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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6755450" data-attributes="member: 6701872">That's thought policing, but here are some reasons for this "sudden change of behavior"1) You character has always trusted what this other character says about threat assessment, but this time it just seems too much to believe. Like most normal folks without supernatural powers probably trust their friends to tell them the truth, especially about things that matter, right up until they say something that seems completely ridiculous like "I think that guy in the security uniform at the door over there is Bill Nighy."2) The game has only covered a small sliver of your character's life, and is thus too small of a sample size with which to judge this moment, rather than everything in-game up to this point, as being the "out of place" behavior.3) Sometimes, people do things they don't normally do.More thought policing. That I eat a bowl of honey bunches of oats for breakfast every day for three months doesn't make it strange that one morning I decide to have bacon & eggs, and this sorcerer changing their mind about what spell to cast first in battle is the same (from an in-character point of view). Do I also have to ask the DM's permission to have knowledge of my character's family members that have yet to come up in play before the moment some NPC wanders up, calls him nephew, and tries to hug him, or to invoke a tale of my character being taught to make pie by his loving grandmother? Why be inconsistent about when I as a player get to decide what my character does know from the list of things my character could know? You must have missed out on the conversation in which the troll scenario was brought up, which isn't surprising since it was on another forum entirely - the DM didn't name the troll, just described it, and the player didn't care whether the character knew they fighting a troll or an ogre, they just wanted to use fire because it sounded cool and was readily available in the form of the camp fire the character was sitting near when the monster attacked.And the DM (Maxperson in the debate) said that it was meta-gaming to use fire instead of the sword that was also nearby, citing that the player (me in the debate) knew it was a troll from the description given. Which is where that whole test I mentioned earlier of whether a complete newbie player with no knowledge to "abuse" could make the same choice of action in the same scenario, and if yes it can't be meta-gaming because the action doesn't require any specific knowledge.Springing a "gotcha" on your players does sound like something it is reasonable for them to be upset about, especially when it is something like changing up what you have allowed to become basic assumptions for the reason that your players are assuming the basic assumptions of the setting haven't changed.Yeah, better teach those nasty players that nothing you or the book says can be trusted because you will change previously established details on a whim just to give them grief if they dare get comfortable enough with your established setting to think they know what is going on without your express permission to think that.Of course a player you have given a proverbial spanking will start trying to figure out what you want them to be doing, getting spanking and having no idea what for tends to make people very curious.You could entirely skip the "gotcha" process and reach the same end result of having players that know what you expect of them by simply explaining it to them before hand... though I expect if you do like Maxperson and insist that they can't ever have their character guess about something unless the player is also guessing, you are going to end up either with a lot of characters that devote their resources to knowledge, or a group of players that intentionally let their characters fumble through basically everything because they'd rather devote their resources to things other than jumping through the hoops you insist on having anyone that wants to make informed decisions jump through.</blockquote>

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