Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7589460" data-attributes="member: 97077">I'm sorry, it does not. We can leave it there if that's alright. It didn't seem like a major point anyway. Please feel free to dredge it up again if we find the thread.To me it's kind of like playing Monopoly and a player in that game refusing to roll the dice or pay rent when they land on the property belonging to another player. I'm sorry, but you have to roll the dice and pay rent when the rules say you have to do that. Otherwise, you're effectively refusing to play the game. Sure, I can reach over and roll the dice for you and move your token around the board and sort through your cash and pay rent when you need to. But why are you even here?Same for describing what you want to do as a player in D&D 5e. If you can't even do that, why are you here?Yeah, I dunno, obvious stuff should just be described by the DM in my view. Many DMs hide information like it's critical to the play experience when it frequently just hurts it. The usual shtick is to gate it behind a roll, even if the information is critical to moving the plot forward. Stupid, in my view. Why put the game's forward momentum at stake? (This isn't an endorsement of event-based or plot-based adventures which I find problematic in D&D 5e, mind you.)That's the DM's problem in my view and why "metagaming" is the DM's fault almost all of the time. If they want not knowing something to be part of the difficulty of the challenge, he or she needs to do that without demanding the player act as if they don't know something they do know.An ability check is not a task. It's a mechanic used to resolve the outcome of a task, when the outcome is uncertain and there's a meaningful consequence of failure. "Does my character know what a Black Pudding is?" is not a task either, and likely to get an answer like "I don't know, does he/she?" in my game. Contrast with "I draw upon my experience as a sage to recall what I may know about black puddings, having read about such things in the world's greatest libraries." Now we're getting somewhere. The DM can decide, based on that description, whether the character succeeds automatically, fails automatically, or whether an ability check is called for. An added benefit is that in some cases we learn something interesting about the character's background.It's certainly a good idea to tell a DM that you know a lot of stuff about the campaign, adventure, etc., but I don't think it's a good policy to have players act as if they don't know a thing. The DM can change that easily enough if the difficulty of the challenge will be greatly impacted by a player's knowledge.</blockquote>

Verification