What is the most horrific example of meta-gaming you have ever experienced while playing D&D? Pt.2 

I love that "Strength of character is not what is required. Strength of will is." thing from the wizard in the second story

The DM with vampire situation... was railroading players and not allowing their backstories and classes to matter. Also, in the mythical world of Forgotten Realms (and others), Vampires are a very well known enemy type to any holy magic user or necromancer. They should know at least a little.

My favorite player-to-player meta moments are when the inspiration for solving the puzzle or the monster weakness are shouted out by the character who is unconscious or dead or in a completely different part of the continent.

While I disprove of reading ahead of modules and looking up monster stat blocks, there's really only so many times I can pretend to fight trolls for the "First Time" and wait an arbitrary length of time to "accidently" cast firebolt to learn their weaknesses. If it's common knowledge to the players, it might as well be common knowledge in the game's world.

Worst I've witnessed was a guy literally perusing through the monster manual trying to find kinks and quirks of a monster I was running. Since then I have tweaked every single monster I run and NEVER mention them by their monster manual names.

For the story where the player talked about how many HP the creature had left, this is why I always count up for damage. The players only know how much total damage has been done, never how much HP is left.

I have one that still pisses me off to this day: around a year ago I was running a Theros game. the characters were a leonin rogue, a noble minotaur fighter and a lizardfolk paladin. so when they first met the leonin had been stealing from the minotaur's mansion and was never caught but this caused the party to from because the paladin was payed to bless the house and caught the rogue. the paladin convinced the rogue to make it up to the fighter by helping him with a quest given to him by a friend. so the party set off and the rogue and fighter become very good friends. now we were on a zoom call and the rogue and paladin were discussing how the rogue who now felt bad for steeling was going to slowly sneak the money back to the fighter. the fighter and paladin are siblings IRL and they still live in the same house so the fighters player overheard them talking about it and gives me this triumphant glance and said gotcha but I thought it was fine because the fighter still didn't know. but fighter goes to her dad and the thing about her dad is to put it simply he's an asshat. now the dad starts screaming at rogues player next session about how that was uncalled for and how dare she take advantage of his daughter. then he tells fighter that she should get this.. KILL THE ROGUE! keep in mind fighter the character still doesn't know about any of this. and the dads excuse for all of this is that she would have found out eventually. and fighter went along with it. so I had to disband a 2 year campaign because this girls asshat dad can't stand to see his daughter being "taken advantage of" when it was just fucking character development.

I have a couple of meta gaming stories. In the first one, I’m the culprit. It was my first year playing TTRPGs. I was playing my very first character, a human barbarian named Nord Steelheart. The party was going through a dungeon crawl and came upon a treasure room being guarded by a bronze dragon. As I had just recently read the novel “Azure Bonds”, I decided to challenge the dragon to a Feint of Honour (a non lethal form of combat, typically done between dragons, where the loser must adhere to the terms of the contest with the winner, no matter what those terms may be). The thing is, my character was fairly low level at the time (maybe 3rd or 4th level IIRC) and was an uneducated, illiterate barbarian, so he shouldn’t have even known WHAT a Feint to Honour was, let alone how to properly initiate one with a dragon. I was using player knowledge, not character knowledge. Luckily the dragon was a good sport, and even though he won the contest, he gave my character a parting gift. A small wooden box. When I eventually opened the box, it contained a single gold coin. The coin was enchanted, a Coin of Larceny. Whenever it’s placed with other coins, the following morning The Coin of Larceny will return to its owner along with all of the coins that it was touching/were touching each other (which is why it was kept alone in a wooden box). The other time I was the victim of meta gaming. It was a one shot. I was always one to play heroic characters in D&D, so this time I decided to change things up and play an evil character for once. So I played a Neutral Evil female mage. While my character was evil, neither she nor I were stupid. I was fully intending to do my part in helping the party achieve our goals. However my character saw the other party members as simply meat shields to keep between her and those intending her harm. Anyway, our first combat as a group was against a dark naga (we were all first level BTW). I did the only thing that a first level mage could do in 2nd Edition, I cast Magic Missile and I ran. The naga cast Magic Missile back at me, at 5th level power (so three missiles doing 1d4+1 each). So me and my whopping 6 hit points went down right away. So I sat out the rest of the encounter, waiting for the party healer to bring me back into positive hit points, when the DM informed me that I was dead. When I asked him why, he showed me a note that the Neutral Good ranger had passed him, which read “I slash the mage’s throat as she lays unconscious.” I turned to him and asked why he did that, to which he said, “You were evil”. “And how did you know that? I didn’t share my alignment with anyone but the DM.” “I read it on your character sheet when you went to the bathroom.” “Okay, and how did your character know I was evil?” “Because he does.” Yeah, I never played with the ranger again. I was never a fan of PvP. But I wanted to play a character who wouldn’t morally object to killing a fellow party member if the situation called for it. And this butthole had to sneak a peak at my character sheet for inside knowledge, and then act on it in game before I even had the chance to make that kind of decision.

Party vs the vampire, that IS a DM being up their own rear. It's one thing if Vampires are rare to the point of being unheard of, but it sounds like most of that party has legitimate claims to having *some* level of foreknowledge about them. Particularly the undead hunter & necromancer, since studying the undead is literally part of their jobs. Sounds like the type of DM who runs their game like it's a jrpg so nobody knows anything about anything until it's already stomped them a couple of times

It's so refreshing to hear brians voice again

Only tangentially related: One time the party found a circlet amongst an old battlefield. It would set INT to 18 and could cast Legend Lore. Nobody wanted to use it so they just kept it around. Eventually they gave it to a Stone Giant, that was sort of a dumb outcast and thus placid enough to have a conversation with, for some information. The Giant stuck in through his earlobe as an earring and activated it's curse: once hearing about a legend the wearer had a compulsion to seek it out. So the party accidentally created an extremely intelligent Stone Giant adventurer that would go to the ends of the earth collecting artifacts.

