It is more than what the PC knows.
Suppose there is a hidden pit on the other side of the wall, which a character might fall into if they drop or fall while climbing. The PC won't know that possible consequence (assuming they fail to notice the pit).
As a player, though, I want to know whether that sort of hidden consequence is on the table. I mean, in classic dungeon-crawling D&D it generally is, and that heavily informs how the game is played: Find Traps spells, wands of trap detection, pushing sheep ahead of you through the dungeon to trigger the pit traps, etc.
In most of the RPGs that I play these days it isn't - or, at least, that sort of "hard move" is gated behind a soft move/hard move structure.
As a player, I need to know what sort of RPG I'm playing, and what sorts of methods the GM is using to determine what is at stake in situations, before I can decide how to approach the game i a sensible fashion.