Knowledge - monsters seriously, seriously nerfed


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells

Silver Crusade

I just looked at the knowledge of monsters and, uh, wow.

So, a success gives you ONE peace of information (the thing the monster is most famous for, eg trolls weakness to fire)

It takes a Critical to get a second piece of information. And this is up to the whim of the GM. It "may" let you know a demons resistances, it may not.

So, knowledge skills pretty much became close to useless. How well the group fares will be largely a matter of chance or how much the players metagame.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

To be fair, it does solve the issue with "Haha, new monster that you don't know anything about!" when even meta wise players don't know <_< I mean in pathfinder monsters are only dangerous when they are unknown.

Also the weirdness of identifying an unique creature or alien from another planet


Critical is also "exceed the DC by 10" but that's definitely more punative than PF1's "exceed by 5/10/15"

Silver Crusade

CorvusMask wrote:

To be fair, it does solve the issue with "Haha, new monster that you don't know anything about!" when even meta wise players don't know <_< I mean in pathfinder monsters are only dangerous when they are unknown.

Also the weirdness of identifying an unique creature or alien from another planet

No, its still very possible to identify that unique monster. The DC to do so isn't even all THAT high. Admittedly, you'll likely only know one thing about that previously unknown to the world monster instead of the 1.5 or so things you know about a troll :-)


Hypercognition spell for the win.


You can continue to use recall knowledge for more information.

"Identifying monster abilities is one of the most common
uses of Recall Knowledge. The monster’s commonality
sets the difficulty: low for common monsters, high for
uncommon, and severe for rare or unique. Most monsters’
level should be the level of the DC, but you could reduce
the level drastically for really famous monsters. A
character who succeeds identifies the monster and singles
out one of its best-known attributes—such as a troll’s
weakness to acid and fire or a manticore’s tail spikes. On
a critical success, the character gets that information plus
something more subtle, like a demon’s weakness or the
trigger for a reaction.

After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can
yield more information, but you should increase the
difficulty each time. Once a character has attempted
an extreme-difficulty check or failed a check, further
attempts are fruitless." -Page 338 of the playtest rulebook

it's not one and done pass or fail like in 1E


That's why Hypercognition is a great spell, giving you 10 checks for one action (and a 3rd level spell slot). Take a bunch of consecutive checks on an individual monster until you're maxed out, then move on to the next one.

Silver Crusade

mavet wrote:

After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can
yield more information, but you should increase the
difficulty each time. Once a character has attempted
an extreme-difficulty check or failed a check, further
attempts are fruitless." -Page 338 of the playtest rulebook

it's not one and done pass or fail like in 1E

1) note the increasing DC. This only helps to a small extent

2) look at how many abilities some monsters (eg vampires or Devils) have. You're only going to be able to get a tiny fraction of them.

Looking at the bestiary I did notice one thing thst reduces the problem somewhat. Very few creatures have damage reduction (resistances now), most now have weaknesses instead. Its generally far more important to know about resistances than weaknesses


pauljathome wrote:
mavet wrote:

After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can
yield more information, but you should increase the
difficulty each time. Once a character has attempted
an extreme-difficulty check or failed a check, further
attempts are fruitless." -Page 338 of the playtest rulebook

it's not one and done pass or fail like in 1E

1) note the increasing DC. This only helps to a small extent

2) look at how many abilities some monsters (eg vampires or Devils) have. You're only going to be able to get a tiny fraction of them.

Looking at the bestiary I did notice one thing thst reduces the problem somewhat. Very few creatures have damage reduction (resistances now), most now have weaknesses instead. Its generally far more important to know about resistances than weaknesses

In PF1e you got 1 piece of knowledge (that's also supposed to be up to GM whim, though table variation exists) and then one more per 5 you beat the DC and retries were not allowed outside of exceptional circumstances, so unless your bonus was truly astronomical you probably wouldn't get more than a tiny fraction of them then either.

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