The Many Types of Metagaming 

Which of these forms of metagaming bothers you the most at your own tables? Thanks so much to OnlyCrits for sponsoring this video! Visit www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK at checkout! www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike

I have the opposite problem: players don't ask each other about their secrets. AT ALL. Even if the situation demands it.

I never metagame I didn't like.

I feel like I've had the opposite of this before. I was playing the spelljammer campaign as an astral elf. When we found out that the elves were the main villains of the story, the entire group looked to my character for answers. I was constantly asking the dm if I would know certain things about the astral elves. Apparently, my character was the most out of the loop astral elf wizard to ever exist.

I love that you use your own mistakes and bad behavior to explain how something that someone does with good intentions can ruin someone else's fun

one of my favorite critical role campaign 1 moments (MINOR spoilers incoming) has to do with “incongruous” monster knowledge. they see some random structures on a mountain, travis rolls an intelligence check, almost as a joke, and gets a high roll (might’ve been a nat 20, cant remember off the top of my head). he immediately goes to write it off like “hey, matt, you don’t have to give me this info, obviously grog doesn’t know this”. turns out it was a stone giant fortress, something that it would make TOTAL SENSE for grog to know about while nobody else in the group has the info!

When I run a game I utilize something called “Backstory Proficiencies.” For low intelligence players if they have something in their backstory that would have knowledge of said thing will allow them to roll a general intelligence roll with proficiency. It allows them to have a slight boost to the roll and gives them a feeling that a “dump stat” is more useful for role play rather than cutting them out of a portion of the game.

A mild extension from the 'I know the monster statblock' one that irritates me is when people say the monster's name before you're finished your description or give away the surprise. My players were going into a city filled with undead spirits, like ghosts, wraiths, specters, etc. And they camped outside the city the night before they entered. Some of the spirits attacked them and the first thing they spotted was a Banshee. I hadn't said it was a Banshee, but that ONE player who recognizes every monster said out of character that it was a Banshee, all while I was trying to build a feeling of suspense and tension as it approached. While it's not as bad as giving away stat blocks, it still really takes the wind out of my sails as a DM cause what was the point of me going through all that tension building if you're going to spoil the surprise, and it breaks said tension for the other players too. This player also tried to tell a new player under his breath to 'Let the person with the highest Charisma make the Deception check', so he's THAT type of meta gamer too.

On the topic of stupid characters understanding enemies, I was playing a Barbarian with 6 int but 16 wisdom. In my mind, that makes him a specialized person educated beyond his actual intelligence in one specific thing… fighting and slaying monsters. There are a lot of people in the real world that aren’t particularly bright, but they’ve been immersed in something long enough to know the ins and outs.

I love that you covered how it's all up to preference and that there are dozens of types of metagaming and it's all situational

I was going to play at an organized play event, and the title of the scenario included the word ‘plague’, so I mentioned we’d probably need some alchemical item to help with disease saves. In every previous scenario, we were briefed on what we might be dealing with so we could get whatever equipment we might need. The GM said I was was “metagaming like a [expletive deleted]”, so I guess he was planning on skipping the briefing… but if that was the case, why did he even post the title on Warhorn? Just a couple minutes later, he was filling out a form for the game, and although the posting said it was for levels up to 7, he decided to ignore that and say my character was too high level. I told him I didn’t have other characters with me, so he said all of the enemies would be attacking my archery-focused ranger constantly. So not only was he breaking the organized play rules by not giving us the briefing (I looked the scenario up later, and a briefing mentioning ‘plague’ was in there) and not wanting to let me play a character that was legal for the scenario, he was also willing to metagame by having enemies magically know character levels. It felt like he was looking to kill characters, so I walked out and made sure to never sign up for a table he was running in the future. It sucked to have wasted time traveling out there that day, but I wasn’t interested in sacrificing my character to feed his overblown and hypocritical ego.

I like the addendum added at 5:20. If everyone knows the "trick" to a certain monster, and that gimmick is the centerpiece of this particular challenge, then it feels a bit off to be forced to see that gimmick through for the sake of (not) metagaming. The classic one is always trolls. If a new player hasn't had the experience of a seemingly dead and defeated troll, rising up again to whack them from behind, then we shouldn't take that experience away from them. But if everyone has experienced that already, then going through the motions of all that would feel a little tedious.

the most fun I've seen this used is a campaign where the world of DND was made real and the people at the table were playing as their actual selves. Now all that knowledge come in handy

Pathfinder 2e has an action called “Recall Knowledge” built right into the system, and even has feat support to give you buffs for doing it. And it’s great to use for players to find out about special abilities or weaknesses/resistances which are way more common in that game. It allows someone with meta game knowledge to also, at the cost of one of your three actions (so not a huge loss to your turn) to in character act on that knowledge if they roll high enough.

The general story knowledge one is so intensely relateable. We had a big gala with every important NPC in the realm and some realms beyond... my fighter was on edge all night long, just waiting for the place to get attacked, so much so that she started a romance with an NPC to lighten the mood for herself. There were assassins in the courtyard, which is better than a dragon tearing off the roof!

Tying (certain types of) metagaming to worldbuilding is a great reminder. I LOVE to let the characters know *relevant* information in the hopes that it helps the players be invested in those parts of the world's lore/structures. But then, I was just reminded at last week's game that I am a very generous GM. As for the rest of this encyclopedic video, very well done.

I think the fact that homebrewing monsters in 5e is arduous makes this problem worse. It's super time consuming to write all your monsters from scratch because of all the stuff you have to worry about.

I always feeel metagaming is such a personal thing and is pretty much hard to completely avoid. The thing I feel people don't talk about as much is how the fear of metagaming can create situations where players feel forced to limit they options to avoid the accusation or having to justify why they made the optimal desicion. There is also not enough talk about the positive requirement of metagaming, i.e. following the direction of the game to allow the adventure to progress,.

I only take notes for sequences I’m involved in, so as I reflect on them in future sessions I accurately recall what I know and forget everything else 😂

I'm curious what your take would be on if gentle reminders are considered metagaming? I find I have a better memory than most people, so sometimes when people are forgetting something in game that they probably wouldn't forget if they were there irl I might give a quick, "Don't forget the..." as a helpful reminder. I had a DM who HATED me doing this and was constantly telling me to "Stop metagaming!", so I tried to not do it in his game. I've never had a problem on this with other DMs so I never even thought this was metagaming before, but now I'm not sure. Longer example: Two characters are talking in a room, my character is somewhere else, but as a player I am watching them on "TV". They discus plans for something and agree that when they leave this room, they should take the sword that is sitting on the table in front of them. They discuss some other things so some time passes, and when they say they are leaving the room they don't mention the sword. I know that they had already decided to take it with them, so I might say, "Don't forget the sword". Is this really metagaming? In a game that is mostly played in our minds, it is much harder to remember everything because you can't actually SEE the room and the sword, so as a player it might slip their mind, but as a *character* they never would have forgot that sword.

