This isn't an issue with metagaming; my players are all very good about that, and the only time THAT'S become a problem is concerning just what the characters would be able to know/guess about the odd computerterminal/circuit breaker/etc. they come across in the ruins of the Iron Gods AP.
My issue is with Knowledge check DCs. Does anyone else feel this way?
By RAW, the DC for identifying the abilities and weaknesses is 10 + CR. When the game begins, any character that put ranks in a class-skill knowledge is going to have a minimum +4, which is an approximate 78% for a CR1 monster, close to 93% if another person in the party has the same bonus and uses the skill (if I'm doing my math right, and I may be off here, correct me if I am).
Identifying the weakness of an "Epic" enemy (CR is APL +3) is 50%, 75% if a second player has the skill, and this is not accounting for positive INT modifiers. With those, it becomes even easier.
I can't be the only one that feels this is a bit much. In my group, the monster is successfully identified in-character nearly every time (the one time it didnt happen recently was when the Cleric player was absent from the group and they had to fight undead creatures).
Telling them how to quickly kill the boss almost every time feels... wrong. I have half a mind to jack up the identify DCs but I only ever change rules as a last resort, after a long series of issues (which this is starting to become, but isn't quite enough yet)
Thoughts?
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It's a little more complicated than that, it's one additional piece of info for every 5 points by which they beat the DC. You can use a base of 10, or 5 or 15 depending on the rarity of the monster in your campaign
You can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster's CR. For common monsters, such as goblins, the DC of this check equals 5 + the monster's CR. For particularly rare monsters, such as the tarrasque, the DC of this check equals 15 + the monster's CR, or more. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall another piece of useful information
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You're right about the % chance of knowing SOMETHING about them - but as Berti points out - you have a much lower chance of knowing much more.
For example - my standard 1st question is to ask about special defenses - so that I know about DR or resistances. Second is special attacks, so I know about Swallow Whole etc. Or perhaps magical abilities. Etc.
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You can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster's CR. For common monsters, such as goblins, the DC of this check equals 5 + the monster's CR. For particularly rare monsters, such as the tarrasque, the DC of this check equals 15 + the monster's CR, or more. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall another piece of useful information
I've bolded the relevant part. A successful knowledge check doesn't allow a player to know any piece of information they want to know, just a "relevant" piece of information. When I adjudicate these types of Knowledge checks, I give them (what I consider to be) the more common pieces of information first and reserve the rarer pieces for higher rolls.
For example, if my players encountered a Revenant, and rolled a 17 on their Knowledge (Religion) check, I'd start out with "Revenants are corporeal undead fueled by the need for vegeance against the one who murdered them" instead of "Revenants are sometimes overcome with helplessness when they encounter their own reflection."
-Skeld
It's a little more complicated than that, it's one additional piece of info for every 5 points by which they beat the DC. You can use a base of 10, or 5 or 15 depending on the rarity of the monster in your campaign
You can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster's CR. For common monsters, such as goblins, the DC of this check equals 5 + the monster's CR. For particularly rare monsters, such as the tarrasque, the DC of this check equals 15 + the monster's CR, or more. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall another piece of useful information
I knew I had to be missing something.
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It's also table variation. Players asking a number of questions seems to be the most popular.
When more than 1 player makes a high enuff roll, they just happen to all ask different questions as to gather the maxed out info they can. (Meta gaming);
1 way would to number off all the different things to know and have players roll to see what they recall. Also if a creature has 4 imunities, would knowing all 4 with 1 question be a bit of useful info or is knowing all 4 more than a bit of useful info. Also recalling that the creature had darkvision might not be useful but that it has constant see invisible would be.
Possible that 3 players make a high enuff roll that they ea. recall 2 bits of info ea but only learn 4 as they recall same thing. Perhaps not as player friendly but more possible it can happen.
Would make it more challenging that players would not have all the info needed to make encounter so easy. For me, as a player that takes all the fun out of it if I know all about the enemy all the time.
