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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5310101" data-attributes="member: 4937"><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sometimes I wish EnWorld was a place people could safely express honest opinions.  I'd personally rather deal with thirty honest impression that I'm an idiot, than one underhanded passive aggressive guy whose subtly attacking the mental state of everyone who doesn't agree with him.Sadly, it wouldn't work out how I'd like.I don't see how.  While we are not directly discussing in game vs. metagame framing of knowledge, it is relevant to any discussion of dissiminating character knowledge to the player.I actually think I get you quite well.Let me make this concrete.  This is the monster list, thus far, from my current campaign (1st-2nd level).Giant JellyfishBull SharkDeep One*Deep One NobleSpellwightPossessed WarhorseGreen Slime*Scavenger Beetle SwarmMonstrous Scavenger BeetleBat SwarmTroglodyte SkeletonTroglodyte PriestStone DragonDadananshee*Monstrous SpiderTroglodyte ZombieGiant CrayfishShrieker*Violet ZombieCave Sprite*Yellow MoldGoblin SkirmishersGoblin SorcererGoblin ShamanGoblin SpyDracolich ShardPossessed MinersBonetangleHuman ClericAngry MinersThe ones with a '*' are ones where they got some information through a dice roll.  Almost every monster is non-standard.  Now, the question is, did this reduce the fun?  Well, it depends on what you mean by that.  I don't think it reduced the players fun in any fashion.   In some cases it changed the way that the encounter went relative to how I'd envisioned it ahead of time, but one of the most pernicious and disasterous attitudes a DM can have is that the game is fun when it goes the way that they imagined it ahead of time.  Ok, so they didn't get suprised by the fact that the monster was an evil cannibal that delighted in getting people to fight with each other.  I was a little disappointed, but so what, my player with the arcane lore felt like he was extremely useful?  They still managed to get in a fight with each other despite foreknowledge of the problem, and everyone had a good time.  The encounter was still suitably difficult and despite knowing ahead of time what the problem was, they still had great difficulty figuring out what to do.   Interestingly enough, had they not had this tidbit of knowledge, it's entirely possible that the encounter would have been less interesting as they might have put less thought into it and managed to simply walk through the encounter by treating it as a normal dungeon ally.  It didn't go as planned, but it did go well.Moreover, my players stay so bewildered most of the time by the plans within plans and spiderweb of plots and NPC's around them, that if I did my best to keep them in the dark about everything I really don't think they would enjoy it.  I use knowledge as a means of providing small hints based on what the character would know about the world that the character wouldn't.  That way you don't have to be an expert in my game world and have read a bunch of published setting supplements that don't exist to get along.You keep saying that I shouldn't use a die roll to find out what the Ogre had for breakfast.  Ok, fine, then what do you suggest that I use?   See its either going to be a die roll or I am just going to arbitrarily decide when to let the player know what he needs to know.   That's not more fun.  "It was a huge part of the "fun" to use the old noggin and try to figure out what was happening with a particular monster."I've been playing this game since like 1980.  Figuring out what was happening with a particular monster was a tiny part of the fun.  It really only lasts through the first year or three anyway, afterwhich you've got experienced players and they've seen everything that isn't unique.  You end up with players that carry bottles of whiskey in their packs specifically to deal with the odd executioner's mask.  There are all other sorts of things to figure out that are more interesting than what this monster is vulnerable to.  Adventures can have plots.  Stories can have twists.   There can be mysteries and who done its and conspiracies and campaign level secrets about the mythology and cosmology of the world.Where you are getting this all wrong is you seem to be buying into Jonathan's description of the world that is either all in boring metagame terms (see his examples) or else its all secret.  But the two aren't really related.  I can have a world that isn't all secret, but which is still described in literary evocative terms.  I don't have to keep basic information hidden from the plalyers to have a literary campaign filled with mystery.</blockquote>

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