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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Norfleet" data-source="post: 1127303" data-attributes="member: 11581">The other issue, once again, is the "noise effect" of skill checks vs. DCs. The concept of a "knowledge" skill seems to fall apart when random numbers are thrown into the matter of whether you do or do not know something.I seem to recall that knowledge was a case where take-10 doesn't apply. I can't quite find where this rule is listed, or if it still exists as of 3.5, but it does create the effect where it's perfectly possible that somebody with more ranks in a knowledge skill will fail where somebody else with a much lower skill can succeed, and this is glaringly noticeable at the low levels. Buying many ranks of this "knowledge" skill can have little or no apparent effect when you actually NEED it.There's also the question of what, exactly, a knowledge skill MEANS: Does the knowledge skill mean simply information that the character has stumbled across and picked up, or does it represent actively studying a subject to the point where it consumes a meaningful amount of study time that could have been used to practice something else, as the opportunity cost of buying a knowledge skill would seem to indicate? If so, then this sort of knowledge is no longer random, and running a random roll vs. a DC makes very little sense: Either a character knows something about the matter, or he does not. It's not something which is randomly determined the moment he tries to recall it, since the skill disallows retry: He can't ponder it and wrack his brain for the information with more time. The knowledge skill, in effect, has become a random roll of whether a character knows something or not. It is a silly way of handling this.</blockquote>

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