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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blankbeard" data-source="post: 6265665" data-attributes="member: 6688913">I cut this statement out for specificity. I don't think that it's correct. OD&D was written to the DM with players who bought the books assumed to be in existing campaigns. So there would be no need to admonish players not to use information their characters didn't know - The players didn't know anything relevant. AD&D in the preface to the DMG says it is for the eyes of the DM only. Character knowledge was controlled by restricting player knowledge. Holmes seems different in that it advises all players to read the entire rulebook (except the sample adventure) and then decide who will be the DM. Since Basic was intended as an introduction for new roleplayers, this is probably not a statement about character knowledge. In any case, the Moldvay revision on page 60 of the DM's book has a perfectly clear statement: "A player should not allow his character to act on information that character has no way of knowing." The existence of this statement is both proof that people were doing exactly that and that it was not considered a correct mode of play.I have little information on non-D&D role playing games in the first decade. MERP certainly didn't assume that characters knew all that players did but I'm not sure that's early enough to be "old-school." Star Frontiers didn't either.I don't think that the authors of early D&D anticipated that players would want to own their own books or that the books would be read when play wasn't practical. Once these two things became clear, you have the 1981 clear, modern statement of separation of player and character knowledge.Some of the statements I found while checking this out are interesting in their own right. The Runequest authors seemed to have viewed  Runequest as an improvement over D&D because it allowed the character to attempt anything. Since this is often stated as a key characteristic of early play, it's interesting to see that at least some didn't view the earliest game that way.</blockquote>

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