We used version 1, Since as you said Discovery hints thats you already know all the skills, and nothing in influence suggest they are hidden.
Also similarly Hazzards(uses the same wording) also dont say that the skill used to disable them are hidden and dont always make sense so unless you want your players to play make 10 guesses you might aswell tell them cause if they have the expertise to disable the trap they should have the insight that they can do it.
We used version 1, Since as you said Discovery hints thats you already know all the skills, and nothing in influence suggest they are hidden.
Discovery hints both, as already stated by the OP:
Success [...] You learn which skill that can Influence the NPC has the lowest DC (skipping any skills that you already know), [...]The bolded text suggests that you're not supposed to know the skills you could use (as long as you don't discover them, which you will then skip at the next successful discovery).
The bolded part is so you can reuse the discovery to get the second lowest DC and so forth and not rediscover the same lowest DC over and over.
but i can understand that the text could be misinterpret.
it would be an odd way to write it if the intent was to discover them in order of Lowest to highest, and would lead to some less then fun things for character with few skills since time can be an issue even if time is unknown to the player.
Also another note, the use the same Language on Both discovery skills and Influence (typically found in the NPC’s influence stat block)
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The main confusion stems from the Discover action:"You learn which skill that can Influence the NPC has the lowest DC" - This sounds like you are already supposed to know which skills can be used overall, just not how their DCs are ranked (interpretation 1).
"(skipping any skills that you already know)" - This on the other hand seems to indicate, that you DON'T know the skills before you discover them (starting with the easiest one) (interpretation 2).
It's 2. You learn the skills via Discover, starting at the lowest DC. What this paragraph is saying is that if you Discover more than once, you get the next one in the list (so you're not wasting Discover actions learning things you already know).
Since english is not my first language, that confusion might stem from lack of understanding. Or maybe the text is ambiguous?
How do you use the system? Version 1 or 2? Or do you have a completely different way of interpreting it?
PS: The influence subsystem is used quite frequently in the Pathfinder Society scenarios, and most GMs and players here HATE it. That might be because we have been using the second interpretation since the first one seems to be much easier - but it might also be too easy then. Since I am looking for how to run it in organized play, house rules and similar suggestions wouldn't help me all that much, either :)
For Influence, we use #2. You don't know unless you Discover. Note that you can infer/guess and just use things without Discovering and effectively figure it out. eg: In Ruby Phoenix you encounter an NPC you can influence who runs the Opera House. You can thus make an educated guess about some skills that are likely going to work without using Discover at all.
Influence can be rough in PFS because with the party makeup constantly changing you can get a situation where you simply don't have the skills required and there's nothing you can do about it. Campaigns tend to have characters that can fill in an obvious gap as the campaign goes on, so the odds in a mid level adventure path of hitting an influence where nobody can do anything are relatively slim. GMs also have more leeway in a home game to alter the list to suit the players than they do in PFS.
We used version 1, Since as you said Discovery hints thats you already know all the skills, and nothing in influence suggest they are hidden.
Discover doesn't actually say you know them either. Learning them is literally the purpose of the Discover action. The part about the ones you already know isn't hinting at anything: it's talking about ones you already learned via Discover, though the GM could also count ones that you figured out on your own.
Also similarly Hazzards(uses the same wording) also dont say that the skill used to disable them are hidden and dont always make sense so unless you want your players to play make 10 guesses you might aswell tell them cause if they have the expertise to disable the trap they should have the insight that they can do it.
Hazards are different than Influence, yeah. Though you can learn how to discover a Hazard/Haunt/Trap/etc with Recall Knowledge, I think most GMs just give players this information if they find the thing without setting it off, as the Master Thief probably knows if they're capable of disarming it or not (and ditto for the Religion expert in an exorcism, etc).
The thing is that since Influence encounters are time/action sensitive, giving out a pile of info up front like makes them WAY easier. The encounters generally have the time available set up working on the assumption that someone will be using actions to Discover. Maybe your table wants these to be easier and that's fine, but that will be the result of doing it this way.
I was informed that the PFS FAQ acutally has an entry for this:
So, it is indeed the second interpretation[NEW - Mar '24] What information should GMs give players during an Influence encounter?