This was one of my first games of D&D and one of my friend invited me to join an ongoing game. Due to things going on IRL, I planned with the DM (my friend) that my character would be a twist villain as I couldn’t invest a lot of time in the game. The party was in an alternate dimension and my character was a weakened demi-god who wanted to reclaim his former power with the use of a Macguffin the party was after. My character shapeshifted into a human and convinced the party that he was a warlock who was banished to this dimension and if he could pretty please leave with them and he’ll help them with whatever they needed. After 1 more session in there the party escapes and we take a quick 30 min break IRL. One of the female players, a halfling cleric, asked me if my character and hers could get into a romance. This was the first time I had been asked by another player to create a romance arc and like I said, both me and my character had no plans on sticking around so I nervously told her no, saying that I had plans for my character and couldn’t fit a romance arc. She got pissed and kept insisting it until I outright told her to drop it. Come back to the game and her character is suddenly super suspicious of mine, treats him like shit and doesn’t heal him unless I’m near death (keep in mind, the only other person who knew of my characters true motives was the DM). Cut to 3 sessions later and we’re fighting a super high level boss to get the location of the artifact my guy was after and we’re about to die. I privately ask the DM if I can use some of my god powers to even the playing field. He says yes and the battle is quickly over from there. After that, the cleric starts yelling at me for casting a spell that a character at my level had no right to cast. In character I said that this must have to do with the place I was exiled to, but she kept shouting, saying I was cheating, taking advantage of being friends with the DM, and then attacked me. Now as I said, this fight was tough. Due to that, everyone was a light breeze from death. Everyone at the table knew this attack was going to kill me so I texted the DM if I can just do the big reveal now. He said yes so I told the table “who’s ready for a twist?” Then my character revealed his true self, what he wanted, and that he despised the party and what they stood for. I got some shocked looks but it was nowhere near as impactful as it would have been if things played out as me and the DM planned. After that my guy made a beeline for the artifact as he now knew the location and the party gave chase. It eventually ended with me absorbing the artifact, gaining immense power, and having a big fight with the party which ended with me dying. TL;DR: girl I was playing with hated me for not making our characters date and it ended with her forcing me to betray the party earlier than intended.

I once had a game where it was possible to hop universes. The party took such a leap through a portal at random to escape a foe. They wound up in a world I did not name, but did describe in detail. The session ended with them stranded on this alien world. They asked me if this was a world I had made up, and I truthfully answered no. I'd rolled their destination randomly from the list of possible realities. Between sessions they used an audio recording of the session to transcribe my description, and spent about 15 IRL hours to identify which world it was... then watched all of the 2003 He-Man series, memorized what they could find of the setting online, and came to the table next session with an exact plan to not only return home, but plunder that world of all resources they desired. That, was some bullshit... especially because I didn't describe any iconic locations or characters. Just some animals, a swamp, some flying machines from the setting, and one banner on a fort they could just BAIRLY make out in the distance, and that was somehow enough for them go "Eturnia, of course!" I gave up on being creative and fun for the party then. DO NOT run for real life detectives.

These stories make me realize how much I love my players. They took a short rest after fighting undead in an underground cavern with a pool of rancid water, smelling of rotten flesh. They had the perfect opportunity to go above ground where their NPCs were waiting. They thought it would help them avoid metagaming since I had asked if they were sure. Yes, your npc friends might be attacked, but it is literally disgusting here. Also, cursed items are fun. One of them has a toxic relationship with a sentient item, but the benefits are currently too good to give up.

for the two-rings story: the dm absolutely should not have have said "i'm not sure". if i was the player, that would have sent me down the rabbit hole of poking around seeing if i misread or misremembered something or if the software was just bugged. a correct response would tell the player that they are not meant to know and that their character further does not know that the vulnerability existed at all. then, the player would at least have the *option* to not metagame rather than be set up to metagame whether or not they intended to.

I had one guy in an Ddventurers League game that, whenever he rolled poorly on something like Insight or investigation, would ignore me saying "It looks harmless" or "You can't find anything here" and tell everyone else to deal with it

Worst one I saw was one that got me banned from playing any arcane class in my old 3.5e group. I was technically following the rules, but at the same time severely derailing the DM's plans. In 3.5e, when using Detect Magic, the caster can attempt a Spell craft check to determine the school of a magic aura they're seeing. Now, with certain spells and cursed items, this isn't fool proof, but it can be handy when general knowledge of what the schools do, along with context, is applied. For example, detecting an Abjuration aura on a ring generally means the ring is going to protect you from shit, while that same aura on a door is going to warn someone else you're there. It also works as a sort of poor man's Identify, which is the application I originally used this for since the DM was kind of stingy on giving out money.

I was playing in a homebrew rapid fire campaign with friends from collage. Milestone exp and once every two sessions we would level up. During the level up process the DM would let us change our stats and spells. This let us get to know the classes better for upcoming campaigns. The goal was to have level 20 characters by the end of the winter break before classes started. Around level 18 everyone had very powerful spells and me as the warlock could cast, blade of disaster. Towards the end of our campaign our party's sorcerer was 'guessing lucky' with the monster weaknesses and solving puzzles. During one session the DM had a homebrew succubus which would receive disadvantages saves against any attack/ spell which purposefully would disfigure or worsen its appearance. The sorcerer says "just make her look bad and she dies" chuckling, with a smile. The DM was shook. He stared blankly at the sorcerer for 20 seconds before checking his onenote (where he had all of his campaign notes). Turns out that the sorcerer was granted access to the DM's onenote for a project the semester prior. He was viewing the session details beforehand and using the mechanic of changing spells/ abilities to meta game through the campaign. Needless to say he wasn't welcome at the table anymore. Edit: TLDR; PC used previously granted permission on onenote to view the DM's notes ahead of sessions.

not horrific, but I had my creatures numbered like 1 to 10, and the party would always pile on the number one guy, assuming he was the leader. I made the leader number 6. and he was a caster. number one was just one of the bodyguards. most of the party was in a cluster around him for some easy AoE spells, and number 6 didn't care if his guys got hit. last week, I had Giant 2 and Giant 3 tokens, and one guy was like 'guys, I'm a bit worried because there's 2 and 3, so 1 must be hidden'. there was no Giant 1.