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Telling them how to quickly kill the boss almost every time feels... wrong. I have half a mind to jack up the identify DCs but I only ever change rules as a last resort, after a long series of issues (which this is starting to become, but isn't quite enough yet)Thoughts?
I feel exactly the opposite way. Especially when we're talking about a group of professional adventurers (like the Pathfinder Society), it should be extremely rare that they encounter monsters that they don't know everything about. That's a basic, common sense, survival tactic. If what you don't know can kill you, you make sure you learn everything you can.
In professional sports, for example, people study film of their opponents for hours on end to learn what to expect from opposing teams and even specific opposing players. In the military, people are trained for endless hours on being able to identify enemy equipment and on the appropriate way to respond to it.
Any character who made it to second level should have bought a copy of all of the bestiaries or their equivalent and should have memorized it. "A slim half-elf with ram's horns? That's an erodaemon, which is immune to acid, but has DR 10/good or silver." This is no less survival information than the "don't eat those berries" that literally every scout troop is taught.
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I feel exactly the opposite way. Especially when we're talking about a group of professional adventurers (like the Pathfinder Society), it should be extremely rare that they encounter monsters that they don't know everything about. That's a basic, common sense, survival tactic. If what you don't know can kill you, you make sure you learn everything you can.
Much of it depends how mystical the monsters you run into are, much of which is a world-building issue. If it's Forgotten Realms and there are magical beasties around every corner and everyone knows about them - then I totally agree that adventurers should know about all but the rarest.
But if you're in a world where magical creatures are rare - and the party is the chosen ones who're nearly the only ones who actually fight them - they may not know much about them. Or only the wizard who has studied ancient tomes, or the bard who has heard of them in ancient lore etc
I think that the whole knowledge skill system assumes the latter situation, or at least for it to be on that side of the spectrum. I figure Golarion is somewhere near the middle. It's not as crazy as Forgotten Realms - but the beasties aren't super rare either.
How I handle it is that the knowledge check is just a matter of, at a minimum, knowing the name of the critter and any attacks of some legend, such as dragon having a breath attack or a Vampire's draining bite. Only Reds are renowned for fire breath, other types, not-so-forthcoming.
Higher results on the die roll will reveal piecemeal information, starting with the most general, like whether it's an undead, abberation, outsider, etc, and perhaps a more dangerous capability, like Behir's breath attack or swallow whole
Even with a good knowledge check, I will cherry pick what they remember on the spot unless it's an extraordinarily good check result. Like a single immunity, vulnerability, or attack vector (like mind-affecting). In 3.x I had fun results when I told a cleric that an iron golem was affected by electricity and fire, but I didn't tell which was a vulnerability and which was the boost. Invariably, he dropped a triple-meta fire strike and made the fight much more interesting and cinematic, yet still not near TPK territory.
It's important to give the players a helpful leg up without simply handing them the monster manual entry. Some things, like Undead, are well known to be vulnerable to holy magic and positive energy, so that goes without saying. Recognizing some obscure horror is undead and not an aberration, monsterous humanoid, or outsider is frequently another matter entirely.
People are probably going to generally comprehend, without the need for a check, common humanoids like goblins, orcs, giants, etc. Krenshar, Behir, most outsiders, and a number of obscure powerful undead are going to be tougher to identify, and thus have a scope limited to skill/memory. These are usually not metagaming problems
Telling them how to quickly kill the boss almost every time feels... wrong. I have half a mind to jack up the identify DCs but I only ever change rules as a last resort, after a long series of issues (which this is starting to become, but isn't quite enough yet)Thoughts?
I feel exactly the opposite way. Especially when we're talking about a group of professional adventurers (like the Pathfinder Society), it should be extremely rare that they encounter monsters that they don't know everything about. That's a basic, common sense, survival tactic. If what you don't know can kill you, you make sure you learn everything you can.
In professional sports, for example, people study film of their opponents for hours on end to learn what to expect from opposing teams and even specific opposing players. In the military, people are trained for endless hours on being able to identify enemy equipment and on the appropriate way to respond to it.
