You get the question. May post an altered version of this on a different board that allows players to talk about annoying fellow players or DMs. Nothing against the rules, yada yada yada. Pls don't include any names other than their character's name, just use nicknames like "that guy" or "annoying player" or make up a fake name.
Can't say i've ever had to deal with a really annoying/problematic player so far. Lucky me.
I am a human person very good at doing human person things, yes yes, i enjoy normal human person things like wearing clothes on my skin and walking with my leg, yes yes, am not a yuan-ti infiltrator, am human person
IF YOU'RE READING THIS GO WATCH INFINITY TRAIN ON HBOMAX
Back in high school (mid-late ‘90s, so it was AD&D back then) I had a friend that would always play a Gnome Wild Mage (back then all arcane casters were Wizards... and bards, but that’s irrelevant). He was under the impression that all Gnomes were lunatics or something, and he played them that way too. Basically think of the worst Joker impression you possibly can, and make it worse. He also thought it was the absolute funniest thing ever when his spells would nuke the rest of the party at the worst possible times, so he would push his spells (that was an actual thing for them back then) to make them explode on us. Eventually every DM we knew banned both Gnomes and Wild Magic.
I had a player create a halfling rogue character, M, whose entire motivation and existence was to be as depraved and inhumane as possible. I asked the players for this campaign to provide minor backstory snippets and we even did a session 0. Things weren't so bad with M, from these two bits of detail I had, but once the party reached their forest town (I had the party run into each other while fleeing a dungeon as the beginning of the campaign) things got out of hand fast. M insisted that the party look for... escort services... in this little frontier town. When they finally agreed, believing correctly that no such people populated their environment, M began randomly attacking villagers in an attempt to bend them to his will. The town guard (read: a militia of farmers and one or two retired veteran fighters) intercepted the party and threw them in jail. M, undeterred, began performing lewd acts in his jail cell, ultimately leading to him being thrown in a burlap sack and left there for the rest of the session.
I spoke to the player behind M's behavior and he told me "I just wanted to do that craziest stuff I could think of." We discussed how that way of playing wouldn't be a good fit with the rest of the party and how those players wanted less depravity and more adventure. He agreed to tone things down and for a few sessions things went, for the most part, well with M.
Then the party met the NPC, Alice. She played a big role in their first large quest and I had written her to be a recurring NPC. M decided to attempt to... forcibly... court Alice. After a few minutes of trying to corral his actions away from such genuinely inappropriate behavior I had to call the session to a stop. I pulled him aside a little after everyone had started to leave and in no uncertain terms told him his, not M, but his, behavior had to change or he would not be welcome back for this campaign. We sat down a day later and discussed the aspects he liked about the mechanics of a rogue, playstyle, and other factors. Ultimately, he agreed to the idea of making an entirely new character, a Monk, who would be introduced during the next session while also agreeing to this being his last chance. So far, as of writing this, there have been no issues with the tabaxi Monk.
Sometimes you just have to draw a line and wait for someone to cross it. Thankfully, he wised up and started having fun with the group instead of insisting on doing crazy stuff that was inappropriate or harmed the party.
I've been pretty lucky, but in all my groups there is always one guy who talks over everyone else. The worst case was in an adventure's league game where there was a new player. He was new to D&D, so I cut him a bit of slack, but he seemd incapable of accepting that he wasn't the only main character. Every time I drew up a map he would start questionning me about it before I had the time to describe the room, he talked loudly over the other players and, worst of all, he was not a team player at all. You know the term Chaotic Stupid? This guy followed that to the letter, because his version of Chaotic Neutral consisted of attacking his allies, including party members, multiple times.
In another AL game I ran mine and another dm's table were mostly empty, so we decided to combine them with me as the DM. The other dm clearly took this to mean that nothing was serious and he could do whatever he wanted, which resulted in him making terrible tactical decisions (casting Darkness in a fight) and intentionally triggering multiple encounters at once. I'm not a killer game master, but this guys carelessness caused him to go through three characters in one session. One was killed by a fireball and buried in a collapsing dungeon after he triggered a second encounter before finishing the last one, the other was hit with the full brunt of Schorching Ray while fighting those now combined encounters.
