Hello, I have a major bone to pick with haunts. I love the concept but despise the execution and having to house rule a core mechanic really bothers me considering how much time P2E has been out and the developers have not fixed them to the best of my knowledge. So if I am wrong and some kind of errata is out there I would appreciate the help as I cannot find anything, and even youtubers seem to gloss over this and just house rule it, which should not be required at this point.
So first issue, the rules make no mention of how to recognize a haunt for what it is. Yes you can perception vs stealth and spot that something is wrong which is enough to know a haunt is most likely present. But that does nothing to tell you what to do next.
The house rule I keep finding is to then allow players to Recall Knowledge to get more information. Paizo has given no rules on this whatsoever so purely by RAW there is no way to actually get more information about a haunt without simply guessing by the players.
Next even if you permit Recall Knowledge to get said information what happens if the players fail. The haunt at that point becomes an unbeatable hazard as once you fail a Recall Knowledge you cannot roll again.
Every other encounter in Pathfinder can be brute forced on a failed recall knowledge in some capacity. Sure it might take the players more resources, or a bit of luck but monsters can be killed, simple hazards can be absorbed, and even complex traps can logically be overcome especially if they are magical.
Complex Haunts are the only thing in the game that by design are unbeatable purely because a party failed a single check.
Without using house rules, or using judgement calls am I missing any errata on complex haunts in particular that solves these issues? I really love the idea of complex haunts and I may have to redesign them for my games as right now they are broken and unusable as written.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A lot of haunts can be pacified with religion, many also give clues what could help - but usually we also use recall knowledge.
I don't really see the "a party failed a single check", everybody can try - and if all fail you can often retreat - or try what sounds useful.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
he house rule I keep finding is to then allow players to Recall Knowledge to get more information. Paizo has given no rules on this whatsoever so purely by RAW there is no way to actually get more information about a haunt without simply guessing by the players.
This isn't a House Rule, this is just how Recall Knowledge works. A haunt would be a subject like any other, so they would first ask "What is it?" -> "A complex haunt" and then "How do we disable it?". Though in normal play where the Haunt probably acted first, they might just jump to "Can we disable it? How?" since it doesn't matter what it is so much as how they can stop it.
The Hazard Rules even state:
"Determining a magical hazard’s properties thoroughly enough to disable it requires either the use of more powerful magic or a successful skill check, likely using Identify Magic or Recall Knowledge. Magical hazards with a minimum proficiency rank cannot be found with detect magic at all."
Although haunts don't have the magical trait, we can extrapolate they would work the same way. This does mean if they lack the skills or have plain bad luck they might not realise how to disable it, but that's true of all hazards, not just haunts.
A lot of haunts can be pacified with religion, many also give clues what could help - but usually we also use recall knowledge.
I don't really see the "a party failed a single check", everybody can try - and if all fail you can often retreat - or try what sounds useful.
The single check is the recall knowledge. Say only one player is investing into Religion of Occultism enough to possibly succeed.
So if its failed your done, if the haunt is guarding treasure, a path , or core to the story then retreating means you lose that area completely.
That is only if you can recall knowledge as the rules don't actually establish that you can.
There are no rules that state how you know what skill to use to disable a haunt. If there is a rule that states recall knowledge then haunts are potentially impossible to beat if recall knowledge is failed. That creates a major problem and makes complex haunts not something you can ever use for anything other than throwaway encounters because they can become unbeatable.
Like I said I am looking for a RAW solution, now a house rule or opinion solution before I look at a house rule solution myself which I would like to avoid.
So going to respond to both of you as best I can.
I am looking for Rules as Written, not rules as interpreted. I understand that a lot of people have gotten comfortable with the lack of written rules on a lot of things, but this one has always bothered me. Planning on running a game where complex haunts in theory would be heavily used, but as written create a lot of issues.
First as it pertains to making extrapolations, that would be interpretation not written. P2E has well established that you cannot reliably extrapolate.
The fact remains that a complex magical hazard can be deduced to be magical by the players without successfully identifying it as magical simply by being hit by it. Players can easily know to Dispel magic and can ignore the skill requirements. They can retreat if needed, and pickup the proper tools to disable a magical trap.
You cannot do that with a haunt, and to address by RAW the ability to use a skill check even if you don't succeed at the recall knowledge, that would be technically correct, but again if the party does not have the required skill they have no ability to overcome the challenge.
