D&D 5E player knowlege vs character knowlege (spoiler)

[Guest 6801328]

That is for the GM to decide like any other setting detail.

Sure go for it. You could even apply it to other things too, Just let players decide facts about the setting too, make it more collaborative world creation. Or just don't even have GM, just make it a group effort. And this is not a joke, I routinely do this in freeform RP that has not GM, I just don't want to do it in D&D and I don't think the designers meant that either.

No. It is perfectly clear that the GM is supposed to set up and adjudicate the facts about the setting. Not that what WotC thinks would affect how I run my games.

One big difference here is that you don't draw a line between character thoughts and game facts...to you those are all just facts under the purview of the DM...but you do draw a line between "stuff characters would know" and "stuff characters would not know."

My experience at the table is that your line is fuzzy and arbitrary, and players will not know in any given circumstance where that line is, so they have to constantly pop up into the metagame ("do I know X?") to find out.* But my line...the line between character thoughts and game facts...is perfectly distinct and you never have to ask for adjudication, and the game stays in-game. Again, that's just my experience.

Two different ways of playing. To each his/her own, I guess.

*Asking what our characters know is so common, because of decades of tradition, that we may not even think of it as popping out into the metagame. But it is.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You have also made it clear that you don't really get the problem here. The problem here is that the character may be thinking and acting on something that is unknowable to the character and is doing so because the player is interjecting something they know into the situation because they encountered the information elsewhere. At that point, it doesn't matter that the character only "thinks" it rather than it being the truth as established by the DM if the DM was also relying on the published material. The difference between thinking and knowing is immaterial.

So what is to be done?

The ideal outcome of a situation like this, I think, is for the player to recognize it, maybe outwardly acknowledge that they know something about it from out of game, and declare that their PC will act on what they believe they would reasonably know given their background and skills, clarifying that extent with the DM if unsure.

No, we all (@iserith, myself, @Elfcrusher, @Charlaquin) get it. We all played that way. We decided to not to. This isn't a lack of understanding, it's a thorough understanding followed by a rejection.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I am really not terribly familiar with FR, so I actually have no clue how common knowledge Valindra being a lich is. Like is she a famous person and famous for being a lich? Or is her being a lich some sort of secret that only very few people know? In any case, the player probably should have just said to the GM: 'Does that name ring any bells, can I roll history or something?'

Well, in the case of the DM not knowing such a detail, which I think was largely the case in the OP....they can simply decide how famous she may be. Same as if it was any other NPC.

And while I have no problem at all if the player did have the presence of mind to not blurt that out, but instead to ask if they might know of the NPC in some way...I just don't see it as necessary. There's nothing about the adventure that relies on the PCs knowing or not knowing who Valindra may actually be.

What if the situation in the OP was a bit different, and a DM just says "Valindra has an infamous reputation along the sword coast as being a power hungry schemer, and many even claim she's undead." Would this be acceptable?

Anything is 'possible' in fiction so that is a too vague. But whether the character has heard of this lich is a fact about the world, thus ultimately for the GM to decide. And players are supposed to play their characters as consistent people in the setting and just deciding out of the blue to think that a random person is a lich with no clue or knowledge is not that. (Unless this is something related to the character's established personality. They of course can be paranoid and think every person they meet is some sort of monster in disguise, but this was not the case here.)

This implies to me that what you're most concerned with is maintaining the DM's authority when it comes to establishing fictional elements. It's not so much about the verisimilitude of the PC knowing something like this.....we could craft any number of fictional reasons that they may have learned of something like this at some point.

So, if that's the case.....then I think the questions become "why does the DM need to have such authority?" and "can such authority be shared a bit with the players?"

Looking at the Forgotten Realms fandom wiki, there are a number of ways a PC could potentially know who she is - but the knowledge is pretty specialized considering her membership in secretive organizations and adventures in weird places, and some of which were a century ago. But the chances of her being known to players is relatively high, having appeared in 3 computer games and something like 5 novels as well as a comic book - though apparently not as a lich in all of those outings.