I've dealt with two that guys in my days as a DM. One got better, the other was just a completely horrible human being. I'll talk about the second one here. So, he wasn't horrible at the table as long as you watched all of his dice rolls because boy would he cheat. At first, he wasn't bad, then one of my friends set up a game and I called a hiatus to mine. By the second session he started to get on my nerves as he tried to intimidate every new person our characters met, including two new PC's, luckily there wasn't much interaction that day. The real problem came after the third session, I made a tanky cleric because originally everyone else was squishy (That guy joined last minute and a level ahead because he refused to level down his barbarian from my game, or create a new character) we were facing a lot of enemies, I was tanking half of them and so was he. I went down, and he almost did.
Why is any of this important? Well, because he preceded to the next day tell me that I should've stayed in the back because I'm a cleric and that I was stupid and useless for trying to tank. When I pointed out that he was barely up after the fight and that he would've most certainly been down if not for half of them going for me he refused to admit he was wrong. He gave a half-apology the next day, saying that he was sorry for calling me useless but I wasn't playing my death domain cleric right because I wasn't playing like a life domain cleric. Then we get to what he did to the DM. He would constantly harass the DM about introducing his homebrew items, that it took hours of cajoling for him to change, so they were balanced by both me and the club organizer, he would constantly ask to have player-craft which was just what he called his homebrew because the DM flat out banned any homebrew not done by him, and he would come up with the dumbest ideas and act as if his character could fight quasi-gods (he quite literally said our level 5 party could take on Asmodeus). This behavior came to a head when he called the DM evil for not allowing, get this, for his character to find a portable ballista while travelling. Needless to say at this point everyone was fed up with him, and he got reamed out by me and my now GF.
Eventually, it got so bad that half the party threatened to leave is he stayed, and everyone else at the table except two were at least considering it. Now, if it sounds like this might be exaggerating and maybe he's not so bad, let me assuage any doubts. He was homophobic and bullied my bigger friend despite being bigger himself, including threatening to out her, he bullied, physically and emotionally, my now GF though I didn't find that out till later, but worst of all I have a friend whose mother committed suicide and it was quite recently at the time of this and he started talking about how the way she killed herself was stupid and how she could've done it so much better and he didn't stop talking about it even when asked until he was told to F off by another one of my friends. Then when I politely told him that I couldn't be his friend because he'd hurt me and my friends (who are basically my family) he lied about bullying my bigger friend, and blamed it all on his depression without realizing that me, bigger friend, and the friend who told him to F off all suffer from depression.
Rant over. Sorry for the salt.
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call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly
We were doing the haunted house adventure in the ghost of saltmarsh campaign book. We had a half elf wizard who didn't take the game seriously and all she did was punch townsfolk. She would start every game by punching the other pc in our group. She some times talked over me while i was painting the picture for the town. She eventually got better but it took like four sessions. Another one was dwarf cleric we were playing the lost mine. He slowly convinced the girls and the boys to turn on each other. So every session it just ended with every body in an all out brawl. The worst time when he did this was when we were in a cave filled with orcs and an ogre. They fought well together but then the guy promoted more in game fighting by dividing the boys and the girls again after they defeated the ogre. One side wanted to tame the ogre and keep him as a pet ( Even though it was kinda a dumb idea ) And another side wanted to kill him because at the time he was only K.O.ed. In the end he just stopped playing because he found it boring. But were still friends because we bond over things.
Meta gaming, playing a character as if they are you, with all of your knowledge and skills, plus whatever knowledge and skills that was built into the PC, tends to suck out much of the fun for the GM, and often others at the table.
If the GM decided to Meta-game, then their narration might sound like this, "There is a 6th level human wizard, with 2 level dip into druid, standing there; here is their spell list, here is what they plan on using against you, they are within range of this, this, and this spell that you have ready right now. You should use spell X, for maximum effect. By the way, they have a staff of Y that you might like."
If this style of play sounds like fun to you, as a player, then seek out a GM who will meta game with you. At least then y'all will be following the same rules.
