So, let's say you have a character who has no knowledge (religion), butworships a deity. Let's saysomeone asks you about all thethings you should knowin order to worship that deity. i someone asks you questions about it, how would you answer? What if you found a clue to a thing related to your deity?
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You can make an untrained check on a knowledge skill if the DC is 10 or less. A person with no points in knowledge religion would be able to answer the most simple questions but not much else. The DC to know the common mythology and tenets is 15 which means a person who is untrained in it cannot do.
A person does not really have to know that much about a religion in order to be considered a worshiper. It is not that uncommon for people to have little or even false information about the religion they belong to. Even in the real world this is fairly common. A truly devout person will probably actually have points in knowledge religion, but the causal worshiper often will not.
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The other thing the GM could do is lower the check DCs for their own religion by 5. This means they could answer questions about common mythology tennets about their own religion, but not about other religions.
This wouod 100% be a house-rule, but it doesn't change all that much and it allows the player a little more roleplay elements.
Good points! Many thanks! :)
More or less you should know how the locals in your area worship your deity. You wouldn't know if those customs are practiced elsewhere, if they were made up by the local priest, and you wouldn't even be sure if someone quoted you holy scripture from your deity is accurate or not. If there was a complicated or long ceremony carried out during worship, you probably just mimed what other people did with no understanding of what was going on other than going along with the crowd.
As far as the fundamentals of your religion, you could confuse local customs and laws as parts of your religion. Also parts of those tennents that don't come up often might be things you don't know.
For instance, as a lay worshiper of Erastil in a farming village you might know Ol' One-eye makes a big deal about protecting the family, sewing seeds, and treating traveling tinkerers well. Also most everybody practices with the bow and whispers a prayer before they shoot. You could be under the mistaken impression that Erastile is the god of the bow, protection, prosperity, and hospitality. You might know he is involved with farming, family and hunting but be totally ignorant that he is also a patron of trade. You also might not recognize his Stag symbol, and think his symbol is actually a plow.
I pretty much agree with this 100%... I've been playing a Goblin Phoenix bloodline Sorcerer in a recent campaign who is a worshiper of Sarenrae... and her tribes beliefs are that Sarenrae is a Fire Goddess that is to be feared above all else... her own personal beliefs however are a bit askewed from her tribes, she worships Sarenrae rather than fears her... however her tribes views on Sarenrae have shaped her own views quite a bit to the point that she honestly couldn't tell you much of anything actually accurate about Sarenrae... her view basically can be summed up as "Fire goddess heals with fire"... and she's taken it very literally... she thinks of herself as a Priestess of "the fire goddess"... some of her views are also off due to the fact that she is an idiot...
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The distance between having a skill point in a skill and not having it is enormous, especially for Knowledge skills. Even more if it is a class skill.
Another problem is that we have a small number of skill points and plenty of them are needed to make viable characters, so we don't have a way to flesh the background of our characters without affecting his growth.
As a GM I regularly use Background skills while giving some limit on how they can be spent. The Lore skill seems perfect in your situation. Your character will not have a smattering of knowledge in every religion, included a small chance to know something about the worship of an obscure deity worshiped only by a small number of people in another continent 3,000 years ago, he will have a bit of knowledge about the deity he worship and how he or she interacts with other major deities.
You know a handful of the most common names of your god, the names and dates of all the major holidays, the name of the leader of your local temple and the name of the highest-ranking church official in the part of your setting you consider "the world".
You know what your deity stands for, what they oppose, and the basic code of conduct for their followers... without rolling.
To use an example, let's talk about the Roman Catholic Church and assume a layman with an INT of 7 and zero ranks in Knowledge (religion)-- what questions they should be able to answer about Catholicism by taking 10 with a -2 penalty.
They worship God, the Almighty, Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour, the Holy Trinity. They know who "Mother of God" refers to, they know the name and "portfolio" of one or two saints who are personally relevant. They can recite the most common prayers by heart.
They know the name of their priest, possibly their bishop, and the holy name of the current Pope and possibly his predecessor.
They can name at least half of the Ten Commandments, and the Golden Rule, and the Church's general position on the issues the local clergy care most about.
Anything more than this, and you would start to suspect they had the benefit of some formal education... but anything less, and you'd struggle to believe that they'd been raised with the Church's teachings, or that they'd attended Church at all since they were small children.
This thread brings up some points that have ALWAYS bugged me every time I put any real thought into organized religion in PF. If a deity, let's say Pharasma, has multiple domains and acceptable worshipper religions, could she be worshipped in 2 or more COMPLETELY different ways, in different parts of the world, and still have certain things be considered "cannon" and thus universal?
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Well in the real world this happens as well. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism all worship the same god. Christianity is also split into many sects that diferentiate themselves: Catholics, Protestants, Orthidox, etc. I assume there are similar splits in the Jewish, Islamic and Mormon religions, but I'm less exposed to them. This means we have dozens of seperate belief systems who all worship the one god.
And it's not just that god: Shoulin Monks are a very well know sect of Buddhism who obviously differ from their more pacifist bretheren. Tibetan Buddhists are allowed to eat some meat, which differs from Buddhists in less severe climates.
In my experience Domains handle these differences very well.
You can always roll knowledge checks, you just cannot get higher than DC10.
You can also take 10