Knowledge (Bears): The Ranting

[virgil]

What do you know? A perennial problem, and I'm not truly satisfied with the implementations I've seen so far for making that check in RPGs. In fact, here's my rant regarding knowledge skills in most systems, especially 3.X
1. Bears Live in Caves? This mainly happens in level-based games such as D&D, where more powerful monsters are harder to know about. This runs right into WSoD, because not knowing 50' red lizards can breathe fire is difficult to justify.
2. They Eat Bears This happens in every game, where the players ask questions the DM/setting haven't thought of, which forces them to ad hoc. At best, it deepens the setting and story while simultaneously allowing memorable knot-cutting moments. At worst, it disrupts the game by creating unintended consequences, even if it just wastes time w/a red herring.
3. American or European Bears? Knowledge skills can readily end up being too narrow, where your knowledge of bird calls leaves you as ignorant as to proper care of roc eggs. Depending on resource allocation, the goal of being the walking encyclopedia becomes a detriment, as you sacrifice everything to truthfully claim to be knowledgeable.
4. Bears are Furry Related to the first point, and particularly prevalent in the later part of 3.5 and well into 4E, where the information gleaned can barely fill the back of a trading card and is just as meaningless. I've described it as "the more you learn, the less you know"; because I've had DMs tell me stuff like creature type and size category. This is usually in response to hatred of metagamers, avoiding giving game relevant information because no book is going to say "Gricks have DR 10/magic."
5. A Bear Exposition Dumps in the Woods What if you fail to make the knowledge check to progress the plot, or the DM wrote a lovely treatise on owlbear mating cycles that is both game-relevant and succinct despite the lack of anyone with Knowledge (Nature)? Why a handy exposition device will arrive and tell you, making the point in investing in the skill pointless, because you could've put it toward more ranks in Sleight of Hand and still end up knowing the information that matters. Sometimes no plot device is needed, and the DM will just tell you what you need to know regardless of your skill level.
6. First Rule of Bear Club This is mainly a problem with D&D, but most fantasy settings suffer from this, and is related to #4. For what little knowledge actually matters, it's apparently incredibly hard to be succinct or even remember tid-bits. A passive player will learn stuff like troll regeneration, universal tanar'ri immunities, and draconic mating calls in the course of normal play. This amount of information can fit in a novlette or taught in a seminar, yet the rules equate it to getting a doctorate. A high-level cleric could raise an undead-hunting ranger and teach everything relevant to killing them, and that ranger is still taken by surprise when a lich ignores his lightning sword and not even recognize a nightwalker (let alone know it's vulnerable to silver).
7. Bears All the Way Down The opposite of #3, and is only really seen in very rules-lite games, where you make an Intelligence check for everything or find some way to tie the relevant information to an extant skill set or background; such as using your experience sailing to recall legends told by traveling pilgrims. The chances the answer's "more bears" (see #2) regardless of results is near-guaranteed if the system consolidates knowledge to virtually nothing.

I don't quite know how to resolve this conundrum. I hope this helps to gather my thoughts by outlining all of my rants.

[Chamomile]

First idea that popped into my head: Roll a relevant knowledge check (dungeoneering, the planes, and nature are good candidates) and get a bonus to killing the thing. GM makes up some tidbit about weakspots or the way they fight or whatever that lets you get an edge on them. Potentially this bonus should also be expanded to things like stealth checks or handle animal checks.

[Wrathzog]

This is usually in response to hatred of metagamers, avoiding giving game relevant information because no book is going to say "Gricks have DR 10/magic."

This seems so backwards to me. Like if you handed out specific, relevant, mechanical information at various Knowledge Check DC's, you should be able to call out people for meta-gaming when they pull out a torch the first time their character meets a troll and fail to his that specific DC with a Knowledge check.

[zugschef]

First idea that popped into my head: Roll a relevant knowledge check (dungeoneering, the planes, and nature are good candidates) and get a bonus to killing the thing. GM makes up some tidbit about weakspots or the way they fight or whatever that lets you get an edge on them. Potentially this bonus should also be expanded to things like stealth checks or handle animal checks.

this doesn't help with point #5.

[Red_Rob]

Gumshoe has an interesting take on this, being an investigative game. Knowledge skills come as a pool of points that you purchase during chargen. When you want to make a knowledge check, simply having a pool at all gets you any plot relevant or unimportant information. You also have the option to spend points from your pool to gain information that will give you an in-game advantage right here and now. Being a game about solving mysteries the examples given are mainly geared towards opening new avenues of investigation or short-cutting lengthy clue-chains, but I could see a system where you spend points to identify monster weaknesses or stat block info.

[tussock]

Dude, the reason your characters don't know shit about dragons is they're reading from actual medieval bestiaries.

Check the sources lower on the page, for they are hilarious. Medieval books of facts are astounding in their depth of ineptitude and falsity. Your knowledge check is a thing where there's ten books saying Bears live in cold swamps, eat moondrops, and will help strangers who have no shoes by carrying them aloft in their gentle embrace, and some ancient-but-young guy in the woods with a pet bear who tells constant lies about what hurts bears so that people don't hurt them.

Because he wants the bear to win.

