Let's FIX RECALL KNOWLEDGE in Pathfinder 2e (The Rules Lawyer)

it's time to fix recall knowledge in pathfinder 2e i have been game mastering the system for two and a half years and i'd say that recall knowledge is easily the most vexing part of the system to adjudicate at the table recall knowledge lets characters in the system recall something about a topic very often about the abilities or strengths or weaknesses of a monster they encounter and it is defined to be a single action and for the trade-off of it costing you time during your turn during an encounter there are increased benefits to the action because of the way monsters and traps and other hazards are designed so that they have definite weaknesses and resistances and abilities that you can tailor your party strategy around so overall it's been an improvement one of the many reasons why i like pathfinder 2 as my preferred high fantasy tabletop rpg but on the other hand while it allows for a lot of discretion for the game master to decide what type of information to give and how difficult to make a certain check which is not characteristic of much a pathfinder 2e it also at the same time like the rest of half the 500 2e lays down some rails and rules that i think unnecessarily weaken the ability and also make it less predictable from table to table so as a result i've seen my players after trying it out at first use it less and less as time has gone by and that goes against the way one of the design goals of pathfinder 2e of trying to give you a lot of choices of how to use your three actions and trying to make them all viable so that you wish you had more actions and give you interesting choices during a combat recall knowledge usually is low on that list in my players experience so i'm going to try in this video to figure out why that is look at some of the rules for recall knowledge and try to fix those and share with you how i'm going to be running it at my tables my name is ronald i am the rules lawyer if you like this video like and subscribe it helps the algorithm and also join the discord community that's formed around my channel and the link is in the description and also support my patreon before i go into my thoughts i want to give thanks to a number of posters over at the paizo.com message board particularly unicore who made a thoughtful post about their issues with the recall knowledge action and asking the piezo designers to use this summer's release of the dark archive book which deals with occult knowledge and introduces some new classes and player options for that book to be the opportunity to clarify things about recall knowledge and how to run it at our tables and there are great comments by a number of people including captain morgan scalifes and nn959 that were really food for thought for me let's start with what recall knowledge is it is a single action and you attempt a skill check to try to remember a bit of knowledge regarding a topic related to that skill the gm determines the dc's the number you have to beat for such checks and which skills apply so it has the secret trait which means that the gm rolls the die secretly because look at our critical failure result if they critically fail and get a result that's 10 or less than the dc the gm is to give incorrect information or give a erroneous or misleading clue if they succeed on the role they give a piece of accurate information or a helpful clue if it's a success they give accurate information or give a useful clue about their current situation and if it's a critical success they give additional information or context that was under the skills chapter later in the book under game mastering it says more about recall knowledge and it says that generally you want to use a simple dc to determine the difficulty of a recall knowledge check on the other hand if you are checking about a specific creature trap or other subject that has a level you are to use the level based dc then it says that a character who successfully identifies a creature learns one of its best-known attributes be it a troll's regeneration ability or a manticore's tail spikes on a critical success the character lends something more subtle such as a type of damage that it has weakness to or something that triggers one of its reactions the book also says that if a character fails to recall knowledge about something that further attempts will be fruitless and if they succeed at recalling knowledge further attempts to try to get more information about the topic will be increasingly difficult so now i'm going to do a deep dive identifying several issues i have with how recall knowledge works but one way to describe them collectively is as two broader issues one of them was articulated very well by unicore they said quote right now there are major question marks that gm's have to resolve individually that can have massively swinging effects on the usefulness of whole builds and the second issue is that these rules make players feel it is too weak to spend an action on i'm also going to suggest house rules or best practices for gm's for how to deal with recall knowledge and i want to preface that by saying that people come from other rpg systems should not house rural pathfinder to e willy-nilly there is a propensity to do that uh when other systems uh leave feeling people feeling like they have to constantly fix it at the table to get the experience that they want and are used to house ruling but pathfinder 2e is a pretty solid system you can pretty much trust it especially in counterbuilding system and these house rules and tips i give to gm's in this video are after substantial experience and they're one of the few house rules that i run okay so the first problem here is with the first words it says use a skill so the first issue is that it's not very thematic one does not have let's say a wizard who has knowledge and occultism nature and arcana and religion encounters a green hag and that wizard does not have one part of their brain that is only knows about occultism and another part of their brain that knows only about nature and one could argue that both skills are useful in identifying the abilities or legends around a green hag society also might be a useful skill because of the legends that are often told in fairy tales having to do with hags so what's more likely to happen in character is they see the creature and they recall all of their skills at once their entire knowledge bank to see if they know what creature it is and what it might be able to do now in game