My PFS character has Dubious Knowledge, and my GM ruled that I believed both answers. The insinuation that the user doesn't even know that one of the two pieces of information is false seems to fly in the face of the dilemma it presents in its description.
You’re a treasure trove of information, but not all of it comes from reputable sources. When you fail (but don’t critically fail) a Recall Knowledge check using any skill, you learn the correct answer and an erroneous answer, but you don’t have any way to differentiate which is which. This can occur as not knowing something is significant, but not whether it’s good or bad.
For there to be a question of which information is wrong, isn't it necessary to know that wrong information exists? Even with just Recall Knowledge, I'm not mind controlled on a crit fail, right? If I Recall that the headsman's axe will fully restore my Hit Points, shouldn't I find my knowledge to be dubious?
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IMO it's a poor ruling to say "you always believe both pieces of information", because any experienced adventurer is going to have had a situation where they recalled something that was wrong (or a party member did) with either disastrous or hilarious results. Thus you know objectively that this can happen in-character even without Dubious Knowledge.
I also tend to believe that characters know how their abilities work in character, thus someone with Dubious Knowledge is going to go that they get it wrong sometimes.
Note that because this is a secret check you aren't supposed to know if you got two pieces of information because of Dubious Knowledge, or because of a Critical Success. I think the real intention here is that you're getting information and you can't use the knowledge of what you rolled and your knowledge of the Bestiary to automatically rule out the bad information.
But a character would know bad information exists and thus shouldn't be compelled to always believe everything unquestioningly. Like, a case where two PCs recall knowledge and get contradicting information. Obviously at least one of you is wrong, and it's entirely valid to realize that and decide "I think what you recalled makes more sense than what I recalled, so lets go with that."
It's not valid to say "you rolled a 2 and I rolled an 18, therefore what I recalled is correct."
My GM wasn't able to hide that I failed because he said "You've never seen it before" having forgot I had Dubious Knowledge. Also, since the remaster, every GM I've had uses the new critical success rule, where instead of 2 info, you get 1 info and a follow-up question.
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My PFS character has Dubious Knowledge, and my GM ruled that I believed both answers. The insinuation that the user doesn't even know that one of the two pieces of information is false seems to fly in the face of the dilemma it presents in its description.
You’re a treasure trove of information, but not all of it comes from reputable sources. When you fail (but don’t critically fail) a Recall Knowledge check using any skill, you learn the correct answer and an erroneous answer, but you don’t have any way to differentiate which is which. This can occur as not knowing something is significant, but not whether it’s good or bad.For there to be a question of which information is wrong, isn't it necessary to know that wrong information exists? Even with just Recall Knowledge, I'm not mind controlled on a crit fail, right? If I Recall that the headsman's axe will fully restore my Hit Points, shouldn't I find my knowledge to be dubious?
I agree with you that the feat clearly does not expect your character to believe that both results are true, it is in the title of the feat, as well as the whole description of what the feat does.
There is a common misconception that the way recall knowledge works as a secret check is that the player is supposed to have no idea whether their roll critically succeeded, succeeded, failed, or critically failed. This misconception comes from the wording of secret checks, and past experience with the purpose of a secret check, but it flies in the face of how the different results of a a recall knowledge check are supposed to be resolved. Without this feat, a player should always know their character critically succeeded on a secret RK. The GM is supposed to either tell you additional information about your result than you would have gotten with a success, or they are supposed to let you ask a second question.
Dubious Knowledge is not "a Failure gives you 2 pieces of information and one of them is wrong." It is "you learn a correct and incorrect answer to your question." It should never be the case that a player is left wondering whether the GM just gave them additional useful information about the situation, or is giving them both a correct and incorrect answer about their specific question.
The counter to this arguement is "but then why even make the checks secret?!?"
For which, I believe there are 2 answers:
1. With secret checks, you don't know your actual die roll, so you don't know if you rolled well and got a failed result, or if you just rolled really badly and still didn't critically fail.
2. The success and critical fail results can be mis-interpreted as each other with a basic RK check (although many class-based abilities that modify RK should make it glaringly obvious whether the player succeeded or not).
