Even smart people aren't capable of it. But apparently it only applies to monsters, because tracking, smithing, tinkering, alchemy and quite frankly, every skill in the book are all very important to adventurers and their success, so his idea that it would only take a few days or weeks to learn it all would mean that every PC was proficient with almost everything(some tools are not necessary) before they depart at 1st level.
In standard D&D worlds libraries are common, you can buy guides to monsters for 50gp, every large town has clerics, wizards and other specialists who can tell you about monsters and there are guilds and organizations specifically to help you do your job well. It beggars belief that intelligent professional adventures can only remember 2-4 things about the things they deal with as part of their job.
Correction: Any reasonably smart PC would know everything the player does about non-unique monsters if the rules were intended to be realistic, which they are not.
Elminster says that Volo even gets a little right in that book. Your PC can rely upon it, but if he does he's getting a lot of misinformation. The book in the game is not the book the DM bought at the store.
Nope. That's what game play, backgrounds, and most importantly SKILLS determine. If you want to know about skeletons, specifically the vulnerability to bludgeoning, you might need to make a roll. Or part of your background might have been fighting undead as part of the temple's irregulars and I would just give it to you.
You don’t actually know that though is the thing. Theoretically, had you separated the two groups so that they didn’t know what was going on with the other, it’s entirely possible that the players in the second group might coincidentally decide to rejoin the first group at the exact moment they get themselves into danger. They also might not. You can’t know what actually “would have happened” if the players didn’t know what was going on with the other group. As you observed, making any decision at all in that moment is making a metagame decision.
Sure, but likewise, if you know the monster’s weaknesses, you can’t know what you would do if you didn’t know the monster’s weaknesses. You can use your player knowledge to exploit the weaknesses, or you can choose not to exploit those weaknesses, but either way you’re making a metagame choice.
Guides that are explicitly stated as having imperfect knowledge.
What beggars belief is the idea that an 18-year-old fresh off the farm with their grandfather's dented sword would have years of formal training. If the player is smart enough to think all this through then good for them, they get to ask around, in-character to learn it. Or we get to off-screen handle that, age the character a few years, and anything that was urgently in need of stopping is now long since happened. Or make a lore roll. There's a chance you know something relevant, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Two things. One, how many people in the real world are incredibly well-versed in serial killers? I mean to the level you're talking about. Very, very few. A few thousand at most. And it took them years, decades, of study. Most people in the real world try to pretend that there aren't monsters among us. Two, in the real world people are stupid enough to knowlingly vote for monsters.
No to both - they're simply part of the trial-and-error learning curve.
Agreed,
A longtime player knows most to all things about most to all monsters, especially if the player also DMs.
And valid reasons are valid. "We don't want to all be crushed when it lands, spread out!" is perfectly valid.
