When Metagaming Goes Wrong: How Do You Stop Out-of-Character Knowledge From Ruining Your Game?

3 Wise DMs

No matter how much we say it’s the DM’s world, the players know the game too. They have access to all the books, all the lore, even all the monster stats! Sometimes that’s a big help. Other times, it can be a problem for the campaign you want to run.

Have you ever had players who actively spoil what all the monsters do? Or players who think they know what your NPCs are all about? Or a fellow DM who’s DMed every Ravenloft module D&D has produced and is trying not to spoil your run through Curse of Strahd? How do you handle players who don’t separate their personal knowledge from what their characters would know?

Thorin, Tony and Dave go off-book a lot, homebrewing, up-scaling, and repurposing all the time. In this episode they talk about what is OK and not OK metagaming, problems metagaming has created in their games, and how they deal with the players and situations it spawns.

1:00 Dueling Strahds: Metagaming rears its blood-sucking head

3:00 What out-of-character knowledge is or isn’t a problem?

6:00 How metagame expectations can undermine attempts to create original adventures

10:00 How we sometimes struggle with meta-knowledge as PCs

15:00 Reimagining Strahd

18:00 Really, how should PCs react when literally The Devil invites them to dinner or to do a job?

23:00 The Strahd dinners that might’ve been…

29:00 What to do when players think they know what the monsters do?

36:00 “You just don’t want us to win!” When the world doesn’t work the way the players assumed, and they blame the DM

38:00 The Deck of Many Editions: What worked then doesn’t work now, and some players hate that!

45:00 In-depth on vampire challenge levels and the problem with nonmagical damage immunities and

53:00 Changing monsters to create interesting thematic, cinematic, moments

58:00 Metagaming: How do you get players to cut it out and respect your “authority”?

68:00 Monk Owl Bears are too far … Or are they?

72:00 Final thoughts