Oddly enough, in the old days of AD&D, metagaming seemed to be expected for survival in those scenarios filled with horrible instant kill traps and encounters. Characters making knowledge checks, DM describing resistance, weak and immunity hits... communication decidedly plays a key role in describing monsters and battles ! As an autie, I share that sentiment about differing mental characteristics ! I once made an extremely charismatic player in Z-Corps (who I engineered to kinda be the Team Mom of sorts), by a DM I used to admire. The campaign started as an individual interrogation after witnessing a terrorist act. When my turn came, the DM asked me if I said the truth or lied about it. I said that I personally would've said the truth, but _asked_ for an actual Charisma check to realize those guys had bad intents, because it that specific kind of situation my character had higher social acumen to do the right thing by herself and it seemed like an important choice to warrant it. He said I couldn't. "Very well, she has no idea of what to say, so she does the reasonable thing and says the truth." *_And she was never seen from again..._* For me that exciting campaign has ended before the first roll, because of my poor personal social skill (and lack of paranoia), regardless of what was written on my sheet and because of my autism. What a jerk of an ableist DM 😡
Great video! I will say, even though you brought your music down when talking, it was still hard to hear you over the music. I think if your vocal audio was raised a couple notches and the music was lowered a couple, then it'd be great! (btw I loved the frame of Bigby from The Wolf Among Us.) I swear I'm not some nitpicky freak, my job literally deals in audio levels, so I'm hyper aware at most times. Hope this helps, keep up the great work!
tweaking statblocks is honestly something i almost always do, like i have a 6 player party and a lot of monsters are just either very simple, or WAY too over overtuned because they are designed for 4 level 9 players vs 6 level 5 players who all play the game like its FF tactics. i have a wild fire druid who just melts most battles, so why not have a monster that absorbs fire damage and hits back with it.
love your videos, and as a forever DM I have seen a lot of the stuff you talk about very often, especially with newer players and I really appreciate this. I hope you continue with the amazing work.
4:30 is great, always remember that communication represents a big portion of the game. It can be easy to forget that we're playing a game of our making and if we are confused by things or hurt by rules we (as players and GMs) can help each other have a better experience. Maybe get more into the RP aspect as well. As a forever DM, 7:50 's take as providing players with information that they should reasonably receive in relation to combat, sounds similar to some (also good) advice about the overuse of the Perception roll. Whereby an over focus on requiring Perception rolls overencompasses both other checks (investigation, nature, survival, etc.) and by having to roll for things that you can see. I remember many a time a player rolls a nat 1 and I'd jokingly describe them as blind before them realising that they had merely shut their eyes. Yet everyone has a certain level of understanding that their characters should have in a game. It also bears mentioning that metagaming and min-maxing sound similar, but are ultimately not forms of metagaming, min-maxing represents a play-style.
When you mentioned trolls, it reminded me of how recently my current character (draconian bloodline sorcerer) was using dragon breath(fire) against some smaller mosquito monsters, and when the troll got in her face, she hit the troll with it... frying the troll. I'd honestly forgotten that trolls were weak to fire.😂
