D&D General Alternate thought - rule of cool is bad for gaming

Reminds me of the time I made my players super paranoid. I was on of my sort-of-annual Halloween games where, if it makes sense for the campaign, we play a haunted house or similar session or two.

So when I have things I want to share just with one player, especially things I don't want others to know I'll pull them into another room. In one Halloween special I rolled a dice, looked at one of the players, told them to bring their character sheet and a D20. In the other room, I told them absolutely nothing had happened, they were fine, and we chatted for a bit about how their week had been.

Getting back to the table, everybody was suspicious for no reason whatsoever. Every once in a while I'd write a note, pass it to the player having them roll a D20 and write the number on the paper and hand it back. It did nothing. People became even more suspicious.

Suffice to say that player knowledge that the PCs did not have absolutely affected their behavior. I don't think that's all that unusual, even if people try not to have it affect them.

Lanefan said:

I'll be charitable and say he's merely being naive here when he says "it's simple enough to rule out of play any actions they attempt based on forbidden knowledge", because believe me, it isn't. My evidence for that statement is the endless hours of arguments I've been in and-or sat through when players have pushed back against similar rulings with justifications ranging anywhere from marginally-sustainable to utterly absurd.

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My question is if the character doesn't know a specific danger is coming then why should the player know? Or put another way, why should the player be (completely needlessly) put in a position of having to sail the character into dangers* the player already knows are coming?

* - speaking here of specific dangers that require specific precautions (e.g. fire resistance vs a fire trap) rather than standard precautions the character would always have in place when in a dangerous environment.

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The answer to your question is in the passages I quoted, and the post you replied to: they are not talking about the player playing to "win". And they are addressed to systems where the PC suffering doesn't equate to the player suffering or "losing" the game.

Oofta said:

Suffice to say that player knowledge that the PCs did not have absolutely affected their behavior. I don't think that's all that unusual, even if people try not to have it affect them.

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No one thinks it wouldn't affect the players' behaviour, do they?

For instance, in the example from Maelstrom Storytelling, Lilith's player is deliberately flaunting Pendleton's key, knowing that - in character - neither Lilith nor Pendleton knows that the key is Pendleton's. The point is that the players aren't declaring actions that advantage their PCs based on the hidden knowledge.

In the Maelstrom example, I imagine that, at a certain point, Pendleton might ask Lilith how she came by her key, and then two-and-two might be put together. Or not.

pemerton said:

No one thinks it wouldn't affect the players' behaviour, do they?

For instance, in the example from Maelstrom Storytelling, Lilith's player is deliberately flaunting Pendleton's key, knowing that - in character - neither Lilith nor Pendleton knows that the key is Pendleton's. The point is that the players aren't declaring actions that advantage their PCs based on the hidden knowledge.

In the Maelstrom example, I imagine that, at a certain point, Pendleton might ask Lilith how she came by her key, and then two-and-two might be put together. Or not.

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I do my best to avoid my PC taking action based on player knowledge, but nobody's perfect and some people do not even make the attempt.

I rarely pull people aside or pass notes because it's rarely worthwhile, just acknowledging the reality.

EzekielRaiden said:

I genuinely don't understand the difference.

Both things are a player, knowing something about a threat before that threat has actually been revealed to them. Both things involve knowledge of the contents of the game separate from what their actual characters could possibly know. There are plenty of times where that knowledge is not so easily explained, but it's considered not a problem a priori, without any concern. But somehow the other is utterly unacceptable, could not possibly be allowed.

I don't get it.

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I don't think that players knowing information is ever not a concern. Even the best players find it hard to pretend they don't know something.

The only way to do it, is to not know.

And sure, if it is role play fluff, then it does not matter. One player does some solo gaming and discovers the BBEG is their father. The other players know this...no big deal.

bloodtide said:

I don't think that players knowing information is ever not a concern. Even the best players find it hard to pretend they don't know something.

The only way to do it, is to not know.

And sure, if it is role play fluff, then it does not matter. One player does some solo gaming and discovers the BBEG is their father. The other players know this...no big deal.

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I don't see what that has to do with what I said. I was talking about how a sharp distinction was drawn between "knowing that trolls are weak to fire and acid" and "knowing that there's a fire trap ahead." I listed the ways the two sounded pretty much identical to me, and thus why I don't understand how one can be perfectly a-okay hunky-dory, and the other is absolutely verboten, totally unacceptable.

bloodtide said:

I don't think that players knowing information is ever not a concern. Even the best players find it hard to pretend they don't know something.

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This is, honestly, nonsense or GMs could never fairly run a game. Its not any more difficult at a player end than a GM end.

(Whether the player wants to is another question, to forestall that response.)

Lanefan said:

But if the other players do know Sue got stuck because they watched the proceedings out-of-character, the odds of those players making the same decision(s) they would have had they not known are IME close to zero: it's almost certain they'll find a reason to go searching for her instead of waiting as they otherwise would likely have done, and they'll also gin up an excuse to go sooner than the agreed-upon wait time.

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I'm a little confused.

We know from your anecdotes that your players will do entire sessions of in-character roleplaying, or just doing player-vs-player fights in camp. So obviously the idea of theatrical/thespian play and character inhabitation isn't foreign to those players; they can slip away from "win the adventure"/old-school challenge mode when they want to.

So why does that character inhabitation become impossible just because Sue fell down a well?

EzekielRaiden said:

I genuinely don't understand the difference.

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To explain (I hope):

Whether learned by rumour or research or trial-and-error, knowledge such as trolls-v-fire only needs to be learned once by any given party. After that, the characters in said party can pass that knowledge along in the fiction to any new recruits they pick up along the way; thus player knowledge can quite easily track to character knowledge, and on seeing trolls approaching even the newest recruit in that party would know to pull out the torches and Molotovs.

Contrast this with a player who (somehow*) knows there's a chute-and-capture trap around the next corner even though that player's character has no possible way of having acquired this knowledge in the fiction. Here the player has one of two choices, both poor: to metagame and suddenly take precautions against chutes for no obvious in-fiction reason (and-or suddenly start searching for traps here, having not searched anywhere else), or to knowingly send the character into the trap like a lamb to the slaughter.

* - and this doesn't even require outright cheating. For example a lone-scout character in the group may have previously run afoul of this same trap and this info wasn't kept secret; the characters know he never came back but have no clue what became of him.

EzekielRaiden said:

Both things are a player, knowing something about a threat before that threat has actually been revealed to them. Both things involve knowledge of the contents of the game separate from what their actual characters could possibly know. There are plenty of times where that knowledge is not so easily explained, but it's considered not a problem a priori, without any concern. But somehow the other is utterly unacceptable, could not possibly be allowed.

I don't get it.

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One situation involves information the character could easily have learned in the fiction, the other does not. That's the difference.

TwoSix said:

I'm a little confused.

We know from your anecdotes that your players will do entire sessions of in-character roleplaying, or just doing player-vs-player fights in camp. So obviously the idea of theatrical/thespian play and character inhabitation isn't foreign to those players; they can slip away from "win the adventure"/old-school challenge mode when they want to.

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Indeed. Good times.

TwoSix said:

So why does that character inhabitation become impossible just because Sue fell down a well?

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Beats me. But it does; with some players more than others, to be fair.

And so I long ago took the tack that when the party splits I'll do whatever I can to ensure each group of players doesn't know what the other group's characters are doing. The messy exception is when a player has two characters, one in each group; on which I'll ask the player to pick a group to be in and that player's other character is temporarily run by those in the other group (same as we do if the player isn't present at the session).