D&D 5E player knowlege vs character knowlege (spoiler)

[Crimson Longinus]

How about your approach? Let's say somebody shows up at your game and "mysteriously" looks for the secret doors in all the right places, tries just the right attacks on monsters with resistances, checks for traps at just the right times, etc. But does so with persuasive innocence, claiming to just be really lucky? How do you handle it?

This would not happen, but in theory I would ask how do they know and how would their character know. And lets face it, the the reason is that they have read the module and are using that information to metagame and this would be an indication that we have incompatible gaming preferences. We would have to discuss whether we can come to an agreement how to handle matter or whether it is just better than we do not play together. And the latter is a perfectly fine solution; I think that choosing a group of players with roughly compatible preferences and expectations is one of the key elements for running a successful game.

Or alternatively it turns out that the player is psychic in the real life. This seems more unlikely, but would certainly be interesting!

I don't quite understand the problem. While players bringing in their own foreknowledge will (or really "might") sometimes obviate the need for a roll, there can still be plenty of other occasions where they don't have player knowledge. Especially if the DM switches things up.

Take the gunpowder example. The low-Int, zero-skill player might say, "Oh I got this. Equal parts potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur." So they try it and...lo and behold!...in this game world, that doesn't work. So now the Wizard with Arcana proficiency says his favorite class in wizard school was pyrotechnics, and he says "I'm pretty sure it's 2 parts dragonbone, 1 part crushed carrior crawler chitin, and a cup of gelatinous cube." The DM maybe asks for an arcana check, or just decides that the characters proficiency & Intelligence, plus Rule of Cool, means that it works.

High Int & proficiency > player knowledge.

When we are envisioning how this fictional person is, the game statistic inform us on that right? (Perhaps we assign different weight on how much though, and that was also reflected on our disagreement on the importance of racial ASIs?) So when I look at my fictional person and try to think how much they would know I look at their game statistics for the clue. High intelligence and a lot of knowledge skills tells me that the character is either well educated or otherwise knowledgeable, the lack of those tells me opposite. So when answering to the question whether my character knows who is the Prime Minister of Thay (there isn't one, right?) I would not go for my own memories about the matter, nor I would pick up the FR sourcebook as those are things that my character doesn't have automatic access to.

As for the gunpowder, this should never, even come up and would be a total dealbreaker. It is not even about whether it would work, it is a completely absurd action taken by a character in this fictional setting and would indicate that the player is not trying to properly play the role and I would have no interest in playing with them.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

To understand how this works, it helps to keep this in mind: A player establishing what a character thinks is not the same as what the character knows.

Frankly, this is just pointless sophistry. There is no real difference.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Now, it's totally fair to ask, "Well why can't you do both? Do what any normal person would do, but with the unique flavor of your character?"

I mean, yes. This is exactly what one is supposed to do.

There is one more kind of roleplaying: the sort where you experience what your character experiences. If the first two variants of roleplaying are about performance, this third sort is about empathy. It's not about what you do, it's about what you experience. For example, the first time you fought trolls and they started regeneration and you genuinely didn't know what to do. This is my favorite kind of roleplaying. And it's utterly incompatible with "pretending" to not know stuff. In fact, the pretending to be ignorant sort of roleplaying is the diametric opposite of this empathetic sort of roleplaying. When I'm pretending to not know to burn trolls, I'm not even remotely feeling what my character is (presumably) feeling.

And I just don't want to waste game time doing this. I want to kill the damned trolls...maybe finding some good moments for performance roleplaying while doing so...and move on to the next challenge.

I get what you're saying on certain level, but I really don't think it is so binary. Now having the characters try to figure out a mystery the players already know the answer to is not particularly immersive and engaging. Fair enough, I agree and this is something that should be avoided. But there is more tangential knowledge and you literally have to ignore a lot of it already to roleplay. Your character doesn't know they're a character in the game for starters! I really don't think that pretending that your low int character doesn't know who the Prime Minister of Thay is and having to consult the groups loremaster who invested on a ton of knowledge skills is a too onerous burden to the immersion. Hell, method actors who go completely in the role can still immerse in their characters in the early scenes even though the actor has read the full script and knows how the story will end and the character at that moment doesn't.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

TIL. you can buy "Volo's Guide to Monsters" in "Tomb of Annihilation" for 50gp.

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It's a bit different from the one on your real-world shelf since it does not contain game statistics (those aren't available in the game world).

And this very strongly implies that the makers of the game assume that the OOC knowledge is not accessible to the characters. This item would make zero sense otherwise. You can either buy this inaccurate IC guide on monsters or the player can just pick up the MM and access accurate information for free!

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yes. Player knowledge, character knowledge, luck, random choice...all the factors that go into deciding what action the character takes...is 100% in the hands of the player.

Once that action is declared, the DM adjudicates the outcome. One way of doing that is by calling for an ability check.

I literally quoted the rulebook for the part where is says that the GM can decide that the action cannot even be attempted if they feel that the prerequisite conditions are not met. If the GM feels that the action declaration is inappropriate they can ask the player to choose another action.

