Erroneous knowledge rolls should not exist, and secret rolls should be the optional rule and not the default

[Colette Brunel]

Erroneous knowledge rolls should not exist, and secret rolls should be the optional rule and not the default.

Erroneous knowledge is burdensome from the GM to handle. The GM has to devise something plausible but incorrect, and that takes time and mental effort. Furthermore, when if the entire party tries rolling for knowledge on a topic, then there is a very good chance that at least one party member will succeed, while another party member (usually one untrained in the skill and with a low relevant ability modifier) rolls a critical failure and dredges up erroneous information, so the GM has to feed the party both valid information and disinformation, eating up even more time. It is even worse when someone in the party has the Dubious Knowledge skill feat, making the GM have to devise valid information and disinformation on the spot, and try to make both sound equally plausible. If the GM does not have masterful finesse, the player might even recognize that the information is false and then try to act against it, which probably prompts an argument on metagaming. It is a mess.

Secret rolls are likewise a chore for the GM to handle. I believe that this lack of transparency will lead to feelings of mistrust, disappointment, and lack of control, particularly given the complete lack of verification this method has. So many rolls are secret rolls, everything from Deception's Lie, to Diplomacy's Gather Information, to Perception's Seek, to all uses of Stealth, to every single instance of Recall Knowledge and Identify Magic. That is way too many. From a purely logistical standpoint, the GM has to either keep track of all of the PCs' skill modifiers and anything that could reroll their skill checks (e.g. Lucky Halfling) or constantly prod the players for their skill modifiers, and the GM has to manually roll and note results, usually for the entire party at a time. This just is not practical; the GM already has so much on their plate, so why does the onus of handling so many skill checks no fall to the GM?

This setup is clunky. I think that erroneous knowledge should be excised from the game, and secret skill checks should be the optional rule (see page 293) and not the default. I should know this, because I had to deal with this when running Doomsday Dawn: Part #1: The Lost Star for two groups, and erroneous knowledge and secret rolls had proven agonizing.

[Scythia]

I disagree. I've never found it difficult to improvise an incorrect fact for a player, and the number of secret rolls hardly seems onerous to me. Besides, if a player wants to avoid even the risk of error, there are readily available feats for such.

[N N 959]

@OP - I address a similar concern in another thread which I assume you've already read. I agree that the erroneous information, while somewhat plausible is more problematic than helpful. It doesn't simplify the game for the GM, and without any guidelines on what to provide, you're potentially creating more problems for GM/player interaction.

I also dislike secret rolls and agree that I don't want to have to constantly be looking at players' modifiers. It's a LOT simpler for me as a GM to simply ask someone to make a role. The meta-gaming that results is hardly a problem, imo, it's a game. The players are not benefited by GMs rolling lots of dice. Let the players roll their own dice. The GM rolls more than enough dice, why take opportunities to roll dice away from players? Just to cause more anxiety? Yeah, I vote no.

[N N 959]

I'm going to slightly reverse my position on secret rolls-- it's not always more plausible. Consider Sneak. The PC is going to have a pretty good idea how quiet they were. What they don't know is who might have seen/heard them. When you take the Sneak roll out of the hands of the player, you essentially make them deaf, dumb, and blind to the quality of their own actions. That isn't realistic. For me, it's very off-putting. I know if I stepped on a twig, that's my roll. Whether someone heard it or not is the GM's roll. I don't see how/why that needs to change.

[MMCJawa]

I've never had a problem with it, and I actually see it as adding an element of fun.

[Sebastian Hirsch]

I think secret rolls (and there are a lot of them) are fine as is, particularly since the write-up just says that you can trust your players, not to metagame.
However, I would like to see Dubious Knowledge feat removed, that one really does create to much noise, my players would not have taken it, that had one of the Doomsday Dawn backgrounds not forced it on them.

[Jason S]

Colette Brunel wrote:

Erroneous knowledge rolls should not exist, and secret rolls should be the optional rule and not the default.

Erroneous knowledge is burdensome from the GM to handle.

I completely agree, especially for knowledge.

The GM already has enough to worry about, let alone knowing the Arcane, Primal, Occult, Religion, Nature, and Society stats for 6+ players and applying them with untrained, trained, expert, master, and legendary levels.

Talk about slowing down the game for minimal benefit.

