The situation determines it. If someone does something that will reveal the information, I can't stop it. It has already been done. It's not about what I want or any kind of timing of mine.
The situation doesn’t determine it. Someone has to actually decide when to share information. That person may base it on what they believe the situation demands… but that doesn’t mean there’s not a person deciding.
And as this thread has shown, there’s clearly a pretty significant gap in opinion about when something would become apparent.
Hence, my tendency to not withhold relevant details without a strong reason.
I'm pretty sure it was you who argued to me that numbers were more important than description. I've shown that to be untrue. You can couple them, but without description the numbers are not very useful.
I said that were more precise.
Whether numbers + description is > than description is subjective.
It’s really not. It’s description… plus numbers. It’s literally more information.
For a lot of us adding in those numbers detracts from the scene and detract from a person's ability to make a choice, because some people will hyper focus on numbers.
I think that the number of people for whom the numbers are a problem would pale in comparison to the number of people for whom a phrase like “pretty difficult” would be a problem.
Yes, but this is apples and oranges. It's apples, because the PC isn't making any attempt to know those things. It's purely player only. Oranges are the folks here arguing that you can look at an ogre and instantly see AC, HP, Move, Dex bonus, magical bonuses and more. Or in the case of one fellow, you can do it because you can reach out and touch a monitor.
The numbers are for players only. The characters see their world. The players get the numbers that represent that world.
Let me ask you this… if you have two fighters and they both use longswords, and one has a +8 to hit with it, and the other has a +10 to hit… do the characters know which of them is a better swordsman?
I mean, the characters don’t know the numbers, right?
That's untrue. It's a troll which I said would be very strong on first glance. Trolls are visibly strong. The two abilities, regeneration and keen smell would likely not be apparent on first glance, but perhaps the scenting ability would be revealed if it couldn't see the PCs, but they could see it and it was smelling them.
I'm not arbitrarily choosing to keep things hidden. The players would only get in word information that their PCs would have, and so that's what I give them.
Special abilities like that are a little different, I’d say. But I would also say that you are arbitrarily choosing to keep them hidden. You can indeed have the troll sniffing at the air, cueing the players about its ability. You can have the troll biting off its own fingers and watching them regrow out of boredom, or some weird inhuman habit. What is “obvious” or not is up to you as a GM. You choose what to share and what to not share.
Now, I’m not saying you have to share everything about an opponent. My approach is if it’s generally observable, I don’t quibble about it and just share it.
I already give them far more than enough to do that. Numbers and monster abilities simply aren't needed for that.
What I said was clear to anyone who understands that realism is on a scale. I'll repeat it with arbitrary numbers to illustrate exactly what I said. I said walls were realism. I said bricks were realism. I said that flies were realism. If walls give us realism of 4, making it a brick wall gives us a realism of 5, and adding in flies gives us a realism score of 6, removing flies does not drop realism to 0 like was implies in the post I responded to. We still have a realism score of 5.
This means that a brick wall with flies on it is more realistic than a brick wall with no flies on it.
Which is just not true. There are plenty of brick walls without flies on them in the real world. Neither of these two things is more realistic than the other.
Which is why your point is unclear.
Having said that, though, I won’t request that you clarify any further. My head hurts.