"My Character Would Know That"

Reynard said:

We don't have a good sense of what 1st level characters are supposed to be able to do, in any edition. People talk about the "off the farm" trope but no edition has really had characters start as the equivalent of untrained peasants. 5E characters in particular are very competent in the beginning, so it's hard to say.

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Maxperson said:

Right, but there's different kinds of training. Competence doesn't equate to being good at everything challenging. Someone trained to be a pro basketball player isn't going to be trained to go 12 miles in grueling heat while wearing a full pack and vice versa.

Few, if any of the classes involve that kind of training inherently. Now if you're playing some sort of military campaign, and I've been in some of those, then yes that sort of training would be par for the course. A cleric, paladin, sorcerer, wizard, bard, rogue, etc.? Not without some sort of back story to explain it. Fighters and especially rangers could get a pass on it, though.

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Reynard said:

Or if the PCs are assumed to be experienced and competent travelers. How often do PCs simply walk for days across the wilderness, with the only requirement being a ranger or "outlander" there to ensure they don't get lost. D&D travel and wilderness exploration are notoriously poorly modeled, partly because we just assume that all adventurers (ie PCs) are good enough at it that they don't die of exposure or end up breaking a leg trying to cross a fallen log.

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Staffan said:

To me, it's more of an anti-gotcha thing. So the DM doesn't get to say "It's a bright sunny day out on the ice, so you need to roll a Con save to resist snow blindness." That's the kind of thing our ranger would know about and pack blinders for (though those might have other effects like disadvantage on Perception checks). It won't help us if, say, someone falls through the snow into a crevasse. At that point, it's equipment list time.

It's basically the same principle as things like "fishing tackle" in the PHB, which includes "a wooden rod, silken line, corkwood bobbers, steel hooks, lead sinkers, velvet lures, and narrow netting." Realistically, those are all things you'd buy separately (and, in a pre-industrial world, likely from a number of different craftspeople). But you don't have to sweat that, and the DM doesn't get to tell you you forgot to buy a whatsit so you don't get to try and fish.

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MichaelSomething said:

Isn't that what skilled play is???

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Reynard said:

Or if the PCs are assumed to be experienced and competent travelers.

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bloodtide said:

Well, the "era" of D&D has always been wacky. The full plate mail, heavy crossbow and galleon put the time at more 16th century....but no guns.

Though the point is before the 20th century the vast majority of all people world wide had to know how to do everything they needed to live as they had to do it everyday.

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CandyLaser said:

Just as a matter of historical fact, I don't think this is true outside of non-agricultural societies. As soon as you get agriculture, you get cities and specialization. q.v. Bret Devereaux on pre-modern cities and specialization,

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bloodtide said:

Though a lot of this only covers a set era.

Europe, even more so England has lots of odd bits. By 1000 or so all the land was claimed, even more so in England. And most was cleared and settled or farmland. There was...and is...very little 'wild' left in Europe. So common folk could not hunt. You lived on a farm, and every square inch of land was owned by a lord. The few 'wild' areas left were places for the rich to hunt.

But the default D&D world never really fit Europe. The Keep on the Borderlands is a LOT more like a 17th century fort in America then Europe, for example.

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Reynard said:

NOTE: This isn't about skilled play versus "sheet play" or even about player knowledge versus character knowledge.

It happens sometimes that the Gm dings a player because they make a poor or nonsensical decision (from the GM's perspective) and the player tries to backtrack with "Well, my character who is a professional adventurer/scientist/space marine would have known better."

Obviously there is a miscommunication between GM and player in that scenario, but that isn't actually what I am interested in here. What I want to dig into is the idea of what the PC is assumed to know based on their class and race and background and skillset and whatever, versus what the player THINKS the PC should know, and how those thinsg interact at the table.

In fiction of various media, it is an easy problem to solve. "Due to his long years hunting watzits, Bob knew the best way to catch one was to wait in the watzit tree." But in a game, the player may decide that digging a pit on a game trail is the best way to catch a watzit. This is a simple example, but it can be extended to planning for a long arctic expedition or developing a tactical plan to take a fortified location or any other scenario where the player might have good ideas that don't actually help, but their PC should know what a more appropriate action to take would be.

What's your take? Do you expect the GM to inform the player when they are making a bad plan that differs from what the GM expects the PC to know? Or should the GM adjust to fit what the player believes their character should know to be a solid plan?

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