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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7579065" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK, let me try it another way: what do you anticipate as a likely outcome to this inquiry?We're talking about a very specific context of inquiry here: the PC is in a combat, declaring combat-type actions (including attacks in most cases); the PC almost certainly knows that fire is a viable attack form; the player knows that fire is a required attack form.When, and under what conditions, is the player entitled to decide that his/her PC uses fire?This may be how you run your games, but it is not how the 4e rulebooks state the game is to be run. Establishing the PC background is a player function, not a GM function. If a player wants to play a PC who deviates from what would be normal, that's the player's prerogative (obviously subject to table consensus around genre, good taste and the like, but knowledge that trolls are vulnerable to fire isn't going to cross those sorts of boundaries!).And as one consequence of that, the GM has no authority to rule that a PC doesn't know about trolls. That's for the player to decide. (Of course if the player is ignorant of trolls, then s/he can't write knowledge of them into his/her PC background for the obvious reason that s/he has no knowledge to write in. That's when monster knowledge checks come into play.)But you're begging the question here, by assuming the PC doesn't know. Whereas the point I'm making (building on [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]'s earlier post) is that there is nothing in the game rules that precludes the character having the knowledge. You seem to be assuming that there are only three ways a PC can know something:(1) The GM tells the player that the PC knows it; (2) The player succeeds on a knowledge check; (3) The PC comes to know it through the actual events of play.But there is no such rule in 4e. The player can decide that his/her PC knows about trolls, can establish some suitable backstory if desired/appropriate, and then deploy that knowledge. None of which involves thinking about the game as a game - it just involves PC building and action declaration.And here, again, we see something that seems to me completely pointless: if you want a hydra (or whatever) to be a puzzle for your players, then choose a monster that will in fact be puzzling for them.The idea that solving a puzzle by using one's knowledge of the solution should count as an unfair advantage makes no sense. That's exactly how people solve puzzles! And getting the players to pretend to be puzzled when in fact they're not just seems utterly pointless - insipid, even.Metagame is a red herring. There's no metagaming in imputing my knowledge of trolls or hydras to my PC. That's just PC building. And if, in fact, my PC knows about trolls or hydras (be that from an uncle, or reading a book, or divine revelation, or whatever) then there is no inauthenticity in playing my PC as acting on such knowledge - in fact it would be inauthentic to do otherwise!There are two main things that distinguish a RPG - even classic, dungeoncrawling D&D - from a standard wargame. One is that the players can play the fiction directly. The other, arguably most important, is that the players each play a single "figure" (to use the old-fashioned terminology) or character, and engage the game from the perspective of that character.Forcing a player to alienate him-/herself from the character, and having the play of the character be mediated through the GM's decision about what the character might or might not know and do, seems to completely undercut the main thing that makes RPGing different from playing a boardgame.</blockquote>

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