I think TabaxiTornado's point might have been that a player can justify their character knowing about spells and creatures because of their Wisdom stat or checks. Personally, I disagree. If anything, I see it as INT-based, and I myself rarely allow that kind of metagaming unless it makes sense for the situation and character. But there are some DMs who let their players roll nature/arcana checks to see if they recognize things, and if that's how you run your table, more power to ya.
I find that homebrewing stat blocks is a nice counter to metagamers. "What?? Owlbears can't fly!" "This one clearly can. My game, my monsters." Also, players who like to metagame would not appreciate it very much if the NPCs did it to them. "The necromancer knows clerics have to present their holy symbols to Turn Undead, so he immediately casts Telekinesis on your amulet to prevent you from destroying his minions." I doubt any player would enjoy a campaign where things like that constantly happen to them. DMs are players too, which is why most of them don't enjoy when people metagame.
Knowing spells and stuff is more wisdom and also I mean Is Meta-gaming so bad?
That depends on what type of metagaming.
Taking the adventure hook, even though it might not be the smartest idea, is probably an example of good metagaming. In my group the player doing it would often pantomime having a hook in their mouth. Also, being accepting of the other PCs despite one of them being a species with a bad reputation would also be an example of good metagaming. Attacking and killing the new character simply because the new player in the group is a huge fan of R A Salvatore is just bad form.
But new characters aren't going to know about every obscure monster, although they should know about some of them. If the campaign background involves regular wars against orcs, backed up by giants as elite units, then it makes no sense to force the players to be ignorant about them. But that thing that no one has seen in centuries? They might know some stories, but the stories might also be wrong, if those stories even tell more than just how dangerous the thing was.
He is getting better, but this one player in my campaign sometimes really annoys me. It goes like this:
In our group of 7, 6 players, one DM, (me) there are a few different types of players. There is a guy who takes very few things seriously, but isn't annoying. There is a guy who takes the game seriously. There is a girl who takes the game seriously. There is a guy who accepts that he will die with incredible clarity. There is a guy who thinks that the guy who i just mentioned is cannon fodder.
And then there is a guy who is completely incapable of doing anything himself. This guy is unfortunately dyslexic, but the fact that before he does something, he says "should I?" Or Right?" and then assumes that the answer is no just gets on my nerves.
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My Hero Academia weeb, and proud of it.
Jeff main in Marvel Rivals. Terrible at competitive gaming.
All around I'm a mess made up of original characters, game lore, and the remnants of the worlds I never finished. In other words, I'm slightly off my rocker.
This guy is unfortunately dyslexic, but the fact that before he does something, he says "should I?" Or Right?" and then assumes that the answer is no just gets on my nerves.
Fwiw, I’m dyslexic, my sons are dyslexic, my PHD wielding, university lecturing, 30 INT wife is dyslexic. Dyslexia is a neurodivergence and learning difference that is principally focused on reading, writing, and spelling, not decision making, cognitive function, or general intelligence.
I just left a game because two of the four players in the group steadfastly refused to join in and play cooperatively. One was an edgelord loner rogue and the other was an edgelord loner barbarian. I attended four sessions, all of which ended up playing out full of increasingly ludicrous actions by the DM as he attempted to get the group to join together. It culminated in him using the wizard’s familiar to murder an NPC, in order to implicate us all so that we would have to work as a team to acquit ourselves, I think. The thing is that I joined this group at level 2, a few months into an ongoing game. And they still weren’t even a cohesive party? I have zero idea what the actual adventure would have been about. What a colossal waste of time.
The worst person ever though was a fellow who came to my house many years ago and accepted snacks from my toddler child, who was maybe two or three at the time, still learning to share, very impressionable and such. When my kid wanted some of the fellow’s snacks in return, this adult snatched them away and refused to share. Like WTF? Who does that? To a small child no less.
To make things short, I had a brother with impecable luck. I allowed him to roll for Charisma in asking out a single box lady he had used a love philter on, then he proposed. He rolled a bat 20, so I let him marry the girl (this might be irrelevant, but her name was Julia). Later, he was having some issues with money in a town full of desecrated building from a recent zombie attack, so he asked to sell his wife into slavery (the campaign had slavery for the sole purpose of plot development).
