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jseah
2015-07-11, 08:36 PM
We all know the problems of trying to track knowledge: X via a single skill number. And in fact, that number actually tells us nothing at all about what a character knows.

For curiousity's sake, I would like to propose and evaluate a different way to track character knowledge.

Key Idea:
Knowledge is an inventory, not a skill.


Essentially instead of modelling knowledge as a rising tide of skill increases, you simply learn actual discrete pieces of knowledge.

Simple examples would be: "Dragons have a breath weapon" and "A dragons' scales are very hard to pierce (high AC)"

Hence it becomes possible that a character knows a lot about dragons, possibly through trying to hunt them, but not much of Elementals (even if both are Arcana). Stuff like commoners not recognizing a bear also goes away.


The problem with modelling common knowledge this way is that you can't write down everything single thing your character knows since that would be ridiculously long.

Hence I propose that various groups of knowledge that are commonly learned together can be summarized into a single "piece of knowledge".

Learning "Common Knowledge (Waterdeep)" would mean your character knows which parts of town are dangerous, whether people in Waterdeep restaurants pay before they eat or reverse, the kinds of weather you normally get in Waterdeep, etc.
"Commoner Farming (Waterdeep)" would include things like how long crops take to grow, how much seed they need to sow, whether water or fertilizer is required, basic facts of local wildlife. Perhaps even which crops give the most money and which the most food.

You may notice I grouped it by geography here. That's because "common knowledge" varies from place to place. Other sorts of groups are also possible.


eg. Arcane Lore (Elemental Planes) would be a group of knowledge regarding the elemental planes, focusing on the magical energies that result from them, how to call on them, magical phenomena you might meet while attempting to explore them, etc.

In the end, this sort of system still relies on the GM but gives hints as to what a character should know, in broad strokes but in more detail than just a single number.

So while arcane lore doesn't strictly cover the existence of elementals, you would expect a character who knows that but not Nature (Elemental Planes) to still be aware that things like elementals exist, but not details of their lifecycles or habits.

How large should the groups of knowledge be? That depends on how much bookkeeping you can stand of course. =P


What do you think? Feasible?

NichG
2015-07-11, 09:27 PM
I had a mechanic in a campaign once where when you bought up a knowledge, you'd gain specific pieces of knowledge that you wouldn't otherwise be privy to - more of a plot-hook generator than 'can I know that trolls regenerate yet?'. This did get some use, but it was a bit fiddly at the time - I had to come up with secrets that would be worth the expenditure on the spot, and depending on things like campaign length/etc that tends to be hard to gauge what will really have been worth it.

One problem with designing knowledge systems is that they risk being a tax. Instead of buying a skill that lets you do something, you have to buy Knowledge(Arcana) so you can justify using things that you as the player already know (like 'Dragons have breath weapons') because the DM didn't bother to mix it up. That kind of 'buying permission' mechanic is really terrible.

So what I'd probably do now is to totally discard the idea of modelling the static contents of the character's head mechanically - leave that up to the player. So basically, the first step would be to get rid of Knowledge skills. But then, many of the things the Knowledge skills provide can be re-framed as active skills that grant certain abilities.

Instead of having a Knowledge(Nobility and Royalty) to see if the character remembers the relationships in a nest of royals (conflicting with the fact that the player has been operating in that court, and simply knows some things about those royals independent of their skill rank) one could have a new use of the Sense Motive skill that allows one to attempt to assess the relationships between political entities - the skill check doesn't determine 'did you know?' but instead determines 'do you get extra information?'. Instead of Knowledge(Local), you can have a 'Find Address' use of Gather Information which lets you find a business of a particular type on a successful check or a 'Cultivate Contact' use that lets you find a guy who can hook you up with shady or secretive organizations. Instead of Knowledge(Arcana) to see what you know about dragons, you can have a 'Analyze Weakpoint' use of the Spot skill that allows you to on-the-fly determine the specific numerical values of a given creature's resistances/immunities, or even bypass some of them with a sufficiently high check.

Darth Ultron
2015-07-11, 10:05 PM
I generally take the extreme of the knowledge skill is useless.

I see the knowledge skill made for more of the casual gamer. Gamer Joe who rides over on his bike to play D&D for a couple hours. Joe plops down on the sofa, tilts his sunglasses back and says ''lets play'', but he just barley knows to ''roll the d20''. And poor Joe can't be expected to know things about the fictional game world. So the knowledge skill lets Joe know everything, and with no effort other then rolling some dice.

I make my players role-play for knowledge, not roll play. And a player can freely ''metagame'' anything they know.

mephnick
2015-07-11, 10:17 PM
I make my players role-play for knowledge, not roll play. And a player can freely ''metagame'' anything they know.

So an experienced gamer's character is inherently smarter, experienced and more useful than a newer player's character regardless of stats or background?

So my stupid dwarf barbarian knows that the Queen of Air and Darkness makes her lair in Pandemonium, but my friend's fey cleric doesn't?

goto124
2015-07-12, 08:21 AM
So an experienced gamer's character is inherently smarter, experienced and more useful than a newer player's character regardless of stats or background?

I go by the belief of "don't force players to withhold their OOC knowledge for the sake of 'verisimilitude'".

What we usually refer to, is the 'trolls regenerate unless you use fire' kind of knowledge. If you didn't know, the trolls can be considered a good kind of challenging puzzle (not that it always is). However, if you already know the answer to the puzzle, and the DM doesn't let you use it, you have to waste time acting stupid. It's just silly, and there's only so much of those you can go through before you scream 'just let me use the fire, darn it!'

Very related: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?427230-Roleplaying-character-ignorance

Your question implies that the experienced player is gaining an advantage over the newer player, and that it is a horrible thing. Isn't the advantage shared with the entire party anyway? If one person uses [knowledge], everyone else learns and gets to use that knowledge too.


So my stupid dwarf barbarian knows that the Queen of Air and Darkness makes her lair in Pandemonium, but my friend's fey cleric doesn't?

IMHO, your example is indicative of poor design. Why would even an experienced player who has never been through the adventure before know where exactly the Queen is? Why is it so bad that it'll snap the rails in half? Why are there rails?

I'll say that you're right in the specific example of published adventures. Otherwise... not really.

Anonymouswizard
2015-07-12, 08:45 AM
In the game I'm writing knowledge skills have been removed entirely. Mathematics [hyperspace] allows a character to accurately solve hyperspace equations with a piece of paper and a calculator. Failure means that you got a few terms wrong and the hyperspace grenade distorted the target in the wrong way.

In the interest of modelling knowledge characters have a Profession and Interests. If one of these is applicable to the knowledge the character knows it, full stop. A character only has one Profession, but the 'broad knowledge base' trait allows you to pick an additional 2 interests (you start with 2).

Keltest
2015-07-12, 10:06 AM
So the way I run it, you have a base 5% chance to know any random fact about anything. If you want to know that the moon is made of chocolate mice, you have a 5% chance of knowing that. You can invest points (different from skill points) into the relevant knowledge skill up to a flat cap, and that represents your level of study about that topic, with different levels representing different levels of knowledge. So level 1 might be equivalent to "Looked it up on Wikipedia" while the highest level is "College degree on the subject."

While ultimately it is up to the DM to decide what all is fair for each level, it is a much more consistent system than random knowledge checks, IMO.

Darth Ultron
2015-07-12, 10:13 AM
So an experienced gamer's character is inherently smarter, experienced and more useful than a newer player's character regardless of stats or background?

So my stupid dwarf barbarian knows that the Queen of Air and Darkness makes her lair in Pandemonium, but my friend's fey cleric doesn't?

Yes.

In your examples the stupid dwarf barbarian might have, say, listened to lots and lots of bard tales and stories. Maybe he had a bard uncle. Maybe he just listened a lot. In any case he is now a ''stupid'' dwarf barbarian that knows a lot of stuff.

The fey cleric on the other hand may not have studied too hard. Maybe the skipped a lot of classes. Maybe they partied too hard. Maybe they just did not care. So now they are a mostly clueless cleric.

Both are perfectly fine characters to role play. And are much more fun then roll playing for information.

Knaight
2015-07-12, 10:28 AM
On the question itself - knowledge as an inventory should work just fine, but it does run into issues with the sheer volume of stuff. As such, what can work fairly well is a hybrid system. You have knowledge skills that are broader, and may not ever be rolled. You then also have an inventory of specific knowledge gained, which you're going to use primarily for things that are abstracted in some way. "Trolls are vulnerable to fire" can be memorized by a player easily enough. The entire layout of a titanic space station? That's going on the knowledge list, and it's going to represent significantly more than one item.


I see the knowledge skill made for more of the casual gamer. Gamer Joe who rides over on his bike to play D&D for a couple hours. Joe plops down on the sofa, tilts his sunglasses back and says ''lets play'', but he just barley knows to ''roll the d20''. And poor Joe can't be expected to know things about the fictional game world. So the knowledge skill lets Joe know everything, and with no effort other then rolling some dice.

