or balance might be a better term, the metagame knowledge that you have of the players and their abilities and preferred tactics with how you design encounters? During encounters I try to run my NPC bad guys as close to using only the information or observations they could reasonably have gained based on the situation, i.e. a bad guy wouldn't know a player has armor granting immunity to fire damage so wouldn't avoid fire attacks for that reason at first. I was designing an a bad guy lair tonight and caught myself altering an enemies disposition because the initial way I had it set up would be easily dealt with with one of my players favored and go to moves. But it was a more realistic thing for the bad guy to do. So I changed it back. BUT, I also want to build a challenging encounter for my party. So how do you balance that in your own planning?
You don't balance for it, the DM should metagame. Just remember that the DMs job isn't to win, it's to be entertaining, so sometimes metagaming means "throw in something that will let PC X shine".
I think you need to get in the bad guy’s head. You’re right, they wouldn’t know a certain PC resists fire damage. Unless they do. Generic bad guy on the street doesn’t know, but BBEG’s lieutenant, who’s been studying the group for a while, they know. They know who to hit with what and when to do it. (Side note, keep in mind int and wis score. Some bad guys might know there’s a better choice, and not take it because they’re dumb or cocky.)
So keep in mind who the monster is. Sometimes, like pantagruel says, that creates an opportunity for one of the characters to shine, and that’s really great — it’s fun for that player, and actually ends up being fun for the others who get to see something really cool. And sometimes, it lets you pull out the stops and tailor something to target a weakness and make a really challenging fight that shakes the PCs out of complacency.
Another voice here for DMs should meta-game. In fact everything a DM does is meta-gaming.
Let me lay out a scenario for you. You have a Warlock who has become 100% reliant on their Eldritch Blast and you've found out they feel their character has become boring because of it. This is, in my opinion, a failure of the DM for not challenging the player characters correctly.
So when designing an encounter we might decide that the dungeon the party are about to enter was designed and protected by a Warlock. As such they decided to have create a pair of Helmed Horror to protect the dungeon. These Horrors have been granted immunity to three spells that you know your party actively have and use very regularly. Now as these creatures have immunity to Force Damage, Eldritch Blast is automatically neutered forcing your player characters to rework their typical tactics and strategies. These monsters also have Tactical Cunning and as such always attack weaker characters and spellcasters first.
This kind of encounter is a cut above the average but serves both a narrative and a challenge purpose. It exists as a way to help guide your players to the realisation that using the same tactic time after time isn't going to work for long term survivability.
In order to build these kinds of interesting encounters and locations though the DM has to take into account the players and the way they play the game. They have to understand the player character abilities. This is stuff that too few players actively understand and frankly there should be a section in the PHB dedicated to this kind of stuff to help players understand that this is part of the role of the DM. Too few actually understand what's involved in DMing and a section dedicated to all the stuff a DM does in the PHB might help them understand this stuff. Likewise the DMG should do a far better job of detailing this kind of encounter design situation instead of the frankly absymal excuse for encounter design that it has now.
DMs are the only player around the table who metagame but that's out of necessity.
Seperate to this is NPC/Encounter behaviours. For this, I suggest that all DMs should be running Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver to gain a more visceral understanding of NPC behaviours.
Basically, decide when building an encounter how your enemy is going to work. To do this I have a checklist of questions I answer when building the encounter:
What actions will make these NPCs hostile?
What will make these NPCs flee/withdraw/surrender from battle?
What tactics will the NPCs use? (Will they attack the weakest first? Will they 'focus fire'? Will they stay at range and behind cover? Will they use traps and obstacles?)
Will they NPCs use killing blows? (If a Beast or Monster, will they be hungry?)
Will the NPCs allow the party to flee/surrender/withdraw?
Do these NPCs fight to the death?
Having these written down harks back to Lost Mine of Phandelver where the Doppelganger will kill the Rockseeker Dwarf if the King Bugbear is downed. By having this pre-decided a lot of combat workload is removed from you and you don't have to worry about what the party are going to do next, you just follow your script.
I think I tend to metagame in the sense that I try to create fun scenarios where I know the characters can shine with their unique features... especially for features that they might not be able to use reliably on their own. For example, during a long-running campaign one of my players was a Hunter Ranger, which can have a unique feature where they can make an additional attack each turn, but only if there are at least two enemies right next to each other. So I tended to include a few more extra low-HP mooks in combat that only exist so that the Ranger can take them out. If one player is a triton, I try to include more underwater exploration, or if there's a wizard in the party I put more thought into which scrolls they might find or what spells are available in an enemy wizard's spellbook.