Any character who made it to second level should have bought a copy of all of the bestiaries or their equivalent and should have memorized it. "A slim half-elf with ram's horns? That's an erodaemon, which is immune to acid, but has DR 10/good or silver." This is no less survival information than the "don't eat those berries" that literally every scout troop is taught.
PFS may be like that, but many APs and homebrew games don't work that way.
Most of the time, in my experience, it's a group of more or less ordinary people who happen to get involved in this plot, and never make a conscious decision to be a "professional adventurerer.
To use a more specific example, the Iron Gods AP I'm running right now starts off with investigating why the town's peculiar power source (a purple gout of flame coming out of a hill) has suddenly gone out, i.e. an ordinary person's problem. There is never a conscious decision to "be an adventurer" and there's no expectations (outside of metagaming) of what they will encounter.
Ordinary folk starting out may have no idea that daemons (or aliens, for that matter) literally exist, and therefore would have no reason to research them, let alone that there's a specific one called an erodaemon that has this and that power.
Point being, if they have a rank in knowledge they SHOULD know something about those creature, otherwise what is the point?
I would say the point of not knowing something with a single rank, would be to promote taking a second rank.
I tend to just tell them everything if they make the check; many of my players are DMs themselves and know things, and it's annoying to force someone into a situation where they have to pretend they don't know things they know. Game doesn't really suffer for it.
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PFS may be like that, but many APs and homebrew games don't work that way.Most of the time, in my experience, it's a group of more or less ordinary people who happen to get involved in this plot, and never make a conscious decision to be a "professional adventurerer.
Even if this were true (hint: it's not), it would stop being true by the time characters hit second level. At second level, they're making a deliberate choice about what they are learning and what skills they are acquiring in preparation for the rest of their career, and a character who puts points into knowledge skills is specifically making a conscious decision to know more about monsters.
But, in fact, this decision not to be ordinary was made long before second level hit. "More or less ordinary people" don't have levels in PC classes. When someone decided to become a bard instead of a baker, or a paladin instead of a painter, that's when they decided not to be an ordinary person.
To use a more specific example, the Iron Gods AP I'm running right now starts off with investigating why the town's peculiar power source (a purple gout of flame coming out of a hill) has suddenly gone out, i.e. an ordinary person's problem. There is never a conscious decision to "be an adventurer" and there's no expectations (outside of metagaming) of what they will encounter.Ordinary folk starting out may have no idea that daemons (or aliens, for that matter) literally exist, and therefore would have no reason to research them, let alone that there's a specific one called an erodaemon that has this and that power.
But, whether or not the characters had a reason to research them, they did. A first level character who is trained in a skill is trained in that skill. Back at Paladin School, while Sister Ulrike was practicing jousting at the quintain (Ride skill), and Brother Ulfric was down in the infirmary learning to set bones and what herbs to use against fever (Heal), Brother Gengulphus was in the library learning about the undead (Knowledge [religion]). (And, of course, Sister Maria was practicing singing (Perform [sing]), but we've never figured out how to solve a problem like Maria....)
At second level, Brother Gengulphus may decide he wants to improve his skill on horseback after he's fallen off once too often. Or he may decide to swot up on demons, devils, and things that go bump on the knight. That, again, is a deliberate choice.
Brother Gengulphus doesn't get a lot of skill points in the first place. it's bad form for you to decide that he doesn't get to benefit from them.
I let them ask a question for every 5 above the DC. Common ones are "do they have any resistances and vulnerabilities?" "What are their special attacks?"
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Yeah, screwing players over on knowledge checks is fun. Not only did they waste their resources putting skill ranks into knowledge skills, they also waste resources when you intentionally mislead them after they make a successful check. Stupid players trying to follow the "rules." [/sarcasm]
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One GM I play with knows that the players themselves have the monster manual memorized so she extensively uses templates and other methods to make monsters not fit that 'cookie cutter' the players are used to. Those of us that currently play with her don't mind, but I know one of my other friends that says "Always making up her own F*****D up monster is B*****T and why I refuse to play with her" But, if you make a high enough knowledge check, she'll give you relevant info about her monsters that your check entails.
