This is RPG-ology #82: Knowing, for September 2024.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Knowing, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
Ever find a piece of paper in your wallet, or your pocket, or on your desk, on which is written nothing but an unfamiliar phone number? You might as well toss it out, because you’ll never figure out whose it is. Well, no, that’s not true anymore–we have reverse lookup directories on the web, so searching for the name that goes with the number is no longer as much trouble as it once was. But it is still easier to find the number that goes with the name than to find the name that goes with the number.
I’ve another example. I bought a clock for my wife for Christmas that plays a different Christmas carol every hour on the hour. It went on the wall Christmas day, and was shut down in March (yeah, we keep our Christmas things out pretty late). Whenever it played a song, even if it woke me from a dead sleep, I knew what time it was from the song played. But if I attempted to list the songs, I could not get them all, and could not connect them with the right hour. Although I developed mnemonics for many of them, I still cannot remember what song plays at seven and which at eleven, and I confuse four o’clock as well. Knowing what time it is from the song is an entirely different mental process from knowing what song it is from the time.
Here’s yet another example. Valdron Inc has published two books of worlds (aptly entitled Multiverser: The First Book of Worlds and Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds), and is currently working on a third (predictably titled–never mind, I’m sure you know). Each of the books contains seven world titles. I’ve had a hand in every one of those–I’m listed as writing or co-writing every published world so far save for NagaWorld, and truth be told I ghosted the text for that one, too, from the descriptions of the creator. If you name any title we’ve published, or any world on which we’re working, I can tell you what book it was in or is slated to be in, if it is so slated. But I can’t easily name all seven titles in either book, or all the titles in the works for the next. I often find myself going back through my head saying, that’s six, there’s one more–which one am I forgetting? I know I’m not alone in this. Naming all the James Bond movies is entirely different from recognizing the names; recognizing the titles of The Wheel of Time or The Chronicles of Narnia is not the same thing as being able to recite them in order. Recently the several members of my household who have read the entire Harry Potter series (I [have had] not yet succumbed) could not between them name the second book; and one had forgotten that there were [now then] four. Yet were I to mention The Chamber of Secrets, even many of you who had not read the books would recognize it.
(I feel compelled to mention, as an aside, that there are other people working on worlds for Multiverser use, and Valdron Inc has every intention of publishing these. For The Second Book of Worlds, one author lost his work to a computer crash, and another called me in to help on one project and abandoned another. There are some worlds in which I have no hand currently slated for the next book–but as yet none are confirmed.)
I bring up this observation on our mental processes not merely because I’m always interested in mental process, but because it is very different from the paperwork memories of our characters. That is, any D&D™ magic-user can quickly and easily give you a list of which spells he’s currently able to cast, which ones are in his books back at home, and probably which ones he could learn if only he could find a copy somewhere. Somehow that doesn’t seem natural to me. I’ve written over a hundred songs, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on stage trying to remember just one that I could sing next. It took me a couple of weeks to compile a list of fifty-nine late last year. Certainly I would recognize any song I ever wrote, and could probably sing it once it’s been called to mind (well, there are a couple on which I had trouble remembering the words even when I wrote them, and a lot I wrote in high school that really wouldn’t be worth remembering)–but knowing the song and knowing that I know the song are not the same thing. Why should knowing the spell and remembering that you know it fit so easily together?
Can you tell me the formula for the area of a circle? Do you remember what British General surrendered to General George Washington to end the American Revolution, and where? Do you know the names of the two ironclad ships that did battle during the American Civil War? Who is the current Secretary General of The United Nations? Who was his predecessor? Now ask yourself this: could you pick these answers out of a list? Would you recognize A=πr^2, General Cornwallis, Yorktown, Monitor, Merrimack, Kofi Annan, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Obviously you know what all (or at least most) of those are; but being able to work from one direction is not at all the same as being able to get back from the other. But more often than not players will look up information on their sheets and so know things about their characters that the characters themselves probably wouldn’t know. Seriously, do you know exactly how much money you have in your pocket right now?
They say that defining the problem is the first step toward solving it; but I’ve puzzled over this one for almost as long as I’ve been playing. Once in a while you can do it with a die roll, some sort of intelligence check to see if the character knows what is written on the paper; or perhaps you could require a check of some sort before the player is allowed to look at the paper. But the character is not the player, and will remember things from those papers which the player has forgotten–especially if your game sessions are less frequent–so you can’t take those papers away from him unless you can replace them with something else.
Maybe you can replace them with something else. I have noticed that changing to a new game system will sometimes throw players off balance, because they no longer know what the scores mean with any specificity. What is an 18 in AD&D, an 80 in Star Frontiers, or a 2@10 in Multiverser? We can look it up, and find out what that comes to in very specific game terms; but even if you know that normal human scores run 3 to 18, 20 to 80, and 1@1 to 2@10 in their respective systems, that might not tell you how good you are compared to anyone or anything else. We learn how good that is through play; if we change the game, we lose what we learned.
But even if you don’t change the game, you can distance players from that sort of precise information. I have never known how much I could bench press, and scales on I.Q. tests are notorious for how varied they can be (to the point that Mensa uses percentiles, not I.Q.’s, to determine membership qualifications). We spoke before of the problem of players knowing more about their characters than they could possibly know about themselves, and mentioned keeping secret character information which would be discovered during play. Perhaps you could run a game in which there are indeed very precise stats on the characters, but the players don’t know them. We could have three characters that look like this:
| Stat | Bob | Ann | Joe |
| Strength | Has yet to find anyone who could beat him in a fair fight | Has trouble carrying her pack, or even lifting Bob’s pack | Can manage well enough, but isn’t particularly impressive |
| Dexterity | Clumsy, tends to drop things | Does needlepoint to relax | An excellent marksman who has more than once shafted his own arrows in the bull’s eye |
| Intellect | Often has trouble following discussions | Wonders why everyone else is so stupid | Reads well, but doesn’t always understand everything |
| Constitution | Keeps going and going and going | Has swum a mile and climbed a mountain, although it was tiring | Runs out of breath when doing strenuous activities |
I’m not saying that these are the character stats; I’m suggesting that the referee still has those character stats, the very accurate numbers on which resolution is based, filed in his papers for reference. And clearly we can tell that Bob is strongest and Ann weakest, Ann smartest and Bob dumbest, that Joe has the worst constitution and Bob the worst dexterity–but is Ann more agile, or Joe? And between Bob and Ann, who has the better constitution? The referee knows, but the players don’t–and that’s a lot more like real life.
In talking about how we Map, we suggested that players shouldn’t be told accurate dimensions unless they are actually measuring them. You could do much the same thing with player equipment, if you tackle it this way. How many arrows are left? About a score. How much money do I have? Between twenty and thirty dollars. How much does my pack weigh? Maybe fifty pounds.
Even if you don’t take the papers from them, make it clear that looking at the papers involves your character in in-game action. You can’t check your paper to see how many torches you’re carrying unless your character stops, removes his pack, and opens it. You can’t look at how many arrows you have unless your character pauses to count them. And you can’t know which one of two characters is stronger unless they arm wrestle or something. Create at least a bit of distance between what is on the paper and what the character actually knows.
Because some players will buck against this, it may be that the ultimate answer is to be mindful of this problem as a player yourself, and to play your characters with something of that fallibility in mind. It will make them more real, and enhance the gaming experience.
Next week, something different.