Hacking the Rules: Monster lore, part 7

Another late post; my apologies again.  Work luncheon on Friday gave me a half-day off, but also gave me a day's work to be done in half a day.  So, you get this post today, but I'll be back on schedule with a new series of posts on Friday.  So, without further ado...

Now that we’ve properly identified all of the elements in our new monster lore system, it’s time to write it up into official rules language.

KNOWLEDGE (Int ; Trained Only [see below])

You are educated in a field of study and can answer both simple and complex questions. Like the Craft, Perform, and Profession skills, Knowledge actually encompasses a number of different specialties. Below are listed typical fields of study.

• Arcana (ancient mysteries, magic traditions, arcane symbols, monster lore)

• Dungeoneering (caverns, spelunking, monster lore)

• Engineering (buildings, aqueducts, bridges, fortifications)

• Geography (lands, terrain, climate, people, nations)

• History (wars, colonies, migrations, founding of cities)

• Humanoids (Alignment, culture, organization, rivalries, society, monster lore)

• Local (Legends, personalities, inhabitants, laws, customs, traditions, establishments, history, monster lore.  You must select a specific location (such as a city, a small group of nearby villages, or a distinct region of wilderness) that your knowledge applies to.  For example, Knowledge (local: Korvosa) would be appropriate, but Knowledge (local: Varisia) would not.)

• Nature (seasons and cycles, weather, monster lore)

• Nobility (lineages, heraldry, personalities, royalty)

• Planes (the Inner Planes, the Outer Planes, the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, planar magic, monster lore)

• Religion (gods and goddesses, mythic history, ecclesiastic tradition, holy symbols, monster lore)

Check: Answering a question within your field of study has a DC of 10 (for really easy questions), 15 (for basic questions), or 20 to 30 (for really tough questions).

You can use this skill to identify monsters and their special powers or vulnerabilities. In general, the DC is determined by the GM, based on a variety of factors. A successful check allows you to successfully identify that monster. For every 5 points by which your check result exceeds the DC, you recall a piece of useful information, such as its offensive, defensive or special abilities.

Action: Usually none. When trying to identify a creature with a Knowledge check, the check is a free action.  The player must choose which Knowledge skill they will use to make the check, and only one check per round can be made.

Try Again: No. The check represents what you know, and thinking about a topic a second time doesn’t let you know something that you never learned in the first place.

Untrained: You cannot make an untrained Knowledge check. The only exception to this rule is using Knowledge (Local) to identify a creature and gain monster lore.  A character is presumed to have a limited knowledge of creatures indigenous to their native area.

Setting Knowledge DC’s

The DC for a Knowledge checks to learn monster lore is based on the creature’s Frequency.  To determine Frequency, identify the monster source book for the creature, and then consult the chart below:

Source book	Frequency	Knowledge DC
Bestiary 1	Common or uncommon	5 (Common), 10 (Uncommon)
Bestiary 2, Bestiary 3	Rare	20
All other sources	Very rare	30

Next, consult the adventure path, regional source book or use your own hand-picked list, and identify those creatures that are local to the campaign area.  If your campaign encompasses multiple regions or areas, make a separate list for each.  These are the creatures that can be identified with a Knowledge (Local) check.  The DC for the Knowledge (Local) check is determined using the same criteria listed above, i.e. DC 5 for common creatures, DC 10 for uncommon, DC 20 for rare and DC 30 for very rare.

In all cases, apply the following modifiers to the DC as applicable:

Modifier	DC
Creature is in native environment	-5
Template – Bestiary 1	+2
Template – Bestiary 2 or Bestiary 3	+4
Variant or unique creature	+5
Creature type is Outsider	+5
Template – All other publications	+6

Once the DC has been determined, the player may make a Knowledge skill check to identify the creature, and possibly learn a bit of useful lore about it.  The applicable Knowledge skill is based on the creature’s type, as listed below:

Creature type	Knowledge skill type
Aberrations	Dungeoneering
Animals	Nature
Constructs	Arcana
Dragons	Arcana
Fey	Nature
Humanoids	Humanoids
Local creatures	Local
Magical beasts	Arcana
Monstrous humanoids	Humanoids
Oozes	Dungeoneering
Outsiders	The Planes
Plants	Nature
Undead	Religion
Vermin	Nature