I have said a lot about secret checks previously, and why I recognize that so many players hate them, even if I think they can sometimes greatly improve the game. However, GMs misinterpreting the secret check away from "the GM rolls the check for this ability in secret," into "the GM has a responsibility to use secret checks to take agency away from the player and tell them what their character believes or thinks about a situation instead of what their character observes or understands coming into that situation," is setting their players up for frustration and creating opportunities for conflicting expectations.
At the same time, picking a fight with GMs about this is a recipe for hurt feelings and reactionary GMing and playing. For PFS, once you are playing a scenario, I would just recommend asking whether this specific GM would be willing to ignore your feat for now if they are going to interpret it in a way that you feel is hostile to you, and then either not play this character with that GM again, or possibly retrain the feat if you can.
Maybe you should also report to the venture captain that you feel like there is clearly a lack of consistency with how different players are interpreting the feat, so that it is possible that the larger group you play within can either make a note of this and make for a more consistent ruling or that it can work its way all the way up to get an official ruling as well. If you go that route, I would try to make sure that the GM doesn't feel like you are trying to report them for being wrong, but that the ability for this feat to be interpreted in different ways creates problems, especially when there are some characters that get the feat without being able to retrain it or pick a different one.
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Dubious Knowledge pretty much always devolves into a contest of the GMs ability to lie convincingly and quickly vs the players ability to tell when the GM is lying combined with the players (quite often unconscious) metaknowledge.
Knowledge checks (even post remaster which DID improve things a bit) are still very much subject to table variation.-
Dubious Knowledge pretty much always devolves into a contest of the GMs ability to lie convincingly and quickly vs the players ability to tell when the GM is lying combined with the players (quite often unconscious) metaknowledge.
Knowledge checks (even post remaster which DID improve things a bit) are still very much subject to table variation.-
With the possibility of success and critical failure being read as the same result, isn't this critique true of all secret knowledge checks? Not just ones affected by Dubious knowledge?
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My GM wasn't able to hide that I failed because he said "You've never seen it before" having forgot I had Dubious Knowledge. Also, since the remaster, every GM I've had uses the new critical success rule, where instead of 2 info, you get 1 info and a follow-up question.
I avoid that by running Dubious Knowledge the same way: you get 2 questions. I'm just going to lie to one of them. So at my table it plays the same way as a Critical Success does.
Works pretty well as long as I can come up with a decent fake answer (or barring that, a really hilariously wrong one so we all get a laugh :) ).
Another weird problem I keep having with Recall Knowledge is that every GM always forgets the question I asked and just answers a completely unrelated one. I'll ask what the monster's most notable offensive ability is, and the GM will tell me it's weak to fire or some lore or something else unrelated to my question.
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My GM wasn't able to hide that I failed because he said "You've never seen it before" having forgot I had Dubious Knowledge. Also, since the remaster, every GM I've had uses the new critical success rule, where instead of 2 info, you get 1 info and a follow-up question.I avoid that by running Dubious Knowledge the same way: you get 2 questions. I'm just going to lie to one of them. So at my table it plays the same way as a Critical Success does.
Works pretty well as long as I can come up with a decent fake answer (or barring that, a really hilariously wrong one so we all get a laugh :) ).
It sounds like you and your players have a lot of fun with the feat and I think that is a super cool way to play it, especially if you veer towards fun, light-hearted and silly with the false information. That is great.
I think, for other tables that don’t take as light-hearted of an approach, and who have GMs that try to turn Dubious knowledge results into results that can seriously be mistaken for critical successes most of the time, DB played that way can easily become a feat that undermines the recall knowledge activity and make players feel like it is a waste of time.
The reasonably isn’t that big a deal with success and critical failure is because success should be happening at least 5 to 10 times as often as critical failure. The critical failure lie should be the rare situation that keeps an otherwise pretty reliable activity a little spicy.
But I think it is important that the developers have gone to greater lengths in the remaster to make sure dubious knowledge failure results and critical success results are different in a way players can identify, so that the 35 to 50% of failure results you will probably get don’t completely invalidate the 5 to 15% of the time you get a critical success, basically taking away CS as a possible result and adding its probability to failure.
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Dubious knowledge makes the GM work more than many want to.
We have had these discussions before about what it should actually give back and weather the pc knows which is true or if they believe both.
