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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 7609060" data-attributes="member: 6801228">*sigh*You know, I know why we keep going in this circle. Because you could care less about players using out-of-character knowledge, seemingly in any form. But this is also why a lot of people see Intelligence as a dump stat, because two of the biggest uses for Intelligence are Investigation and knowledge checks. Oh sorry, Intelligence checks using proficiency with the intent to recall lore. But, if players get to determine that they already know the lore, then there is no need for those checks. If they just tell you they know something, then that is what they know. The only check upon that is that they might be wrong out of the game because you as the DM changed something. In which case, why do we even bother to have an Intelligence stat and the skills for recalling various types of lore. It seems meaningless under this style. Except what counts as a "meaningful consequence"? Not knowing something obviously isn't meaningful enough, taking a lot of time is probably not meaningful enough especially if players don't take these checks while under a time pressure or in dangerous territory. You have to actively work to make things worse for the players in response to them attempting things, just to allow them to make checks, or they auto-succeed on trying anything. Sure, "the players just succeed" sounds really easy on paper, but it opens things to abuse that I don't want to deal with, and makes failing a roll dangerous enough that my players might not end up attempting interesting things. After all, who would try and woo a princess if failing the charisma check ends up with her ordering your execution. After all, her just not being interested isn't "meaningful" enough, you have to end up making things worse for you and your party. The first paragraph is our point of disagreement. Players cannot just tell me they successfully recall lore. Recalling lore is an action, it has associated skill proficiencies. The fact that they might be right or they might be wrong tells us that there is uncertainty about that. Again, you as the DM are free to make changes, these earth elementals summoned by Zuul might be different, but the players have recalled facts about normal earth elementals because they have either fought them in other games or read the MM. That is not knowledge their characters are just born knowing. So, if I call for a check, I am not telling the player what they are doing. They already declared the action, I am adjudicating. That is not overstepping my bounds. You are right, they didn't explicitly say "I try to remember what the vulnerabilities of earth elementals are." Instead, they just declared "I know that Earth Elementals are weak to Thunder damage." So... if they player just tells you they succeed and get the end result, they don't need to make a check? That is ludicrous. You would never allow a player to simply state "I walk off with the Queen's Crown" and just let them do so, why then do we allow them to state "I perfectly recalled the weaknesses of this monster"? They are attempting to do something with uncertainty, we at the table do not know if this character has this knowledge, so a check is called for. So, not knowing the weakness of Earth Elementals and not being able to prepare for the coming fight by buying scrolls specifically targeting that weakness is not meaningful enough? How much more impactful does a consequence have to become to be meaningful?Two things.First, Holy crap. That was an integrated tool system, which means it was in the warforged's warm body. A failure led to them getting infested with quickly growing brown mold within their body, the only way to destroy said mold being to expose it to cold damage, so the player is either going to constantly be draining hp from taking the cold damage of being "near" the mold that is inside their body, or have themselves blasted with cold damage to destroy the mold. Cold damage which would have been Ice Knife from the wizard if I remember your example correctly. An Ice Knife which potentially would have needed to be targeted within the warforged's body to hit the mold growing over their integrated tool. Did the warforge know they were courting death, loss of their tool set, and possible dismemberment from exploding ice shards when they tried to determine the nature of a mold? A mold they strongly suspected the nature of? Secondly, how are they supposed to verify their assumptions with checks to recall lore? They are only thinking, which means they automatically succeed, because there are no meaningful consequences. Unless they could be wrong about what they are thinking... which is kind of the entire point of me calling for a check involving Arcana in the first place. So since you disagree with me, there must be something else players do in your game to recall lore. They cannot just make a check, because they cannot fail to think something they want to think. As we established before, I would likely ask them why a character who cannot use magic scrolls is going to go and buy magic scrolls. This would likely get their intent, which brings us back to the beginning of this discussion. But it does exist in this game. Players can make checks using Intelligence (Arcana) to recall the weaknesses of monsters. This is a knowledge check. "A rose by any other name" as it were. Sure, the game doesn't explicitly call them that, but since players can recall lore it is assumed that they don't know every fact about monsters, so what is the difference here? Did 3.5 have a rule that explicitly said "Players are not expected to have all the information on a monster from the monsters statblock, if they wish to use this information, they should make a knowledge check" and 5e says somewhere that I've missed that "players are expected to know a monster's statblock and do not need a check to recall lore about monsters"? I mean, you keep saying that the rules allow the player to know this stuff, but the rules never state that. At least, not that I've ever found. The very existence of Arcana, Religion, Nature, and History seem to contradict this opinion that players can just know whatever they wish to know. Accept and build what? That there can't be secrets? That players will act on knowledge there is no way their character's could know? I admit, I have biases, but I don't see how this improves fun at the table, if players can just know everything that happens no matter where their character is or what is happening. But you seem unconcerned with actions that can impact people having a good time and creating an internally consistent story. In fact, your description of a DM is very hands-off in every aspect. So players can bring modern designs, knowledge of chemistry, gunpowder, ect to the game. You may talk to them out of game, maybe pausing the game to tell them that isn't consistent with the world... but that's exactly what happens by telling them "No, your character wouldn't know that" when it comes to these applications. Because pausing the game and talking to them is telling them that that knowledge is not acceptable in the game world because it doesn't match the knowledge that exists in the game world. The other option, of letting them keep the knowledge and simply not have people believe them, leaves open the chance for them to try and make the thing themselves. Personally revolutionizing the economy is incredibly lucrative,  and if you are trying to run a single game world for many different campaigns, it is incredibly destabilizing.</blockquote>

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