Fixing/Improving Recall Knowledge

[Rhianni32]

So you are assuming that a commoner with an average stat block array, simply armed with the knowledge of a vampires weaknesses is advantaged in a conflict with a supernaturally strong, supernaturally agile, supernaturally fast, magical, regenerating creature that is largely immune to weapons and can kill the average person with a single bite or blow?

That would not seem to follow. The player's are well aware that vampires are discomforted by garlic, fear holy symbols, don't cast a reflection, must rest in a coffin in the day, must be staked and beheaded, can't enter a private home without permission, can't cross running water, and so forth, and yet I've never noticed that PCs - who have vastly more capabilities than peasant farmers - are so unchallenged by vampires that they can simply shoo them out of their vegetable patches.

Vegetable patches that obviously contain lots of garlic, because well, vampires.

yes I was obviously spinning hyperbole about lvl 1 stat block commoners defeating lvl 8 immune to non magic weapon or whatever PF2 stat block vampires offer. I didn't think it was necessary to state that but apparently the conversation went in that direction vs the question I asked. I apologize if my post came off combative. That was not my intent. Nevermind.

 

[Rhianni32]

Good stuff!

As I understand it, the intention is to create a "mini game" where you can spend actions in combat to gain bonuses in the form of "puzzle pieces" - Pathfinder 2 combat is often described as being a "puzzle" where the solution is to find out what tactics (individual attacks and actions, as well as sequences of them) work best and what tactics to avoid.

Do you find that fun? Do you use it?

Most d20 based games are combat simulators with non combat skills and activities as an afterthough.
I think one of the intents of PF2 is to make skills more important by putting more activities to them vs 1 roll and have the GM tell you stuff. Obviously as we are discussing here they didn't fully succeed with Recall knowledge.

I do find those things fun but up to an extent. If the game includes "Guess the monster type matching knowledge skill or you automatically fail your recall knowledge activity" I'll pass.

If you allow characters to find out pieces of the puzzle (i.e. monster info) out of combat (such as by visiting a library in the dungeon) there is no real cost (since the cost is measured chiefly only in actions, and it is only in combat you have limited actions).

Next issue is value/worth. Since the Recall Knowledge isn't automatic and only provides a single puzzle piece ("one of its best-known attributes") you could potentially waste several rounds before finally learning that piece of the puzzle you wanted.

The single puzzle piece aspect is a problem. It also needs to be a meaningful puzzle piece that will drive a decision point. In your example below where your crafting tells you the golem is resistant to attacks... yeah great, the fighter found that out when he struck it with his strike and did at least a little damage. In one of the examples they gave it lists two facts (trolls have regen AND it is stopped with fire)

On the other hand the type of knowledge is not consistent. Why is troll weakness only a success but demon weakness a crit success!?

To answer the question upthread: failure means nothing in particular, but critical failure means you learn something wrong. Does this mean I need lists containing stuff like "A Troll is vulnerable against cold"?

I worry about this too because it also has to be a believable bit of false info. If its too outlandish than the players will know you rolled a "1" and you defeat the purpose of having a surprise roll in the first place.

Then there's the elephant in the room: the... artificiality... of it. What do you think of the notion that you can basically only find out monster facts while fighting them? (Again, if you can just read this in a book, that's much MUCH cheaper action-wise) Doesn't this mean the whole system falls apart for you?

This is where I will disagree with you that the system breaks down. If they go and read a book about Trolls and then later are in combat they could still realistically fail their recall knowledge for several reasons. If they know they are going to fight trolls ahead of time, and take the time to research it, and successfully find the info out then they can spend the cost with other currencies other than action points. Time and or gold to get into the library in the first place. Or maybe they owe a favor or other RP reasons.

There is room for its own mini game here. I cannot remember where but I thought there was a rule that said some lore rolls had to have a certain training level. Like if you wanted to research Tiamat you can't just roll an untrained Arcana roll (or whatever dragons are). It has to be a master trained Dragon Lore to even roll. To me, this seems like a system for library could be worked that you find a book that grants access to "master Dragon" knowledge.

For the majority of player recall knowledge rolls though I would think they are going to get into fights with an unknown monster they didn't know about ahead of time when they were back in town in downtime mode.

 

[CapnZapp]

I do find those things fun but up to an extent. If the game includes "Guess the monster type matching knowledge skill or you automatically fail your recall knowledge activity" I'll pass.