 

[jasper]

'Don't be a jerk' covers this whole issue for me. If I have a know-it-all who dumps INT and wants to constantly spout knowledge, I'll just make him wrong until he quits. There's no threat in player knowledge for me. YMMV.

I don't do that. I Just tell the jerk, that he is being a jerk. And tell the others at the table to ignore the jerk's input.

 

[jasper]

You'd have some work to do to prove that is true given the rules of D&D 5e. DMs can adjudicate attempts by the character - as established solely by the player - to recall lore and make deductions, and they can establish necessary context in the description of the environment. A DM cannot simply say an action declaration is invalid because the character lacks requisite knowledge. In order to say the DM can do that, one must create a table rule.

The reason some can't have fun if the guy or gal next to them is "metagaming" is entirely due to internalizing a social contract as a moral position or group identity. Set aside that social contract and deprogram oneself from this legacy thinking and it's not an issue.

Me, "Hey, rest of the table! We know Bob runs in Iserith homebrew campaign on Saturday, they are two chapters ahead of my Adventure League game. So Bob is metagaming about knowing how the Stardock door locks. Bob, No having a INT 20 does not give automatic know of spaceships. And Please quit megagaming. "
I don't need a table rule. Just explain the facts to my AL table. Oh I swapped the names Bob and Iserith for the real players. And the above is a thumbnail sketch of what happen in my 20th session of Mad Mage.

 

[Hriston]

I literally quoted the rulebook for the part where is says that the GM can decide that the action cannot even be attempted if they feel that the prerequisite conditions are not met. If the GM feels that the action declaration is inappropriate they can ask the player to choose another action.

That passage deals with fictional positioning (or lack thereof). The character lacks the fictional positioning to undertake the player’s declared action at that time. Taking a step back and clarifying the situation gives the player a chance to revise the declaration to one that’s possible given the circumstances.

I think it’s a trap the DM can fall into to think the contents of a PC’s head constitute fictional positioning. I made this mistake recently when a player said their character was looking for a certain herb which had been established as having water-purifying properties. I asked the player how they expected to find this herb just by looking considering their character had never seen it before. (Its existence had been established earlier by a check to discover it accidentally. ) I realized through conversation that the player had a different conception from me about the initial act of discovery and that their action declaration was based on the character having a mental picture of the herb. At that point I decided the action could be attempted because it relied on the character’s thoughts which are firmly in the province of the player, and the ensuing check became about whether the character’s mental picture was correct and whether the herb was actually present in the environment.

What I tell my players is that one of my jobs is to describe the environment and that their characters’ thoughts are not part of the environment. A player is free to invent the needed fictional positioning for an action that relies on their character’s thoughts.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That passage deals with fictional positioning (or lack thereof). The character lacks the fictional positioning to undertake the player’s declared action at that time. Taking a step back and clarifying the situation gives the player a chance to revise the declaration to one that’s possible given the circumstances.

Sure. But certainly it is an example to illustrate the general principle and does not only apply to situations about positioning when trying to attack an orc?

I think it’s a trap the DM can fall into to think the contents of a PC’s head constitute fictional positioning. I made this mistake recently when a player said their character was looking for a certain herb which had been established as having water-purifying properties. I asked the player how they expected to find this herb just by looking considering their character had never seen it before. (Its existence had been established earlier by a check to discover it accidentally. ) I realized through conversation that the player had a different conception from me about the initial act of discovery and that their action declaration was based on the character having a mental picture of the herb. At that point I decided the action could be attempted because it relied on the character’s thoughts which are firmly in the province of the player, and the ensuing check became about whether the character’s mental picture was correct and whether the herb was actually present in the environment.

Right. Here it merely seems that there was some confusion about what the original information provided exactly entailed and the confusion was resolved. This is perfectly normal. The player didn't just read from the sourcebook that such a herb exists and decide on their own that their character now knows about it.

What I tell my players is that one of my jobs is to describe the environment and that their characters’ thoughts are not part of the environment. A player is free to invent the needed fictional positioning for an action that relies on their character’s thoughts.

But certainly it is the GMs job to provide information about the setting and that information also entails what the people in the setting (i.e. the characters) can know? And it is the job of the player to attempt to portray a fictional person living in this setting to best of their ability, and this entails not to use the players knowledge of the setting secrets or of modern engineering that the character in the setting would not have access to?

 

[Maxperson]

No, sorry, it's not a strawman, although possibly a misunderstanding (you call a LOT of things a "strawman"). You said the the DM would have to explicitly allow things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, which is the same thing as being disallowed by default. They are equivalent.

I said that not denied does not equal allowed. Not that not denied = denied. Big difference there. You changed my argument and then argued against the change. That's a Strawman whether it was due to a misunderstanding or not.

Not explicitly allowed is in fact NOT the same thing as being disallowed. It's the same thing as being unknown, and therefore up to the DM to decide whether allowed or disallowed.