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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7812185" data-attributes="member: 16814">That's... not what temporary suspension of disbelief is.  Temporary suspension of disbelief is what lets you pretend that a troll exists in the first place.  It's not you deciding to ignore things you know, it's pretending things that you know don't or can't exist do, for a short time, to enjoy the fiction.  I guarantee you that I can present classic tropes without requiring my players to pretend they don't know things.  This is a bogus claim -- there are other ways.  I say it's lazy DMing because you're just relying on the monster's gimmick being hidden, or forcing players to pretend it's hidden, to create the tension in the scene.  I'm saying you should value your players a bit more and do a tad more work.  It's not much harder at all:If you want a fun encounter where players can know about trolls, then set it underwater.  Or, have the troll know about itself, and cover itself in armor of wet leaves and mud so that it's immune to fire for X damage.  This both prevents requiring players to have to pretend to be dumb, and take actions they know will just harm their characters, all to provide the DM the vicarious thrill of using the monster's gimmick.Oh, goodness -- this is what every DM is required to do whether they require players to pretend ignorance of monster gimmicks or if they don't.  You can't claim credit for more work for just doing the basic parts of the job.You're putting the onus of making the encounter work on the players.   You're doing this by using a gimmick to make the encounter interesting but requiring the players to pretend they don't know the gimmick so you can use it again.  That's lazy.  The onus of making the encounter work is on the DM.  Do the work.  A good start would be to ask yourself, with any encounter, "if I hand the players this statblock, is this encounter still fun?"  If the answer is no, you have more work to do.</blockquote>

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