[pauljathome]

Jason S wrote:

Colette Brunel wrote:

Erroneous knowledge rolls should not exist, and secret rolls should be the optional rule and not the default.

Erroneous knowledge is burdensome from the GM to handle.

I completely agree, especially for knowledge.

The GM already has enough to worry about, let alone knowing the Arcane, Primal, Occult, Religion, Nature, and Society stats for 6+ players and applying them with untrained, trained, expert, master, and legendary levels.

Talk about slowing down the game for minimal benefit.

I vehemently agree. I've now played and run several times and they've come up every time.

I do NOT have the rolls be secret because it would just slow the game down WAY too much for me to have to roll 4 or 6 times and look up skill modifiers. I also trust the players to try hard to not metagame.

But, every time I call for a knowledge check everybody rolls. Pretty much every time at least one character fumbles and at least one character succeeds. And, given how close the modifiers are its quite common that the ignorant untrained fighter is right and the scholarly wizard is wrong.

So, there is now the problem for the players of who to believe. The GM also has to try and make up something plausible. In one scenario this afternoon, the group decided to believe the more plausible result (the Minotaurs worship Baphomet and not Asmodeus). But that line of logic means that we'd probably NEVER know that a bad guy actually worshipped an unlikely god because we wouldn't believe the wizard :-( :-(

Worst, in every case, if the players actually decided to follow the false information the only result will be to lose time or fail as they go off pursuing false leads. That really, really is NOT fun.

I'll reiterate. False knowledge, especially as often as it will happen, just delays the game, adds to the burden of players trying to separate player and character knowledge, and IS NOT FUN

[JDavis91]

Personally, I enjoy the idea behind Erroneous Knowledge, and the feat Dubious Knowledge. But I've had DMs who have adlibbed information... that wasn't always plausible (the idea being that the character states the information in such a way the party believes it). For example, had an encounter with a stone golem in a past game, and someone rolled and failed. The DM still gave them one part of actual knowledge (this is before 2E) which was their AC.

But they also gave them the knowledge that Stone Golems love hard rock (the pun... ugh) music.

Cue the bard trying to soothe the Stone Golem to sleep with a rendition of Sweet Child o' Mine. Needless to say, we had to fight a Stone Golem.

As for secret rolls... I'm against it. It makes me lose any sense of agency I have with the character. I can see this being done to prevent arguments (lord knows I've seen a few folks get uppity about failing a roll despite rolling well. I don't mean a 'Jeez, a 26 doesn't pass?' but saying that and then dragging the game off the rails with grumbling and complaints). But it makes me go 'Well, at this point, I'll just give the DM my character sheet, sit back, and be told stories of combat while I play a game on my phone' cause at that point it might as well just move from a game to story time.

I also do know DMs will sometimes fudge numbers a bit. I've done it, not with checks like this, but in combat. For example I had been DMing, the characters came up against a homebrew dragon... 10,000 years old, ancient beyond belief... our gunslinger-wizard nuked it in one shot. Suffice to say I added a bit of health onto that dragon, just enough that the other two players felt like they could actually contribute to the fight.

And... I don't have a huge issue with it... but if they're going to fudge a number for better story or encounter, just have it be on their end? Like, let me get a nat20 on my stealth check... and if that dude sees me I'm going to think 'Meep'. That this isn't a fight I want if they can see me that easily. To me, that will give a character a legitimate reason to behave in a way that they might not normally do so... but it's still ultimately on me what the roll is and how the character behaves.

[ThesetTeSheper]

I've spoken with my group's GM about this previously and it honestly depends on the GM and the group. Our GM personally loves coming up with random storylines or taking something that one of us wrote in our backstories and weave it into the adventure path. So for him, coming up with fake information would not be a stretch.

Conversely I can see where some people will feel put on the spot. Not all GMs have been running games for 10+ years. For the brand new GM whose very first RPG system is Pathfinder 2e, coming up with false information on the spot and not giving it away that it's false information can be a challenge.

As for the Dubious Knowledge feat, I can see that pushing towards the increasingly common "fail foward" design concept. Even if the erroneous information is not the default rule, getting a false fact and a true fact from a bad roll seems like it might be more interesting than getting told "you don't know."

