Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8404451" data-attributes="member: 6779196">That’s reasonable. Personally, I don’t draw the line there on the basis that, just because the character doesn’t know something, doesn’t mean they couldn’t incidentally act in a way that someone who did know that thing would. Take the troll and fire example because it’s easy (and assume that for whatever reason, the character absolutely wouldn’t know about trolls being weak to fire). Not knowing trolls are weak to fire doesn’t actually prevent someone from attacking one with fire. You can argue that they “wouldn’t think to do that,” but the character might not be motivated by a desire to exploit the monster’s weakness in the first place. I can imagine all sorts of reasons you might try to kill a monster with fire, whether you know that will be more effective than usual or not. Therefore, any argument that the character “wouldn’t” do it has to rely on doubting the player’s word as to their character’s motivations, and relying on past behavior to establish precedent. And that’s just not the kind of game I want to be playing.Perhaps it would be better to say I do draw a line somewhere: at telling the player their reasoning for their character’s actions is invalid. “Your character wouldn’t” is a hard line at my table. No one gets to tell a player what their character would or wouldn’t do but the player themselves.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 8404451, member: 6779196"] That’s reasonable. Personally, I don’t draw the line there on the basis that, just because the character doesn’t know something, doesn’t mean they couldn’t incidentally act in a way that someone who did know that thing would. Take the troll and fire example because it’s easy (and assume that for whatever reason, the character absolutely wouldn’t know about trolls being weak to fire). Not knowing trolls are weak to fire doesn’t actually prevent someone from attacking one with fire. You can argue that they “wouldn’t think to do that,” but the character might not be motivated by a desire to exploit the monster’s weakness in the first place. I can imagine all sorts of reasons you might try to kill a monster with fire, whether you know that will be more effective than usual or not. Therefore, any argument that the character “wouldn’t” do it has to rely on doubting the player’s word as to their character’s motivations, and relying on past behavior to establish precedent. And that’s just not the kind of game I want to be playing. Perhaps it would be better to say I do draw a line somewhere: at telling the player their reasoning for their character’s actions is invalid. “Your character wouldn’t” is a hard line at my table. No one gets to tell a player what their character would or wouldn’t do but the player themselves. [/QUOTE]

Verification