You have other people to manage wildlife, often times, and are probably not likely to encounter said animals. If you are then you know to carry bear spray, for example.

Now imagine you’re in a world where bandits on the road are threat you actually have to consider. Trolls might live down the road and your town sends out memos saying “if you see these signs, run, and if you absolutely must then fire is the only thing that will be effective.” It’s perfectly plausible, you just need to be the littlest bit creative/steal stuff like wildlife advisories from the real world.

You don’t even need an NPC. My first character was a sorceror who didn’t know what he could cast but his will, muscle-memory, and being in certain situations brought it out of him. Any “puzzle fight” should have enough room for players/characters to realize there’s a problem and the discover the solution. You can’t plan ahead, maybe, but there’s no reason you can’t have one roleplay turn and then “get lucky” choosing a fire spell next to see what happens.

Tip for shy/annoying/cowardly/etc. characters is to make it a thing they overcome. My current character is just a lil’ guy who basically got possessed so he’s constantly scared shitless but he’s trying his best and I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to get him out of his shell or even just to feel like he has to say something whether he likes it or not.

Ok, I’ll throw my hat in the ring.

Metagaming is fine, actually.

Obviously, don’t read the module you’re a player in, but knowing to use fire on trolls is just basic game knowledge. It’s ok to be good at the game, because it is a game. If you’re playing dungeons and dragons, or pathfinder, or any other rpg that spends most of the pages on combat rules, then you’re playing a tactics game. I like tactics games (I’m not good at them, but that’s a separate conversation).

I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to come up with a brilliant plan to do a thing, and then be told that I’m not allowed to do it because me figuring out the puzzle is metaknowlede.

It is exclusively in the tabletop rpg space that being good at the game is considered a bad thing. It’s in a similar vein that I hate tutorials in video games, especially when I’m being prevented from doing things that I already know how to do (because I’ve been playing games for multiple decades now and I have some amount of media literacy) for no other reason than the game hasn’t taught me yet. So arbitrarily, I’m not allowed to use fire damage on the trolls until some npc tells me that trolls are weak to fire? That’s asinine.

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.

Eh, I know nothing about how to handle most dangerous animals, even ones that live in my area; I’d imagine that even in a world with trolls, regular people wouldn’t know anything about them.

Debatable. You definitely know a Tigers greatest weakness, and a bears greatest weakness even if you don’t know how to use them. >!Bullets!<

Is this meta- metagaming?

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”.

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

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, which by the way was the other person’s point all along. They didn’t once yuck the yums of people who play differently.

Id say that we don’t know those things now because we live in modern technological times where you don’t have to know those things to survive. If this was the middle ages and you were an adventuring type who could hold their own out in the wilds, you would almost definitely know all of those things.

yeah in pf2 it’s a level based DC, and if it’s an uncommon, rare, or unique creature that will increase the DC

also the skill to use for recall knowledge depends on the creature’s trait:
humanoid > society;
animal > nature;
dragon > arcana;
abberation > occultism;
etc

though the GM can rule that you can use something else if they choose.

oh so DnD does have that, but nobody knows about it. sick

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.

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.

There’s more than the two alternatives of playing “Myself, a person who games a lot and knows things a veteran gamer would know, but with D&D powers” and “The personification of chaotic stupidity that is my alter-ego, an insufferable piece of shit, but with D&D powers”.

The “My Guy” syndrome is the inexperienced person’s experimentation of Improving in RPGs. The meta-gamer is the experienced-but-tactless person’s desire to play the game straight up as a board game, rather than a social experience.

There’s a third - even more experienced - kind of player, who can seamlessly integrate the rules they’re very familiar with into the story of their character that they’re trying to tell. The player who says “I’m going to play a kleptomaniac Rogue” and proceeds to steal the belt off a rampaging Ogre to trip him with his own pants as a combat maneuver. Or the player who says “I’m going to play a Stubbornly Self-Righteous Knight” and is as rigid in his morals as he is tankie in his ability hold the line when the party needs it most.

These players lean into their conflicts for a comedic interlude, then squad up to form a deadly duo when its time to crack heads. And that makes the game both more fun for everyone at the table (especially the DM) than someone mired in the technicalities of a feat description or obsessed with being the center of attention.

Great suggestion! Will try to work on it next time. I must admit my characters have very little character development usually. I should work on that!

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 like the idea of some kind of fighter who fights with a variety of cursed weapons.

Not the only negative, “this blade is everdull and gives you bone-itis” type of curse. The “you can cut through anything but you need to bleed before you can sheath it” type curse.

if your headed to a place called troll canyon you should probably do some research on what trolls are weak to beforehand

Unsolicited but usually helpful advice is my forte lol! Appreciate the appreciation!

“Dude, you took a big hit, How’re you feelin’?”

“On a scale of 1 to 57, I’d say I’m about a 35”