Custom Creations in a Game?

[Darth Ultron]

I did have a co-worker once who was very concerned about the "large cat-sized rats" she saw. A bit of thought later, I asked her if she knew what possums were. She looked perplexed.

Still, for the whole party to be ignorant of the environment requires some heavy-handed setup or some ridiculous odds.

I'm fine with players knowing..or thinking they know whatever they want to. I even believe in the ''reverse metagaming'' where if the player knows X, I'm fine with the character also knowing X.

And it's loads of fun, even with just real world animals in a game. Like a player have a character running from a constructor snake or a bear and will have the character climb a tree and they will say ''ah, the animal can't get me now!''. And then you have all the stuff in the game rules that they, sort of remember too....

I mean, the reason my signature character Quertus is a worlds-famous author is because be goes around testing everything he encounters, and records his findings. He develops custom spells to facilitate this process. Quertus is bloody dedicated to ignorance! I'd contend that he's what Expert level ignorance looks like.

It is impossible to even fake the idea that a character is super smart, other then the ''sigh, stop the game, DM tell me what my character knows''. I know a lot of gamers ''love'' to play the game this way, but to me it's just annoying.

Worse, you can't have a player ''fake being an all knowing expert'' just by having the DM tell them a sentence or two. So even if you do it this way, there will be massive holes in the character and player knowledge. Unless you really do want to stop the game and really do nothing for the next several hours other then ''X 101 everything you wanted to know about x''.

So I take the other route in my games: your character knows next to nothing (but does know anything the players knows). Both the player and character will learn things Slowly, through game play. You won't be penalized outside the game if you ''don't know something'', though sure the character is going to have wacky, fun encounters and adventures based around lack of knowledge...but that is part of the fun of the game.

Also, thought it's rare, I'm more then happy to give a good player that wants to play an 'expert type' handouts and information. Like during the game the character might read a book about X, and then later I'd e-mail them the ''cliff notes'' of what the character read. Then come the next game the player is free to use that information.

A LOT of movies and TV shows do the ''Clueless character'' to great effect, and I think it is worth emulating. Harry Potter is a great example, the poor guy is clueless, even after several books/movies. But it does nicely let the author/writer do the ''oh a portkey is.....''. Even shows where ''everyone is a super highly trained expert'', like Star Trek, has do have the silly thing where Once an Episode a ''super highly trained Starfleet expert'' who should know, will stop and ask ''oh, what is X?'', just so another character can explain it to the viewers/audience. Just think of the famous time on ST:TNG Disaster when Consular Troi did not know what a ''core breech'' was and had to have others explain to her ''it means the ship will explode''.

This is a fairly key point - the extent to which one changes the system is highly system specific. D&D goes across a pretty wide range depending on edition, and that makes the central questions of the thread edition dependent. There's a few constants (custom monsters are totally fine as a general class, although implementations can be bad), but the extent to which the rules are rules as opposed to rough guidelines varies.

Well, mostly I stick to ''theme '' things. The Demon Cultists have a Demon Thug class, some demonic spells and demonic items. Really just adding to what is there. And I do love the more simple items, like Grease Darts(oh, they explode and cover a 5 foot square) that the Cult of Jubilex has.