I see this as abject nonsense. There's likely going to be way more information available than is written down at any one time, new NPCs being created every so often to fill in gaps as the players get closer to them, and things abstracted to some degree. Knowledge skills represent an area of character knowledge just fine. Take local area knowledge - it's probably not worth having every street mapped out for a city of 500,000 people. Some styles of game will have things like broad districts, main roads and such, but getting every back alley is ridiculous. Getting every building, market stall, etc. in said area is even more ridiculous. That creates a very useful niche for a skill representing the area familiarity, which can come up just as easily as things like athletics or stealth. "How good is my character at escape or pursuit through knowledge of the back alleys of Cordoba?" is just as valid a question for skills to answer as "How good is my character at climbing a tree?".

Then there's the matter of applied knowledge, which covers a lot of skills. Is there a skill for repairing vehicles, which will be valuable in just about any modern or futuristic setting? That's applied knowledge. Is there or are there a skill or skills covering medicine, which has been around in some form since the dawn of civilization? That's applied knowledge, though skills like surgery will also depend on manual dexterity. So on and so forth.

VoxRationis
2015-07-12, 11:47 AM
Well fine then. I guess if I do some quick research the day before the session, my half-orc barbarian who's never seen any technology more advanced than a stone axe can jump-start the Industrial Revolution and introduce gunpowder weaponry (at an advanced state) to the setting. Because clearly that's excellent roleplaying.
You people are introducing the most feeble of justifications (when you bother justifying yourselves at all) for no longer playing characters who are different from yourselves, all because you can't stand not being able to optimally play against all the monsters in the MM. There are names for this sort of behavior, and they are not flattering. You are not your characters. Your characters know things which you do not, and you know things which your characters do not, just as your characters can do things which you cannot.

Anonymouswizard
2015-07-12, 11:59 AM
Well fine then. I guess if I do some quick research the day before the session, my half-orc barbarian who's never seen any technology more advanced than a stone axe can jump-start the Industrial Revolution and introduce gunpowder weaponry (at an advanced state) to the setting. Because clearly that's excellent roleplaying.
You people are introducing the most feeble of justifications (when you bother justifying yourselves at all) for no longer playing characters who are different from yourselves, all because you can't stand not being able to optimally play against all the monsters in the MM. There are names for this sort of behavior, and they are not flattering. You are not your characters. Your characters know things which you do not, and you know things which your characters do not, just as your characters can do things which you cannot.

Hey, don't lump some of us in with the others. I believe in separating character knowledge and player knowledge, if you didn't put a point into xenobiology your soldier does not have any idea that trolls can't regenerate if lit on fire, the same as if you don't put any points in pilot (sailboat) you can't sail at all. In this case though, the player who did put points into knowledge (evil monsters) is allowed to yell 'trolls are vulnerable to fire, you idiots!'

I once played a character who assumed zombies were best dealt with by disabling their limbs, because despite being in the middle of a zombie apocalypse he had never fought one before (he was supposed to be useless in combat, the GM refused to let me build with a template that would let that happen). It took another player metagaming and going for a headshot for him to realise that maybe sense wasn't working in this scenario (he specifically did not like horror films to enable this being completely in character as well).

NichG
2015-07-12, 12:23 PM
Well fine then. I guess if I do some quick research the day before the session, my half-orc barbarian who's never seen any technology more advanced than a stone axe can jump-start the Industrial Revolution and introduce gunpowder weaponry (at an advanced state) to the setting. Because clearly that's excellent roleplaying.
You people are introducing the most feeble of justifications (when you bother justifying yourselves at all) for no longer playing characters who are different from yourselves, all because you can't stand not being able to optimally play against all the monsters in the MM. There are names for this sort of behavior, and they are not flattering. You are not your characters. Your characters know things which you do not, and you know things which your characters do not, just as your characters can do things which you cannot.

If that's what someone wants to play then, why not? Why try to force your player into a playstyle that they clearly don't enjoy?

Trying to use rules to force people to roleplay isn't a way to generate good roleplayers, its a way to generate good rules lawyers.

Players have lots of choices when making a character. Whether or not its an interesting character or makes sense with respect to the setting or whatever, a player could choose to be a misunderstood good-aligned twin-scimitar wielding drow ranger with a panther animal companion. Yet its fundamentally against roleplaying to decide 'I'm a half-orc barbarian, but that doesn't mean I'm an idiot'? But if a player is having fun getting into roleplaying a classic half-orc barbarian then they may well decide on their own not to import a bunch of OOC knowledge about gunpowder - because that isn't something they envision their character knowing when they're getting into it. Someone who is immersed in their character can be trusted to make that decision without a bunch of rules rules telling them 'you don't know that', and someone who isn't immersed isn't going to become immersed by seeing that to play their mental image of their character they need to fight against the rules or sacrifice their ability to be competent because the system was designed in a way that makes you buy 'I can name a local bar that serves good ale' and 'I can think really hard and gain temporary hitpoints' with the same pool of character resources.

And if they do have an idea that involves their half-orc barbarian introducing gunpowder, well, why not give that player the same leeway you'd give other players playing their crazy whatevers and let them pitch this idea that has them actually getting excited about the game world? After all, you can always say 'fantasy world, gunpowder doesn't work here'.

I mean, to put it another way: this hypothetical player actually cares enough about the setting and its socioeconomics to try to create economic change. Obviously this is terrible roleplaying - a good roleplayer would just have their PC murder-hobo their way up the XP chart to personal godhood like any realistic character.

veti
2015-07-12, 03:58 PM
Well fine then. I guess if I do some quick research the day before the session, my half-orc barbarian who's never seen any technology more advanced than a stone axe can jump-start the Industrial Revolution and introduce gunpowder weaponry (at an advanced state) to the setting. Because clearly that's excellent roleplaying.
You people are introducing the most feeble of justifications (when you bother justifying yourselves at all) for no longer playing characters who are different from yourselves, all because you can't stand not being able to optimally play against all the monsters in the MM. There are names for this sort of behavior, and they are not flattering. You are not your characters. Your characters know things which you do not, and you know things which your characters do not, just as your characters can do things which you cannot.

First off, gunpowder and steam engines are not simple things to invent. Merely knowing a few formulas and memorising some designs won't cut it. There are reasons the Industrial Revolution didn't happen earlier, and it's not because everyone before the 18th century was stupid. There's a not-so-little matter of manufacturing techniques. A master blacksmith could spend his whole life trying to build a low-pressure steam boiler, only to blow it and himself to smithereens when he tries it out.

I give out knowledge skills, the operative word being "give". A cleric has some knowledge of their own religion, a wizard has some understanding of magical theory, a fighter can likely tell a falchion from a scimitar, for whatever good it'll do them. Nobody spends "points" on that. And if they've lived in Dog's Bottom, then they're going to have basic local knowledge, no rolls required unless they want to know something obscure.

If your mother was a butcher, then you're going to know how to kill and bleed a pig, chop and mince meat, make jelly and sausages and other things from it. But probably not how to cleanly skin an animal and cure its hide - for that, you'd want a parent who was a tanner, or possibly a hunter. In any case, you don't "pay" for those skills - they're simply a part of your background.

As for using player knowledge in-character? Well, that might or might not work - I'm prone to changing random things about monsters between campaigns. You may have heard that trolls regenerate and are vulnerable to fire, but these trolls don't do either of those things - they're the kind that are made of stone, and will stop fighting when they're reduced to gravel, or maybe the kind that are small and hairy and magical. Or you may have heard that shiny dragons aren't evil, but maybe this evil dragon has discovered paint. You just can't rely on those things.

VoxRationis
2015-07-12, 04:22 PM
If that's what someone wants to play then, why not? Why try to force your player into a playstyle that they clearly don't enjoy?

Trying to use rules to force people to roleplay isn't a way to generate good roleplayers, its a way to generate good rules lawyers.

Players have lots of choices when making a character. Whether or not its an interesting character or makes sense with respect to the setting or whatever, a player could choose to be a misunderstood good-aligned twin-scimitar wielding drow ranger with a panther animal companion. Yet its fundamentally against roleplaying to decide 'I'm a half-orc barbarian, but that doesn't mean I'm an idiot'?

Uh, yes. The actual intelligence of the barbarian is irrelevant, since anyone from a Stone Age background would never have heard even of the concepts relevant to gunpowder or industrialization, let alone know anything about how to implement them.



But if a player is having fun getting into roleplaying a classic half-orc barbarian then they may well decide on their own not to import a bunch of OOC knowledge about gunpowder - because that isn't something they envision their character knowing when they're getting into it. Someone who is immersed in their character can be trusted to make that decision without a bunch of rules rules telling them 'you don't know that',
And if the system allowed you to just say your attack and damage results instead of having them defined by character stats and dice, I'm sure there are people who would occasionally say they rolled poorly. Why do you even bother with rules?


And if they do have an idea that involves their half-orc barbarian introducing gunpowder, well, why not give that player the same leeway you'd give other players playing their crazy whatevers and let them pitch this idea that has them actually getting excited about the game world? After all, you can always say 'fantasy world, gunpowder doesn't work here'.
Yes, because arbitrarily altering the game world to shut down ideas post facto is obviously a better idea than pointing out that the previously established facts about the characters preclude those ideas.

erikun
2015-07-12, 06:28 PM
Key Idea:
Knowledge is an inventory, not a skill.
Actually, I had the same idea for a system.