Alright, so basically, right now I am an intermediate player, I have mostly just played barbarians and fighters for the last few campaigns I have been in, and recently I was able to scrap together a dnd game with around 6 people (It's usually changing a lot). I was really happy to start this, and things were going great up until the players reached level 7, one of the players (who just so happened to be the host) found out about a little spell called Aura of the Guardian. Now, I cannot progress any further into the campaign due to the fact that the host (who I can't kick out) keeps on repeating "I take the damage" whenever a npc gets almost murdered, and now the host keeps on saying that I am terrible at dnd and that I don't know what I'm doing, I'm genuinely thinking about ending my campaign because of this absolutely horrible player, if anybody knows how to deal with this player, please respond as soon as possible.
So I've got a player who's been in my campaign for about seven months and he has been kinda a reoccurring problem. He has gotten better as of recent months, but he has had his moments even now. He joined in on the second or third session and has been playing a half-elf half-aarakocra (a custom race I had to make) druid of the circle of the elemental flow (another homebrew). His main problem is he argues about every little thing. He is driving me out of my damn mind with the amount of calls (in and out of game) that he has said are incorrect. He even has begun judging my DMing style. And he won't even say it to my face. I've heard these things from people I trust who say he has said these things. (And I have verified and it does fit his personality and how he acts) The worst thing is he is just kinda an ass. He is very demeaning sometimes and treats me like a child. And while I am a few years younger (All of us are below 18, with most of us being early teens and then a handful of us being mid to late teens) I am perfectly capable, but just the way he acts and speaks sounds like he is a grown-ass adult when he is barely older than me. And he is an ass to me because me and his sister are dating and he doesn't think we should be. And he tries to offer "advice", both in and out of the game, which is just veiled insults and him complaining.
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In the words of the great philosopher, Unicorse, "Aaaannnnd why should I care??"
Best quote from a book ever: "If you love with your eyes, death is forever. If you love with your heart, there is no such thing as parting."- Jonah Cook, Ascendant, Songs of Chaos by Michael R. Miller. Highly recommend
Knowing spells and stuff is more wisdom and also I mean Is Meta-gaming so bad?
That depends on what type of metagaming.
Taking the adventure hook, even though it might not be the smartest idea, is probably an example of good metagaming. In my group the player doing it would often pantomime having a hook in their mouth. Also, being accepting of the other PCs despite one of them being a species with a bad reputation would also be an example of good metagaming. Attacking and killing the new character simply because the new player in the group is a huge fan of R A Salvatore is just bad form.
We just had this exchange during our recap:
Me: Then you headed up into the Northern Wastes. You're still not entirely sure why. Player: Because that's where the plot was!
On the other hand, there's a fine line. Knowing that goblins are pretty easily killed, tend to be greedy and move in large troops; most adventurers would know that and it's no big that the players act accordingly. On the other hand, opening the player owned copy of the Monster's manual, looking up the goblin stat block and then telling the party mid fight "that one only has 3 HP left!"... that's not so cool.
On the topic, I had a player that wanted to die-roll every single challenge and would become agitated when they couldn't.
Early in the campaign they got a mcguffin. it was supposed to be the "you will carry this mcguffin around and learn about it and have people try to steal it and you'll eventually use it to do great things." Instead the player insisted, passionately, that as a 1st level artificer they could find out everything about the mcguffin with a single die roll. And I resisted because I had built the campaign around questing for information about the mcguffin. The whole game failed if I just said "you rolled a... 19.. so yeah, here's all the things it is capable of. that ends the first 2/3rds of the campaign".
And it kinda became a running trend. Every question that came up was met with a "can I roll to know the answer?" rather than "how do we find the answer?" And rather than confront the player about it, or explain to the table that primary arcs were built around questing for information, I just kept.... not. I kept trying to work with these requests and find ways to offer half answers or newer challenges and hope the dice kept the mystery.
Basically I did the Wrong(tm) thing. The game ended in a table flip moment of frustration from that player which then lead to some hard conversations about player agency, DM style and the group broke up.
Definitely should have worked harder to say "hey, this play style isn't working for the game I'm trying to run. How do we find a middle ground where you feel valuable and empowered but you also respect that this is how the story is structured?"