That possibility is way too meta for me.

The way I'm running that part (the "asking for a skill check" step when a PC spends a RK action) I match the monster type to the skill, a skeleton is undead, and ask for a Religion check.

The players don't have to guess which skill to use, that's not even a step.

At least, I never thought of it as one.

 

[5ekyu]

Seems to me there needs to be a sub-system to support the various concepts of the design in pactice.

"Secret rolls" are (to dome) "good" because they prevent players from having to pretend they dont know they rolled a 2. ( I go differrntvroute but that's neither here nor there.)

Combat is supposed to be puzzle figuring out the monster flaw.

But, unless your players never read bestiary or play in other games eith other characters, then, unless the GM makes up rules then you tun headlong into "but the player knows..." issues before any roll.

So, a sub-system to support this would be (remembering Supernatural) either a monster specific or widely available (tier) system for assigning a flaw on the fly (weakness I guess they call it) to any given broad type of monster.

So maybe we roll, consult the type (monstrosity, elemental, infernal, etc) and tier/CR range and get one of a variety of weaknesses. So, for many this could be by-products of the creation. Others could be maybe a by- product of envitonmdnt.

Maybe trolls mutate whrn they recently fed on different beasts. Maybe undead vary by moon phases. Etc.

There would be a great deal of lore-friendly way to support this. It could also yield into investigation and research or even planning.

"So, if we feed the troll a load of fish, we can get it vulnerable to..." or " if we drive off the macguffin the trolls will not be as sttong... "

But does anything like this exist as a standard part ' not just "create your own monsters" GM advice fluff over " make stuff up"?

 

[CapnZapp]

My observation at this stage is simply this:

If you expect players starting to take Recall Knowledge actions during combat that ain't happening.

The value of making that choice needs to be comparable to the value of a "third action": repositioning yourself, raising your shield, commanding a familiar, or even a second attack (assuming you just made a two-action sweep or something).

And even if the value was there (because you like me hand out much more info than merely a single snippet on a successful roll) it will still be bloody hard to produce a steady stream of such actions without help from the system.

Maybe if somebody writes a computer program that reads and parses the online Bestiary and spits out semi-random snippets of the "it has a relatively high AC" or "its Will save is poor" or "its known to cast necromancy spells" or "it has a weakness to cold iron" kind, but also including less hard-numbery things "hags form covens that break when their number drops below three" or "it's physically hurt by rejection" that sometimes are just as essential for survival...

(The Bestiary definitely needed a dev to go through the entire list marking at least three snippets as fundamental for each critter, giving the poor GM some guidance as to what to provide on successful Recall checks)

Even then, the elephant in the room remains: why can't the players engineer opportunities to watch and study these monsters from afar and gain the crucial information "for free"? (And once they've beaten their first skeleton or hobgoblin or chuul or whatever, why can't they spend some time making Recall Knowledge actions until they feel satisfied they know everything there is to know in anticipation of meeting another such monster in the future?)

Not saying there can't be an answer to this question. Saying the rulebook gives me the impression its devs think there is such an answer without clearly communicating it to us.

 

[kenada]

There’s nothing that says Recall Knowledge is the only way to learn information about a topic. It wouldn’t make sense if it were, since one needs to know the information first before recalling it. Recall Knowledge is an abstraction, so the players and the GM don’t need enumerate everything they know before they start playing.

If the PCs want to observe a creature and draw their own conclusions without using Recall Knowledge, that’s fine. Of course, they could check their conclusions by attempting to Recall Knowledge. They could also Gather Information and find someone who knows. Interestingly, there isn’t a Research activity. That definitely seems like a gap.

I think the intent with creature identification is you should say something about its core aspect, the one that was identified during concepting in creature creation. Of course, most creatures GMs will be using are published creatures, and that’s not called out, so they are left guessing as a result. That’s not great, since it may be obvious for some creatures and less obvious for others.

My approach will be to encourage PCs to pick specific topics on a creature instead of just “what is this”, since “what is this” may not necessarily yield useful information. For example, “How can I hurt this?” is better than “What are this creature’s defenses?”. If they happen to learn something empirically, that stabbing skeletons doesn’t work well or whatever, then that’s also fine.

 

[Celebrim]

My observation at this stage is simply this...

All of that seems highly sound to me. The whole system is flawed because it is not based on what is going to happen in play, and especially not what is going to happen in play over and extended period with players that have experience and ultimately mastery of the system.