Yeah that last story is an example of the issues with a digital format. You can't prevent metagaming when you put the surprise right in to their character sheet like that.

I was playing in a group from school with some new players like me and a couple experienced players. At that point I had a bit of book smarts when it comes to dnd but no street smarts, also the player in question was new and probably didn’t register that at a certain point our party had split up: she was (very innocently) asking about how she could help the goblin fighting group despite the fact that she was with the “protect the tnt so we don’t tpk” group.

I'm currently running Curse of Strahd with my friends (got the Revamped set as an early Christmas present) and our crew just escaped the Death House and hit Level 3. One of the players is a mild-mannered fellow normally, but when you get a few drinks in him followed by daisy-chained nat-20's, he becomes a completely unpredictable chaos tornado. As the rest of his teammates struggled to get out of the house, he had an adrenaline-charged conversation with Ismark in front, with the phrase, "SIR, THIS IS A WENDY'S!!!" being hollered at one point. In-character, I asked him, "Sir, I...do not see how Old Woman Wendy across town has anything to do with this?" And that is how Old Woman Wendy and her goat-faced daughter came to exist in Barovia and are now a main plot element in one of the side quests. Just one example of how I've had to adjust modules and campaigns on the fly thanks to my party and honestly I would not trade their wildly unpredictable heinies for anything.

The worst case of meta-gaming at my table was in a fight against a spawn of Kyuss and some regular zombies. As I described the spawn, the cleric asked to do a history check to see if she knew what it was. She failed but I gave her the name. The Rangers player looked it up and openly called out tactics specifically to fight it. Needless to say I was pissed

The oath of treachery one is so mean I as the Dm would have ret conned the players killing the character and have a talk with the players Edit: this is making me realize my table meta games a lot, we don’t look monsters up but we have a lot of out of character discussions on what we think weaknesses/resistances are

As long as you meta game within context of your character with a good rp reason, who cares. That vampire stuff the players were doing was just fine imo

I once got cold vulnerability on my character without the character knowing and I just RPd that during the nights i bundled up more than normal and that I'd always complain about the cold on trips and stuff. I even reminded the DM at times that i had the vulnerability. But I was never actually hit with any cold damage on that character after that. I never had any reason (in character) to suspect that i had a cold vulnerability

There's a boss that repeatedly adapts to the party so as they learn its abilities, resistances, and weaknesses, the boss changes everything of that nature during the encounter slightly and drastically in the next encounter

I actually have a really bad habit of keeping track and remembering the exact damage we've done to a monster, which when combined with me being a complete nerd and having read the Monster Manual back-to-front twice now has led to some times were I have to hold myself back from metagaming like this My brain just likes to keep track of numbers so I always gotta make sure i don't say it out loud or let it effect my judgement by thinking "My character wouldn't know that"

For the cursed rings I agree with not knowing the source of the curse, but if they take damage that they are suddenly vulnerable to, as adventure they should be able to recognize something hurting them twice as much as they expect it to, prompting them to now search for a source of a curse

Other than how faux pas the cursed rings were handled, I like the idea of troll-bone accessories that at least grant SOME healing with the vulnerability.

So, that last story with the cursed rings, I honestly feel like the DM might have been a bit in the wrong there. Like, if irl me was given a ring of fire resistance, I would immediately light a candle just to test that it was working and to see how potent 'resistance' was. As a DM, I feel like he should have worked with the players to be like, "okay, is your character the sort to test something out like that?" And then, if it got to the 'fairness' question, I think the best response would be something like "look, your character would have no reason to test or suspect anything is wrong with the ring. I intended this as a fun obstacle for your character to overcome when the time was right. If you are worried about potentially dieing from the vulnerability, I can understand that. So, I give you my word that I will not let you die on account of my actions here. My goal is to make an interesting story, not to kill your character and I need you to trust me on that." Edit: spelling and grammar

I bought some random game for my first time being a DM and they derailed the campaign so hard that instead of fighting and killing a group of goblins that they are now attempting to kill a God. The original campaign was supposed to like maybe 5 sessions. Now it's been going for almost a year. It's been the greatest experience of my life

I wanted to have a boss the party was fighting have a "one last attack" type moment where he came back at 1hp and tried to hold a party member hostage while dumping some lore. I removed the token for every enemy in that boss fight except his. The rogue walks past an enemy that was left for the party to defeat, right up to the "corpse", and stabs the boss in the neck. An entire dramatic moment ruined because I treated that one token differently. I couldn't even be mad, just made a mental note to either remove none of the tokens or just add the enemy back to the field with the revive the next time I tried something like that.

For the last one, you can avoid that by waiting until the first instance of your player taking damage to reveal the vulnerability. Then they can’t complain.

I once had a player REFUSE to do a spell save against an illusory charm type spell because his character "knew it wasn't real." I was almost speechless; he was literally choosing what rules he was going to follow. I decided that the enemies ignored him in combat from them on to avoid it any more instances of "oh this doesn't hit or effect me because blah-blah." I've had meta-gamers at my tables before and since, but none so egregious as to decide what rules they were going to follow.

