Knowledge System rant:
One of the sillier things about the Knowledge skills is that the DC for determining what the character knows about creatures is mostly dependent on an artificial game construct that has no actual bearing on the world (Challenge Rating). There's some consideration given for how uncommon a monster is in the Skill section (the base DC varies from 5+CR to 15+CR based on whether it's common, standard, or rare), but a high-CR, rare, but quite famous creature, such as a Great Wyrm Red Dragon, is all but impossible to find information on. That goes counter to the common sense that everyone has heard of dragons and should at the very least know the basics about them, and I would have to think that when your world conveniently color-codes dragons by their abilities, it's not hard to get a good idea of what exactly you're facing.
So, what I'm attempting to do here is re-write the Knowledge system as it applies to identifying creatures. The key points of the system are as follows:
The quickest of those key points to determine is the last. Using the SRD for CRs and the Pathfinder Core Rulebook for DC calculations, we get DC 5 for the low end (goblins, kobolds, etc) and DC 42 for the high end (great wyrm gold dragon). So, we want our DCs to range between the rough ranges of 5 and 40, with 5 being for very common, very iconic monsters like goblins, common predator animals, and the like, and DC 40 being reserved for extremely rare, possibly unique, possibly extraplanar, and not-terribly-famous monsters like PF#10's Havero or PF#11's Danse Macabre.
Items number one and two on the list above are inter-related. We'll eliminate the metagame factor by adding in two in-game factors: Rarity and Prominence.
Rarity is rated as follows:
Prominence is rated as follows:
Rarity is easy to define. Rarity measures how many of these creatures there are, and how frequently they are encountered by the mythical average person. One thing to keep in mind is that Rarity says nothing about how much an average person knows about a creature, in and of itself. It simply rates how often an average person could expect to encounter or hear of someone they know encountering the creature. Goblins, for example, are both very numerous and very active in the wilds between towns, so they would get a Rarity rating of "Very Common".
Some other Rarity examples out of the SRD:
Now, to define Prominence. Prominence is a bit trickier; it describes how high the public's awareness of a certain monster is. Even if a monster is rated Very Common, it's quite possible that they're not really "in the public's eye" -- maybe because they like it that way and make an effort to keep themselves mysterious, maybe because they're generally neither violent nor friendly towards people and thus most people may know they exist but know virtually nothing about what they can do, maybe just because they're just not deemed important. There is some cross-over between Rarity and Prominence, in that extremely rare creatures are unlikely to be highly Prominent, or, if they are, the general knowledge of them isn't likely to be highly accurate. One final factor in Prominence is just how many abilities the given creature has; creatures that have many, many abilities will almost always be more mysterious than ones with fewer or no special or magical abilities. Our example goblins from above make no special efforts to hide themselves from public knowledge (though they certainly try to hide from the public's dogs and horses!), are a Very Common critter, and don't have any really special abilities inherent to them as a race. This marks them as a Well-Known creature.
Other Prominence examples:
Alright, so we have both a Rarity rating and a Prominence rating. How do we use these to determine the DC of a given monster, and what does meeting that DC tell us? The base DC of a Knowledge check is 15. To that DC, we add or subtract the number listed next to the creatures Rarity and Prominence ratings.
Goblins are Very Common, Well-Known creatures, giving them a DC of 15-5-5=5. Great Wyrm dragons, on the other hand, are Possibly Unique, Notable creatures, giving them a DC of 15+16-1=30. Trogs are Uncommon, Notorious creatures with a DC of 15-1-3=11; Storm Giants are Very Rare, Obscure creatures, yielding a DC of 15+8+2=25.
So what does that tell us? This depends on how Prominent they are:
There's still DM discretion needed with this system. Failing a check for an Obscure or higher-rated creature by 5 or more should probably yield some mis-information about the creature, with more severe failures yielding more dangerous mis-information. For example, rolling a total of a 10 on a check (and thus failing by 15) to identify a Storm Giant might give the player "knowledge" that Storm Giants are immensely strong but dull and stupid, and that despite their names they are no more resistant to electricity than any other giant. Failing a check on an Obscure or higher-rated creature by rolling a 1 on the check may mean that the creature has been mis-identified completely; if you decide to use this optional rule, give the player information on another creature that is plausibly similar to the one they tried to identify. For example, if the roll of 10 to identify the Storm Giant above was the result of a natural 1 on the die roll, consider describing it as a Cloud Giant instead.
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Very interesting.
Many of the numbers can be calculated in advance, making it simple to produce a "Knowledge Check DC" for each creature.
There's some variability in determining how "Rare" or "Prominent" something is, but those two terms are easily interpreted by a GM giving them a ballpark range for the DC.
