OSR Spells and Player vs. Character Knowledge
OSR Spells and Player vs. Character Knowledge
Some spells do weird non-obvious things. Like purify water destroys water weirds utterly. How are people balancing what the character knows when you might have a player who never read the Monster Manual vs. a player who has it and every monster weakness memorized? This is where a Dungeoneering skill check or some such would come in in later editions. Do you call for an intelligence check? Not give any clues? Assume the character would know even if the player doesn't? Allow bardic knowledge? Something else?
Allow bardic knowledge - bards kind of get the shaft in other ways so an INT check at a pretty significant penalty or a pretty easy bardic knowledge check.
ReplyDeleteTry to avoid using standard monsters with standard "known" reactions to spells, and maintain flexibility in how I interpret spell results.
ReplyDeleteIn danger of getting all Gygaxian, milieu is more important to me than memorized mechanics. The mechanics are useful for providing interest points in the form of checks and stakes, but the fun advantage that some people get from having a lot of "player knowledge" isn't very collaborative and I don't feel the need to reward it much.
ReplyDeleteBasically my rule of thumb is: if something is cool, it has a chance of working. So of course purify water will fuck up a water weird, I'm not gonna bother to look that up.
Honestly I'm not sure. I've mostly been using more custom monsters, but if I was running a game with all the standard monsters "by the book," I'd probably just tell the player. The interesting trade-off comes from whether the player wants to spend the resource in that way at that time.
ReplyDeleteI find people forget about it and clerics fail to memorize purify water. Like if you call something toad made of blood, or even a foul water serpent the formulas memorized as a 10 year old are forgotten. I've had several monsters with easy to use common spell vulnerabilities, but I haven't seen them exploited.
ReplyDeleteWe're playing ACKS, which makes the memorization part moot. The clerics would just need to have a 1st level spell available to cast. I think I'll start with a description like, "putrid water tentacle" and see if that works. Maybe call for an intelligence check if they need a bone thrown. They'll probably be fighting a dragon at the same time as the water weirds are trying to drown them, so they might have other things on their minds.
ReplyDeleteI've often wondered if there was a place for an INT stat... clearly your character can be no more intelligent than the cumulative intelligence of the player party acting in committee.
ReplyDelete