Lastly, make a notation in each monster’s bestiary entry to add the DC’s for various knowledge checks.  For example, the characters encounter a giant solifugid (Bestiary 2).  Next to the creature’s stat block, the GM should note “Knowledge: Nature 15, Local (Wati) 15”

When the characters encounter a creature, the GM should read the short description of the creature found at the top of its Bestiary entry, and show the players a picture of the creature.  This can be the picture found in the Bestiary, or any picture the GM deems appropriate and representative.  When a player chooses to make a Knowledge check, they may attempt to guess what the creature is before making their Knowledge check.  If the player guesses successfully, grant a +5 insight bonus to the character’s Knowledge check. 

 

And that’s our system.  All we need to do now is test it and see how broken it is.

Now, I promised you in an earlier article that I would rigorously crunch these numbers and see how they change the old baseline for monster lore.  I’m going to do that below.  WARNING: MATH AHEAD!

MATHFINDER!

The selection I chose to test our system was the Mummy’s Mask adventure path.  It’s the next AP I will run with my group, and seems representative of an average adventure path in terms of creature variety.  I first went through the entire AP and noted any creature from an encounter, be it hostile or friendly.  I also noted the creature’s source book, its Challenge Rating, and its Environment.  If the creature had a template applied to it, I noted the template, and the source book the template was published in. I then did the same thing with any creature that was listed on a random encounter table in the city of Wati, or that was listed as an ‘urban’ encounter in Osirion: Legacy of the Pharaohs. I added a column for these creatures called “local.”

After removing any duplicate entries, I finished with a list of 217 different creatures that could or would be encountered by the characters in the campaign. 

The next step was to list the creature type for each creature, i.e. monstrous humanoid, undead, dragon, etc.  The last step of data entry on my spreadsheet was to add columns for old DC, new DC and net change.  The old DC was the DC based on the creature’s Challenge Rating, the new DC was the DC established by the rules listed above. 

Once the data was gathered, I started grouping creatures by type and determining the change in average DC for Knowledge checks.  The results are listed below:

Creature Type		DC change	Sample size
Overall		+2.0	217
Aberrations		-5.4	5
Animals		-2.6	8
Constructs		+3.4	19
Dragons		-4.9	8
Fey		+5	2
Humanoids		-2.2	9
Magical beasts		-0.9	25
Monstrous humanoids		-2.3	10
Oozes		-1.8	6
Outsiders		+5.4	47
Undead		+4	55
Vermin		+2.5	23

NO DATA WITHOUT ACTION

Reviewing the results above, the average DC for all sampled creatures increased by 2.0.  7 out of 12 creature types saw a net decrease, while the remaining 5 creature types increased.  Undead and Outsiders were the most commonly occurring types, representing 47% of the total encounters.  Both categories saw a net increase in DC’s, which skewed the average DC upward.

Blah blah blah whatever.  What does all this shit mean?

It means that Knowledge checks for monster lore just got harder.  On average, the DC increases by 2, meaning that an old DC 15 check just became a DC 17 check.  From a player’s perspective, ranks in Knowledge skills don’t buy as much as they used to.  Statistically, they are worth 10% less than they used to be. 

I’m not satisfied with that result.  Which leaves me with two options.  Either decrease the standard DC’s by 2, or compensate the characters with two additional skill points per level.  As it stands, the DC’s for our new system are neatly organized in multiples of 5, which appeals to my sense of order and structure.  So, how can we award additional skill points to characters without rewriting the entire Core Rulebook?  Easy.

 

Pathfinder Unchained.  Background skills.  2 additional skill ranks per level to be spent on Appraise, Craft, Handle Animal, Linguistics, and certain Knowledge skills.  You’re welcome.

Alright, fine.  It’s not as simple as all that.  The optional Background Skills system found in Pathfinder Unchained does grant 2 additional skill points per level, but they can only be spent on what are defined as non-adventuring skills.  These are skills that are not usually employed in a dungeon or wilderness environment.  You can spend the extra two skill points on Knowledge skills such as engineering, nobility, history and geography, but none of these skills can be used to learn monster lore.  Even though players get two extra skill points per level, it doesn’t directly balance the increased DC’s that result from our new system.

