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<blockquote data-quote="iserith" data-source="post: 7065846" data-attributes="member: 97077">In my games, it's very rare for someone to try to recall lore on a monster. I can't say why exactly. I do make an effort to telegraph certain aspects of the monsters when describing them, not just initially when things kick off, but on each player's turn as things play out. So it could be there's enough information there for them to make deductions on their own. It could also be that many of my players are veterans and they know a lot of the monsters' capabilities. But even among the newer players they don't tend to make an action declaration along the lines of trying to recall lore. This is why I've never implemented an action cost, but I can see an action cost being a good thing in some cases, just to create that trade-off.When I say &quot;background,&quot; I quite literally mean the Background that is provided by the game, not to be confused with &quot;backstory&quot; that the player may have written. (Though I require backstories to be no longer than a tweet in my game.) So a player might say, &quot;Drawing upon my time as a Sailor, I try to recall what weaknesses this kraken might have...&quot; or &quot;As a Sage who studied at some of the greatest libraries of the world, I must have read something about flumphs and I try to remember what their goals are.&quot; This is part of describing a goal and an approach which are required in my view for the DM to adjudicate properly. Based on what they say, they may automatically succeed, automatically fail, or we'll go to the dice. &quot;I try to recall lore on X...&quot; is insufficient. I need to know what experiences you're drawing upon and what you hope to recall before I can decide how to narrate the result.Of course, none of this matters to me if a player acts on knowledge he or she already has. I can only narrate the result of the adventurer's actions, sometimes calling for a check when the result is uncertain. If a player knows about kraken weaknesses, they're free to exploit them with no concern that I'll say anything about it. (They just better hope that I didn't change those weaknesses!)To bring this somewhat back around to the topic... actually, I can't think of a good way back. So I'll leave it there!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="iserith, post: 7065846, member: 97077"] In my games, it's very rare for someone to try to recall lore on a monster. I can't say why exactly. I do make an effort to telegraph certain aspects of the monsters when describing them, not just initially when things kick off, but on each player's turn as things play out. So it could be there's enough information there for them to make deductions on their own. It could also be that many of my players are veterans and they know a lot of the monsters' capabilities. But even among the newer players they don't tend to make an action declaration along the lines of trying to recall lore. This is why I've never implemented an action cost, but I can see an action cost being a good thing in some cases, just to create that trade-off. When I say "background," I quite literally mean the [I]Background[/I] that is provided by the game, not to be confused with "backstory" that the player may have written. (Though I require backstories to be no longer than a tweet in my game.) So a player might say, "Drawing upon my time as a [I]Sailor[/I], I try to recall what weaknesses this kraken might have..." or "As a [I]Sage[/I] who studied at some of the greatest libraries of the world, I must have read something about flumphs and I try to remember what their goals are." This is part of describing a goal and an approach which are required in my view for the DM to adjudicate properly. Based on what they say, they may automatically succeed, automatically fail, or we'll go to the dice. "I try to recall lore on X..." is insufficient. I need to know what experiences you're drawing upon and what you hope to recall before I can decide how to narrate the result. Of course, none of this matters to me if a player acts on knowledge he or she already has. I can only narrate the result of the adventurer's actions, sometimes calling for a check when the result is uncertain. If a player knows about kraken weaknesses, they're free to exploit them with no concern that I'll say anything about it. (They just better hope that I didn't change those weaknesses!) To bring this somewhat back around to the topic... actually, I can't think of a good way back. So I'll leave it there! [/QUOTE]

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