Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7580181" data-attributes="member: 42582">Really? You know this for sure? Even if the PC background is being born and raised in a peasant village, living in mud-and-timber housing?But you're equally sure that they won't know what a troll's weakness is?It does baffle me that you cannot see that this is a completely arbitrary way in which to draw lines about what player knowledge a PC is or is not permitted to draw upon.Why are you assuming that all knowledge checks would succeed?What is the nature of the competition?In the first ever encounter with a troll, or yellow mould, or whatever, the players had to solve a puzzle in order to succeed in the encounter. The nature of the competition (or challenge, if one prefers) in that sort of case is pretty obvious.But what is the competition in your case? The challenge of beating the troll is not the central focus of the encounter, because the player is deliberately choosing to make sub-optimal action declarations.Is the competition a roleplaying competition? To be judged by whom?But there is no genuine discovery here. The player already knows about trolls. The player even knows that, if it actually matters, his/her PC will learn about trolls, eventually, one way or another. What is being discovered is how exactly the GM is going to gate that PC knowledge, and what sorts of steps will be required to open the gate.Trying to win a fight to the death in which my PC finds him-/herself is not treating the game as a game. It's playing my character.What does seem to me to constitute treating the game like a game is declaring stuff I know are suboptimal while hoping to flick the GM "switch" that will allow me to use fire against the troll. That is, trying to identify and play out the right "script", rather than inhabiting my character. It could hardly get more game-playing than that!</blockquote>

Verification