Dubious Knowledge + Unmistakable Lore.

How does this interaction work? By RAW it seems to mean you always get info on Recall Knowledge with Lore skills. Some feats specify they trigger when you ROLL a certain result. Unmistakable Lore does, for example. But Dubious Knowledge does not.

I feel like I'm missing something, though. This might be too good to be true. Certainly I'd expect people to have hopped on this combo by now but I've seen no awareness.

Not that good to be true honestly.

It works.

Not that good to be true honestly.

It works.

Well cool. Get a universal lore and you can get information on literally anything no matter what you roll. Sounds fun!

Well except that was restricted in the most recent Errata:

The Lore skill was ambiguous when addressing inappropriate choices of Lore as to whether those subcategories were allowed. Change to make it clear they are not: "For instance, you couldn't choose Magic Lore to recall the breadth of knowledge about magic covered by Arcana, Nature, Occultism, and Religion, or Adventuring Lore to give you all the information an adventurer needs, or Planar Lore to gain all the information spread across various skills and subcategories such as Heaven Lore.

Well except that was restricted in the most recent Errata:

Yeah but there are things like Bardic and Loremaster Lore that are universal by default.

How does this interaction work? By RAW it seems to mean you always get info on Recall Knowledge with Lore skills. Some feats specify they trigger when you ROLL a certain result. Unmistakable Lore does, for example. But Dubious Knowledge does not.

I feel like I'm missing something, though. This might be too good to be true. Certainly I'd expect people to have hopped on this combo by now but I've seen no awareness.

On a critical failure, you get 2 pieces of knowledge, one right one wrong.

Captain Morgan wrote:

How does this interaction work? By RAW it seems to mean you always get info on Recall Knowledge with Lore skills. Some feats specify they trigger when you ROLL a certain result. Unmistakable Lore does, for example. But Dubious Knowledge does not.

I feel like I'm missing something, though. This might be too good to be true. Certainly I'd expect people to have hopped on this combo by now but I've seen no awareness.

On a critical failure, you get 2 pieces of knowledge, one right one wrong.

So it's true you can technically get a proper piece of information on anything related to your Lore. But I hardly see a GM allowing you to roll Bardic Knowledge to know if Aroden is dead. During an adventure, you rarely have checks with completely crazy DCs. And if the player tries to abuse it by asking crazy checks, I expect the GM to just answer "You don't know" without a roll.

True, that restriction exists. But this works on anything you CAN roll for, at least.

SuperBidi wrote:

Captain Morgan wrote:

How does this interaction work? By RAW it seems to mean you always get info on Recall Knowledge with Lore skills. Some feats specify they trigger when you ROLL a certain result. Unmistakable Lore does, for example. But Dubious Knowledge does not.

I feel like I'm missing something, though. This might be too good to be true. Certainly I'd expect people to have hopped on this combo by now but I've seen no awareness.

On a critical failure, you get 2 pieces of knowledge, one right one wrong.

So it's true you can technically get a proper piece of information on anything related to your Lore. But I hardly see a GM allowing you to roll Bardic Knowledge to know if Aroden is dead. During an adventure, you rarely have checks with completely crazy DCs. And if the player tries to abuse it by asking crazy checks, I expect the GM to just answer "You don't know" without a roll.

True, that restriction exists. But this works on anything you CAN roll for, at least.

But:

And more importantly:
4. Dubious Knowledge is very bad if you are Lore oriented: it kills all your critical successes (as you can't turn it down). So you need to be both bad at Lores and despite that invest quite heavily on them.

So I'm fine with that, personally. I think it's far from an impressive combo.

I suppose it depends on how good the GM is at bluffing the player when presenting the incorrect information.

If the player actually can't tell the difference between the true information and the false, then I would probably allow the interaction to work - with Unmistakable Lore increasing critical failures to failures and then Dubious Knowledge gives both true and false information.

But for a GM that is bad at bluffing... Well, personally I think that the best solution would be to have Dubious Knowledge marked as Uncommon. The GM could also tweak the order that the feats are applied in - making Dubious Knowledge apply first - so a critical failure would cause Dubious Knowledge to give no information and Unmistakable Lore would upgrade the result to a regular failure, which removes the incorrect information from critical failure result.

But since critical failures don't happen all that often outside of trying checks that really shouldn't be tried, limiting Dubious Knowledge for GMs that have trouble with it would be better.

I suppose it depends on how good the GM is at bluffing the player when presenting the incorrect information.

If the player actually can't tell the difference between the true information and the false, then I would probably allow the interaction to work - with Unmistakable Lore increasing critical failures to failures and then Dubious Knowledge gives both true and false information.

