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| #1LocksleyDec 04, 2014 8:03:52 | Myself, my fellow gamers and the members of our local Adventurers League community of about 30, have all been patiently awaiting the Dungeon Master's Guide for direction on how to handle what the adventurers do and do not know about Monsters they encounter.
Either by way of:
However, all of us are currenlty flailing about what information about a Monster the characters do and do not have, and are or are not entitled to. If they know about the Monster, do they know about its powers, spells, senses, resistances, vulnerabilities, immunities, alignment, origin, tendencies, history?
Further, and I admit I have not fully investigated this, we are all curious the awareness of effects that creatures have on them. Do they understand the effect, the source and or type of the effect? What amount of knowledge do adventurers and Monsters have between each other from what they are doling out and taking?
We'd appreciate some guidance either from official WotC personelle, or at the very least what the larger community seems to be doing. In general, our group perfers stricter guidance with things like this over the "just let the DM decide", especially since this is organized public play with rotating DMs.
Thanks |
| #2iserithDec 04, 2014 8:10:49 | There is no "stricter guidance" for the issue you raise. It is up to the DM. I would suggest you and the other DMs come to an agreement on how you want to handle it, write it down, and stick to it.
In our games, I do this:
It's up to the player to describe what he wants to do (recall lore) and for the DM to narrate the result of the adventurer's action. That may or may not involve an ability check.
For my part, when a player describes an action that amounts to them trying to recall lore about a monster, I ask them for their intent i.e. what exactly they want to know. Because assuming we're in a scene where the monster has turned up, I've already described the thing and telegraphed its badness. This alone is generally enough to deduce what it can do, what it likely resists or is immune to, and what it might be vulnerable to without requiring a check. This is just me doing the whole "The DM describes the environment" thing.
So let's say the player then describes his action to recall lore and tells me his intent is to get some hard numbers to back up his assumptions. Fair enough. So I ask myself whether the monster is an iconic D&D monster or something more obscure. If it's iconic (you know, a beholder, a dragon, a troll, a roper, etc.), then there's no check. I just give the player the information he wants to know and ask him how his character knows it. (My intent by asking is to get him to flesh out his character a bit by establishing new details.) If I dont' think it's iconic, then I start thinking about what happens if the player fails the check. Okay, it's a nothic which I don't think is particularly iconic... it's got this cool ability where it steals secrets which could make for a cool failure condition. Now I make the player an offer: "I'll tell you what you want to know if you roll a DC 15 Intelligence check. If you fail, I'm going to tell you what you want to know, but the creature will steal a secret from your mind. You'll tell me what it is and it gets advantage on its first attack roll or contest against you. Deal?" If the player accepts the deal, then he rolls and we play to find out what happens.
I tend to go with a DC 15 because it's a medium DC and that seems about right. A low-level adventurer has probably at most around a 50/50 chance of recall which improves with experience. Succeed or fail, I'm going to give the player the information he wants, only failure is going to come at a cost that speaks to the monster's nature and creates a little tension. I don't see any point in rolling dice if failure isn't interesting. |
| #3SaelornDec 04, 2014 10:54:27 |
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