A character who had the [Car Mechanics] knowledge knew how cars ran and how car engines worked; they could take apart and put together a car engine. A person without it had no clue, and while they could make an Intelligence check to try to identify a problem or follow some wires, they wouldn't be able to put together a dismantled engine or even know what was the standard for swapping out parts without finding specific instrcutions for that question. A character who had the [Downtown New York] knowledge was familiar with New York, it's streets and its popular locations. A character who did not was limited to asking for directions.

Important things that PCs learned, such as character names or locations, went into their Knowledges. If a player memorized a map, then the map was in their Knowledge.

The problem boiled down to identifying what was an important enough to be a Knowledge and what was just general known information, along with what Knowledges were relevant to specific skills. People's names and locations were obvious, but you didn't want to flood the Knowledge category with the names of every street in every town - just like you wouldn't want to flood a PC's Inventory with every single stick, leaf, or scrap of cloth they had on them. It would mean being a bit for vague on just what in revealed, such as [Vampire Weaknesses] rather than specific weaknesses to fire, running water, and sunlight.
(Although on the plus side, this did mean a knowledge represented accurate information, rather than just what the players assume.)

I never did work out a good way to deal with it. The idea did sort of require the DM to intentionally put "Knowledges" in the setting much like equipment, with ways for the PCs to get them to know what to do. I also felt like they were kind of pointless at times: rather than just throwing some sort of wolf-monster at the town and letting the PCs figure things out, the system would encourage the PCs to just example clues until they found the [Werewolf Weaknesses] Knowledge that was hidden somewhere in town - not what I'd want to encourage.

Arbane
2015-07-12, 06:56 PM
OP: Just to make this more complicated, how about knowing things that ain't so?

Back in the Middle Ages, everyone "knew" that maggots spontaneously arose in rotting meat, and mice would be generated by leaving grain to rot. They also "knew" that diseases were caused by imbalances in the bodily humours. A really well-educated doctor of the Middle Ages could lecture for hours on the four humour theory, but ask him if washing his hands was a good idea, and you'd probably get a blank look at best.

Vitruviansquid
2015-07-12, 07:00 PM
Looking at these objections of knowledge as an inventory, I could still see the system working, just not as something that you spend resources on in character creation.

If your character travels to New York, and then spend quite a long time there, the GM could just tell you that you gain "Knowledge - Living in New York." Then whenever a situation came up where the players need to know about New York, that player could ask the GM "do I know about that based on my 'Knowledge - Living in New York,'" and the GM can rule whether or not that particular knowledge is helpful. Alternately, the GM may make you roll based on something like intelligence to see whether you got the knowledge down.

Because players don't spend resource on it, you can define any kind of knowledge on the fly to give to your players, and it wouldn't matter if it was too niche or a bit general.

shadow_archmagi
2015-07-12, 07:03 PM
My main contention with Knowledge is that it's not just hard to use, it's incredibly easy to use in such a way as to lower fun. Here's a list of cases where Knowledge frustrates me:

1. DM sets baseline:
"I say we build a dam."
"Your character wouldn't know about dams. You have 0 points in Engineering."
"I can still SUGGEST one. I mean, real-life me isn't an engineer, but I've heard of dams. :smallmad:"

2. Knowledge consumes character resources, forcing weird choices.
"As a pirate, I'd like to have Intimidate, Knowledge (Geography), Profession (Sailor), Use Rope, Bluff, Gambling, Knowledge (Local), Knowledge (Nature), and Swim. And Appraise. I have enough for... four of those."
"What're you going to cut?"
"I guess I'll just drop Knowledge (Nature), (Geography), and (Use Rope) and just be a sailor who can't tie knots and knows nothing about the ocean."

3. Putting a few points into Knowledge tends to result in a low chance of knowing any given thing, rather than a broad base of common knowledge.
"Are dolphins edible? I wanna roll knowledge nature."
"Let's see... you got a 4. You have no idea. They're probably poisonous."
"What do I know about Krakens?"
"You get... a.. 25. You know their strengths, their weaknesses, and their childhood dreams."
"Are *they* edible?"

4. Knowledge failures make your character look dumb.
"Do I know what my hometown's name is?"
"Apparently... not."

5. Knowledge successes are boring if they're not useful.
"What do I know about Flamekor, the Fire God?"
"He's immune to disease."

6. Knowledge successes are often anticlimactic if they are useful. It's hard to give information without feeling like you're just telling them the answers to the test because of the dice.
"What do I know about Flamekor, the Fire God?"
"He can be killed instantly by water and you have a decanter of endless water in your inventory."

NichG
2015-07-12, 10:41 PM
Uh, yes. The actual intelligence of the barbarian is irrelevant, since anyone from a Stone Age background would never have heard even of the concepts relevant to gunpowder or industrialization, let alone know anything about how to implement them.

Would you have the same problem with this if it were a stereotypical ivory tower 'learnèd wizard' with max ranks in Craft(Alchemy) rather than a barbarian?

Until the character hits the scene, they don't 'actually' have a Stone Age background or anything for that matter. That's something that the player has the ability to decide modulo whatever constraints are being em-placed by the setting. By saying that it is possible to possess the knowledge via a rules-mechanical process of buying up skill ranks, you're saying that you haven't hard-banned that knowledge from the setting as a whole. So there is no setting-based constraint on not being able to know about gunpowder or industrialization, since there are characters that, by implication, you would permit to know about them.

This has nothing to do with roleplaying though, it has to do with being able to squeeze enough skill points out of a character to invest in an appropriate knowledge skill or buff it up using complex combinations of spells in order to pass your hurdle and justify to you knowing about this thing.

To put it another way, its fine to say 'I don't want this knowledge to exist in the game world' and block it. But saying 'I don't want this knowledge to exist in the game world, so I will make it annoyingly expensive' is just daring someone to pay that price. Putting a high skill DC or a price on it doesn't communicate 'don't do that', it communicates 'try harder, its worth pursuing'.


And if the system allowed you to just say your attack and damage results instead of having them defined by character stats and dice, I'm sure there are people who would occasionally say they rolled poorly. Why do you even bother with rules?

Well, with those kinds of rules, its certainly not to make people roleplay better.

In general, lots of reasons. To create strategically and tactically interesting situations, to provide explicit tools to the players so that they can accurately gauge what they can and cannot do sufficient to devise plans, to augment human ability in places where it would be insufficient, to fill in the gaps between a rich world and the fairly poor context of everything being communicated by the DM describing things, to provide fair resolution to conflicts between parties of equal agency (e.g. PvP), to introduce elements of unpredictability into the scenario, to provide fodder for people to exercise their optimization muscles because they enjoy doing so, etc.


Yes, because arbitrarily altering the game world to shut down ideas post facto is obviously a better idea than pointing out that the previously established facts about the characters preclude those ideas.

Its not like the laws of physics and chemistry of the game world existed in such a robust way that there's an existing answer that you're changing. The player is saying 'what happens when I mix sulfur, charcoal, and these white crystals I grew from horse poop?'. In most systems and most campaigns, the answer to that won't be written down somewhere in one of the books or campaign notes.

This is the thing with a lot of these knowledge gimmicks. If you throw a red dragon at the party, you as a DM should know 'the players will know what this is and what it does'. You're picking an element, either by intent or by error on your part, that is iconic and that the players will be fully familiar with. Asking that their characters play dumb in the face of that is just amplifying the character/player separation. It means that now rather than playing fluidly, the player has to stop at every thought or action and say 'wait, is this based on my knowledge of dragons or my character's?'. The same goes for things like gunpowder or nuclear fission. If you introduce the component elements, its your fault when they trigger OOC knowledge. If a player tries to introduce the component elements, you're under no obligation to say that the world works the same way as their OOC knowledge would indicate.

The wrong thing to do is to say something like 'knowing about nuclear fission requires DC 100 Knowledge(Arcana) and Craft(Alchemy) checks', because then the player will just figure out how to hit that DC.

To put it another way, if you use an excuse to shut something down without stating your actual intent in shutting it down, the other person doesn't know they should stop trying, just that you didn't like the particular way they tried to go about it. So they'll try something else instead. If you're not going to let something work, its best to give the top reason even if its less palatable rather than trying to excuse it with something 4 steps down the list.

mephnick
2015-07-13, 09:14 AM
Your question implies that the experienced player is gaining an advantage over the newer player, and that it is a horrible thing. Isn't the advantage shared with the entire party anyway? If one person uses [knowledge], everyone else learns and gets to use that knowledge too.

I'm just not sure I like the idea of one player dominating another aspect of the game just because he's the biggest nerd. It takes a role away from other players that they may enjoy, and will likely lead to new players automatically deferring to the experienced one instead of forming their own ideas, even in situations where their character should be mechanically superior



IMHO, your example is indicative of poor design. Why would even an experienced player who has never been through the adventure before know where exactly the Queen is? Why is it so bad that it'll snap the rails in half? Why are there rails?

I'll say that you're right in the specific example of published adventures. Otherwise... not really.

Where..did railroading/adventure design come into this at all? I didn't mention needing it to advance the story at all..? I know a lot about the Unseelie Court (because I've run a campaign dedicated to it), but it's still entirely idiotic that a new player educated fey cleric has to slavishly beg my Dwarf Barbarian (in character even, according to Ultron's system mind you) for information on his own race. It just doesn't work for me, sorry.