Don’t know if I agree with the last story. If you put something in somebody’s character sheet then you can’t blame them for using it.

That one with the vampire sounds like the DM got more upset than they needed to be, but I wouldn't call them a bad DM.

The oath of treachery story is why I never put the real details on my character sheet when I'm playing something I want to keep secret.

I had a player like the apathetic ranger. We went through a bunch of mornal scenarios, his character mot caring at all. He had written this long backstory about his family and how they were really shitty to him and his sister. So i decided to roll with that, thinking it would engage the character. Did a whole thing where they had to go back to his homeland, i had it written up that his mother was being controlled since he had in his backstory some empathy from her. So i set up a small adventure for them to gather some magical items and whatnot to defeat the family. During which, things go to shit and the family becomes useless to the controlling force. The evil force imprisons the family by chaining them to posts and killing a few of the worse ones. The party finds the family and the mother is still alive, chained to a post and badly hurt, but now free of the evil control. The player, fucking jesus stabs his own mother. And basically says "meh." It was so heartwrenching and really took a toll on me as a DM, i really thought i was building something that his character could empathize with and make for a great story. Instead he wasted like 6 weeks of my time and the 3 other party members who fricken helped him do all the shit to defeat the family. Ridiculous ppl really.

Honestly, the worst case of metagaming I've seen was in my very 1st D&D campaign- it was 3.5e, we were fighting this monster and when the DM shows us the picture I pipe up "I know this! That's a Behir!" I didn't actually know anything, just saw it in the MM and remembered the name because it was cool The DM proceeded to give us no material rewards for this fight as a "lesson" about metagaming My 12 years playing this game were all truly blessed

I love the subtle insertions of memes like attack on titan and the punisher great job Jacob

The DM in the vampire situation was definitely just being difficult by not letting players even *try* to obtain any potential knowledge they could've reasonably had. While my character in the first full campaign I played was an encyclopedia on anything that originated from *her* world, she was actually in a totally different one due to portal fuckery that effectively created a multiverse. As a result she had to actively research information via talking to NPCs and taking notes on monsters the party encountered. I had to make rolls for knowledge unless the DM said I knew about it already, and over time the frequency of these rolls decreased as my character gained knowledge. That would've been the right way for that DM to handle it, rather than shutting down every suggestion and generally being a dick Edit: Omg Ripper read my comment about the paladin player that tried to tell people what to do lmao. Never thought I'd hear my own story in a video. Meant to say "where" my bodyguards would be and remove "up to" but I suppose the context makes that pretty obvious. Honestly, the part I regret the most is that I (unknowingly) had so many opportunities to kill that paladin and didn't take it because of healer brain and generally wanting to be nice even though I was pretty fed up before I finally told him to let me decide for myself what my character should do. But I'm actually spectating another campaign this same player is part of (though he doesn't recognize me yet). Suffice to say he's not much better this time around, and the other players are getting frustrated at him just like the first group. Maybe I'll have more to post about him later lol

I don't encourage solving out-of-game problems in an in-game way, but for the second story, I kinda thing I would just say "alright, I have no idea of what vampires are, so I'm not going there, and would rather go find some information on the topic instead". I kinda feel like the DM would claim it being out of characters (while according to their descriptions it isn't) or would just forbid them to go anywhere but to the castle, but at this point it would be no reason not to just walk out of the room.

The last story with those cursed rings? That DM feels like kind of an asshat for how he handled it after the players caught on. When they straight up asked out of character if the rings were cursed, he should have given them the chance to solve it in character. "Hey wait why do I have poison weakness?" (In shifty GM voice) "Hmm~ I'm not sure~ Hehehehe" "Wait these rings.... are they cursed?" "Well, think for a moment about where you found them, and make a quick intelligence check for me." It's not that hard to both roll with the punches and make the meta knowledge they've gleaned into character knowledge. This also gives you a way to say "good on you players for figuring it out!" Rather than scrambling to out-meta-game the players. Sure, it ruins the surprise, but it's better to acknowledge that your players noticed something than to try and fight them on it and escalate things. That's only going to create animosity between the GM and the players. Throw them a bone this time, and be sneakier next time.

It's late for me as I binged some of these videos; but I had to input my own experience when I saw this title. My group playing Mad Mage got a new, unvetted player who joined us. Not only did he metagame the shiiiiiiiiit out of the whole thing (by reading the adventure so he knew what loot there would be), but he had a very nasty habit of altering his HP between sessions (healing himself fully at first; then a little at a time so it would be less obvious), as well as swap out his weapons, sometimes for magical weapons; he would also open our character sheets on D&D Beyond to go through our inventory, so he always knew how much gold everyone had individually, and what equipment they had. Not meta-gaming, but he'd also interrupt other player's turns (or storytelling by the DM) with a loud, "OH WAIT! I could actually have done this instead. Can I have done that instead so I didn't ?" THEN, bitch and whine and complain when the DM said no. He never once apologized for cutting off and talking over other people. Once he threatened our DM with physical violence, the discord channel mods just banned him outright. I opened his character sheet and took a screen shot of his inventory. At the start of the next session, right after we did a check in to make sure everyone was cool, the DM said, "Before we start. Our rogue has a story to tell you all." (I'm the bard/rogue) "Ori slit Bardax' throat in his sleep. She used the stolen ship and her budding thieve's guild to row out into the deep, dark waters outside Skullport. There she and her crew went through everything Bardax was carrying, and dumped his cold corpse over the side." Player presents list. "Here's all the shit he had on him. Take what you want. My guys will pawn off the rest of his trash. Also I took that I had originally given him when he joined us. Full transparency. If anyone feels they need a cut of the value, I'm willing to pay that in gold." We're a happy family now, and the crabs have feasted!!