6:26 I really like that you moved from stats to how a character is played and what's in the backstory. To me, it makes perfect sense for a fighter with an int of 7 to know a troll is vulnerable to fire/acid (probably one or the other) if that's what they are trained for. 30:35 I feel this as a player. I joined an online game back in 2016 and I had a full detailed backstory and character description and was very much non-stereotypical for the class, then a major NPC referred to me by class upon first meeting. The DM was otherwise good and put in a lot of effort but that killed my immersion dead and it was totally unneed to even add the players classes into that NPC greeting us. He'd done so much work creating the scene and the NPCs in it then just killed it dead by reminding each an every player that they're playing a game and what class they are playing.

I'm currently treading that "revealing other players' secret" right now. I'm playing a goblin in a Dragonlance game where another player is a Solamnic knight that was secretly reincarnated as a hobgoblin. The hobgoblin knight is covered in armor, so all the characters think it's a human. So far, it's just some light ribbing about goblin related topics, but I definitely want to leave it up to the player to reveal their secret to the other PC'sc when the time is right.

I have one exception to the "Omnipresent Knowledge" metagaming. When a player whose character is not present in a scene, asks if a character that is present, can see/hear something they forgot to ask about, and/or the DM forgot to mention. The only reason I actually like this, is it gives the player information they should be given, and it assists/keeps honest the DM when they've failed to give details on the space, and it allows the players listening to better visualize the scene. When I'm the DM, I like it because it reminds me to give details I might have forgotten, and when I'm a player it keeps me engaged. It can of course be abused, and there are ways that the DM might be concealing information from the PC in order to get the jump on them (the player never mentioned looking up at the ceiling, and so fails to see the monster waiting in ambush there) but in most cases I'm opposed to that kind of design. Holding hostage what should be obvious information from a player because they didn't think to ask the key phrase, breaks the reality of the world to me. I should be told what my character should be able to see, hear, feel, and smell about the environment, without having to ask. Being suddenly told that there's a trap or ambush where it would have been obvious to my character, because I wasn't given enough information, feels like a cheat. I think a lot of meta-gaming is really just the game making up for the abstraction of the world. Knowing how many hit points someone has is the experience of being in battle, trained to fight in a group, and being able to look at someone and know how long they can keep fighting. It's something we can't really replicate, because we aren't those people, we just play them. This is why I don't mind a bit of cross talk at the table when it comes to strategizing in combat, there's a lot of communication that people who have been fighting along side each other can do without talking, and training which means that they'd actually already know what to do, instead of having to discuss it. But my players don't have that, they only fight monsters once a week.

The section on magic reminded me of how open Matt tends to be about what spells the enemies are casting on Critical Role, and it was only when reading a book written by another DM that I realized 1, not all DMs do this and 2, it actually doesn't make much sense in-world. (Unless your setting is anime-style and everyone has to yell the names of their attacks.) But while "you see ice crystals slowly forming on their fingers before they spray out towards you" makes more sense in-world than "They're going to try and cast Ray of Frost", sometimes breaking the immersion is necessary if you have players with Counterspell and they need to decide what to use it on and what to let through. Some DMs have players roll to recognize spells, while others are more open. Matt on Critical Role does play with this when it's a REALLY significant or unusual villain spell though. I seem to remember him never directly calling-out Delilah's Finger of Death until the party had witnessed it several times, only describing it in vague terms that still made it clear "this spell is BAD and you don't want to get hit by it."

A couple years ago I joined this group for dnd, and I had very little experience. I was playing a wizard at the time, and most of the party were busy that day so it was just me, a gunslinger, and the dm. Honestly, I’m not sure how I got the confidence to be willing to join on that day because I knew neither the dm nor the gunslinger player at all at that point, and this was basically my introduction to them besides making my character with the dm. That’s besides the point, though. This was my first session in the campaign, and I knew incredibly little about dnd at the time. The gunslinger had been playing for years, though. At one point, we encountered a hydra’s den. I believe it was a hydra, but I can’t quite remember. The hydra was asleep, so we discussed how to kill it. I looked through my spells and said “…I have this spell called ‘Delayed Blast Fireball.’ Do you think that would work? If the hydra’s asleep, we can just wait the full minute for it to go off at max power.” (We were playing level 15 characters, which is a wild experience as a newcomer). The gunslinger looked at me and said “I don’t know. Sounds like a solid plan. We could try.” So that’s what we did, and to my utter surprise, the fireball did an insane amount of damage, crippling the hydra so much that it only took one round of combat to bring it down completely. And that’s when the gunslinger said to me, “I knew it was weak to fire damage. I was trying so hard not to say anything. That was awesome.” …And that was awesome. Love my dnd group so much.

When it comes to monster stat, what me and my table do to avoid metagaming is ask the DM: "would my character know what this monster is weak to?" And let the DM decide. They might ask for a check or simply say, based on the character's background "yes, you would know that".

my favourite way to work around the discussing skills issue is I frame them in terms of *my character.* Is Danny the strongest person in the party? Im not sure, but I know he's stronger than *me.* Lucy is absolutely smarter than me, but I'm far and away more charming than she is. I don't know the exact number of Rory's DEX save, but I do know he's not the most nimble guy around, and I can run circles around him if I need to.

I love when your dog barks or shows up in the video. Gives the video a home feeling, much approved.

I have to agree about the player secrets one. one of my chars is a hallow one barbarian/fighter. I gave away the information to the players early on also letting them know this is not something they would just know. the char doesn't look like undead. and part of the reveal process was supposed to be things like detect good and evil detecting the undead in the party. etc. from day one all of the other players acted like it was normal and that everyone knew he was undead. It really hurt. as it was a fun idea for my char to slowly come to grips with his undead nature. as well as recover his memory from before he died. [basicly i play him that his barbarian levels are from after he came back and is the anger from being ripped from the grave. and his fighter levels are him regaining the knowledge he lost before he died.]

Re: Dice roll knowledge, the hardest thing to teach players is that outside of combat, failure can be fun. There's this create scene in the latest season of Dimension 20 where Lou rolls a Nat 1 on an Insight check and _completely_ leans into his character reading the situation wrong and it's awesome because he knows the DM isn;t going to kill his character over it. So many DMs punish players for low rolls on things like perception, insight, persuasion, etc. that players can't help but dread a low roll, but it's up to the DM to teach the players to embrace the failure.