If anyone tests this out I'd like to hear about their results. :)
Yeah, one of the intentions with this was to provide a quick and easy way to alter how difficult it is to identify a creature. For example, if your campaign world has several orders of knights who ride around mounted on dragonback, it makes sense that dragons would be easier to identify (at least the types that are commonly used as mounts). You can easily simulate this just by decreasing their Rarity and/or Prominence ranking. It creates a unified system for determining Knowledge DCs without relying on any factors that exist outside the actual game world.
That said, it does increase the complexity of the system a fair amount, as you have to look up three different things to determine how much information the character knows about any given monster, rather than just one. It's not a system for everybody.
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<rant>
Which brings me to an annoyance of the Paizo PDFs: I can't add comments to them. :(
I asked customer service and was told that the PDF can't both be protected from having the watermark removed AND have commenting allowed.
But I don't buy it as an explanation. Aren't there two possible passwords, one for the document creator to go in and change all of the permissions and one for unlocking those things the creator has allowed to be unlocked? If so, Paizo could add a password to allow commenting only and not editing the protected content.
It's a real bummer as I can't add these knowledge check DCs to the PDF as a comment field. :( I'm probably going to slurp the PRD to a local directory on my machine and then use a Firefox plugin that allows me to annotate the HTML pages. (The plugin can be used on remote pages, but the PRD site is sometimes slow during my game times.)
</rant>
Could also just get it printed (Kinko's or some other business center type store should be able to print and bind a PDF for you for a reasonable price) and write notes in the margins or put sticky notes on pages for monsters you're going to use in the near future.
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Neat idea.
And yeah, I tend to agree with the notion that CR should have little bearing on 'general knowledge.' It doesn't matter what it's CR is, the average peasant is *far* more likely to 'generally know' that red dragons breath fire than he is to have any freaking idea what a CR 1 darkmantle is...
Anyone who has grown up in a fantasy world with vampires in it is probably going to have heard all the legends about not inviting strangers in at night, or that vampires can't go out in sunlight (along with some nonsense about them having to stop to count things, or being unable to resist untying a knot, or rising from the graves of the unconsecrated dead), but have no idea what a Formian Worker is, or that it has a hive mind.
Zurai, yours is a profound idea, and I've chewed on it for some time now. But there's one thing I just can't get over: the complexity and length of the thing.
Surely, somehow, there got to be a "perfect" solution between the way-too-easy and simplistic 3.5x/Pathfinder way and the Zurai way. No? Something that satisfies your excellent concept without requiring 1 1/2 pages to explain it? I hope so.
Zurai, yours is a profound idea, and I've chewed on it for some time now. But there's one thing I just can't get over: the complexity and length of the thing.
Surely, somehow, there got to be a "perfect" solution between the way-too-easy and simplistic 3.5x/Pathfinder way and the Zurai way. No? Something that satisfies your excellent concept without requiring 1 1/2 pages to explain it? I hope so.
Note that this system is presented for DMs, and thus has a lot more explanatory text and examples than it strictly needs. All that's needed to use the system are two simple two-column charts for Rarity and Prominence, a slightly larger chart for Information Gained (actually, since it's based on Prominence, you could probably roll it into the Prominence chart), and the text telling you that the DC is 15 + Rarity + Prominence, and you gain an amount of information by meeting or exceeding that DC based on the Information Gained chart.
That said, it IS more complex than the default system.
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I usually just use the following super-dumb breakdown:
0 -> Knowledge of these is nearly ubiquitous, if not so.
5 -> Very well known, but falls just short of ubiquity.
10 -> Somewhat well known amongst the general populace, but many people are ignorant of them.
15 -> Generally only known to the educated, but amongst them is quite well known. Many of the commoners who "hit the library" but aren't otherwise educated may know of them.
20 -> Extremely rarely heard of outside of academia. There might be a handful of the "hit the library" types that know if them, and even amongst those who educate themselves you have to hit PhD level* for it to become common knowledge.
25 -> The kind of thing used by the undergraduate-equivalent student as a "did you know" that no-one among his peers knows. Many PhD level will have heard of it.
30 -> Even PhD holders are unlikely to have heard of it, though it isn't rare enough for it to be hard to find one that has.
35 -> There are probably a couple people that know this. Somewhere.
40 -> Yeah, there is that one guy.
45 -> Yeah, there is that one guy. But he died 7,000 years ago. I think the book he wrote on the subject is buried somewhere uninhabitable.
50 -> At this point, even extra-planar creatures are going "Uhhh..... Let me go.. 'consult' with this *definitely* not divination based magic item."
60 -> If you want to know anything that isn't hearsay about this creature you're going to have to talk to gods, or creatures old enough to be assumed gods. Or a level 20 bard, he *might* know, but probably not.
65 -> Even that level 20 bard has to go "Err... no."
80+ -> Unique. This creature has never been seen before until this very moment. Absolutely no-one, save for an omniscient god, could possibly know what this thing is. But hey, at least it bought you donuts!
* I assume that this is roughly a +15 modifier after a good library is taken into account.