I was just re-listening to the 'Glass Cannon Podcast' playtest and have noticed that the players used the 'seek' action to try to see through the town wizard's illusions, applying perception and/or some form of Lore. Later on, the paladin uses Religion to recall knowledge about the lesser shadow, which also requires an action.
Have you glimpsed any difference between these two actions? It seems that both may involve knowledge-related skills and could potentially overlap.
It got me a little confused, as in first edition, recall knowledge did not require an action, if my memory serves me right.
Seek is looking/observing. I may not know what anything about wizardry, but if I look closely at that scary orc, I can faintly see a much weaker human with a beard. (Seek action to observe, presumably a will save to pierce the illusion.) It’s like the old intentional perception check as a move action.
Knowledge checks are still knowledge checks. It’s just an action to dredge up details now, rather than having everyone basically roll knowledge with initiative.
yuck! - maybe I can just about see an action required to share information, but you shouldn't require an action to recall knowledge that's just silly.
yuck! - maybe I can just about see an action required to share information, but you shouldn't require an action to recall knowledge that's just silly.
Weeeell... If you think of a round as a chaotic six seconds, and then the sheer amount of knowledge a hero might absorb... I don't think it is crazy to need a moment to think about it, and it's harder to get that moment while taking other actions. Imagine answering questions on jeopardy while dodging knives the audience throws at you.
I can totally dig it from an immersion and realism stand point. I think my more pressing concern is game balance. From what we know, identifying reactions sounds incredibly important, so you know if you are risking an AoO or something similar. I don't know if I love the idea of this taking an action, but I guess it does make knowledge checks a little more tactical.
I thought they said there are still free actions. Things like dropping a weapon, etc that don't actually take one of your three actions per turn.
I can definitely see it taking an action to "seek", if that's what it's called, to actively look at something and make an active perception check. But if you're just trying to identify a foe you can already see, I would think / hope that would just be a free action. When I look at a dog, I don't have to spend time processing that it's not a cat.
EDIT: I /guess/ I might be okay though if the free action only got you monster name, type and basic information, whereas taking an action got you more detailed information like strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully there would be a skill feat to then reduce that to a free action, though.
My instinct on what this meant, which does not make it correct, is that if you wanted to know something that you do not know simply by looking (or simply by looking at the notes of what has previously transpired), you can attempt a Recall Knowledge action to get a hint. For example, if your character never met a really tall blue-skinned humanoid, you could make a Recall Knowledge check to recall your grandpa telling you about them (and how they hate fire and like the cold).