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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Primitive Screwhead" data-source="post: 2567567" data-attributes="member: 20805">Those particular skills are a bit different.. The fix to Diplomancy is well covered with Rich Burley's rules.. and with "Demagogues and.." {I can never remember the name of that book..} Poisen DC's are low as a 'fun' factor. It sucks to have your character die from a snake bite.. even tho its realistic. A partial fix to this is Sean Reynolds variant poisen rules. The game designers probably also wanted to aviod the 'Poisen his food, its the only way to be sure' method of play. When you have a means of taking out the opposition that is highly effecitve, it gets used more and more.Knowledge skills are... really difficult. There are some checks that should be impossible. An example is the Know(critter) check you mentioned. When a new creature appears, by creation or planar travel, nobody should be able to get much beyond a physical description... no matter how high your skill check is. Figure in a +40 'never been seen before' modifier to the DC <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> The thing to remember with them is, for the most part, Know represents book learning. This sort of check will never identify the leader of a cult, nor even the location of cult members. It could let teh characters know that they are dealing with Cult X and some about the Cults beleifs and tactics.  For finding them, Gather Info, Diplomancy, Bluff, and a potential adventure awaits the group. Digging into the political landscape of Guilds, Houses, Nobles, and fanatics can earn the party some enemies.  The biggest thing to remember is that your are dealing in a world were books tend to be rare, no internet.. no scientific journals. Unfortunately, adding the level of granularity to the know check systems slows down games. A recent thread on identifying creatures does a good job on the subject for that specific peice of the skill. Another thing to remember is to provide the information *in character*. As to learnign checks.. I agree with having extra weeks provde a chance to recheck with a culmative +1.. however, if you are rolling then there should be a chance to fail. Perhaps a roll of 10 less than the DC means the character cannot learn more about this skill until after the next adventure. This is partly because yoru system can eaily degenerate to 'roll to see how long it takes you to finish leveling up.  I use a rule of 1 month per character level for training. This artificially slows advancement in the game calendar, avoiding the 14th level in one year problem. My group recently reached 4th level.. and that has spanned 10 months of game time. It also forces the group to worry about mundane issues like paying for living expenses between adventures {an opportunity to leech some of thier money away <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> } I try to avoid leveling mid adventure.. but have been forced to do so as my 9 player group averages 4 who can make a given session. In this case I allow the 'automatic' increases, but leave skills and feats for when the party can train up. Gotta hate it when I find the encounters almost slaughtering the party cause I forgot to scale them back down <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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