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What does it mean to "Challenge the Character"?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7602027" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>See, again, I think you are trying to draw contrasts that just aren't there, and I wish you'd stop using me as evidence in some argument you are having with someone else..</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I wasn't in that discussion, but this seems to be something else entirely. I'm generally of the opinion that there is no such thing as metagaming, so if you the player know that earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage, you don't have to justify to me how your character knows that. I'm not going to force you to pretend you don't know that information and try to get you to guess how you would behave if you didn't know that, because that's just impossible. So yes, in that case if you have player knowledge, there is no roll, there is no story. The player simply knows so the character does as well. If you want to justify your in game knowledge through some sort of backstory, eh, I don't care. If you don't, I still don't care. The thing with metagaming is that the player's mind is inherently part of the game universe and can't be removed from it. So even if in theory I'd like to stop metagaming, it's not possible to do it in a way that doesn't amount to telling the player how to play their character. As long as the player isn't snooping at the session notes or buying copies of the module we are playing, I'm OK with player knowledge.</p><p></p><p>What I was talking about was something else entirely. Suppose a player does not know that Earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage, and the player encounters some monster for the first time. That player is allowed in my games to make a skill check versus a DC that depends on the monster (in my game, based on commonality and reputation) and if they are successful, I will tell them a number of facts about the monster that depends on how well they succeeded on their check. </p><p></p><p>What I was saying was that if you declare, "I used to sweep floors for the village hedge mage, and he once told me all about earth elementals.", that gets you no advantage on your lore check to identify the monster. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>The same for me would generally hold true, although it's much harder to metagame social encounters with NPCs that it is monster entries in a monster manual. But conceivably, if I ever run the same group on multiple campaigns in my homebrew world (and considering I've played 7 years on the current one and have years more to go, that's unlikely), all the stuff that they learned about the campaign world would be stuff they are carrying around that I couldn't stop them from using. Granted, I'd probably set the campaign in a different part of the campaign world to minimize the cross over of knowledge, but now they'd have built up considerable lore about the cosmology, personality of various royal persons, religion, ways of magic, thieves guilds and secrets societies, secrets of the universe and so forth. I can't ask the players to forget all that and there is no way to know how they'd act without it, so if they act on that knowledge, we can only assume that the character heard about it somehow.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7602027, member: 4937"] See, again, I think you are trying to draw contrasts that just aren't there, and I wish you'd stop using me as evidence in some argument you are having with someone else.. I wasn't in that discussion, but this seems to be something else entirely. I'm generally of the opinion that there is no such thing as metagaming, so if you the player know that earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage, you don't have to justify to me how your character knows that. I'm not going to force you to pretend you don't know that information and try to get you to guess how you would behave if you didn't know that, because that's just impossible. So yes, in that case if you have player knowledge, there is no roll, there is no story. The player simply knows so the character does as well. If you want to justify your in game knowledge through some sort of backstory, eh, I don't care. If you don't, I still don't care. The thing with metagaming is that the player's mind is inherently part of the game universe and can't be removed from it. So even if in theory I'd like to stop metagaming, it's not possible to do it in a way that doesn't amount to telling the player how to play their character. As long as the player isn't snooping at the session notes or buying copies of the module we are playing, I'm OK with player knowledge. What I was talking about was something else entirely. Suppose a player does not know that Earth elementals are vulnerable to thunder damage, and the player encounters some monster for the first time. That player is allowed in my games to make a skill check versus a DC that depends on the monster (in my game, based on commonality and reputation) and if they are successful, I will tell them a number of facts about the monster that depends on how well they succeeded on their check. What I was saying was that if you declare, "I used to sweep floors for the village hedge mage, and he once told me all about earth elementals.", that gets you no advantage on your lore check to identify the monster. The same for me would generally hold true, although it's much harder to metagame social encounters with NPCs that it is monster entries in a monster manual. But conceivably, if I ever run the same group on multiple campaigns in my homebrew world (and considering I've played 7 years on the current one and have years more to go, that's unlikely), all the stuff that they learned about the campaign world would be stuff they are carrying around that I couldn't stop them from using. Granted, I'd probably set the campaign in a different part of the campaign world to minimize the cross over of knowledge, but now they'd have built up considerable lore about the cosmology, personality of various royal persons, religion, ways of magic, thieves guilds and secrets societies, secrets of the universe and so forth. I can't ask the players to forget all that and there is no way to know how they'd act without it, so if they act on that knowledge, we can only assume that the character heard about it somehow. [/QUOTE]
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