One of my gaming groups recently had a bit of a TPK, the fallout from which led to an interesting discussion regarding  some epistemology between myself and my Game Master.

My lines are illustrated in Blue, while his are in Red.

 

So Role playing has a really unusual dynamic when it comes to Player and Character knowledge.

 

The idea is that there is a vast set of things that a Player *cannot* know, but that a Character *must*.

Examples: If I'm playing a Forest-type Ranger, it *must* be assumed that the Ranger knows how to clean and prepare a deer, while Blue has trouble opening cans. A Magic-User has a grasp of how magic *works* that Blue can't have. A Fighter can use a sword to defend himself, while the most Blue knows is that the pointy end goes in the *other* guy.

 

These are basic examples, and may seem fairly obvious. But if we extrapolate to the rest of the campaign world we see that there are fundamental aspects about the Game World that a Player can't know, but that a Character would. We get to things like the name of the local Sherriff to the names of specific flowers.

This might seem obvious and reasonable thus far, but here's where it gets tricky.

*It is impossible for the Player to know that he doesn't know.*

 

We boil it down to this

There are two kinds of ignorance.

A) Primary Ignorance is when someone doesn't know something; but, he knows that he doesn't know. For instance, I know I can't clean a deer, but I know someone else does. I know it can be done, and I just have to find a way to learn.

B) Secondary Ignorance comes when a person doesn't know that he doesn't know. For instance, an Amazonian tribesman has no inkling of what Quantum Mechanics is, so it doesn't even occur to him to ask about it.

 

The Player's knowledge of what his Character knows falls into the latter category.

As a Player, I have no idea how the Game World works, born as it is from the deepest, dankest recesses of a mind so nightmarishly twisted and vile, fueled on the soulless soda-husks of diet mountain dew and and dessicated corpses of stale Cheetos (i.e. the GM thinks it up).

So the Player is forced into a state of imposed pseudo-ignorance, knowing that he doesn't know a thing, but not knowing what that thing is, left ever-grasp at the gray edges of his consciousness.

This is just something that I've been pondering over the last year.

Its a problem that simply can't be avoided, and it's literally only one of two things that can rub me the wrong way about GMing.

Side Note:
The other thing is actually what Red was mentioning about the oil flasks as grenades. When the players can get away with completely stupid stuff, it takes away a critical sense of consequence. But that's another discussion.

But issues that fall into the domain of this Knowledge Gap always irk me. It's really the only thing that bugged me when Steve or our freind Mike GM-ed. It bugs me more when I do it.  But it literally cannot be avoided. It persists.

And whats weird is that the more in-depth a GM makes their world, the more he prepares, the worae the problem becomes. A rigid game world creates rigid world-physics (i guess ill call it that), which makes the problems more apparent and blatant. So the "better" a GM is, the more he faces this challenge.

Its a problem endemic to roleplaying, not any one person

 

Generally, I find discussions about epistemology as frustrating as I find discussions about physics. When they involve epistemology or physics within the context of gaming, I have even less interest. 

Sorry I'm not going to be any help here.

 

Let me give an example of a time that I sucked.

So from the Humblebee adventure, my players cam face to face with a bear lying across their path. Attempting to awaken the bear in order to move it from the path led to a difficult combat.

The image I attempted to convey was a bear in the middle of road with a clear, if difficult, path around the bear, but what the players almost uniformly heard was that their only path out was blocked by a bear. So because of my poor communication the Players were forced into a combat that the Characters would have certainly avoided.

It was only through good fortune I was able to recognize the issue before any of the characters died, and I engineered an opportunity for the Players to use the escape route the Characters would have recognized and used. So I was able to pass on necessary Character knowledge to the Players without too much ret-conning.

 

 

I disagree that the combat would certainly have been avoided; that is to say, the onus of communicating the environment doesn't fall completely on the DM. The players have to engage and ask questions. If they react based on insufficient information, that's their fault, not the fault of the DM.

And to assert that there is a difference between what the characters know and what the players know is, I think, to get hung up in the wrong area. Even IRL, people don't notice a perfectly open door next to a locked one. I know I've stayed on a "bad road" even when there were alternatives.

You're assuming that with more information the players would make better decisions. I disagree. I think the players in your example would still have provoked combat with the bear. Because the players were trying to play a different game than the one they were playing and they weren't engaged with the information you were presenting. They wanted to "charm the bear, like in Pokemon", if I recall your full anecdote correctly.

I think trying to find the perfect balance where DMs and players communicate and what the players experience is akin to a fully-rendered simulation rendered in their mind's eye is a chimera.

Like all games of make-believe, it is ultimately about questions and answers. And human communication will always be fraught with miscommunication.

