DC to identify Magic Items?

[Charon Onozuka]

While preparing to run Lost Star tonight, I'm having a bit of trouble trying to figure out how the set the DCs to identify any magic items the party finds.

Reading through the rules, it seems that identifying items would use the Identify Magic activity from the Arcana/Nature/Occultism/Religion skills, which takes an hour to perform (except for scrolls which take a minute if you have the spell on your spell list). However, the table of DCs which the Identify Magic activity refers to is only for identifying spells, which isn't helpful for magic items which lack a spell level.

So does anyone know how you are supposed to set the DC for identifying items? Right now, the closest thing I can think of is to use the general skill DC chart (Table 10-2) and setting the difficulty to the same as monster identification (low for common, high for uncommon, and severe for rare/unique).

[Captain Morgan]

Charon Onozuka wrote:

While preparing to run Lost Star tonight, I'm having a bit of trouble trying to figure out how the set the DCs to identify any magic items the party finds.

Reading through the rules, it seems that identifying items would use the Identify Magic activity from the Arcana/Nature/Occultism/Religion skills, which takes an hour to perform (except for scrolls which take a minute if you have the spell on your spell list). However, the table of DCs which the Identify Magic activity refers to is only for identifying spells, which isn't helpful for magic items which lack a spell level.

So does anyone know how you are supposed to set the DC for identifying items? Right now, the closest thing I can think of is to use the general skill DC chart (Table 10-2) and setting the difficulty to the same as monster identification (low for common, high for uncommon, and severe for rare/unique).

I think you are on the right track but I don't have my book on hand to check.

[Palinurus]

Captain Morgan wrote:

Charon Onozuka wrote:

While preparing to run Lost Star tonight, I'm having a bit of trouble trying to figure out how the set the DCs to identify any magic items the party finds.

Reading through the rules, it seems that identifying items would use the Identify Magic activity from the Arcana/Nature/Occultism/Religion skills, which takes an hour to perform (except for scrolls which take a minute if you have the spell on your spell list). However, the table of DCs which the Identify Magic activity refers to is only for identifying spells, which isn't helpful for magic items which lack a spell level.

So does anyone know how you are supposed to set the DC for identifying items? Right now, the closest thing I can think of is to use the general skill DC chart (Table 10-2) and setting the difficulty to the same as monster identification (low for common, high for uncommon, and severe for rare/unique).

I think you are on the right track but I don't have my book on hand to check.

That’s what we did. I think I would use trivial for something they had identified before. However, checking the book you use spell effect level for items. Table 4-2 on page 146. A first level spell or can’t rip is typically DC 13. The DC table on p.336 has low at 12 and high at 14 for level one. That could use clearing up because some items don’t have obvious spell levels.

[dragonhunterq]

Table 4-2 on page 146 supposedly gives you the DC for identifying items as well (it doesn't direct you anywhere else, so half the level of the item? round up?

[Shadrick Hawkins]

Yeah, I ran into the same problem last night. I went with the modified 10-2 DC table from Update 1.3 and used "High/Hard" for common items based on the following phrases in the rulebook "Many tasks use the high-difficulty DC for their level" and "This is the default difficulty in Pathfinder." But it certainly caused a stop in play as we tried to nail that down.

The Spell table (4-2) has no official way to convert an Item Level to a Spell Level - and as written there is no way to identify a level 11 or higher item using that table.