I ran a LMoP on Roll20 with a two friends and two people from the forums, and clearly one of the players I didn't know went out and bought the adventure in between the two sessions that took part in the Wave Echo Caverns. At the start of the second session they wanted their character to backtrack to the previous parts of the Caverns the players had been to the week before to do some _very_ specific things that they only could have known by reading the adventure. Not even asking for rolls to figure things out, just "I go back to that room and do this very specific thing like I've got completely knowledge about it". Crap like that drives me crazy, you don't get special internet points for reading ahead and "winning" the game.

About the Character Secret knowledge, I've once played a Mimic who was pretending to be a Warforge, at the first session as the character, the party leader realised I was a mimic because he told me to take care of an enemy and watched in horror as I ate the poor guard. A few sessions later the rest of the party found out one by one as I transformed in front of them allowing them to naturally find out I was a mimic, one day some new players joined, one of the players was a cleric who hated all bad people, by itself it was horrible because we were all playing chaotic neutral and evil characters, but when my turn came around I mentioned to the DM that I'll go to my characters room in the tavern to eat the moles I caught, that player realised something was wrong and asked to walk into the room, the DM told him that the door is locked (because he had no reason to walk into the room of someone he just met) and the next time we were in combat the cleric chose to attack me with some of his spells saying that he doesn't trust my character and saying his god will make him attack any monster, that resulted in most of the party being on edge because... We... Were all monsters disguised as humanoids or humanoids that were fused with monsters...

I once got jumped on for metagaming when I said "I attack the people worm" so I changed it to "I attack the annelid with a violet hue" for the rest of the combat.

I just realized that my D&D group instinctively doesn't talk about hit points the vast majority of the time. Definitely not in combat, then sometimes we say it once the tension drops, just to have a little break while acknowledging how crazy that combat was, or something. We never said anything about it in our session 0, it's just something that came about naturally (probably at least partially because we don't have healers, so it doesn't really come up).

On the last kind of metagaming, I was running a game 3 or 4 years ago and a player character died or was petrified or something, so the player rolled up a new character. He sent me a homebrew class, I read it over and approved it which makes this partially my bad but whatever. One of its abilities allowed him to ask someone 3 questions in a dream state and they couldn't lie. He, playing someone the party had never met and who had no connection to them, tailored 3 questions to pry out that one of the PCs that they had been tasked with stealing a powerful orb capable of trapping any creature from another player, who was tasked with protecting it. Everyone knew it out of game because I had spent a long time setting it up, nobody knew it in character. At no point before the session did he even hint to me he was doing this. It destroyed an entire players arc that was meant to begin in like 2 sessions, dozens of hours of my work and lead to the eventual collapse of the game. I have never come closer to ending a friendship over something that happened in a dnd game. It was gutting, and incredibly disrespectful to me as the DM and everyone else at the table.

Re character stat knowledge, I don't generally have an issue when players say "I'll roll as I have the best survival" as I view it as players vocalising something that would otherwise be unvoiced - ie a character simply scouring the ground for tracks or noticing broken branches because that is something they're tuned into, but I loved hearing a different take on these issues

I think there are situations in which a person can react to someone else rolling low and not finding something in-character. like if someone rolls low on an investigation check to search a room, it could mean that their character did a visibly half-assed job looking around the room. Like, they just walked in, looked around, and left, and if another character was there to see that, they could reasonably go "hey idiot, you didn't search this room properly. you need to actually open drawers or look behind furniture." It probably doesn't work in every situation but I think a bad roll usually LOOKS like a bad attempt in character. EDIT: I do think perception is harder to justify because it's not like you can visibly "hear better" but I also can't think of a situation where one character is making a perception check and others aren't since usually they are in the same spot, potentially looking at and listening to the same things. But I think this is why passive perception exists, since perceiving passively is more likely than doing any other skill passively.

27:29 i did this in character. Speaking to the ranger "you're the famous tracker; I'm an Archivist. I'll be right behind you, long as you stay out of the mud"

I recently got a compliment by my dm regarding meta knowledge. We had a technical glitch that allowed my screen to show the entire map for me to see. I immediately warned dm and they sighed and I apologized. They said it was fine and they weren’t worried because, as they told me in this moment, I am “very good at not using meta knowledge even if you know something.” I felt flattered by that since this is a very experienced and talented dm who I have a lot of respect for. It made me feel good to have that type of compliment because I genuinely do try very hard to remember what a particular thing a character of mine my actually know. This is because I can memorize things I see almost instantly. Considering how much research I did initially when I joined the dnd hobby, this means I know waaaay more than I should for not being on the dm side of the screen. So, because of that, I work hard to take notes and make it clear to myself what my character does and does not know and react with that knowledge, not my personal meta knowledge…well…not without good reason, like helping welcome a new player to the fold or other social aspects of the table that help everyone there having fun.

That was a potent point, about metagaming being the abuse of knowledge rather than just the use of it. And to that end, "how does your DM feel about it" and "how does it affect the other players" are the most important questions to ask. I love that you mentioned HP totals as well.

30:11 This one is more for your pleasure, Mike, but in our current game, I play a Tome Warlock with good alignment, stealthy patron worship and half-decent INT and for the first two months of play, every other character just assumed my PC is a Wizard. "He's using arcane magic, he has a spell book, and he's really smart, OF COURSE he's a Wizard, what else would he be." "Wait, what do you mean 'You're not a Wizard.' Did you get kicked out of college? That's fine, we still think you're a Wiz-- Oh. Those powers aren't yours. Okay..." We also had a similar situation with our two backstory friends, a Cleric in full plate and a DEX based Paladin, where the two had swapped classes assigned to them. That was very fun.

The secrets one reminds me of a recent game I've been playing. My character is a Shadar Kai Warlock who, up until some secrets about the Raven Queen were revealed, was very loyal to her cause. One of the things he adamantly believed in was that "the undead shouldn't exist in any form". The bard happened to be an undead (I forget which one, I never looked it up), and had revealed it to the Pally, but for obvious reasons never revealed it to my warlock until much later, after my PC abandoned the cause. It was so satisfying for me to finally have my character know about that in that moment, when I had known since almost the beginning as a player!

Really appreciate this clear breakdown of the different metagaming styles, and just wanna say if you would enjoy putting together that long discussion of fiction tropes as they relate to ttrpgs I'd love to watch/listen to that. Maybe in multiple installments?

Very good summary and zoology of metagaming. Making notes/saving the video.