For example, the party is fighting a Babau and you want to know what it's weak to. You fail and you get an "I don't know" and now you probably bumble about hitting it with things until you manage to kill it. With Dubious Knowledge you might get "Well you know it's week to SOMETHING, but you can't remember if it's Acid or Cold."

Now you probably hit it with both, find that it's outright immune to acid, but you were right about cold. You still probably waste an attack throwing acid at the creature, but it produces a better narrative.

[Long John]

Maybe I've just been really lucky with PCs that don't metagame, but I've given out erroneus information on "critical fails"since PF1 (a nat 1 followed by a confirmation "failure").

The most iconic example was when my buddy misidentified a black dragon swimming in a swamp for a particularly ugly and large crocodile. And another time where a string of 3 nat ones lead to me giving the segment of plot dedicated to his backstory to another PC. A third time it lead to a conscious decision on the players part (he failed mass compulsions) that he just always heard talking badgers from then on, and if dominated or compelled, it was the badgers who commanded it.

Moral of the story is misinformation is really easy to make fun - as long as the PCs are good at roleplaying. Even if they know their character is completely wrong - they saw the roll - long as they just go with it.

[Rysky]

Long John wrote:

Maybe I've just been really lucky with PCs that don't metagame, but I've given out erroneus information on "critical fails"since PF1 (a nat 1 followed by a confirmation "failure").

The most iconic example was when my buddy misidentified a black dragon swimming in a swamp for a particularly ugly and large crocodile. And another time where a string of 3 nat ones lead to me giving the segment of plot dedicated to his backstory to another PC. A third time it lead to a conscious decision on the players part (he failed mass compulsions) that he just always heard talking badgers from then on, and if dominated or compelled, it was the badgers who commanded it.

Moral of the story is misinformation is really easy to make fun - as long as the PCs are good at roleplaying. Even if they know their character is completely wrong - they saw the roll - long as they just go with it.

^ this.

As a GM I love Erroneous knowledge and tidbits.

[Captain Morgan]

Long John wrote:

Maybe I've just been really lucky with PCs that don't metagame, but I've given out erroneus information on "critical fails"since PF1 (a nat 1 followed by a confirmation "failure").

The most iconic example was when my buddy misidentified a black dragon swimming in a swamp for a particularly ugly and large crocodile. And another time where a string of 3 nat ones lead to me giving the segment of plot dedicated to his backstory to another PC. A third time it lead to a conscious decision on the players part (he failed mass compulsions) that he just always heard talking badgers from then on, and if dominated or compelled, it was the badgers who commanded it.

Moral of the story is misinformation is really easy to make fun - as long as the PCs are good at roleplaying. Even if they know their character is completely wrong - they saw the roll - long as they just go with it.

I've personally had a lot of fun with these sorts of things too, even without them being secret checks. Botched Knowledge Religion checks have led to some particularly hilarious results for small fry deities or divine casters suddenly seeming much more important.

I guess not everyone likes being put on the spot like that though.

[pauljathome]

It is fine as an optional rule for those groups who enjoy it.

It is atrocious as the default rule.

And it is going to be an absolute killing issue for PFS unless the authors, for EVERY knowledge skill check made state what fake knowledge is gained AND make sure that fake knowledge doesn't actually derail the game. PFS scenarios have to be played in a fixed time period, there just isn't time to go on wild goose chases for 1/2 an hour. And, even then, I expect to lose at least 10 or 15 minutes a session as I gather in all the character sheets, try and figure out the format of that particular sheet (some players character sheets are rather, uh, idiosyncratic and hard to decipher), roll the dice, and figure out the results. That is for me, an experienced GM with math skills. It will be worse for new GMs.

Its notable that the PFS scenarios suggest that the GM NOT use hidden knowledge checks.

But if the combination of hidden knowledge checks and erroneous lies are required for PFS this 5 star GM will NOT, under any circumstances, run PFS2 games. It is an absolute show stopper for me

Edit: I should add that the above IS based on actual experience. I've received and given erroneous information (albeit without secret rolls, players were trusted to not metagame). Players did NOT metagame so we spent some time arguing about what to do (pursue false clue or correct clue) until GM put things back on the rails

Edit2: I should also add that I quite like the game in general. This is NOT a "change is bad" reaction. This does NOT work in general and totally does NOT work for PFS