Knowledge(Common sense)

I ran a game for a bunch of new players today. Part of the issue with dealing with new player and new characters is the lack of general worldly knowledge, along with the potential for one little misstep to mean death (or at least unconsciousness).

Hijinks today included:

• Attempting to slaughter a bunch of unarmed humanoids for the crime of not being traditional PC races in the middle of a multicultural city market.
• Glorious, skyward stretching, marble-fronted temple of Lathander? Maybe it's an evil religious cult! (This is what I get for playing with a bunch of atheists...)
• Oh, he'll 'pray over me' in exchange for donating a bunch of gold? Definitely a cult, that stuff never works, screw this. (I've never had to persuade someone that praying fervently to your deity of choice can heal a broken leg. Scratch that one off the bucket list.)
• Confronted with a dire rat: HOLY SHIT IT'S AN ROUS! Wait- is it going to eat me? What should I do?
• Staring at a 15' wide hole that is going down into the Underdark beyond what even darkvision can see, while the rats in the cellar are already proving to be terrifying: "Maybe we should go down and check it out!"

Everyone had a good description of things, but the important details often got obscured, and general ideas like "Is this thing going to kill me if I get into reach?" were hard to figure out when as far as you know, a Rodent of Unusual Size damn near ate the Dread Pirate, so it could probably do the same thing to you in a heartbeat.

Solution? Knowledge(Common sense) Allow and encourage new players to roll knowledge checks against... that thingy in front of them. If their character happens to have the right skill, let them know they do and roll against that. If not, roll the INT check, and give them some general, common sense information, like "This skeleton is an undead being. Undead are usually formed by necromantic magic and stuff like that. Good clerics can fight them, evil clerics can control them, and on the whole, they tend to be evil."

One of the biggest problems for the poor newbie is not knowing what they don't know. On the flip side, their character might know things that the player doesn't, and the player might be able to reach into that knowledge to save their skin.

It also gets every player into the habit of actually doing things, rather than staring at the rest of the group and hoping somebody will take the lead. That one little step makes them a pro-active player rather than a reactive one. Going from "Well, my knowledge check didn't reveal anything" to "What other methods could I find out about this thing?" is a much smaller jump than doing it from nothing.