While GMs are empowered to run influence encounters as best fits their table, we recommend using the following guidelines:
- Players (and by extension, PCs) should be aware of the Discovery skills (but not their DCs) at the start of the encounter.
- Players should not be told which skills are Influence skills until they are successfully Discovered.
- Players should never be told the DCs of any Discovery or Influence skills.
I had no idea that you're supposed to tell people the Discover actions up front, though it does make a lot of sense.
Great find!
I have been running influence encounters where I give the discovery skills up front, as well as obvious skills that can be used in the situation (like which of the three social skills are definitely on the list, and by proxy, that using any social skills not on the list is going to hit a very hard DC) + any very apparent useful lore skills (like warfare lore for a soldier) because having those and not using them is no fun. Then I tend to give additional skills out as additional info on a discovery check, so that even a failure to discover doesn't feel useless in an encounter with such limited number of player actions.
I don't see the harm in telling the PCs the DCs of the discovery skills up front though. VP subsystems already tend to feel player unfriendly, and discovery DCs shouldn't be too high. Because each player only gets one action per turn in an influence encounter, they don't really need to be gambling with which discovery skill they want to use.
My personal take is to consider this another 'zoom level' of gameplay.
Usually, interpersonal interactions are handled with a single die roll. If you get the subsystems involved, then you 'zoom in' a bit more and instead of a single roll, the whole encounter gets played out in detail and you end up making a bunch of rolls.
You know, not entirely unlike combat. And in combat, people know that Trip and Grab and Shove etc. are things that exist, they do not need to discover them. What they do need to discover is what works best.
So I would go with #1.
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I was informed that the PFS FAQ acutally has an entry for this:
So, it is indeed the second interpretation[NEW - Mar '24] What information should GMs give players during an Influence encounter?
While GMs are empowered to run influence encounters as best fits their table, we recommend using the following guidelines:
- Players (and by extension, PCs) should be aware of the Discovery skills (but not their DCs) at the start of the encounter.
- Players should not be told which skills are Influence skills until they are successfully Discovered.
- Players should never be told the DCs of any Discovery or Influence skills.
This is 100% how we have always run this -- so I'm glad it's right.
I'll also mention that sometimes when you choose to learn a Weakness, it will also indirectly tell you one of the Influence skills. (It might say something like, "if you bring up this subject, it will give you a +2 bonus when you influence with Religion"). So we have found that if going for Weakness fairly early can be very helpful.
I was informed that the PFS FAQ acutally has an entry for this:
So, it is indeed the second interpretation[NEW - Mar '24] What information should GMs give players during an Influence encounter?
While GMs are empowered to run influence encounters as best fits their table, we recommend using the following guidelines:
- Players (and by extension, PCs) should be aware of the Discovery skills (but not their DCs) at the start of the encounter.
- Players should not be told which skills are Influence skills until they are successfully Discovered.
- Players should never be told the DCs of any Discovery or Influence skills.
This is 100% how we have always run this -- so I'm glad it's right.
I'll also mention that sometimes when you choose to learn a Weakness, it will also indirectly tell you one of the Influence skills. (It might say something like, "if you bring up this subject, it will give you a +2 bonus when you influence with Religion"). So we have found that if going for Weakness fairly early can be very helpful.
This is how we've run it at our PFS table as well. I didn't even know there was official clarification on the matter. Glad to see we got it right.
In any case, I think the default skills common to every Discovery check (Diplomacy and Perception if I remember correctly) should be known to the players. You gotta start somewhere, right?
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Discovery skills should always known, there's no mechanism to discover them, and their only reason to be is to use them to get started with the rest of the scene. It'd be like refusing to tell people what score to roll initiative with and giving them a 0 if they get it wrong.
Influence skills should be discovered using Discovery.
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My big grip with discovering influence skills is that there's wide variety in how many lores you have to plow through to get to regular skills. That feels unbalanced to me that the difficulty of an influence scene could wildly go up if you have to spend three more Discovery checks because the author felt creative and listed a couple more "helpful" lores you don't have.
So what I usually do is, every time you use Discovery to learn a skill, you learn the next non-lore skill up the ladder, and you get the lores in between as freebees.
That way lores legitimately feel like a cool bonus instead of as a stealth handicap, and influence encounters are less wildly varied in difficulty for random reasons.