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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6774704" data-attributes="member: 996">Implicit in that is whether you ever knew it in the first place.  Training would tend to indicate that you've been exposed to quite a lot of information about a subject, while high INT means that you can remember what you've been exposed to and make connections and draw inferences from that.  If D&D were being very simulationist, there might be two checks, one using the proficiency bonus, the other the INT bonus, or they might modify the check in very different ways.  But 5e keeps it simple, and it makes proficiency and level relatively small modifiers, in keeping with Bounded Accuracy.  That's never going to model an 'obscure' bit of information very well.  So it falls to the DM to make it work.  Ruling that untrained characters auto-fail while trained roll, or that un-trained roll while trained auto-succeed is something that the core 5e resolution system is very up-front about giving the DM license to do.   The former works OK for 'obscure' information that only a trained character might have been exposed to and thus remember.OTOH, setting different DCs for the same task is also 'legal.'  But, it's something that has gotten a lot of flack in the past, and, mathematically, it un-does some of the benefits of Bounded Accuracy.Maybe because the former is more specialized, perhaps, thus, more defining?That is, perhaps, one of the few things players actually get to define: by declaring their actions.  Now 'examine the runes' might be a pretty blah action declaration, maybe asking for more detail would help spark ideas of how there might be different tasks involved...   Reading the writing, if it's in a familiar language, or decyphering it if it's arcane would be two obvious things that might be implied.  But, a character might also determine how long the writing had been there and by what sort of person in what sort of mental state, what was used to make the ink (or what animal the blood was taken from if written in blood) and to apply it.  You could fairly easily bring different proficiencies and thus characters, into it.Identifying human blood might be a different check than arcana, letting another character get in and contribute.The DM rules the action fails, in 5e parlance, but yes, that makes sense.  If they had done so.  But, then, what does that tell them.  More than the DC 10 check but less than the 20?  If all they get is 'protect something valuable,' they'll be releasing an aberration in short order - that's worse than failure.</blockquote>

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