Flickerdart
2015-07-13, 10:10 AM
Knowledge skills exist so a player can say "hey DM, my character has inhabited your world for decades/centuries, while I've only been here for a few hours. What does he know about this world that I don't?" They create an opportunity for a DM to make the player more involved with the world and the story. To squander that opportunity on an ideological basis creates dramatic inconsistencies within the game world (like a wizard not recognizing his own spells) for absolutely no benefit. It strikes me as incredibly irresponsible gaming.

goto124
2015-07-13, 10:18 AM
To squander that opportunity on an ideological basis creates dramatic inconsistencies within the game world (like a wizard not recognizing his own spells)

Except... Knowledge skills tend to CREATE that problem, plus a few more?

NichG
2015-07-13, 10:47 AM
Knowledge skills exist so a player can say "hey DM, my character has inhabited your world for decades/centuries, while I've only been here for a few hours. What does he know about this world that I don't?" They create an opportunity for a DM to make the player more involved with the world and the story. To squander that opportunity on an ideological basis creates dramatic inconsistencies within the game world (like a wizard not recognizing his own spells) for absolutely no benefit. It strikes me as incredibly irresponsible gaming.

This can all be done without the skills. Nothing is stopping a player from asking the DM questions.

Flickerdart
2015-07-13, 10:50 AM
Except... Knowledge skills tend to CREATE that problem, plus a few more?
In what way? A wizard's player can roll to find out what the blue sparks and ominous Latin chanting means - things that the wizard, in-character, already knows.


This can all be done without the skills. Nothing is stopping a player from asking the DM questions.
Nothing is stopping a player from asking the DM to let him hit a monster. Mechanics exist to determine whether or not that works - otherwise we are playing DM-may-I fantasy tea party.

Keltest
2015-07-13, 10:54 AM
In what way? A wizard's player can roll to find out what the blue sparks and ominous Latin chanting means - things that the wizard, in-character, already knows.


Nothing is stopping a player from asking the DM to let him hit a monster. Mechanics exist to determine whether or not that works - otherwise we are playing DM-may-I fantasy tea party.

The problem comes about when that wizard fails to recognize that the blue sparks represent, say, a spell that they themselves have cast 17 separate times.

Leewei
2015-07-13, 10:56 AM
I think a big part of the issue is the random nature of skills in games. A skilled mathematician should be very capable of performing simple arithmetic repeatedly, quickly, and flawlessly. A highly-intelligent novice would take longer, and might make occasional errors.

In these cases, it'd make sense to recognize that sufficient mastery either reduces difficulty on skill checks, or altogether removes the necessity of rolling (i.e. auto-success).

Many game systems also have regional or situational skills, which quickly become innumerable. This is problematic when skill points are limited in number. GURPS manages this well enough, since a character's skills are increased by spending Character Points in a way that isn't constrained by level. Other systems are more of a challenge.

I'd suggest that situations, regions, and other nouns be given a trait I'll refer to as familiarity. A character highly familiarized with hyperspace navigation systems might not actually be a great mathematician, but he still knows where to plug in the coordinates. A character grew up near the Thornwood knows to keep a fire lit all night to stay safe.

Familiarities initially derive from character background stories. The game master reads these and records a number of them for each background. This rewards players for reaelly fleshing out their characters.

Skills would be more generally applicable. All cities are somewhat similar, so Streetwise skill can be used to make new contacts. Someone with familiarity of a city already knows some people, and knows the parts of town where things get exchanged.

In 4E D&D, a familiarity might reduce difficulty, or if already Easy, might allow for auto-success or "take 10" on a roll. In 5E, familirity might remove Disadvantage or grant Advantage to a roll.

NichG
2015-07-13, 11:20 AM
In what way? A wizard's player can roll to find out what the blue sparks and ominous Latin chanting means - things that the wizard, in-character, already knows.

In your example of a wizard recognizing their own spells, there should be no question of whether or not it works. Mechanics which allow for the possibility of failure in this case only get in the way, because failure in the case of your argument is already given as an example of a nonsensical possibility.


Nothing is stopping a player from asking the DM to let him hit a monster. Mechanics exist to determine whether or not that works - otherwise we are playing DM-may-I fantasy tea party.

Curiously, we manage to play quite acceptable and entertaining games without, for example, having mechanics to: determine whether our character successfully manages to get up in the morning, walk across a level surface successfully, manage to form the words of their native language correctly, remember what abilities they possess, make choices about which abilities to use in what situation, determine what their goals are, determine their emotional state (outside of abilities which force it), etc, etc.

There are many more possibilities than 'everything must have a mechanic' and 'totally and completely free-form'.

jseah
2015-07-13, 11:35 AM
OP: Just to make this more complicated, how about knowing things that ain't so?

Back in the Middle Ages, everyone "knew" that maggots spontaneously arose in rotting meat, and mice would be generated by leaving grain to rot. They also "knew" that diseases were caused by imbalances in the bodily humours. A really well-educated doctor of the Middle Ages could lecture for hours on the four humour theory, but ask him if washing his hands was a good idea, and you'd probably get a blank look at best.
Knowledge pieces don't have to be true. =P

More usefully, knowledge pieces could be a general rule: "dragons have breath weapons". And the exceptions to the rule is another piece of knowledge: "except this species".

Segev
2015-07-13, 11:43 AM
I personally don't see a problem with the Knowledge system as-is in D&D 3.5, as well as other, similar ones: a given piece of information has a particular DC to know it; if you have the relevant Knowledge skill trained (or can roll untrained), you roll and, if you beat the DC, your character knows it.

Things like "trolls are vulnerable to fire and acid," "silver hurts werewolves," and "red dragons are immune to fire" are all things that honestly should be low-DC, and even probably "common knowledge" to your typical adventurer.

As far as the Pirate goes, let him roll Profession(Sailor) for knot-tying, nature-reading, and geography pertinant to doing his job of "being a sailor." Profession skills can and should overlap with multiple others, just not in an all-encompassing way. Use Rope lets you do all sorts of things with ropes; Profession (Sailor) lets you climb rigging and tie sailors' knots in the appropriate place and time, but doesn't really let you apply that knowledge to "similar" (but non-sailing) situations.

goto124
2015-07-13, 11:53 AM
Why is there a Use Rope skill anyway? It may or may not be realistic, but what mechanical purpose does it serve? Balance? Is it at all helpful to make usage of rope a non-auto-success?

Keltest
2015-07-13, 12:05 PM
Why is there a Use Rope skill anyway? It may or may not be realistic, but what mechanical purpose does it serve? Balance? Is it at all helpful to make usage of rope a non-auto-success?

depends on what youre doing with the rope really. I know I personally wouldn't be able to tie a rope properly to, for example, scale a cliff safely.

Joe the Rat
2015-07-13, 12:36 PM
Knowledge pieces don't have to be true. =P

More usefully, knowledge pieces could be a general rule: "dragons have breath weapons". And the exceptions to the rule is another piece of knowledge: "except this species".

Sometimes, player knowledge isn't correct. Now this can be because of specific changes to a world (such as, say, all dragons can learn to shapeshift), but it can also be due to changing expectations between game systems, or using different source myths. And sometimes, the player just flat out remembers wrong. All undead are vulnerable to silver. Troll arms don't grow into new trolls. In both of these cases, there is no reason the characters in question should know otherwise (neither has asked, and "take-10" rolls would not reveal otherwise), so I let the self-inflicted misinformation slide. One is learning the specifics through trial and error (attacking different undead and sees what happens). The other will find out next time he opens his Bag of Holding :smallamused:. But where a character should know something (another character is specifically focused on vampire lore, and knows their common weaknesses), I make corrections.

You can also treat information like rumors. Not everything your character "knows" is true - or at least not entirely true. But if you go this route, make sure the sources are suitably vague or dodgy (Legend has it / an old wives' tale / this one guy at <character class> college / you learned from someone who is secretly the creature in question / was transcribed from a partial inscription written in a language that's been dead for 10,000 years / you heard it from a fisherman). These work best when there's a kernel of truth, but some of the details are wrong. Throw in some mostly correct tales as well. And always, always have some things the character can rely on - even if it happens to be personal experience.

VoxRationis
2015-07-13, 12:50 PM
This has nothing to do with roleplaying though, it has to do with being able to squeeze enough skill points out of a character to invest in an appropriate knowledge skill or buff it up using complex combinations of spells in order to pass your hurdle and justify to you knowing about this thing.

To put it another way, its fine to say 'I don't want this knowledge to exist in the game world' and block it.

And I've done that in my campaigns. But the difference that you have missed is that the knowledge exists in the campaign setting—I didn't erase things from the previously established world in order to patch up the intended tone—it's just that people don't have access to it, because there's no reasonable in-character way for them to know it.



The player is saying 'what happens when I mix sulfur, charcoal, and these white crystals I grew from horse poop?'.
You know, you can just say 'saltpeter.' Using excessively informal language is a cheap rhetorical technique to attempt to erode the dignity of someone's argument, and I'd like to think everyone here is more intelligent than that.


This is the thing with a lot of these knowledge gimmicks. If you throw a red dragon at the party, you as a DM should know 'the players will know what this is and what it does'. You're picking an element, either by intent or by error on your part, that is iconic and that the players will be fully familiar with. Asking that their characters play dumb in the face of that is just amplifying the character/player separation. It means that now rather than playing fluidly, the player has to stop at every thought or action and say 'wait, is this based on my knowledge of dragons or my character's?'. The same goes for things like gunpowder or nuclear fission. If you introduce the component elements, its your fault when they trigger OOC knowledge. If a player tries to introduce the component elements, you're under no obligation to say that the world works the same way as their OOC knowledge would indicate.
So you're saying that famous aspects of a setting or system are automatically known to everyone in-universe? If you played a game in the Mass Effect setting before the events of the first game, would you think it reasonable if one of the PCs constantly made plans based on knowledge of the Reapers? If you did a DM of the Rings-type game, would it be reasonable for Gandalf to just stab Saruman at the beginning of the story, knowing OOC that he had been corrupted?


The wrong thing to do is to say something like 'knowing about nuclear fission requires DC 100 Knowledge(Arcana) and Craft(Alchemy) checks', because then the player will just figure out how to hit that DC.

I was not arguing for the skill-check knowledge system, which has all the flaws shadow_archmagi pointed out, largely stemming from the inability of a d20+modifier to model consistency of success separately from ceiling of capability. I was arguing for the retention of player knowledge/character knowledge separation as a general concept, not any particular system.

goto124
2015-07-13, 01:11 PM
I'm not sure if Knowledge skills are even related to plot-based knowledge...

Plot-based knowledge shouldn't even be a problem in the first place, outside of published adventures, since the 'plot' would differ from table to table, DM to DM, time to time.

Does knowledge of the setting get you that far in most games anyway? You still have to do something about it, to make the rolls, etc etc. And that's assuming the DM didn't change so much as an inch.

Flickerdart
2015-07-13, 03:07 PM
Curiously, we manage to play quite acceptable and entertaining games without, for example, having mechanics to: determine whether our character successfully manages to get up in the morning, walk across a level surface successfully, manage to form the words of their native language correctly, remember what abilities they possess, make choices about which abilities to use in what situation, determine what their goals are, determine their emotional state (outside of abilities which force it), etc, etc.

There are many more possibilities than 'everything must have a mechanic' and 'totally and completely free-form'.
There are mechanics for movement. They just don't involve a check. Similarly, there need to be mechanics for getting knowledge about the world that your character would have and you do not - and while they do not necessarily have to involve a roll, "suggestions" along the lines of "haha no, metagame please" are going to result in gaping plot holes with the aforementioned unwashed barbarian and fey cleric.

Really, the problem with encouraging metagaming of that sort is that it nails the DM to one setting. Personally, I love coming up with new settings that subvert player expectations in different ways to enable new plots. Whether or not some of them know about certain things like long-forgotten gods or exotic, powerful monsters is a very important thing that deserves more complexity than me arbitrarily deciding that someone knows about it and someone else doesn't. The dice, after all, can't help but be unbiased.

veti
2015-07-13, 06:10 PM
In your example of a wizard recognizing their own spells, there should be no question of whether or not it works. Mechanics which allow for the possibility of failure in this case only get in the way, because failure in the case of your argument is already given as an example of a nonsensical possibility.

You're assuming that (a) the outward appearance of casting a spell is the same as the internal experience of it - maybe the caster perceives something quite different from what's visible externally - and (b) that the outward appearance of casting, I dunno, Levitate is the same when another wizard does it - maybe when you do it, the sparks are white instead of blue, and maybe the other wizard learned the Old Pronunciation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciation_of_Latin), or maybe he intones the magic in Akkadian, which works just as well. There are plenty of reasons why you might fail to recognise your own spell, and I for one don't see anything inherently nonsensical about them.

My objection to knowledge skills is the one, already well rehearsed in this thread, about requiring players to spend points on them that prevent them from learning other, usually better-defined, skills. Knowledge-as-inventory is a reasonable description of what I do, but I do still require INT rolls from time to time for the character to put two and two together and realise that a specific item in this 'inventory' applies to this situation.

Darth Ultron
2015-07-13, 08:10 PM
Well fine then. I guess if I do some quick research the day before the session, my half-orc barbarian who's never seen any technology more advanced than a stone axe can jump-start the Industrial Revolution and introduce gunpowder weaponry (at an advanced state) to the setting.

Well, sure you will have some bad players no matter what.



You people are introducing the most feeble of justifications (when you bother justifying yourselves at all) for no longer playing characters who are different from yourselves, all because you can't stand not being able to optimally play against all the monsters in the MM. There are names for this sort of behavior, and they are not flattering. You are not your characters. Your characters know things which you do not, and you know things which your characters do not, just as your characters can do things which you cannot.

Well, I do encourage players to read any D&D stuff they can, plus novels and books on real life things. I want the player of a druid to go buy the book ''plants and animals of North America'' and use what they have read in the game. It is much more fun when a player and character really know things.

But it is not like the player is ''playing as themselves'', I hate that and discourage that.

NichG
2015-07-13, 09:08 PM
And I've done that in my campaigns. But the difference that you have missed is that the knowledge exists in the campaign setting—I didn't erase things from the previously established world in order to patch up the intended tone—it's just that people don't have access to it, because there's no reasonable in-character way for them to know it.

You know, you can just say 'saltpeter.' Using excessively informal language is a cheap rhetorical technique to attempt to erode the dignity of someone's argument, and I'd like to think everyone here is more intelligent than that.

So you're saying that famous aspects of a setting or system are automatically known to everyone in-universe? If you played a game in the Mass Effect setting before the events of the first game, would you think it reasonable if one of the PCs constantly made plans based on knowledge of the Reapers? If you did a DM of the Rings-type game, would it be reasonable for Gandalf to just stab Saruman at the beginning of the story, knowing OOC that he had been corrupted?

In each of these cases, this is a problem of the DM having an unrealistic expectation. It sounds like you want to recapture the surprise and shock of events from those settings by forcing the players to pretend like they don't know. But manufactured surprise is no substitute for the real thing. Instead the experience in a game like this is more likely to be 'I want to mess with this but I'm not allowed' rather than '*gasp* I didn't know Saruman was going to go dark-side!'.

If I DM'd a Lord of the Rings game and I wanted to surprise the players or have a shocking betrayal, I would intentionally avoid the parts of the story that everyone already knows, so that they can actually be surprised OOC too. Or I would run a segment of the story that everyone is very familiar and then go off script enough to create a feeling of unease and doubt in the players as to whether things are the same or not, and then use that to basically erode their confidence in their pre-knowledge. Make it similar enough that it reminds them of things they know, but different enough that they know that its intentional and not just the DM mis-remembering the story. Then at every branch they'll ask 'is it going to be different this time?' or better yet 'what did we do that changed things?'.

No matter what you do with the mechanics, you can't escape what the players know. You can try to stop it from having IC effect, but when it comes to the feel of the game, pretending that the mechanics have resolved it is just going to get you a lot of jaded responses 'yeah, yeah, we know Saruman is evil, get on with it'.

Instead of fighting against what the players know, embrace it and use the fact that they know to your advantage in achieving a good response. Or avoid it entirely by running the game in a segment of the storyline that hasn't already been written.


There are mechanics for movement. They just don't involve a check. Similarly, there need to be mechanics for getting knowledge about the world that your character would have and you do not - and while they do not necessarily have to involve a roll, "suggestions" along the lines of "haha no, metagame please" are going to result in gaping plot holes with the aforementioned unwashed barbarian and fey cleric.

That's not a plot hole, that's just an over-attachment to archetype. That 'hole' can be justified by a convoluted backstory, or by a convoluted mechanical story, but neither is inherently superior to the other. If the barbarian knows because 'oh, I took Able Learner to make Knowledge(Planes) a class skill, maxed out my ranks, took a +2 to skill feat, got a Masterwork quill pen of knowing things about the Planes, and got my buddies to cast some buffs on me and spent a week making every Knowledge(Planes) check I could think of because it might one day come up, before retraining the whole mess away' is that really better than 'Oh, as a child I always used to listen to my tribe's shaman tell stories of the gods. A hundred years ago, our tribe was beset by tricksters who would spoil the rations, scare away the game during a hunt, and otherwise torment us. The shaman's grandfather went on a quest to figure out why we were being targeted, and discovered that the dark fey are under the command of the Queen of Air and Darkness, who rules over the insane in her realm on Pandemonium. So he came back and figured out the right rituals and sacrifices to supplicate her."?

(and yes, you could use the story in the second example to justify the mechanical mess in the first; the point is that the mechanical hurdle to being able to use the story doesn't really do anything to help the story or its consistency - its completely orthogonal to the question of the roleplay in the situation)


Really, the problem with encouraging metagaming of that sort is that it nails the DM to one setting. Personally, I love coming up with new settings that subvert player expectations in different ways to enable new plots. Whether or not some of them know about certain things like long-forgotten gods or exotic, powerful monsters is a very important thing that deserves more complexity than me arbitrarily deciding that someone knows about it and someone else doesn't. The dice, after all, can't help but be unbiased.