the player by rule needs to choose a skill that they are using for this recall knowledge check so let's imagine the game master presents the bone devil to the party but they don't call it a bone devil they say it's a skeletal flying creature that looks monstrous and the players are likely going to conclude or assume that it's an undead creature because it's made entirely of bone so the cleric who not only is trained in religion but has decided to specialize in undead lore as one of their skills says i'm going to use undead lore to try to know more about this creature by rule because the creature is not undead that character knows nothing about it and we compound this with the fact that the gm is to roll recall knowledge secretly so if the player hears that you don't know what this creature is they don't know whether that's because it actually is an undead creature like they thought but they rolled too low on their check or that it's an entirely different creature altogether and so they are then wondering to themselves should i make another check using another one of my skills given my first check didn't succeed maybe it's something else it basically leaves the player feeling like they're groping around in the dark and one possible solution is maybe the gm can know what that character's list of skills is and secretly roll a d20 and apply the best skill well that seems like one way to go about it they don't have to guess at what which skill to use on this particular creature but on the other hand that would seem to preclude that same character being able to attempt recall knowledge again against that same creature using a specific skill well the way i do it is i know in advance before the session starts all of the characters skills and what their proficiencies are in them and when let's say that wizard tries to identify the green hag i know immediately that their best bonus some combination of knowing what their best numerical bonuses and also which skill is probably most on point for this particular creature i know which is the best skill for them to roll then i secretly roll it and i then give them the result they the other part of how i run it is that after i do that they are free to use any one of their skills and say i specifically try to use a skill to try to recall knowledge about that creature or that topic and no matter what the result of the first check is i'll allow them to do that subsequent check so this solves the problem of them feeling bad because they guessed at the wrong skill or having no idea whether they guessed it the wrong skill and it also still gives them the opportunity to make more attempts and not be foreclosed from trying to recall more about the creature or try to recall again also if they choose the supposed wrong skill then i still usually let them have a chance at it but at a higher dc so if they use undead lore in relation to that bone devil i think that their studies into the undead might have included encountering a book saying don't confuse bone devils with the undead and so it's very plausible that that lore can tell them about this creature this next example highlights several problems that i find in the recall knowledge rules as written let's say that a level eight adventuring party is walking down a corridor and a incorporeal creature appears by floating through one of the walls turns towards the party and casts a spell blasting cold uh and ice towards the party the players want to identify this creature and what this creature is is a level 10 ghost mage casting cone of cold however as written they are now being asked to roll a level based dc for a level 10 creature which is 27 which is pretty hard to get for a level 8 party and when they succeed on that check they learn the most well-known fact about that creature and here it's probably that it's incorporeal or that it's a ghost that had something unresolved about their death which bounced them to this world and it will not be truly killed unless you can solve uh that problem but for this party they encountered level four ghost commoners earlier in their adventuring careers and they already knew these things however this knowledge that they already knew is hidden behind a level 10 level based dc now this highlights one problem first problem number two the rule mechanic is conflating identify the creature and know its most well-known characteristics with the party trying to hone in on specific aspects of the creature in the case of a party that already knows the most well-known aspects of in this case the ghost mage recall knowledge and what it gives you by default is not very useful so the party may instead be inclined to ask specific questions such as oh it's incorporeal how do we bypass its ability to probably resist a lot of our damage against it or it floats through walls is there a way we can make it stop floating through walls however the way the rules are is you are learning about that creature and that alone and you are trying to identify that creature and what you will learn is the most useful thing or the most well-known thing about that creature and it takes some agency away from the players and puts them on this track where they're getting less useful information than they would like also what they would really like to know probably is what types of damage it's weak to in order to damage it given the fact that it's incorporeal or maybe one of its weaker saving throws whether it's fortitude reflex or will but as written in the book these are the more subtle things that are hidden behind a critical success on the roll so again this is a higher level creature than the party they probably need to roll a natural 20 to get what they really want to learn about this creature this also feeds into the perception that spellcasters are weak in this edition because spellcasters one of their strengths is the ability to target a weaker saving throw on a creature or target one of its weaknesses to a specific kind of damage now what's a solution i think that players should be allowed to ask specific questions about a creature that they want to know more about such as what weakness does it have or how can we get past its resistance to all damage in the case of an incorporeal creature another problem here problem number three is that the dc's are tied to that creature's level and this is true for monsters as well as hazards and in addition if it is an uncommon thing you are to add two to the dc and if it is rari at five what this means is that higher level creatures which are the ones