Your elephant in the room shows that even if they spent a lot of page count developing lists for each monster, the long term payoff of that isn't going to be that great. In a system designed just to inform player choice, players will just read the monster manual and make the choices without recourse to the in game action. Such a system will only have limited utility in situations where the GM creates a custom monster as a puzzle monster, and those sorts of encounters typically are "a little goes a long ways" since as with most puzzles inserted into game play they often don't have a fail forward situation if the players fail critical dice rolls.

Think of the principle here as "Your gameplay still needs to have compelling components even when the player has all the spoilers."

Not saying there can't be an answer to this question. Saying the rulebook gives me the impression its devs think there is such an answer without clearly communicating it to us.

You are making the assumption that the developers have thought through his and developed this system organically in play as one that contributed heavily to their enjoyment of play, and my guess is that neither is true. They've neither thought through this nor developed it as a result of lengthy play testing. They just needed a system that sounded good and went with it.

Let me suggest that you've planed the system and revealed it as empty, and the only fix is getting a new system that has math that works.

If it were me, I'd have "Recall Knowledge" be a martial buffing system, were the player called out facts in a way that aided other members of the party. The exact nature of that fact can be as granular or abstract as you like, but you still have the same concrete result - bonuses to hit, bonuses to AC, reduction of damage resistance, etc. You can still use "Recall Knowledge" to learn specific facts in the systems intended usage if you like, and you need to feed in game information known by the character to the player, but when that well is running dry the action still has usage.

Even then, the elephant in the room remains: why can't the players engineer opportunities to watch and study these monsters from afar and gain the crucial information "for free"? (And once they've beaten their first skeleton or hobgoblin or chuul or whatever, why can't they spend some time making Recall Knowledge actions until they feel satisfied they know everything there is to know in anticipation of meeting another such monster in the future?)

If it is a martial buffing system, all of these problems go away and become opportunities to say "Yes."

"Yes, if you study the monsters from afar for at least X time prior to combat, and have a chance to coordinate plans, with a successful check a party member can begin combat with the Recall Knowledge buff of your choice."

"Yes, if you have encountered and defeated a monster before, then you get a bonus on your recall knowledge check AND you can on the first round of combat get one additional free recall knowledge action."

This also addresses some of your other complaints. How valuable are those feats that enhance your Recall Knowledge action? They might need to be tweaked a little, but potentially, vary.

What happens on a critical failure? Maybe you debuff the intended target by way of distraction or miscommunication or false intelligence?

If you want granularity you could have a system which matched different knowledge types against different monster types for different debuff types. Under that system, comments like, "For example, Arcana might tell you about the magical defenses of a golem, whereas Crafting could tell you about its sturdy resistance to physical attacks" now make sense, as the different skill checks could pertain to different buffs - better spell penetration or better physical damage penetration, or better chances to hit, or more damage from an attack.

 

[5ekyu]

All of that seems highly sound to me. The whole system is flawed because it is not based on what is going to happen in play, and especially not what is going to happen in play over and extended period with players that have experience and ultimately mastery of the system.

Your elephant in the room shows that even if they spent a lot of page count developing lists for each monster, the long term payoff of that isn't going to be that great. In a system designed just to inform player choice, players will just read the monster manual and make the choices without recourse to the in game action. Such a system will only have limited utility in situations where the GM creates a custom monster as a puzzle monster, and those sorts of encounters typically are "a little goes a long ways" since as with most puzzles inserted into game play they often don't have a fail forward situation if the players fail critical dice rolls.

Think of the principle here as "Your gameplay still needs to have compelling components even when the player has all the spoilers."



You are making the assumption that the developers have thought through his and developed this system organically in play as one that contributed heavily to their enjoyment of play, and my guess is that neither is true. They've neither thought through this nor developed it as a result of lengthy play testing. They just needed a system that sounded good and went with it.

Let me suggest that you've planed the system and revealed it as empty, and the only fix is getting a new system that has math that works.

If it were me, I'd have "Recall Knowledge" be a martial buffing system, were the player called out facts in a way that aided other members of the party. The exact nature of that fact can be as granular or abstract as you like, but you still have the same concrete result - bonuses to hit, bonuses to AC, reduction of damage resistance, etc. You can still use "Recall Knowledge" to learn specific facts in the systems intended usage if you like, and you need to feed in game information known by the character to the player, but when that well is running dry the action still has usage.