Also, bears are quite small, enjoy dancing to music, and are fond of jewellery, especially rings in the nose. Which is a thing you've totally seen.


Or the bear entry, which is less informative for adventure purposes and yet much stranger.

The check to realise it's an Animal rather than a bear-demon or bear-dragon or bear-titanothere is especially valid in D&D, where those other roughly bear-sized things wander about and want to eat you more than the bear does.

[TarkisFlux]

Here's a couple new ones for you:
8. What's a Bear? Common knowledge isn't actually common. In many cases there is no system for determining what class, kit, skill, or even culture based stuff you know from training and growing up, much less how much truth is in them. And the check for recalling this bit of common knowledge may or may not even be reliable.
9. Don't Know Bears. Just Train/Track/Taxidermy Them. Many systems assume that you know stuff so that you can use your other skills, but the limits of this stuff is not discussed. You can train or track or taxidermy animals and beasts, but not know dick about them if it's not common knowledge (and fail to remember that half the time depending on the mechanic).

Knowledge may as well be called "remembering", because it's functionally a mechanical representation of your ability to recall true things that you learned previously (Tussock's bit about falsehoods only applies if a failed check gives you an actual shit answer and you don't know that for some reason). And that's a really limited shtick, but it's also the least bad version of it that I can think of. The alternatives seem to be "argueMTP with the DM over what you know" or "extensive mental inventory", and both of those are terrible for different reasons. It has value as a skill when it's less about remembering shit and more about synthesizing things that you do know into something new. Running in a necromancer's lair and fighting something he whipped up? ID it anyway. Fancy new unique magic effect that no one has ever seen before? Understand it anyway.

But past that knowledge is a crap skill that might as well be handed out for free* (with minor exceptions for monster / magic identification). Tie the relevant parts of it to other active skills. Know wilderness survival? You can fucking ID the creatures that live in the wilderness. And the rest of it can be handled by whatever system is in place for things that fall outside of the game mechanics. No one cares if you have an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry.

These solve a few of the above problems. Here's my thoughts on a couple more.

5 is solvable by changing the failure state of a check. Instead of just not knowing something that is within the expectations of your level of training, the failure state should be that you know where to find it. Adventure gets an extra bump but otherwise continues. Failing to know things well above your pay grade shouldn't matter in the first place.

Swapping the failure state to actual false information just makes the exposition problem worse, but could otherwise be fun in the right setup.

6 could be expanded a bit to not just mentoring but research in any library ever. Studying does fuck all for you, whether you have the skill or not, but removing book knowledge as it's own thing at least provides an explanation for that. If you don't have the skills with traps that your mentor does, you are just flat worse at remembering all of the triggers and mechanisms that go into them. Not remember stories about monsters remains bullshit if you're already good at stabbing them in the face, but that should probably just be background things anyway.

* Free here means has no level or skill based character resource cost. Time or narrative costs are probably appropriate.

[fectin]

FantasyCraft deals with it by giving you "interests" as a resource. Interests can be spent on languages, having a religion, or studies. Your knowledge check is Int + [number of studies], and you get a extra +1 if at least one of your studies is relevant to the check.

That does a couple of things:
- It forces knowledge checks to stay near the RNG (because the maximum reasonable bonus is around 10), so everyone has a decent chance of just knowing things.
- You also gain interests on a unified schedule (like feats in D&D), so it avoids huge discrepancies, but still allows noticeable variation.
- It allows wide variations in knowledge sets, without huge effects on gameplay. It also gives the MC a great excuse to just tell you stuff, without it being forced exposition. ("Oh you have a study in Pirates? Cool. You've heard about Calico Jack...")

Of course, like everything else in FantasyCraft, this comes at the cost of much more complexity.

[OgreBattle]

Knowledge Checks give you a bonus (like +X or rerolls) when interacting with the Thing you are knowledging about

so a knowledge check on bears lets you track the bear outside of combat, and hit it in the hurty spots in combat.

[PhoneLobster]

Try these on for size.

10)I'm stopping this adventure until someone makes a god damn Knowledge(Bears) check!
No really. Some people do that. Or claim they do in arguments where they pretend Knowledge(Bears) is the equal of any genuinely useful character ability because at any second the GM could, or even SHOULD put the players on a railroad and then hold that same railroad hostage to mandatory Knowledge(Bears) checks.

11)We make Knowledge(Pandas) checks with the Knowledge(Furry Animals) skills we have not the Knowledge(Bears) skills we wish we had.
Because the only knowledge skills that can matter are the ones you have. There are a large number of them, what they do is all pretty negotiable. If the GM decides to hold the game hostage to them like in 10, he is going to hold it hostage to a knowledge skill someone actually has invested in, well, unless the GM is REALLY a dumb bastard.

If the GM is going to give you bullshit fairy tea party rewards, highly subjective and variable information, or simply be open to bullshit fairy tea party arguments to put your skill to use as per point 7...

...it's only going to matter with whichever knowledge skill you invested in, and the ones you don't invest in won't matter. They in fact pretty much can't matter. There is no particularly good reason to go into an adventure with Knowledge(Star Trek Trivia) instead of Knowledge(Star Wars Trivia). Whatever highly unpredictable value they might have... it's pretty much equal, interchangeable, and indistinguishable.

