Recall Knowledge and Known Weakness - Can the investigator's specific feat overcome the general failure?

[ThatGuyDM]

Known weakness allows an investigator to RK every time they Devise, but the rules for Additional Knowledge state that once you fail, you can't RK anymore. At first the DM said that the 1st level feat was effectively off whenever the Investigator failed any RK about the same creature, but we argued that the feat was specific, and *always* allowed a check, failure or no, albeit at increasing DC's.

Is that accurate? Or would the general rule of no more RK's upon failure apply to Known Weakness regardless?

[Baarogue]

looks like a sound specific over general argument to me

[Ascalaphus]

I don't think it overrides it.

If it had said something like "you can do this even if..." or something like that, then there would actually be a specific rule to override the general.

Right now, it mostly just shaves off the action cost. That actually makes it pretty good because saving actions at the start of a combat is really good, and getting RK info at the start of a combat is also really good.

[Gortle]

I agree that it doesn't override it.
But you can always try another knowledge skill. Recall Knowledge checks are on a per skill basis.
You aren't totally blocked till you have failed every relevant skill , where relevant is determined by the GM.

[breithauptclan]

I would go with the interpretation that Known Weaknesses allows you to make the Recall Knowledge check, but doesn't override the DC adjustments or usage limits of the Additional Knowledge rule.

I would allow the checks to be made per creature, rather than per creature type. If they are making the Recall Knowledge checks to gain knowledge about the creature type, they won't learn anything new from inspecting a different creature of the same type, but they can still attempt to crit the check at the initial DC for each separate creature in order to gain the circumstance bonus.

If the GM was preventing the use of Devise a Strategem because they couldn't also use Known Weaknesses due to not being able to use Recall Knowledge, that would be a different matter.