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I have no problem with giving the player the type of information they want as long as they use a reasonable skill to obtain it. I believe there is even an example of that in the rules where you would us arcana on constructs to know their magical resistances and craft to know about their hardness or physical abilities.
If someone asked me the alignment of goblins I would happily oblige.
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I would consider any GM telling me that learning the alignment of goblins or that they speak goblin was a useful piece of information worthy of my action was gaslighting me to intentionally make the rules seem unplayable.
Seems like a straw man of the highest order. There has not been a whole lot to learn about goblins by rolling dice in any edition.
A useful piece of information about goblins might be that they are able to scuttle into flanking positions or that they love fire and tend to fight chaotically with little regard for each other’s safety.
A better example would be the fact that a black pudding will split in two if you hit them with a slashing or piercing weapon.
We mathematicians (and also computer programmers) have to consider the stupid cases, too, in order to cover everything. When "specific," "useful," and "best-known" are in conflict, how does the GM resolve the conflict?
I once had a PC deliberately roll a knowledge check in a PF1 game to see whether she and a chuul had any languages in common. The chuul had risen out of a toxic pond and grabbed the fighter in its giant crab claws. The highly-diplomatic skald decided to talk the chuul into letting go of the fighter rather than attacking the chuul. It worked, too, though the fighter was very miffed at her non-violent approach.
How well-known will the goblin scuttle be? It did not exist in PF1, so I have no experience with it being in the folklore. If a figher asks about the goblin warriors' tactics, should I tell them about their AC and saves or their weapon attacks or the goblin scuttle? AC is probably most useful, helping the fighter judge whether to make multiple attacks. The weapons are probably the best known of the three. Goblin scuttle is merely the most unusual. It would make a good flavorful additional information on a critical success.
Maybe the GM ought to ask a followup question to be more useful and more specific, "Would you like their AC and saves, or full details of their weapon attacks, or the nature of tactical ability called Goblin Scuttle?"
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I see where you are coming from and I see you are asking honestly so I apologize if I came across as sarcastic.
My honest opinion is that things like ac and statistical bonuses are not something that should ever be part of that discussion as they exist outside the experience of the characters (what is an ac?) and because they are highly individual rather than based on a creature type.
They would recall useful information about special abilities etc which is why hardly anyone would waste a check on a goblin, vs a multi headed beast that seems to have a gaze attack and be immune to some types of damage.
I see where you are coming from and I see you are asking honestly so I apologize if I came across as sarcastic.
My honest opinion is that things like ac and statistical bonuses are not something that should ever be part of that discussion as they exist outside the experience of the characters (what is an ac?) and because they are highly individual rather than based on a creature type.
They would recall useful information about special abilities etc which is why hardly anyone would waste a check on a goblin, vs a multi headed beast that seems to have a gaze attack and be immune to some types of damage.
I don't think the stat block should ever be the result of a knowledge check.
However, lowest defense should probably be one. AC or fort or reflex or will. Or resistance, or weakness, or immunity, or a general description of a special attack, or a universal monster rule (called something else this edition).
I see where you are coming from and I see you are asking honestly so I apologize if I came across as sarcastic.
I am sick today, so my writing is not up to my usual clarity.
My honest opinion is that things like ac and statistical bonuses are not something that should ever be part of that discussion as they exist outside the experience of the characters (what is an ac?) and because they are highly individual rather than based on a creature type.
I could explain the Recall Knowledge result as, "That goblin is wearing makeshift leather armor like a down-on-his-luck rogue who survives by his fancy footwork." Eventually, my players will learn to ignore the "makeshift", that "rogue" means trained in light armor, and "fancy footwork" means +3 Dex in order to decode my statement as AC 16.
But by the same reasoning, my players will refuse to tell me that they rolled a 15 to hit, since that number exists outside the experience of the character who just swung the longsword. The numbers are a shortcut for communication between players and GM, not an immersion for the characters.
They would recall useful information about special abilities etc which is why hardly anyone would waste a check on a goblin, vs a multi headed beast that seems to have a gaze attack and be immune to some types of damage.
First-level characters don't run into multi-headed beasts that have gaze attacks and are immune to types of damage. They do run into goblins and other level -1 creatures. The players need to experience those Recall Knowledge checks at 1st level to learn when to ponder dusty memories and when to charge and strike. And they might want to know that a giant centipede has a mandible attack with venom and despite its chitin exoskeleton its AC is only 15. In Doomday Dawn, one rogue sneaked into a room full of sleeping giant centipedes, saw them, and carefully sneaked back out without waking them. A Recall Knowledge check about their Perception would have been appropriate.
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This feat can give a baseline expectation.
Battle Assessment
(Rogue 4)
With careful observation during battle, you identify an enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. The GM rolls a secret Perception check for you against the Deception or Stealth DC (whichever is higher) of an enemy of your choice who is not concealed from you, hidden from you, or undetected by you, and who is engaged in combat. The GM might apply a penalty for the distance between you and the enemy. The enemy is then temporarily immune to your Battle Assessment for 1 day.
Critical Success: The GM chooses two of the following pieces of information about the enemy to tell you: which of the enemy’s weaknesses is highest, which of the enemy’s saving throws has the lowest modifier, one immunity the enemy has, or which of the enemy’s resistances is highest. If the event of a tie, the GM should pick one at random.
