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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 6995002" data-attributes="member: 97077">It's hard-won by the players. They earned it in my view and, just like in any other game, I think they should be free to use it, if they so choose. It's not for me to tell them they can't.I don't think there's any particular reason to believe a character "should" know less than the "loremaster." It's very easy to imagine, for me at least, why someone might know more about a particular subject that this learned scholar. And, again, if you want to make sure the player of the loremaster gets to dominate that particular niche, you can just change the monsters instead of asking or demanding players change how they play. That is a way more reliable strategy in my view then relying on others to adhere to a pretty arbitrary standard of what a given character knows.I don't think however much work I put into my game justifies asking the players to do that. That seems like a rather entitled attitude to have and I just can't share it. But it's very enlightening as it could well be the root cause for why it appears to stick in your craw to have to change your monsters. "Why should I have to do that on top of all the other 'work' I'm doing for these ingrates?" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I've given examples about how easy it is to justify how a character knows something. It might even be easier than justifying why they don't since we're talking about a fictional world and fictional characters.Further, if you really must keep the monsters the same (you don't, but whatever), then here's another option: Make having the knowledge be useful, but implementing strategies based on it hard, costly, complicated, or dangerous. Sure, go ahead and use fire on those trolls - but their lair is in a swamp filled with pockets of explosive gas. Strike that match at your own risk. It isn't about narrative control. It's about a player declaring actions for his or her character and nothing more which is their only role in the game. You appear to want to say certain actions are simply invalid because a character couldn't possibly attempt it due to a lack of knowledge established by some arbitrary standard. I don't agree with that and whatever bad outcomes you think may come from allowing them to do as they wish is easily mitigated with a couple of techniques that I've mentioned in this post.</blockquote>

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