A few things I've done to combat "dice piling" is having the players roll five or ten Perception checks, Will saves, etc, I write them down and just mark off those numbers once they would apply. As for Secret Knowledge/PVP, I always make sure both sides are okay with another player (or NPC) trying to discern if the player is lying, starting a fight between players, etc. In my mind, players are entitled to their character secrets and can deny a roll and simply tell the other player what they sense, and that's that!

I'm not sure if this was metagaming or not, and I would love some insight. In my most recent session, my group spent 30 minutes debating if we should go by foot or by horse on a lengthy journey. Buying horses would take up almost all of our gold, and we weren't in a time crunch in-game, however our rogue felt strongly about going faster on horseback. I ended up putting in my opinion that we were burning game time, and that it wouldn't affect how long we as players experienced travel, just how long our characters were traveling. We ended up going on foot, but I'm not sure if that counts as metagaming or not, because I made a choice based on my knowledge as a player rather than my knowledge as a character. Sure, it was for the benefit of the table's fun, so it would probably be harmless, but it still bugs me that I did that.

This is probably the most frustrating thing about DMing a game for my family. Trying to explain to a 10 year old the SHE knows what is going on, her character may not.

To prevent players from knowing something is wrong when they fail a roll, I ask players to give me from 3 to 5 d20 rolls in advance and write them in my notes. I then use those as Perception or Insight checks whenever they might come up without their knowledge. It's REALLY moved my games in a very favorable direction. We all like that.

I think this is a good example of metagaming done right: Sparing the wall of text of details, essentially my character is an aspiring chef and working the kitchen at a party. My allies are enjoying the party, but are wary of a would be assassination against our lives. Someone brings them drinks, but my character isn't present, and thus can't check the drinks for poison. My solution was that my character was delivering another round of food to the table (something already done several times organically) and could subsequently be offered a drink and discover the poison. This allowed me to be useful with a feat I previously took, it moved along the story, and it let my party have a fun chase + interrogation while I got to be the 'hero.'

On Specific DM knowledge, there is one instance of metagaming that I actively encourage in every one-shot I run: When I design a one-shot, I always add some way for the players to recover their HP, spell slots, abilities, what have you before the final boss encounter. I do this so players don’t feel like they have to “ration” their abilities throughout the adventure, so so I can design a tough boss fight without supposing that the party will be resource drained. Whether it’s a potion, an item, some form of divine or arcane intervention, my players know to be on the lookout for it, and they know that they can go all-out (just this once) during the other encounters. Is it metagaming? Yup, but it makes the one-shots much more fun in my opinion

Thank you. This video has helped me a lot, as a new dm and a new person to dnd in general. We are all new to it, I was the only one out of the friendgroup who played before (besides one other person who didn’t wanted to be dm). I had only played 2 times before, so gamemastering was pretty hard and learning everything was a bit though. We played 2 sessions now and I am still figuring out how to manage meta gaming. The one player who has played a lot, often uses his Monster knowledge and his general knowledge about the game mechanics. Which is a problem, because I occasionally forget some of the smaller rules. And another player plays a secret Changeling. So of course the others are gonna get suspicious of her, when something meta happens.

I know a LOT of the monster mechanics that our DM throws at us because i often DM as well and know a lot of monster stats. Generally instead of exploiting any weaknesses or warning my party, i (as discreetly as i can) try to make myself vulnerable to whatever its strongest attack is to bait my DM so the other players will see it. Ive been hit by so many cone, line, and grapple moves its surprising ive only killed 1 of my characters by 9th level :D (RIP my Paladin, the black dragon was too much lol) My current character has the sage background so i mostly ask about my character knowledge now but it was fun playing the bait/tank

There are a lot of benign or even good things that are technically metagaming. Finding a way for a character who wouldn't normally go on the adventure to go on the adventure is *technically* metagaming, but it's not bad. This is how I feel about tactical metagaming like "how many hit points does everyone have?" It's technically metagaming, but also it's fine and even good, depending on the style you're playing. The one thing about monster statblock metagaming that can be a hurdle is if I've homebrewed something and the person gets upset their metagaming was wrong. I don't do this necessarily to "get" metagamers, but to make things more opaque and interesting. I also run for a DM [my duet] or 2-3 DMs [when I run for a party], and I often change monsters because "trying not to metagame, but I actually know this exact statblock" can be less fun as a player instead of just not knowing what the monster's deal is in the first place. Hard agree that pcs metagaming to discover other pc's secrets is really annoying though.

I actually just did a creature feature last week with an owlbear. I told the players "you've heard of owlbears, but this one doesn't look like the ones in stories. It's mangy and emaciated with viscera dripping from its beak." Then it spit acid on them.

One extra viewpoint about the beginning of the video about everyone knows something about the creatures in their world is that there is one extra twist. In a d&d game, these are characters that are going out of their way to actively engage with the monsters in their world, it's closer to someone in the real world who is about to travel to a new area and look into the wild animals of a new area, like traveling to Australia and looking into the creatures living there, so the characters in the d&d world would probably of looked into the possible threats in there world before they started traveling and know something about the monsters of their world.

Dice roll knowledge is something that bothered me a lot. But we are playing online via foundry and it has a neat option called "Blind GM Roll". With that the player still rolls himself (no responsibillity taken away from them by rolling behind the screen), but they don't know the result. With that I try to do all perception based tests (so mostly insight and perception, others might occur). That also leads to interesting situations on the table when on an insight check two players have wildly different results, yet both characters feel that their perception of the situation is right. And the players can't look on the dice to see which one is 'false'. So they actually argue if an NPC can be trusted. For the index cards in online gaming: We just add AC and PP to the character's name in the programm (when using roll20 we add it to the player's name).

The spell knowledge one is really interesting, and makes me rethink some of my characters' own knowledge. I also main wizards, ones who think about the hows and whys of magic in all its forms. I thibk, wherever Im going to use or play in FR's weave-magic underlay, Ill talk to the dm/players about religion, arcana, and nature scores to identify spells of that level and below. Its totally a world building thing, as you said, but I think it would make sense to identify a fireball cast with a +3 in Arcana, and it even would let nonmage characters have a reasonable expectation of knowledge and tactics for it.

Knowledge about vampires is common in my setting because 30 years before the campaign started, there was a really really bad vampire problem that was saved by the previous generation of Heroes. The exact details like what constitutes running water may not be well known but they do know running water is bad for vamps. I rule fresh water flowing naturally is is flowing. Salt water doesn't count and neither are water on worked stone

I kind of accidently meta gamed last session because I got personally SO EXCITED to see myconids and knew as long as I didn't hurt them, we'd be safe with them (or at least from what I knew.) I feel like it was something in character to a degree for my character who's curious and wants to help the world would want to go after this thing she's never seen before.

