What does it mean to "Challenge the Character"?

pemerton said:

I can't answer for [MENTION=6801228]Chaosmancer[/MENTION], although I get the sense that he (? I think) and I have some similar views here.

The things the player characters believe, the things they say to one another, etc are a part of the gameworld as much as anything else. If a character is telling another character something about earth elemental, then that belief and conversation is part of the fiction.

Now when it's speculation about esoteric arcane matters, if the belief diverges from the truth that probably doesn't create any issues for the fiction - though in some circumstances (eg the PC is an archmage) it might.

But if the conversation is about the character's hometown and childhood friends, then all of those beliefs turning out to be false would be rather odd. Is being an inveterate liar, or someone who is utterly deluded about his/her childhood, part of the player's conception of the character? Chaosmancer and I are assuming that it's not.

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I don't understand what you're saying here in relation to my specific question that you quoted. If the DM does not care that the PC went to buy scrolls presumably good in a fight against earth elementals with no explanation whatsover, then why would someone care if they do so after saying "earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder" or words to that effect? Does something meaningful change about the action declaration at that point?

iserith said:

If the DM does not care that the PC went to buy scrolls presumably good in a fight against earth elementals with no explanation whatsover, then why would someone care if they do so after saying "earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder" or words to that effect? Does something meaningful change about the action declaration at that point?

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Yes. The action declaration is premised on some other elements of the shared ficiton established by the players - something along the lines of that such-and-such a character believes such-and-such a thing, and has shared that belief with other PCs.

If the GM is intending to introduce fiction that reveals the PC belief to be false, and it is established or implicit in the fiction that the PC is an expert (eg my archmage, or [MENTION=6801228]Chaosmancer[/MENTION]'s diabolist), then we have the possibility of tension if not outright contradiction.

Whose vision has to yield? If the answer is the player's, then Chaosmancer and I think that contradicts the clam that the player has authority over the character.

iserith said:

If you're fine with the them going to buy the scrolls without explanation, why care with an explanation? The DM is just there to adjudicate the action of buying the scrolls, nothing more. A player might say "Hey, everyone, earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage." But there's nothing there for the DM to do.

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Because intent matters? The narrative weight of actions can change depending on the intent behind them, and require different adjudications?

Really, the entire point of the example has been to show that players can take actions with player knowledge beyond just simply attacking something in combat.

Maybe they buy items specifically to defeat an enemy they have never researched, maybe they break into the shop to steal a wish scroll they only know about because they read the module, maybe they use knowledge from the books to confront a powerful being in disguise as an old man and use a clue they were supposed to get later down the line to trick it into fighting against their enemies.

There are many ways in which players can use the carte blanche to know anything with no restriction to disrupt the game. And the GMs job is more than just adjudicating actions, it is making sure things run smoothly.

And, while this is amusingly ironic, you seem to be fine with it on this end of the spectrum, but on determining things about a player's past and the people they know after the game has started, you are not fine with it.

iserith said:

I don't say "player knowledge = character knowledge" though. I'm saying the player determines what the character thinks. A player might know that, assuming the DM hasn't changed anything, earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage. He or she may say the character thinks that. Or he or she may not. It's up to the player. A player might choose to establish some other reason for buying the scrolls that is unrelated to thinking anything in particular about earth elementals, too.

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You are giving the players the freedom to choose how much of their knowledge the character has, mostly I think because like Elfcrusher you find the idea of pretending not to know something distasteful, so do you expect players to not utilize any scrap of knowledge they have?

iserith said:

Except I just told you I do warn them? Through telegraphing, remember?

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How exactly do you telegraph that the item they read was hidden in the fort isn't actually there? How do you telegraph that hags don't eat children to give birth to daughters?

Sure, you can telegraph something is weird about an earth elemental by saying it is blue instead of brown, but some aspects of knowledge are going to be nearly impossible to telegraph without just outright stating that you changed something.

And, I keep trying to make this clear, I'm not only talking about combat and combat strengths and weaknesses. I'm talking lore. I'm talking knowledge.

