Hacking the Rules: Monster lore, part 6

When I first started working on this system, my goal was to improve the realism of monster lore checks.  But thinking it over, ‘realism’ isn’t the right word.  After all, how realistic can you be when dealing with dragons and demons and orcs?  I think what I was really after was to improve immersion.  That is, I wanted to decrease the chances that the rules would get in the way of immersing ourselves in a good story.  One of the rules of good story-telling is that uncertainty creates drama and certainty creates boredom.  If characters are presented with uncertainty, it creates drama, and pulls the players deeper into their immersion in the story.  The current system for monster lore features a lot of flaws that break immersion.  From the example of the Tarrasque and the ningyo to the Yeti in the desert to the hala demon from the depths of Hell, all of these provide opportunities for players to recognize the absurdity of the system, which in turn breaks immersion by drawing attention away from the story and towards the rules.

This begs the question of what makes a good story.  Taking books, movies and TV shows as our template, a good story almost always involves uncertainty.  A story where the outcome is a foregone conclusion is boring.  No one is interested in a character that always makes the right choice, always has the correct answer, and always wins.  We want our protagonists to face impossible choices, to fight against insurmountable odds, and often to lose the battle before winning the war.  We know intuitively that the protagonist will triumph by the end of the story, but it’s the illusion of uncertainty that keeps us reading or watching until the end.  It’s what makes the story interesting.

Turning back to role-playing games and monster lore specifically, what makes a more interesting story?  The character that sees a monster, makes their Knowledge check and casually comments “Ah, that creature there is a kurobozu, from Bestiary 5.  It is an undead creature, has the evasion ability and has a disease breath weapon.  I rolled a 30 on my Knowledge (Religion) check, so I calculate its CR at roughly 6”, or the character that sees the same monster, and says “I think I have heard of this creature before.  It is called a kurobozu; I heard a bard from Tian Xia tell a tale of it, but I know nothing more.”  The first reaction is a rules reaction, the second is a story reaction.  The first breaks immersion, the other improves it.  The first reaction presents no mystery, no uncertainty.  The other creates mystery, tension and uncertainty.

My point is that uncertainty creates drama.  And drama makes for good stories.  And the more uncertainty a character faces, the more interesting the story becomes.  That premise should be considered as we create our new monster lore system.  Some monsters should be mysterious.  How can we translate this imprimatur into a cogent mechanical expression, and does it improve immersion in the game?

I’ve mentioned previously that I’m prone to complicating things.  At this point, before I start adding bells and whistles to our system, I want to acknowledge that through this process, we have created a working product.  As it stands now, our new monster lore system is robust, balanced and achieves our design goal.  The player’s interface with the rules remains the same (see monster, roll check, determine result), and while the new system creates more work for the GM up front, the potential for improved immersion is worth the effort spent.  I could walk away from this right now and be happy.

But we still have some nagging problems that we haven’t solved yet.  Remember the Yeti in the desert?  And the hala demon from the Abyss?  We still haven’t looked at these issues yet.  Before I jump in and start complicating this paper bag, I want to point out that every idea that follows from this point is a suggestion.  I need your input to determine if the added complication is worth the immersion value it potentially creates.

The environment

 Everyone is talking about the environment. Pressure from the political left is forcing me to think about it as well.  And how it can affect our new monster lore system.  To start this portion of our discussion off, let’s go ahead and answer one of the two questions about the yeti in the desert.  Why is the yeti in the desert?  Actually, we don’t care!  Remember that we aren’t interested in determining how many yetis exist in the desert, we only need this as a reference to determine how much the characters know about yetis.  Keeping that in mind, let’s talk about environmental matches and mismatches.

Each monster in the Pathfinder RPG gets an entry in their stat blocks called Environment.  Environment gives us two pieces of information: Typical climate and typical terrain.  Example: Our yeti (Pathfinder Bestiary 1, p. 287) has an Environment listing of ‘cold mountains.’  We’ve learned a few things about Betty (sorry, I couldn’t help it.  At least she doesn’t live in the Serengeti…).  Her typical climate is Cold, so arctic, sub-arctic and high elevation areas.  Her typical terrain is Mountains.  Great.  What can we do with that information?

To start, we need to remember that our group plays adventure paths, which means that our chances of encountering Betty are 100% if she is featured as an encounter in the AP.  It doesn’t matter that we encounter her in a hot desert environment, because the adventure says she’s there.  Maybe the GM calls shenanigans and replaces Betty the Yeti with her cousin Freddy the desert yeti (who quite likes spaghetti).  But let’s just roll with Betty for the purposes of our experiment.  Fact: Betty the yeti, who likes cold mountain environments, is encountered in a hot desert.  We don’t care why she’s there (maybe she’s seeking confetti), but we do care about how much the characters know about yeti.  The characters are from a hot desert environment.  Should Betty’s environment mismatch affect our character’s Knowledge checks for monster lore?  You bet your sweet ass it should!

