Knowledge Is Power, France Is Bacon

What do you think of the “Know Your Enemy” ability in D&D 5E.2014? If you are familiar with the game, and yet still respond to the question by saying some variation of “the what ability?” I don’t blame you. 

“Know Your Enemy” is the 7th level fighter (battle master) ability, allowing a character to observe or interact with a creature to learn if that creature is better or worse than the fighter across several statistics and other criteria.

Know Your Enemy: Starting at 7th level, if you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its capabilities compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice:

• Strength score
• Dexterity score
• Constitution score
• Armor Class
• Current hit points
• Total class levels (if any)
• Fighter class levels (if any)

This ability stands out from 5E’s heavy emphasis on combat and ability checks. While the parameters of the information feel overly prescribed, its focus on transparently delivering information without requiring a roll of the dice could almost work in OSR.

I have run thousands of hours of 5E, including a player taking a battlemaster character to 10th level, and this ability came up… maybe once? If even that?

I did hack a version of it for a rogue (thief) character, as a bonus “feat” based on in-game achievements and training. That worked out like this:

Superior Case: If you spend at least 1 minute observing or interacting with another creature outside combat, you can learn certain information about its resources compared to your own. The DM tells you if the creature is your equal, superior, or inferior in regard to two of the following characteristics of your choice: 

• Dexterity score
• Intelligence score
• Charisma score
• Perception skill modifier
• Wealth currently on their person
• Total wealth

I thought this was a neat fiction-forward ability… but it got about as much airtime as Know Your Enemy did. Players in 5E only have so much mental capacity to remember all the things their characters can do, and the rhythm of the game tends to push them toward combat and ability check-relevant class features.

What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

In another system, abilities that allow PCs to learn about antagonists before fighting them could be extremely powerful. In a game where knowledge is power – and going into a fight blind can be a death sentence – such abilities would be used all the time. But D&D 5E’s predominant play culture implicitly assumes that PCs can go into almost any fight cold, with no planning or prior information, and expect a winnable, level-appropriate challenge. 

I recently ran an Electric Bastionland one-shot, and while prepping, I noted that the Bastionland book goes to great lengths to emphasize that gathering information about antagonists is one of the most important things the players can be doing. If you start fights without a good sense of what you’re facing, you’ll get pasted.

And it was true! Trespassing near Hog Hall without much sense of who their antagonists could be, my players took some heavy hits from Musty the Mock Badger. But when they fought Abyss, they lured the robotic monstrosity into a trap, and prevailed. Some of the other monsters in the adventure drive this point home even more explicitly; the Ash Wraith (which my players wisely fled from) simply can’t be harmed by normal weapon attacks. The game does not bake in a mechanical solution to the Ash Wraith, as a 5E module would. The players have to figure it out. And the more information they have in advance, the better their chances.

Knowing Is Half the Battle

A different kind of game could put knowledge incentives at the center of its mechanical execution.

Consider a game where the level of danger in each situation is opaque. Sure, anyone can tell that the dragon is more dangerous than the goblin. But if all (or almost all) of the antagonists are humans or human-like creatures, with relatively few obvious indicators of their combat ability, it's less clear. And  moreso if the PCs themselves are relatively weak. A game focused on one-on-one duels between essentially normal mortal warriors would be a good example. 

You enter combat with a finite pool of dice. You can use them all at once, or one at a time, to execute attacks and actions. Combat is measured not in rounds, but in dice. It ends when your dice pool is empty. The antagonist attacks in response to each use of the dice, no matter how many or how few the PC rolls.

If the PC has little or no knowledge of their opponent, they may need to use these dice one at a time, in a series of probing strikes, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This gives their opponent a lot of opportunities to hit back. But if the PC knows exactly what works on their opponent, they can use all the dice at once, potentially ending the fight before it really begins.

In such a system, it would be difficult for players to miss the value of learning about their opponents before fighting them.