13:14 I am not so sure about that last one. Cursed items usually should be backed up by some sort of description of feeling wrong, you shouldn’t just flat out tell them “no you don’t know that” 

Similar to the last story, was running curse of strahd and players got cursed items. Playing in person though I could give them an index card of magic item with cursed version on another card behind dm screen and give them cursed card when it was discovered to be cursed to avoid meta gaming like that.

I'll be honest, I've meta gamed against a troll before. I was just getting into dnd properly and was just really happy that I actually recognised and remembered something and wanted to put it to use! It's like finding the weak spot on an enemy in playthrough 1, and immediately focussing it on playthrough 2. I was still in the gaming mindset, luckily I've realised dnd is different these days.

I was running an online game with several custom monsters flavored from published ones. I changed them to make them slightly more challenging and give them a little different flavor. In this case, a little more Thing from Wednesday. One of the players kept telling me how their attacks worked and telling me I couldn't do that. So I added more of them and focused on him until he shut up. He doesn't look up monsters during encounters now because he knows I'll change them between turns.

I was playing a Storm King's Thunder campaign once, where I decided to pick up the module to read because we, as a party, were completely stumped on what to do and where to go. The DM had a little trouble guiding us through. We had spent our first session travelling to every town on the first map, looking for someone (?). It was frustrating and didn't go anywhere. The next session, I knew what we were supposed to do, so I told the DM we would go back to town one, talk with the right NPC to start the adventure proper. This was in the before times, and the campaign and group didn't survive the pandemic.

For the noping dm, the players should nope away from that table.

My worst is from the same player. I had been a dm for maybe 2 sessions. Party gets into a fight, I drop a monster on the table. His ranger who dropped all knowledge skills (pf1e) and without say kind of roll says "oh its ok guys it's just x it only has 8 hp it just looks scary. " That monster and others got several random buffs. Same guy brought his sons friend to play. Good kid. Sent me his backstory. Generic "I was left on the doorstep to a monastery and raised by traveling monks". Ok fine, so he and I email back and forth eventually deciding he would venerate desna the goddess of travel. Fast forward a session. Party is in town and stumped. Someone suggests praying for guidance and the kid asks if there's a temple of desna nearby . Player x loses his damn mind because no monk would ever pray to a chaotic God. Literally stopped the game dead for the night and had me, new dm, so irate I has the group take a month off and he was not invited back. Downside the kid was cool, upside where we lived had a good size dnd community but everyone tended to know everyone and this jackass basically got himself black listed for being a jerk.

2:50 I’m with the party on that. They have made decent reasons in character to roll for History. Maybe only allow the Wizard, since his is no shenaniganary baked into his build with the Sage Background.

The last one wasn't all the player's fault. If I was a player, and was asking about why the ring on dnd beyond was messed up, the DM responding with "I don't know" makes me believe that dndbeyond must have messed up, and would try to fix it by taking the messed up ring off my sheet and replacing it with what it should be. The right way to DM this is to tell the players to add the ring to tgeir sheets themselves. Then, when they would take extra damage from an element, give a really cool description of how their magic ring betreys them. "When this fire hits you, you see the ring on your finger glow; you expect the heat to be lessened, but the flame only gets hotter." **Roll the damage in front of the player** "You take [double of the roll] points of damage." One thing I've learned about DMing, is it's best to describe a surprise to the players in a way that anchors it in the world. In tge above example, that would be the ring glowing. The point is to ensure your players that it's not you messing with them, it's the world. This can also help with immersion because the players don't need to ask themselves "Is this part of the world, or did our DM forget something?"

DM with the custom monsters is a legend!

Me: "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE . . . " My character: "I dunno . . . This is starting to feel like a bad idea."

I'm convinced Brian is just SwaggerSouls not leaning into the nasally voice

Unfortunately I have a horrible habit of meta gaming but not intentionally. It's mainly because I usually play fighters and such so I'm usually significantly smarter than my character. So when I'm coming up with plans and solutions my DM has to sometimes stop me because, "your character would not have the knowledge to do that" or "while that is a really good plan, your character is not clever enough to think of that" and has me roll INT to use the plan and the roll usually fails. Because of this I now usually build my fighters to have a higher INT or WIS than they need.

i had a fun way to combat meta gaming, if in combat and they start meta gaming i would have returned it as in a booming voice announces "Nope" as the monster is sudden ripped into a portal. this would leave the party without the encounter which means no EXP or treasure. they are just left with the area being suddenly bare. the party di try to avoid meta gaming after that however they thought it would work on bosses as well, this is followed by the voice going "Nice Try" before a group of minions are portal in. they milked that encounter for more EXP though they did almost get wiped. If only they didn't have that Trick Banana.

I don't understand as a DM trying to engineer a TPK. Even in games like Shadowrun, when I ran them, my goal wasn't a TPK. Even when I pulled some outrageous homebrew shit because my players all kind of stabbed each other in the back for no good goddam reason beyond "they heavily incriminated themselves at a scene of a crime", I was willing to give them another chance. I even gave it to them by essentially dropping a thorium rod on what they did. I can't imagine the mindset of "I want to roll dice at my players until they suffer".

I've got a guy in my current spelljammer campaign who keeps pulling out the book, looking at where we are, and complaining that we haven't made enough progress

A bit of a reverse story on this one. I had a DM rule that nobody in the party would know about lycanthropes or silver weapons. Not the wizard, not the bard, not even the ranger who was specifically a worshiper of the god of evil lycanthropes. He then forced us into a fight against a lycanthrope we had no ability to damage, all the while chortling that we 'should have done our research.' He really liked the phrase "Your character wouldn't know that" and would thus block us from solving puzzles because "Your characters aren't smart enough to figure that out."

