The subject came up on the fora some time ago. I thought I’d pass on my thoughts on the matter.



What should a player know? What does he need to know to make his roleplaying experience more enjoyable? When you consider the great detail many RPGs can get into, getting to know the rules comprehensively can be somewhat daunting. Then you have the matter of the setting, which can cover literally millions of square miles and hundreds of nations and peoples in some cases. So what does a player need to know?



Not much, really. Where the rules are concerned, all he needs to know is how to resolve tasks. That is, he needs to know how he determines success or failure in a task. That’s it. Once he knows how to do that, then he has everything he needs to know to handle combat, social interaction, magick, and the rest. The details he can pick up later. (Roll this die, add your skill, and if the result is higher than this number, you’ve made yourself a canoe that’s seaworthy.)



When dealing with the setting, the player really only needs to know his people. That is, the land and the people his PC came from. And not all that much either.



As his PC, the player should know his family, the place he grew up, his friends and enemies, and a bit of his people’s history. A lot of that he can work out in cooperation with the GM. For instance, the GM may have a short history of the PCs nation worked out. In that history he briefly mentions a recent minor battle. Said battle took place within living memory, and a few miles from where the PC grew up. The player adds the detail that a great-grandfather of his fought at that battle, and gained some notoriety by saving a minor aristocrat. The landed knight in question gifting the ancestor with a sum of money and helping him get established as a tradesman in a nearby town. This gives the PC a bit of history, establishes a contact (the knight’s descendent) for the PC, and could give the GM an adventure hook or two he can use later.



The player really doesn’t need to know that much. How the core mechanic works and as much as the PC would know about the world, and that’s it. Later on he can learn more, both about the game’s system, and the world his PC lives in. That will come in due time.



On a related note we have the question of player knowledge versus character knowledge. We’ve all had occasions when a player has used knowledge he had, but his character didn’t, to his character’s advantage. The question has arised, how do you keep a player from using player knowledge to aid a PC?



Remind him that it is player knowledge. That his PC doesn’t know what the player knows, and so can’t make use of it.



Let’s say the player knows that the black tufted common basilisk’s paralyzation gaze will not work on the pygmy mongoose, so he has his PC buy a pygmy mongoose at the market to distract a black tufted common basilisk the party is hunting for a collector. Thing is, his character doesn’t know anything about black tufted common basilisks, all he knows is the red crested common basilisk, and it can paralyze pygmy mongooses just fine. As the GM you need to remind your players that they can’t use player knowledge as their character, just what the character would know.



Which means, you can’t use GM knowledge to aid your NPCs and GMCs. Works both ways you know. You, as GM, know that Malcolm the Paladin is suffering from a nasty phobia, but that doesn’t mean that Reginald the Unhealthy knows this. Which means that as Reginald the Unhealthy you cannot use Malcolm’s phobia against him. Now, should one of Reggie’s henchmen see the phobia in action, and bring news of this to Reg, then as Reginald the Unhealthy you can use the phobia against Malcolm the Paladin, but not before.



All my roundabout way of saying, don’t mix GM knowledge with NPC/GMC knowledge. Just as your players should refrain from mixing player knowledge with PC knowledge. It makes for a better game and better play.



*****



Coming Up: I space things. One of the symptoms of my ailment. So if you remember what I was supposed to write about, could you drop me a line via email and remind me?



Work is proceeding on Tales of the Wolf Folk Sea.The first installment should get uploaded to the Gaming Library this Wednesday at the latest. Instead of keeping to any sort of formal publication I’ll be “publishing” each part when it’s ready. More when next I write. See you later.



Alan