12)Bears I Don't know Can't Hurt Me!
As an extension of other points. If you bring a Knowledge(Bears) character to your party... the GM might make the skill (annoyingly) useful, he might even hold the game hostage with point 10.

What is the BEST way to prevent this? Do not bring a Knowledge(Bears) character in the first place.

The Knowledge(Bears) tea party/mini-game whatever is one so optional and bullshit the GM is highly likely to not even remember it exists (or invent it by pulling it out of his ass at the last minute) unless you go reminding him with some sucker invested in the damn skill and talking about the damn thing all the time.

I feel this is best expressed by the simple fact (that I mention back on that awesome anti-d20modern rant I went on) that in the d20Modern universe any team of Fast characters who encounters a would be Smart character recruit is almost certainly wiser to kill them on sight as the Smart character is basically nothing more than a giant sign demanding knowledge checks and other obscure even MORE poorly written skill checks like Repair and Craft to suddenly become a big deal out of nowhere at the expense of being totally non-functional in every other respect, especially the main combat mini-game.

[hogarth]

I never thought I'd be saying this, but PhoneLobster expressed my thoughts on the issue.

[Whipstitch]

I feel the same way about driving in SR4. That game sadly goes a lot smoother if getting to your car is always handled with squealing tires and a cut to the team celebrating a job well done over some brews. Mind you, driving is a bit different since thematically it should be cool and relevant but in practice it only leads to tears and Edge burning.

[Josh_Kablack]

But there are important distinctions between bears

[PhoneLobster]

Ah... SNL, proof that the United States does not possess a functional sense of comedy and probably should never have broken away from the UK in that respect.

I'd say that the rest of the world laughs at you for thinking that show is funny. But the point is more rather they don't, they mostly yawn at you.

Also, while I'm on the topic, brief memo USA. I don't give a crap about Chevy Chase etc..., not every comedian that appears on your parochial little SNL automatically deserves to inflict a fucking movie career on the rest of the rather befuddled world. In particular I'm looking at YOU Will Farrel.

[Wrathzog]

Woah, man, hold on. Will Farrel made tons of great movies like

[Whipstitch]

I liked Anchorman, fuck ya'll.

[Josh_Kablack]

5-10% of SNL is hilarious. The other 90-95% is quickly forgotten, leaving us to remember only the highlights and grouse about how the show isn't as good as it used to be.

And even here stateside, SNL is infamous for launching so many of its alums into horribly considered movies. For every Bill Murray-type who does things like Ghostbusters and Lost in Translation there are several Chris Kataan-types who do Monkeybone and Night at the Roxbury and more than a few Jimmy Fallon-types who go on to strong showbiz careers despite starring an an embarrassment like Taxi.

[deaddmwalking]

Do you think (assuming a 3.x style system) that Knowledge skills would benefit from being treated like languages (you're either knowledgeable or you're not).

Instead of requiring a 'knowledge check', you'd have 'Knowledge (planes)' and would just know most things. For something very esoteric, rather than a knowledge check, it'd be an Int check (assuming you have the relevant knowledge).

If I were handwaving it, I'd say something like everything that is listed as a DC 15 (or maybe 20) is 'automatically known' if you're trained. Anything beyond that requires an Int check of the listed DC minus 15.

So a DC 30 would be a DC 15 Int check.

That would seem to solve many of the problems of knowing everything about a particular creature one moment, than forgetting it all when you encounter that creature again the next day (which can also be a problem if you don't track your previous skill checks).

[Omegonthesane]

Do you think (assuming a 3.x style system) that Knowledge skills would benefit from being treated like languages (you're either knowledgeable or you're not).

Instead of requiring a 'knowledge check', you'd have 'Knowledge (planes)' and would just know most things. For something very esoteric, rather than a knowledge check, it'd be an Int check (assuming you have the relevant knowledge).

If I were handwaving it, I'd say something like everything that is listed as a DC 15 (or maybe 20) is 'automatically known' if you're trained. Anything beyond that requires an Int check of the listed DC minus 15.

So a DC 30 would be a DC 15 Int check.

That would seem to solve many of the problems of knowing everything about a particular creature one moment, than forgetting it all when you encounter that creature again the next day (which can also be a problem if you don't track your previous skill checks).

Sounds like a fair solution, or at least fairer than the clusterfuck 3.5 actually gave.

Interestingly I've had experience lately with Green Ronin's SIFRP, which essentially does the opposite - Knowledge is one of your core abilities, and taking feat-equivalents to specialise in a field is more likely to take you to "never fail" than to unlock the field at all. Amusingly you also make Knowledge rolls for the equivalent of Gather Information, so apparently maesters have huge networks of informants everywhere.

[Voss]

Dude, the reason your characters don't know shit about dragons is they're reading from actual medieval bestiaries.

An amusing source. The basilisk alone is quite funny, adheres to the snake/cock confusion, but it also breaths fire, kills with its odor, its glance, by hissing, and its bite makes people hydrophobic.

It is also a great excuse to make people carry weasels around.