You're reading way too far into it.

The joke comes from the fact that people say you need to study Shakespeare in order to be clever. However, Shakespeare did not study Shakespeare. He is just making a very simple joke making fun of that fact. It's not more than that. There is no further implication. It is a simple play on words.

I am not American.

No warning either. Just might as well be emotions by Sybil.

don't jump through your hoops

looks inside

The hoops are basic gameplay mechanics

Yeah. Like I said. Forgotten Realms.

EXACTLY.

People in this thread keep saying that they should be expected to keep the information that they as a player have because it's obvious. No one is really giving an argument other than the fact that it hurts my fun. No one else who is making that argument is thinking about how the fact that that hurts other players fun because it makes it all about them.

You are hitting the nail on the head. You are able to have your cake and eat it too if you combine the roleplay with learning the information. You know you're going to a place called Troll Canyon? Go do the research. Suddenly you now do know that they are weak to fire. No one can argue that fact, and everyone can prepare. Moreover, you're also going to be in an area where you could probably get some extra fire stuff to help take care of them. It's also the type of cleverness that a DM will actually reward instead of just going. Oh yeah, of course you would know the thing for no reason.

I really don't know what is so hard to understand about this. You are playing a role-playing game. Part of the role-playing game is that you are playing a role due to, you know, it being role-playing game. One of those roles is that you are an inexperienced adventurer. The expectation is that you as an inexperienced adventurer would not know the detail of a monster that an experienced adventurer would know.

No one is saying you cannot use fire. Everyone is saying you cannot prepare only fire spells when going to this area because that would be you having information to knowledge that your character does not have. But do you want to know what every single DM would reward? You go into a library to look up trolls. If you know that they're supposed to be trolls in a specific area because it's called troll canyon, do some research. I guarantee you that the DM will actually reward you.

What you want is a reward given for no effort. You want to say that your character has the information because you as a player have the information, but again, this is a role-playing game and you are playing a role that doesn't have the information that your player has. The limitations on you being an inexperienced character and not having access to that information is something that you should probably ask the DM at the start, but it also does mean that you're going to be limiting pretty severely the role-playing aspect of the role-playing game. If you would like to have your cake and eat it too, then I highly recommend trying to do something in the game that would actually demonstrate that your character is trying to learn something about the various creatures, so that way you could not only get vulnerabilities from that, but also be rewarded in general and look like a team player trying to help out everybody by getting the information across to everyone instead of just assuming that they are allowed to have the thing themselves Just a general hint and tip from a DM who is tired of this shit.

No, the conversation did not start out with you being effectively called a bitch. A meme was posted that you decided to take incredibly seriously and incredibly personally. But you are 100% being an ass.

So just to recap. You posted a giant message saying your problems, I posted one of about the same length giving a rebuttal and you dismissed it all out of hand and gave a single line response?

Good luck on ever getting me to read one of your comments again.

So arbitrarily, I’m not allowed to use fire damage on the trolls until some npc tells me that trolls are weak to fire?

You say arbitrarily but it's not arbitrary. It is dependant on the situation. If trolls aren't super common and your characters have never dealt with a troll? It makes zero sense that you would know that they're weak to fire damage. Question. Do you know how to escape a car that's upside down and submerged in water? Because if you don't, there are a lot of things that are going to get you killed due to not being aware of what the issue is. Now, you might have learned it in the past due to some particular event or due to reading it in something or being aware due to work stuff or whatever else. But the point is that it's a danger that not everyone on the earth is familiar with despite the fact that it is a hyper common vehicle and water covering the vast majority of the earth's surface.

Now instead of cars and water being everywhere, it's a specific monster in a specific location you've probably never visited and the internet doesn't exist. Want to explain to me how it's "arbitrary" that your character would know the vulnerabilities of a specific creature that is from an area you're not from? That you've got no crossover with? That your character has no experience with?

Your perspective comes from that of a player that is frustrated but not of someone who is looking at the world as a whole. Your whole comment talks about how angry you get from being prevented to do certain things but none of it reflects anything from how the world would work internally.

You call it asinine but it's way more ridiculous to think that as a lower level character from the middle of nowhere that you'd have intimate adventuring knowledge of a creature that isn't super common in most situations.

If you want to play let’s pretend with dice, that’s fine.

I mean that is literally the game... Fun fact on the definition of metagaming.

Metagame thinking means thinking about the game as a game. It’s like when a character in a movie knows it’s a movie and acts accordingly. For example, a player might say, “The DM wouldn’t throw such a powerful monster at us!” or you might hear, “The read-aloud text spent a lot of time describing that door — let’s search it again!”

For a lot of us this isn't a game first. It's a Roleplaying Game first. The way that you want to play is rejecting a lot of the roleplay aspect of it in favor of mechanical benefit. Phrasing that as "play lets pretend with dice" just feels bizarrely tone deaf considering that is literally the entire core concept of the game.

The thing about your comment here that is frustrating to me as a DM is that it doesn't factor in anyone else. It's all about how your plan was ruined and about how things prevent you from doing various things but there's no consideration or reference to anyone else in the party. How enjoyable do you think it is for other players if someone in the party is consistently saying "I would know the thing" and providing no reasonable explanation for why you'd know the thing?

Yup. Granted it was after I begged for money because I was going to be homeless and pants shittingly terrifying. And not something I ever want to do again because I felt so so so guilty. I used every cent to everything necessary. Hell someone was like "Get a treat!" and I was like "Fuck that. Bills." but also mostly because I couldn't stomach the idea of spending the money on anything other than what was strictly necessary because I hated myself as is

So paid but... with fine print I should have read lol

Posting to Lemmy lol