Not quite arguing, but not far off.

[soulcat]

Discussing this is the only answer. I would also make it a house rule (if you have a hourse rule document I would include this with it) that the novels are not necessarily canon in your version of FR.

I've done that in my games both because it helps me run the campaign the way I want... plus it saves my players from reading badly written books. Just kidding; some of the recent ones have been quite OK.

I actually enjoyed 90% of the FR books. That is where a lot of the flavour for my campaign comes from, before I started the campaign I listed 6-7 books that players could read if the wanted to have some background knowledge of the area, and then in their character histories I tried to give them a feel for what they could expect to know.

Not all of the players read the books (although over half the group has now), and I probably wasn't clear enough on Player knowledge vs character knowledge, but all the other players tend to ask first without assuming, and to be honest he does sometimes as well, he just has a habit of assuming things are yes' when they are definite no's.

 

[Eremite]

I should clarify that my real complaint with the novels is not so much that they are badly written (as I mentioned, some of the recent ones have been OK) but that interesting plot hooks get resolved in novels and not in my game.

However, that's not meant to be a hijack of this thread.

I think the easiest solution would be to allow the players to think whatever they like based on their out-of-game reading but you should start throwing in some changes so that they go, "Hey, that's not the way I remember it!" That will allow you to explain that they don't have perfect recall and some things that their characters have learnt/heard are wrong. You know, just like real life!