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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Petrosian" data-source="post: 814583" data-attributes="member: 1149">Some general thoughts...Do CHARACTERS have a universal knowledg of everything, some sort of omniscient knowledge?  nope. Does this have anything to do with whether or not they know how things work in the world they live in? Not really.In my world, the one where i am sitting at the keyboard, i know that vampires need stakes, that holy water affects them, that werewolves need silver, that rakshasas need blessed crossbows, and that you can ground out the frankenstien monster using his neckbolts.Not one single one of these did I get from DND. Not one of them exists to be a real life and death issue in my world.In school i was shown films about fire prevention, drop-n-roll, safe street crossing, first aid, and even sex ed with diseases and such and in some schools there are gun safety courses.In my campaign world, where BY THE BOOK, these things ('cept frankie) EXIST and are a threat to life and limb, churches sell holy waters AT COST because of the good they can do against various evils.In my campaign world, legends, folk tales, and rountine teaching about survival tips against creatures that exist and plague people for centuries and millenia are not uncommon.Why would there be legends about silver working against werewolves and not about magic when magic, including spells works just fine?A GM needs to make a point of letting his players understand what the differences are between their players knowledge and their character's knowledge FROM THE GET GO. The players will often make a routine assumption... that their characters know the way things work in the world. The Gm does IMO in a part of his "playing fair" a duty to describe the differences.******************Does this mean he can not pull a "altered monster" out... not at all. A troll showing up that is only stopped regenerating by cold is a great thing. It should stand out to the players and their characters as an unusual thing or even a sign of an evolution or a new threat. It should be considered a clue that something special is going on.It should not be thought of as "well Bob has probably just changed the rules on us again without telling."The latter is what you get when you make rules changes without telling the players. There is a huge difference between finding a group of wererats that are not affected by magic weapons, when other wererats are, and in finding that all those stories and legends that the Gm did not inform the players of... that magic beats silver... like you know, magic spells do... are not actually present in this world.Sitting down with a new group of players, telling them you are running a DND 3.0 game, and then actually running house rules you don't tell them about is IMO a bad GM moment.*****************I find things work much better when in play my players encounter something that doesn't work right and deduce that as a clue that something unusual is going on IN CHARACTER and react accordingly. That means i can be subtle and rely on them to figure out things.If instead i TEACH THEM in practice that it might just be that i have changed the game rules again... I lose a lot.************Of course i can use custom monsters. I can even at first glance have them appear similar to "regular monsters" and then have the differences come out in play. That is not a problem, although, like any technique, if overused loses its specialty.What i should not do is simply change the rules so that the "normal monster" is different and not tell the players that difference in their character's understanding.There is a dramatic and huge difference between those two things.YMMV and clearly does.</blockquote>

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