Is this PF or PF2 thing that I am unaware of? I don't necessarily think spirits = religion and =/=occult is an RPG standard. Heck necromancy, which deals with death and spirits, is typically arcane or occultism.
@kenada is right that Occultism does
recall knowledge of spirits, though perhaps it's more correct to say that using stuff like exorcisms and prayer to
get rid of spirits is Religion, which would be my first go-to. I'd say a knowledge check with either would give you some level of what's going on.
I suppose you could do some interesting delineations of what Occultism and Religion cover: Religion for exorcisms, Occultism for a séance, etc.
Don't you just use Recall Knowledge to figure out how to disable haunts or other hazards? That's how I'm running it.
Sure. It's one action, after all, which is why that Dance Haunt is so neat: it's sort of a stalling action until you can figure out how to defeat it, with multiple ways of trying to stave off the damage.
I sort of agree with both sides. I can see what Paizo is trying to do, but I never had much luck with running haunts in PF1, and they don’t seem much improved. I think the issue for me is that a haunt as a challenge to be overcome just feels really weird, and I have trouble envisioning how the players would know that it’s such a challenge without being very game-y.
I hadn't really looked at them before (probably because most of the examples of them are in the GMG), but I feel like they're interesting for two reasons, and I think both link up to how you should use them.
The first is that they are undead that you can't just defeat with a stick (or magical stick, depending on how powerful they are). Well, they're not
technically undead yet, but one of the weird things about these sorts of games is that most of the stuff you think about in hauntings you can literally just
attack in different ways. I mean, both PF2 and D&D 5E have statblocks for poltergeists, which just makes no sense to me as someone whose cultural experience with that word meant that it was something that
couldn't just be whacked with a doodad. Haunts provide a framework for something that feels like an
actual poltergeist in my mind, something that isn't substantial enough for you to use the traditional "Turn Undead" button on or smacked with a sword.
The second is that these actually provide cool usages of Religion and Occultism if you like. Like, you can have a Priest who isn't a Cleric actually be able to solve matters involving spirits because, hey, prayers work because the Gods are active and real. Father Bryan over there can't heal you, but he can exorcise a spirit or two, which is a neat thing for the community. Same thing with Occultism: ideally you could do different views on the same sort of material with Occultism versus Religion, and have different sorts of solutions: For example, maybe an Occultism check would allow one to commune with a lesser haunt (Like Bloodthirsty Thought) and give a lowered DC for a Diplomacy check because they can better commune with it (or even figure out its unfinished business). Or maybe an Occultism check allows you to draw a ward around it that will temporarily make it unable to do it's thing unless the ward is disrupted or after a certain amount of time. These are probably way more complicated than Paizo would want people to be making them, but I think it offers interesting ideas.
I think the biggest thing is that while Haunts are hazards, to me they shouldn't really be used as mere traps but as focus of a story itself: if you find book that makes people want to kill others suddenly,
that's the adventure. And that's maybe part of the problem with the design of some of them: they're just spectral traps rather than something interesting on its own. Plummeting Doom is just a magic hand that pushes you off a cliff. This does nothing to inspire one to use it interestingly. But a magical orchestra that makes people dance until they die? That's a
Real Ghostbusters episode in the making.
I can totally see how they could be misused. Makes me want to figure places to insert them into an adventure or sidequest, though.