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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1888724" data-attributes="member: 3146">I don't know about trolls and most fiction. Trolls (variously interpreted) share a fair number of defined characteristics in the norse tales and those don't include abject surrender but rather generally waiting for a hero. On the other hand, D&D trolls are a good deal more common than mythology trolls. A lot of legendary trolls get the role of the mythical Other and aren't required to have an ecology. D&D trolls, on the other hand, may live in a swamp and raid periodically like a neighboring tribe of orcs would.I'm not assuming that everything written in the books is an everyday occurence in the world, but I am trying to get into the workings of the assumed world of the D&D core rules--a world where there are typically X encounters a month in the wilderness and a hamlet typically has y people with a gp limit of z and NPCs of levels xy-az in classes Bard-Wizard. If you alter that assumed world dramatically--like saying that demons are only summonable once every thousand years on the night of the stellar conjunction, that departs a long way from the core rules where (evil) clerics can summon them with the planar ally spells, wizards with Planar binding spells, and both (for very limited purposes) with Summon Monster spells. I can definitely agree that, in that situation, PCs, shouldn't have the normal knowledge of such things (which is why, if you look closely, my original examples were mostly from Greyhawk which is more or less a core D&D world). In fact, Knowledge: Planes might not even exist (depending upon what planes are known and what creatures--if any--can be summoned). On the other hand, if demons are really so rare, PCs probably shouldn't be encountering them to begin with.In any event, I'm not proposing that, even in a normal D&D world, PCs know "everything in the monster manual from first level" or that players should "only focus on the numbers." (Heck, I've got a pretty good memory, but I don't know everything in the monster manual and I use it to write mods on a regular basis. What I am suggesting is that players have a lot of background knowledge and "common" sense that need not be reflected in knowledge ranks. For instance, it shouldn't take a knowledge rank to know that evil outsiders (things that look like demons--you know, horns and bat wings) are vulnerable to holy water and holy weapons. That's a general principle that will sometimes lead a character wrong but will usually lead them rightly. And that's the kind of thing PCs should know whether or not they have knowledge ranks.</blockquote>

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