My take on it was that there is no way to give a player bad info about a creature and not expect metagaming since players have all the information available to them at any time if they just bother to look it up. This feat requires players to play what the pc knows not what they (the player) know. The pc does get good and bad information from various sources but its not that the pc sees those sources as dubious, the pc is retaining info that is bad because they believed the info from the bad sources as much as the good ones.
This feat isnt a power feat to gain an advantage its a role playing feat there for people who find it entertaining to roleplay off of bad info.
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This feat isn't a power feat to gain an advantage its a role playing feat there for people who find it entertaining to roleplay off of bad info.
Or they are FORCED to take it because their class [Thaumaturge] requires you take it no mater your thought on the feat... :(
This feat isn't a power feat to gain an advantage its a role playing feat there for people who find it entertaining to roleplay off of bad info.Or they are FORCED to take it because their class [Thaumaturge] requires you take it no mater your thought on the feat... :(
Unfortunately
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My PFS character has Dubious Knowledge, and my GM ruled that I believed both answers. The insinuation that the user doesn't even know that one of the two pieces of information is false seems to fly in the face of the dilemma it presents in its description.
You’re a treasure trove of information, but not all of it comes from reputable sources. When you fail (but don’t critically fail) a Recall Knowledge check using any skill, you learn the correct answer and an erroneous answer, but you don’t have any way to differentiate which is which. This can occur as not knowing something is significant, but not whether it’s good or bad.For there to be a question of which information is wrong, isn't it necessary to know that wrong information exists? Even with just Recall Knowledge, I'm not mind controlled on a crit fail, right? If I Recall that the headsman's axe will fully restore my Hit Points, shouldn't I find my knowledge to be dubious?
I've rarely seen someone stating that their knowledge was unreliable. So I fully understand your GM: Your character believes that both pieces of information are true.
And yes, if my character ever remembers that the headsman's axe restore hit points I'll act accordingly. I won't dismiss critical failures as its part of the game.
I've had the pleasure of playing Thaumaturge with a GM who is a good liar on the fly, and it's a blast.
Some things that make it work well:
- Loose amounts of information given. "What are its special abilities?" allows slipping in another monster's ability, "Worst save" allows giving the worst and best (one of which is actually the middling save) or saying it's a tie between two when it isn't, and so on. If answers are always strictly something like one single ability, then Dubious Knowledge is always obvious.
- Using character biases. The GM can ask what sort of mistakes a character would be likely to make, and then there's much less conflict between what the character "knows" and how the player wants to play them. If you're playing Mulder, Dubious Knowledge suggesting alien influence adds to the RP rather than pushing you to metagame.
- Having a standard source for the knowledge. My character's Esoteric Lore is flavored as part of their ability to talk to rats, so there isn't a weird case of suddenly doubting themselves.
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Which translates that he knows one piece is false, just not which one.
Or just that he considers both as true.
We already got this discussion, I think the only proper answer around Dubious Knowledge is "Expect table variation!".| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My GM wasn't able to hide that I failed because he said "You've never seen it before" having forgot I had Dubious Knowledge. Also, since the remaster, every GM I've had uses the new critical success rule, where instead of 2 info, you get 1 info and a follow-up question.I avoid that by running Dubious Knowledge the same way: you get 2 questions. I'm just going to lie to one of them. So at my table it plays the same way as a Critical Success does.
Works pretty well as long as I can come up with a decent fake answer (or barring that, a really hilariously wrong one so we all get a laugh :) ).
It sounds like you and your players have a lot of fun with the feat and I think that is a super cool way to play it, especially if you veer towards fun, light-hearted and silly with the false information. That is great.
I think, for other tables that don’t take as light-hearted of an approach, and who have GMs that try to turn Dubious knowledge results into results that can seriously be mistaken for critical successes most of the time, DB played that way can easily become a feat that undermines the recall knowledge activity and make players feel like it is a waste of time.
The reasonably isn’t that big a deal with success and critical failure is because success should be happening at least 5 to 10 times as often as critical failure. The critical failure lie should be the rare situation that keeps an otherwise pretty reliable activity a little spicy.