Success: The GM chooses one piece of information from the above list to tell you about the enemy.
Critical Failure: The GM gives you false information (the GM makes up the information).
Let's actually examine the different language between editions, shall we?
PF1 says the following:
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.So...that's really pretty clear that it's one piece of info, plus another one per five to exceed the DC by.
Now, let's look at PF2:
A character who successfully identifies a creature learns one of its best-known attributes—such as a troll’s regeneration (and the fact that it can be stopped by acid or fire) or a manticore’s tail spikes. On a critical success, the character also learns something subtler, like a demon’s weakness or the trigger for one of the creature’s reactions.Beyond only getting more info on a crit (rather than for every 5 points), and making more explicit that the initial piece should be fundamental to the creature (but potentially really useful...like both regeneration and weakness on a Troll), that actually reads almost identically in terms of what you get.
Frankly, I cannot see any logic to thinking the second of those two paragraphs is more restrictive than the first in the way this thread is complaining about. I am confused and befuddled why anyone would think that the success conditions referred to in those two paragraphs had notably different results.
The fact that it takes an action to know anything at all is what makes it more restrictive. According to the rules you cannot differentiate between a dog, cat, or dire bear without a check. You cannot tell if the people approaching you are city guard or bandits because it takes an action to make the recall check to identify the uniforms.
Then you get to the part where you can get multiple bits of information on a decent roll as opposed to only a single piece of info except on a critical success. And the crit only gives you some nebulous additional info that is even less defined than what you get on a success.
Then there are the secret checks.
And finally there is the misinformation on a failed check.
All told it really comes across as being miserly with the information is the way things are supposed to be done.
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According to the rules you cannot differentiate between a dog, cat, or dire bear without a check. You cannot tell if the people approaching you are city guard or bandits because it takes an action to make the recall check to identify the uniforms.
This is nonsense. Nothing about the rules even implies, let alone states, that immediately visible traits that require no knowledge, like the massive size difference between a cat and a bear, or whether someone in front of you is wearing a uniform is the kind of thing you would have to make a check for, instead of basic information that requires no check or action.
You may need to make a check to know what kind of cat, exactly, that is, or to recognize that the uniform is a fake, but that is a different matter.
If your DM is not telling you enough information to tell between a cat and a dog than you need a new DM. On cases where you need to make a check the fact that recall knowledge takes an action makes me much more likely to give you useful knowledge than in PF1 where battles began with every PC making a knowledge check on every odd monster.
"You see a medium sized mammalian quadruped."
So basically "What if our GM is a terrible person who thinks the role of GM exists only to make our lives as players miserable"?
No amount of rules are going to save you from that.
True, but the rules seem to support that view. So an otherwise cooperative GM might come across as antagonistic because that is what the rules tell him to do.
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If your DM is not telling you enough information to tell between a cat and a dog than you need a new DM. On cases where you need to make a check the fact that recall knowledge takes an action makes me much more likely to give you useful knowledge than in PF1 where battles began with every PC making a knowledge check on every odd monster.
This. I like that players now have to expend effort to make knowledge checks instead of that being a freebie.
In exchange, I'm going to be making a concerted effort to make sure that my players get useful information out of successful checks.
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Just to clarify: unlike PF1, you can now try new checks to know more right?
So when the monster does something unexpected we can spend an action to know more about what that just was and how we could fix it.
Because that could be a big quality of life improvement compared to PF1 where you'd spam your knowledge early on and then if you ask the wrong questions, you don't have a re-take to ask "so how do we de-petrify him?"
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According to the rules you cannot differentiate between a dog, cat, or dire bear without a check. You cannot tell if the people approaching you are city guard or bandits because it takes an action to make the recall check to identify the uniforms.This is nonsense. Nothing about the rules even implies, let alone states, that immediately visible traits that require no knowledge, like the massive size difference between a cat and a bear, or whether someone in front of you is wearing a uniform is the kind of thing you would have to make a check for, instead of basic information that requires no check or action.
You may need to make a check to know what kind of cat, exactly, that is, or to recognize that the uniform is a fake, but that is a different matter.
Yes, it is nonsense. The Recall Knowledge rules explicitly state on page 237, "You might know basic information about something without needing to attempt a check, but Recall Knowledge requires you to stop and think for a moment so you can recollect more specific facts and apply them." I consider distinguishing between a dog and a cat to be basic information.
Also consider this from a game-running perspective. "As you enter the tavern, you smell the wood smoke from the blazing fireplace but the air is free from the scent of spilled beer and vomit like the last tavern you visited. The barkeep is wiping the bar clean with a rag while a waitress carried a tray of tankards and steaming bowls to patrons at a table. You heard the cheerful, hushed tones of conversation from the patrons at the tables, though one pair is hunched in silent concentration over a game board." I can ignore the action cost to roll Recall Knowledge(Society) to distinguish between the barkeep, waitress, and customers, since the PCs are in exploration mode, but if the roll was truly necessary, then they would need to make many d20 rolls in case they failed and assumed that the burly blacksmith sitting at a table in his leather apron was the barkeep.
Interrupting my room description so that the PCs can prove that they are not a bunch of idiots would make the game much less fun.
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True, but the rules seem to support that view. So an otherwise cooperative GM might come across as antagonistic because that is what the rules tell him to do.So basically "What if our GM is a terrible person who thinks the role of GM exists only to make our lives as players miserable"?