It all comes down to intent. If you leave something the same, you can expect the players to be familiar with it. If you change something, you can expect the players to not know. If knowing or not knowing is an important part of the challenges the players face, you can factor that in and give the players many opportunities to learn things that you know they don't know OOC - hints, NPCs and locations which store knowledge, setting notes, etc.

The dice are also biased, they just hide the bias behind a context of mechanical decisions. Deciding that a given piece of lore has X prerequisite, Y difficulty, and is based on Z skill creates that bias, even if there's a die roll thrown in to randomize things. Complexity in something like this is just a screen that makes it hard to trace the actual causality of where the decisions were made. I have a lot more faith in situational human logic than I do in a human's attempt to condense their intent before-the-fact into a set of rules statements. In the case of the wizard not knowing his own spells, a human in that situation says 'oh, duh, of course you should know your own spell', but a pre-baked set of mechanics can only know that that matters if you anticipated it ahead of time and put it in.

Pre-baked mechanics are good for some things. By designing them right, they can make causality very clear in situations where it would otherwise be murky. They can also clarify decisions and exchange rates, so the player can make long-term plans. I'm not saying that you can't make a system for knowledge of some form that falls into the strong points of mechanics. But I think the line of argument so far has been more like 'knowledge is a thing about a character, therefore it should have mechanics' rather than 'here is a form of gameplay that would make knowledge very important and central to the game, how can we design the mechanics to enable this?'. Its coming more from fear of what the players and DM might do in the absence of the mechanic ('The players could metagame. They could have different levels of OOC knowledge which might give an unfair advantage. They could bring in modern technology. The DM could change things and give us no way to know! We need mechanics to make us safe.') rather than any vision of actually making it an integrated part of interesting and fun gameplay.


You're assuming that (a) the outward appearance of casting a spell is the same as the internal experience of it - maybe the caster perceives something quite different from what's visible externally - and (b) that the outward appearance of casting, I dunno, Levitate is the same when another wizard does it - maybe when you do it, the sparks are white instead of blue, and maybe the other wizard learned the Old Pronunciation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciation_of_Latin), or maybe he intones the magic in Akkadian, which works just as well. There are plenty of reasons why you might fail to recognise your own spell, and I for one don't see anything inherently nonsensical about them.

I'm just assuming that Flickerdart is arguing in good faith. E.g. that if he introduces 'a wizard can't identify his own spell' as a nonsensical thing that the knowledge system is intended to prevent, that he would also consider it nonsensical if the knowledge system actually returned that result after all.

Flickerdart
2015-07-13, 10:26 PM
That's not a plot hole, that's just an over-attachment to archetype. That 'hole' can be justified by a convoluted backstory, or by a convoluted mechanical story, but neither is inherently superior to the other.
Backstory? What? No, the barbarian thing was literally "the barbarian's player knows the setting, while the cleric's player doesn't, and if the DM encourages them to metagame by denying them knowledge their characters should have access to."

However, allowing people to arbitrarily write traits into their backstory just leads to Henderson, so even attacking the wrong argument doesn't really serve your cause.


I'm just assuming that Flickerdart is arguing in good faith. E.g. that if he introduces 'a wizard can't identify his own spell' as a nonsensical thing that the knowledge system is intended to prevent, that he would also consider it nonsensical if the knowledge system actually returned that result after all.
Yes, a mechanical system can indeed be used to intentionally create this kind of wizard, if the player wants to - just like someone can intentionally create a barbarian who knows about fey lore. But if it were all in the hands of the DM, he could say "haha no that's absurd, of course your wizard knows what spells look like, and of course your barbarian can't know about pixies" and that would be that.

NichG
2015-07-14, 06:11 AM
Backstory? What? No, the barbarian thing was literally "the barbarian's player knows the setting, while the cleric's player doesn't, and if the DM encourages them to metagame by denying them knowledge their characters should have access to."

However, allowing people to arbitrarily write traits into their backstory just leads to Henderson, so even attacking the wrong argument doesn't really serve your cause.

Generally I find 'if we don't control the players, they'll ...' is an indicator of an OOC problem not an IC problem. If you're playing with people who exploit privileges in a way that cause problems, one option is to just not allow anyone to have any privileges, but the better option is to say 'hey, knock it off, don't be a jerk'. And if you've got a group in which people don't mind and it doesn't cause problems, something like Henderson can even be great fun.

Very few mechanical systems can survive an active intent to thwart them. Design centered around hostile participants who are actively trying to break the system tends to make things that look more like an IRS audit than a game.



Yes, a mechanical system can indeed be used to intentionally create this kind of wizard, if the player wants to - just like someone can intentionally create a barbarian who knows about fey lore. But if it were all in the hands of the DM, he could say "haha no that's absurd, of course your wizard knows what spells look like, and of course your barbarian can't know about pixies" and that would be that.

Or it could all be in the hands of the player, and up to them to say if they know what their own spells look like or if the barbarian can know about pixies. Or, more reasonably, it can actually be a shared responsibility, with players helping each-other out with things that they should know, the DM pitching in, etc, etc.

To bring it back around, just because knowledge could be made mechanical doesn't mean that it should. To justify it, there needs to be an actual interesting gameplay reason for knowledge to be a controlled and monitored resource, and it has to be something that doesn't create more difficulties elsewhere than the benefits it brings in the context of the interesting gameplay.

Since its a bit unfair to complain without giving alternatives, I'll give an example of something that would satisfy my constraints.

An example of this would be something like a system designed to emulate the TV show Supernatural. In that show, monsters are generally almost entirely immune to all but a few specific methods of taking them out, and a significant portion of the conflict in each episode is the protagonists trying to acquire the information they need to either implement a known technique (e.g. finding someone's remains so they can banish their ghost), or finding the right technique for dealing with a novel creature type (so for this guy, we need an oak stake soaked in virgin's blood, okay...). So that's a fairly concrete design target where the possession and acquisition of knowledge is clearly important, and the types of knowledge with gameplay consequences are fairly well delineated. The mechanics have a gating character which are likely to be frustrating (if you can't figure out the weakness, you automatically lose), so that has to be taken into account in the system design to make sure that the upsides don't bring greater downsides with them.

Given that timing also plays a big role in that series, a natural system design choice would be that actually obtaining a given piece of knowledge becomes inevitable once it directly applies to the situation, but the amount of time needed to obtain it varies as a consequence of skill or progress. That is, arbitrarily deciding 'do I know how to kill a leprechaun?' would be blocked out until its relevant, but once its relevant it would be something like 'you will figure it out once you amass X points of leprechaun-related interactions (X set by skill or rolled), where indirect contact is worth 1 point, investigation is worth 2, and combat is worth 1 point per round'. Since each encounter without the knowledge to kill the leprechaun is a risk, there's an interesting strategic decision as to how to go about obtaining the necessary points, as well as interesting tactical decisions as far as timing the acquisition of the requisite number of points with the opportunity to implement the result.

A system like this would not try to address 'does your character know the answer to this physics problem?' or 'does your character know the name of a particular political figure?' because those are not relevant to the central gameplay conceit. In other words, since the answer doesn't matter mechanically, let the player choose to answer it. Similarly, the system would not try to address things like 'can I figure out how to build a spaceship?' because they are, again, outside of the scope of the things which benefit from mechanical support (here, though, since the answer could matter mechanically, the DM must exercise judgement - they are, in effect, being asked to change the topic of the game from 'monster hunters' to 'adventures in space'; that kind of genre shift should not be left to the mechanics, but should be discussed among the participants).

Segev
2015-07-14, 07:40 AM
And, of course, having a leg up on the number of "Leprechaun knowledge points" from an innate and applicable knowledge stat or skill would mean you'd need fewer "Leprechaun-related interactions" to get the needed information, and therefore you'd have fewer risky encounters and fewer deaths of innocents and, in general, get a safer/better overall outcome. Speed isn't everything, but most players like winning with lower cost, even if the cost is purely in-setting civilian collateral damage.

Jay R
2015-07-14, 10:08 AM
Most of the contrived "problems" with the Knowledge skills are automatically solved by any competent DM, by rolling on knowledge some people know, and not rolling on things everyone knows or nobody in the party could know.

If DMs won't make these straightforward calls in this system, they'll find equally foolish things to do in any system you substitute.

Some DMs apply the rules blindly. In any set of rules less complicated than real life, this will lead to nonsense decisions as documented in this thread.

The solution - the only solution - is for the DM to apply common sense.

VoxRationis
2015-07-14, 10:24 AM
Well, I do encourage players to read any D&D stuff they can, plus novels and books on real life things. I want the player of a druid to go buy the book ''plants and animals of North America'' and use what they have read in the game. It is much more fun when a player and character really know things.


This is an entirely reasonable practice and is not what I'm arguing against. What you're doing is giving the player OOC knowledge that aligns with the character knowledge, so that they can use their character knowledge more seamlessly.

mephnick
2015-07-14, 10:33 AM
Yeah I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with "My pampered noble duelist knows the intricacies of displacer beast biology because I have fought many displacer beasts in my 20 years of D&D." Which seemed to be what he was originally insinuating.

Flickerdart
2015-07-14, 12:07 PM
Or it could all be in the hands of the player, and up to them to say if they know what their own spells look like or if the barbarian can know about pixies. Or, more reasonably, it can actually be a shared responsibility, with players helping each-other out with things that they should know, the DM pitching in, etc, etc.
Determining whether or not you hit the monster could also be in the hands of the player.