But I think it is important that the developers have gone to greater lengths in the remaster to make sure dubious knowledge failure results and critical success results are different in a way players can identify, so that the 35 to 50% of failure results you will probably get don’t completely invalidate the 5 to 15% of the time you get a critical success, basically taking away CS as a possible result and adding its probability to failure.
Well I try to give a serious answer most of the time so that it seems at least reasonably believable. But it's hard to do that all the time, and so occasionally I just throw out a completely absurd thing instead to get a laugh. :)
Running the feat in a serious way demands a lot of a GM, and IMO also demands a fair bit of players to not metagame it and go "well one of those sounds like an improvisation so that must be wrong". There may be some tables where it's just not a good feat for that reason. I think that's okay, though its possible it should have the Uncommon tag because of the extra work and the table variation it's going to naturally create.
IMO it's a fun feat so I'd allow it anyway, but the way its written right now may not convey just what folks are getting into by taking it.
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Which translates that he knows one piece is false, just not which one.Or just that he considers both as true.
We already got this discussion, I think the only proper answer around Dubious Knowledge is "Expect table variation!".
That was a direct quote from the listed benefit in the text of the feat...
Dubious Knowledge isn't any more work due the GM than any RK check. You just give them both the success and the critical failure result. Randomize the order so you don't do it the same way every time. Done.
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In my opinion, the remastered changes to Dubious Knowledge are designed to make it much easier to run. You don't really have to make anything up any more, you just give 2 answers to the same question whenever possible. The question should obviously guide it, and if one of the answers is fairly easy to spot as the right one for the player, than good for them.
What is its highest save? It is either Fortitude or Reflex.
What special offensive capabilities does it have? Its Jaws attack is powerful and can either grab you, or possibly risk giving you a disease.
When the question really doesn't make sense to answer with 2 possible answers, that is when you try to parse that last sentence, and think about giving information that might be significant, but not give away if it is good or bad.
It takes very little thinking on your feet to make it work as long as you don't worry too much about trying to enforce some believability on your players. GMs afraid of giving too much information to player are much more likely to cause frustration and bad feelings at the table than GMs that end up revealing too much information to players that are actively spending significant actions in encounters to trying to learn that information.
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Yeah and that takes us back to the feat actually providing a success result on fail or succeed.
They get to ignore bad info and just act on the part they know was correct.
Is the intent of the feat to make all failures a success?
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Yeah and that takes us back to the feat actually providing a success result on fail or succeed.
They get to ignore bad info and just act on the part they know was correct.
Is the intent of the feat to make all failures a success?it's up to the gm to come up with 2 believable pieces of info. so that leaves the pc guessing "which is which".
if he can't, there's the new provision that he can just give up incomplete information instead of 1 correct/1 wrong.
as an example "you remember that creature is weak to some type of metal, but not sure if it's silver, cold iron, or adamantine"
I think you hit on why GMs dont like this feat. Its a feat that requires the GM to try and fool their players if run that way.
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I don’t see how framing it as “you are not sure if it is…” is having to fool the player really at all or giving it away.
Like if the player sees a giant flaming bat, and for some reason asks “does it have any weaknesses?” You can respond with “it is either weak to cold or immune to it,” and chances are the player or someone in the party was going try hitting it with cold any way. If players are asking questions they really already know the answer to anyway, they are not gaming the system by getting answers that potentially reinforce their suspicions, and some times answers that might seem obvious to the GM won’t be.
That is why I suggest not worrying about trying to give answers that need to be exactly 50/50 believable. Keep players wanting to recall knowledge instead of feeling like it is better to just metagame and read up on monsters as much as possible in advance and then just taking guesses off of their memories.
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I don’t see how framing it as “you are not sure if it is…” is having to fool the player really at all or giving it away.
Like if the player sees a giant flaming bat, and for some reason asks “does it have any weaknesses?” You can respond with “it is either weak to cold or immune to it,” and chances are the player or someone in the party was going try hitting it with cold any way. If players are asking questions they really already know the answer to anyway, they are not gaming the system by getting answers that potentially reinforce their suspicions, and some times answers that might seem obvious to the GM won’t be.
That is why I suggest not worrying about trying to give answers that need to be exactly 50/50 believable. Keep players wanting to recall knowledge instead of feeling like it is better to just metagame and read up on monsters as much as possible in advance and then just taking guesses off of their memories.