No amount of rules are going to save you from that.
The rules do not support that. See my post above from the Bestiary that Common creatures are “generally known”.
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It also states that common creatures are “generally known” so you could easily argue that the players should know some basic information without a check.
The full quote is
Rarity Traits
Unless the creature is common, its trait list starts with a rarity trait. Creatures that don’t start with a rarity trait have the common rarity.
Common A creature of this rarity is generally known and can be summoned with the appropriate summon spell.
Uncommon Less is known about uncommon creatures than common creatures. They typically can’t be summoned. The DC of Recall Knowledge checks related to this creature is increased by 2.
Rare As the name suggests, these creatures are rare. They typically can’t be summoned. The DC of Recall Knowledge checks related to this creature is increased by 5.
Unique A creature with this rarity is one of a kind. The DC of Recall Knowledge checks related to this creature is increased by 10.
The text implies that the characters know enough about common creatures that a spellcaster can summon one unseen. I agree with The ShadowShackleton that this means that recognizing a common creature is basic information that does not require a Recall Knowledge check. Identifying a particular attribute of a common creature might require a Recall Knowledge check, but the DC of this check is not raised like with uncommon, rare, and unique creatures.
Cats, dogs, ghouls, goblins, and medusas--which have been used as examples in this thread--are common. While most giants are common, rune giants are uncommon. Young and adult dragons are common and ancient dragons are uncommon. Golems, krakens, and linnorms are uncommon. Lichs and phoenixes are rare.
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The fact that it takes an action to know anything at all is what makes it more restrictive. According to the rules you cannot differentiate between a dog, cat, or dire bear without a check. You cannot tell if the people approaching you are city guard or bandits because it takes an action to make the recall check to identify the uniforms.
No. By this logic, a failed Knowledge check in PF1 would also result in an inability to tell a cat from a dire bear. Which is equally idiotic, and will only result from a GM who's, frankly, a complete a#!$!%+.
Likewise, while recognizing the uniforms of the city guard might be a Recall Knowledge check, being able to tell that someone is wearing a uniform is immediately obvious.
And, from a realism standpoint, taking two seconds of thought (ie: one action) to realize what uniform someone is wearing is pretty believable.
Then you get to the part where you can get multiple bits of information on a decent roll as opposed to only a single piece of info except on a critical success. And the crit only gives you some nebulous additional info that is even less defined than what you get on a success.
What info you gain has never been well defined. It's ;ess defined in PF1, if anything.
Then there are the secret checks.
Secret checks are optional, and stated as such.
And finally there is the misinformation on a failed check.
Sure. This is a thing. But it means you only gain false info on a critical failure. Frankly, it actively stops a lot of the issues in your first paragraph cold if you think about it. Thinking a cat is a dire bear (or vice versa) is certainly false info that can't arise without a crit failure (personally, I'd say it couldn't arise even then, but technically the degree of falsity on crit failures is a GM call).
All told it really comes across as being miserly with the information is the way things are supposed to be done.
Again, not necessarily. I still maintain that the 'default' on a success actually encourages you to be a bit free with the basic stuff. Outside combat you can also retry an unlimited number of times and get all the info you could ever want (in practice, the GM won't let you do unlimited times, but you can certainly manage several).
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You are throwing in a specific "exploiting said knowledge" clause, and that is mental acrobatics to avoid the fact that the very idea of metagaming is flawed to the point of uselessness.That isn't what metagaming is.
Metagaming is when you encounter a monster, look up (or remember from your past experiences outside of the campaign) the creature so you know exactly what the monster is (hp and everything) without making any check or doing any in character research beforehand before the fight even began, and exploiting said knowledge, even if it doesn't make sense for the player characters (not the players) themselves to know without a skill-check or research.
I did not say the quoted text. BluLion did. I substantially agree with him in most respects, but not actually about the 'exploiting' terminology.
I agree with you that doing the 'wrong' thing because you 'don't know the right one' can equally be metagaming. I do not, however, think that makes the question of metagaming meaningless. Just a tad more complicated.
The fact that it takes an action to know anything at all is what makes it more restrictive. According to the rules you cannot differentiate between a dog,...Let's actually examine the different language between editions, shall we?
PF1 says the following:
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.So...that's really pretty clear that it's one piece of info, plus another one per five to exceed the DC by.
Now, let's look at PF2:
A character who successfully identifies a creature learns one of its best-known attributes—such as a troll’s regeneration (and the fact that it can be stopped by acid or fire) or a manticore’s tail spikes. On a critical success, the character also learns something subtler, like a demon’s weakness or the trigger for one of the creature’s reactions.Beyond only getting more info on a crit (rather than for every 5 points), and making more explicit that the initial piece should be fundamental to the creature (but potentially really useful...like both regeneration and weakness on a Troll), that actually reads almost identically in terms of what you get.
Frankly, I cannot see any logic to thinking the second of those two paragraphs is more restrictive than the first in the way this thread is complaining about. I am confused and befuddled why anyone would think that the success conditions referred to in those two paragraphs had notably different results.
as stated above, common entries and commonly known
It also states that common creatures are “generally known” so you could easily argue that the players should know some basic information without a check.
