D&D 5E Player knowledge and Character knowledge

[Cap'n Kobold]

The statement I quoted said nothing about extreme limits. Heck, I'm not sure its safe to say a 16 strength PC can bench press an ogre. So, hyperbole aside, what else is that 8 Strength pre-deciding? Can I climb to the roof of that building? Can I swim across a river? Can I even swim at all?

My apologies. I had no wish to offend with my obviously misplaced humour.

Please replace "bench-press an ogre" with "lift a 400 lb weight" if that is a more acceptable example.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I'd be fine with it. Nor would I even consider it bad form. I think it might be good form, though, to tell the group that he's read it, so that all the players get to decide how they want to use the info.

Fair enough. I'm guessing that if the others decide that they'd rather investigate and discover things for themselves, its reasonable to expect the player who had read the module to either roleplay not knowing everything or just hang back on most subjects?

 

[Satyrn]

Fair enough. I'm guessing that if the others decide that they'd rather investigate and discover things for themselves, its reasonable to expect the player who had read the module to either roleplay not knowing everything or just hang back on most subjects?

Huh. I don't know if that is reasonable. It doesn't sound to me like that'd be fun for that player. But if he was cool with it, then sure.

If he wasn't cool with it, and the other players weren't cool with anything else, then I'd probably have to run a different module. Whatever is needed to make it fun for everyone, right?

 

[Mercule]

Broadly speaking, I can think of two categories of player knowledge, here. For lack of better terms, I'll call them "general" and "specific".

General information is stuff like "fire is good against trolls" and "drow hate the light". While it was cool to discover these for the first time and I'd never want to take that discovery phase away from new players, after 30+ years, there's nothing fun about feigning ignorance about how to keep the stupid troll down. It's an artificial drag on the game that brings everyone down. Even the "it's a big, green, rubbery humanoid" schtick has worn thin -- it's a freaking troll already. I think it was WoD that broke the group of this: it's only fun to play the freshly bitten mortal just discovering their powers once, maybe twice if you've got a great GM.

That doesn't mean we don't ever have fun with mystery, though. Instead, I usually (when appropriate) use less detail. "It's a big, brutish humanoid. Probably not big enough to be a true giant, though. Roll your Nature skill or suggest an alternative check." (Yes, I let the players suggest alternate skills for knowledge in 5E.) If no one makes it, they can take some guesses, but it changes from surprise at having it get back up to suspense at wondering whether it's just an ogre or if they're going to have to pull out the flaming sphere to keep it down. After that, they just know. If having the mystery is really critical to the game, I've done things like having a werewolf who was weak to gold instead of silver or completely re-skin a monster so that the troll looks like a bullette.

Specific information would be something like if someone has read the published module the group is going through or is a buff about the setting and knows stuff. In this case, create a character appropriately. If your group is going through Curse of Strahd and you DMed the old I6 multiple times, back in the day, you may have as much misinformation as benefit. Make a character who is an outcast Vistani, escaped thrall, warlock seer, or somehow else privy to secrets. A good DM will play it up and keep the other PCs questioning your loyalty the whole time. Good times all around.

If you're a member of two different groups, and just finished running Princes of the Apocalypse for one group when the other decides they want to play it, well.... now's a great time to try a barbarian with a 6 intelligence or a rogue who is so focused on wealth that he never thinks about the long game. IME, the amount of information you can willfully forget if you make a concerted effort is astounding. Make sure you've communicated with your GM, though.

Some information walks the line between the two. I find that, between changes between editions and the rarity with which they're encountered, even the veterans I play with don't remember the details of, say, demon resistances. My general guide on this is to allow knowledge checks for some information and some logical deductions (do iron weapons work on demons or devils?). If you happen to remember something, that's cool, but no cracking open the Monster Manual during combat; if there's a reasonable chance you're going to encounter more soon, I'd prefer you to not run home after the game and read up, either.