In general a feat should be a benefit. That feat is just trying to balance a level 1 feat that affects all RK across any skill getting the result of a success on fail by also giving the result of a crit fail with it. The crit fail part of it shouldn't just be ignored completely should it?
With the example you gave players might just rightly assume using water on a firebat is a good idea. Thats expected common sense and I wouldn't expect a player to play as though their character cant figure that out without RK and a successful roll.maybe a forest troll is a better example. I would expect a player to immediately think to use fire. but they might not think electricity. If they RK asking if they are weak to more than fire I could absolutely give a player I dont think has read up on them yet its either acid or electricity and that would make a good moment for dubious knowledge.
So i will admit that when there is a good moment for the either or its fine.
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All I am really trying to point out is that the new rules around it make it much easier, especially if you get away from the older thinking of trying to present a failed dubious knowledge check as the same as a critical success. It is a failure, maybe a little more helpful than not, but not super helpful…is fine. But critical success should always be more than that.
I've seen an FAQ button appear on some posts. What causes it to appear?
I've seen it show up in Pathfinder Society forum. Seems like it should be on all the forums.
I've seen it show up in Pathfinder Society forum. Seems like it should be on all the forums.It was intentionally not a thing for pf2 because pf2 uses a different protocol to handle errata.
How does pf2 errata work then?
https://paizo.com/pathfinder/faqHow does pf2 errata work then?I've seen it show up in Pathfinder Society forum. Seems like it should be on all the forums.It was intentionally not a thing for pf2 because pf2 uses a different protocol to handle errata.
How does it get flagged in the first place, though?
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How does it get flagged in the first place, though?https://paizo.com/pathfinder/faqHow does pf2 errata work then?I've seen it show up in Pathfinder Society forum. Seems like it should be on all the forums.It was intentionally not a thing for pf2 because pf2 uses a different protocol to handle errata.
the fact that they do not post rulings in the forums (because of all the problems that creates) doesn't mean that they do not read forums, reddit, etc.
there are also dedeicated threads for errata when new books come out for them to collect information about possible errors.
case in point: recall, and even dubious, WAS changed during the remaster to be much clearer due to feedback that recall was muddled/weak (the fact that some specific people refuse to aknowledge said changes doesn't change this fact)
Said specific person.
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And also do not undermine a critical success, which I think is the bigger risk of GM fiat with Dubious knowledge
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Ok yeah, I do agree with both of you.
Your examples are pretty straitforward shroudb.
And Unicore I think crit success info was something that came up last time even in the example we used that crit success will always look different because of the confidence of all the knowledge the pc should have in comparison to the maybe shaky unsure delivery of knowledge of a failure.
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Honestly, to me, it feels like Dubious Knowledge was originally intended to be the default behaviour of a failed RK check, splitting the difference between success and crit fail, but was cut and relegated to a feat to ease the burden on the GM. (On account of 2-1-2-1 being a more natural pattern than 2-1-0-1, "you vaguely remember something but are a bit confused about the specifics" fitting RK's other results more than "you somehow know nothing whatsoever about this", flail--err, failing forward giving RK more value in hopes of encouraging non-RK-specialist-builds to try using it on subjects they're familiar with, and also giving more opportunity to have fun with the fail.)
So, they changed it into a feat, and made sure to clarify that you get one correct and one incorrect and don't have a way to differentiate which is which. Because that wording is the key to this entire discussion: You know that the two pieces of information are different, and that the difference matters. If you automatically think they're both true, or automatically think they're both false, then there's no differentiation, and the clause is not only invalid but misleading. It only makes sense if you know that your knowledge is, in fact, dubious, and that exactly one but not both is actually true.
Basically, it's meant to model things like:
• "The Cucco Farmer's Almanac says the dodongo dislikes smoke, while the Cave of Scholars Encyclopedia says their mouths are flammable, but they've been extinct for so long that nobody knows which is true."
• "Ma says X, Pa says Y, and for some reason this is the hill they'll both die on."
• "Your favourite author is into hard sci-fi, and always does their research, but they keep flip-flopping between whether it's Z or Q. Maybe there are different subspecies or something, who knows."