Lore vs Arcana, Occultism, Nature, Religion

[kpulv]

One of the backgrounds from The Lost Star is the Pathfinder Hopeful, which includes the ability to take the Additional Lore feat, which gives you a Lore of your choice.

I'm now trying to figure out with one of my players what exactly a Lore subcategory can do and can't do. The book seems to suggest that any given Lore shouldn't be able to do what the four main knowledge skills (Arcana, Occultism, Nature, Religion) can do, but I'm having trouble figuring out where exactly to draw the line.

Specifically, my player is looking for something akin to Dungeoneering from PF1, but it looks like that isn't really an option anymore, so he's kind of at a loss of what to take, and since nothing he can take can interfere with the four main ones, it's tough to find something that would him not feel like the Additional Lore feat is totally worthless. He was looking to be able to identify monsters in dungeons, but that seems to very much overlap and compete power-wise with the four main skills.

Any thoughts or advice here?

[Xenocrat]

Lore is really meant as profession, not a PF1 style knowledge skill. You also have knowledge about stuff needed to do your profession (a farmer could recall knowledge about how healthy crops looks or whatever) but it's meant for making money.

[Thebazilly]

Lore is sort of a combination of Profession and Knowledge, since it can be used to make money and to Recall Knowledge.

Have your player pick something specific, like Lore (Oozes), or something flavorful, like Lore (Miner) if they're going for Dungeoneering, and try to be permissive in what you let Lore skills apply to.

[kpulv]

Thanks. I think the term Lore is a little bit loaded -- my group was thinking it was more on the knowledge side of things. Thinking about it as more of the profession related skills of PF1 helps clear this up.

It sounds like it's pretty flexible, which is cool, but also challenging in regard of making my players feel like they're picking something worthwhile.

[Captain Morgan]

You can look at the backgrounds for examples of what a reasonable Lore is. Personally, I think a Lore on one specific category of monsters, like dragons or oozes, seems all right.

Otherwise, it is something that probably won't come up a lot but you should get in the habit of "say yes" when it could remotely apply, perhaps at a lower DC than another skill would use if it feels like it should DEFINITELY apply.

For an example of the 1st thing, say you find an abandoned campsite with food and ale left out. It is supposed to be a DC 15 survival check to figure out how long ago it was abandoned, but the Barkeep might be able to roll a DC 15 Alcohol Lore check to tell how long the ale has been left out instead.

For an example of the second thing, you could the Animal Handler roll Animal Lore instead of nature to train an animal, perhaps only needing to make a DC 18 instead of DC 20, or perhaps being able to apply their intelligence bonus which is higher than their wisdom bonus.

[shade2077]

Planar Lore is one of the examples in the Rulebook. I'm guessing this equates to the 1E Knowledge (Planes). So you could presumably have Dungeon Lore that gives information similar to 1E Knowledge (Dungeoneering).