Jester David
Hero
Which is great so long as the intelligent characters are played by experienced players and the dumb superstitious characters are played by novice players.If a player knows about a fictional monster for a game, it would seem reasonable that a character would know about the actual monster that actually eats people and as an adventurer is their job to know about. When the bards come to the inn to entertain, stories of dragons would be like Star Wars and gnolls and hobgoblins like episodes of Breaking Bad. It would be hard to believe that even the average person wouldn't have a huge amount of general monster knowledge.
And provided the frequency of monsters is proportionate to their rarity.
I've always seen monster knowledge checks as a way to prevent meta-gaming. It's an unbiased way of determining whether the character does or does not know something.
Before knowledge checks, it was always tempting to play a character who knew everything that the player knows, because there was no objective way to measure that. You could play a character who knew less, but you were actively choosing to increase the chance of TPK based on your preference for one story element over another.
With knowledge checks, you don't have to worry about that. It becomes a pure trade-off in character utility, whether you'd rather know about religious stuff or know how to tell when someone is lying. If your character doesn't know it, then your character doesn't know it, and you know how to play that. It also introduces the possibility that the character might know something that the player doesn't, in which case you will also know how to play that.
In theory yes. In play, my players just throw down dice at the start of a fight and say "what do we know about it?"
It'd be a little better in 5e than 3e and 4e, as skills are more restrained, but there's still the possibility of a great roll revealing everything and eliminating some of the mystery and trial-and-error of a monster.
Last edited: