NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6424764" data-attributes="member: 29398">A few thoughts:1. The only time character knowledge can equal player knowledge is when the player is brand new to the game with a 1st-level character; always the most delightful of times.  After that, every now and then an argument breaks out as to whether the character doesn't know what the player does know.  My own preference is that character knowledge takes precedence, meaning players are expected to ignore what they-as-players know when running low-level characters meeting a particular monster for the first time.  I've also found that even changing just the names of common monsters both a) keeps the players guessing for a while, and b) adds greatly to the flavour of a specific campaign.2. Mid-combat strategizing can be a pain, though telling people that all this talking is causing them to skip their initiative often curtails it.  Worse to me is players trying to make meta-game suggestions.  One rule I and others have used now and then in the past to stop people making suggestions relating to things their characters couldn't possibly know about is that such a suggestion immediately bans the suggested action from happening.  Example: party is trying to sneak into a city. Joe's Thief has climbed over the city wall while the rest of the party hides outside the gate.  Behind the gate are two guards, one with an obvious set of keys hanging from her belt.  Thief can either try to sneak past the guards and quietly pick the gate lock, or sneak up and try to backstrike the guards, or try to pick-pocket the keys from the one guard, or wander off elsewhere and leave the party hanging for a while, or whatever.  If Joe decides to go for the pick-pocket idea (or just can't make up his mind what to do) and Steve - whose character has no idea what's become of the Thief after seeing it go over the wall - says player-to-player "No, you should pick the gate lock!  You'll never get those keys quietly!" then picking the gate lock becomes a banned action even if otherwise it would be the best plan.  It took a while, but this rule eventually stopped a few frequent offenders from doing this sort of thing; and now it's not really an issue very often at all.3. Casters can count squares and line up enemies all they like, in my game they still have to roll to hit the spot they're aiming at.*  It's usually pretty easy to get it close enough, but trick shots or blind shots aren't always easy at all; and anything requiring a roll to aim can always cause a fumble if the rolls are bad enough.* - I can't recommend this highly enough as a way of reining in casters a bitLan-"best spell fumble I ever saw was the wizard whose fireball went off inside the cloak of fire resistance he was wearing...what a mess"-efan</blockquote>

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