SubMatirx's page

For the two linked skills, if you fail a recall knowledge check with your first skill you get to retry with the linked skill. However, does this skill have to be relevant to the target of the recall knowledge?

For example, if Religion and Arcana are linked, and you do a Religion check against a skeleton and fail, and retry with Arcana, does it instantly fail since Arcana doesn't apply to skeletons? Or does it still work for Religion but use your Arcana skill roll?

My GM said his interpretation was that it would use Arcana vs the skeleton and fail instantly, which I can see based on how it's worded. Though if that's the case it would make this a very weak and extremely situational skill feat since you'd need to pick two skills that just happened to be the two skills used by the creature you're fighting.

I think skill checks to appraise loot are normally not exciting enough to bother with. But sometimes you might want to use a Craft or relevant Lore check to do a spot appraisal.

For example when you're running out of an angry dragon's lair, pass by it's hoard, and have time to pick up maybe one item so you wanna spot which is the best one to take with you.

Or perhaps you're trying to impress a merchant by picking out the real antique item from among a heap of tourist trash.

I definitely agree with you that appraising can be boring. It has mainly come up as a topic because 3 of the 4 players are constantly trying to steal from each other. So whenever new loot is found that contains gems, art, and other items of not-immediately-known-value, they begin scampering over each other to determine what to grab and appraising (especially with inaccurate amounts on crit failures) has been a fun way to deal with that.

Easy enough to roll a Secret Identify Magic check for those cursed items if they show up and still give out the goods on magic items as they're found. Cursed items are so rare (usually) that it's not gonna come up often anyway.

That's a fair point. The majority of my players are in their 30's and this is their first experience with any sort of tabletop RPG so I'm trying to familiarize them as much as possible with the core rules first before I start introducing additional house rules.

James Jacobs wrote:

And don't be afraid to simply tell the players what items are worth. It might sacrifice a bit of verisimilitude, but the time you save yourself in having to keep track of the value of every single bit of treasure on your own and the complexity to players having to split up treasure when they don't know or can't trust their character's appraisals of the loot they earned is more than worth it in my opinion.

I'd suggest doing that and saving the Craft check to appraise things ONLY for items that aren't obviously of value.

This is how my table has always handled Appraise checks.

I'm curious on a closely related issue. How do people generally handle magical loot? My group usually just gives out the name of an item when its looted: "you find a +1 longsword," or "you find 3 potions of minor healing." But that does skip the item identification rules and makes Detect Magic a little less useful.

I'm interested in knowing if other groups religiously use item identification rolls or make characters use detect magic to find magical items.

Personally, I still require detect magic, read aura, and identify magic checks, because if you use cursed items you still want to give your party a chance at knowing it's cursed. But if you only require an identify magic check when the item is cursed your party will catch on pretty quickly.

That being said, I treat all identify magic successes as critical successes (unless the item is cursed), mainly because it's a pain as a GM to try and dumb down what an item's properties are and annoying to a lot of players. It might be fun the first couple of times watching players trying to experiment with an item to figure out how exactly it works, but it gets tiresome rather quickly.

Am I missing something somewhere or are there no rules covering how to appraise items, specifically gems and art.

I feel like identifying magic items works well enough as an appraisal for magic items since the player would understand its power and therefore have a position to bargain from.

However, if the players find gems or art, and run across an unscrupulous merchant who tries to cheat them, what recourse would players have aside from opposing deception?

This is also relevant if coming across stone or similarly heavy artwork in a dungeon where bulk is an issue and the party needs to determine value in order to decide what they should take vs. leave behind

I've seen a couple of homebrew rules but find it hard to believe there aren't any official rules covering this.

This might be in the weeds, but our group is wondering why there seems to be a discrepancy in horse carry load/STR values.

Specifically, Table 7-9: Mounts and Vehicles, states that a Light horse with a load of 175-525 lbs. and a Heavy Horse with a load of 229-690 lbs. move 1/3 slower (40 miles per day vs 28 miles per day with the load).

This seems to imply that the weight range listed is the medium load for those horses.

And based on Table 7-4: Carrying Capacity, we can reverse engineer their STR with a light horse seemingly having a STR of 14 (174/3 = 58) and a heavy horse having a STR of 16 (228/3 = 76).

However, the stats for these horses would seem to imply otherwise. With a light horse having a STR of 16 and a heavy horse having a STR of 20.
Light Horse, Heavy Horse

Am I missing something? Are there multiple types of light horses and heavy horses? Or is table 7-9 based on incorrect STR values for the horses?