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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6157109" data-attributes="member: 6681948">RAW is one factoid for success, and one more for every 5 you succeed by.  About the only wiggle room is which one to reveal first.Then why do we have knowledge skills to determine the monster's special abilities?  The PLAYER knows the enemy has petrification gaze and snakes for hair once we say "Medusa" if he has knowledge of greek mythology.  Of course, he would also know there is only one Medusa, and that her sisters the Gorgons have the same abilitied, and cannot be killed (and are not metal cows that breathe out a petrifying mist).  A Banshee by lore neither kills instantly with its keening nor attacks with a terrfifying negative energy touch.  It is a harbinger of death, not the cause of death, in folklore.  It seems like your "common sense" is more "all players and PC's have read the Monster Manual" than anything else.How many of our group have ranks in Knowledge:  Nature?  You can't use it untrained for anything above DC 10, so not to ID monster abilities.  If the player rolls a '1', does that not mean that, regardless of whether he can recite the MM entry, word for word, the character remembers nothing about a Medusa?  I don't think you can have it both ways - either the Knowledge skill governs knowledge of monsters and their abilities (so it can be used to determine Monster X has a deadly SoD ability) or it does not.Agreed - they are CR 13, IIRC, so they should be pretty much no threat at all.  Yet it seems they are, and they are because of that SoD mechanic.  By your logic above, though, whenever our brave, bold L17 team sees a monster, we should all join hands and Teleport away (or we should all be fast enough to flee at better than 60', and should clearly do so).  Then we should upate our entire repertoire of spells so we are specifically defended against this one entity, at which time we return.  It, of course, will have done nothing in the interim.  And we always have a full day to retreat, review and revise our repertoire - never any time pressure, of course.D&D had been around quite a few years before there was a Call of Cthulhu game.  They did manage to get sued for including a Lovecraftian chapter in their first edition of Deities & Demigods, though.I find it interesting that, in all the Great Snake Debate, no one has mentioned the change from 2e to 3e where poison stopped being SoD and went to the new Ability Damage mechanic.  Clearly, someone decided that the SoD was excessive, whether for comparison to real world poisons or for game design reasons.</blockquote>

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