players are going to want to use recall knowledge on they're less concerned about finding the weaknesses of a weak creature that those creatures are harder generally very hard to get useful information on under the rules so what is the solution to these problems the way i run it at my table is that the players first they may just try to do a general check about that creature and identifying it as part of what they've learned and i'd give them the most well-known fact about that creature but they may want to ask more specific questions and i think that identifying the creature should be given for free as part of a successful check to get an answer to their question so in this case the party that encounters the ghost mage wants to know how to bypass its [Music] incorporeal nature and how to do full damage against it well i will do their check let's say that cleric does undead lore then with the gm resolves it they are not bound by the level based dc the gm could use a simple dc an expert check of 20 or in this case because the ghost commoner which has a similar trait is level 4 use the level 4 dc meanwhile actually identifying it as a high level level 10 ghost mage would have level based dc but i would resolve their single role in comparison to both if they get a 27 or higher they know that it's a ghost mage but if they get 20 or higher they're going to learn useful information about how to attack an incorporeal creature this is also more thematic because knowing what exactly a creature is will tend to be harder the more rare it is and the more high level it is and those uncommon and rare tags would also be appropriate for knowing and thematic for identifying what it is problem number four is how the rules treat recalling knowledge about the same topic over and over again as written it says that when you attempt let's say you succeed in recalling some knowledge about a topic when you try to recall knowledge again it will be adjusted to be a hard check so you add 2 to the dc then very hard you add 5 to the dc and then incredibly hard you add 10. and this does not account for the possibility let's say you're trying to i uh learn uh about a creature that you're encountering it doesn't account for the possibility that the players be asking specific questions about that creature let's say they encounter a hydra a multi-headed legendary beast that when you cut off its head it can grow two heads in its place well upon seeing it they might fail to identify it however they might in the late later in the battle after cutting off its head recall based on this new information that actually it is a hydra and they might also recall that if they think about it how to deal with a creature that regrows its heads uh what type of damage you want to apply to the stump so the way the rules are written is that you're completely closed off on finding uh recalling knowledge again about the topic in this case the hydra but if we're allowing them to ask specific questions and not railroading the players to have to ask simply about the creature in front of them and only ask that question then it allows for more repeat attempts also we are not bound again by the level based dc different questions that they ask about the creature can have different dc's maybe it's well known that that level 19 ancient red dragon breeds fire that could be a low dc or that it has a weakness to cold damage that could be a low dc but knowing that it has special reactions special abilities that it's particularly hot fire has unexpected effects that's going to be a higher dc allow them to make checks about the same quote unquote topic or a the same creature when in character it makes sense for them to do so maybe seeing them react to a fireball is a new occasion to recall knowledge about whether that creature is more physically hearty has a high fortitude save versus being nimble and light having a high reflex safe also there isn't much need to prevent players from trying to recall knowledge again because in battle and this is something that was said by midnight toker in the paiso.com forum it's understandable that you're not going to recall x fact while you're under duress in the middle of combat not allowing repeat knowledge checks after you've failed makes sense out of combat otherwise a character would just repeatedly roll something until they roll high enough now in that instance i think the gm should allow a player to re-roll about a topic if using a different skill and calling out a skill that they haven't tried on that topic before now when it comes to inside combat not only does repeating a failed check make sense because you may have been dressed under duress before but also in combat you are observing that creature right in front of you and recall knowledge can also be considered or re-flavored as observing your the target closely and drawing the appropriate conclusions from what you see problem number five is the critical failure rule and here i'm in complete agreement with derrick of knights of last call in that i feel it's too punishing what the rule is is that if you critically fail on a check to recall knowledge which is to get a role in pathfinder 2e that is 10 or more lower than the dc that you're trying to achieve then the gm is to give you false information well this succeeds at making an action that already feels weak into one that actively punishes you for trying it and for higher level creatures and bosses who you are going to really want that information that you know what is the boss creature's weakness about you are going to be punished you're more likely to be punished for trying it against those very creatures you really want to use it against and because the dc's higher and you're more likely to critically fail this can feel really bad let's say that you are facing the boss of a volume of an adventure path and you are trying to find out what the weakest saving throw of a creature is and you are told the exact opposite you cast a spell uh one of your highest level spell slots against its strongest defense and you whiff it and it feels really bad you have used up three maybe four actions and you've wasted your time and you were set up to waste your time because you tried to recall knowledge and in a game that's trying to encourage players which seems to be a design goal to encourage players to think tactically to punish them for making their characters think tactically is just just seems counter to what they're trying to do so what my solution is i think there's two ways to deal with a critical