I think the most interesting piece not stated about these examples is that they're all problems of metagaming _in Dungeons & Dragons._ A lot of these aren't necessarily problems in other games because they're problems that develop from the mechanics of D&D's rules. Monsters are the primary resource a DM has to antagonize players so knowing all their tricks can be frustrating. Spells being used by NPCs leads to spells being pain points for the same reason knowing monster abilities. D&D being predominantly a war game derivative means that acting on knowledge of separated party members, queues from the DM, or just story structure in general will all be resources players are expected to latch onto. Classes have no attachment to the world and so it does get a little goofy when every Ranger is a ranger. Having varying difficulty classes for rolls leads to a general sense of when you've done poorly, and with a system that's a hard pass/fail with odds generally not in your favour (save for combat rolls), you're nearly expected to have the characters who are best at something be the ones to try, so keeping information from the party is frowned upon. These are all behaviours that are hard coded into the mechanics of D&D! Looking at other games, you can see some clear differences on how they approach these problems as TTRPGs first. The Fantasy Flight Star Wars games use a dice pool and symbols to have more nuanced roll outcomes to the point where failing can still push you forward towards success with advantage symbols. Ironsworn makes the difficulty of accomplishing a task part a die roll in and of itself by rolling 2d10 and judging the outcome on if the player's roll fails against both, rolls higher than both, or lands somewhere in the middle. Blades in the Dark makes success clear as day by having the same results mean similar outcomes with players choosing how many dice they're bringing to the task, while the game master lays out how effective success will be while also making the severity of failure just as clear. All of these systems skirt around the metagaming issue by making metagaming part of the conversation in a positive manner by incorporating discussion about dice rolls and making failure fun (and even putting in mechanisms to soften or avoid consequences). So how can we help D&D? By embracing its limitations. Assume the heroes are competent at their jobs and will have knowledge about the things they encounter. Try to avoid getting too deep into the brush (but it _is_ a wargame, so it might not be avoidable all the time) but let players share knowledge of monster abilities in character as though they've heard stories; dragons breathing ferocious fire, trolls regenerating unless cauterizing their wounds, and a banshee's wail killing those who have no sense of self are easily all folk legends heroes would hear from villagers and fellow adventurers alike. Establishing classes as organizations that form around like minded practices and having unique skills identify them are ways to ground mechanics in lore. When the bard colleges are actual gatherings of like minded travelers, Paladins are oath warriors who follow and project the morals of like minded codes, and Rangers collect in warrior lodges surrounding a particular foe or method of hunting, and suddenly these silly game names have weight in your world. Have players understand that selecting classes and skills will lead them to being _the_ person for certain task and make sure that's gameplay they're interested in. If you're playing a Ranger, you should want to engage in leading the party through the wildness whether its your favoured terrain or not, so play something else if you're not interested in the exploration mechanics. Offer knowledge that should be available to characters with proper proficiencies and class choices. Clerics shouldn't struggle with knowledge about their own religion, just like someone with cartography proficiency shouldn't stumble at reading or drawing a basic map. Only have players roll if they actively engage; don't ask players to make rolls unless their character is focusing on the task to avoid players looking for information they missed. Make sure to include anyone who does roll into the consequences of the action so that not participating means you're safe from any immediate danger failure presents. Lastly, D&D is a game about teams. Teams work best when they know who's strong at what and plying your advantages where possible is what you should be doing. But also embrace parties scrambling for solutions to a problem they aren't naturally equipped to solve and watch as those players find unique ways to use their skills in order to scrape by. TL;DR- These are D&D problems. Other games don't have these metagame problems. Embrace these as features and you'll probably have a better time. Or, y'know, play a game that has problems you can turn into features.

30:13 i had fun with this. as my urchin wild magic sorcerer's magic started to show, he bought robes and looted a magical book (he is illiterate) thinking he must be a wizard, only later to discard it after being kidnapped by the fae and told he owes debts. Currently he thinks it's all directly from the fae and will be snatched away any minute.

Been needing to buy a dice tray for a while now, got a nice one thanks to your code

Good through treatment thanks! Made me think a bit more about my somewhat oblivious character, and what is ok for him to intuit.

It's really the Dice roll knowledge that gets me. Most other kinds either don't bother me, or I find easy to deal with/avoid. But for some reason, every time someone, usually the one good at it, makes a check and gets below ten, suddenly two or three other players are also "Me too!" rolling. It really breaks the idea that we're telling a story, not just playing a game. Though hit points I like the happy medium of saying that players can speak "in quarters". So you can't tell your allies your exact HP, but you can say whether you're above or under full, 3/4, 1/2, and 1/4 remaining. I get that it can make healing a little more inefficient, but that's sort of the point to me. The idea that you don't always perform to the exact numerical best is part of the experience of being those people, and that it is okay for that to be the case. Having perfect numerical HP and players acting on that, in my experience, leads them to being more concerned with numerical or mechanical perfection in other aspects as well.

Added the video to my Metagaming playlist I have on my channel.

me and my co-dm has always done the "roll to see if you know the monster" and often let the player use a skill that feels fitting for the situation. So far non of our players have thought that this house rule is bad, they mostly seem to enjoy it (and none have voiced negative opinions relating to it). we do have it take an action to attempt, and the DC is something we have a table to decide on. It's also fun to be able to maybe tell them a small hint if the player has no idea, but the dice say that the character knows something about the monster. Like it's creature type, or if it has a special ability, or a resistance.

This video made me realize I've metagamed before without realizing it. Our GM (or as we refer to her, our god) was describing the final boss of the campaign, and although I don't remember what I said specifically, I said what it was (it was a lich, and I might've mentioned the philactory as well). Someone else in the group started reading out the statblock after this as well. Then our DM/god smited him, killing his homebrewed character with low health instantly. Then, she nerfed the strike to let him keep playing/

I had an experience once with something that I couldn't really decide if it would be metagaming or not, so I just messaged my DM on discord and asked him privately. It sort of comes down to me not knowing whether the DM was phrasing things a certain way on purpose or if he was accidentally tipping his hand, and I didn't want to take advantage if it was the latter. Basically there was a murder mystery situation (think Clue or Murder on the Orient Express) in a small village and our party members were the only people who weren't suspects since we had just arrived in town, so the chieftain tasked us with solving the case. We had narrowed our list of suspects down to two and were interviewing them separately. I noticed that one of the NPCs tended to talk about the victim in the present tense and the other tended to use the past tense. I (the player) know that this often indicates that the one who is speaking in the past tense has had time to process the information that this person is dead, and the person speaking in the present tense is still coming to terms with the fact. Grief counsellors can tell you when you lose somebody it can be difficult emotionally to make the transition to speaking of them in the past tense. On the other hand, police interrogators will say that a suspect already speaking of the recently deceased in the past tense is a big red-flag. Over Discord I let my DM know that I had picked up on this and asked if it was a clue or a slip-up. It turns out it was actually the latter, but my DM decided it was okay if my character picked up on it anyway since he has the Gambler background and expertise in Insight... so it makes sense that he would be really good at picking up subtle tells like that. Once the DM had given me the go-ahead I shared this observation in-character with the rest of the party. At that point our barbarian intimidated the suspect that we were now convinced was guilty until they finally spilled the beans (I know it wouldn't hold up in real court since we basically forced a confession, but hey... it's DnD).