Magical trap = Dispel Magic
Mechanical Trap = Depending on the trap you can bypass most if not all of them without ever rolling a skill check.
Complex Haunts = Nothing, you cannot disable them through positive magic like you could in P1E, they cannot be targeted, emanations would not affect them. As not all haunts are spiritual but can also be psychic you cannot treat them as undead as they don't have that trait.
Unlike magical and mechanical which can be destroyed by abilities and effects that specifically target those two traits. Haunts are not something that have simple solutions other than knowing what they are. Sure you can have players just start rolling random skill checks with zero justification and zero immersion and hopefully someone picks the right skill and meets the rank requirements (Trained, Expert, etc).
There needs to be something other than a skill check that can bypass haunts, similarly to other hazards that common magic can solve, and even at times physical solutions for the more martial players. Haunts just come off as last minute additions with little thought and effort put in.
This is probably again house rule territory, but I was hoping I missed something in the actual books that cover this. I base a lot of my interpretation of the rules on how Paizo writes there AP's. So far I have never seen an AP that runs a haunt give any solution to haunts other than skill checks.
Personally I think there needs to be a way to either bypass the skill check, or reduce the skill requirements through research (books, NPC interactions, etc). Something that if the players lack the specifical skill requirements, they can learn something in the dungeon, or local people to remove/reduce the difficulty. No player likes an impossible dead end, failure is fine as it can be temporary, but impossible is not fun.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I mean, RAW is you see a haunt, roll the check to disable it and either succeed or have to try again. The only requirement is being able to detect the haunt which means either identifying it before it activates or being in the middle of one.
I agree haunts are kind of weirdly noninteractive for what they're supposed to be and treating them as traps the way the system does is somewhat unsatisfying, but if you're only interested in the RAW they're pretty straight forward, albeit a bit disappointing.
I mean, RAW is you see a haunt, roll the check to disable it and either succeed or have to try again. The only requirement is being able to detect the haunt which means either identifying it before it activates or being in the middle of one.
I agree haunts are kind of weirdly noninteractive for what they're supposed to be and treating them as traps the way the system does is somewhat unsatisfying, but if you're only interested in the RAW they're pretty straight forward, albeit a bit disappointing.
Thank you, basically everything I assumed, but I had really hoped I was wrong about.
Definitely something I will need to house rule then if I want to use it as a story telling tool and not just a random hazard to waste resources on.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The complex haunt situation is similar to the regenerating troll situation. If the player characters fail to Recall Knowledge on the troll, and the players never heard of Regeneration creature ability, then the combat won't really end. The PCs hit the troll over and over again, they manage to deal damage faster than it regenerates, the troll drops to dying, and then it gets back up again. In the long run, without hitting it with fire or its other vulnerability (sonic for an Ice Troll, electricity for a Forest Troll, etc.) the troll cannot be killed.
And suppose that the clueless party does hit a Forest Troll with electricity once, say by a wizard expending a slotted spell? The GM had better say, "The troll seems to have taken additional damage and as you watch you see a pause in its flesh pulling itself back together." The Rules as Written do not explicitly spell out that the GM has to give such clues (though enemy Resistances and Weaknesses would be boring rather than tactical without such clues), but the Game as Immersion definitely demands such observations.
Haunts are like that. The GM has to tell the details so that the players can piece together how to disable the complex haunt. Let me start with Confounding Betrayal as an example. The party enters a room and to their eyes their teammates pull off their masks to reveal that they are monsters mimicking their old friends and on a failed DC 30 Will save the character believes that. A 7th-level fighter with WIS +2 has to roll a 17 or higher to succeed. A druid who made his save might Recall Knowledge (Nature) to identify the illusion as an occult effect and tell the bard to use his trained Occultism stop the illusion. But if the bard is confused, then the druid might drag the bard out of the haunted room and wait for the confusion to wear off in one round.
Even before the Recall Knowledge, the GM ought to give clues. The GM had to say something so that the players know that they saw their teammates reveal themselves to be monsters and that they are absolutely sure that the monsters never were their teammates, so embellish the statement with clues.
GM: Ramona the Wild, you are unaffected but you see transparent spirits with monstrous visages flying in air around each person.
RAMONA: Watch out for spirits!