Category Three: an attempt to redefine the term. For example, the way the D&D 5th edition DMG defines metagame thinking as basing your choices on knowing that you are playing a game (I.e. trying to say that metagaming refers to things like "The DM wouldn't throw such a powerful monster at us!" rather than the usual "you can't do that because your character didn't know [blank]" type of stuff)
I'd point out that the D&D 3.5 manuals had the exact same definition for metagaming (I believe the example they used in that book was about the placement of a lever rather than a monster, but same difference). Any 'redefining' they may have done to get that happened almost two decades ago now at least, not any time recently.
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I feel a lot better about Recall Knowledge after reading the Game Mastering section. The description under Skills makes it sound like you could end up with any random fact no matter how useful or not it is but the GM section makes it very clear that the #1 priority should be giving out useful information.
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The rules do not support that. See my post above from the Bestiary that Common creatures are “generally known”.
I agree with you but (there is always a but :-))
on a quick read, at least, the rules DO seem to somewhat imply that the GM be a bit of a hard ass on things. And the rules that act against that impression are scattered and easy to miss.
There have been several people who, in good faith, got that impression from reading the rules.
AFTER reading this thread I agree that the impression is stronger than what the rules actually state. But, players and GMs read 600 page books quickly and so that first impression is important.
When you combine that with the undeniable fact (admitted by just about everybody) that, by design, the characters get less information than PF1 for more effort AND that information is sometimes flat out false you do sort of get a multiple whammy.
I'm now much more hopeful than I was that this is at least partially an issue with switching to a new game and "soon" best practices will percolate into the community and so many of the issues that I was seeing will go away.
I AM still somewhat concerned how high level play will go when there are a dozen or more very significant things to know about a monster. But I'm certainly willing to wait and see how it ACTUALLY plays out.
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I don't agree that the rules inherently give that impression. They clearly gave you that impression, but they gave me quite the opposite one, so I think the actual text is more ambiguous than that in what impression it grants.
But I'm clearly not the only one who got that impression. My GM (assuming that I'm right that he is NOT an arsehat) got a similar impression, several other people in this thread seem to have gotten that impression.
You (and others) got a different impression.
I do think that this means that, at the least, the rules should have been clearer in their intent.
I did not say the quoted text. BluLion did.Sorry about that... the positioning of the reply button on this board is different than every other board I've ever used, so I click the wrong post sometimes.
I agree with you that doing the 'wrong' thing because you 'don't know the right one' can equally be metagaming. I do not, however, think that makes the question of metagaming meaningless. Just a tad more complicated.All of the cases I have seen thus far in my gaming career that someone invokes the term "meta-gaming" fit into three specific categories:
Category One: trying to force a knowledgeable player to 'play dumb.' An example of which is using a type of damage you know will be less effective when a more effective damage type is available to the character.
Category Two: referring to reading the adventure content being played through. The clearest examples being a player choosing to avoid a particular area when their character actually appears to have incentive to go to that area (such as while exploring and not knowing what the right place is, and that place is nearer than another option).
Category Three: an attempt to redefine the term. For example, the way the D&D 5th edition DMG defines metagame thinking as basing your choices on knowing that you are playing a game (I.e. trying to say that metagaming refers to things like "The DM wouldn't throw such a powerful monster at us!" rather than the usual "you can't do that because your character didn't know [blank]" type of stuff)
Category One refers to the thing which is not at all useful to do (worry about what a player does or doesn't know). Category Two is covered by the terms "cheating" and "being a bad player" better than it is by the term "metagaming." And Category Three wouldn't exist if the term already had a useful meaning.
That's why I say the very idea is flawed to the point of uselessness.
I appreciated that you went to the trouble of giving examples from your experiences of what others called metagaming. I haven't actually heard of the definition from category 3 being used before, as the definition I've always used was "using knowledge that is not available to their character in order to change the way they play their character" or "The use of out-of-character knowledge in-character". I have always thought that this definition was widely accepted, but it looks like I'm wrong.
As for category 1, or the part where you mentioned where knowledgeable players are forced to play dumb in, is about trying to separate what you, the player knows, from what the character you are playing knows. I'll admit, this is actually harder than it sounds since it feels unnatural at times, and purposely trying to hit it with things you know it doesn't work against feels even more unnatural. Personally, I have always tried to just forget about my past experiences and just tried to go with what my character would know, that way my character will be able to act more organically to threats. I know it sounds like another form of playing dumb, and it doesn't always work, but it feels like it's the most natural way for me to play.
And to be honest, I'm be more worried about having a player say "okay, it's green and it has a 15 foot reach, so it's clearly a Adult Green Dragon at least so the AC is 27 and it's got DR 5/magic and we're looking at a 12d6 breath weapon" (yes, that's 3.5 stats) before initiative even started. It kills the magic, and it falls more in category 2 territory (the cheating kind).
...The fact that it takes an action to know anything at all is what makes it more restrictive. According to the rules you cannotLet's actually examine the different language between editions, shall we?
PF1 says the following:
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.So...that's really pretty clear that it's one piece of info, plus another one per five to exceed the DC by.
Now, let's look at PF2:
A character who successfully identifies a creature learns one of its best-known attributes—such as a troll’s regeneration (and the fact that it can be stopped by acid or fire) or a manticore’s tail spikes. On a critical success, the character also learns something subtler, like a demon’s weakness or the trigger for one of the creature’s reactions.Beyond only getting more info on a crit (rather than for every 5 points), and making more explicit that the initial piece should be fundamental to the creature (but potentially really useful...like both regeneration and weakness on a Troll), that actually reads almost identically in terms of what you get.