Jay R
2015-07-14, 01:14 PM
Determining whether or not you hit the monster could also be in the hands of the player.

That works about as well as me deciding that all of you accept my argument as the final word on this topic.

Frozen_Feet
2015-07-14, 03:31 PM
Players and characters have different sets of knowledge. Theoretically, character knowledge is a subset of player knowledge, and the player should know everything their character does, but in a word-based medium, this rarely pans out in practice. Mechanical knowledge skills a la d20 are player failsafes, like saving throws - they allow players access to in-game information where their own knowledge or memory fail them.

But just as well, they're GM saving throws, allowing a GM to firmly state when some piece of information is beyond a character, allowing for detection and prevention of cheating.

Because while character information is subset of player information, the reverse isn't true. The player has metagame knowledge their character has not, and unjustified use of such knowledge is breaking the spirit, and frequently also the rules, of roleplaying games.

Now, whether the justification is achieved by math, prose or speech is matter of taste, but some things remain constant: all of them favor the more experienced player. The player with more metagame skill and knowledge will generally play better and be better at justifying what their character knows, regardless of the form required from that justification.

The only ways around that are firm a GM telling the experienced player "no" while helping the less experienced player, or some other handicap mechanism. Frequently it's not worth the bother.

Knaight
2015-07-14, 03:36 PM
That works about as well as me deciding that all of you accept my argument as the final word on this topic.

Which is the point. The argument made is that the player deciding the same thing for knowledge skills can also cause a lot of the same problems.

Frozen_Feet
2015-07-14, 03:45 PM
If you want examples of said problems and how players deal with them in absence of mathematical rules, take a look at the freeform roleplay section of these forums.

Cluedrew
2015-07-14, 05:11 PM
Determining whether or not you hit the monster could also be in the hands of the player.

It can, I have some friends who are playing a campaign in a system where that is how it works. I have never sat in on one of their games but I think they are having fun.

NichG
2015-07-14, 07:51 PM
Determining whether or not you hit the monster could also be in the hands of the player.

Sure! So could a lot of other things. When you make those design choices, there's reasoning involved. Some target, some particular kind of feel of play, some weighting of what is important and what is not. Not just 'well, knowledge is an attribute of a character, so we'd better stat it'. I could, for example, design a very crunchy system that centers around, say, the social relationships between a group of monster hunters, where the social mechanics are highly crunchy and represent the core tactical aspect of the game, but the fights completely narrative and give the players full agency to describe how they play out in every detail including the possibility of Guren Lagann type 'I throw the universe at it' shenanigans.

Knaight
2015-07-14, 09:57 PM
Sure! So could a lot of other things. When you make those design choices, there's reasoning involved. Some target, some particular kind of feel of play, some weighting of what is important and what is not. Not just 'well, knowledge is an attribute of a character, so we'd better stat it'.
Exactly. You also don't want "it could just be decided by a player, so we'd better not stat it". That argument is meaningless. In the cases being discussed, there is a particular feel of play that is desired - the characters are generally explicitly part of a broader world in which they have lived for a good amount of time, there's a default system assumption of statting things heavily, and more than that the focus is on the tools the characters have access to and the problems they oppose. Essentially, we're looking at a case of the traditional game, and where knowledge skills fit.


I could, for example, design a very crunchy system that centers around, say, the social relationships between a group of monster hunters, where the social mechanics are highly crunchy and represent the core tactical aspect of the game, but the fights completely narrative and give the players full agency to describe how they play out in every detail including the possibility of Guren Lagann type 'I throw the universe at it' shenanigans.
You could. However, it's worth noting that there's been a major change here. The subset of games being discussed aren't about the social relationships between a group, but have to do with the group against the world, the tools and the problems. Knowledge skills could fit into both of these - in the first, something like a knowledge web reflecting what each character knows about each other character would likely help, particularly with a focus on secrets. In the more traditional setup, the knowledge skills aptly work as a tool to draw from in the adventure story framework.

goto124
2015-07-14, 10:59 PM
If you want examples of said problems and how players deal with them in absence of mathematical rules, take a look at the freeform roleplay section of these forums.

I believe our solution is 'use original settings that don't appear anywhere else'. I myself went with 'use a pre-established setting that only you and no one else on the forums are remotely familar with, thus leading to the same result', and I tweak my setting for fun and to better fit the new format.

Heck, I've played with people acting as DMs, who come up with their settings on the fly.

Unless you meant combat.

Frozen_Feet
2015-07-15, 04:04 AM
I meant the use of metagame information in general.

A typical forum freeform game reads like a novel and a typical player hence has knowledge of events and character information their own characters could not possibly know about. It follows that a) freeformers are well accustomed to acting ignorant in character and b) other players are very quick to call a person out when there isn't adequate justification for knowing something.

In order to get a final word on things, typically the originator of the information gets to say who can know it . In case of combat on these forums, the defender gets to say if the attack succeeds.

The reason for such rulings is simple: while freeform roleplaying is cooperative effort (even more so than tabletop games), it is near-universally acknowledged that there can be conflict of interest, and compromise can be an unrealistic expectation.

In contrast, the most destructive and vitriolic arguments in freeform games happen when there is no such ruling, or when conflicting players have equally absolute control over their characters. Hence, the situation cannot be resolved in-game, and has to be resolved out-of-game - a process which is frequently time-consuming and unsatisfactory.

In tabletop games, we have dice and GMs-as-referees to break these ties within the game. In tabletop games, the biggest arguments happen when one party does not commit to the rules of conflict resolution. Ironically, many tabletop players who are disillusioned with dice or their GM push forward the compromise-seeking discussion from freeform as an ideal, without realizing it does not work appreciably better.

And this is the heart of the matter. Someone has to decide. Dice are so ubiquitous in gaming because decision made by them has a veneer of impersonality and lack of bias: so-called fair chance. You can have the GM decide or the players decide, but in the abstract you can't reliably say which is better. If anything, most tabletop games are a mix, suggesting that some parts of a game are better served by human decision-making and others by RNG. You could place the burden solely on a single factor; whether you should is a different question alltogether.

NichG
2015-07-15, 05:20 AM
Exactly. You also don't want "it could just be decided by a player, so we'd better not stat it". That argument is meaningless. In the cases being discussed, there is a particular feel of play that is desired - the characters are generally explicitly part of a broader world in which they have lived for a good amount of time, there's a default system assumption of statting things heavily, and more than that the focus is on the tools the characters have access to and the problems they oppose. Essentially, we're looking at a case of the traditional game, and where knowledge skills fit.

You could. However, it's worth noting that there's been a major change here. The subset of games being discussed aren't about the social relationships between a group, but have to do with the group against the world, the tools and the problems. Knowledge skills could fit into both of these - in the first, something like a knowledge web reflecting what each character knows about each other character would likely help, particularly with a focus on secrets. In the more traditional setup, the knowledge skills aptly work as a tool to draw from in the adventure story framework.

In each case, it comes down to 'what is the reason for this mechanic to be there?', which is the direction I was hoping to move the discussion in.

So far in this thread, the reasons given have been things like 'we want to prevent the players from metagaming' or 'we don't want the players to write things into their backstory to gain power' or 'we want to make sure that the DM gives us the information that we should obviously have'. But these things are all moving away from fears rather than moving towards an actual positive outcome. My contention is that when you design a game like that, as a movement away from an unwanted behavior rather than a movement towards wanted gameplay feel, you tend to get games that feel bureaucratic or stifled.

Especially in something like D&D, which traditionally has a strong streak of power fantasy as part of its core makeup, having mechanics which explicitly act to prevent people from doing things feels backwards. If a mechanic is telling the player 'well normally you could have your character do this, but in this system, you have to pay for the right to do something you could have already done!' that's not something which is enticing, inspiring, or interesting - its just a gotcha.

jseah
2015-07-15, 07:07 AM
In each case, it comes down to 'what is the reason for this mechanic to be there?', which is the direction I was hoping to move the discussion in.

So far in this thread, the reasons given have been things like 'we want to prevent the players from metagaming' or 'we don't want the players to write things into their backstory to gain power' or 'we want to make sure that the DM gives us the information that we should obviously have'. But these things are all moving away from fears rather than moving towards an actual positive outcome. My contention is that when you design a game like that, as a movement away from an unwanted behavior rather than a movement towards wanted gameplay feel, you tend to get games that feel bureaucratic or stifled.
When I had the idea, it was to build a better model of knowledge mechanics, rather than thinking about how it would actually be used. I should have thought a bit longer than half an hour before posting it on this forum... =P

That said, the way I had envisioned it working was to replace a single number knowledge skill. If you were building the system from the ground up, each creature, skill or some sort of abnormal effect, would have included the knowledge categories that encompass various information about that thing.

An example from d20srd:
Bear, Brown
These massive carnivores weigh more than 1,800 pounds and stand nearly 9 feet tall when they rear up on their hind legs. They are bad-tempered and territorial. The brown bear’s statistics can be used for almost any big bear, including the grizzly.

Combat
A brown bear attacks mainly by tearing at opponents with its claws.

Improved Grab (Ex)

Skills
A brown bear has a +4 racial bonus on Swim checks.

