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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3291776" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think that necessarily is true, or at least, if it is true it makes for much more interesting gaming if it is not.  I think you are confusing character and player knowledge.  The player might (or might not) know that Animate Dead has an Evil descriptor, but even if the player does, it doesn't necessarily follow that the character does.  Sure, if the player is wise, educated, and instructed by good hearted teachers, he'll probably recognize a spell on a page as being of a dark and foul sort of magic - but I don't think that it is necessarily the case that he will, and I can think of at least one TSR publication (and a well written on at that) from very late second edition that uses that to very good effect - 'Bastion of Faith'.And I've used that to good effect in my own gaming.  This is another case where hiding the rules from the player can lead to profoundly more interesting gaming.  I had a character who played a young Wizard.  As part of my hooking them into the setting/party, I RPed with the character that his master and mentor, a kindly but somewhat feeble old urban 'hedge wizard' had just been murdered, leaving the young mage with only his starting funds, some ragged spell books, and a few items of minor magical value.  Unbeknowst to either the player or the character, the death was the result of arcane turf warfare between two of the large wizarding guilds in the city.  The character was in the campaign later approached by the faction that had murdered off the old wizard, a group of mages of a necromatic bent who were secretly really evil SOB's.  The cozening words, promises of training and help, and friendly disposition the player joined up, somewhat oblivious to my sometimes not so subtle hints that these were the bad guys which would have been picked up by anyone that had been an experienced gamer.  It wasn't that he was RPing badly, quite the contrary.  He didn't have any meta-game knowledge to go by, so he played the situation straight up (and though the other PCs were experienced enough to catch on, more importantly, they were experienced enough not to break character and act on OOC knowledge.)  If everyone just knows that Animate Dead or whatever has an evil descriptor, you can't get into those situations, and I and the players would have been deprived of some very interesting and complex situations.</blockquote>

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