One of the elements we must consider is the character’s environmental origin.  See, this gives us a context for what kinds of monsters the character should be more familiar with, and which ones she knows less about, in a general sense.  Adventure paths normally advocate for having characters originate in the AP’s geographical region.  For example, Giantslayer characters are recommended to originate from the town of Trunau, Crimson Throne characters from Korvosa, and Mummy’s Mask characters from the city of Wati.  It isn’t required, of course, but rather suggested as a way to tie characters into the setting and the story.  Assuming all characters follow this recommendation, we have a unified origin environment for all the characters, we can compare their native environment to the environment listing for a creature, decide what a match means and what a mismatch means.  It gets more complicated if one or more of the characters hails from an environment outside of the AP region.  In our Giantslayer campaign, only one character remains that originates from Trunau.  We have five out of six characters in Crimson Throne that come from Korvosa, but the sixth has been there long enough to consider it home.  I’m not sure what to do about that; I’m just noting it here so I don’t forget about it later.

Let’s just pretend that all characters in the Mummy’s Mask campaign are from Wati, and no one needs to be a special snowflake and play a Viking or a mongol or a pirate.  This geographically-unified group wanders through the desert and encounters Betty the yeti (who’s feeling quite sweaty).  We compare the character’s environment reference (hot desert) with Betty’s environment (cold mountains) and we come up with a mismatch.  From the perspective of immersion, the characters should have a harder time figuring out what Betty is, because she’s not native to their environment.  Yeti just aren’t found in hot deserts.  How do we translate this environmental mismatch into game mechanics?  What about environmental matches?  I have two ideas:

•  Decrease the DC for monster lore checks by 5 where environmental match occurs, and increase the DC by 5 if a mismatch occurs.

•   Grant a +5 circumstance bonus to monster lore checks where environmental match occurs.  Alternately, impose a -5 penalty to monster lore checks where mismatch occurs.

Personally, I prefer the first option because it doesn’t add any complication to the players, but your thoughts are desired and welcome.  I’m also not set on the values for the bonus/penalty/DC change either.  We could also further refine the system to differentiate between climate and terrain.  Let’s say Betty’s cousin, Freddy the desert yeti (who’s from Cincinneti [oh God I can’t stop]), is encountered in a hot desert.  Freddy the yeti’s native environment is hot mountains, so we have a partial match.  How would you handle, and is such granularity valuable from a player perspective?

The result is that characters who live in a particular environment can recognize monsters from that same environment more easily, but they have a tougher time identifying monsters from environments other than their native one.  Monster lore checks are affected by climate and terrain.

Templates and variants

As written, a template increases a monster’s Challenge Rating by a fixed amount, i.e. +1, +2, etc.  So, a CR 10 monster with a +1 template is increased to a CR 11 monster.  This, in turn, increases the DC for monster lore checks by an equivalent amount.  So, bringing back our behemoth hippopotamus, we apply the celestial template to this CR 10 creature, turning it into a CR 11.  With our new rules, the un-templated behemoth hippopotamus can be identified with a DC 20 Knowledge (Nature) check.  When we apply the celestial template, our Humongous Holy Hippo™ still becomes a CR 11 creature, but the DC for monster lore doesn’t change, because it’s no longer based on Challenge Rating. 

So how do we adjust for templated monsters?  The simple solution would be to just increase the DC for monster lore checks by the same amount that the template increases the CR of the monster.  But really, is this sufficient?  Does it adequately express in the game mechanics that the creature is truly different in some way?  Sure, we can probably guess that the Humongous Holy Hippo™ is a celestial creature because of the halo around its head, but what about if we applied the Boreal Creature template?  Now we have a Humongous Hoary Hippo™.  Maybe we can identify it by the icicles hanging off its ears?   What about a Humongous Hellish Hippo, or a Humongous Haunted Hippo?  Does an increase of +1 or +2 really reflect the changes that the template makes to the monster?

Variant monsters are a little different, in that the variant creature could potentially have a lower Challenge Rating than the normal creature.  The variant critter is potentially easier to identify than its standard version, which is stupid.  A variant creature should always be harder to identify, regardless of how its Challenge Rating changes. 

Here’s my thinking: Since we’ve already established a filtering criterion for Frequency, why not use the same filters for templates?  Templates from Bestiary 1 would increase the DC for monster lore checks by +1, those from Bestiary 2 & 3 would increase DC by +2, and those from any other publication would increase by +3.  I think that might adequately account for the strangeness of a templated creature, but still make the more common templates easier to identify than the more esoteric ones.  What do you think about this solution?