But for a GM that is bad at bluffing... Well, personally I think that the best solution would be to have Dubious Knowledge marked as Uncommon. The GM could also tweak the order that the feats are applied in - making Dubious Knowledge apply first - so a critical failure would cause Dubious Knowledge to give no information and Unmistakable Lore would upgrade the result to a regular failure, which removes the incorrect information from critical failure result.

But since critical failures don't happen all that often outside of trying checks that really shouldn't be tried, limiting Dubious Knowledge for GMs that have trouble with it would be better.

That's great and all, but Thaumaturges come with Dubious Knowledge built in. So unless the GM decides to replace it with a different feat, or just restrict it entirely from the class chassis. There are also backgrounds that grant dubious knowledge like the Street Preacher or Acadamy Dropout. Uncommon doesn't stop a character from gaining feats and abilities granted by such things unless the GM decides to flat ban it.

The best advice for running dubious knowledge, which for the record I don't like as a rule because bluffing is difficult to pull off convincingly on the fly for me personally, I can give is to prepare some general bluffs that can be used for different types of creatures.

So for undead you can pre-prepare a more general bluff to throw the party that sounds reasonable. Say they are looking at a Plague Zombie. You could include that they have weakness 10 to good instead of positive. It sounds plausible at first blush but is factually incorrect.

Generally the GM will know what the party will be fighting, so they can use that to pre-prepare their bluffs, especially for higher difficulty foes that the party has a higher chance of rolling that failure against.

On Topic, I did bring this combo up during the Thaumaturge playtest since it basically removed any chance of a Thurge being unable to use Find Flaws. I haven't watched Nonat1's video yet, but I skimmed the tldr reddit post and it seems that the check made for exploit weakness isn't specifically a Recall Knowledge, instead being a lore check, so neither dubious knowledge or Unmistakable lore would probably apply. I'll have to wait to read the exact wording to make a real decision on that.

But I hardly see a GM allowing you to roll Bardic Knowledge to know if Aroden is dead.

...though in that particular case, it's not so much a problem. I mean, it's a yes-or-no question and you're getting back two pieces of info - one true and one false.

SuperBidi wrote:

But I hardly see a GM allowing you to roll Bardic Knowledge to know if Aroden is dead.

...though in that particular case, it's not so much a problem. I mean, it's a yes-or-no question and you're getting back two pieces of info - one true and one false.

Right? That seemed like the easiest lore to improvise.

Captain Morgan wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

Captain Morgan wrote:

How does this interaction work? By RAW it seems to mean you always get info on Recall Knowledge with Lore skills. Some feats specify they trigger when you ROLL a certain result. Unmistakable Lore does, for example. But Dubious Knowledge does not.

I feel like I'm missing something, though. This might be too good to be true. Certainly I'd expect people to have hopped on this combo by now but I've seen no awareness.

On a critical failure, you get 2 pieces of knowledge, one right one wrong.

So it's true you can technically get a proper piece of information on anything related to your Lore. But I hardly see a GM allowing you to roll Bardic Knowledge to know if Aroden is dead. During an adventure, you rarely have checks with completely crazy DCs. And if the player tries to abuse it by asking crazy checks, I expect the GM to just answer "You don't know" without a roll.

True, that restriction exists. But this works on anything you CAN roll for, at least.

But:

1. You are using a Lore and 2 feats. It's an investment.
2. Your chances of critical failure should be quite low as you are at least Trained and it's a Lore. So outside some crazy cases (Unique monster) it should hardly modify the outcome of more than 25% of your checks.
3. Lores are far from overpowered right now.

And more importantly:
4. Dubious Knowledge is very bad if you are Lore oriented: it kills all your critical successes (as you can't turn it down). So you need to be both bad at Lores and despite that invest quite heavily on them.

So I'm fine with that, personally. I think it's far from an impressive combo.

Yeah, it isn't insane by any stretch of the imagination, but it is pretty great on my Strength of Thousands Shisk who has like 8-10 lores right now.

I think the bigger issue is Dubious Knowledge drives some GMs crazy with the need to improv. Honestly though, I prefer it to the normal crit failure. Giving a player two pieces of information is a much better reason to pause and figure out the false info than just giving the one piece on a crit failure.

I think the bigger issue is Dubious Knowledge drives some GMs crazy with the need to improv. Honestly though, I prefer it to the normal crit...

I personally don't like the wrong piece of information when you score a critical failure on a Recall Knowledge check. It's sometimes a conundrum to make up a believable lie. So, for Recall Knowledge checks that are rolled by the whole party, I consider that every critical failure removes a success as characters are bickering about who's right or wrong.

If one of my players takes Dubious Knowledge, I may ask them to switch for something else. It's really not a feat I like, and the reason why my Alchemist ended up Herbalist instead of Hermit.

On Topic, I did bring this combo up during the Thaumaturge playtest since it basically removed any chance of a Thurge being unable to use Find Flaws. I haven't watched Nonat1's video yet . . .