20:32 D I N G! 😂 I enjoyed watching Th3Birdman’s EWWCS videos last year - must give them a rewatch. Thanks for the video, Mike! I enjoyed learning about the different forms metagaming can take. I think I understood, on some subconscious level, that different groups find some types acceptable in certain circumstances and not in others, just from watching & listening to some different TTRPGS, but I don’t think I ever twigged that when PCs ask the DM what they know, and are asked to do a check/roll, that it’s probably because the player knows more than their character might. It’s now more telling when it doesn’t happen too often, since so many of the players know much more about the games than their characters do.

Being new to dnd (11th sesh next Saturday) Ive been struggling to figure out how to play my character in a way that separates me from her. I tend to talk alot and have unfortunately wedged my way into conversations not needing me and have done some minor meta gaming when it comes to where characters are, I'm still trying to cut down on it but it's hard so far, I love dnd and really enjoy playing it, this videos helped me to have some self reflection and hopefully I can improve in the future.

Aaaaah, I just commented but I have to again cause I just got to the part about character secrets. My BF tried to run Curse of Strahd, which happened to have been my first ever campaign which had ended horrifically for my character pretty early on, so I was excited to get a second chance at it with more experience. I made a character with personal ties to Strahd and Barovia: A dhampir, turned by Strahd himself as part of a cruel game, and seeking revenge. Also a swarmkeeper ranger with a swarm of bats because I went all in on the Aesthetic. So, the other characters found my character sheltering in the Death House for the night, and there was immediate distrust cause let's be honest, my character was pretty spooky. Now, the players knew I was playing a dhampir with ties to Strahd, cause I had said as much when we made them. But their characters didn't. And they basically spent the majority of the first and only session badgering my character to tell them "the truth" and insisting there should be no secrets in the party (of people who literally just met). The thing is, my character did answer all their questions, just not with the whole truth. But they wouldn't KNOW it wasn't the whole truth. It was so frustrating and disruptive. Though the funny part of that story is when I did tell the honest truth about the bats: They're my friends, they just like me lol. The main guy doing the hounding mistook them for a dhampir feature, so thought I was lying about them and kept pushing for "the truth". We don't play with him anymore for a myriad of reasons, one of which was frequent metagaming.

Oh that first one hits hard. I play in 3 campaigns by 3 DMs. We all play together. They KNOW their monster stats. And they do say "Oh. I know what this is!" And I do sometimes just browse monsters in the books when bored between sessions as I'm thinking about DMing something myself, so I'm often with them. That said, every single one of us has been known to say "I know what this is, but my character doesn't" We fail the "Do you know?" check? We often hit it with a common spell we use that it's either resistant or immune to (if it has them) to "figure out" said resistances/immunities IC. But then, we also look at common enough issues like trolls, vampires (Depending on setting), etc and are like "We live in a world where these DON'T exist and we know their weaknesses. These monsters would have enough rumour that you've heard how to beat them."

"The dumbest person in our world still knows the difference between a lion and a tiger" Speaking as a zookeeper who has had conversations with zoo guests where they INSIST that I am wrong and that the lion we are looking at is in a fact a tiger... sometimes there ARE in fact people that dumb 😂

This is completely subjective, but I think that PC secrets should be open among the table, unless the game is working with some paranoia-style mechanics. I play in a respectful group where folks dont try to push themselves in to anothers players reveal, but i've also had players obsessed with wanting to impress everyone at the table with their backstory, getting upset when I laid it bare that it needed to be shared. But it seems more rewarding if the entire group can celebrate the one pc with the twist background roleplaying well or keeping their secret a secret, rather than just that one player knowing whats going on, while the rest wonder the true context of the scene.

I do want to give two examples of me metagaming that I did for the sake of the party. (Yes I know I posted already but felt this needed to be said separately). The first one. I own the module for one of the games I play in. A family member bought it for me as a gift when I was early into the dnd hobby. I have read through it. While I make sure not to read through it as I play, I have a natural ability to memorize what I read so I do retain a decent amount of knowledge in the module. I choose to actively not use this, making a conscious effort to do so. However, during one session I did. This was for good reason though. I play in this module with a party of 3. During this session that day both I and another player had managed to highlight and pull off cool things during the events. However, for our third player, the dice were not in their favor. Realizing this I used my knowledge of the module to pull this player into center stage at a crucial moment. See, there is a crossroads in the module where you can allow this one npc to either be banished or, if you speak up for them, they can remain and be grateful towards your party despite you thwarting them. The other party member had already made it known they were going to allow the exile, so I spoke up. This led to a standstill on what to do with the npc. As a tie breaker the dm turns to our 3rd player and asks what their character wants. After being reassured that the party would support them either way, they decided to speak up for the npc and gain their gratitude. This allowed this player to have their cool moment in that session, no dice rolls needed. The dm even emphasized the impact of their decision which made the player feel good. Why did I do this though? Because that third player? They were new and this was their first campaign. I wanted them to have their moment. I simply realized this was a good way to do so and took my chance and used my meta knowledge to make it happen. It’s not like it was totally out of character for my own character anyway and the other player quickly realized what I was doing when the 3rd player was allowed center stage (and thanked me after because it had escaped their attention til that moment). That’s one time I had used meta knowledge. Another time I had used meta knowledge was to allow a smooth introduction to a new player. They had arrived in the presence of an npc my character had established distrust towards. My dm asked what I wanted to do. I said “well, technically my (character name) would probably have attacked because of (distrusted npc) but I won’t.” Instead I had my character cautiously greet the new character and npc and we roleplayed the tension but we kept it tame and made sure the new player was welcome by all. It was a fun game I will say, but I used meta knowledge in this class to smooth the way for the new player to integrate into the party. So basically when I use meta knowledge, especially actively, I’m usually trying to help give the other players a cool moment or allow more harmonious gameplay. My fun in dnd is the teamwork aspect and I get a lot of fulfillment from the collaboration there so it’s usually when I stretch my meta knowledge. Now, I don’t ever do any of this without dm approval and as you can see from my examples, the dm will play along with them so it isn’t a form of metagaming that steps on their toes.

