Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Leiden
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Hi all,
I'm a bit confused about some of the Lore skill checks that have been requested in scenarios recently, specifically with regards to geographical indications. Player Core defines allows these lore skills as follows: "Lore about a specific settlement (Absalom Lore, Magnimar Lore)". Alternatively it allows Lore skills related to a specific Plane.
Yet I've seen various scenarios asking for country wide, or even continent wide lore skills, which players would not be allowed to have as they are not specific enough.
Is there a point to adding these disallowed lore skills in scenarios? For starters nobody would be allowed to roll these, and secondly it gives the impression these lore skills are allowed. And maybe only relevant to writers, it's kind of a waste of word count space.
Country wide lore skills:
Cheliax Lore, season 6
Rahadoum Lore, season 6
Continent wide lore skills:
Arcadia Lore, season 4
Tian Xia Lore, season 6 (I may have misremembered this one: The scenario may have asked for a country wide lore skill instead. The category was larger than that of a single settlement)
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Those are suggested, common Lore skills. Nothing says it's a restrictive list. If you choose a broader Lore, it might come up more often but the GM shouldn't reduce the DC (or reduce it less then they would for a narrower skill).
A nation is still far narrower then the Society skill, and being narrower then the standard skills is the requirement.
(Although I notice the text both uses Planar Lore as an example and as an example of something that's too broad.)
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Leiden
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That Planar Lore contradiction is a funny thing yeah :D.
It's kind of hard to interpret the exhaustibility of a list when some lists have been declared exhaustive but others have been declared incomplete. Also compared to the Society skill, the narrowness of a subject is up for debate if it covers a whole nation or continent. The way we've interpreted it so far here, is that without clarification the list described in the description of the Lore skill should be exhaustive. In the end the issue is similar to the Undead Lore skill discussion.
Rolling Untrained at high level is pointless, even for lore skills. As to Untrained Improvisation for Lore skills, that is a whole other unclear situation that has not been addressed (AFAIK, at least), so I'm not getting into that can of worms here.
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The time I asked this question myself
Time having passed, I'm inclined to agree with Hillary when she answered the first time. The one gray area is players using features like Ancestral Longevity to become trained in such a lore skill. In that case I would probably ask them to reduce the scope of the requestsd lore skill to a more appropriate subject (which would probably cover everything the player needs anyway).
Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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Allow me to quote the Archives of Nethys listing for 'Stone Giant'.
Recall Knowledge - Humanoid (Society): DC 24
Unspecific Lore: DC 22
Specific Lore: DC 19In this case, Unspecific Lore would be Jotun Lore.
Specific Lore would be Giant Lore.
If you're going to quote those, you should probably mention that those DCs aren't part of the book statblock, but an AoN invention. And that "Unspecific Lore" and "Specific Lore" aren't real categories.
The principle of adjusting RK DCs based on the specificity of lore skills is there in the rules, but there are not categories like this. They are just standard difficulty adjustment steps (Easy and Very Easy) applied to the rarity-adjusted level-based DC for convenient reference.
It's especially important that thise DC Adjustments are not defined in a statblock, but made at GM discretion, if someone is talking about using Untrained Improvisation for lore skills, as it is common and reasonable to give the same DC for Untrained Improv regardless of the skill the player names, since the character is doing the same thing with the same qualifications (drawing on their general knowledge with no special study).