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Message: <blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7461951" data-attributes="member: 97077">So, first, players describe what they want to do and making an ability check isn't something they should be asking for in my view. They should be describing a goal and approach for the character. In this case, it's about recalling lore about the beast (goal) by drawing upon the NPC's description and possibly the character's race, class, or background (approach). It sounds like you left the dwarf's description as vague or inaccurate which suggests the outcome of recalling lore may be uncertain at which point you (not the player) calls for an Intelligence (Nature) check. The difficulty of this effort is translated into a DC for the check. It sounds like you made the dwarf's description vague or inaccurate which reasonably translates into a higher DC, but you might mitigate that a bit given the character's race, class, or background. A character that has familiarity with orcs because his or her village was razed by one as a child, for example, might reasonably know a thing or two about aurochs.Once the roll is made, you have to give them some kind of result. Generally, I recommend that you give the player something useful if the check succeeds and something interesting if the check fails. "Useful" here might be up to and including "It's an auroch" plus some actionable information from the monster entry. "Interesting" might just be some information from the creature's stat block, such as its charge or gore attack being particularly deadly and worth avoiding, but perhaps you leave off the name of the beast or its association with orcs.In general, I recommend being quite generous with information because the players need information in order to make informed decisions to move the adventure forward. Don't rely too much on keeping information hidden in order to increase difficulty in the challenge. There are other ways to keep difficulty high without shortchanging players on information that will keep things moving. Informed decisions are meaningful decisions - otherwise, they're just guesses and that doesn't require skill.The different schools of magic are in the Wizard class section. If they are detecting a specific spell, you can look up the spell and it will tell you what school it is. If it's not a specific spell but rather an effect, you'll have to make a judgment call on what that may be based on what effect it is or perhaps even the nature of the monster in question. Hags and pixies are known to use magic that confounds and befuddles others, for example, so you might say that the PCs detect magic of the school of illusion. Again, this depends on how much information you want to give at the outset and what goal and approach the players use to make that determination. You might describe the environment and just say that they have the look of ambulatory dead that have been dispatched in the battle. Or you might simply describe them as corpses and then reveal, after some reasonable statement of goal and approach by the players and maybe an appropriate ability check, that they were zombies before being put down. In general, if you need the players to know something, then don't hide that information behind an ability check. Just put it out there. And, as I stated already, you'll want to be quite generous with information so the players can make informed decisions.These are all good questions and you'll get into a particular groove with this given some experience with your group. Good luck!</blockquote>

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