But I think it does indirectly balance the change, at least partly.  If I’m playing a class that has an animal companion (druid, ranger, hunter or whatever third-party creation is my current flavor-of-the-month), I’m going to want to invest skill points in Handle Animal.  In the old system, I would have to do so at the expense of a rank in a different skill, including any Knowledge skill.  Now that Handle Animal is classified as a non-adventuring skill, it frees up a skill point for me to spend on any adventuring skill, including any Knowledge skill that can be used to determine monster lore.  So that gets us a little down the road towards balance.

If my character wants to be some kind of scholar, I will probably invest skill points in the History or Geography category.  Now that those skills are considered non-adventuring, it also frees up skill points.  We get a little closer.

Craft, Artistry and Profession get ignored a lot.  As a player, I often feel obliged to take a rank in Profession, just to demonstrate that my character had a life before they became a murder hobo.  As a GM, I frequently hand-wave such skills because A. They don’t contribute significantly to the plot of the adventure, B. They don’t offer useful solutions to challenges encountered during an adventure, or C. The crafting rules in Pathfinder are boring and needlessly complex. Shoving these skills into the non-adventuring category is just another way of hiding them in a dusty corner to gather dust, as they rightly should. 

Don’t get me started on Appraise.  That’s a whole other article.

I guess what I’m saying is that Background Skills get us closer to a balance with our higher DC’s for monster lore, but not all the way.  Maybe half.  If accurate, that means that an average check for monster lore has a net DC increase of about one.  As a GM, I’m satisfied with that outcome, and as a player I would be willing to accept a slightly higher difficulty if the system provides greater immersion and logical consistency.  Your mileage may vary.

One last point of examination, and then we can put a bow on this bitch.  I added a skill in our new system, Knoweldge (Humanoids).  We need to identify which classes receive our new Knowledge skill as a class skill.  Since we took Knowledge (Local) and split it into two different skills, it seems logical to make Knowledge (Humanoids) a class skill for any class that gets Knowledge (Local) as a class skill.  From the Core Rulebook classes, that’s the bard, rogue and wizard.  Of the classes introduced in the Advanced Player’s Guide, only the summoner gets Knowledge (Local) as a class skill (WTF?), but I think it makes sense to give the inquisitor Knowledge (Humanoids) as a class skill, since monster lore is kinda their thing.

With that out of the way, I guess I need to look at how adding a skill to the game affects the expenditure of skill points, and what impact that effect has.  To do that, I’m going to have to make some assumptions about the way players spend skill points on their characters.  My assumption is based on how I create characters and allocate skill points.  Which is probably similar to the way the majority of players handle it, but maybe not.  Caveat emptor.  I’ll put this in a footnote so that you don’t have to be bored reading my bullshit excuses for foisting this on you rational and well-thought-out justification. ¹

Using the Core Rulebook classes as our sample, an average character receives 3.8 skill points per level.  Let’s round that up to 4 to keep it simple.  Under the original skill rules, each class receives an average of 4.24 class skills per level.  Adding the new skill Knowledge (Humanoids), each class only receives an average of 4.19 class skills per level.  For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the average character will get 1 skill point in each of their class skills per level (see footnote).  Over the course of a 15-level campaign, the character receives 57 skill ranks (not adding their Intelligence modifier or ranks gained from Favored Class bonus).  They have 64 opportunities under the old system (15 x 4.24) to spend those ranks.  Under the new system, they still get an average of 57 skill ranks, but now can spend them on 63 opportunities (15 x 4.19). 

So, the addition of a single skill costs the characters 1 skill rank over the course of a 15-level campaign.  I’m thinking that’s not a terrible burden to bear, but if you want to mount an armed rebellion, I can’t stop you.  The final net result of our new monster lore system is an approximate increase in DC of one, and a cost to the players of one skill rank over the course of a campaign.  Is that cost worth a revised system for monster lore that actually makes sense?  Comments welcome!

 ¹ If you’re like me, you probably spend most of your skill points on class skills.  It just makes sense numerically; you get a +4 bonus for investing a rank in a class skill but only get a +1 bonus for a non-class skill.  Better bang for the buck.  Sure, you probably want to max out Perception even if it’s not a class skill for you (because it’s the most useful skill in the game), but most of your other non-class skills either get ignored entirely or get lip service with a pity rank.  The point is that the large majority of your skill points are probably going to be spent on class skills, which is what the analysis that follows is based upon.