You get the question. May post an altered version of this on a different board that allows players to talk about annoying fellow players or DMs. Nothing against the rules, yada yada yada. Pls don't include any names other than their character's name, just use nicknames like "that guy" or "annoying player" or make up a fake name.
Can't say i've ever had to deal with a really annoying/problematic player so far. Lucky me.
I am a human person very good at doing human person things, yes yes, i enjoy normal human person things like wearing clothes on my skin and walking with my leg, yes yes, am not a yuan-ti infiltrator, am human person
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Me.
Back in high school (mid-late ‘90s, so it was AD&D back then) I had a friend that would always play a Gnome Wild Mage (back then all arcane casters were Wizards... and bards, but that’s irrelevant). He was under the impression that all Gnomes were lunatics or something, and he played them that way too. Basically think of the worst Joker impression you possibly can, and make it worse. He also thought it was the absolute funniest thing ever when his spells would nuke the rest of the party at the worst possible times, so he would push his spells (that was an actual thing for them back then) to make them explode on us. Eventually every DM we knew banned both Gnomes and Wild Magic.
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I had a player create a halfling rogue character, M, whose entire motivation and existence was to be as depraved and inhumane as possible. I asked the players for this campaign to provide minor backstory snippets and we even did a session 0. Things weren't so bad with M, from these two bits of detail I had, but once the party reached their forest town (I had the party run into each other while fleeing a dungeon as the beginning of the campaign) things got out of hand fast. M insisted that the party look for... escort services... in this little frontier town. When they finally agreed, believing correctly that no such people populated their environment, M began randomly attacking villagers in an attempt to bend them to his will. The town guard (read: a militia of farmers and one or two retired veteran fighters) intercepted the party and threw them in jail. M, undeterred, began performing lewd acts in his jail cell, ultimately leading to him being thrown in a burlap sack and left there for the rest of the session.
I spoke to the player behind M's behavior and he told me "I just wanted to do that craziest stuff I could think of." We discussed how that way of playing wouldn't be a good fit with the rest of the party and how those players wanted less depravity and more adventure. He agreed to tone things down and for a few sessions things went, for the most part, well with M.
Then the party met the NPC, Alice. She played a big role in their first large quest and I had written her to be a recurring NPC. M decided to attempt to... forcibly... court Alice. After a few minutes of trying to corral his actions away from such genuinely inappropriate behavior I had to call the session to a stop. I pulled him aside a little after everyone had started to leave and in no uncertain terms told him his, not M, but his, behavior had to change or he would not be welcome back for this campaign. We sat down a day later and discussed the aspects he liked about the mechanics of a rogue, playstyle, and other factors. Ultimately, he agreed to the idea of making an entirely new character, a Monk, who would be introduced during the next session while also agreeing to this being his last chance. So far, as of writing this, there have been no issues with the tabaxi Monk.
Sometimes you just have to draw a line and wait for someone to cross it. Thankfully, he wised up and started having fun with the group instead of insisting on doing crazy stuff that was inappropriate or harmed the party.
Happy hunting, fellow adventurers.
I've been pretty lucky, but in all my groups there is always one guy who talks over everyone else. The worst case was in an adventure's league game where there was a new player. He was new to D&D, so I cut him a bit of slack, but he seemd incapable of accepting that he wasn't the only main character. Every time I drew up a map he would start questionning me about it before I had the time to describe the room, he talked loudly over the other players and, worst of all, he was not a team player at all. You know the term Chaotic Stupid? This guy followed that to the letter, because his version of Chaotic Neutral consisted of attacking his allies, including party members, multiple times.
In another AL game I ran mine and another dm's table were mostly empty, so we decided to combine them with me as the DM. The other dm clearly took this to mean that nothing was serious and he could do whatever he wanted, which resulted in him making terrible tactical decisions (casting Darkness in a fight) and intentionally triggering multiple encounters at once. I'm not a killer game master, but this guys carelessness caused him to go through three characters in one session. One was killed by a fireball and buried in a collapsing dungeon after he triggered a second encounter before finishing the last one, the other was hit with the full brunt of Schorching Ray while fighting those now combined encounters.
I've dealt with two that guys in my days as a DM. One got better, the other was just a completely horrible human being. I'll talk about the second one here. So, he wasn't horrible at the table as long as you watched all of his dice rolls because boy would he cheat. At first, he wasn't bad, then one of my friends set up a game and I called a hiatus to mine. By the second session he started to get on my nerves as he tried to intimidate every new person our characters met, including two new PC's, luckily there wasn't much interaction that day. The real problem came after the third session, I made a tanky cleric because originally everyone else was squishy (That guy joined last minute and a level ahead because he refused to level down his barbarian from my game, or create a new character) we were facing a lot of enemies, I was tanking half of them and so was he. I went down, and he almost did.
Why is any of this important? Well, because he preceded to the next day tell me that I should've stayed in the back because I'm a cleric and that I was stupid and useless for trying to tank. When I pointed out that he was barely up after the fight and that he would've most certainly been down if not for half of them going for me he refused to admit he was wrong. He gave a half-apology the next day, saying that he was sorry for calling me useless but I wasn't playing my death domain cleric right because I wasn't playing like a life domain cleric. Then we get to what he did to the DM. He would constantly harass the DM about introducing his homebrew items, that it took hours of cajoling for him to change, so they were balanced by both me and the club organizer, he would constantly ask to have player-craft which was just what he called his homebrew because the DM flat out banned any homebrew not done by him, and he would come up with the dumbest ideas and act as if his character could fight quasi-gods (he quite literally said our level 5 party could take on Asmodeus). This behavior came to a head when he called the DM evil for not allowing, get this, for his character to find a portable ballista while travelling. Needless to say at this point everyone was fed up with him, and he got reamed out by me and my now GF.
Eventually, it got so bad that half the party threatened to leave is he stayed, and everyone else at the table except two were at least considering it. Now, if it sounds like this might be exaggerating and maybe he's not so bad, let me assuage any doubts. He was homophobic and bullied my bigger friend despite being bigger himself, including threatening to out her, he bullied, physically and emotionally, my now GF though I didn't find that out till later, but worst of all I have a friend whose mother committed suicide and it was quite recently at the time of this and he started talking about how the way she killed herself was stupid and how she could've done it so much better and he didn't stop talking about it even when asked until he was told to F off by another one of my friends. Then when I politely told him that I couldn't be his friend because he'd hurt me and my friends (who are basically my family) he lied about bullying my bigger friend, and blamed it all on his depression without realizing that me, bigger friend, and the friend who told him to F off all suffer from depression.
Rant over. Sorry for the salt.
call me Anna or Kerns, (she/her), usually a DM, lgbtq+ friendly
Meta-gaming the story or situation to show off how smarter they are than the DM.
We were doing the haunted house adventure in the ghost of saltmarsh campaign book. We had a half elf wizard who didn't take the game seriously and all she did was punch townsfolk. She would start every game by punching the other pc in our group. She some times talked over me while i was painting the picture for the town. She eventually got better but it took like four sessions. Another one was dwarf cleric we were playing the lost mine. He slowly convinced the girls and the boys to turn on each other. So every session it just ended with every body in an all out brawl. The worst time when he did this was when we were in a cave filled with orcs and an ogre. They fought well together but then the guy promoted more in game fighting by dividing the boys and the girls again after they defeated the ogre. One side wanted to tame the ogre and keep him as a pet ( Even though it was kinda a dumb idea ) And another side wanted to kill him because at the time he was only K.O.ed. In the end he just stopped playing because he found it boring. But were still friends because we bond over things.
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Halike Morgad the Dhampir fist of arlo
Sir strange one of the centaurs
Knowing spells and stuff is more wisdom and also I mean Is Meta-gaming so bad?
Huh?
Meta gaming, playing a character as if they are you, with all of your knowledge and skills, plus whatever knowledge and skills that was built into the PC, tends to suck out much of the fun for the GM, and often others at the table.
