the Jester
Legend
Whoah, hold on!
I established that a literate person CAN know about things they haven't personally seen. I didn't say anything about specific probabilities.
Sure, the percentage of people reading this thread who could recognize a camel might exceed 95%, because, as you say, we're literate members of a civilization with mass media. The probability of the elven scholar having seen a picture of a camel might be much lower, maybe as low as 5%. But it isn't *flatly impossible*, under appropriate circumstances, to recognize something one haven't personally seen.
True- and I've said that, if the monster (or whatever) is something local to the pc's home area or otherwise is something where there is a justification for them to know, then I'll usually just tell them. "You recognize these things as gnolls."
I am, at the moment, discussing the difference between "zero, no roll possible" and "nonzero, there is SOME chance", rather than the differences between 5%, 50% and 95%.
Sure. And clearly this is a matter of taste. I'm more and more aware that I'm solidly against player empowerment in a lot of ways. I know that this makes me, in some eyes, a terrible meanie of a DM who is constantly punishing the players for whatever, but actually, in play, it turns out that my players really, really dig it- both my old players and the new guys who've barely started with me.
As I've said upthread, this is really a playstyle issue, as so many things are. Personally I feel that the game is more fun with more mystery in more places. I don't do the easy identification of magic items on a short rest, either, and I firmly believe that it improves the game for me, based on the style of game I want to run.
Also, "literate" already means we're NOT talking about a typical person in a typical D&D setting, assuming that 90% of humanity in a low-tech setting are illiterate farmers.
This is a complete tangent, but I also really preferred it when the assumption was NOT that all pcs were automatically literate. Anyone else remember having to invest skill points (or rather, nonweapon proficiencies) in Read/Write?