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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9400029" data-attributes="member: 29398">I'll be charitable and say he's merely being naive here when he says "it's simple enough to rule out of play any actions they attempt based on forbidden knowledge", because believe me, it isn't.  My evidence for that statement is the endless hours of arguments I've been in and-or sat through when players have pushed back against similar rulings with justifications ranging anywhere from marginally-sustainable to utterly absurd.  And while I love a good ol' argument as much as anyone, I have no patience for these arguments because they are 100% preventable by simply ensuring that player knowledge and character knowledge are kept in synch.And yes this means sometimes doing things by secret note, or via a player and the DM leaving the room for a while, or by whatever other means are required to keep unknown information secret.Also, with these suggestions he's proactively disallowing the players from keeping secrets from each other either in or out of character; which means so much for any meaningful or immersive in-party intrigue.But even more important than that, for me (and I suspect, many others) a large part of immersion rests in being able to think as our character is thinking; a task that is made much harder if not impossible when one has to constantly worry about mentally filtering out what in-game information is accessible and what isn't.I too am not referring to simple things like trolls-v-fire.  I'm referring to the 100%-inevitability of player-side actions changing based on whether or not players have info their characters do not.Example: Sue the Ranger goes off on a solo scout around the castle to assess its defenses, while the rest of the PCs hide their mounts and await her return; she and they expect she'll be gone for an in-game hour or two.If Sue falls down a ravine during her scout and gets stuck there and the other players don't know it - all they know is that she doesn't come back after an hour, then an hour and a half, then two hours - they can decide in-character to wait longer or go looking or write her off or storm the castle and hope for the best or whatever - their decision-making process isn't tainted by their knowing what in fact became of Sue.But if the other players do know Sue got stuck because they watched the proceedings out-of-character, the odds of those players making the same decision(s) they would have had they not known are IME close to zero: it's almost certain they'll find a reason to go searching for her instead of waiting as they otherwise would likely have done, and they'll also gin up an excuse to go sooner than the agreed-upon wait time.This is a disingenuous take, in that it takes trolls-v-fire-like OOC knowledge (which old-school play does expect the player to accumulate over time; and which is in fact often explainable in the fiction though everyone likes to ignore this bit) and equates it with Sue-the-scout-like OOC knowledge of oncoming danger e.g. the player knows there's a fire trap around the corner but the character doesn't.My question is if the character doesn't know a specific danger is coming then why should the player know?  Or put another way, why should the player be (completely needlessly) put in a position of having to sail the character into dangers* the player already knows are coming?* - speaking here of specific dangers that require specific precautions (e.g. fire resistance vs a fire trap) rather than standard precautions the character would always have in place when in a dangerous environment.</blockquote>

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