Player Knowledge and Character Knowledge: Where is the line?

Role-playing is a wonderful medium to channel your imagination and act out your dreams.  Taking up the role of someone else is essential to this exercise because they act as your avatar in the game world.  But where is the line between what you know of and what your character actually does?

Well I think there is no definitive answer to that question but I can speculate a bit based on my own experiences as well as looking at the play style of the original Dungeon and dragons game designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Too begin, lets have a look at attributes.  In Dungeon and Dragons, there are six of them that govern who your character is.  Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution are your physical attributes while Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma are you mental.  The physical stats are far easier to handle in any given situation of the game because once they are set, it’s easy to say that, as an example, a fighter with a dexterity score of 8 is slow to react to any given situation, be it a dodge or surprise, while a fighter with a dexterity of 15 is agile and quick, possibly able to handle two weapons, one in each hand.  With the mental attributes, you are looking at more of an Interpretation than anything concrete.

For example, Dungeon and Dragons uses the assumption that all animals have an Intelligence of 1 or 2 but any player character can have a 3 or higher.  The average human is said to have an intelligence score of 10.  What does 3 Intelligence mean in this context?  Well you can extrapolate that you are nearly animalistic in thought but have enough intellect to actually create a complex ambush using traps.  You could say that you think like a 5 year old would.  You could also use the monster manual to help further this explanation by looking up monsters with similarly low statistics.  Take the troll for example, it has an intelligence of 5.  So it’s slightly smarter than your character with 3 Intelligence, but in what ways?  Well trolls throw themselves into combat without so much as a second thought and will fight to the death.  So this makes them seem rather single minded and slightly animalistic but you can also look at their statistic block to maybe explain why.  Trolls are able to regenerate their wounds and have the advantage of size over most foes.  You can gleam further information from the blocks how they organize themselves.

However you approach the issue of interpretation, the next problem you run into is “How do I role-play this character’s mental stats?”  I mean even with our interpretation, you still find a way to separate your own experiences from those that this character has experienced.  If you look at the century that this game is based in, you will find that, even though most humans have an Intelligence of 10, they will still be uneducated farmers.  So while we had the convenience of a formal education, what would a farmers education be like to constitute him having a 10 Intelligence?  This further complicates the issue at hand because even with a valid interpretation, you have just been thrown a curveball.  Average Intelligence of 10 in our world is much different than that of the medieval fantasies.

So we are no closer to the answer than from where we started from.  Now we have a few examples up so that we can near accurately say what the mental stats mean but we are still lacking the idea of how it’s supposed to play out.

Well ODnD had a simple approach to the game.  Try to cleverly navigate the dungeons to find the treasure at the end.  Things that you had to consider were survival and resource management.  Inspiration, Intuition, and Ingenuity were common in these games and rightly so.  Death was always around the corner.  But how many times did the players step outside there character’s knowledge and into there own.  Well I cannot say, but I imagine that the lines were as blurred then as they are now.  I’m guessing that Gary or any other DM during this time period would have to tell the player when he was beginning to think to much like himself and not his character.  I find that a little subjective but it’s the best answer I can come up with.  I can say though that I have laid out a few good guidelines for determining what each attribute can mean and can maybe even expand upon it, but that’s for a later time.