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@Platypus: Players/characters learn through exposure during the course of a campaign. Once they have encountered a creature a few times and had to figure out things on their own, they then know them going forward.
I have no problem with a character/player who makes a good, solid roll getting a couple of uncommon bits of knowledge. However, if the DC is 15, and they roll a 16, they get to know that, "This creature is a Narflbarger; these creatures are generally evil and aggressive." They're not going to find out, "This creature is a Narflbarger; such creatures have a racial allergy to peanuts." If everybody in the party barely makes the roll, they're not going to learn successively more expert information on the creature.
Look at it this way. If you have 10 C-grade students taking a physics test, and they're asked to write as a group an essay on black holes, you are certainly not going to get a discussion of Akos Bogdan's 2014 study on the effects of dark matter on the size of any given galaxy's central black hole. They're going to discuss the basic stuff that was in their science text book.
The roll represents how much that person knows about that creature. If they barely passed the check, they barely know anything about the creature. If they fail the check, they don't know much of anything about it. If they pass it spectacularly, they know a lot about the creature, even esoteric information.
While I agree that they're unlikely to use stuff outside of the reading material required for the test, those ten students are likely to remember some parts of the curriculum better than others. Since I'm not terribly familiar with physics and haven't studied it in about a decade, I'll use cooking as a metaphor instead:
10 students are studying cooking, and take a test. They each have some parts of the material they're good at/interested in/have a knack for, and other parts they're likely to be below average at. Here's a (very) simplistic example:
Two of them are better than average at desserts, but bad at fish.
Two of them are better than average at fish, but bad at meat.
Two of them are better than average at meat, but bad at fruits and vegetables.
Two of them are better than average at fruits and vegetables, but bad at hygiene, cooking preparation, sauces and wines.
One of them is better than average at hygiene and cooking preparation, but bad at fish.
One of them is better than average at sauces and wines, but bad at fish.
Make them take the cooking test individually and you'll see how each of them excels in his area of expertise and underperforms at whatever area of cooking he does not fully grasp or is not talented for.
However, if you make them take the test collectively their average grade is likely to go up, since each cook would contribute with the area he performs the best in.
Let's transfer the metaphor to a party - Frank the (Lore Warden) Fighter, Wesley the Wizard, Randy the Rogue and Claire the Cleric are participating in a pub quiz because the GM didn't have enough time to prepare the session that night. They're asked to list everything they know about (GM flips through his Bestiary at random, sweat rolling down his face) Flesh Golems! In a statistical freak of nature they all roll 17 on their Knowledge (Arcana) check. While they all rolled the same on their knowledge check and barely broke the DC (17), they're aware of Flesh Golems but not overly familiar with them. Here's how I imagine that conversation could go:
Frank the Fighter: Flesh Golems are unnaturally hard to damage with plain steel, I'd use my adamantine axe on them.
Wesley the Wizard: Golems are immune to just about all kinds of magic, they're incredibly hard to effect with my evocation spells. I'd probably summon in a monster to fight it for me.
Claire the Cleric: Flesh Golems are frequently confused with zombies, but they're constructs rather than undead. They won't be affected by my positive energy channel.
Randy the Rogue: Flesh Golems friggin HURT. I'm not going anywhere near those guys.
Note that each character gains knowledge relevant to how that character would engage a golem, since that is the knowledge most relevant to him/her and most likely to be memorized. The fighter is unlikely to remember or care that golems can't be affected by Scorching Ray, and the rogue is unlikely to care if he's backstabbing a large zombie or a flesh golem.
I will warn that some monsters are likely balanced against the weaknesses that you find out with knowledge checks.
Shadow demons, for example, are rather brutal for their CR, and they are balanced against sun powerlessness (which lets you get a quick escape if things go bad and if you can get bright light going against a creature with at will deeper darkness).