Frankly, I cannot see any logic to thinking the second of those two paragraphs is more restrictive than the first in the way this thread is complaining about. I am confused and befuddled why anyone would think that the success conditions referred to in those two paragraphs had notably different results.
So no recall check is needed for common critters. Good to know.
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The game is feeling more adversarial to me as a result.
Quite franky, that is what you get from many GM's if you specifically develop your new edition to shift the power back to the GM from the players. I was concerned about that during the playtest and it's one of the main reasons why I opposed the rarity system back then so much. Many GM's don't know how to handle the power they are given (okay, that sentence sounds just a bit hyperbolic, but you get my point) and by putting more power into player hands 3.X/PF1E did a good thing, IMO. And I say that as someone who has GM'ed about 70-75% of the games I've been in for the last 17 years or so.
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It seems to me that, while the GM gets to decide what a "useful piece of knowledge" would be, a player could reasonably communicate to said GM at the beginning of the game or before the knowledge check what kind of information they would find useful.
If I'm an elemental sorcerer, I might tell the GM that I'm usually interested in identifying creatures weak to my element. The GM could then go out of their way to choose that knowledge when I attempt to recall knowledge, or override it and give me something else they want the party to know about a given creature (e.g. it's going to do a devastating attack in 3 rounds unless you account for it).
It's frustrating that it takes an action to get info now, but I also understand the trade-off.
I think this is a very good short explanation of "useful information".
The GM remains the final judge of what to give, in good faith, but uses input from the players.
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Here are my thoughts on knowledge checks:
As a developer, if I make rules that say "here is a list of things you learn about every single monster, determined by the DC of the check" then I am essentializing specific things about the monster in a manner that will impact how every single party will ever interact with the monster. I am saying that x is the first and most basic thing and z is always an obscure and difficult fact about them. This becomes very bad when the default assumption about players making knowledge checks about creatures is primarily an attempt to defeat them in combat, a situation that might be common, but is thankfully not the end-all be all of how players interact with creatures. It is actually essential that the rules do not force the GM into having a specific order of information about the creatures to the players because it destroys GM agency in making sure that they can feed players information that is best for the situation the players are in, not just mechanically giving them the right level of clue, but narratively, to help move the story along.
Learning how to do this as a GM is an actual skill that requires practice and it can be frustrating when, as a player, you feel like the GM is bogarting information that you feel like they should have told you, but they have not. It can feel like the GM is out to get you, and in the case of revealing weaknesses and strengths, it could easily be the case that the GM assumed you did or did not know certain things about their monster that they factored into the encounter. How difficult or easy an encounter is going to be often does hinge on what your players know about the situation and when the GM doesn't have a good sense of that, the game becomes much more swingy as far as the likelihood of facing a TPK or a party steamrolling the entire adventure. Learning how to do this is a table by table process, but there are ways to help your new GM figure this out:
Be kind. Don't assume the GM is out to get you. Assume that they had a vision of this encounter and the things they are telling you about the creatures or environment or the overall situation of the encounter are relevant to making that vision come true. If you know this person closely, and you know how familiar they are with sitting in the GM chair, and how they respond to unsolicited advice, then you can use that information to decide if they would appreciate you informing the table that this is a monster that you know much more about then has thus far been revealed, and why your character might be able to share that information with the party, especially if you are willing to spend an action to make the recall knowledge check, or you can choose not to push it, and instead try to think of actions your character can take that will still feel useful to you, but might also help other characters discover the important information necessary to overcome the challenge.
Telling a GM "you are being too controlling" in the moment of the encounter, or deciding for them that they are not handling the recall knowledge check correctly and feeding the table information about the creature that the GM has deliberately withheld is not going to have the desired effect of helping them learn how to feel out the balance of setting up a great story and allowing the characters to be the protagonists of it. It is going to make them resentful of their players because they spent a lot of time preparing to tell this story and is much more likely to lead to future encounters with a hostile GM. Letting a bad encounter play out and lead to nowhere as a player can help the GM learn that they are being too stingy with information better than trying to force that opinion on them in the situation. If the encounter looks like a trap: A low level party being expected to fight a large green monster (that is obviously a troll) underwater with no hint that it might be weak to something other than fire, instead of charging in, you can urge caution. Most GMs will not feel tricked or cheated by a party respecting their encounter design enough to show fear. If they grow tired of seeing you act cautiously, they will either start giving you some clues or other information to ease your concerns and draw your characters into the encounter tactically prepared to face it, or they might ask you why you are playing so cautiously and then they are giving you the opportunity to tell them that you feel like your character is not being given enough information to proceed into difficult encounters prepared enough to face them.
Side note: this line of communication can also lead to important conversations for players and GMs to have (maybe should have had in session 0) about how forgiving/by the book the GM is going to be with character death, and help establish a tone for
1:
whether everyone would prefer to play a game where the heroes act decisively and sometimes brashly because: a. they are confident they are not being lead into a trap, or if they are there will be a way through it that is balanced to their level and party composition, or b. They are comfortable with a campaign where their characters might die quickly and often and that is not going to hurt their fun, because they have been encourage to bring back up characters or have other ways of participating in the festivities of the session that are engaging and rewarding.
or
2: Everyone would rather play a survival game where the gods are cruel and vindictive and the party needs to learn quickly to be on their toes, expecting traps that could kill them with a single misstep and a healthy fear of the monsters that they might soon encounter, and reckless play will be punished and not rewarded.
