It is my impression that the GM decides which skills are applicable, but the player chooses which one to attempt.
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...GM even has to say what skill was used...your GM has to use it...
To be fair, your GM doesn't HAVE TO do anything. All the rules in the CRB are optional and even when they do follow the printed rules, there are cases, like Recall Knowledge, where the rules are incomplete. I don't see anything in the Action description that indicates a GM must tell you which skill was used or if they used one that was non-standard. I think the only reason the GM would ordinarily need to involved the player in this is because they don't have ready access to the character sheet across the table. With everything online/digital, a GM can do the secret checks truly in secret.
It is my impression that the GM decides which skills are applicable, but the player chooses which one to attempt.
That does raise the question of what to do if the player chooses an inapplicable skill. Does the GM simply inform the player that his action yielded no information because the selected skill was used against an invalid target, or does he let him try again with a different skill? Or does the player say that he wants to recall knowledge about a given target and the GM (who is doing a secret check anyway) simply picks out the most applicable skill for that target?
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The issue really boils down to how often as a GM you want to use recall knowledge to give your party useful information about the encounter and the situation they are in, or how much you want them to have to work for that knowledge.
If you make the PCs choose their skill, I think most of them will start to devalue the recall knowledge skill, because it has another potential element of failure associated with something that is already of questionable value to a lot of parties. If GMs are giving away attack roll bonuses, ACs, and resistances with the process of revealing information to the PCs in regular play, very few players are going to bother using actions to assess the creatures they are fighting, because they will collect all the information that feels relevant to them to defeat a foe that way.
This also sets up the occasional unusual creature to be a TPK machine when it does things like split in two when attacked with a slashing weapon.
When I GM, and I give out information to a PC recalling knowledge in combat, I try to always give a useful bit of combat related information, but also information that helps contextualize why the creature is where it is, and what its goal for being there might be, if that could be ascertained relatively easily. I find when I do this that PCs start thinking outside the box of "smash and destroy" and get more creative about their tactics as well as consider shifting an initially hostile encounter into something else. I usually work with my PCs when they decide they want to recall knowledge and try to give them a couple of options that might work for getting some kind of useful information, then have them chose which one they want to use, and then roll secretly.
Edit: I do this (give them a couple of options and then have them choose) to also plant the seed in their minds that they could try again with a different skill and learn different information about both the creature and the possible goals for both the party and their enemies in the current encounter.
I have a couple of PCs who really hate secret rolls, and I do sometimes let them roll their own checks, but interestingly, none of those players tend to use recall knowledge in combat, and tend to prefer just attacking things on their own anyway. I mostly play by post and by VTT and I often suspect these are players who tend to look monster stats up on their own as soon as they get a name for a creature, and rather than try to fight them on that, I just sometime change my creatures stat blocks around and then don't worry about it.
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In my experience the players tell me what RK skill they want to use, and usually get it right anyway. Unless its a creature that appears to be of a different type than it is, like a Bone Golem, which uses Craft, but looks like an undead, I generally correct them if they guess wrong.
The most common things my player ask are categorical, like Weaknesses, Resistances, and Special Attacks. Sometimes they're more specific like "weak save" or "strong save." I am generally pretty free with the info, though in some circumstances I consider "none" a reasonable and useful response. If they ask me something totally useless, I'll redirect them rather than wasting the action, and sometimes if there's something I think is significant, I'll just skip asking them what they want to know and give that.
I allow repeated checks until a failure or a success at +10, but I'm not sure I've ever gotten more than three questions on the same creature.
I have my players declare they they are recalling knowledge. I then ask "Ok what is your _______ skill?" So if it's undead and that's religion, I of course ask for religion. If it's an animal, I'm asking for their Nature skill.
Then I roll the skill and add their modifier, determine the result, and give them information accordingly. If I don't feel like rolling myself I just have them roll, see the last paragraph for more on that... I do like secret checks but I also have a zillion things to keep track of on my side of the screen, so I like to keep as much of the math on the player side as I can.