Which gets to a call-out on the specific knowledge: If you're in the middle of playing a module, don't buy it until you're done. If you find it at clearance or something, then just don't open it yet. This is the one area where I start to have a real problem and would actually consider cheating. I have no room at my table for a player who would do this. If discovered, I'd boot them immediately and I'm not sure even an apology would get them back into any game I ran in the future. It's a complete violation of trust, not just between that player and the DM, but between that player and all the others. IMO, this is much worse than fudging dice or "miscalculating" hit points. It's about as bad as you can get without getting into non-game personal conflicts.

 

[Dausuul]

"Metagame at your own risk" is what I always tell my players as a DM. And as a player, I take my risks and accept unwanted consequences.

Pretty much. I don't fuss much over the distinction between player knowledge and character knowledge, on either side of the screen. My experience is that betting hard on metagame knowledge is very dangerous; DMs are prone to tinker with things and act in unexpected ways, and that can easily invalidate your clever plan. (Famous last words: "It's okay, the DM wouldn't throw an encounter at us that we couldn't beat.")

 

[ChrisCarlson]

My apologies. I had no wish to offend with my obviously misplaced humour.

Please replace "bench-press an ogre" with "lift a 400 lb weight" if that is a more acceptable example.

There was no offense. And it seems you missed my counter-point completely. Because by changing it to "lift a 400 lb weight", now I am positive neither can a 16 strength PC do so.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, we're talking about different things.

I'm saying: "A PCs role is whatever their player decides it is. If it changes, fine. Whatever factors go into those decisions aren't my concern as DM. Also, I take for granted that the player's previous experiences will have some bearing on any new PC they create. However much or little isn't my concern, either. Just don't read the Monster Monster in front of me when a combat encounter begins."

You're saying: "Don't cheat."

Which is cool.

Pretty much!

Re: building jackhammers, atom bombs, and other assorted pieces of modern technology...

This isn't really a problem I've encountered. Mostly, it's just not possible. A PC might have the ideas done, but most settings won't have the industrial base to manufacture anything complex. My problem with this sort of thing isn't that it's metagaming or even cheating. It's that pursuing this direction means a lot of extra work for me-as-DM as I brush up on a mess of history. A player in my old 2e game did, at one point, want to invent modern finance capitalism/the stock market. I could have ran with it, but at the time I just didn't want to put in the effort required to make the process interesting and game-able.

In a world of magic where wishes, fabrication magic, and so on can cause the pieces to spring into being formed correctly, you don't need the industrial base that we do here in the real world.

 

[Maxperson]

The irony here is that in another thread Max was accusing me of using a "slippery slope" argument, and here he is introducing jackhammers and...when that wasn't extreme enough...nuclear weapons.

Still don't know what a Slippery Slope is, eh? The jackhammer and nuclear weapon are equal with the theory being bandied about that dreams can just teach you how to do things that only the player knows.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

There was no offense. And it seems you missed my counter-point completely. Because by changing it to "lift a 400 lb weight", now I am positive neither can a 16 strength PC do so.

I . . . may have got the maths wrong, but I think you'd need a Strength of 14 or over.

It was the most straightforward example of something that you decide that your PC could or couldn't do at character creation that I could think of at the time. You were asking about that.

 

[Hriston]

Meta-gaming is bad because it's an example of not role-playing.

This judgement is based on the assumption that there should be nothing in the game that isn't role-playing. I disagree. Unless we define role-play as simply "playing the game", putting undue attention on this one aspect detracts from the game as a whole.

You cannot role-play if you are meta-gaming, because your character cannot possibly take out-of-game information into account when making decisions.

But the character isn't playing the game, the player is. By which I mean, we don't play this game solely to bring these characters to life, although that may well be an important and enjoyable part of the game. We play the game to have an enjoyable experience at the table for all involved. The character serves as the player's vehicle for interacting with the game-world, solving the problems and facing the challenges found therein. Ideally, the character-interface should become all but transparent to the player, allowing for as direct an experience as possible with the game world. Focusing too much on what the character knows and doesn't know detracts from that experience and is itself a form of metagaming, an over-awareness of the character as something separate from oneself.