But ultimately, it's a bit like drawing a line between 3rd person omniscience and 1st person perspective. The authors offer up a certain amount of omniscience in their books. But not every character is privy to it. And that's why I think the player should have pulled the DM aside when they realized they recognized the NPC to hash out what they might or might not actually know.

Sure, it might be specialized knowledge in that the average person doesn't know she's affiliated with evil organizations and that she's a lich. But certainly some folks know those things, and certainly those folks might talk to other folks.....and so on.

This specific example doesn't seem incredibly likely to come up all that often, right? Not unless the DM decides to actively drop all kinds of existing FR NPCs into their campaign....and if that's the case, then I would think they're actively promoting sharing player and character knowledge of these characters, or else they're setting up a potentially frustrating play experience. As mentioned earlier by @Ovinomancer I think.....metagaming is really a problem that happens at the DM level.

The problem here is that the character may be thinking and acting on something that is unknowable to the character and is doing so because the player is interjecting something they know into the situation because they encountered the information elsewhere.

I know this bit was not directed at me....but how can we say what may or may not be unknowable to a PC? I mean, there are going to be some very easy examples we can think of in both categories......but aside from those obvious things, there are going to be a whole slew of things that we wouldn't know for certain if the PC would, could, or should know.

How do we determine that? Who gets to decide? Why?

 

[Guest 6801328]

No, we all (@iserith, myself, @Elfcrusher, @Charlaquin) get it. We all played that way. We decided to not to. This isn't a lack of understanding, it's a thorough understanding followed by a rejection.

Agreed. On the contrary, the thing that is not being "gotten" here is that, based on the comment you are responding to, the poster doesn't seem to grasp what we are trying to explain.

 

[Guest 6801328]

This implies to me that what you're most concerned with is maintaining the DM's authority...

Really I think this pretty much sums it all up.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What, then, is it the player's authority to decide? This phrasing, that the GM has ultimate authority to determine what a PC knows, places a huge amount of things under the GM's authority in regards to playing the PC. Essentially, the player is in a position where anything they declare can be overridden by the GM, not as a failed attempt, but as a possibility. If I cannot decide that my PC think that that NPC is a lich, for whatever reason, without GM permission (explicit of implicit), then I don't have much control over my PC at all.

The reality is that whether or not the GM decides they need to use this authority is entirely dependent on if the PC asserts a fact that the GM wants to be a secret. Example -- the OP situation is only a problem because the GM wants to keep the lichyness of the NPC a secret. If they don't care, it's not a problem. If the NPC isn't a lich, it's not a problem. To expand that last, many GM's concerned about "metagaming" wouldn't bat an eye at a PC asserting things not true, because that's fun. It's only when the thing asserted is what the GM wants to be a secret that it becomes "metagaming." This means that "metagaming" only exists when the GM is using that same "metagaming" to keep secrets. No secret? No "metagaming."

Thus, "metagaming" is a problem created by GMs and confused with being necessary for proper play. It's only necessary to protect GM secrets -- which is a trivially easy task to avoid as a GM by just not hinging your scene design on secrets that can be easily "metagamed." Or at all. Evidence abounds that people that do not care about metagaming have robust, deep, and immersive games, largely because they just steer around the pothole of "metagaming" instead of driving right over it and insisting everyone pretend there wasn't a bump.

No, it is not about secrets alone as any good secret is an actual secret to the players as well. It is simply adjudication what is common knowledge, what is not and what might perhaps require knowledge roll and the players attempting to portray believable characters in the setting. This is really not hard.

 

[Hriston]

Sure. But certainly it is an example to illustrate the general principle and does not only apply to situations about positioning when trying to attack an orc?

I agree with @iserith that the example illustrates the DM's role as mediator between the players and the rules, so the rules-clarification is that the player's character lacks the movement to get to the orc and attack on the same turn. There is no analogous clarification a DM can make about a player's declaration about what their PC thinks because, according to the rules, the player determines that. It's called roleplaying.

