NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7796735" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think what you did counts to me as saying "Yes", not saying "No.", since you in fact imparted to the character a pertinent piece of information - that the creatures are not in fact known to the civilized world. That to me counts as the same sort of minimum success that I might grant to a player had they chosen to roll (or I had chosen to allow them to roll), as "This creature is not known to science" requires a pretty high knowledge of natural science and tells you something that is potentially important right there. From my perspective what you decided was the DC to recognize that the creature was unknown to science was trivial, but the DC to know anything specific about a creature unknown to science was so high as to make it pointless to roll. So you didn't bother rolling.I've been meaning to write up my own monster manual that systemizes what a player can learn about creatures from a background knowledge check, but the fact that it is hard to be very systematic about that - your decision that learning specifics about a creature no one has encountered before and lived to tell the tale is a valid one and an example of why being systematic about these things is hard - makes me hesitate to do that. That and the enormous amount of work for comparatively little gain. Deciding on a semi-arbitrary DC and providing one fact to the player with the highest roll for each point they beat the DC by has worked pretty well as an informal system.</blockquote>

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