When the players know too much

[devonapple]

For players who are sitting out a scene or two, a GM could let them act out relatively trivial NPCs (depending on the group's openness to such a thing). Even playing "enemies" can work for the right gaming group. Since NPCs are easy to develop on the fly, a player may even help the GM flesh out a scene this way.

[Sanctaphrax]

I like this idea. I think I might have to try it.

[funnybonzo]

Make the Lore rolls necessary to get *leads* to answers, as opposed to the answers themselves. The player with Lore 6 *knows* that the Scroll of Anuba contains the information needed to make a Rezeluan Mindspider appear in the flesh so it can be confronted. And the last time he knew its whereabouts, it was in the hands of Disraeli Campos, a Wizard-turned-Warlock who went into hiding after stealing this Scroll from Edinburgh. Maybe it's time to collect on that bounty, remove an enemy of the White Council, and make progress in removing the curse on the party's White Court Virgin.

Edit: Recalling "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," the Grail Diary contained all the information needed to retrieve the Holy Grail because even the premier Grail researcher in the world couldn't memorize everything about it. And so many adventures centered around that book rotating through various factions' possession.

I want to come with you to Alderaan and learn the ways of the Force.

[funnybonzo]

I think devonapple has the right idea.  There's a good reason the rule books have references to libraries and time to do research.

I think there should be two levels of difficulty for lore checks.  The lower level is to know "Oh, yeah, I think I've heard of that, doesn't it have some weakness?" and the higher level is "Oh, that's an X! It's weakness is Y!".

Also, if your player is spending fate points on his lore rolls to get them super high, then he's obviously investing in knowing a lot. Let him have his fun with that.  Skill points and fate points invested in lore checks means he's not putting those resources into other areas, so you can find other ways to challenge him where he's weak.

Finally, you always have a few other options, such as splitting the party once in a while so the others don't have the benefit of his lore some of the time.  Or you could find a way to give him a compel to NOT know the answer to something.

Oh, and remember the catch rules - some weakness *aren't* known to anyone who hasn't done research (resulting in a lower catch value). Make sure you know ahead of time how much common knowledge there is about a given monster.

I like this.  There were some times that Bob was unable/very reluctant to provide information to Harry, prompting Harry to go out and do the research himself; I'm specifically thinking of Death Masks when Bob could not give any information to Harry about the

(click to show/hide)

Shroud of Turin

, and in Dead Beat when Bob turned out to be the

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Word of Kemmler

.

It also raises an interesting question about what resources you allow your players to access for gathering information.  Since wizards and technology don't mix, who does the research if magical means of research are temporarily unavailable?  Those individuals might not know all the correct questions to ask/locations to dig for information, and that could also lead to side adventures full of Red Herring^TM (the favored fish of GMs everywhere).

[EldritchFire]

I think that what Samael is trying to say is that "not playing" is not fun. So it should be avoided to the greatest extent possible.

Samael's issue is acknowledged by the core rules on page 262 of Your Story. I recommend that you all read the exchange between Harry and Billy there.

PS: How did the wizard get Lore 6? Did you raise the cap?

But if you remove the time requirements, you get into a situation that the OP is facing. The player made his roll, so he knows it automatically? There has to be a balance between time and success. That's the thing about research, it takes time.

I'm honestly curious, how would you fix the situation?

-EF

[Sanctaphrax]

Honestly, I don't know if I share Samael's issues with this.

If I did, I'd probably just Compel people not to know things.

Failing that, I'd set ridiculous difficulties. Like, 17. And I'd justify them in-story.

"The Wptaksa was sealed in a can 15 000 years ago, and it just got out. It predates the invention of writing, and nothing alive had ever heard of it until last week. Nobody's studied it in that time. The only way to work out its weakness is to work backwards from the flavour of its magical aura, making several dubious leaps of logic on the way to your conclusion due to insufficient information. The difficulty is 17."

[Lanir]

I'm a computer tech at a datacenter. I work with unix systems for most of my work day. It's not wizardry but as far as knowing things and how the research works, it's probably got a lot of similarities. To start with, nobody knows all the details. The only time you know everything about what you're doing down to the last flag or bit of info you need to pass to the commands are when you're re-doing a task you've done a lot and you're doing it by rote. Most of the time you first have to figure out what the problem really is so you're asking the right questions. That's a big important point right there that can trip up even the most knowledgeable person and it's where you may have to be with most of your plots with high Lore characters. Having all the right answers to all the wrong questions gets you nowhere useful.

After you've done the troubleshooting and isolated the problem, you issue the right commands to fix it. If you can do it by rote, cool. But often you'll end up knowing the right command but using the documentation to look up the right way to pass it particular info. Most of the time this is pretty quick. As long as the documentation you have covers that issue. In game, this may be the point where you grin maniacally and tell the players about that lost book that some minor power has and what they'll need to do to get it. Sometimes you don't even know the right command and that takes even more digging. This might be a way of implying that the PCs need some specialized magic they don't possess or a really tricky ingredient.

I've met people with 15-20 years of experience in the field who still look things up. There's just too much to know to do everything by rote. I think the way magic is presented, it's supposed to have the same feel of being too complex to hold it all in your head at once.

Oh, for sitting out... I generally only make players sit out if they're doing something that will add more oomph to them alone. I would feel kind of cheap if I made someone sit out just so they could unravel the info necessary for a plot I presented to develop. If it really required research, I'd just fast forward and pick up the timeline at the end of it, letting the other players do similar prep work. Something that helps the whole group really shouldn't be penalized. Although it would make convenient excuse for why their character was absent if they wanted to go buy food or something.

[Taran]

Thanks for all the good tips.  I'd thought about the time chart...a little late after having the player make a bunch of Lore rolls, but I'll keep it in mind for things like this.

I really like having Lore roles tell you WHERE to find information, then make that information challenging to get access to - or at least have it be the justification for the Lore roll to take "half a day".

As far as having players sit out of scenes, I find it hard not to when the party splits up:

Player: "I go to the docks and talk to the workers to find info"
GM: "Sure, that will take a few hours.  Roll contacts"

 - Do mini scene of him talking to dock worker telling him the rumours -

Meanwhile everyone is watching.  Then I move on to the guy who gone to the Library to do research.
The scenes are short, but yes, some people are not involved.  Obviously, there are times when I just say "time passes and here's what you find out."

So, for me, it's almost the opposite.  The people doing research (and potentially forwarding the plot) get a scene and the people doing nothing get to watch.

I try not to have people sit out of important scenes where there will be conflicts.

[JustinS]

Note that by taking lore 6, he is saying that his character is "The man with the answers", and some times he just should know amazing things. Consider the equivalent investigation 6 is Sherlock Holmes.

That said, 'you know the right book', 'you know who the expert on that topic is, and have been exchanging letter with it for years', 'you can whip up a quick magic ritual to deal with that, under the light of the full moon' all work.

You can also try to move the mystery farther away from the character. Destroy evidence. Give him 2nd hand answers from people who are confused or don't know what to look for. Give him a list of a few options that are possible so far, or eliminate some answers, but not all of them.