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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rackhir" data-source="post: 4456494" data-attributes="member: 149">Ah the old question of Player vs Character knowledge.Sounds like you're one of the DMs who wants to make the world as mysterious and unknown as possible. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that's not always compatible with players who have been around for a while (and thus basically know all the monsters) and don't like having to "play dumb" because you think their characters shouldn't know something about a monster.The biggest problem I have with the "ignorant" characters approach to things is that there is a very good argument to be made for the characters actually being more likely to know things than the players, even at low levels. We're talking about people who have made the decision to go out and risk their lives poking around in the dark places of the world. It only makes sense that they would study up and pay attention to information about the more exotic dangers.If you are dealing with a fairly "standard" D&D world, these creatures have pretty much all been around since the beginning and generations of heroes have battled pretty much everything under the sun. So while everyone might not know everything, stuff like needing silver/magic weapons to penetrate the DR on were creatures should be pretty commonly known.If it really does bother you that much, the advice about changing descriptions and mixing up some of the features is the best approach. There's an RPG called Champions that does superheroes and rather than have powers like "fireball", "lightning bolt", "Disintegrate" or "Flame Strike", it has "Energy Blast" that you can define as almost any type of attack that you like and put modifiers on for other various effects/characteristics. Which is a good example of how you can recycle the same mechanics with a different descriptions to completely baffle players. Even just a handful of creatures that don't conform exactly to the MM description, can raise enough doubt and uncertainty that even when they do run into a MM standard monster, they'll treat it with the kind of caution and uncertainty that you seem to be looking for.One other word of warning, if you are getting that sort of reaction from players. You might want to consider carefully your approach to how you try to make things "mysterious" and "surprising". There was a DM for one campaign I was in, who tried to make our first encounter with a zombie feel like a sequence out of a horror novel and it fell flat on it's face (didn't help that it dropped from like two hits from the barb). RPGs are not novels and the same narrative techniques aren't necessarily going to work.There was a recent thread that also referenced a couple of older threads on horror in a campaign. They would be a good source for other ideas, since really what you have to do is get your players to feel those emotions.</blockquote>

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