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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7797675" data-attributes="member: 29398">"... as you imagine you or that other person would... " - seriously? You're not playing yourself in the game (with rare exceptions where a game specifically expects you to play as real-world you), you're playing "that other person". And so, a further clause needs to be added to your definition of role-playing: "...given such knowledge and information as that person would have available."Perhaps, but I posit that said role-playing has by that point lost some or all of its integrity.Most (or nearly all?) of the time, using knowledge of 'extra' information known only to the player but not the PC gives the PC an in-fiction advantage it wouldn't otherwise have.  To me this trends toward cheating.By the same token, it's also very much the case that DMs have to carefully self-police in how they run their NPCs; as the DM always knows tons of stuff the NPC would not.I agree; in fact that was kind of my point.  I was responding to a post suggesting the reason for any check be told to the players before the check was called for, and gave an example of how this would quicky fall apart.Better yet, ask for the stealth check anyway whether there's observers there or not...in this case, as the character is trying to move through a crowd, the check might also inform whether the PC somehow caught the attention of a random passer-by - e.g. the PC is trying her best to be stealthy and some little kid yells out "Hey - why is that person acting so sneaky?!"It breaks character the moment they do something they wouldn't have done otherwise, or change what they'd already committed to doing.Example: party says they're going to sneak down a passage past several open doors.  Not until the 4th door do you call for a check (you-as-DM already knew the first three held no threat); and in response, before rolling, someone says "We stop here and rearrange our marching order into battle formation".Now you-as-DM have given yourself a headache.  Do you ban them from changing their order based on their prior commitment to sneaking the length of the hall?  Do you let the order change happen and thus set a precedent that such metagaming is allowed?Wouldn't it have been better to call for the stealth check at the first door, even though there was no threat there?  The characters (in theory) wouldn't know which doors held threats and which did not, so why not determine their SOP at the first opportunity?They can still interact with the game, only that interaction is going to be based on less-than-perfect knowledge - and this is quite realistic, in that their PCs wouldn't have perfect knowledge either. There's always something to interact with, only sometimes that thing is just a shadow.This was an issue I had with many of the battlemaps included with 4e modules: very pretty, nice art, and so on; but they always showed rooms and areas the PCs had no way of being able to view yet.  Bloody annoying.</blockquote>

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