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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732357" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well I can tell you, it is established in my BW GH game that there is a pyramid in the Bright Desert (the PCs beat up on some orcs who were going to try and enter it); but I - the GM - do not know how high it is.I can also tell you that Jabal the Red lives in a tower in Hardby, and that a lot of the action of the game has taken place in that tower. But no one knows exactly how high that tower is either; it has never come up as relevant. (It is established that there are multiple floors, and an internal staircase, but I don't think the number of floors has ever been established either.)The absence of such fictional details has not been an obstacle to the game going on.I would make something up. Or, if it mattered to the PC that it be this height rather than that (eg "the Tower at the Naval of the World is known to be exactly 100 cubits tall", or whatever), then the determination of the height might be the result of a successful (or unsuccessful) Towers-wise check.With respect, I posit that JRRT's stories in LotR are more meaningful than any story that has ever resulted from your RPGing. Yet there is no "truth" as to the exact height of Glordindel, or Cirdan, or Haldir, or indeed most of the characters who populate those stories. Tolkien never told us, because it didn't matter. And a story that has not been told, and that cannot be inferred from what has been told, doesn't exist in some Platonic realm! It is a non-existent thing.Sticking with character heights for a moment - no system for generating heights in a RPG that I've encountered has ever yielded details more accurate than fairly coarse fractions of an inch. Of two PCs both who turn out, on the random height table, to be 5' 10", it seems likely that one is in fact taller than the other. But no one knows which. Because the authorship hasn't happened yet.You can wish as much as you like that imaginary worlds might write themselves without active authorship, but only children believe that that is actually possible. To believe that there are things that are "true" of fictions in the absence of acts of authorships is to be out of touch with reality!EDIT:You didn't say that the GM must be able to figure it out. You said the GM must know it. I can figure out how many bricks are in the walls of my house, by counting them. But I've never actually done the count, and so I don't know that. Can be known is not a synonym for is known.And as far as figuring it out before it becomes relevant - if the only trigger for working out the height of a NPC, or a building, or a mountain, is that a player asks, then the GM is not figuring it out until it becomes relevant!And this clearly is triggered by out-of-game knowledge - namely, the out-of game knowledge that the person casting the divination spell is a PC (there can be oodles of NPCs casting such spells, and hence learning the height of the mountain, but this won't require the GM to actually work out what that height is).Knowing that the players care about the height of the mountain, because their PCs have asked a god about it, there are a range of ways the GM might work this out. Gygax, in his DMG, suggests that if the players are looking for a plot of land suitable for building a castle on in a certain place, then the GM should let them find it unless it is obviously out of place for the established terrain/geography of that place. The fact that you prefer another method - eg random tables that purport to model ingame causal processes, despite never delivering a range of results remotely commensurate to the actual diversity of the real world - doesn't establish any sort of truth about what counts as roleplaying.</blockquote>

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