I ran a Curse of Strahd game, but never made Strahd the villain, yet all the players seemed to think he was. I used a combination of all the hooks described in the module to get the party situated in the game world. A noble gathered a mercenary, a visiting relative, their bodyguard, and their own child to investigate a disturbance on the premises. Vistani from Barovia were traveling through the area, telling stories of their troubled homeland and asking adventurers for assistance with their king and the trouble that beset the land. I did everything I could to set the scene, tie in the PCs, and introduce the players to a dark world tormented by shadows. From their first trip through the fog to the very last session of the campaign that lasted more than a year, I never once described Strahd as the BBEG. Barovia was trapped from the outside world and monsters of the night roamed freely but nobody knew any answers as to where the atrocities came from and how to stop them. I ran the module as if there had be a hundred adventuring parties that had tried and failed before. All of the inhabitants of Barovia had given up and were just trying to survive in their own sections of the world, there was no fight left in anyone. For the first half of the game the PCs were just looking for a way out. I never really got them to feel that sense of dread of helplessness as their efforts to make the world better were limited and never lasted long. The second half of the game was speed running through every encounter in order to face the final boss, Strahd. Despite my best efforts for world building to paint Strahd as a defeated ruler, an eternal ruler of nothing. The common idea that immortality is a curse as you are forced to watch everything you love eventually fade, but for Strahd it was a constant cycle as everyone in Barovia was forced to reincarnate, live their lives, and die again. Strahd's *curse* was not what he had done to the world, but what he had done to himself and the world he loved so much that he tried to save by turning to dark magics. I introduced multiple factions with ideals about how Barovia should be, from left alone so people can survive in peace, to total annihilation for the nightmare it's become and everything in between. Somehow my players never felt tied to any of these threads and just continued to push through, just playing the game, before deciding to simply storm the castle. Needless to say the final encounter was lackluster and entirely unfulfilling for everyone. TLDR: Curse of Strahd but Strahd is the victim of the cures; party singles him out as evil anyways and kills him

A friend of mine thwarted a meta gaming attempt by switching out what was going to be a white dragon encounter with an albino red.

A friend of mine used to run an after-school D&D table for kids. Something like 12-14 year olds would show up, roll dice, then leave when their rides got there. Over time, his players started to get in the habit of tabletalking a bit too much and not staying in character. So one day he created a monster that could communicate telepathically and while they started up on their OOC discussion about killing the being, it started talking to them in fear - through the 4th wall. "No, please. Don't kill me, I... I can be of help to you all, yes... Yes I can!"

If a player checks my sheets I have them take half their level(rounded up) in d20s as either radiant or necrotic, whichever they don’t have a resistance in because their character accidentally saw the truth of the world and couldn’t handle it. Of course if it was a small offense like seeing a note about an npc it won’t kill. Of course it was horrifying to a certain player who had to roll 10d20 and died because he saw the dm map I had and whispered to everyone that a dragon was a boss of the dungeon.

Now I want the "and how did you proceed to crush it", part of the stories. Don't forget guys you're the DM

I’d say the last one was a problem with the character sheet system rather then meta gaming, you can’t just have the sheet automatically take -5 from your resistance and not have the players question it.

Oh, here we go. So I ran a homebrew once( in fact, I only homebrew) about a massive island forgotten by the world at large and populated mostly by giants. They had broken the island into pieces, and would skirmish with eachother regularly for territory/resources, but didn't break out into full blown war with eachother as beneath them the Linnorms were ready to emerge, and would wipe them all out if they weren't united. Which is where my players come in. Allying with certain giants get you certain things and pisses off other giant tribes to varying levels. Now maybe this is bad form of me, but I like to talk about my campaign ideas with my players since I've got alot of them, and like to know which ones to dedicate more of my time to. I'd told them about this particular campaign, and they were interested, so I focused more on it. During session 0 and all the typical backstory stuff, I told them that as far as the characters are concerned, they have no idea they're coming to this place and no idea what to expect, so build with that knowledge in mind. Lo and behold, two of my 4 players speak giant. One because Rune Knight(which was UA at the time so horrifically broken. And yes he's the power gamer of the group), and the other decides to take Giant as an exotic language. Her reasoning was: 'Oh, I'm a Bard, and I used to perform everywhere, so I've sung for giants too, and picked up their language.' When I called her out on it by asking if I'd told them this campaign took place in the abyss, would she still speak Giant, or would she have sung for demons, she got very quiet. Now, I don't tell my players what campaign I'm going to run. I just tell them to make their characters, I audit their sheets, and then throw them in the deep end. If I could trust that this wouldn't happen again, I'd be more open about it, but it only takes 1.

My group is pretty good about that, but I'll show you the best! It came up that the Kobold and Aarakocra should be immune to spicy peppers because lizards and birds can't taste capsaicin; and that Dwarves should have unbelievably flavorful food spiced with all kinds of nasty stuff because of their higher constitution, and the only reason it would be bland is because it's simpler to pass on the spices entirely rather than remember what will and won't mess with everyone else.

This is a bit of a strange one; I have a Tiefling hexblade in my party, and they were up against a green dragon (I'm DM). The night before, while keeping watch, someone in the party saw a burst of fire, and the next morning a chunk of forest was burnt. The person who plays the Tiefling immediately assumes that a green dragon means fire. In battle, he runs up to do melee, despite having access to eldritch blast and a crossbow. Dragon's turn. Uses the breath weapon. The ranger succeeded her save, the bard succeeded his save, the tiefling failed. Everyone else takes something along the lines of 30 damage (young green dragon), and he loudly exclaims "I take 15!". Acid damage. He managed to succeed on his death saves from there.