GM: When Ramona yelled, the rest of you heard, "Watch my spirits eat you alive." Ramona, you hear the spirits repeat their revised version of your words.
RAMONA: Can I get my real words through?
GM: It will be a DC 28 Deception check [one of the Disable checks] to slip a message past the spirits. You are an expert in Deception, right?
Lead the players down a breadcrumb trail of clues to the solution. Choosing to skip clues is not Rules as Written, because the game insists that the GM tell people about the details around them.
Complex haunts are as rare as regeneration, so the rules spend very little space describing how to handle them. Just because the rules do not give explicit anti-haunt actions beyond the Disable line in the hazard description does not mean that the players have to run clueless.
Let's look at another complex haunt, because hazards are different from each other. How about Bounding Hounds, "Description Three phantom hounds chase down intruders, damaging any they pass through." This haunt has an AC, saving throws, and hit points, so in addition to the Nature or Occultism checks to disable the hounds, the party can also simply Strike them. They are practically ghosts, so simply describe them as "phantom hounds" and the PCs will try attacking them with ghost-touch weapons.
Dance of Death, "Description An eerie orchestra compels all who hear it to dance until they collapse from exhaustion." The bard Jinx Fuun in my current party would start making music even without Recall Knowledge, the player saying something about trying to lead the orchestra (the player used to be a choir director). I would count that toward the DC 40 Performance (master) twice check to disable the haunt. If she succeeds once, then I would tell her, "It seems to be working. Keep it up." If instead of playing music, Jinx Fuun cast Phantom Orchestra, I would say, "It is orchestra versus orchestra. Make a Performance check for them, with a +2 circumstance bonus because you brought an entire orchestra." I can follow my player's clues myself.
|
I appreciate the raising of the subject, as I'm a little uncomfortable with haunts as well, as a GM that's still new-ish to PF2E.
(Isn't there also an unanswered question about how much space haunts cover? Not as important, but still a strange omission.)
I'd really like to see more written on haunts, as far as rules. That said, I really don't want haunts to always be brute-forceable with a single roll. This is an ongoing issue for me, because my Sandpoint players really want to cleanse the Glassworks. I want it to be memorable, no just "one roll per haunt, then a fight with a [redacted]."
I'd like to see the option to handle haunts as some kind of subsystem, sort of analogous to the Influence subsystem, wherein the PCs can use various skills to build up to an educated guess about what will permanently quiet a haunt.
If rules to help aren't forthcoming in the next three months or so, I'll have to create my own, I guess.
The difficulty here is that there are two very different ways to play the game. One is to play it like a computer game where everything has fixed rules that you can choose from in order to accomplish what you want. The other is more fluid where you have much more freedom to do what you want, but you have to negotiate out exactly how that is going to work.
Now, I'm not wanting to be disparaging towards that first way of playing. There are a lot of really good computer and video game RPGs that I have loved over the years: Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc. And there is nothing wrong with running PF2 the same way. But by doing that, you are going to have to stick to the simpler and better defined aspects of the game.
The game rules cover combat extensively. Mostly because that is where character deaths generally happen. No one wants to lose their character due to a misunderstanding of interpretations of rules. Players want to be able to approach combat in a way that they can accurately predict how much mortal danger their character is in.
But there are a lot of other subsystems to PF2 besides combat. And nearly all of them do not have the level of rules rigor that combat does. The rules really are more like guidelines.
So if you want to run the game by following the rules exactly as written, that is fine. But it will leave a lot of the more rich content on the table. Yes, hazards and haunts are one of those subsystems that doesn't have fully specified rules. It is expected that different tables--or even different hazards in the same campaign--are going to be using slightly different game mechanics. The specifics of the mechanics for a particular hazard or haunt should be founded on the game rules for hazards and haunts so that the players have a general idea of what to expect. But it is not required, or very entertaining, to have every hazard or haunt encounter run by the exact same rules.
Think of it like how combat with creatures have fairly well defined rules, but the creation rules for the creatures themselves is more of an art than an algorithm. That is what keeps combat interesting. Two different creatures--no matter how similar they are--may have different special abilities.
So to relate that back to hazards and haunts, it is not so important to have fixed rules for how to identify them or how the characters learn what is needed in order to disable them. That would limit the creativity of building a hazard or haunt encounter. Remember that the rules for the Recall Knowledge action are designed for identifying creatures while in combat. Using that action for identifying a haunt is allowed to have different rules - for example it could have no penalty for repeating a check in order succeed after a previous failure, or in order to gain additional useful information.
