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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5309641" data-attributes="member: 4937">Water Bob: The problem with linking to essays to express yourself is not everyone else will find the essay as compelling as you do.  In this case though I can completely side step the topic by pointing out that in fact, the essay you link to has nothing at all to do with the topic under discussion.Justin is talking about the importance of conveying in game information in the frame of the in game character rather than through the metagame communication layer where we talk about the game and adjudicate the outcome of actions in the in game world.  While I feel he could have made his point better, I don't in fact disagree with him in this and hinted at the same things he's talking about earlier in the thread when I talked about how the outcome of a roll like this should never be a list of numbers and game attributes.It's a completely different topic.This topic is how to communicate to the player information from the game layer in an in game way.  I might as well come out and say it, if you don't communicate to the player the things that his character is expected to know, chances are you are a very bad DM.  The vast majority of cases of DM abuse I've heard of are from DM's that spring surprises on their players when no character actually within the game world would have been so surprised.For example, I've heard of DMs that do things like:DM: "You see some orcs."Player: "Ok, let's go attack them."DM: "Your paladin now loses all abilities, and you lose a level.  Your alignment changes to CE."Player: "What???"DM: "Well you see, in my game world orcs are a noble species of highly intelligent and benign philosophers."Or, for example:DM: "You see a party of elves approaching."Player: "I politely hail them in elvish and ask them if they have in news."DM: "They all draw arrows and begin pelting you with arrows."Player: "What???"DM: "Well you see, in my game world all elves are demon worshipping cannibals."Both cases are somewhat extreme, but are actually drawn from life.  This is the 'Nitro Miller' school of DMing, where the players can never know anything about the game world that their players live in, because it would 'ruin the mystery'.   The basic problem here is that the DM is just playing a dumb game of 'gotcha'.  In the game universe were all elves are evil or all orcs or good, almost no one in the game universe - no character - would not know of the races reputation.  The DM is not allowing the player to know what the character would know when observing the thing.  And it's the DM here, not the player, who is actually relying on meta-game perceptions to pull off his trick.  If he really wanted to introduce an unknown race of ugly but benevolent individuals, or a race of beautiful but evil individuals he'd name them something other than elves or orcs, or he would fairly introduce this wrinkle as part of the setting background information.We are talking about here is a means of fairly arbritating this exchange of information between the character who presumably as an inhabitant of the game world knows all sorts of things about it that the player doesn't and who doesn't know all sorts of things that the player knows. Obviously, that information - coming as it does from within the game world - should be communicated whenever possible in the terms of the game world rather than in the terms we use like 'armor class' and 'hit dice' that we use to talk about the game.  I think my example makes that perfectly clear.The argument Jonathan makes is really a straw man argument.  He doesn't give his audience sufficient credit as to their intelligence.  He's insulting.  He doesn't assume that he's talking to intelligent people who are in need of intelligent advice.  He assumes he's talking to morons or about morons.  There is a point to saying that some answers can't be learned by a dice roll.  There are literally things about my game universe that the gods of that game universe don't know.  No lucky roll is going to unearth a campaign level secret.  But on the other hand, I'm not going to take the antogonistic stance that I have to be stingy with common lore about the game world because otherwise my game won't have any mystery.  That's just a way to cover up for your world not having alot of depth.</blockquote>

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