this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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RPGs depend on mutual respect. If you think your players will metagame you and you need to punish them then it stops being a collaborative roleplaying game.
okay then, for you the game ends here:
you can't just not metagame
if you know a choice will result in a certain outcome, you can no longer make that decision neutrally
in fact, you literally can't take a risk when you know what the outcome of a choice is, because there's no risk to take
not even bothering to roll is barely a step removed from just telling your players "i'm not going to make the enemy roll to hit you because then you might die and you haven't found your long lost brother yet", and if you can't see that that's a garbage scenario for roleplaying i don't know what to tell you
I'm all for rolls that make sense. If it's an encounter, of course you should always roll. I roll in the open and players know what hit them and whatnot. The consequence is damage and/or death. But if you're a thief and want to open a simple lock and nobody's is trying to defenestrate you at the moment? No need to roll, failure is meaningless. You just killed a dragon? No need to persuade the king to help you. That's a reward for doing something beforehand. But oh my if an orc swings at you with his axe I'm gonna roll the dice right in front of you so you know that critical was not fudged.
I skip rolls if players are either super prepared or their failure will not mean anything. But as I said earlier, it needs trust between players and the GM - I don't make their lives harder as a punishment, I do that for the storytelling. And they don't try to work around me because we skipped a roll for athletics when they had a full day to climb a tree.
Oh but that reminds me. I was metagamed recently. When the team tried to decide what to do with a defeated enemy one of them said "let him live, he will come back as a sidequest. When we kill him then that plotline is dead as well".
Well he was not wrong but that needn't to be said.
this conversation is specifically talking about when you're in a scenario where you logically need to make a roll, but where a bad roll coming up essentially ruins things for both the gm and players