Right. Here it merely seems that there was some confusion about what the original information provided exactly entailed and the confusion was resolved. This is perfectly normal. The player didn't just read from the sourcebook that such a herb exists and decide on their own that their character now knows about it.

Not exactly. The confusion came from me and the player imagining different things about what the character thought he knew. When I realized that my idea didn't agree with the player's, I resolved the confusion by deferring to the player's idea of what their character thinks because that's the player's job, not mine.

But certainly it is the GMs job to provide information about the setting and that information also entails what the people in the setting (i.e. the characters) can know? And it is the job of the player to attempt to portray a fictional person living in this setting to best of their ability, and this entails not to use the players knowledge of the setting secrets or of modern engineering that the character in the setting would not have access to?

Common knowledge about setting is part of my description of the environment, but I don't limit the PCs to knowing only what I tell them. That would require me to spend a ridiculous amount of game time exhaustively going over everything a person in the setting could possibly know, and not even I know that imaginary stuff, so it's impossible and not desirable anyways.

I don't think the word portray really captures the player's job very well because it suggests, to me, that the character is something fixed and defined externally to what we see of it in the game. I would say rather that it's the player's job to create the character both before and during play (mostly during because that's where it's fulfilling its purpose).

And I don't agree with the importance you seem to place on the origin of the information on which a player bases their roleplaying decisions. Players have many real-world concerns that influence how they make decisions for their characters. As long as it contributes to the goals of the table, I don't see that as a problem.

 

[iserith]

Because it really isn't such a meaningful distinction. The player is supposed to portray a believable character in the the fictional setting and thus what they think is informed by what they know. It is not believable for such a character to think things they possibly could not know. Like a player could decide that their character in a game set in the 14th century France constantly quotes modern movies and makes other pop culture references and 'thinks' about future events the player knows about, but that would not be portraying a believable character in such a setting.

A player is supposed to portray a character, but I don't think there's any rules support that suggests there's an onus on a player to portray a believable one, what doing so would entail, or how that might be judged. There's quite a bit of advice on how to create the character and what certain aspects of the character like ability scores, background, class, and race might mean in terms of portrayal, but that's it so far as I can tell.

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable table rule for some groups though. Other groups might be perfectly fine with a Deadpool-like character in the party (or even more than one).

 

[Maxperson]

Recalling lore is explicitly an ability check in 5e. Players cannot decide to just succeed at ability checks. What a player can do is try to present things in a way to minimize the DM's likelihood of calling for a roll or saying no, but it's not up to the player to say yes to the ability check. The DM is the one who gets to say if the outcome is in doubt or not.

A player simply deciding that he know she is a Lich(success at the intelligence check) is the same as a player simply deciding that his PC jumps 5 feet farther than his strength score(success at the strength check).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

One big difference here is that you don't draw a line between character thoughts and game facts...to you those are all just facts under the purview of the DM...but you do draw a line between "stuff characters would know" and "stuff characters would not know."

There are many kind of thoughts. Not all or even most thought are really about knowledge even though that's what we are focusing on in this thread. The GM decides what information the characters have access to, the players decide what they do with that information.

My experience at the table is that your line is fuzzy and arbitrary, and players will not know in any given circumstance where that line is, so they have to constantly pop up into the metagame ("do I know X?") to find out.* But my line...the line between character thoughts and game facts...is perfectly distinct and you never have to ask for adjudication, and the game stays in-game. Again, that's just my experience.

Two different ways of playing. To each his/her own, I guess.

*Asking what our characters know is so common, because of decades of tradition, that we may not even think of it as popping out into the metagame. But it is.

The players need to confirm all sort of thing and the GM gives information about all sort of things. How tall is the wall, where is the celestial dire badger how much the stack of enchanted carrots cost or how the mayor looks. This literally is no different. Why don't you just let players to decide those things as well?