In fact, here is a good table example. We were playing a game, and we were going through a dream world dungeon full of various undead. We encountered a pair of vampires, a married couple, who had no idea they were vampires and in fact had been turned into vampires by some weird stones. One of the players, despite these NPCs having no idea what was going on and having never harmed anyone, attempted to dominate and destroy them. They were acting under the lore that all undead are made from portions of the Negative Energy plane, that they are anti-life and therefore have no rights and must be destroyed absolutely no matter what. They got upset when the DM had no idea what they were talking about, because the DM was not only not acting under that assumption, but had no idea that assumption even existed.

It ended up causing a massive fight and hurt feelings around the table, because the player went forth thinking everything they knew was true and the DM had subverted that without intention, and so while they were seeing abominations to be destroyed, other members of the party say victims being persecuted and we ended up in conflict. And not interesting party conflict, the type that nearly wrecked the campaign.

Going forth and allowing players to believe that everything they know about the game applies and is valid for them to draw upon can be a dangerous proposition. Especially when it conflicts with what the DM or other players know and are drawing from.

iserith said:

Great - though I don't say that "I change things constantly" as that would not be accurate. But that I can change things at all is sufficient warning to be vigilant.

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Only if you change a lot, otherwise their knowledge being inaccurate is an anomaly not something they will learn to look out for.

pemerton said:

Yes. The action declaration is premised on some other elements of the shared ficiton established by the players - something along the lines of that such-and-such a character believes such-and-such a thing, and has shared that belief with other PCs.

If the GM is intending to introduce fiction that reveals the PC belief to be false, and it is established or implicit in the fiction that the PC is an expert (eg my archmage, or [MENTION=6801228]Chaosmancer[/MENTION]'s diabolist), then we have the possibility of tension if not outright contradiction.

Whose vision has to yield? If the answer is the player's, then Chaosmancer and I think that contradicts the clam that the player has authority over the character.

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I don't find any contradiction here that isn't created by the player. It is the player that has to yield since it is the player stating something about the world (e.g. "earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage"), which is under the purview of the DM. The obvious solution to me is for the player not to do that (nor declare the guard is Frances, an old friend) and, again, to verify one's assumptions before acting upon them.

Chaosmancer said:

Because intent matters? The narrative weight of actions can change depending on the intent behind them, and require different adjudications?

Really, the entire point of the example has been to show that players can take actions with player knowledge beyond just simply attacking something in combat.

Maybe they buy items specifically to defeat an enemy they have never researched, maybe they break into the shop to steal a wish scroll they only know about because they read the module, maybe they use knowledge from the books to confront a powerful being in disguise as an old man and use a clue they were supposed to get later down the line to trick it into fighting against their enemies.

There are many ways in which players can use the carte blanche to know anything with no restriction to disrupt the game. And the GMs job is more than just adjudicating actions, it is making sure things run smoothly.

And, while this is amusingly ironic, you seem to be fine with it on this end of the spectrum, but on determining things about a player's past and the people they know after the game has started, you are not fine with it.

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I think [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] establishes a good line here: The player is free to draw upon hard-won knowledge to inform how he or she has the character act. The limit is when the player is not acting in good faith and has, as you suggest above, read the module and presumably didn't tell anyone. I think a player not being forthcoming about this many people would consider rude or worse. But sometimes my players replay my one-shots to try out a different character or approach with a new party. It can work just fine even with perfect knowledge.

But anyway let's say that the player does say "earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage" then says he or she wants to go Ye Olde Magick Shoppe to buy some scrolls or thunderwave for the party wizard to use. You know as DM that THESE earth elementals have no particular vulnerabilities to thunder damage. Let's up the ante and say that the characters have never encountered earth elementals before. Let's go one step further and say the character is an Int-8 barbarian. What do you do here as DM? Does the character go buy the scrolls or do you invalidate the action declaration?

I'll add that you are incorrect about my views on the player determining things about a character's past during play. Here I'm stating what the rules support, not what I personally do. Read upthread and you will see me make several statements about my preferences in this regard. What I'll not say is that the rules of the game support that preference (or yours). Every table has to figure this out on their own. (This was, by the way, the answer I gave that you said was "clear as mist" and wanted to move past.)

Chaosmancer said:

You are giving the players the freedom to choose how much of their knowledge the character has, mostly I think because like Elfcrusher you find the idea of pretending not to know something distasteful, so do you expect players to not utilize any scrap of knowledge they have?