I do not believe in meta-gaming against the PC's in the sense of tailoring encounters and altering them specifically to be challenging for them by taking advantage of their weaknesses or ignoring their strengths. This will more often than not leading to your players feeling cheated and the items they get go from feeling like a reward or a powerup to becoming mundane or worthless in their eyes. You have to keep in mind that it is not your goal to defeat your players and that letting them have an easy win from time to time is not a bad thing. As a general rule of thumb if I feel my players roleplayed and used their characters skills and knowledge to come up with a clever solution to a puzzle or an extremely effective tactic to defeat an encounter I just let them have it because it rewards them for the kind of behavior that is conducive to a good TTRPG experience.
That being said if you feel that you are having difficulty keeping encounters challenging there are ways around this. Personally I design encounters to have two or three stages of difficulty and I will provide in game exposition to hint towards these varying stages of difficulty. I recently ran a fomorian and a troll against my party and gave them clues about a black corrosive sludge that had been eating away at the ruins and the furniture inside that became more prominent the closer they got to the encounter. I ran the original encounter and when one of my players meta-gamed to get the party to use fire against the troll I dropped three black puddings on them as a bonus.
It's also important to remember that your party cannot see behind the scenes and so you can use GM fiat to fudge rolls or decide when an encounter needs to end. When I felt that the encounter had been challenging enough after dropping the black puddings on the party I decided to ignore their splitting feature(save for one) and let them die before they had run out of hit points. I've even let creatures continue to fight after they have run out of hit points to allow the encounter to feel more challenging. In general I find it's easier to make an encounter too hard and then use GM magic behind the scenes to make it easier as opposed to the other way around.
As a final note don't forget that an intelligent opponent will learn from their encounters. The tougher the creature the more experience it will have especially in the case of humanoids and other races of the realm. These enemies will have learned their weaknesses and run up against tactics that are effective against them previously and maybe even lost a fight a couple of times and will prepare and strategize accordingly. A mage that likes to sit in the back will have prepared counter measures against archers. A band of bandits will make their camp some place that is hard to ambush or storm. A manticore will use a cave as it's lair and sleep in a spot that is difficult to access such as an isolated high up alcove. Learning about the behavior of real life predators helps with this a lot.
And keep in mind that CR is a guideline. It is not set in stone.
I do not believe in meta-gaming against the PC's in the sense of tailoring encounters and altering them specifically to be challenging for them by taking advantage of their weaknesses or ignoring their strengths. This will more often than not leading to your players feeling cheated and the items they get go from feeling like a reward or a powerup to becoming mundane or worthless in their eyes.
I disagree, it's been my experience that when players come out the other side of those encounters (when used well) feeling like absolute heroes. They faced the odds and won despite not working as optimally as they might otherwise. Over a couple of decades and dozens of players I've seen senses of achievements from players who have faced challenges rather then feeling cheated.
I have decades of experience with hundreds of players and multiple year long spanning campaigns and I still do not believe in meta-gaming against the PC's. As I said in my post there are ways to make encounters that will take advantage of your groups weaknesses or diminish their strengths in an organic manner that doesn't require tailoring an encounter against them or deciding to alter/homebrew encounters and monsters.
Perhaps then this is a difference in outlook. I'm not trying to tailor encounters against them. Rather for them. I am always on their side. Much like when directing theatre, my role as a DM is to provide the tools and support necessary for the players (actors) to tell the story to the best of their abilities. In fact last night I threw six level 5 players against four Helmed Horrors. The ensuing combat was awesome and the way the party dealt with it was fantastic. The monsters were guarding a mysterious house packed full of useful magic items and potions...as well as some clues that will come in useful in the future. They actively eliminated one of the monsters before combat even began because it's never just a suit of armour standing there.
I knew that they'd triumph, I knew that it would be an encounter that they'd find tricky - but you know what I was rooting for them to roll high with every to hit, and rooting for every monster to roll low on their to hit. In the spirit of fairness I wrote a list of the spells the enemies were immune to even before combat began and revealed it to the players after combat to show I wasn't making it up as I go along.
