NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7538367" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I think that player knowledge of mechanics serves as a stand in for character knowledge of the world. It doesn't really have to be about the DM being fair, or the players trusting the DM. It's more about (as others have gone on to say in the thread) the fact that characters have some knowledge of their world and their place in it. A novice cleric would know that he has a better chance at turning a zombie than a vampire, for instance. And so on. I find that meta knowledge of all kinds can serve as a substitution for some in world thing that cannot be replicated at the table. I allow players to offer each other advice, for example, which is something I know many DMs do not allow. But I find that it's a suitable representation of battle experience and how a group can learn to function well together. And so on. I'm sure for some, this kind of thing breaks immersion, but I find it helps the players to be more inline with what their characters are experiencing, and the options they have in the moment. When a friend recently asked me to play a 1e game again for fun, he shared the books with me so I could make a character. I had forgotten that all the to hit matrices were in the DMG. I'm so glad they've changed that. I mean, even back in the day they realized what a bad idea that was and made that info available to players in different ways. Sure. I wasn't clear about what I was saying....since Gygax seemed reluctant to want to offer his world as a source for players and instead expected them to come up with their own setting, it seems odd to use examples from his own game. Especially since he also used examples from fiction and myth (copyrights be damned in some cases!).It seems to me to be a bit of a conflict compared to the commonly accepted idea that he did not expect players to mine his material for their home game. Certainly he had to know that The Hand of Vecna was going to wind up as the goal of some home games, rather than simply as inspiration for a DM to come up with some other similar artifact to use.</blockquote>

Verification