Player knowledge

[chomskola]

Hi guys,

How much knowledge should players have of their foes/potential foes. Presumably any player can pick up the MM and have a good idea of an orc or skeleton skills, feats, stats and hit points? Is this information the DM should give out on request? Also should the players know how much HP the monster has lost in each round of a battle or should that not be disclosed? should it be hinted at?

[PEACH]

Depends entirely on your campaign. In general, telling people exactly the stats monsters have isn't really done. You can also change up stock monsters so that people don't automatically know exactly how they work, but that does take a bit more effort on the DMs part. Stuff like AC and saves can be figured out fairly quickly by players, though, and I personally don't care if they happen to use that information to figure out how to play (knowing "high fort save" and "makes his save on anything better than a 4" lead to basically the same outcomes).

As for how much damage is dealt: there's no reason not to tell them. They need to know how much damage they take, obviously, because that tells them how long they have to live, and they roll their own damage dice, so they know how much damage the enemy is taking, and if the enemy has damage resistance or evasion or immunity of some kind, they should be able to figure that out from an in character perspective.

[supermonkeyjoe]

It depends what kind of game you are playing, hack and slash games usually lean more towards metagaming than RP heavy games.

In most games I've played in/run finding out information about enemies is either tied to the use of the appropriate Knowledge skills or working out the numbers by good old trial and error (hmm an 18 missed but a 20 hit so the AC is either 19 or 20).

[RagnaroksChosen]

As I ususaly gm, I have a lot of stats memorized from over use. It is hard when I am a player to not metagame... sometimes it just kicks in. So I try to justify it a bit by dropping points into the Knowledge's that pertain to a given campaign.


Its annoying. Sometimes I wish the other gms would modify more monsters rather then just use the stock MM.