I'm also fairly lax with failure results. I do feel as though an action spent is a high enough cost, and like Luke Styer above, I find my off-the-cuff false information to be pretty bland and awful, so it's a portion of the game that I just gloss over in favor of other things that I do better.
That also allows me to freely allow my players to roll, since they either get no information, or they get information they know is correct, so they never have to do the whole "well Bob the human knows not to use an edged weapon against a skeleton, but Bobilius the Great the PC rolled beans on his Recall Knowledge check, so... I guess I'll stow my warhammer, draw my dagger and give it a good go anyways..."
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Unfortunately, I have had too many bad experiences with meta-knowledge used by players that I am hyper-sensitive to it. I don't want them to know what skill is being used especially if the creature being identified could easily be mistaken for something much different, but by knowing the skill, they already get valuable information even if they crit fail the check.
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It is my impression that the GM decides which skills are applicable, but the player chooses which one to attempt.That does raise the question of what to do if the player chooses an inapplicable skill. Does the GM simply inform the player that his action yielded no information because the selected skill was used against an invalid target, or does he let him try again with a different skill? Or does the player say that he wants to recall knowledge about a given target and the GM (who is doing a secret check anyway) simply picks out the most applicable skill for that target?
In my games, an invalid skill usually results in a "You know it's not a [type]." response.
For example, if someone used religion on a flesh golem, regardless of the result, I'd tell them that it isn't an undead (indicating that perhaps they should use a different skill). If there is a bit of useful information to be had, such as a flesh golem requiring divine ritual components to create (I don't know that they actually do, but for the purpose of this illustrative example, let's assume that's the case), I might say as much.
"You think it might be a flesh golem, a construct made of flesh and bone and animated through a divine ritual. You don't know much of anything about flesh golems, save that they aren't undead."
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I was thinking more about something like a shadow vs a shadow demon. Granted they now (in 2E) use the same skill (Religion), but it goes to illustrate my point. If say Fiends were Occultism, then by knowing which skill was to be used, they would know if it was a fiend or an undead even with a failed check. That would be information that should only be revealed on a successful check, else they need to figure it out through trial and error. I'm sure there are examples of creatures that use different skills for ID that are similar enough to be mistaken by PCs.
Recall Knowledge is a difficult topic and at least in my opinion insufficiently covered in the CRB.
In between monster name & traits (monster ID) and useful information to be gained via Recall Knowledge it took a lot of discussion and haggling in between players and GM in order to establish a mutually agreeable solution. And this is homebrew, i.e. once we have decided how to tackle a certain rule this interpretation will be used consistently.
We have established the following procedure:
1) Monster appears and GM provides a vivid description along with the skill(s) required for further ID.
We decided that we want to have all players use RK on a regular basis and felt that we will not use the skill much if we feel our action might be wasted (or even worse fed wrong intel almost certainly) while using the incorrect skill.
2) Player announces use of RK when his turn comes up and the GM rolls a secret check.
3) Depending on the outcome of the secret check our GM will either provide no additional information, the monster name, all traits and one piece of useful information that is not already covered by the traits or wrong intel as per the critical failure result.
Considering the length of most engagements and the usefulness of info the earlier it is available RK checks are usually only made during round one or in case somebody is clearly failing their check, yielding no additional information. For example our Spirit Barbarian may also try to RK in case my Cleric fails to ID monsters that fall under the Religion skill. I have never seen our GM increase DCs while doing so (he sometimes discloses DCs after a successful check), however we neither have a class that is mechanically dependent on RK'ing multiple times in a row nor do we see need to RK more than once that often.
