DC for Recall Knowledge when a LOWER level of the creature exists?

[The Rot Grub]

Hi all,

Let's say that a party encounters a Ghost Mage and recalls knowledge, trying to find a way to bypass its resistance to damage. The PC fails if the DC is for a Level 10 creature (which the Ghost Mage is), but it would succeed if it were against a Level 4 Ghost Commoner. The means to bypass their resistance are the same for both.

How would other people adjudicate this? By RAW, you use the level of the creature they encounter. But arguably in the lore this piece of information is lower level.

I feel like Recall Knowledge is not used enough for my players, so I'm inclined to give this information.

[HumbleGamer]

The Rot Grub wrote:

Hi all,

Let's say that a party encounters a Ghost Mage and recalls knowledge, trying to find a way to bypass its resistance to damage. The PC fails if the DC is for a Level 10 creature (which the Ghost Mage is), but it would succeed if it were against a Level 4 Ghost Commoner. The means to bypass their resistance are the same for both.

How would other people adjudicate this? By RAW, you use the level of the creature they encounter. But arguably in the lore this piece of information is lower level.

I feel like Recall Knowledge is not used enough for my players, so I'm inclined to give this information.

I am permissive as well when it comes to dragons and similar stuff ( like the ghost example you provided ).

Even if it may be fun:

GM: "You see a large draconic creature covered in black scales"

Player: Rolls a success "Beware my friends, that one is a young black dragon"

GM: "You also notice that next to him there's an itentical creature, but bigger"

PLayer: Rolls a critical failure "I have no idea what creature is that one... might be a white dragon"

[thewastedwalrus]

By RAW the GM determines the DC for such checks, so if a lower DC makes sense for your situation then go for it. I usually separate the abilities out based on where they come from and try to adjudicate DCs based on that.

So a Ghost Mage's resistance is a shared ability of Ghosts (the most common undead spirits), so I'd probably allow an untrained DC of 10 to know that they resist most kinds of damage and a trained DC of 15 to know that magic attacks have a partial effect or full effect with force/positive damage. But for something like the kinds of spells a Ghost Mage could cast I would set it near a 10th-level DC of 27.

[Fumarole]

I find it is best to reward players for using Recall Knowledge, so I too am very generous with it.

[Nefreet]

Ghosts are typically template-built; even the Ghost entry points this out:

Building Ghosts wrote:

Note that the ghost mage is built from the ground up, rather than by applying the ghost rules to a once-living creature, so its numbers don’t exactly match the values listed above.

Since the template is a CR+2 adjustment, I think it's reasonable to set the base Recall Knowledge DC to 16, but only for the purpose of identifying generic Ghost abilities; for a Ghost's specific abilities, you should probably still use the appropriate Level-based DC.