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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4565086" data-attributes="member: 54707">I didn't say all monsters should be mysterious Glaz, I said all monsters should be dangerous and unpredictable, as I was employing the term monster. (I mean as Sinecure pointed out, a sewer rat can be a monster for purposes of game classification, I'm talking about the point of what really constitutes being a monster).But both my observations and your observations can be true, and without being mutually exclusive. A monster can be both an unknown quantity, and quality, and he can know that about himself in relation to his own enemies. That is to say if a human knows a troll can only be killed by acid or fire then chances are the troll knows this about himself, as I said, and he will know that perhaps others know this about him as well. That's why I said this:And this:Which are other ways of saying that monsters also have no incentive to allow people to escape with good ideas about how to fight, damage, harm, or kill them. (Of course as I said, with my world setting that is not a real problem because monster designs are mostly unique, meaning there is only one Troll, one Hobgoblin, and so forth. And even if another Troll were created then it might appear just like the original troll, but it would have different and unique characteristics of both capabilities, and conduct. That is you could say, "That looks like the Troll I once killed" but in this case it might be practically invulnerable to fire, rather than susceptible to it. And it might be cunning and secretive, rather than fierce and directly aggressive.)But you also raise a very good point about gathering intelligence. Over time, because monsters are real in a world such as we are describing, more and more information would leak out about them. More and more data gathered. However if there were only one Orc, and that Orc operated in secret and in the shadows then it would be much harder to know anything real about it than if there were thousands, or ten of thousands of orcs that had been encountered throughout various stages of history, and in large numbers. So when fighting unique monsters intelligence is much, much harder to come by, and it is much, much more susceptible to being inaccurate and misleading, or at the very least incomplete. (Also if you're the only one of your kind then you have an incentive to remain in the shadows that the army of Orcs lacks.)Most such monster would operate in the dark, or underground, as would criminals, and neither monster nor criminal has any interest or incentive to allow leaked or compromising information out to the public at large. They would try to control the flow of information, or simply kill or block that flow altogether. Because the less the knight coming to hunt the Hobgoblin knows about the Hobgoblin then the more likely the Hobgoblin is to kill the knight before the knight even knows what happens. But even in a world full of monsters, few if any monsters have any incentive to tangle openly with most enemies unless they are sure they can destroy those enemies, or they are simply forced or tricked into fighting those enemies through no fault of their own. Orcs will not make a habit of raiding people they cannot kill, and if they can kill those people, then only a few survivors will be able to convey any real, accurate information. The survivors will be too busy trying to escape. A man is attacked by a Troll at night in ambush and killed, he leaves no information to transmit. A man is attacked by a Troll at night in ambush and barely escapes, how accurate will what he says actually be? Will he have had more important things to consider than observing, "he didn't seem interested in the rabbit I was roasting on the fire."So yes, absolutely, adventurers would know there are monsters, that they are dangerous, and could maybe gain some limited, or even on occasion very good intelleugcne about them. But they would probably not be privileged to detailed information like exactly how they can be killed, if they regenerate, exactly where they live, how much gold they have as treasure, what their Armor Class is, if they are immune to herbal poisons, etc. All of which they know now if the DM does nothing more than use the typical Monster Manual entry as a guide to writing monsters into his campaign or milieu. (Look at it from the monster's point of view. If a monster were real would he let detailed information about himself circulate freely, and if he suspected such information were already floating about freely then what would he do to correct a problem like that? If he's got any brains at all then he'd do everything he could to solve such a problem. His very existence relies upon the fact that his enemies cannot predict his behavior or know beforehand his exact attributes and capabilities. If you were a monster then how far would you go to save your own life? Disguise yourself? Wear different armor? Move around? Build traps and defenses? Set up hiding placates and retreats? Dig tunnels? Set up false identifies? Gather Intel on your own enemies? Set up alarms? Get better weapons? Try to make peace? Trick your enemies? Build mock-ups and fake models of yourself? Distribute false rumors and disinformation? All of these things? - If monsters are real then they have to act like they are real, not act like they are made of sterile numbers and paper statistics.)Let me use an modern analogy. Most everyone has seen a TV in the modern world. Most everyone can change the channel with a remote. Few people, coactively speaking know exactly how a television functions, how to improve reception, or could build a television. Televisions are well known. Being able to either explain how one operates, or to build one are very different matters (given time and research in the modern world this ignorance could be easily resolved, but not so easily in a world without internets and free information.)Now, in a fantasy world most people would probably have heard of a dragon, though very few seen one. Far fewer still would be one who could accurately describe one, or the properties of the dragon's real physical descript. Far fewer still those who had observed one carefully enough to know something of its general behavior. And extremely few people who could accurately describe how to kill or fight one. Even in a setting where dragons are numerous, unless they are often encountered, and very good and very public records made freely available to most everyone (unless there were good and easily accessible libraries, plenty of sages to consult, or a magical version of the internet available to every adventurer who decided he wanted to hang a dragon head above his hearth) then very, very few people, only those who had actually fought and killed a dragon, could tell ya how to most easily fight and kill a dragon and still survive the process. Without easily available information to grease the skids, assuming some fellas decide hunting dragons sounds like great fun, they are likely in for a real shock or at elates a very tough period of trial and error before they take any real trophies. In a paper game it might be as easy as knocking down 3000 hit points with a bum-rush and a fireball cannon. But if one assumes monsters are real, even in just game terms, in a world where monsters really had no incentive in being dissected and studied for sport, it would be a helluvah lot harder to know how to really kill one, or even where to find one, than it would be to just know they existed. Or put in military terms, no plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy. The enemy had plans of his own, and he's not interested in you making him fight your fight. He's fighting to kill, not fighting out of a sense of justice and fair play. He's a monster, not a gentleman dandy. So there's a real difference between the way a real monster would operate, and how a fantasy game might fantasize them behaving. As different as the difference between knowing there is such a thing as a television, and knowing how to build one.I wouldn't argue that real things wouldn't be known about monsters in a world in which they actually existed. But how much would really be known, by how many, and just how accurate would that information really be? Would you wanna bet your life that the local storyteller or the old tome you consulted told the gospel truth about something that could knock down city walls, or murder dozens in their sleep like a living shadow?I've seen some real human monsters in my time, and if other kinds of monsters are anything like that then they're not playing around. And they don't win at the games they actually bother to play by being straight down the middle, or up-front about their intentions.</blockquote>

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