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What?
It's still very unclear what you're actually asking.
Maybe and that’s final.
Generally, breaking walls would be a force open check, if you wanted to get more physical with your code breaking.
I know what breaking the 4th wall is. But I don't know what you are asking.
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No it's that people literally don't understand what you mean by your post.
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I think I get what Laclale♪ is asking. Sometimes proper roleplaying requires information that the players don't have. The players either have to speak out of character to ask the GM for that information, or the characters break the 4th wall to ask in character. Or the GM notices the gap and fills it in.
1: Lie action if you need to mention someone you don't know
Imagine that my players need to slip onto temple grounds in order to steal an ancient relic. The bard decides that they can bluff their way in. They approach the gate and address the guard.
BARD: We are expected. (Out of character: 30 on my Deception check.)
GUARD: Oh, you are the new students! I was told to expect you. But, weren't there supposed to be just two of you?
BARD: The roads are dangerous, so our families sent two armed retainers along for our protection. May they enter, too? They carry our stuff.
GUARD: I guess for a little while. They will have to leave before sundown.
BARD: Thank you, Could you give us directions?
GUARD: Go to the building on the left and see Deacon Pickering. He is the the supervisor of instruction.
Thus, the GM informed the players, in character as the guard, that they can pretend to be students studying under Deacon Pickering. Don't try this on Deacon Pickering himself.
Alternatively, they could break the 4th wall.
BARD: We were sent by the local ruler. (Out of character: 30 on my Deception check. Who is the local ruler? I must have heard his name.)
GM: Duke Arguile.
BARD: Sent by Duke Arguile.
2: Automatic writing feat doesn't need you to know that entity, and so Occultism could break 4th wall in some way
That is just like a Recall Knowledge check. The GM tells the player what the character wrote. The spirit that was channeled during Automatic Writing does not have to identify itself, but the player probably invented a spirit as part of the character's backstory.
3: That 4th wall breaking part was slipped in Lore and you just recalled it
The phrasing "slipped in Lore" is odd. Is this anything more than a Recall Knowledge check with a Lore skill?
4: Intelligent item can be 4th wall breaking character
An intelligent item can be treated like an NPC. I have a story.
One player in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign played Elric Jones, a bladebound magus. In Pathfinder 1st Edition, a bladebound magus gains an intelligent sword at 3rd level. But the player characters were exploring a buried spaceship, an inappropriate place to acquire a magic sword. However, the story in the module, Fires of Creation, is that other adventurers had gone in before them and never returned. Thus, I had Elric find the intelligent sword of a dead adventurer (more details at Iron Gods among Scientists, comment #26). A side effect of this discovery is that the sword, Sci, told them what had killed the dead adventurers. The party decided to avoid entering the adjacent room and encountering those hazards themselves.
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Breaking the fourth wall is comedy, and you cannot have rules for comedy. Guidelines and norms, sure, but not rules.
I think what they mean is usually called "metagaming".
In general, I wouldn't consider this as breaking the fourth wall -- the player character is not addressing the other players or the GM directly. Its not being done for comedic or dramatic effect, its being done because we're players, playing characters. We don't live in that world, "common knowledge" or past character experiences/memories won't be as vivid. We're collaborative telling a story. Players will forget important things that their character's wouldn't. If a player needs help (and its not meant to be a mystery for them to piece together), just tell them.
The way I tend to handle this type of situations
a) The simplest case is the player has their character BSing, and knows they're BSing, so will roll deception. Don't penalize the player for forgetting a particular name/key detail that the character wouldn't have. Don't interrupt the roleplay to correct it, just let it happen. Perhaps you have the NPC laugh off the wrong name "oh is that what's he's being called these days, I always knew him as ...." if you feel its important for the players to hear the correct name again, but its not a penalty on the check, its not an instant fail, etc.
b) The player asks OOC,"hey I forgot the name of the NPC we met two sessions ago, what was their name", jsut tell them. And then let them work it in to their roleplay. Its not a check, its not an action cost.
c) The player is having a great moment of roleplay and invented stuff that wasn't in the scene/campaign, but should be! When players help, by accident, with world building its often wonderful. Even if you have to tweak it a bit to fit, you suddenly have a new faction,npc, location, something.
Breaking the fourth wall is comedy, and you cannot have rules for comedy. Guidelines and norms, sure, but not rules.
Let's not be too hasty. Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme just launched on Kickstarter recently, and that is likely to have some rules for this.
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Breaking the fourth wall is comedy, and you cannot have rules for comedy. Guidelines and norms, sure, but not rules.Let's not be too hasty. Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme just launched on Kickstarter recently, and that is likely to have some rules for this.
That's comedy with rules, a thing that already exists (c.f. improv), not rules for comedy. It's the difference between an instance of making a thing work within a given structure, and imposing a structure around the entire space of potential things.
Comedy, by virtue of sometimes working via "surprising the audience by way of their given expectations" cannot have inviolate rules, since for any given rule there's probably an instance where someone could be funny by breaking it.
Just like puzzle, metafiction needs to break 4th wall in some way.
For example: Your GM asks you to break 4th wall but you don't know what exactly.
- 1: Lie action if you need to mention someone you don't know
- 2: Automatic writing feat doesn't need you to know that entity, and so Occultism could break 4th wall in some way
- 3: That 4th wall breaking part was slipped in Lore and you just recalled it
- 4: Intelligent item can be 4th wall breaking character
Any deeper for 2 and any other?
Some reasons people might find this confusing:
- You don't really need to break the fourth wall.- Why would your GM ask you to break the fourth wall? The idea of the GM just... making that request is incredibly surreal. Normally, breaking the fourth wall is some that a player has a character do as a joke.
- Justifying breaking the fourth wall mechanically is a bit odd. That's not really how lying works anyway? Generally, fourth-wall-breaking is not going to be "canon" in the game, unless you have a character like Deadpool.
That said, if I were to play a character with fourth-wall breaking tendencies, here are a few things I'd consider:
- Ancestors Oracle, but instead of ancestor spirits, it's more of a Twitch Plays Pathfinder situation. The character has many voices giving input, and within the fiction, the voices are "outside" the game. Most are helpful enough to not try to break the fourth wall, but the character still probably gets a stilted impression of another world the voices come from.
- A familiar cursed with knowledge of the "real" world and painfully aware that it must walk the line of comedic relief carefully - too boring, and it will fade from narrative focus like all too many familiars, and cease to exist, while too overdone and it risks the players or GM getting tired of it.