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I have no issue with a player playing a character that doesn't know something the player does. That's up to the player. My issue has always been the DM requiring the player to do so.

Chaosmancer said:

How exactly do you telegraph that the item they read was hidden in the fort isn't actually there? How do you telegraph that hags don't eat children to give birth to daughters?

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That depends on the context. I don't understand the first question. The second could be done through a knowledgeable NPC, and I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to get the correct information into the PCs' hands. Not to mention - the smart play is to act on assumptions only after verifying them.

Chaosmancer said:

Sure, you can telegraph something is weird about an earth elemental by saying it is blue instead of brown, but some aspects of knowledge are going to be nearly impossible to telegraph without just outright stating that you changed something.

And, I keep trying to make this clear, I'm not only talking about combat and combat strengths and weaknesses. I'm talking lore. I'm talking knowledge.

In fact, here is a good table example. We were playing a game, and we were going through a dream world dungeon full of various undead. We encountered a pair of vampires, a married couple, who had no idea they were vampires and in fact had been turned into vampires by some weird stones. One of the players, despite these NPCs having no idea what was going on and having never harmed anyone, attempted to dominate and destroy them. They were acting under the lore that all undead are made from portions of the Negative Energy plane, that they are anti-life and therefore have no rights and must be destroyed absolutely no matter what. They got upset when the DM had no idea what they were talking about, because the DM was not only not acting under that assumption, but had no idea that assumption even existed.

It ended up causing a massive fight and hurt feelings around the table, because the player went forth thinking everything they knew was true and the DM had subverted that without intention, and so while they were seeing abominations to be destroyed, other members of the party say victims being persecuted and we ended up in conflict. And not interesting party conflict, the type that nearly wrecked the campaign.

Going forth and allowing players to believe that everything they know about the game applies and is valid for them to draw upon can be a dangerous proposition. Especially when it conflicts with what the DM or other players know and are drawing from.

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That sounds like a few problems at play to me, mostly having to do with personalities and how the group deals with conflict resolution. What appears to kick things off is that the player acted on an assumption without verifying it first. But the DM bares some responsibility here as well by failing to describe these vampires as somehow distinct from others. Then there's an issue with how the players move forward on action declarations as a group and how they resolve conflicts. This can't be laid entirely at the feet of the person wanting to attack the vampires and frankly there are plenty of characters that might credibly do that even if the player knows something is off about these vampires.

This is a situation with multivariate issues. To lay it at the feet of just one thing looks a lot like confirmation bias to me.

Chaosmancer said:

Only if you change a lot, otherwise their knowledge being inaccurate is an anomaly not something they will learn to look out for.

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Seems like a blanket statement to me that is easily disproved by a single example.

pemerton said:

Whose vision has to yield? If the answer is the player's, then Chaosmancer and I think that contradicts the clam that the player has authority over the character.

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Was it a claim of absolute or final authority?

AFAICT, even under the hard-core, don't-tell-me-what-my-character-thinks ethos, the GM can place an environment that's at odds with everything he thinks.

Tony Vargas said:

Was it a claim of absolute or final authority?

AFAICT, even under the hard-core, don't-tell-me-what-my-character-thinks ethos, the GM can place an environment that's at odds with everything he thinks.

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It would be interesting to see what you and others think of "the smelly chamberlain".

Suppose that the players play their PCs as keeping their distance from the chamberlain, opening windows when he enters the room, etc - because the players have decided that their PCs think the chamberlain smells - while the GM, exercising his/her power to describe the environment, insists that the chamberlain doesn't smell. Whose view prevails? What is true in the fiction - does the chamberlain smell? are the PCs hallucinating? can the GM insist that the PCs in fact don't think the chamberlain smells?

The idea that each can have absolute authority over a domain - PC beliefs/feelings; the rest of the gameworld - with no possibility of contradiciton isn't tenable, in my view.

iserith said:

I don't find any contradiction here that isn't created by the player. It is the player that has to yield since it is the player stating something about the world (e.g. "earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage"), which is under the purview of the DM. The obvious solution to me is for the player not to do that (nor declare the guard is Frances, an old friend) and, again, to verify one's assumptions before acting upon them.