All of this is to say that the recall knowledge action is a very important part of the game, and one that may see much more attention given in the Game Master guide, but it will need to be in the format of helping GMs realize the role it plays in defining the tone and play style of their players in both combat and non-combat encounters, not in the format of an incredibly rigid set of rules about how it must be applied at all tables in order for the game to function correctly.
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Page 506 in identifying creatures. Unequivocal may be slightly strong but "learns one of its best known attributes" seems to very strongly imply to me that the GM decidesThat's a heck of an assumption, IMO.
Not in my opinion.
I feel there is a huge difference between "best known" and "useful".
"Best known" will be interpreted as an "in the common knowledge of the setting". And the setting is completely in the hands of the GM. A GM does not need to ask the players to decide what the "best known attribute" of a creature is.
"Useful" is to the players. A GM has to know their players or, even better, ask them what is "useful" knowledge to them.
It is very good if the rules explicitly state that the provided knowledge has to be useful. It would have been even better if they did it directly in the Skill description instead of using the "best known attribute" expression.
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The game is feeling more adversarial to me as a result.Quite franky, that is what you get from many GM's if you specifically develop your new edition to shift the power back to the GM from the players. I was concerned about that during the playtest and it's one of the main reasons why I opposed the rarity system back then so much. Many GM's don't know how to handle the power they are given (okay, that sentence sounds just a bit hyperbolic, but you get my point) and by putting more power into player hands 3.X/PF1E did a good thing, IMO. And I say that as someone who has GM'ed about 70-75% of the games I've been in for the last 17 years or so.
That is exactly the point. Even if the GM is allowed to bend or even break game rules there should be a set of "binding" rules for both sides to begin with.
And while reading through the sections of the CRB I also noticed that one side (the players) has a very firm set of rules, while the other side (GM) at least in parts has only very vague guidelines how to handle things.
And what 30 years of gaming of board games and RPGs have told me is that "vague" rules usually leave too much margin for either errors or arbitrariness.
The moment a GM is telling me: "You are fighting a green something, roll for initiative!" is the moment I will leave the table, even in organized play.
Sorry but I got no time for your artificially more difficult encounters.
I feel a lot better about Recall Knowledge after reading the Game Mastering section. The description under Skills makes it sound like you could end up with any random fact no matter how useful or not it is but the GM section makes it very clear that the #1 priority should be giving out useful information.
I don't agree that the rules inherently give that impression. They clearly gave you that impression, but they gave me quite the opposite one, so I think the actual text is more ambiguous than that in what impression it grants.
My own impression of the Recall Knowledge description for gamemastering on pages 506-507 is that it is mostly about deciding on the skill to roll and the DC to set. I am glad for that information, since setting DCs is difficult.
The line, "Knowing simple tales about an infamous dragon’s exploits, for example, might be incredibly easy for the dragon’s level, or even just a simple trained DC," is also reassuring in that Recall Knowledge can give a tale, which was what I intend with my houserules. However, that example sounds like the result of Gather Information rather than Recall Knowledge.
In contrast, the paragraph on Additional Knowledge worries me.
Additional Knowledge
Sometimes a character might want to follow up on a check to Recall Knowledge, rolling another check to discover more information. After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can yield more information, but you should adjust the difficulty to be higher for each attempt. Once a character has attempted an incredibly hard check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless—the character has recalled everything they know about the subject.
The most likely reason a player character would make a second Recall Knowledge check to identify the same creature again is because the GM did not give properly useful information in the first place. The player is willing to spend more actions to get that the truly useful information, but the rules recommend increasing the chance that Recall Knowledge will fail. Why?
That is not how my memory works. Remembering something in the first place tends to open floodgates of related information. Therefore, the increasing difficulty must either be how someone else's memory works or come from a mechanical reason for game balance. Game balance might say that the additional information is more valuable, so it ought to be harder to obtain. But as a story-weaving GM, I want to put the most significant information up front. Additional information would be less valuable. Or maybe the PF2 developers want the wizard to stop making Recall Knowledge rolls and start casting one-action Shield spells instead.
I could stretch out the information in a Goblin Warrior's stat block to require eleven successful Recall Knowledge rolls. A ghoul has more abilities and would take sixteen successful Recall Knowledge rolls.
PLAYER: I roll 16 to Recall Knowledge on the ghoul.
GM: It has a bite attack, with about as much piercing damage as a short sword, that has a chance at ghoul fever and paralysis.
PLAYER: Paralysis! What's the chance?
GM: That's additional knowledge.
PLAYER: I roll Religion skill again, 15.
GM: DC 15 Fortitude save, but you get a save at the end of the turn, too, and the DC goes down by 1 each try.
PLAYER: What about the ghoul fever? What does that do?
GM: That's additional knowledge.
PLAYER: I raise my shield instead.
GM: The ghoul moves to you, makes a bite attack, 14 to hit.
PLAYER: That misses.
GM: Next a claw attack, 18 to hit.
PLAYER: That hits.
GM: (openly rolls 3 on 1d4). You take 4 slashing damage and must make a Fortitude save against paralysis.
