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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chriton227" data-source="post: 3221299" data-attributes="member: 33263">Where did you learn this about bears?  Was it on TV?  There is no TV in most D&D settings.  In a book?  The vast majority of the populace is commoners, who are illiterate.  On the Internet?  No Internet either.  Maybe in school?  What grade did your fighter graduate from?  How about the smith down the lane, or the commoners working the fields?  How about in your travels?  How far from home do you think the average villager has traveled, in a world where caravans need guards to protect them from monsters and beasts?  As recently as the last century, many people lived their entire lives without going more than a day's horse ride from where they were born (about 50 miles).In our modern times, information is communicated with amazing ease.  This isn't the case in many D&D settings.  Even Eberron, with all its modern conveniences, isn't like modern times.  The newspaper is distributed on the Lightning Rail, which moves a whopping 30 mph.  It can take days if not weeks for the latest paper to arrive assuming you live near a LR station.  If you don't it can easily be months.  Books are expensive, because most are hand copied, and are very fragile.  You can't order books through Amazon, they have to be hand carried between locations.  Humidity, heat, insects, fire, and weather are all more significant threats to property that they would be in modern times. Sages, Libraries, and Knowledge skills exist for just this reason.  We cannot make assumptions on what the average person knows based on what we know of the modern world.  We each have access to the equivalent experiences of several, if not dozens, well travelled adventurers, so we cannot say "I know this random trivia about bears, therefore my character knows that fact about trolls".  I travelled about 800 miles this weekend, and spent a couple hours in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum this weekend.  How long do you think it would take a 1st level fighter to experience as much as I did?  It would have taken them about 5 weeks of travel just to cover the distance on foot, 2 1/2 weeks on a fast horse.   How long would it take for a the same 1st level fighter to research as much about a topic as you can in 1 hour with Google and Wikipedia?   Would they even survive the overland expedition to the nearest large city to even begin the research?Living where you do, can you honestly say you would know what a seal or giraffe even is had you never had access to school, TV, the Internet, books, or travel of more than 50-100 miles from home?</blockquote>

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