Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Why would it be ok? What diagetic reason does your PC have to know that information?
D&D General Alternate thought - rule of cool is bad for gaming
- Thread starter deadman1204
- Start date
This is just convention, deriving from early D&D play practices where some player knowledge (monster vulnerabilities, spell interactions etc) is accepted as being cumulative, while other player knowledge (the solution to a particular puzzle) is only meant to be used once: you don't keep playing and beating the same module over and over.
The ossification of these rather idiosyncratic conventions into widespread norms of RPGing is one of the stranger features of the hobby.
Thomas Shey
Legend
To be entirely fair, if you don't have someone who is both decent at firewalling, and strongly willing to work at keeping track of what their character does and doesn't know, its probably impractical for them to remember certain very common D&Disms are things they're supposed to not know.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I'm fine with all of it being diagetic; ie, you know it and can act on it if your PC knows it.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Practicality does rear it's ugly head here sometimes, yes. What I'm talking about is more an ideal to aspire to as opposed to a 100% achievable goal.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I'm not the one who claimed it was! I was responding to what sounded to me like a contradiction--the fact that others had said that it was perfectly okay for a character to know that trolls are weak to fire, but not at all okay for them to know that a particular dungeon has fire traps in it.
This does tend to raise the question, "What does my PC know?" Which in a FRPG in particular could be anything, really - "The gods spoke to me in a dream, and told me that . . ."
Oofta
Legend
Assuming that the player gets to decide what the gods told them.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Sure, if you're trying get around the spirit of the thing...
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
I tried playing in a game with a module I had been through already. After letting the DM know, he gave me the okay to play. It was super frustrating for me to try and determine when my PC would have figured something out so that I could act on it. That was the one time I did that and never again.