The important thing is to run the game in a way that is enjoyable and entertaining. That is the RAW as recorded by The First Rule. Don't let any other RAW overrule that.
While I agree with Finoan, part of the problem imo with Haunts is that they're not spelled out as narrative tools. They feel like narrative tools but they're built with very specific stat blocks. This makes them especially frustrating in some ways because they look and smell more freeform but if you dig into the rules guidance dealing with them is very rote.
Obviously a GM can do whatever they want, but the way haunts are written feels kinda bad imo because of the clash in how they're written. I'd personally be fine if they were more narrative and freeform if that was more spelled out in how they work, but it isn't.
[A great discussion (with examples) on handling haunt disabling.]This is genuinely fantastic, but you can see that what you've offered here is very advanced GMing, right? I think haunts need something a little more cognizant of apprentice, and even journeyperson, GMs.
Yes, being able to improvise the clues is advanced GMing. But the very advanced GMing is the GM designing custom haunts.
Apprentice GMs should avoid complex haunts. Journeyperson GMs should allow multiple Recall Knowledge checks. (I have a houserule that receiving new information from the creature or hazard doing something resets the Recall Knowledge checks. "Oh, the dragon just breathed acid. Let me try Recall Knowledge again to identify it.")
Isn't there also an unanswered question about how much space haunts cover? Not as important, but still a strange omission.
If the haunt is in a module, the outline of the hazard is on the map in the module. If the GM is designing the hazard themselves, then the GM decides the size.
So first issue, the rules make no mention of how to recognize a haunt for what it is. Yes you can perception vs stealth and spot that something is wrong which is enough to know a haunt is most likely present. But that does nothing to tell you what to do next.
The house rule I keep finding is to then allow players to Recall Knowledge to get more information. Paizo has given no rules on this whatsoever so purely by RAW there is no way to actually get more information about a haunt without simply guessing by the players.
Next even if you permit Recall Knowledge to get said information what happens if the players fail. The haunt at that point becomes an unbeatable hazard as once you fail a Recall Knowledge you cannot roll again.
As mentioned already - this isn't a house rule. Recall Knowledge can be used to recognize pretty much anything. Including Haunts. This is just standard stuff.
Complex Haunts are the only thing in the game that by design are unbeatable purely because a party failed a single check.
Without using house rules, or using judgement calls am I missing any errata on complex haunts in particular that solves these issues? I really love the idea of complex haunts and I may have to redesign them for my games as right now they are broken and unusable as written.
So, this is only somewhat true: If the PCs lack the skills to disable a haunt, then yes, they've got a problem. This can happen in high level games where it needs Legendary X and no one has it. APs will often telegraph important skills (such as by just stating them in the players guide) for this reason, and likewise there are typically two or more options (though sometimes not).
If that does happen, though? Yeah, at this point the GM has to intervene either by changing what works, letting the PCs hire someone with the skill, creating an item to help bypass it, etc. It's definitely a thing that can cause a hard stop without GM intervention.
If they fail to identify it, though? They should retreat. It's abnormal for a haunt to also block retreat, and doing that when the PCs can't actually do anything else would be pretty GM hostile.
Once they retreat, they can do things like gather information, research it at a library, or otherwise put in effort to learn about it. At this point they have information to work with in terms of learning what it is, after all.
So it doesn't really hinge on a single recall knowledge check otherwise the campaign stops. If that happens, they need to go find another way, but those do exist in the rules.
And of course if someone took Dubious Knowledge (or is a Thaumaturge), Failure still tells them something. It's a better feat than it looks if you run RK RAW precisely because you go from "nothing and you can't try again" to "you've got some nonsense and also something you can work with."
All that said... Recall Knowledge in general is very brittle and failure prone IMO. A lot of use house rule it pretty extensively to make it easier to use.
One of my house rules is that while in combat, failures on RK don't lock you out. You can try again. That makes the odds of this situation happening much lower.
That doesn't help you RAW, of course, but I'm not a fan of how difficult RK is RAW in general so I'm perfectly find changing it. YMMV.
The reason I asked the question as RAW only is not because of a lack of ability to house rules it. But rather to avoid house ruling something that was already covered somewhere that I am not aware of.
