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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8061331" data-attributes="member: 6785785">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?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?"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 [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] I think.....metagaming is really a problem that happens at the DM level. 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?</blockquote>

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