Size/Type:
Large Animal

Hit Dice:
6d8+24 (51 hp)

Initiative:
+1

Speed:
40 ft. (8 squares)

Base Attack/Grapple:
+4/+16

Attack:
Claw +11 melee (1d8+8)

Full Attack:
2 claws +11 melee (1d8+8) and bite +6 melee (2d6+4)

Special Attacks:
Improved grab

Special Qualities:
Low-light vision, scent

Skills:
Listen +4, Spot +7, Swim +12

Feats:
Endurance, Run, Track

Environment:
Cold forests

Organization:
Solitary or pair
Truncated for relevance

So depending on the sort of knowledge categories the DM wishes to create, you would group the information appropriately:
Eg.
Common Animals (Geography and Behaviour), Common Animals (Beasts and How to Fight Them)

Where you would divide the knowledge of how bears would react to intruders, where they live and likelihood of finding nearby bears into the Geography and Behaviour portion; and the combat stuff like dangerous up close (read: likes to grapple) and approximate HP into the Combat one.

Other such categories would be: Magical Monsters, Outer Plane Dangers, Primal Creatures (read: elemental planes), etc. etc.

A DM could also create more specialized areas: Large and Dangerous Land Animals
Which wouldn't cover things like the famously dangerous household cat, only more normal stuff like horses, tigers and bears. But the more specialized area would include mention of low light vision, scent and ability to swim. As well as any weakness for things that have them.

Categories of this level could be specific groups, like Familiars and Companions, Dragons, Swarms, Elementals

A person who has met and killed many bears could also have an even more specialized area: Bear Hunter
Which would additionally cover things like the actual attack bonuses, skill ranks and initiatives.


In the realm of things like general knowledge, you could have geographical categories for things that are local, and a sort of mini-tech tree if your players really insist on it for overall knowledge.
Eg.
Local Knowledge (Waterdeep)
Political Structure and Intricacies (Myth Drannor)
Introduction to Alchemy (alchemist fire not included)
Advanced Alchemical Academics (comes free with "explosive gunpowder!" warning label)


And plot specific knowledge would function like reminders of important plot points (this ring belongs to who again?). Frankly, this part is optional.

NichG
2015-07-16, 04:10 AM
When I had the idea, it was to build a better model of knowledge mechanics, rather than thinking about how it would actually be used. I should have thought a bit longer than half an hour before posting it on this forum... =P

That said, the way I had envisioned it working was to replace a single number knowledge skill. If you were building the system from the ground up, each creature, skill or some sort of abnormal effect, would have included the knowledge categories that encompass various information about that thing.


To continue along this line, I think its good to ask the following types of questions and try to make sure that it all makes sense:

What sort of gameplay do you wish to create with this?

What kinds of meaningful choices emerge from the category system, as opposed to the skill system or a null system?

What can you do to make it attractive to players?

Glimbur
2015-07-17, 07:15 PM
I've seen an alternate approach to knowledge skills, where rather than letting the character know something that the rules already say is true, it lets you establish new things that are true. So knowledge(architecture) can find a secret door even if the DM hasn't placed it ahead of time, knowledge (geography) can determine there is a stream or a hill or whatever is necessary for the crazy PC plan, and knowledge (arcana) can identify a relevant magical fact or ritual or even determine that there is a useful location nearby.

This is tricky to balance in power. But it makes knowledge useful and not replaceable by knowledge (metagaming).

Hawkstar
2015-07-18, 12:12 AM
In each of these cases, this is a problem of the DM having an unrealistic expectation. It sounds like you want to recapture the surprise and shock of events from those settings by forcing the players to pretend like they don't know. But manufactured surprise is no substitute for the real thing. Instead the experience in a game like this is more likely to be 'I want to mess with this but I'm not allowed' rather than '*gasp* I didn't know Saruman was going to go dark-side!'.

If I DM'd a Lord of the Rings game and I wanted to surprise the players or have a shocking betrayal, I would intentionally avoid the parts of the story that everyone already knows, so that they can actually be surprised OOC too. Or I would run a segment of the story that everyone is very familiar and then go off script enough to create a feeling of unease and doubt in the players as to whether things are the same or not, and then use that to basically erode their confidence in their pre-knowledge. Make it similar enough that it reminds them of things they know, but different enough that they know that its intentional and not just the DM mis-remembering the story. Then at every branch they'll ask 'is it going to be different this time?' or better yet 'what did we do that changed things?'.

No matter what you do with the mechanics, you can't escape what the players know. You can try to stop it from having IC effect, but when it comes to the feel of the game, pretending that the mechanics have resolved it is just going to get you a lot of jaded responses 'yeah, yeah, we know Saruman is evil, get on with it'.

Instead of fighting against what the players know, embrace it and use the fact that they know to your advantage in achieving a good response. Or avoid it entirely by running the game in a segment of the storyline that hasn't already been written.
Dammit... now I kinda want to run a Lord of the Rings game... where the big twist is that it's Gandalf and the three Elven Ring-Bearers that are the fallen ones, and Sauruman really is the last bastion against Mordor's might.

Why did Sauruman create the Uruk-Hai? Because he needed loyal soldiers he could trust free from Mordor's corruption (Orcs, Goblins, and Trolls are creations of Mordor. Elves, Humans, and Dwarves were corrupted by the Rings of Power. Hobbits were too far away, too few, and really, not up to the task. But hobbits could be trusted.) They're like Orcs(Same/similar creation process), but completely free of Mordor's corruption. Part of the purpose of the fires of Isengard are to burn as hot as those of Barad'Dur, allowing the One Ring to be destroyed without marching it right up to Sauron's front door and handing it over.

The attack that killed Boromir was Isengard's attempt to stop the Fellowship of the Ring by rescuing the hobbits from Gandalf's minions, and return them to Isengard so the ring could be safely destroyed in the industrial powerhouse.

We only have Gandalf's word that Sauruman wanted to use the ring for himself. Perhaps the real reason Gandalf was imprisoned atop Orthanc was because Sauruman saw how Gandalf had fallen, and tried to detain him and stop him from corrupting the Rohirrim to turn against Isengard, weakening the resistance against Sauron's return to power by taking out both the majority of the Rohirrim, and Isengard in one fell swoop. Among other things that happened...

Segev
2015-07-20, 11:16 AM
If I DM'd a Lord of the Rings game and I wanted to surprise the players or have a shocking betrayal...I would run a segment of the story that everyone is very familiar and then go off script enough to create a feeling of unease and doubt in the players as to whether things are the same or not, and then use that to basically erode their confidence in their pre-knowledge. Make it similar enough that it reminds them of things they know, but different enough that they know that its intentional and not just the DM mis-remembering the story. Then at every branch they'll ask 'is it going to be different this time?' or better yet 'what did we do that changed things?'.

This reminds me of something tangential but appropos. My friends and I recently re-watched The Last Airbender (movie), and lamented again how wooden it was, and how Shaymalan did such a poor job with it overall.

We got around to talking about other Shaymalan movies - good and bad - and what made his good ones GOOD and how he'd gotten stuck in the rutt of aways having to one-up his last "twist," but at the same time that The Last Airbender didn't have a twist and was still pretty bad.

We thought about how, while keeping some of Shaymalan's signature style, it could have been done better. It could have, like the RPG NichG describes above, focused on things not covered extensively in the TV series: focus MORE on Zuko's pre-exile and MORE on Aang's pre-freezing. Show us, rather than tell us, what led up to the Agni Kai that scarred him, and spend at least as much time as the episodes devoted to it did on Aang's childhood and how he discovered he was the Avatar. Maybe even weave in the tale of Avatar Roku that came in a later season, detailing the start of the war. Make that the first third or so of the movie, then only highilght a few key points where the gaang was traveling to the northern water tribe.

In particular, spend time meeting Kiyoshi Island and the Kiyoshi Warriors, and then have Suki actually join them on their journey. Take some of the stiffness out of this version of Sokka by playing some UST between him and Suki, without either acknowledging it (and with Katara being alternately little-sister jealous or "girl talk"ing with Suki). When they get to the Northern Water Tribe, continue to ignore the sexism subplot and build up the Sokka/Yue thing, but with more huffiness from Suki, whose friendship with Katara causes Katara to be more involved with it.


Instead of Zhao killing the relevant fish, the twist is revealed when Suki does it. "Suki" was Azula all along, horrifying Zuko when he shows up to kidnap Aang and sees her there. This opens up the way to play more "dating catwoman" style tensions if later movies had happened, since "Suki" really did have an understated romantic/tension thing with Sokka.

(Anybody re-watching the movie could note that Suki never actually appeared on screen with any of the other Kiyoshi Warriors; she always approached Sokka alone until the gaang moved on from Kiyoshi Island. Insert some hints, perhaps, at her ability to firebend at some point, without overtly stating or showing it, and then maybe have her give "big sister" advice to Aang about his crush on Katara that actually backfires; it wasn't well-meaning after all, but MEANT to drive a wedge.)


Perhaps obviously, I feel this worth bringing up because it's a way that one could introduce a twist/surprise by taking a "known" element, and then changing it from the source material in a way that keeps the overall tale somewhat consistent but makes it "your own" (where "you" are your entire table).