The point that Complex haunts should be an advanced DM tool I think makes my point entirely. New GM's running a Paizo product like an AP, one shot, society, etc, especially society which is designed with new player involvement in mind will run RAW.
I think any system that forces a GM to house rule something like Complex Haunts in order for them to actually work is just a poorly designed system. P2E has always had an issue with rule scattering, it got better in the remaster, but is still a massive problem. As TheFinish even pointed out early in this you are forced to extrapolate from other rules, or create new rules that don't exist to make this work.
I am all for GM's making their table run how they need it to for the players they have. Whatever makes the game more enjoyable do it. But when it comes purely to the RAW rules and understanding them house rules have no place in that discussion.
That is not to say as some have already done, stating that "the rules as written are crap, and here is how I handle it" that is very much appreciated. But I needed to know that I was not missing something first. I get new players all the time and some of them know specific rules far better than I do, and the last thing I want is to house rule something thinking I am fixing it just to find out I missed a rule that the player is reliant on and I have just killed that rule out of personal convenience without telling anyone thinking I was doing a good thing.
Complex Haunts are fantastic narrative tools and should be designed to be exactly that, the combat should be the secondary. I agree with the idea that the players can retreat and do some research to overcome the haunt later, but RAW if the players do not have the specified skills no amount of research matters.
The example of the troll is not an equivalent scenario. Sure their is the narrative that the players observe that the creature is healing from the wounds, or not healing. But even if you ran it as nothing more than a dice chucker the moment its turn comes around and it does not get back up you know you succeeded at stopping its regeneration, you don't actually need any GM help to solve that mystery. Even new players would know to try different attacks until they found what worked, and retreating to grab missing tools would be a natural conclusion if they lacked electricity damage for example. They could eventually figure it out organically. That is not the case for a Complex Haunt, you either show up with the right tools or nothing else matters based on RAW.
I really appreciate the responses and it has confirmed that the RAW is just bad and needs to be handled differently, and honestly I think it needs to be handled in a way that contradicts the RAW, but that is just my personal opinion. I just needed to make sure I wasn't missing a rule somewhere so again thank you.
As mentioned already - this isn't a house rule. Recall Knowledge can be used to recognize pretty much anything. Including Haunts. This is just standard stuff
Actually there is no reference to using Recall Knowledge on hazards excluding Magical Hazards that I can find. So non-magical hazards including haunts are not assisted with Recall Knowledge rolls.
Based on the written rules once you perceive a hazard you can diable it, and under the "Disabling a Hazard" rules it lists off the standard skills a player would use. But makes no reference to how players can get the information required to know how to disable it if there are other options besides those listed. Simply succeeding at the perception check is all you need to also perceive how to disable it.
So Complex hazards in general require narrative assistance, and Complex Haunts more so than any other hazard requires extensive GM narration to guide the the players to disabling it. This is not a massive deal, but the issue is simply how poorly laid out Complex Haunts are that they require a GM to house rule how to deal with them. Sure multiple GM's might come to the same way of doing it, but the fact remains that their is no explicit rules on haunts.
If I an incorrect about the recall knowledge thing please show me, I would very much appreciate seeing the rules that I am missing, because I have searched extensively and maybe I am just looking in the wrong place, which to be honest with P2E it is really easy to do.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As mentioned already - this isn't a house rule. Recall Knowledge can be used to recognize pretty much anything. Including Haunts. This is just standard stuffActually there is no reference to using Recall Knowledge on hazards excluding Magical Hazards that I can find. So non-magical hazards including haunts are not assisted with Recall Knowledge rolls.
The rule is under Recall Knowledge rather than under Hazards.
To remember useful information on a topic, you can attempt to Recall Knowledge. This action is one you're likely to use frequently. Learning more about the world and people around you is one of the best ways to inform your decisions, and Recalling Knowledge can help you figure out how to best fight monsters and figure out puzzles and social challenges.
Identifying creatures and identifying magic items are spelled out in more detail because they are used often and the information is complex, but this does not rule out identifying other things. The Hazard rules so explicitly say that Recall Knowledge can identify a magical hazard in a paragraph about hidden magical hazards, but that is part of a longer description that Detect Magic alone is not enough; instead, the trap-finder needs both Detect Magic and Recall Knowledge. That traps can be identified by Recall Knowledge was implicit, but the trap-finder needed Detect Magic, too.
