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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7579073" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, I'm saying that - in 4e - the player can impute his/her knowledge to the PC. Not that s/he has to. In your shard example, if the player wants to play his/her PC as ignorant that seems much easier than in the troll case (because there's no bad action declaration s/he's making when s/he knows what a good one would be).But if the player wants to play his/her PC as knowing, then sure. In my 4e game when the PCs found a sword which had some-or-other backstory (I'm not recalling all the details at present), there was enough there that one player suspected it was the Sword of Kas, and confirmed that knowledge when his PC took damage from handling it (because his PC had an affiliation with Vecna).To my mind part of the point of using the Sword of Kas or the Rod of Seven Parts is that players will recognise and enjoy them!Conversely, if you want to use a shard whose character is secret from the PCs, then I think you should use something which is secret from the players. That's how people do dungeons - they don't normally recycle the same dungeons over and over but expect their players to pretend not to recognise them. Why handle monsters, magic items, etc any differently?As I've posted upthread, this is why Gygax had those long lists of traps and magic items and monsters: those early D&D players kept generating new content precisely so they could use puzzles and secrets in their games. They didn't recycle the same stuff and then ask their players to pretend not to recognise it!</blockquote>

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