That is true. I was assuming that the players would have chosen a different path if given more information, and that is a false asaumption. My logic was flawed.

Hmmm...

I still feel that the Knowledge Gap is important, but might be ignoring other, equally important parts of the story.

Maybe we could draw a connection between the inquisitiveness of the players and how observant the character is? So if the player asks a lot of questions, the GM infers his character is paying closer attention to his surroundings, and is more likely to attain information even about things the player doesn't ask about.
I still think its impractical for a player to ask questions about every detail of a room, and I juat feel*some* extrapolation needs to be done, if only for brevity's sake.

It's not, I'll stress, something I do consciously or deliberately. It's a reaction. 

It's the same way on stage, whether in the theater or in a corporate training: I can tell when the audience is engaged and when they aren't. The two different groups don't experience the same performance even if I deliver my lines and hit my blocking the same way each time. When the audience is engaged, I find the performance invigorating; when disengaged, enervating.

I'm not sure if those observations are helpful, but I'm not positive the problem is, fundamentally, one of epistemology.

 

I still come back to a model of two, distinct sets of knowledge.

But instead of a total seperation, based on what you're saying, there is an injection from Player Knowledge to Character Knowledge, and a surjection in the reverse direction. So player knowledge becomes indicative of character knowledge.

I'm still troubled by epistemological edge cases. What does a Player do when he doesn't know what to ask, or that a question is even relevant or necessary? How does a GM handle such an event?

In my experience, I try to be fair based on my subjective perception of player engagement and the resulting inference of character situational awareness. 

If it's clear that there is a factual error, e.g. the party wants to go down a set of stairs that appear to lead up, I'll make a point to correct the fact. But once you're in the realm of a perception that might be factually incorrect but is reasonable, e.g. the fountain may contain an acid but so far as anyone can tell without touching or drinking it it appears to be clear water, I won't stop the players from making poor choices. I'll try to describe the apparent pitting of the stone around the acid-filled basin, etc., but if the players miss that information or, more commonly, misinterpret that information, there is little I can do.

Every DM handles it differently. Rob Kuntz has a habit of ridiculing players who say or do things that are "patently stupid" from the POV of the character and what he ought to know. Matt Finch just smiles, asks you if you're sure you want to do such-and-such, repeats back what you just asked to be certain he understands correctly...and then adjudicates the consequences. That's how Crass the Thaumaturgist ended up getting laundered by Ogres.

I've had DMs who just say, "No. You can't do that. Your character knows such-and-such and would never do thus-and-such." And when I deal with a DM like that, I usually don't come back to their table. It's my character. I decided his knowledge, or lack thereof. I decide his motivations, or lack thereof. His survival is my responsibility as a player.

I endeavor to play fair and if I think something is both "patently stupid" and based on an error of fact, I'll ask for clarification. As I did with Nuglute and the grass and, two weeks before with different group, with the ranger who was eaten by that same patch of grass in almost exactly the same circumstances.

I realize none of the foregoing gives you the clarity or precision that I think you're looking for, Blue. It's art, not science, and that's fine by me.

The best any DM can do is play fair and be as clear as possible. In a combat situation, there's a very different meaning to the term "clarity" than in a leisured situation. I couldn't tell you the dimensions of any of the alleyways I've fought real fights in.

I can't, honestly, remember the layout of the corridors in which I got "eaten" by "Aliens" in a paintball game at 3 AM in college. But I do remember the terror. The disorientation. The sense that up was down, left was right, and everyone was shooting at us. In the after action debrief, we discovered that 95% of our casualties were friendly fire. We shot each other because we all panicked. I had a great time, but that's as close to actual, bona fide combat as I ever want to get.

So, based on my experiences, once combat starts I really don't give players much time or information. But I, usually, don't drop you into a flat-footed surprise situation unless you Knock your way into it. ;)

 

And I don't have a problem with that. I'm honestly not that emotionally committed to my character sheets. I've been known to play around ;)

 

I just wanted to segue into a discussion I thought was interesting with folks who's opinions I actually care about.

 

And you're right, I'm never going to get a comfortable level of precision, because human interaction are never rigorously proscribed. And that's why I like talking about some of this stuff. Epistemology has always been *more* intriguing to me when framed in a game or puzzle, but that's true of almost any topic.

 

I definitely think there's a tug-of-war between the player and the GM over who needs to be responsible for what the character knows (note: NEVER what the character does).

 

Every character will have a back story, but likewise so will every campaign world; and, where those two meet creates a balancing act between the various needs of a gaming group. So at what point does the responsibility for managing character knowledge shift? How abrupt should that shift be?