The typical knowledge skills for identifying mechanical traps are Crafting or Thievery. The typical knowledge skills for identifying environmental hazards are Nature or Survival. The typical knowledge skill for identifying magical traps is the skill associated with the magic: Arcana, Nature, Occultism, or Religion. The typical knowledge skills for identifying haunts is Occultism or Religion. If a knowledge skill is listed under disabling a hazard, then that skill plausibly could identify the hazard. For the DC to identify the hazard, I recommend the DC by Level for the level of the hazard, adjusting the difficulty for unusual hazards.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am agreement with most on the thread. You have to modify haunts to use them for storytelling. They made them like all hazards. In PF2 the system is very generous for modification, so write up what you want it to do and give it DCs in line with its level or what you want it to do.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Personally, I tend to prefer that if a character can spot the haunt, they can get just enough context clues for a guess what might work to disable it. Same as a character seeing a mechanical trap would already know that an expert in traps and disabling will most likely be necessary, they can probably know that almost every haunt requires some amount of prayer or esoteric rites to drain it of power. I would likewise treat it as semi-common knowledge that many haunts can also be addressed in various ways according to their nature, ie Diplomacy, Intimidation, Deception.
These basic guidelines for dealing with restless disembodied spirits I'd consider automatic knowledge with Religion and/or Occultism training, even if I might make them roll if they wanted to ID the exact kind of haunt and get a lock on which exact skills work best.
ADDITIONAL KNOWLEDGE: Sometimes a character might want to follow up on a check to Recall Knowledge, rolling another check to discover more information. After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can yield more information, but you should adjust the difficulty to be higher for each attempt. Once a character has attempted an incredibly hard check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless—the character has recalled everything they know about the subject.
This text looks like it's talking about further attempts after an initial success, not an initial roll overall. The text describing the RK action in Player Core lists nothing under the failure condition.
So first issue, the rules make no mention of how to recognize a haunt for what it is. Yes you can perception vs stealth and spot that something is wrong which is enough to know a haunt is most likely present. But that does nothing to tell you what to do next.
The house rule I keep finding is to then allow players to Recall Knowledge to get more information. Paizo has given no rules on this whatsoever so purely by RAW there is no way to actually get more information about a haunt without simply guessing by the players.
This isn't a house rule. You can Recall Knowledge about anything, including hazards. The GM can set the DC based on the hazard's level and rarity (and perhaps other factors). And while creatures do have their most applicable RK skills spelled out, you and the GM can still work out which skill is most applicable on your own, as described in the Recall Knowledge action.
Next even if you permit Recall Knowledge to get said information what happens if the players fail. The haunt at that point becomes an unbeatable hazard as once you fail a Recall Knowledge you cannot roll again.
You are only prohibited from trying again if you first succeed then either fail a subsequent check or succeed against an incredibly hard DC. Besides, even if you don't have the skill proficiency for a hazard, you can usually just leave and wait for the hazard to reset.
The complex haunt situation is similar to the regenerating troll situation. If the player characters fail to Recall Knowledge on the troll, and the players never heard of Regeneration creature ability, then the combat won't really end.
The combat is still winnable. You just need to improvise.
A good alternative when you can't exploit such a damage vulnerability is to use a death effect. That bypasses the inability to reach dying 4 and kills the troll outright. But if the troll is a PL+2 or PL+3 boss, there's a good chance you don't have any death effects.
So the best alternative is suffocation. Bring it to zero HP, use Readied Strikes to keep it at zero, and start shoving stuff down its throat until it can't breathe anymore. If there's water nearby, you may just be able to use that.
Of course, that's assuming you even need the troll to die. By knocking the troll unconscious, you've deprived it of all information of its surroundings. That's your chance to flee.
|
|
ADDITIONAL KNOWLEDGE: Sometimes a character might want to follow up on a check to Recall Knowledge, rolling another check to discover more information. After a success, further uses of Recall Knowledge can yield more information, but you should adjust the difficulty to be higher for each attempt. Once a character has attempted an incredibly hard check or failed a check, further attempts are fruitless—the character has recalled everything they know about the subject.This text looks like it's talking about further attempts after an initial success, not an initial roll overall. The text describing the RK action in Player Core lists nothing under the failure condition.
The text you quoted describes what happens once a character failed a check : "further attempts are fruitless".