If the GM decided to Meta-game, then their narration might sound like this, "There is a 6th level human wizard, with 2 level dip into druid, standing there; here is their spell list, here is what they plan on using against you, they are within range of this, this, and this spell that you have ready right now. You should use spell X, for maximum effect. By the way, they have a staff of Y that you might like."
If this style of play sounds like fun to you, as a player, then seek out a GM who will meta game with you. At least then y'all will be following the same rules.
I think TabaxiTornado's point might have been that a player can justify their character knowing about spells and creatures because of their Wisdom stat or checks. Personally, I disagree. If anything, I see it as INT-based, and I myself rarely allow that kind of metagaming unless it makes sense for the situation and character. But there are some DMs who let their players roll nature/arcana checks to see if they recognize things, and if that's how you run your table, more power to ya.
I find that homebrewing stat blocks is a nice counter to metagamers. "What?? Owlbears can't fly!" "This one clearly can. My game, my monsters." Also, players who like to metagame would not appreciate it very much if the NPCs did it to them. "The necromancer knows clerics have to present their holy symbols to Turn Undead, so he immediately casts Telekinesis on your amulet to prevent you from destroying his minions." I doubt any player would enjoy a campaign where things like that constantly happen to them. DMs are players too, which is why most of them don't enjoy when people metagame.
That depends on what type of metagaming.
Taking the adventure hook, even though it might not be the smartest idea, is probably an example of good metagaming. In my group the player doing it would often pantomime having a hook in their mouth. Also, being accepting of the other PCs despite one of them being a species with a bad reputation would also be an example of good metagaming. Attacking and killing the new character simply because the new player in the group is a huge fan of R A Salvatore is just bad form.
But new characters aren't going to know about every obscure monster, although they should know about some of them. If the campaign background involves regular wars against orcs, backed up by giants as elite units, then it makes no sense to force the players to be ignorant about them. But that thing that no one has seen in centuries? They might know some stories, but the stories might also be wrong, if those stories even tell more than just how dangerous the thing was.
He is getting better, but this one player in my campaign sometimes really annoys me. It goes like this:
In our group of 7, 6 players, one DM, (me) there are a few different types of players. There is a guy who takes very few things seriously, but isn't annoying. There is a guy who takes the game seriously. There is a girl who takes the game seriously. There is a guy who accepts that he will die with incredible clarity. There is a guy who thinks that the guy who i just mentioned is cannon fodder.
And then there is a guy who is completely incapable of doing anything himself. This guy is unfortunately dyslexic, but the fact that before he does something, he says "should I?" Or Right?" and then assumes that the answer is no just gets on my nerves.
My Hero Academia weeb, and proud of it.
Jeff main in Marvel Rivals. Terrible at competitive gaming.
All around I'm a mess made up of original characters, game lore, and the remnants of the worlds I never finished. In other words, I'm slightly off my rocker.
UwU
Fwiw, I’m dyslexic, my sons are dyslexic, my PHD wielding, university lecturing, 30 INT wife is dyslexic. Dyslexia is a neurodivergence and learning difference that is principally focused on reading, writing, and spelling, not decision making, cognitive function, or general intelligence.
I just left a game because two of the four players in the group steadfastly refused to join in and play cooperatively. One was an edgelord loner rogue and the other was an edgelord loner barbarian. I attended four sessions, all of which ended up playing out full of increasingly ludicrous actions by the DM as he attempted to get the group to join together. It culminated in him using the wizard’s familiar to murder an NPC, in order to implicate us all so that we would have to work as a team to acquit ourselves, I think. The thing is that I joined this group at level 2, a few months into an ongoing game. And they still weren’t even a cohesive party? I have zero idea what the actual adventure would have been about. What a colossal waste of time.
The worst person ever though was a fellow who came to my house many years ago and accepted snacks from my toddler child, who was maybe two or three at the time, still learning to share, very impressionable and such. When my kid wanted some of the fellow’s snacks in return, this adult snatched them away and refused to share. Like WTF? Who does that? To a small child no less.
To make things short, I had a brother with impecable luck. I allowed him to roll for Charisma in asking out a single box lady he had used a love philter on, then he proposed. He rolled a bat 20, so I let him marry the girl (this might be irrelevant, but her name was Julia). Later, he was having some issues with money in a town full of desecrated building from a recent zombie attack, so he asked to sell his wife into slavery (the campaign had slavery for the sole purpose of plot development).
