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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swarmkeeper" data-source="post: 8340753" data-attributes="member: 6921763">Very much this.  The players, through their PCs, should engage with the game world to verify their assumptions.  Blindly acting on player knowledge can be costly to the PCs!  In this way, the DM does not need to ever police the "player-character" separation - and especially needn't ever utter the words "that's not something your character would do".On that note, in the 5e PHB, roleplaying is defined as "a player determining how [their] character thinks, acts, and talks."  Those things are squarely the player's responsibility.  The DM, meanwhile, has enough on their plate with describing the environment and running NPCs and monsters - they don't also need to tell the players how to play their characters.IMO, we can also draw a fine distinction between what a character thinks and what a character knows.  The former can be anything the player wants and can be justified with any story the player likes.  The latter may or may not line up with the game world, however, in which case we are back to players needing to verify certain ideas in the game world via their PCs before leaping to conclusions that lead to sad trombone noises.  And that, I feel, addresses the OP since, yeah, sometimes the players can successfully substitute their own reality if something a player deems the PC knows lines up with the DM's general conception of the world, even though the DM didn't come up with said idea previously.</blockquote>

Verification