|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm wondering for those who have played a fair amount at this point what sort of Lore skills you may have encountered or found particularly useful.
There have been a couple of society scenarios where Pathfinder Society lore came in handy.
I also imagine Ship or Vehicle lore would help a lot too, as a driver/sailor.
Legal Lore looks useful to get out of stuff in a city or get acess to some stuff.
X City Lore (Absalom Lore per example) is more specific but could give around the same benefits that Legal Lore maybe even with lower DC and could give some historical events as well.
X Terrain Lore (Mountain Lore per example) as a DM I would make the DC lower for someone using this instead of survival.
|
Lore skill usefulness will vary between campaigns.
The Age of Ashes Player guide suggests many useful backgrounds/lore that would be good.
Fall of Plaugestone has others.
PFS has its own backgrounds and training that can give you additional lore. And I suspect those would be commonly used in PFS scenerios
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I agree that the value of specific lore skills as a body of knowledge will vary between campaigns.
However, the real value of the lore skill is in how it helps you as a player look for ways to be your character in play. By having a specific lore associated with your background, it puts the onus on you as a player to realize that, as a farmer, your character is going to be better and finding out information about the scenario at hand, if you can frame it in the context of a farmer? Can you find other farmers to talk to, can you start your investigation by looking at field animals, etc?
Yes your class skills and choices will matter as well, but as a free pick up, lore gives you another way to be different from every other character that is X ancestry and class, in fashion that can reward you in play.
I can honestly say that it is one of my favorite narrative elements added with PF2. It is subtle, but it really encourages creative play.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yes, the flipside of the applicability of lore skills being largely GM discretion is that it is clear that the GM also has a lot of freedom to say yes, when you have an idea for how your lore may be applicable to a situation.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I also see Lore as a good GM reward. GM gives you a free skill trained, Lore is both story based and thematic while simultaneously not exceedingly strong or overpowering. It's also unlikely to have any overlap with existing abilities.
I’d expect a GM to provide a list of thematic lore skills. I also expected the same for languages in PF1e (although I had to argue pretty much every time for it). In PFS your out of luck of course. At that point you might as well pick at random.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Sailing Lore could prove to be very useful, the equivalent of Profession(Sailor) in PF1, allowing you to crew a sailing ship, for example in a pirate-themed adventure.
What skill would you use to navigate by the stars or using navigation equipment? Do you think Navigation Lore should be a lore skill?
FWIW, at the start of a new campaign, I handed out an additional lore skill, to represent 3-4 months that the PCs had been working in a specific profession, even though they had chosen other backgrounds during character creation. This sort of thing seems like a useful perk that DMs can give in very specific situations to make a PC more interesting, without invalidating the skill system as a whole.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In PFS your out of luck of course. At that point you might as well pick at random.
I dunno, Lore:Pathfinder Society will probably come up frequently in PFS :)
Lore: Polymath :P
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Lore: Polymath :P
I'd pick Lore:Lore :P
I would always go with the lores "suggested" by the AP or the GM in a custom campaign.
If they are the ones telling you this might be useful, then that means they might have plans. They might have lore checks already build into various situations.
Everything else? It is all about how well you can convince the GM. If you don't have a lenient GM, then you might as well forget it and not invest anything.
I would always go with the lores "suggested" by the AP or the GM in a custom campaign.
It also depends on what you have for skills: for instance, Age of Ashes Player's Guide suggests Lore: engineering but if you already have Craft that covers engineering you'll want to pick another Lore since you might as well try to cover something your skills don't.
I would always go with the lores "suggested" by the AP or the GM in a custom campaign.It also depends on what you have for skills: for instance, Age of Ashes Player's Guide suggests Lore: engineering but if you already have Craft that covers engineering you'll want to pick another Lore since you might as well try to cover something your skills don't.
Well it was my first PF2 WTF moment when I read the Age of Ashes lore suggestions in the players guide. Foreshadowing much? ^^
Lore: Polymath :P
I think this would only cover knowledge of polymaths in Golarion and their exploits. :P
Is it cheating to say Bardic Lore? Probably. But that is pretty useful, though perhaps not quite worth a while class feat. Otherwise, it depends on location and campaign. It might be good to grab Additional Lore for the terrain or city your campaign takes place in, then retrain if you get a significant shift in setting. Or choose a lore related to your campaign theme. For instance, Lore (Ancient Azlant) would be stupidly useful in Ruins of Old Azlant, as the title implies. Same for Lore (Thassilon) for the campaigns all about runelords.
PFS being too broad to pick a lore that's always applicable also means that it's broad enough that there will be situations popping up occasionally where any lore could come in handy, so no one will actually need to retrain their lore.
PFS has seasons.
In at least one Dwarven Lore would've been quite useful despite being a throwaway tag to an Ancestry feat.
Demon or Worldwound lore for the demon season, Elemental Planes for that season, and so forth. Your faction's goals likely imply a useful lore too. Or how about Lore: Aspis Consortium, Whispering Tyrant, or whatever country is getting pillaged the most this season.
You could run two PCs through, each following a different meta-arc.
Now with the reset of levels, it should be pretty easy to juggle 2 PCs without worrying about being in the proper level range.
I'd imagine that a high-Int Elf (or Half-Elf or Apopted) could make great use of picking up just the right Lore every session (assuming the party has a preparation opportunity.) That's a pretty sweet ability when you're jumping all over the world. "Yeah, I know something about that place too. Or did. Let me reflect awhile."
I'd imagine PFS lore should apply to the checks related to the current season of PFS, you know about the current operations of the society. Otherwise, Underworld Lore is slightly better than the rest because you can earn income with better tasks by taking Experienced Smuggler (probably through your background).
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It would be helpful to have an expanded list of lore specialities and examples of in-game situations where they are relevant.
For example, I am using Sailing lore for checks involving correctly setting the sails, diagnosing how serious damage to a ship is, manning the tiller with checks to weather a storm, gaining tactical advantage against another ship closing on yours, identifying enemy ships, things like that. I feel like a different lore skill should govern navigating by charts and computations, and navigating by the stars. I had intended that Sailing lore replace the PF1 skill Profession (Sailor).
Now, I'm uncertain whether Sailing lore should really have this role. But this is the kind of thing that would be useful to define in game terms, in an official Paizo publication.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It would be helpful to have an expanded list of lore specialities and examples of in-game situations where they are relevant.
For example, I am using Sailing lore for checks involving correctly setting the sails, diagnosing how serious damage to a ship is, manning the tiller with checks to weather a storm, gaining tactical advantage against another ship closing on yours, identifying enemy ships, things like that. I feel like a different lore skill should govern navigating by charts and computations, and navigating by the stars. I had intended that Sailing lore replace the PF1 skill Profession (Sailor).
Now, I'm uncertain whether Sailing lore should really have this role. But this is the kind of thing that would be useful to define in game terms, in an official Paizo publication.
I think the point of the less defined lore skills is so that a GM can give the player some leeway when putting their character mechanics into narrative practice.
For example, in a campaign at sea, that is going to be spending levels and levels on ships and navigating dangerous waters, I think you want more subtlety for different roles characters might have, navigator, look out, sailor, diver, etc.But in an inland campaign, if a character wants to be a landlocked former captain, runaway from a mutiny, it is probably fine to let one lore cover more general sailing and navigating skills and not force overly specific, non-relevant roles.
I probably wouldn't include navigating in Sailing Lore because it's one of the main uses of Survival. And not everyone on a ship needs to know it, anyway. The navigator can reasonably be asked to have both Sailing Lore and Survival.