They took the criticism/concerns about Recall Knowledge to heart and changed Find Flaws to a skill check vs. standard DC for that creature's level rather than tying it to Recall Knowledge. You can get Recall Knowledge like results, but it is not a Recall Knowledge check so Dubious Knowledge (and Unmistakable Lore) does not apply.

But it does apply for any Lore you get, including Esoteric Lore.

That is just awful for players like me who would never take it. Or for GMs who dislike it. Now it's an unescapable feature of a whole Class.

Not to mention it does not synergize at all with things like Known Weaknesses. Or Kreighton's Cognitive Crossover.

I love the Thaumaturge very deeply. But this I hate.

But it does apply for any Lore you get, including Esoteric Lore.

That is just awful for players like me who would never take it. Or for GMs who dislike it. Now it's an unescapable feature of a whole Class.

Not to mention it does not synergize at all with things like Known Weaknesses. Or Kreighton's Cognitive Crossover.

I love the Thaumaturge very deeply. But this I hate.

I still don't like Dubious Knowledge and due this now a class feature I probably homebrew it allowing the player to select Automatic Knowledge instead or add Unmistakable Lore for free.

I mean if you don't like having a free skill feat you could ask your GM to let you not have it.

I don't know why they didn't allow the player to turn the feat on and off depending on the situation.
It would be a great way to have a character suffering highly from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like the Wizard who's very knowledgeable about Arcana and don't hesitate to say he doesn't know when he doesn't know but who has dubious religious knowledge and always thinks he knows about the subject, bringing half truth and misinformation in the middle of actual facts.

I have a particular hatred for any of the "omni-lores" like bardic lore, or the dandy? one and it sounds like this one and how they relate to dubious knowledge.

I like Dubious Knowledge of the flavor that SuperBidi lists -- where its a choice and typically a narrow area and normally not the character's primary thing. But I ran into too many players who thought finding a way to auto fail bardic knowledge with assurance and dubious knowledge (or just intentionally tanking their attribute and using mutagens to make it worse) and proactively choosing to roll on everything was the most amusing thing ever.

I like Dubious Knowledge of the flavor that SuperBidi lists -- where its a choice and typically a narrow area and normally not the character's primary thing. But I ran into too many players who thought finding a way to auto fail bardic knowledge with assurance and dubious knowledge (or just intentionally tanking their attribute and using mutagens to make it worse) and proactively choosing to roll on everything was the most amusing thing ever.

I would quit GM'ing for that game. Straight-up stand up and walk away.

Am I reading this wrong or doesn't Dubious Knowledge apply to all Recall Knowledge checks, not just Lore checks and not Lore checks which aren't Recall Knowledge checks?
And Unmistakable Lore applies only to Lore and only when used for Recall Knowledge.
So if a Thaumaturge's check isn't Recall Knowledge any more, but its own thing, then using Lore or not the feat wouldn't apply.

---
As for Assurance, has it been clarified that using it still counts as rolling? I ask since it does say "forgo rolling", and many abilities use the language about rolling an outcome.
Was the disconnect intentional or a matter from casual language? As in, has Paizo answered, or should we play to our interpretation or tastes?

ETA: BTW, I like the feats, and PF2 Recall Knowledge in general as compared to any other RPG system except maybe the loosest.

Am I reading this wrong or doesn't Dubious Knowledge apply to all Recall Knowledge checks, not just Lore checks and not Lore checks which aren't Recall Knowledge checks?

And Unmistakable Lore applies only to Lore and only when used for Recall Knowledge.
So if a Thaumaturge's check isn't Recall Knowledge any more, but its own thing, then using Lore or not the feat wouldn't apply.

Thauma still uses RK. The Esoteric Lore uses it.

Only Exploit Vulnerability used exclusively to know the greater weakness (if have one) and maybe also others immunities/resistances/weakness in a critical success. Any other information about creature still requires a RK check.

So yes a player still can use Dubious Knowledge + Unmistakable Lore to do an Esoteric Lore check about other characteristics of a creature or about curses and haunts.

Which does make Unmistakable Lore feel pretty must have on a Thaumaturge when you already get all the other pieces of the combo for free. I dig it.

Which does make Unmistakable Lore feel pretty must have on a Thaumaturge when you already get all the other pieces of the combo for free. I dig it.

That's one of the motives that I said in Thauma topic that the Cha as key stat don't feels like a real key stat due Exploit Vulnerability fail checks already gives the main benefit and if the char have Unmistakable Lore makes Esoteric Lore failures basically a success. Due these mechanics a see little reason to do a cha focused Thaumaturge. In general is better to focus in the 3 physical stats instead.

I mean if you don't like having a free skill feat you could ask your GM to let you not have it.

I would love to. But PFS does not allow this :-(