Skill Training and new lore skills.

[themannamedbruh]

Skill training (the feat) and skill training when levelling up both seem to simply state "You become trained in the skill of your choice.". Lore skills in Archives of Nethys and the Skills Rule page do not specify any particular rules on training into a lore skill. My GM says that he thought at one point the feat "Additional Lore" was designed to give you access to a lore, without the automatic levelling. Archives of Nethys does not show any legacy content with that.

When creating an Elf Detective Mastermind Rogue with Free Archetype Investigator, I had an overabundance of skill points. The only solution I could think of was to train into a lore but could not find any place to see whether that is supported. Due to my GM saying the old version of Additional Lore did not have scaling, he said that will not be supported unless I get a ruling from Paizo.

Pathbuilder (which I know is not directly owned or controlled by Paizo) does allow the training I am attempting to do.

Can you train into a lore skill with levelups or general skill training from picking up an archetype?

[Dr. Frank Funkelstein]

Training lore skills works, they are skills - you don't get automatic scaling for that though.
(you most likely won't get an official answer from Paizo here, sorry)

[Finoan]

themannamedbruh wrote:

Due to my GM saying the old version of Additional Lore did not have scaling, he said that will not be supported unless I get a ruling from Paizo.

One, that logic doesn't make sense. Why does an update to Additional Lore have anything to do with whether you can use a general skill boost on a Lore category or not?

Two, that isn't even accurate. The Legacy Additional Lore feat does auto-increase as you level up.

Three, the rules already say this:

Lore wrote:

Each subcategory counts as its own skill

So I'm not sure what else Paizo is supposed to say about it.

Yes, a Lore subtype is just a regular skill. You can spend skill boosts on one of them any time you get a general purpose skill boost. Including from freely chosen skill training from archetype dedications or leveling up.

Some things give you skill training in a Lore subtype specifically - most notably Backgrounds. And those would be handled like any skill boost that specifies what skill it requires being spent on. So as a comparable example, the trained proficiency in Deception and Society given by Dandy Dedication.

One of the first feat examples that I can think of for this is the Legacy Pirate Dedication which gives you trained proficiency in Sailing Lore. It was updated to use Additional Lore in the Remaster, and Additional Lore is the other example that immediately comes to mind when I think of a feat that gives a Lore subtype specifically.

[themannamedbruh]

After these replies and my GM and I talking some more, we have reached a better understanding of the rules and each others points.

GM said that the greatest confusion was actually basically that instead of Additional Lore being it's own feat, it would have made a lot more sense for Skill Training to have a caveat for "If the chosen skill is a lore skill, at 3rd level.......".

His confusion was the fact that it was separate to begin with, considering that if Skill Training and levelups can give you lore, why is it entirely separated instead of just an extra rule on an existing feat?

With that, I consider the question closed and it was ruled in favor of normal levelling and the Skill Training feat allowing for Lore skills to be trained.

[Captain Morgan]

Well that is easy to answer. It's three things.

1. Lore skills are broadly less useful than regular skill.

2. Skill increases (as opposed to training) are a pretty rare commodity.

3. Skill feats for many skills are kinda bad, especially intelligence skills.

Lores generally aren't good enough to invest regular skill increases in, and most builds wouldn't even bother using skill trainings on them. So how do you facilitate someone who wants to be a legendary fisherman? Make a skill feat that auto scales to legendary. Even with reduced DCs in their narrow area, it is really hard to get item bonuses to lore skills so it's fine.