Alright, so basically, right now I am an intermediate player, I have mostly just played barbarians and fighters for the last few campaigns I have been in, and recently I was able to scrap together a dnd game with around 6 people (It's usually changing a lot). I was really happy to start this, and things were going great up until the players reached level 7, one of the players (who just so happened to be the host) found out about a little spell called Aura of the Guardian. Now, I cannot progress any further into the campaign due to the fact that the host (who I can't kick out) keeps on repeating "I take the damage" whenever a npc gets almost murdered, and now the host keeps on saying that I am terrible at dnd and that I don't know what I'm doing, I'm genuinely thinking about ending my campaign because of this absolutely horrible player, if anybody knows how to deal with this player, please respond as soon as possible.
So I've got a player who's been in my campaign for about seven months and he has been kinda a reoccurring problem. He has gotten better as of recent months, but he has had his moments even now. He joined in on the second or third session and has been playing a half-elf half-aarakocra (a custom race I had to make) druid of the circle of the elemental flow (another homebrew). His main problem is he argues about every little thing. He is driving me out of my damn mind with the amount of calls (in and out of game) that he has said are incorrect. He even has begun judging my DMing style. And he won't even say it to my face. I've heard these things from people I trust who say he has said these things. (And I have verified and it does fit his personality and how he acts) The worst thing is he is just kinda an ass. He is very demeaning sometimes and treats me like a child. And while I am a few years younger (All of us are below 18, with most of us being early teens and then a handful of us being mid to late teens) I am perfectly capable, but just the way he acts and speaks sounds like he is a grown-ass adult when he is barely older than me. And he is an ass to me because me and his sister are dating and he doesn't think we should be. And he tries to offer "advice", both in and out of the game, which is just veiled insults and him complaining.
In the words of the great philosopher, Unicorse, "Aaaannnnd why should I care??"
Best quote from a book ever: "If you love with your eyes, death is forever. If you love with your heart, there is no such thing as parting."- Jonah Cook, Ascendant, Songs of Chaos by Michael R. Miller. Highly recommend
We just had this exchange during our recap:
Me: Then you headed up into the Northern Wastes. You're still not entirely sure why.
Player: Because that's where the plot was!
On the other hand, there's a fine line. Knowing that goblins are pretty easily killed, tend to be greedy and move in large troops; most adventurers would know that and it's no big that the players act accordingly. On the other hand, opening the player owned copy of the Monster's manual, looking up the goblin stat block and then telling the party mid fight "that one only has 3 HP left!"... that's not so cool.
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
Tips, Tricks, Maps: Lantern Noir Presents
**Streams hosted at at twitch.tv/LaternNoir
On the topic, I had a player that wanted to die-roll every single challenge and would become agitated when they couldn't.
Early in the campaign they got a mcguffin. it was supposed to be the "you will carry this mcguffin around and learn about it and have people try to steal it and you'll eventually use it to do great things." Instead the player insisted, passionately, that as a 1st level artificer they could find out everything about the mcguffin with a single die roll. And I resisted because I had built the campaign around questing for information about the mcguffin. The whole game failed if I just said "you rolled a... 19.. so yeah, here's all the things it is capable of. that ends the first 2/3rds of the campaign".
And it kinda became a running trend. Every question that came up was met with a "can I roll to know the answer?" rather than "how do we find the answer?" And rather than confront the player about it, or explain to the table that primary arcs were built around questing for information, I just kept.... not. I kept trying to work with these requests and find ways to offer half answers or newer challenges and hope the dice kept the mystery.
Basically I did the Wrong(tm) thing. The game ended in a table flip moment of frustration from that player which then lead to some hard conversations about player agency, DM style and the group broke up.
Definitely should have worked harder to say "hey, this play style isn't working for the game I'm trying to run. How do we find a middle ground where you feel valuable and empowered but you also respect that this is how the story is structured?"
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
Tips, Tricks, Maps: Lantern Noir Presents
**Streams hosted at at twitch.tv/LaternNoir