If it is a martial buffing system, all of these problems go away and become opportunities to say "Yes."

"Yes, if you study the monsters from afar for at least X time prior to combat, and have a chance to coordinate plans, with a successful check a party member can begin combat with the Recall Knowledge buff of your choice."

"Yes, if you have encountered and defeated a monster before, then you get a bonus on your recall knowledge check AND you can on the first round of combat get one additional free recall knowledge action."

This also addresses some of your other complaints. How valuable are those feats that enhance your Recall Knowledge action? They might need to be tweaked a little, but potentially, vary.

What happens on a critical failure? Maybe you debuff the intended target by way of distraction or miscommunication or false intelligence?

If you want granularity you could have a system which matched different knowledge types against different monster types for different debuff types. Under that system, comments like, "For example, Arcana might tell you about the magical defenses of a golem, whereas Crafting could tell you about its sturdy resistance to physical attacks" now make sense, as the different skill checks could pertain to different buffs - better spell penetration or better physical damage penetration, or better chances to hit, or more damage from an attack.

This sounds like a good sfx for something very much like bardic inspiration type abilities. Whether its recalling knowledge about creatures in general or perhaps better spotting and deducing from clues weaknesses about this guy - you grant some doet of bonus or bonus die that can be used to "exploit" an observed flaw.

"It is favoring its left leg."
" it drops its head just before it claws."
"Its not blocking hits from the right side."
"Its armor is weaker from behind."

The check result could provide maybe a d6 you can spend against the target creature.

A GM could require different ability checks for different creatures- maybe allowing crafting checks for those with armor. DC could vary quite a bit, troops in rag-tag raider or brigands- gear not kept up, routine health problems, etc. Well trained and provided army regulars - different story.

But it's definitely, as stated, going to need to be balanced against the use of the third (or imo second) action for other things.

 

[Rhianni32]

Even then, the elephant in the room remains: why can't the players engineer opportunities to watch and study these monsters from afar and gain the crucial information "for free"? (And once they've beaten their first skeleton or hobgoblin or chuul or whatever, why can't they spend some time making Recall Knowledge actions until they feel satisfied they know everything there is to know in anticipation of meeting another such monster in the future?)

Where are you getting these limitations from that players cannot do these things? Recall Knowledge is a Concentrate, Secret activity. There is no Visual trait so I would not expect a visual requirement. One scouting PC could describe a flaming skeleton they saw and report back to the party where skill rolls start happening. There is no maximum range requirement. If the party is on a hilltop a hundred feat away currently in encounter mode because they haven't rolled initiative yet, I don't see why a GM would stop them from rolling a recall knowledge check.

I read the rules as a list of requirements. If it is listed as a rule then you are bound by it (if going RAW). Otherwise you are free to do and act as you want. If we are to read the rules as only allowed to do specifically what it says then we are screwed because there is no way they can cover every scenario a player might think about, especially in 1 book. I go back to my PF2 is a collectable card game comment. On every Magic the Gathering card they just list the key words that you have to follow those rules. Otherwise you can get creative.

I have minimal PF1 experience but I know they have an ass ton of books. Perhaps I have the rules understanding backward.

 

[GMMichael]

As I understand it, the intention is to create a "mini game" where you can spend actions in combat to gain bonuses in the form of "puzzle pieces" . . .

Except the GM gets zero help with this. Are you supposed to prepare each monster beforehand or come up with things like "well, while Recall Knowledge for a Golem is generally Arcana, its physical resistance is Crafting" on the fly? For each monster? And how many puzzle pieces are there? And what are the puzzle pieces for a given monster anyway?

I'm not sure that I've ever seen a cleric stop in the middle of fighting a demon, and a thought bubble pops up over her head saying, "wait, can I turn a demon? Does it have turn resistance?"

So yeah, probably a mini-game instead of a part of the action.

The answer to the Captain's question-flurry is, "what would be fun?" There aren't going to be other answers for these, because combat is, itself, a mini-game (primary game?) and the only concrete puzzle piece is: when hit points reach zero, combat ends.

The 1 action cost is unfortunate, if you ask me. I don't charge PCs for thinking during combat.

However, the failure rate is fine because if you're in encounter mode, somebody's life had better be on the line. And if that's the case, clear thinking isn't always easy.