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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6994080" data-attributes="member: 6787650">(1) If it turns out to be something other than a Rakshasa, I'd laugh and laugh.(2) If it's a Rakshasa, and I haven't altered it for this campaign, I'd be fine with it. As a player I like to roleplay stuff, sometimes even being ignorant of things that I know better as a player--but that's only because I find getting into someone else's head fun. If the player decides that his PC's beliefs about the world are identical to the players' beliefs about the world, fine, that's still a fun game.(3) I do alter a lot of monsters on a per-campaign basis. Sometimes trolls turn to stone in sunlight, and in other campaigns they don't. In some campaigns vampires can enter dwellings uninvited but must obey anyone who knows their true name. In some campaigns, Rakshasas are mighty spellcasters, and in others they have strictly MM stats except they can also eat your dreams and modify your memories over time. Sometimes, Nagas and Couatls are all evil creatures allied with the drow and the neogi, and sometimes orcs and goblins are (arguably) the good guys and the elves are semi-bad guys (or at least no better than the orcs--more like Germany vs. Britain). Sometimes black puddings are delicious treats when dead... and sometimes they aren't, and they dissolve your stomach from the inside out.If a player wants to know a monster's actual stats/goals/vulnerabilities/habits, I will sometimes make secret checks for each PC and pass out information based on the check results to each PC... which sometimes means that PCs have conflicting beliefs about monster stats. One guy thinks vampires are an overhyped pushover because his grandmother told him so, and the other PC swears up and down that they are death incarnate. You can sort of guess who might be right by looking at whether the high-proficiency PCs agree with each other, but you can't ever really know for sure how vampires work in this campaign until you meet one.Ultimately I don't think it's a big deal if people who live in a big, complex, deadly D&D world know as much about the folklore of their world as I know about Greek mythology. Because that's all it is, folklore, unless and until I the DM give it my blessing by actually using that folklore as the actual stats in my game.</blockquote>

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