Outsiders

Last potential complication, and then I’m ready to refine and publish.  Let’s talk about the Metaverse.  For purposes of definition, let’s say Metaverse is any plane of existence other than the Prime Material Plane.  Places like the Abyss, Limbo, the Elemental Plane of Air, the Negative Energy Plane, the Ethereal Plane, etc.  99.9% of all living beings in Golarion never get to see any of these places until they die, and when they do die and go to their eternal reward or punishment, they can’t come back and tell anyone about what it’s like unless they’re raised from the dead, which 99.9% of beings can’t afford.  In short, very few beings can visit the Metaverse and share their observations. 

 

But there exists that 0.1% that actually does visit Elysium or Axis or the Elemental Plane of Pudding and some of them write about it.  There is an opportunity for characters to study and learn about the Metaverse, which is why we get a Knowledge (the Planes) skill.  Considering how rare, difficult and dangerous it is to travel the Metaverse, and how few creatures have the means and opportunity to do so, wouldn’t creatures from the Metaverse (i.e. Outsiders) be so alien and inscrutable that they don’t fit into our standard filtering system for monster lore?  Should not the DC’s for identifying outsiders be harder?

Think about it: Unless you are traveling through the planes of existence and encounter an outsider on its native plane, Outsiders will never be in their natural environment.  Any Outsider encountered on Golarion is not in its natural environment unless it has the ‘Native’ subtype.  We could still classify the Frequency of Outsiders by Bestiary publication, so we would still have uncommon, rare and very rare creatures, but it just feels like Outsiders should be kicked up a notch.  

We could bump up the DC’s for monster lore checks for Outsiders by 5 or 10.  A rare (normally DC 20) Outsider would therefore be increased to DC 25 or 30, reflecting the limited amount of knowledge anyone has about these creatures.  The drawback, of course, is that the ranks you have invested in Knowledge (the Planes) become less valuable.  At an increase in DC of 5, a first level character with INT 18 and a rank in Knowledge (the Planes) would have a 45% chance to identify an uncommon Outsider.  With a DC increase of 10, the chance to identify decreases to 20%, with no chance of learning a useful bit of information about the creature.  How do you feel about Outsiders?  Do you think they should be treated differently, or am I just being a mean GM?

Okay, I lied.  Two more fiddly bits and I’m done.  I promise, because it’s 5:00 and I want to go home.  

Name that Monster!

This next suggestion is a little meta-gamey, but it could be a fun way to grab a bit of a bonus as a player of the game, rather than as a character in the game.  Here’s how it would work:  You encounter a creature.  The GM reads the short description of the monster from the relevant Bestiary.  “This eerie beast appears to be the animated skeleton of a huge fanged cat, its bones glowing with fire and seething with smoke.”  And then, you are shown this picture:

Before your character makes any Knowledge check, as a player you get an opportunity to guess what the creature is.  If you guess the creature correctly, your character gains a +5 insight bonus to their monster lore check.  If the player guesses incorrectly, but is able to identify the creature’s subtype, they are instead awarded a +2 insight bonus to their monster lore check.

I know enough to be dangerous...

Lastly, how about a mechanic where if you fail your check by 5 or more, your character remembers an incorrect piece of lore about the creature?  You think it’s DR 5/silver, but it’s really DR 5/cold iron.  You think the monsters main attack deals poison, but it actually deals a disease effect. Would that be fun, or just a pain in the ass?  In my Savage Tide campaign many years ago, I had a player who flubbed a roll and truly believed that the very human villain was a fiendish tyrannosaurus.  While this example involved a Gather Information check instead of a monster lore check, it’s such memorable moments that this idea seeks to capture.

And that’s it.  After we discuss the options presented above, all that remains is to codify the system in a rules-consistent format, and introduce them into our game.  Which I will do in the next, final post on Monster Lore.

Hacking the Rules: Monster lore, part 5

So far, we’ve determined the DC’s for common and uncommon monsters, and determined that any creature published in the first Pathfinder Bestiary will be classified as either common or uncommon.  We’ve seen that creatures like dragons and elementals are now more easily identified because of their frequency.  What remains is to set the DC for rare and very rare creatures, and figure out how to classify their Frequency.