Especially with the rules assuming that GMs would have to deal with critical failures, maybe it would be a good thing ito the future for bestiary monsters to include a sentence in their description mentioning creatures they are often mistaken as. Some already do, but putting that sentence in the same place of every entry would really help cue in GMs to where to look for it quickly. I know space in printed material is at a premium, so it might not be worth it to be official material, but maybe a thirds party or fan developer will do something with clickable links to the creatures that it might be mistaken as.
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Personally, I ask them: What would you try to use? Then roll the best skill they have that matches one for the creature. If they "guessed" right, I give them a small bonus on that roll. (Usually a +2, but if I feel this was really a good guess and they chose that skill because it fit best even if it's not a good one for them, I tend to push the bonus up a bit. I even once gave a +5 because they chose an untrained one that was exactly the one they needed, when I knew that they didn't know AT ALL what that monster was, and they had knowledge skills at master.)
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A pretty good guiding principle to ask yourself as a GM, in weighing the question as to whether you want to encourage your players to attempt more knowledge recalling or less, is to ask yourself whether the element of revealing knowledge in combat is a fun game element for you or not?
If it isn't then you might be perfectly fine letting players collect their knowledge through various means of meta-sources: from deducting attack roll bonuses and defenses from targeting them, to not caring if they look up monster entries as long as they do so discretely and don't table talk it in a way that cheapens the encounter. I think that this is generally frowned upon by a lot of tables, but honestly it doesn't bother me that much as a GM, as I will just occasionally change stat blocks, weaknesses, and other elements of a creature to keep things spicy from time to time. My real problem with it though is that it encourages players to look at monsters as purely tactical combat obstacles that have to be overcome with violence. That gets really boring really fast for me as a GM, and I will regularly have even powerful monsters do unexpected things, like offer terms of surrender that are actually fairly reasonable, or break down and start crying for a round after a particular companion or minion was killed, to try to inject some narrative life into creatures that are starting to look like bags of xp and gold. So if you feel like your PCs are never trying to dig deeper into your encounters than figuring out how to kill your creatures as quickly as possible, AND that is bothering you about how your game is going, then you might want to review how you are giving out information about encounters to your PCs (intentionally or not) and whether they are utilizing sources for gathering information that are guiding them towards playing a numbers game when you want them engaging in the story a little more. Giving out "too much information" with recall knowledge checks, including all of the mechanical stuff that they are most interested in, will let you use the recall knowledge activity as a vehicle for also giving them some cues for some narrative play that they just might absorb by proxy.
If you want the revealing of information to be a slow part of the process of learning how to win an encounter, BUT your PCs seem resistant to using recall knowledge in play, then you probably need to lean into having more powerful monsters with unusual abilities for the party to encounter, but have those monsters fight a little more cautiously, with more deceptive goals than "murder everyone." If the PCs can kill enemies by acting first, rushing ahead and slamming them 80% of the time, then that is what they are going to start trying to do 99% of the time. And they are just going to get frustrated by the fact that their characters tend to die every 5th encounter against a superior foe. But if they just nearly die, then find out that there is a way to overcome that powerful foe with a little more preparation, then they will feel a lot more heroic about it.
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I use their highest bonus ( or even lower bonus but also lower dc, for example when it comes to "specific lores", but not bardic lore and similar ) and then give them information.
On the one hand, I understand Paizo logic.
Having the players to either trading resources to get information, and also simulate the real time combat ( you'd probably know what are you facing, but given the thrill and dynamicity of combat I understand they won't be able to do it for free ).
On the other hand, I don't expect a player to mistake its skill to recognize a creature ( that's why I roll the highest they have to recognize it ).
To speed up things I roll Several dices before the adventure ( for every player ) and use the result to give them the answer asap ( game runs smoothier and as a DM I am free to concentrate on other stuff ).
I also plan ahead some "generic lies" to tell them, if they critically fail the check.
I love the idea of rolling before the game and it inspired me to write up a spread sheet today.
Here is the link for everyone.
This is the first Google Doc spreadsheet I've made so let me know if parts are not working or if you have suggestions or explanations.