The mentioning of Omnipresent Knowledge reminded me of two stories from a campaign I was a player in revolving around one players and myself. 1: During one of the major battles of an arc in the campaign, my character retrieved the macguffin. Because of this, the final boss tries to teleport everyone into a different location in a hope to retrieve said item. Knowing that the macguffin could destroy the continent, my character decides to leave the teleportation area without his comrades (Multiple of the other players could have left as well, but decided to stay as a way to help the players/npcs that couldn't leave the area). Well, after waiting a day and a half, my character assumed his party died fighting, as they didn't appear back and decided to run with the item back to the destined location in hopes to avoid the Final Boss (They were in fact alive, but teleported somewhat else after they killed the boss). After spending a month to get back to the quest city, one player decided to look through all the ongoers and outgoers to try and find my character (He was in fact doing this since he got here). Due to his low perception roll, I got into the city without him noticing me. Almost on cue, as soon as this happened, he left his location and headed to a tavern, even though this could have normally caused him to miss hundreds of people going in and out of the city. Deciding to go to a tavern (Which to be fair was based on my own Omnipresent Knowledge (I didn't want to retrieve all the reward and fame as a player when the other players are literately just here)), it was the same tavern that the other player entered. No big deal about this one. Sure, it was somewhat weird that the player acted this way, but it wasn't a habit so no bit deal... or so I thought 2: Two, maybe three games later, we entered the biggest city of the whole continent. Deciding that we all wanted to do different things, we broke into two groups and promised to meet at the Adventure Guild of the city. The first two players went and did their thing but forgot about the promise. They instead went to a tavern and rested. As the other player and I (At this point, it was just me, as the other player left around this time because they were busy irl) got to the Adventure Guild and waited for an hour, thinking they were just running late. The player that said his character passed out remembered the promise (More than likely due to me saying that I am waiting for an hour for them to the DM), and had his character remind the other of it as well. As they got there, however, my character was already at a different location, now looking for them. That player decided to go exactly where I was again, but once again missed me as I went to another location (My character was just going to locations mentioned to the party before and asking if they saw the other two players, which didn't take that much time). While at the third location, the player wanted to go there as well, but didn't (Forgot what happened, he might have been told off by the DM at this point). In the end, he decided to block both entrances to one of the districts as a way to catch me. While not the biggest deal, I did feel somewhat annoyed that the player was just being very blatant on what he was doing.

The way I took care of the dog piling issue is to always have a penalty for failing a skill check. An easy example is if you fail you gain a level of exhaustion, or for perception/knowledge checks I will have every check yield SOMETHING but the fails are false information or unimportant red herrings.

I can also recommend to watch Legal Kimchi's video on metagaming after you guys are done watching this one. He also talks about different forms of meta gaming, and that certain types are basically unavoidable and stuff like that.

I run one of the official modules, OotA. One of my players has read all of R.A. Salvatore's books, so he is familiar with the main plot of the module. So, he acknowledged it to me, and I've told him not to worry because adventure differs from books. He not only doesn't spoil information for other players, but is actively helping me! Various neat details from books, descriptions, time lines, and other staff (for example, he provided me with info about Gauntlgrym and its reconstruction). Such a beautiful player. He's playing as a somewhat psionic sorcerer, so I'll gladly give him some lore-focused nightmares or other staff as a reward >:D

Recently I was in a game and the DM had us find this person that was trapped in a sarcophagus. It was made very clear to us that this had not been opened in a long time. We weren’t 100% sure if it was an elderly high elf or a lich. We asked the DM over the table if we could try to discern an heasked if our characters had any experience with liches. Luckily my character was a former Vecna Cultist. So I was able to warn the party that that a lich was inside due to familiarity with lichdom.

Ugh the part about outing player secrets reminds me of my group at the start of the campaign. I guess one guy super hated that we weren’t “communicating” well enough and made our characters all sit in a circle and ask each other any questions we wanted and if we didn’t want to answer we had to pay 15 gold to the person asking. It was fucking stupid, of course nobody told the truth and players who didn’t care of course didn’t ask any questions or didn’t have anything to say so it was only for the benefit of whoever got satisfaction from prying secrets out of people. Absolutely could have destroyed a lot of character narratives ESPECIALLY for the character I was playing at the time who was in the middle of having their secret unfold naturally. So of course I immediately looked suspicious cause this friendly, outgoing bard didn’t want to talk all the sudden :/ Don’t do this guys. Yeah people not telling you everything in game is frustrating but unless you have a very in game justifiable reason to be suspicious, just let their story play out

23:07 We generally just embrace the glorious failure. We all missed some roll to notice being "made" when undercover in a session, and it became a joke for several subsequent sessions: "This is completely safe, because we know for certain that we aren't being followed!", etc.

Shout out to Cinema Wins. He helped me clear some of the mind poison that Cinema Sins injected into the culture.

I've had a few weird instances of this lately, one is me changing the plans for how I introduce the next arc of my campaign after realising that I'd be pulling a similar trick for the third time in one campaign, of having evidence be found behind the back of some noble the party already met that implicates the noble in some crime they've been investigating, the two scenarios were fairly different, the first nobles were prime suspects in the case already and the nobles while being cross examined made a suggestion that just bought them some time before their next move fully exposed them. The others were a much more "the one time you weren't really suspicious was the one time you should've been" about nobles that offered to collaborate in finding the mcguffin because they needed it for their own tragic motivation. I wanted to have my next villain be an evil lich disguised as a noble and have the players find a pathway into his experimental laboratory beneath his manor, but that does feel too samey. The other type of metagaming that really annpys me is the videogamey "we should go do the sidequest before we do the main story" which often I'd be happy that my players want to do more of what I offer thrm, but if the current scenario I've already introduced as being non linear and also time pressured, I want the players to sometimes let those sidequest hooks simmer so they can actually get some character advancement, I don't wanna hold them at level 4 for months because they put off the milestones I mentioned pre emptively I'd feel mean.

Great content. I appreciate your insights.

Looking forward to your video on random encounters. For the last game I DM'd, I made a pretty neat random encounter system that worked well and I will use again. I had them roll 2d6. The 1st d6 is the random encounter (the NPC or monsters). And if the 1st d6 is a 6, then that almost always means "Roll twice." That way, you sometimes get weird/wild interactions between groups of NPCs/monsters. And the 2nd d6 is a random complication or circumstance, relevant to the setting. It could be "extreme rain," or "dense fog," or "on the edge of a cliff," or (for the random encounter table in a tavern) "during Kenku Karaoke Night." So, rolling on the table generates (random encounter) + (random situation), which keeps things interesting.