Much like when I was teaching and setting a difficult task. Just because something is challenging, does not mean I'm not on the player's side.
I never challenged your viewpoint, nor did I ask you to defend it. I have absolutely no interest in debating anecdote and sophistry and derailing a thread either.
Like the title says. Obviously dealing with players metagaming is a different matter, but how do you deal with, or balance might be a better term, the metagame knowledge that you have of the players and their abilities and preferred tactics with how you design encounters? During encounters I try to run my NPC bad guys as close to using only the information or observations they could reasonably have gained based on the situation, i.e. a bad guy wouldn't know a player has armor granting immunity to fire damage so wouldn't avoid fire attacks for that reason at first. I was designing an a bad guy lair tonight and caught myself altering an enemies disposition because the initial way I had it set up would be easily dealt with with one of my players favored and go to moves. But it was a more realistic thing for the bad guy to do. So I changed it back. BUT, I also want to build a challenging encounter for my party. So how do you balance that in your own planning?
You don't balance for it, the DM should metagame. Just remember that the DMs job isn't to win, it's to be entertaining, so sometimes metagaming means "throw in something that will let PC X shine".
I think you need to get in the bad guy’s head. You’re right, they wouldn’t know a certain PC resists fire damage. Unless they do. Generic bad guy on the street doesn’t know, but BBEG’s lieutenant, who’s been studying the group for a while, they know. They know who to hit with what and when to do it. (Side note, keep in mind int and wis score. Some bad guys might know there’s a better choice, and not take it because they’re dumb or cocky.)
So keep in mind who the monster is. Sometimes, like pantagruel says, that creates an opportunity for one of the characters to shine, and that’s really great — it’s fun for that player, and actually ends up being fun for the others who get to see something really cool. And sometimes, it lets you pull out the stops and tailor something to target a weakness and make a really challenging fight that shakes the PCs out of complacency.
Remember kids, smart villains use Divination spells. (And knowing's half the battle.) GI Foe!
Another voice here for DMs should meta-game. In fact everything a DM does is meta-gaming.
Let me lay out a scenario for you. You have a Warlock who has become 100% reliant on their Eldritch Blast and you've found out they feel their character has become boring because of it. This is, in my opinion, a failure of the DM for not challenging the player characters correctly.
So when designing an encounter we might decide that the dungeon the party are about to enter was designed and protected by a Warlock. As such they decided to have create a pair of Helmed Horror to protect the dungeon. These Horrors have been granted immunity to three spells that you know your party actively have and use very regularly. Now as these creatures have immunity to Force Damage, Eldritch Blast is automatically neutered forcing your player characters to rework their typical tactics and strategies. These monsters also have Tactical Cunning and as such always attack weaker characters and spellcasters first.
This kind of encounter is a cut above the average but serves both a narrative and a challenge purpose. It exists as a way to help guide your players to the realisation that using the same tactic time after time isn't going to work for long term survivability.
In order to build these kinds of interesting encounters and locations though the DM has to take into account the players and the way they play the game. They have to understand the player character abilities. This is stuff that too few players actively understand and frankly there should be a section in the PHB dedicated to this kind of stuff to help players understand that this is part of the role of the DM. Too few actually understand what's involved in DMing and a section dedicated to all the stuff a DM does in the PHB might help them understand this stuff. Likewise the DMG should do a far better job of detailing this kind of encounter design situation instead of the frankly absymal excuse for encounter design that it has now.
DMs are the only player around the table who metagame but that's out of necessity.
Seperate to this is NPC/Encounter behaviours. For this, I suggest that all DMs should be running Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver to gain a more visceral understanding of NPC behaviours.
Basically, decide when building an encounter how your enemy is going to work. To do this I have a checklist of questions I answer when building the encounter:
Having these written down harks back to Lost Mine of Phandelver where the Doppelganger will kill the Rockseeker Dwarf if the King Bugbear is downed. By having this pre-decided a lot of combat workload is removed from you and you don't have to worry about what the party are going to do next, you just follow your script.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
I think I tend to metagame in the sense that I try to create fun scenarios where I know the characters can shine with their unique features... especially for features that they might not be able to use reliably on their own. For example, during a long-running campaign one of my players was a Hunter Ranger, which can have a unique feature where they can make an additional attack each turn, but only if there are at least two enemies right next to each other. So I tended to include a few more extra low-HP mooks in combat that only exist so that the Ranger can take them out. If one player is a triton, I try to include more underwater exploration, or if there's a wizard in the party I put more thought into which scrolls they might find or what spells are available in an enemy wizard's spellbook.