Higher level knowledge checks would reveal that it can possess people with a magic jar SLA, and that you can shut that down with a sunbeam (which seems like a major story line thing for it to do, coming into an NPC's house at night and making him do terrible things).
So overall- consider how the limited information affects how hard the fight gets. Also, consider whether you are going to use this monster again (either it doesn't die in that fight, or it is just the first of many). Giving the players a tough first fight, and then letting them go back and do their research is a fine thing.
Telling them how to quickly kill the boss almost every time feels... wrong. I have half a mind to jack up the identify DCs but I only ever change rules as a last resort, after a long series of issues (which this is starting to become, but isn't quite enough yet)Thoughts?
I feel exactly the opposite way. Especially when we're talking about a group of professional adventurers (like the Pathfinder Society), it should be extremely rare that they encounter monsters that they don't know everything about. That's a basic, common sense, survival tactic. If what you don't know can kill you, you make sure you learn everything you can.
In professional sports, for example, people study film of their opponents for hours on end to learn what to expect from opposing teams and even specific opposing players. In the military, people are trained for endless hours on being able to identify enemy equipment and on the appropriate way to respond to it.
Any character who made it to second level should have bought a copy of all of the bestiaries or their equivalent and should have memorized it. "A slim half-elf with ram's horns? That's an erodaemon, which is immune to acid, but has DR 10/good or silver." This is no less survival information than the "don't eat those berries" that literally every scout troop is taught.
PFS may be like that, but many APs and homebrew games don't work that way.
Most of the time, in my experience, it's a group of more or less ordinary people who happen to get involved in this plot, and never make a conscious decision to be a "professional adventurerer.
To use a more specific example, the Iron Gods AP I'm running right now starts off with investigating why the town's peculiar power source (a purple gout of flame coming out of a hill) has suddenly gone out, i.e. an ordinary person's problem. There is never a conscious decision to "be an adventurer" and there's no expectations (outside of metagaming) of...
If they were characters in a novel of movie maybe, but when you make your character you know you are are going to be an adventurer. So yeah some metagaming is required to even play the game or you would show up as a commoner or expert most likely.
This is not a real problem for the players unless they want to roll for random classes with random feats and skills, but most people don't play like that, so that would be a corner case.
It's also legal not to let the wizard ask about energy resistances. There's nothing in the skill saying the players can ask questions. A GM can also choose to let them know something that might be helpful, whether or not it's what the players thought they wanted to know.
Knowing "something" doesn't mean knowing something useful.
"A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster."
You can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC of such a check equals 10 + the monster's CR. For common monsters, such as goblins, the DC of this check equals 5 + the monster's CR. For particularly rare monsters, such as the tarrasque, the DC of this check equals 15 + the monster's CR, or more. A successful check allows you to remember a bit of useful information about that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall another piece of useful informationI've bolded the relevant part. A successful knowledge check doesn't allow a player to know any piece of information they want to know, just a "relevant" piece of information. When I adjudicate these types of Knowledge checks, I give them (what I consider to be) the more common pieces of information first and reserve the rarer pieces for higher rolls.
For example, if my players encountered a Revenant, and rolled a 17 on their Knowledge (Religion) check, I'd start out with "Revenants are corporeal undead fueled by the need for vegeance against the one who murdered them" instead of "Revenants are sometimes overcome with helplessness when they encounter their own reflection."
-Skeld
I'd say there is some value in knowing where the information the knowledge check came from. Let's say you're a cleric and you just passed your DC 17 knowledge check to identify the revenent. I suspect in that case you would remember the tidbit about Revenents hating their reflection as opposed to less practical information about how they are created. Although practical depends on the context of the situation typically.
Let me give another example. The party runs into a puzzle based on analytical geometry.
DM: Make a Knowledge (Math) check.
Wizard PC: I got 22.
DM: That just barely beats the DC. You know that Rene Descartes is the father of modern analytical geometry.
