That’s an entirely reasonable take on it - actually, ‘How Much Fantasy World Knowledge Does Everyone Have?’ might be a good determiner to keep in mind when designing a setting.

I am the verisimilitude cheerleader of my group, though. So - grain of salt and all.

(We always laughed about the standard D&D setting, at least as implied by the Monster Manual(s): the world is filled with Horrible Creatures, almost all of them carnivorous. It’s a wonder that something like a 1HD Human survives at all…)

I focus more on the fun for players than on the Verisimilitude. Unless deep suspension of Disbelief is what my group wants, I won’t make raise an eyebrow to some metagaming that stems from the fact we’ve been playing that game for 7 straight years now.

Now if Yan rolls a Barbarian and writes in his 14 pages of background that he comes from the frozen wastes of Kwaluland and that his tribe fought Ice trolls and White dragons every wednesday afternoons, well I won’t be so generous when he starts gabbing about the best way to kill a Red Dragons.

‘Lazy Metagaming’ is when the city kid knows all about the wilderness, and how to handle the creatures there; things like that. They break, for me, the verisimilitude of the game. It no longer feels like we’re playing living, breathing characters, we’re just using whatever works best within the rule mechanisms.

Sometimes my DM has to stop a player and ask, ‘Okay, why is your character making this amazingly convenient assumption, given that his background and experiences so far lead nowhere even close to that?’ Not quite in such direct language, but the gist is the same.

I’m lucky, though, in that I’ve got a pair of very, very good DMs who don’t abuse they players (characters, sure, but we ask for it!) with the ‘you don’t know that’ clause. Ignorance can and should hurt sometimes, though - skills and knowledge aren’t free. If we all know how to defeat a troll, or whatever, why would anyone spend skill points on Knowledge: Horrible Monsters?

The posts were perfect, I just wanted to have them handy when I start refering to them in future posts!

Thanks so much for dropping by!

And for those who missed it, Ve4 comes from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Yan and I are from Montreal.

Please take a few minutes to fill in either the DM or player questionnaires as I love to see what makes RPG Players/GM tick.

A Wight dragon! That’s such a cool subversion of the trope!

Thanks to Andy Collins, there. My players threw things at me afterwards.

So let get this straight. Demons are evil. So the their worshipers are too.

As far as alignment goes, that’s why I like the Eberron campaign setting. (Well, that and airships.) In it, the default alignment of a race or organisation doesn’t exist, and the setting promotes freedom of choice. You’re as likely to have a benevolent red dragon, or a CE gold dragon, as you are to not.

To give an example relating to the demon cult, however, an inquisitor of the Silver Flame (a LG religion) may very well be LE. Heck, he might have to be, to do the things he has to do as an inquisitor. A group involved with demone is not necessarily worshipping those demons, though that may be what the townspeople think they’re doing. And even if they are, they could believe that this demon is benevolent, and has the world’s interests at heart, even if he doesn’t. All of these make it possible to have LG people associated with demons, and indistinguishable from a demon cult.

That said, when alignment is not a given, you need to run those NPCs as their actual alignment. If a goblin is good, he shouldn’t be pillaging with other goblins. If your demon-cult-ish people are good and expecting help from Kord, they shouldn’t shoo off a Kord-ian.

Now, when you come up to a demon cult, you should definitely be suspicious of them. I don’t blame the party for the fight that started, I blame the DM for not making it clear enough that these demon cultists were not the same as normal ones.

But in other cases, you just need to remember to judge the NPC or creature on its actions, and not on its default alignment.

And if the DM makes that impossible, and has a red dragon burning down a town right before you find out he’s “good”, then I feel sorry for you, as that’s no way to run a game like this.