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I do not believe in meta-gaming against the PC's in the sense of tailoring encounters and altering them specifically to be challenging for them by taking advantage of their weaknesses or ignoring their strengths. This will more often than not leading to your players feeling cheated and the items they get go from feeling like a reward or a powerup to becoming mundane or worthless in their eyes. You have to keep in mind that it is not your goal to defeat your players and that letting them have an easy win from time to time is not a bad thing. As a general rule of thumb if I feel my players roleplayed and used their characters skills and knowledge to come up with a clever solution to a puzzle or an extremely effective tactic to defeat an encounter I just let them have it because it rewards them for the kind of behavior that is conducive to a good TTRPG experience.
That being said if you feel that you are having difficulty keeping encounters challenging there are ways around this. Personally I design encounters to have two or three stages of difficulty and I will provide in game exposition to hint towards these varying stages of difficulty. I recently ran a fomorian and a troll against my party and gave them clues about a black corrosive sludge that had been eating away at the ruins and the furniture inside that became more prominent the closer they got to the encounter. I ran the original encounter and when one of my players meta-gamed to get the party to use fire against the troll I dropped three black puddings on them as a bonus.
It's also important to remember that your party cannot see behind the scenes and so you can use GM fiat to fudge rolls or decide when an encounter needs to end. When I felt that the encounter had been challenging enough after dropping the black puddings on the party I decided to ignore their splitting feature(save for one) and let them die before they had run out of hit points. I've even let creatures continue to fight after they have run out of hit points to allow the encounter to feel more challenging. In general I find it's easier to make an encounter too hard and then use GM magic behind the scenes to make it easier as opposed to the other way around.
As a final note don't forget that an intelligent opponent will learn from their encounters. The tougher the creature the more experience it will have especially in the case of humanoids and other races of the realm. These enemies will have learned their weaknesses and run up against tactics that are effective against them previously and maybe even lost a fight a couple of times and will prepare and strategize accordingly. A mage that likes to sit in the back will have prepared counter measures against archers. A band of bandits will make their camp some place that is hard to ambush or storm. A manticore will use a cave as it's lair and sleep in a spot that is difficult to access such as an isolated high up alcove. Learning about the behavior of real life predators helps with this a lot.
And keep in mind that CR is a guideline. It is not set in stone.
I disagree, it's been my experience that when players come out the other side of those encounters (when used well) feeling like absolute heroes. They faced the odds and won despite not working as optimally as they might otherwise. Over a couple of decades and dozens of players I've seen senses of achievements from players who have faced challenges rather then feeling cheated.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
I have decades of experience with hundreds of players and multiple year long spanning campaigns and I still do not believe in meta-gaming against the PC's. As I said in my post there are ways to make encounters that will take advantage of your groups weaknesses or diminish their strengths in an organic manner that doesn't require tailoring an encounter against them or deciding to alter/homebrew encounters and monsters.
Perhaps then this is a difference in outlook. I'm not trying to tailor encounters against them. Rather for them. I am always on their side. Much like when directing theatre, my role as a DM is to provide the tools and support necessary for the players (actors) to tell the story to the best of their abilities. In fact last night I threw six level 5 players against four Helmed Horrors. The ensuing combat was awesome and the way the party dealt with it was fantastic. The monsters were guarding a mysterious house packed full of useful magic items and potions...as well as some clues that will come in useful in the future. They actively eliminated one of the monsters before combat even began because it's never just a suit of armour standing there.
I knew that they'd triumph, I knew that it would be an encounter that they'd find tricky - but you know what I was rooting for them to roll high with every to hit, and rooting for every monster to roll low on their to hit. In the spirit of fairness I wrote a list of the spells the enemies were immune to even before combat began and revealed it to the players after combat to show I wasn't making it up as I go along.
Much like when I was teaching and setting a difficult task. Just because something is challenging, does not mean I'm not on the player's side.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
You seem to be confused.
I never challenged your viewpoint, nor did I ask you to defend it. I have absolutely no interest in debating anecdote and sophistry and derailing a thread either.
Wow, lots of great responses and advice, thanks everyone!