PLAYER: I roll 15. That's enough, right?
GM: Yes, that is enough.
PLAYER: What about the ghoul fever save?
GM: I hate to give out free information, but the claw attack lacks ghoul fever.
PLAYER: Why the switch to a claw attack then? It does less damage.
GM: That's additional knowledge.
On the other hand, I plan to houserule it as:
PLAYER: I roll 16 to Recall Knowledge on the ghoul.
GM: You remember the time you were on guard duty at the city gate and a party of adventurers came in all roughed up. "We fought a pack of ghouls in the graveyard," they said. "Their paralysis bite was nasty." But then your sergeant said, "Ghoul bite! Get to the cleric immediately." He explained about ghoul fever that had no symptoms at first, but turned into a fever that could kill a person in six days and they rise as a ghoul.
PLAYER: Paralysis! What's the chance?
GM: That's additional knowledge.
PLAYER: I roll Religion skill again, 15.
GM: You met one of those adventurers in a tavern again. He mentioned having to stand paralyzed while the ghouls attacked his buddies, but was able to finally fight it off. Mechanically, it's a DC 15 Fortitude save, but you get a save at the end of the turn, too, and the DC goes down each try.
PLAYER: I raise my shield.
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That is exactly the point. Even if the GM is allowed to bend or even break game rules there should be a set of "binding" rules for both sides to begin with.And while reading through the sections of the CRB I also noticed that one side (the players) has a very firm set of rules, while the other side (GM) at least in parts has only very vague guidelines how to handle things.
And what 30 years of gaming of board games and RPGs have told me is that "vague" rules usually leave too much margin for either errors or arbitrariness.
The moment a GM is telling me: "You are fighting a green something, roll for initiative!" is the moment I will leave the table, even in organized play.
Sorry but I got no time for your artificially more difficult encounters.
While there are some great cooperative boardgames, the vast majority of games in that genre have to have clearly defined rules and even often clearly established etiquette largely because of their competitive nature: Someone wins because of their ability to play well according to the rules of the game, and winning by being a jerk has its own set of consequences about how people view your victory (playing loud music when someone else is taking their turn, for example).
In an RPG, that is not the case.
Defeating the monsters can feel like winning, because it is the characters accomplishing their goals. But, while the characters probably should feel like they are winning when they face easy encounters and succeed without difficulty, the players probably should not.
"Artificially difficult encounters" is an interesting phrase that I would not ever have thought to use to describe a GM trying to make a challenging encounter because everything about the encounter is a construct of the GM using their knowledge of the rules to create a situation for the players to encounter.
"You are fighting a green something" is not good descriptive language and if the GM feels they have to avoid giving their players interesting details in the set up of the encounter then that is a problem. Because saying, "you see a large humanoid creature lurking in the waters below. Perhaps it is covered in a moss or mold, or perhaps its skin is naturally a mossy green, but its sickly color inspires discomfort and perhaps a twinge of fear. It has long lanky limbs and is smiling at you with gruesome green teeth from beneath the waters as if to invite you into its realm." is enough to give me a hint that it might be a troll, but it is also apparently breathing underwater (perhaps from a spell effect, perhaps naturally) and I can't be certain. I can decide to tell the table that I think it is a troll and that we should adopt x tactics against it, or I can try to play into the situation the GM has set up and make checks based on my character knowledge.
Every player has a right to decide what is fun for them and if you prefer a GM that says: "you see a troll under the water" instead of the above description. Or if you feel cheated by the idea of having to spend an action to figure out if it is a troll under under the water, in a situation where this environment is supposed to be a part of the challenge, then I guess get up and leave the table. Hopefully the GM wasn't your friend before you started playing, because they are not very likely to be your friend afterwards. But regardless, all you taught them was that they must be a stupid bad GM that should never sit behind the screen, or that you are player that they should actively avoid when they play in the future. Neither feels constructive to me.
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Mathmuse: in my opinion your example of the ghoul demonstrates exactly the kind of information players should get. The fact that it transmits paralysis and disease with its bite should be sufficiently useful information. What in story reason should there be for a GM to be giving out the DCs aside form saying it is weak or especially strong or virulent?
That part I don’t agree with. I do like your style of wrapping the information in a story format though, and that is certainly a legitimate way to do it.
You seem to be bemoaning the GM not turning over the entire statblock though. How does that make the game more fun?
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For those of you bemoaning the loss of the “good old days” when players ruled the roost and GMs had no room for trust to be placed in them, I present the following evidence:
In my area, and in most other areas I have heard of through other VOs, we were facing a downward spiral in the number of people willing to step forward to GM. One of the main reasons sited was the complexity of the rules and the antagonistic relationship put forth by optimizer players that seemed to be demanded of the GM.
I was willing to GM because I have been doing it for 35 years and I had a decent amount of rules mastery. Our tables were frequently full of players, none of whom was willing to GM even if it meant the table was cancelled. A few burnt out GMs would throw themselves on the grenade and run more tables than they preferred to do, but it was clearly breaking apart at the seams.
With 2nd edition I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to new people being willing to take up the challenge of GMing.
I have ZERO problem with a tiny modicum of trust being placed back in the hands of the GM.
Mathmuse: in my opinion your example of the ghoul demonstrates exactly the kind of information players should get. The fact that it transmits paralysis and disease with its bite should be sufficiently useful information. What in story reason should there be for a GM to be giving out the DCs aside form saying it is weak or especially strong or virulent.
