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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6877240" data-attributes="member: 42582">For reasons already discussed, that would break the game, because it would make a 2nd level spell as powerful as a 5th+ level one. In particular, it would give the PCs the benefit of access to genius-level knowledge although Eloelle's player only stuck a 5 into INT.Most of the time, in an epic level 4e game the information that villains might be wanting to extract is more dramatic than what some random person had for breakfast - though even then, the character may well have seen it as part of some vision of the future!The mechanical issue is that the game does not have DCs for History, Arcana etc checks higher than the mid-40s. So whatever question is posed, the player has a very good chance of rolling a successful check. The actual constraint on the player's knowledge of backstory is how many checks he declares in a given session. It's a practical constraint arising from the realities of action declarations at the table, not a rules constraint.If an NPC compels the PC to answer a question, though, on what basis can the player just say &quot;I don't know&quot; rather than make a check to find out - a check which will almost certainly succeed? The rules are not clear on this, and the narration that has grown up around this character doesn't help, because it deliberately establishes that his experiences and scholarship are virtually unlimited.I should add - I'm not at all worried about it as a practical issue at my table. I am pointing to it as something where the narrative and the mechanics around PC mental states, and access to information, and INT-type checks, can all come into a degree of collision. Just as is the case for Eloelle. I don't regard these sorts of narrations as house ruling, and so don't tend to regard the narrations that sort them out as house ruling either.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6877240, member: 42582"] For reasons already discussed, that would break the game, because it would make a 2nd level spell as powerful as a 5th+ level one. In particular, it would give the PCs the benefit of access to genius-level knowledge although Eloelle's player only stuck a 5 into INT. Most of the time, in an epic level 4e game the information that villains might be wanting to extract is more dramatic than what some random person had for breakfast - though even then, the character may well have seen it as part of some vision of the future! The mechanical issue is that the game does not have DCs for History, Arcana etc checks higher than the mid-40s. So whatever question is posed, the player has a very good chance of rolling a successful check. The actual constraint on the [I]player's[/I] knowledge of backstory is how many checks he declares in a given session. It's a practical constraint arising from the realities of action declarations at the table, not a rules constraint. If an NPC compels the PC to answer a question, though, on what basis can the player just say "I don't know" rather than make a check to find out - a check which will almost certainly succeed? The rules are not clear on this, and the narration that has grown up around this character doesn't help, because it deliberately establishes that his experiences and scholarship are virtually unlimited. I should add - I'm not at all worried about it as a practical issue at my table. I am pointing to it as something where the narrative and the mechanics around PC mental states, and access to information, and INT-type checks, can all come into a degree of collision. Just as is the case for Eloelle. I don't regard these sorts of narrations as house ruling, and so don't tend to regard the narrations that sort them out as house ruling either. [/QUOTE]

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