Wizard PC: That's it? Well, s~#$.
I think that players that succeed on knowledge checks should get the most immediately useful information first and then trickier stuff after that.
Since you mentioned Iron Gods, remember that in order to roll knowledge engineering for identifying a robot you need to have the technogist feat.
If your party is able to make Knowledge checks consistently the chances are that one or more PCs have made a significant investment into that aspect of the game, so you shouldn't feel too bad about them getting some info on the monsters. Inquisitors in particular are superstars when it comes to knowing about monsters, but that's one of the class's featured functions.
I've actually had more trouble lately as a player with being in parties who can't identify practically anything. In yesterday's party the 6 monster ID skills are split between a Fighter and a Ninja because our Scarred Witch Doctor is so dumb she gets 1 skill point per level. Meanwhile the Low Will Save Duo only have 1 or 2 ranks in most of the Knowledge skills by 10th level and are completely missing Knowledge like History which might be important for story purposes rather than just identifying monster. In another game with goblin PCs my Feral Gnasher is probably the best in the party at Knowledge skills (which is kind of scary), but the first question he asks when he exceeds the required DC is usually whether the monster is safe to bite.
Most DMs I play with now use the rule where common creatures have a DC of 5+CR to identify, uncommon ones are 10+CR, and rare ones are 15+CR. You get to know an extra detail for each 5 you exceed the DC by. One DM tells you random things which are sometimes useful, but the other two let you ask questions. The latter method makes it more rewarding to have multiple PCs with overlapping Knowledge skills in the party since you can ask different questions (which might be a little unrealistic but feels rewarding)
But, whether or not the characters had a reason to research them, they did.
This seems very meta-gamey to me. Are you telling me it's expected for a character to that has only encountered humanoids, undead, and constructs in an adventure thus for to suddenly go "Welp, time to researching dragons!"
It's an even less realistic when one gets to broader categories like magical beasts an aberrations, where there are fewer universal traits. Especially when you consider the fact that the "research" the characters would be doing would be reading entire books in-character and not single page statblocks.
Most DMs I play with now use the rule where common creatures have a DC of 5+CR to identify, uncommon ones are 10+CR, and rare ones are 15+CR. You get to know an extra detail for each 5 you exceed the DC by. One DM tells you random things which are sometimes useful, but the other two let you ask questions. The latter method makes it more rewarding to have multiple PCs with overlapping Knowledge skills in the party since you can ask different questions (which might be a little unrealistic but feels rewarding)
Yeah, I wasn't aware of that 5-15 rule, you can expect I'll be using that from now on, and the details bit sounds worthwhile as well.
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This seems very meta-gamey to me.
But, whether or not the characters had a reason to research them, they did.
It's called "spending skill points." Is it also meta-gamey for a player to spend a feat to learn an ability he doesn't yet have?
Are you telling me it's expected for a character to that has only encountered humanoids, undead, and constructs in an adventure thus for to suddenly go "Welp, time to researching dragons!"
No, it's "expected" that players can spend their skill points as they see fit; if my paladin decides to put a point into Appraise, then he suddenly learns how to value objects. If the paladin decides instead to learn Sleight of Hand, he suddenly learns how to do card tricks, palm coins, and pick pockets.
If for some reason you decide that you need to approve skill points before the player spends them, you're being nontraditionally overbearing.
But if you decide that, having allowed the player to spend skills points in a certain way, they're not going to get the benefit of them, you're simply being a jerk and a bad DM.
It's an even less realistic when one gets to broader categories like magical beasts an aberrations, where there are fewer universal traits. Especially when you consider the fact that the "research" the characters would be doing would be reading entire books in-character and not single page statblocks.
What's unrealistic about using down time to read books? We never see the paladin polish his armor or clean his weapons, either. Once he's done that,... is he assumed to go into stasis every night once the weapons are polished?