In a similar vein to having players roll Perception regardless of whether there is something to see: I roll a die every time an Insight check is made against one of my NPCs, regardless of whether they are being deceptive, so the player doesn't treat the die roll as a meta-indication of a contested Deception check.

One of my favourite moments as a DM was when a character checked a chest for traps. The player rolled poorly, but the character had no knowledge of how well they checked. I told them that they found no traps, so the character confidently opened the chest because they KNEW they had already checked it for traps. *chef's kiss. None of this metagaming bs where the character had knowledge of their low roll, or some lame justification like "I know I didn't check it well." Get out of here with that metagaming crap.

My poor dad was running pf 2e for the first time after I had been playtesting it and even had a campaign and a third under my belt, so I recognized nearly every monster he threw at us; perhaps worse was that my character was very smart, and from an RP pov, had justification to know things. That said, every time I recognized a monster, I kept my mouth shut, or geeked out at how cool and scary the monster is without actually revealing the abilities. My character; an alchemist gadgeteer; really helped with this because she'd still try to cycle through bomb types to find out weaknesses, and because she's a bit scared of melee, tends to run away (which played up and emphasized me saying that the monster was tough and scary). Sometimes, I'd even lob types that I knew would be resisted because it's what my character would do (experimental method and all), plus it showed off a strength of the monster. The only times I actually metagamed was in situations where my character WOULD know (ex; throw fire at the tallow monster, it should melt it; chuck sonic damage at the crystal monster, the harmonic frequency should shatter it; and other such things that a chemist actually would reasonably be able to sus out)

D&D needs to get a little better at naming their adventures because of this. If you tell your players "we're doing curse of strahd" well they know its Strahd because he's one of the more famous characters in DnD's history. The plot hook of "Tomb of Annihilation" doesn't reference any tomb at all. So dms basically have to tell players "You don't know the tomb/strahd exists"

So I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but one of the reasons I find Dungeon World really interesting is because the players are the world archetype for that class. Sure there are other priests and holy people in the world but your character is THE cleric. And I think that's a really interesting concept and gives the DM interesting ways to have the NPCs react to the players and how the PCs fit in the world.

One of the instances of metagaming that I have done recently is a decent example of trying to garner information or move in a specific direction but in the context of my character. My character is a hexblade warlock, a sort of John Wick style assassin/muscle for an Illuminati type organization who is trying to control everything. In trying to take down his former cohorts / employers (for being evil douchebags) one of our players died in combat. My character only has like a 10 in intelligence, and I didnt think it made much sense for him to know much about resurrection magic. So, despite doing research on what spells we could use to bring him back IRL, my character carried his fallen companion's body and demanded that someone bring him back. When a knowledgable and important NPC was talking to us about what happened, I demanded that he explain more. "What do you mean? Explain. How do we bring him back!?" I knew full well that Reincarnate and Resurrection were our only options but I made that NPC explain it to my character because my character doesn't really understand all the facets of magic, especially the kinds he doesn't use. This gave a story reason for my character to learn about what kind of magic we could use, and what our options were. This is something we probably would have been told eventually anyways, but I felt my character would be extremely vigilant in trying to find the answers as soon as possible. He even acted as though time was of extreme importance until he was told that it was irrelevant. He knew time was limited but didn't know the specifics (like that revivify has to happen within a minute, and beyond that its days) and my character was much more used to talking / intimidating someone into giving him an answer, rather than doing research or something. He also couldn't understand why the wizards couldn't do anything (we were at a wizard college) and yelled at them demanding something be done ("Aren't you people wizards? Aren't you supposed to be able to DO something??"). This was one of my favorite moments as a player because I felt like I combined OOC knowledge and character personality to make a realistic interpretation of what my character would do, and it was really rewarding to see that I had gotten somewhere where we could practically influence the game effectively without sacrificing character development.

In my settings the class names are common titles for adventurers guilds and are basically like job descriptions to explain how people would know the difference in character.

I had a dm who would roll just to mess with people at the table. It felt a lil disruptive because they were just trying to rile people up. And I agree that using ghe passive stats is really nice 😊 When it comes to cleric and healing, I didn't play a life cleric, but I also kept track of damage to make sure when I should use a group heal or a stay close to another character.

Classes also have theme attached to them, and that's how NPCs perceive them most, in-game. You could also make the argument that this is offset by background as well, but there is theme written in each class, so people would be able to distinguish between a generic "Cleric" and a "Paladin".

At my table, the most common form of metagaming is during a social encounter, a player says something that would use one of the charisma skills so I ask them to make a roll of that skill, then they ask the other players who has the highest of that skill. It's really annoying and I have to keep telling them that they're the one that is saying it to the npc so they have to make the roll.

In my last "D&D" session (we're playing through Dragon Mountain, a 2E D&D boxed set, using the Pathfinder 1e rules), I did actually say "Would Berannd have met before? Yeah, I think so." We started at 10th level so didn't have an entire backstory of every adventure they'd been on before. I think it was a brown mold or something relatively common in a cave/dungeon setting. Should I have directly asked my DM? Probably. I was thinking out my backstory out loud though. I think that's the important part. My DM heard me say that, he was looking right at me, and agreed with it. There have been other monsters where he changed up special features to mess with us, because most of us have been playing some form of D&D for decades.

The words Mage and Warrior are a dm's best friend

The way I look at the whole situation is that during session zero, you build your enclosure to keep the drama llama in its pen and hope no one lets it out. Accidents happen so I encourage players to ask the question and there are times I will offer clarification so that everyone sees the boundaries we're playing in depending on the situation. As a DM, I feel like it's my job to clarify and I expect my players to trust me when it comes to knowledge. I lean on the side of too much rather than not enough so no one feels the need to 'get one over'.

Great points across the board. It really is subjective, and I do see the less egregious metagaming (and am guilty of a lot of it) in every game I play and have played. Everyone speaks openly about their level and hit points, I never really knew to even question that, and apparently no one else does either. We will _occasionally_ describe our health in combat ("Anchor is upright and looks mostly okay" "Brudon is bleeding from most of his holes and some new holes he didn't have before" etc.). While some forms of Meta are pretty hard to accept (acting on player knowledge of secrets), a lot of these come down to an axiom, a slider I keep in mind. Is your game a Stageplay or a Boardgame. Where you land on your opinion of playing tabletop games will come down to whether you really like the aspects of a stageplay - immersion, character interaction, story, "realism" as altered as it may be - or a boardgame - min-maxing, turn-based strategy, big numbers, dice, loot. That preference is always a slider, and that slider will move over time.