I remember a time when I flat out refused to meta game. We were playing WFRP, and we had found a sword that the wizard determined was magic. And he identified it as being able to give three Strength 8 attacks every day. I had Strength 6, so it wasn't very useful to me, but for some reason I still kept it. I can't remember why it wasn't given to another character, but I think it was because I was the main damage dealer. Then in a tomb I found a good quality sword that wasn't rusted. So I decided to keep it as my backup weapon, in case my main weapon got lost or something. I had no reason to think it was magical, so when the wizard wanted to find out if it was magical, I said "You don't even know I have it. So no, you won't". After a while, the GM got tired of keeping the note about the details of that sword, so he told me, so I could write it down, in case I used it. It was magical, and gave +10 WS, which was tremendously much better for me than three Strength 8 attacks per day. But since I didn't know it was magical, I kept using the sword I knew was magical.

DM: you wouldn't know about the vampire Players: list reasons why they would know about the vampire Dm: no, you're meta gaming

I spoiled my first ever module (lost mines of phandelver, I'd played several homebrew campaigns before) because my gf was new to DND and the DM running it was too. I put together 3 separate compendiums for the campaign, compiled 8k resolution maps for the entire module, I even printed poster sized maps for them, and it was great, my gf had a blast and that's what mattered to me. Sucks I didn't get to go in blind, but I made 2 people happy for my trouble, and I play clerics, so I wasn't nuking everything, just quietly chilling doing my thing. All in all 10/10 would confront the black spider again.

First game I ever played, a few rounds in. My character so far was basically the moral compis of the party, but I was secretly a thief and a con man. After a shop keep ripped me off despite my rolling well on bargaining, and the fact we were trying to save the town he lived in, I was going to rob him blind. A member of my party, who knew only out of character that I was a thief tried to grab me, and take me out of the shop to prevent me from stealing. Our dm was pissed and had my tail wack him on accident to make him back off.

Honestly, the problem with a lot of these stories is that they doesn't indicate if these were a pattern of behaviour or if anyone actually spoke to the players/DM about it. The vampire DM and troll DM could literally be the same person and tbh I could definitely see someone getting fed up with troll party's actions and it resulting with vampire DM behaviour. Players never see their shit behaviour if the whole group is acting like shit.

4:03 Never thought one of mine would get read anywhere.

Trolls should be something well known in-universe to anyone who doesn't live under a rock. I did a little experiment asking ChatGPT 3.5 to simulate a commoner of unspecified profession and race and asked what are some creatures that aren't magical beings or mundane animals that I could encounter, which it as a commoner knows about. It listed trolls in 19th place, and it explained their regeneration, claws, toughness, and vulnerability to fire and acid.

In the first campaign I played in we had a Rogue Assassin who tried to dig up a hole, enter the hole, and cover it up so that he wouldn't get attacked in his long rest sleep. DM had to explain how that wouldn't count as a long rest, because of obvious reasons. A few sessions later he tried to pull the same shit, but this time in a wooden dresser. He also read up on Strad when we tried it out. Avoided rooms with traps, and told the players what monsters we would encounter in the future. There were a lot more smaller issues he had which would take me a while to list them all, but eventually we had to kick him out of our group. We've been happier ever since.

The second story about the DM shutting down all those very plausible reasons for knowing about vampires. Just stupid bad DMing. Give em shit for meta, but take into account their characters' histories.

In the first campaign i ever played, had a new player joining the party (he had never played before and had just met our group), he had a wierd first RP moment with another player (the other player kinda got pissed), flash foward and the new player casts Thurnderclap to clear a fog cloud (hitting that other player and some other players) this triggered a third player (cleric) to strike a fourth player (ranger) and start the PVP, the player that got pissed just dashed her rogue out of the map, while the cleric and ranger started killing anything and anyone themselves included (the third and fourth player, they killed our wizard, our new bard and the druid died running into a demon), only for them to hug it out after everyone but me and the rogue was dead (literally both the characters and players hug it out with the smuggest of faces, saying that they stopped killing each other cause they were tired, only to start killing again right afterwards)

4:24 soundin’ like swaggersouls lol

We were running Curse of Strahd and a certain boss, can't remember which one, resisted a bunch of my cleric spells. So, the DMs husband literally says "what! No way, what's this guy's INT svore?" Then proceeded to Google the character sheet of said boss.

Very short story : DMing a short one shot, I get a feeling that one of the players looked up what I was running right there at the table, either that or he snuck a look at my notes. I say we go to take a break and jot down a note that says "the key is in the umbrella stand", close my notebook, put some other stuff on it and walk out to have a smoke. I come back, we continue. Party walks into a room, I tell them about cabinets, closets, desks, boxes and crates and casually mention an umbrella stand. First thing he does is look at the umbrella stand. Nothing in there. Another player looks at the umbrella stand. More nothing. The first player casts detect magic on the umbrella stand. I say, how convenient, almost like someone knew there was something in the umbrella stand, detect magic reveals... nothing, it's an umbrella stand. That was the first and last time dming a quickie at the store for randoms.

"It only has 6 hitpoints left" DM: "the monster uses a legendary action to cast what is clearly a healing spell, midway through casting the spell it lands on a spike. You cannot tell how badly injured it is." Then roll some D20s and maybe a D12 for no particular reason, noting the results, and making up what it's new health should be.

For the curse one - Remove Curse doesn't remove curses....it just allows you to REMOVE the cursed item from your person and unattune to it. "At your touch, all curses affecting one creature or object end. If the object is a cursed magic item, its curse remains, but the spell breaks its owner’s attunement to the object so it can be removed or discarded." IT doesn't remove curses from cursed magic items. Only way to do that is technically dispel magic or wish. Nothing else removes magic from "an item". It all targets creatures or allows it to "be removed and unattune."

I actually got something most haven't heard. Instead of fighting the metagaming, I've worked it into the story of my world. Whenever a player metagames I simply ask "where did that come from?" They usually try to BS it like "oH It'S a BacKStoRy THinG." But play it off and later have the character realize they've never actually had that memory. Every time it gets them confused, but I eventually hope to have the PC's "see" the players themselves. Metagaming isn't bad, at least not for me, it's a tool I can use, and when I ask my players to describe themselves to their character in just going to watch their Jaws hit the floor.

What I learned from watching this is if you’re smart enough about it you can get away with any amount of meta gaming.

My players would start looking up the statblock of monsters they’ve never seen before, partly to see the picture of what it looked liked, but they found out all the information they needed. They stopped when I made them fight homebrew monsters or 3rd edition monsters they could not find or simply changed statblocks. Although they still kept asking if its still alive after supposedly dealing tons of damage

2:14 I didn't take that to be the DM shot down all their ideas. I took it to mean the DM was thinking each and every one of them had an argument that they COULD have made, but instead they just said "let's roll for knowledge."

that last story abotu the cursed items feels like a Dm that's trying too hard to keep the cards to his chest. A player is going to find out an item is cursed if they attune to it and try to take it off. That's why most official magic items in 5e say they're cursed on the description. and the identify spell exists for this reason, so does detect magic. I think it's safe to tell the player attuning to the item they're cursed.. because they're cursed.

I had a player that was playing a character who was being a bit of a jerk (character was jerk, not the player, until now). A named NPC reacted to his antics the way I would expect, and cast hold person. When setting up the location, I did make some changes to some of the NPCs so their CR was a bit more level with the PCs who were higher level than I initially anticipated (they did things in a different order). Hold person, saving throw failed. Gets beat on by NPCs that came from other room when they heard stuff go down. Player drops from the Discord voice chat when he goes unconscious. I was going to leave it at that....kinda the NPC going "I hope you learned your lesson, next time I won't be so kind". NPC was supposed to become an ally (or at least it was one of the known options that I planned for) He sends me a screen cap of the stat block for that particular NPC and says "THEY DON'T HAVE HOLD PERSON!" "That version doesn't, but mine did" RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE QUIT

To be fair curse of strahd is a nightmare to navigate through

Ya know some good stories here, I'm a long time rpg player. Most groups I have been in have been great about that the only exception being my current DMs young child who was quickly silenced and had it explained later. However I have a fantastic story of anti meta gaming. I was running a game called earthdawn. The characters were exploring a ruined city and becoming horribly lost. With luck they found a map, but the map was just as confusing as the city itself. Everyone made checks to attempt to figure out the groups current location. Everyone rolled terrible..... Except the troll, who rolled really well even with his low intelligence, since the rolls were open ended. The entire party players and characters looked to each other, looked to the troll and went naaaa, and went off some other way. The troll player didn't complain either just went along with all the other "smarter" people.

A player quitting the game because I added a homebrew that nerfed leg. resistance, but also made it a little more mysterious on when it applies (think of purging the effect after it connects, not just handwaiving it.) He was pissy because he wasn't able to correctly count down how many leg. resistances a creature would have so he wouldn't be able to 'strategize' properly. And he had the gall to say that wasn't metagaming.

My table religiously metagames. I love and hate it because I can't stop myself from being a board commander, but also I hate that it takes players 20 minutes to formulate their turn.

I'm inclined to imagine most of the worst examples of metagaming are people so afraid of the idea of having metagames that they're trying so hard not to that it just ends being metagaming again, only to their detriment instead of their benefit.

I ran a one shot where the players stole a Deck of Many Things. Their objective was to escape the city and meet up with their secret employer to sell the cards for an insane profit. Given how chaotic a Deck of Many Things can be, I told each player to make a backup character that would spawn in as a bounty hunter who would hunt the rest of the party to try to recover the Deck. Of course as soon as alarm bells are ringing and the whole of the city is bearing down on them, the team panics and starts pulling cards because what else are they supposed to do? The first two cards are Demon and Death, so one player is cursed and immediately killed by the Avatar of Death within two seconds. We laugh and I set him up in a tavern on the other side of town where he gathers information from the authorities about these thieves. The rest of the party now draws cards more sparingly and make their way towards the docks through the sewers to try to commandeer a boat. Through good rolls and proper tracking the newly turned bounty hunter caught up with the group and has a showdown with them as they are fighting their way past some guards attempting to arrest them. In an act of desperation, the warlock pulls the card Key from the Deck. This gives him a rare or higher weapon so I have him roll a percentile to see what he gets. He ends up receiving a Luck Blade with 2 charges which gives him 2 wishes. For this session I told them for this session, any items that require attunement are automatically attuned to them when they receive it so they could use them in the heat of the moment. The player running the bounty hunter got a greedy look in his eyes and ran straight for the warlock, taking 2 opportunity attacks and declared he was going to try to wrestle the sword away. I asked him why he wanted to do that and explained he had no knowledge about what the sword did, only the warlock knew from the attunement. His response was if a sword just appeared in someone's hand it must be special. In hindsight I probably should have shut it down, the metapidgeon was a raging barbarian trying to wrestle a sword away from a warlock with a negative strength modifier. After both players rolled and compared, the barbarian produced a 16 while the warlock rolled an 18! The dice gods weren't about to let this cheater steal these wishes, and on the warlock's next turn, they wished to have themselves and their friends teleported safety to the place where they were going to meet their contact. With their final wish, they wished to be free from their abusive patron and were able to become a paladin with their new treasured blade.

Very interesting! Maybe a "Best and Worst Party Member Betrayals?"

I'm actually with the players on the ring story, the players got the rings checked out before hand, it wouldn't be that unreasonable to test the rings effects and character general get an understanding of an item when they attune to it