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One option that I've not yet tried extensively, but been thinking about and tested a little to deal with the 'how do players know which skill to use' discussion is to allow some useful information to be gathered with almost any Recall Knowledge skill. The appropriate knowledge(s) are still going to be the ones to give you precise information about the monster, but others can give information appropriate to the skill you're using. It encourages almost all players to try a Recall Knowledge, and it helps players feel like their knowledge comes from something they've focused on. For example, I'll use a troll:
Society: Gives you precise information; you may find out they have Attack of Opportunity, or they're slighter faster than most, or their Will saves are garbage, and so on. Anything you care about in the stat block, essentially.
Craft: You've heard of armour made of trollskin that seems to patch itself back together after it's been hit, if the armour has been prepared correctly.
Medicine: You've heard of the injuries dealt by trolls, and know they're vicious and effective melee combatants
Nature: You've heard about the effects trolls have on the ecosystem, and that they're scared of fire-based animals, or forest fires drive them away, etc
Religion: You know of Urxehl, the demon lord many trolls worship, and that he hates trolls and sends forest fires to torture them.
Arcana/Occultism: Likely better to warn the players that these ones just don't have much connection at all, and just not let them roll it. Or maybe there's an interesting way to connect these back to trolls I'm not thinking about right now!
I don't think it'd be generalizable in a way that lets Paizo use it very effectively, but I think it's an interesting way for individual GMs to try to encourage use of the skill, and nice for someone like an Inventor to be able to use their encyclopaedic knowledge of crafted materials to figure out information about the world.
Very cool, Arcaian! I attempt something similar, but am not quite as generous.
I usually give them a few options, but let them use something else if they have a reason for it. I then slightly tailor the information given to which skill is rolled, if applicable.
I try to be very generous and my players still rarely want to spend the action to RK. On a success I give out traits, alignment, some lore, AND 1 or 2 of their abilities.
when they do, it goes like this:
Player: I spend an action to Recall Knowledge
Me: That will require a Nature roll, do you still want to spend the action?
Player: (either makes a roll) or I am not trained so I'll do something else.
This way they don't get shafted out of an action if it requires a skill they aren't trained in.
My current group has pretty poor stat distributions to do Recall Knowledge checks all that frequently but I also don't like rolling those secretly. There's enough for me to keep track of and I also am pretty poor at making up something wrong on the spot.
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Where are you finding this?.
I think you will find that the rules governing Recall Knowledge are generally permissive by way of not being dismissive of actions. So as 959, the rules would “allow” the GM to do such things because they are hinted at in general skill adjudication rules and not specifically banned by the Recall Knowledge rules. So, it’s going to be hard to find specific instances of permissive RAW since the rules are ambiguous enough to allow a lot of freedom and fiat.
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What RAW does allow is a player to ask a specific type of question and use a skill that might include that type of knowledge (or vice versa) beyond the one that covers the creature's primary category.Where are you finding this? I'd like to have a reference for future reference.Some topics might appear on multiple lists, but the skills could give different information. For example, Arcana might tell you about the magical defenses of a golem, whereas Crafting could tell you about its sturdy resistance to physical attacks.***The GM might allow checks to Recall Knowledge using other skills. For example, you might assess the skill of an acrobat using Acrobatics. If you're using a physical skill (like in this example), the GM will most likely have you use a mental ability score—typically Intelligence—instead of the skill's normal physical ability score.So a PC could learn about an aberrations poison ability via a Nature check. However the last clause suggest you might still have to use your Int modifier when making an Athletics check.
Ah ok, gotcha. Yeah, I was thinking of suggesting similar things to my GM. Crafting to find AC or weapon attacks if an enemy is using manufactured armor and weapons, respectively. Medicine to find fortitude or reflex saves of humanoids or other not-so-alien creatures. That sort of thing. This will be a good thing to point out for support of such a request. Thanks.