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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matthias" data-source="post: 5065709" data-attributes="member: 3625">Getting back into DMing after a year or two and am anticipating running a PF game for the first time... I have been thinking about ways to improve my style and to make running the game smoother and more interesting both for myself and my players.Players (as well as DMs) can develop habits and routines. One of these is making Knowledge checks to remember information about monsters. And oh my gosh, it about drove me nuts sometimes when the first thing, my players would say every time I called for initiative on an encounter is "knowledge check, is it a/n <creature type>?" if they did not immediately recognize the species (as creature type relates to which field of knowledge is to be used).I'll admit that throwing a huge variety of creatures at a party will make them to do this as a sort of defensive adaptation, but when it comes up even before discussion of tactics or some real, actual combat, it spoils the anticipation, kind of, and "facing the unknown" doesn't seem so thrilling when you have PCs hopped up on knowledge ranks and able to extort some pretty useful info about a creature that has never actually appeared "on screen" in the present campaign, even if the PC might have heard about or read about it in their studies.I did notice that Pathfinder incorporated a pretty nifty modification, a "species rarity bonus" to the base DC. I had this in 3.5 and will enjoy using it in this system...it makes plenty of sense to me that not all creature information is equally obtainable.Of course, players *should* be able to rely on their PCs' in-game knowledge to recognize threats. I'm certainly not looking to remove this basic feature or replace it with something else. What I'm mainly looking for is a method to push this automatic defensive maneuver more into the background, or handle it in some way so as not to waste too much time dickering over PC knowledge and preventing this from derailing what I intend to be a tense and exciting encounter.My first idea is to make the knowledge checks (and field of study) myself and to keep the results hidden, thereby keeping a newly discovered monster's creature-type (and by extension its templated abilities & immunities) a 'state secret', as well as concealing its assigned rarity in the world. Perhaps the PCs will be able to recognize the monster by its general appearance and movement based on legends they've heard, but again the exact monster type won't be automatically known to them, nor any but its most common traits.I also thought of maybe attaching a "hard way" XP bonus to encounters whenever the PCs go for the "cold read" approach when handling an encounter with an unrecognized monster.Any other suggestions or ideas?</blockquote>

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