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To me, the player yielding in this fashion is not consistent with the idea that the player has total authority over what the PC thinks and feels.

iserith said:

I think [MENTION=4937]The player is free to draw upon hard-won knowledge to inform how he or she has the character act.

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This seems straight out of the Gygaxian playbook. I don't think it suits a game in which the player wants to play a PC who is embedded in the gameworld rather than a relative stranger to it.

pemerton said:

It would be interesting to see what you and others think of "the smelly chamberlain".

Suppose that the players play their PCs as keeping their distance from the chamberlain, opening windows when he enters the room, etc - because the players have decided that their PCs think the chamberlain smells - while the GM, exercising his/her power to describe the environment, insists that the chamberlain doesn't smell. Whose view prevails? What is true in the fiction - does the chamberlain smell? are the PCs hallucinating? can the GM insist that the PCs in fact don't think the chamberlain smells?

The idea that each can have absolute authority over a domain - PC beliefs/feelings; the rest of the gameworld - with no possibility of contradiciton isn't tenable, in my view.

To me, the player yielding in this fashion is not consistent with the idea that the player has total authority over what the PC thinks and feels.

This seems straight out of the Gygaxian playbook. I don't think it suits a game in which the player wants to play a PC who is embedded in the gameworld rather than a relative stranger to it.

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"'The idea that each can have absolute authority over a domain - PC beliefs/feelings; the rest of the gameworld - with no possibility of contradiciton isn't tenable, in my view."
Uh huh...

But the heart of the matter is this...

"- while the GM, exercising his/her power to describe the environment, insists that the chamberlain doesn't smell."

As a gm, I would never rule the NPC doesn't smell. Everyone has a smell to them, even faint. Perception rules establish expectations. In one supers campaign, I had a villain who chain smoked distinctive brands and that smell often lingered at crime scenes. In another game, each magician had tell tale sigils, they also could linger after.

So, what the players are doing is *either* (their call as to which ) in character pranking *or* deciding that their character finds the particular smell of the target unpleasant. If its the former, it might become relevant as deceptions are not absolute. If its the latter, it would need to be played within the normal expectations for percrption established in the game.

So, no real conflicts unless the players want to define not just what they think of the target's smell but how far it goes or how loud it is.

This, imo, is an example born out of vagueness in the term smell. Seitch it got hearing sounds and liking it or not and the difference is rather clearer. They can decide they find the NPCs voice funny, but not that its overly loud or unusually high pitched.

I don't find the Smelly Chamberlain to be particular complicated. The author apparently thinks it's some sort of paradox.

The only paradox is that the author seems to think that the GM needs to define whether or not the chamberlain is objectively, factually smelly. He doesn't. He only needs to decide whether other people (other than the PCs) think he's smelly.

If the GM likes the idea, he runs with it. If he doesn't think his Chamberlain should smell bad (but I do hope he has a good reason, because really if the players want him to smell bad that's a great contribution) then the PCs are the only people who think he smells bad.

The players are free to have their characters act like he smells bad.

The players are free to have their players think he smells bad. But they may eventually notice that nobody else thinks he smells bad. They're free to come up with whatever narration they want to explain it. They're crazy? They suffered neurological damage in the battle with Jubilex? They all were fed some herb as kids that happened to make them extremely sensitive to the chamberlain's cologne? I don't know, but if they're creative enough to come up with the idea in the first place, I'll bet they are creative enough to come up with an explanation for why they are the only three people who seem to think he's smelly.

Or not. Does it really matter? The 3 PCs think he's smelly. Nobody else does. Maybe it's just one of those things that nobody can explain.

Or MAYBE it's a plot hook....

(All of the above applies to Francis the Guard, by the way.)

pemerton said:

To me, the player yielding in this fashion is not consistent with the idea that the player has total authority over what the PC thinks and feels.

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Why? Does what the PC think have to be a truth about the game world or be permitted to create NPCs during play (over which the player has NO authority by the rules) in order for you to feel the player has "total authority over what the PC thinks and feels?"

pemerton said:

This seems straight out of the Gygaxian playbook. I don't think it suits a game in which the player wants to play a PC who is embedded in the gameworld rather than a relative stranger to it.

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Why does this make the PC a "relative stranger" to the game world? The player can choose to use that knowledge to inform how he or she has the character or not as he or she sees fit.