One GM I play with knows that the players themselves have the monster manual memorized so she extensively uses templates and other methods to make monsters not fit that 'cookie cutter' the players are used to. Those of us that currently play with her don't mind, but I know one of my other friends that says "Always making up her own F*****D up monster is B*****T and why I refuse to play with her" But, if you make a high enough knowledge check, she'll give you relevant info about her monsters that your check entails.Good for the GM who makes her own monsters and puts effort into it. Keeps the mystery alive. It's a shame that your other friend has a negative attitude about it, sounds like a bit of a poor sport.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment,... while interesting custom monsters are interesting and mysterious, badly designed custom monsters are boring, often unbalanced, and usually no fun at all. There's a reason that the RPG superstar competition asks for monster designs as one of the weed-out criteria.
Especially in a thread that's fundamentally about a very bad GM deliberately breaking rules in order to make sure that the party suffers embarrassing and unnecessary failures.... well, let me just say that it's even easier to make sure that the party suffers embarrassing and unnecessary failures by designing "[their] own F*****D up monster [that] is B*****T," for example, by making sure that the monster is completely immune to whatever the party can do and only vulnerable to things that the party cannot do. (For example, regeneration that can only by prevented by,.... let me see,... it looks like none of you have any unholy water on your character sheets,... can only be prevented by unholy water.)
But, whether or not the characters had a reason to research them, they did.This seems very meta-gamey to me. Are you telling me it's expected for a character to that has only encountered humanoids, undead, and constructs in an adventure thus for to suddenly go "Welp, time to researching dragons!"
It's an even less realistic when one gets to broader categories like magical beasts an aberrations, where there are fewer universal traits. Especially when you consider the fact that the "research" the characters would be doing would be reading entire books in-character and not single page statblocks.
No, but someone else thought to do that. When looking up stuff about golems, you might end up picking up a bestiary that has stuff on dragons and magical beast (these are all knowledge arcana things).
Why? Dragons are casters (and intimately tied into the study of magic, as seen by the fact that draconic is a standard academic language for wizards), so you go from golems->magic that makes golems->magic theory in general-> how burning hands was copied from fire dragon breath (or whatever). As one of the oldest and longest lived spell casting races, it is hard to get into the history of magic without dragons popping up
The link is a bit more obvious with magical beasts- a lot of them were made originally by mad wizards, just like golems.
General point is- While you might not expect these creatures to have much to do with eachother, someone else might. A crazy, compulsive academic that wrote a thorough text on the matter (he is crazy since he is too thorough, but that makes it a better value). The general theory behind knowledge checks is that you over heard or skimmed over some related information during your everyday life.
I let Knowledge also represent picking up on visual cues by comparing to other creatures.
"You see that the creature's scales shimmer and reflect more light than normal. You remember that was a quality of Kobold scales that gave them the ability to withstand intense heat and flames."
Though most recently it was a bit of the opposite; using knowledge of dragons to determine strengths and weaknesses of Kobolds.
Of course, I would use Kobolds as an example. Just check my avatar.
Since you mentioned Iron Gods, remember that in order to roll knowledge engineering for identifying a robot you need to have the technogist feat.actually the technologist feat allows u to automatically identify robots with a knowledge DC of 15 or less.
Why?
Technologist allows you to use various skills (including knowledge engineering) for technological purposes.
I'm far more bothered by the problem that you can't learn anything about dragons without picking up all the other Arcane knowledge.
You can't give your dragonslayer appropriate knowledge about his targets without him picking up "ancient mysteries, magic traditions, arcane symbols, constructs, magical beasts" along the way. Or my Ranger who knew nothing about the Warg (magical beast) we faced other than that it wasn't a wolf, despite looking so much like one.
It's a minor irritation, but it nags at me.
Unless you are only fighting very young dragons or linnorum, then you are facing full on spellcasters. That is one of their main threats- they are both physically powerful and extremely magical.
If you aren't prepared to face a caster, how can you face one that can rip your face off?
Even the random symbols and constructs can be chalked up to 'bored dragons' (which again, are bored casters with a lot of time on their hands and few natural predators), and as such something you need to prepare for.