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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4981039" data-attributes="member: 58197">Whoa, hold on. Nobody's advocating that "the rest of the game follow along." I don't see anybody claiming that the barbarian should randomly get a huge bonus to his social skill checks - or that the effects of those skill checks should be minimized or ignored.How I play my character is my business, how the other players play their characters is theirs, and how the rest of the world reacts to us is the DM's. I have no more business telling the DM how to have his NPCs react to me than the DM has telling me how to play my character.Sure. Why wouldn't I be? He's still gonna fail his Endurance checks after getting clawed up by a wererat or exposed to the plague. The player doesn't have to portray his low Constitution; the rules portray it for him. I believe mental stats should be handled the same way.As DM I have better things to do than police the players to be sure they're toeing some arbitrary roleplaying line. If your character has Int 5 and talks like a doctoral student giving a dissertation - you know what? I don't care. Knock yourself out. Of course, you'll fail most of your knowledge checks and be comically wrong about stuff.The issue of out-of-character knowledge (monster stats, adventure plots, et cetera) is a bit different, because that's the player using information that the player is not strictly speaking supposed to have - like peeking at your opponent's hand in a poker game. Players have the choice to not read that information. If they choose to read it (because they DM themselves, or simply like reading sourcebooks), then I do expect them to segregate in-character from out-of-character knowledge.But even there, I'm not going to get too fussed about it. Because if you start quoting the Monster Manual in my game and relying on the data therein, you do so at your own risk. I am well within my rights as DM to change monster stats and abilities without telling you, as long as it's not inconsistent with what your characters legitimately know. In fact, I do so routinely; half my monsters are homebrewed from scratch, and half of the rest are tweaked extensively. Good luck guessing which is which.</blockquote>

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