You seem to be bemoaning the GM not turning over the entire statblock. How does that make the game more fun?
I editted my comment to add what I myself would say. The inital dialogue is what I would have said if I were sticking to the rules and interpreting them generously.
Most disease effects act immediately, so "ghoul fever" without player knowledge would have the player guess an immediate sickness condition or similar condition. If the ghoul bites the player and he fails the fortitude save against ghoul fever, he will learn for free that ghoul fever has no immediate effect.
Why should the player waste actions on Recall Knowledge to learn something that he will learn from experience within two rounds?
On the other hand, imagine that the players made no Recall Knowledge checks and never heard about ghoul fever. A day later, two of them come down with ghoul fever and they finally make some Medicine checks and learn about ghoul fever. They wasted a day when they should have turned back and found a cleric to cast Remove Disease.
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I don’t think that is a remotely generous interpretation of the rules though. On the first roll I would probably give them the paralysis and maybe the disease as well and let them know there is not much else of use they can recall.
Point is that the idea it would take 11 checks to learn everything is using an interpretation of the rules that are nothing like the stated way it works or the intent judging by the few examples we have.
In my opinion they get a piece of information, not the math behind it. The rules for recall knowledge don’t spell out any circumstance where they get to have a peek at the math. In my opinion that wasn’t true in PF1 either.
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Point being in my interpretation you get all the info on a ghoul on one and maybe at most two checks. If they are a common monster I would probably give out one of those pieces of information for free.
Your storytelling style I definitely agree with though, I just don’t see any justification in the rules to give out the DCs etc. in anything other than vague terms.
"Artificially difficult encounters" is an interesting phrase that I would not ever have thought to use to describe a GM trying to make a challenging encounter because everything about the encounter is a construct of the GM using their knowledge of the rules to create a situation for the players to encounter.
However this is exactly the point of this discussion. At the moment GM's can willingly increase or decrease the challege based on how much information they are handing out. A fixed encounter in any adventure path might be hard for one group or easy for another group entirely based on the amount of "useful" information the GM is willing to hand out when they pass their respecitve Recall Knowledge checks. And this is not how it should be.
"You are fighting a green something" is not good descriptive language and if the GM feels they have to avoid giving their players interesting details in the set up of the encounter then that is a problem. Because saying, "you see a large humanoid creature lurking in the waters below. Perhaps it is covered in a moss or mold, or perhaps its skin is naturally a mossy green, but its sickly color inspires discomfort and perhaps a twinge of fear. It has long lanky limbs and is smiling at you with gruesome green teeth from beneath the waters as if to invite you into its realm." is enough to give me a hint that it might be a troll, but it is also apparently breathing underwater (perhaps from a spell effect, perhaps naturally) and I can't be certain. I can decide to tell the table that I think it is a troll and that we should adopt x tactics against it, or I can try to play into the situation the GM has set up and make checks based on my character knowledge.
I am 100% with you on this one. It is the narrative which should create most of the suspense, dread and sometimes even a little fright, not the monsters statistics block. That is not to say that the stats can't help to emphasize the strength of a monster, but in an RPG the players should always be wary of a monster based on its "fear factor", not by its capabilities within the given set of game rules. A dragon should be feared for being a dragon, not as a flying huge creature that can breath a 60 feet cone of fire for 12d8 damage every d3 rounds.
Every player has a right to decide what is fun for them and if you prefer a GM that says: "you see a troll under the water" instead of the above description. Or if you feel cheated by the idea of having to spend an action to figure out if it is a troll under under the water, in a situation where this environment is supposed to be a part of the challenge, then I guess get up and leave the table. Hopefully the GM wasn't your friend before you started playing, because they are not very likely to be your friend afterwards. But regardless, all you taught them was that they must be a stupid bad GM that should never sit behind the screen, or that you are player that they should actively avoid when they play in the future. Neither feels constructive to me.
Of course dialogue is always better than one-sided action and of course my example is somewhat exaggerated, however if worst comes to worst (and dialoge isn't working) then I reserve my right to quit playing once I am under the impression that the GM is actively playing against the group instead of with the group. And I consider a GM playing against the group if he is deliberately witholding cruical information despite the respective checks have been done and passed and sometimes even if those checks have not been passed (by trial and error). If that devil we are facing is shrugging off our sorcerers fireballs like nothing happened or our fighters slashing weapons do not deal any damage to the monster we need to know this as the characters and players.
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However this is exactly the point of this discussion. At the moment GM's can willingly increase or decrease the challege based on how much information they are handing out.
In my mind, the difficulty of the encounter is shaped by how much the party knows going into it, and a good system helps the GM understand that and learn how to reveal that information for the benefit of play experience. Which I am starting to see where you are coming from becasue...
If that devil we are facing is shrugging off our sorcerers fireballs like nothing happened or our fighters slashing weapons do not deal any damage to the monster we need to know this as the characters and players.
A GM not making it clear that the troll is regenerating, or that certain attacks are ineffective is doing the same thing as describing a monster as a green something unless the party makes a check. A fighter might be better off making a slashing attack to test whether a monster is affected by that weapon because their bonus to attack is better than their knowledge check. While a wizard is probably better off making the check than the attack. That feels like the system working as intended.