Continuing with the idea that we can sort monster Frequency by Bestiary publication, my next decision was to give any creature in the Bestiary 2 a Frequency of rare.  Bestiary 2 was pretty much all of the legacy monsters that couldn’t fit in Bestiary 1.  Some of the creatures were still iconic, but not as iconic as those in the first Bestiary.  After crunching some numbers, I realized that there just weren’t enough monsters with a Frequency of rare, so I expanded my classification to all monsters published in Bestiary 2 and Bestiary 3.  In my proposed new system, rare creatures can be identified with a DC 20 Knowledge check.  So, let’s take this baby for a drive and see how she handles:

Once again, we will examine the extremes to see how the system performs.  Our test subjects for this round will be a hippocampus (CR 1) and a nightwave (CR 20).  On the low end of the spectrum, the hippocampus could be identified using the old rules with a DC 11 Knowledge (Arcana) check.  Using the new rules, the DC increases to 20.  At the top of the food chain, the nightwave is a DC 30 Knowledge (Religion) check, whereas under the new rules, the DC decreases to 20.  Just to double-check, let’s have a look at a middle-range monster, like the behemoth hippopotamus, weighing in at a Challenge Rating of 10.  Old rules: DC 20 Knowledge (Nature).  New Rules: DC 20 Knowledge (Nature).  The median result is identical and the variance at either extreme is equal at +/- 10.  So far, it’s still skewing towards easier DC’s.  But that will change once we get to very rare monsters.

I have some thoughts about very rare beasties.  The ‘very rare’ classification implies that most people have never even heard of such creatures, let alone seen one.  Because they are so very rare, precious little is known about them.  Only the most erudite of scholars could identify one, and even rarer is the scholar that could tell you about their abilities.  Very rare monsters should evoke a sense of mystery, of something alien that very few intelligent beings have ever come across.  “What the fuck is that?!?” should be the reaction of most characters, turning hopefully to the group wizard.  Who responds with “I have no fucking idea.”

This is not to say that very rare creatures are unidentifiable; there should be a chance of success, even if it is exceedingly small.  Setting a DC of 30 seems like a good target number.  A first-level character with a rank in Knowledge and an 18 Intelligence would still have no chance to figure out a very rare creature.  And that fits in with the overall vision I have for monster lore.  A character with only a small amount of learning in a Knowledge skill should not be able to identify a very rare creature, regardless of its Challenge Rating.  As that character gains experience and continues their studies (i.e. takes more ranks in their Knowledge skill), the chances of success improve incrementally until they reach a reasonable chance for success (i.e. greater than 50%) at around 10^th to 12^th level.  By that time, if our character has maxed out their ranks in the relevant Knowledge skill, they have become that erudite scholar, capable of recognizing even the most esoteric of creatures.

We still have a lot of monsters left, all of whom must fall into the very rare category.  We’ve used Bestiary 1, 2 and 3 for our common, uncommon and rare categories, so now everything else falls into the very rare box.  This includes all creatures from Bestiary 4, 5 and 6 and also any creature that was included in an adventure path bestiary.  We also should include any monster from a third-party publication, such as the Tome of Horrors (Frog God Games) or the Midgard Bestiary (Kobold Press).  That seems like a lot of monsters.  Maybe the majority of them.  Maybe a large majority.  Let’s check it out to see if that impression is correct.

I’m going to use the Mummy’s Mask adventure path as our sample.  If I reference the source book for each monster encountered in the adventure path, I find that 28.5% of all monsters come from Bestiary 1, 42.1% are drawn from Bestiary 2 or 3, and the balance (29.4%) come from other publications.  Therefore, our fear that most creatures will fall into the very rare category is unfounded.  The distribution works out somewhat evenly.

A consequence of the decision to set the DC at 30 is that monster lore checks for very rare creatures become harder.  A lot harder, especially at low CR’s.  We gather up a troodon (CR 1) and a lotus tree (CR 20) as our lab rats.  Troodon – old rules DC 11 (Nature).  New rules DC 30 (Nature).  Ouch!  For our lotus tree, the old rules yield a DC 30 Knowledge (Nature), while the new rules produce the same result.  So, for most very rare creatures, it becomes harder to identify them, and in low-CR cases, much harder. 

But if we loop back to common and uncommon monsters, the reverse is true.  Low-CR creatures remain at pretty much the same DC, and high-CR creatures become much easier to identify.  As a whole, the new system appears balanced with respect to the old. 

We have an alternate rule system that is balanced, and keeps the same chances for success at monster lore checks, but redistributes them from Challenge Rating to Frequency.  Our design goal was to base monster lore checks on the Frequency of the creature, which I believe we have done.  Some checks are harder, others are easier and our chances of success are based on how pervasive the creature is in the campaign setting instead of how hard it is to fight.  Achievement unlocked!

Next time, we’re going to add some layers of complexity to the system.  We need to talk about environment and how it affects Knowledge checks.  We also need to tackle monster templates, and variant versions of monsters.  And we need to discuss the metaverse.  Ah yes, the metaverse…