failure first i think that you can give something that is obviously false and it's kind of a moment to laugh at the table so that they're not lured into trying something that wastes their time i think that's one way to deal with it and sometimes yeah if i if i feel it's not going to be too punishing i will give a false piece of information that they may act on but it won't be too punishing let's say uh you don't think that has that troll has an attack of opportunity or some creature uh and you walk up to it and it has an attack of opportunity the benefit is that they know right away that their information is false so that they don't and they don't waste very many actions acting on that information and they still get some gain in this case to get closer to the creature another way to make critical failure less punishing is simply to adopt my rule of allowing repeat checks in combat of failed recall knowledge checks normally but in the case of critical failure not to allow repeat checks then and that is how a number of other rules elements in pathfinder 2e work as well problem number six is how these recall knowledge rules interact with core class features and this is what was brought up by unicore there are some classes that rely heavily on their ability to find out information about creatures one example is the ranger which can at level one take a feat called monster hunter rangers have as a core class feature the ability to hunt prey costs one action to hone in on a creature that they are hunting and get bonuses against it what monster hunter does is for free let you recall knowledge about that creature for that same one action it also says that if you critically succeed on this check that you and your allies each get a plus one circumstance bonus on your next attack against that prey by rule if they fail their check against that creature they don't get to attempt to recall knowledge about it again investigators get a similar feature where they get to recall knowledge for free as part of devising a stratagem against something they see they also get a plus one to themselves and allies if they critically succeed in my games i've only seen critical successes on these checks happen sometimes and given that the bonus is plus one to yourself and your allies on the one hand i usually emphasize every plus one matters and that they're more significant than people think however given the limited number of times you get a critical success on recall knowledge that it does feel like it could be it could use a boost the mastermind rogue is another example every rogue racket gives you a new way or a particularly powerful way to impose the flat footed condition on a creature so you can get sneak attack damage against it well for the mastermind rogue which is intelligence based whenever you recall knowledge about a creature that creature becomes flat-footed to you until the start of your next turn now what are these things all doing thematically you are keenly observing a creature or using your knowledge some way where you see uh an opening to attack and it's there for a moment and it's temporary and this is being conflated combined with the same action of learning about a permanent trait about a creature so what happens is that when you fail that recall knowledge check sure maybe you won't learn more about that topic again later when you recall knowledge again but that shouldn't preclude you finding these temporary advantages so we get this weird thematic disconnect where let's say that mastermind rogue uh tries to recall knowledge about a goblin that they see they fail against that goblin and then they see several more goblins come into the room they are gonna they would like to be able to recall knowledge about those new goblins that have come into the room however by rule they've already recalled knowledge about that first goblin and failed so they're not able to recall knowledge about the new goblins that have entered the room and this becomes problematic if you are in a goblin adventure and dealing with many similar creatures and this same problem becomes true for the ranger and for the investigator so what's the solution i think that for recalling knowledge about the goblin or the new goblins that ran into the room we use the rules that i laid out before if you have a specific question the player has a specific question they can ask that question and i assign a dc appropriate to that question however when it comes to looking for these temporary weaknesses i think that their level based dc is appropriate for that and furthermore they can repeat that check in the future against the same creature so it's going to be so they're not precluded from trying to find these openings against let's say a high-level red dragon but it's going to be a difficult check each time which makes it work like other abilities like striking that creature casting a spell against that creature you get to do it more than once and the ability to do that is your ability to do that is going to be shaped by its power compared to you now a few miscellaneous issues about recall knowledge that i'd like to go over one is that there's this great uh flavorful skill feat called dubious knowledge where if you fail on your recon knowledge check [Music] but you don't critically fail the gm gives you one piece of accurate information and one piece of false information first this is a really funny feat but it's also really challenging because you have to think of something true and also make up something and the way i like to run recall knowledge checks is i like to say something that is in character for that character as the basis for that what they think well all this is hugely hard to think on the fly to think of something true and something false when you roll and i've had this situation where i blurt out the right fact and then i'm thinking at the table about what should i make up that is false and it is completely a huge giveaway so anyway my only advice to this is to when they have the dubious knowledge feat to pause several seconds even if they've succeeded on the role so you can think and when you're thinking about a right and wrong answer just pause those several seconds it doesn't matter that you give something right away or not you're not matt mercer you can think about uh something that set is true and something that sounds true but isn't uh so there's that my other piece of advice is um another very useful piece of information players want to know is what level a creature is there are spells in pathfinder 2e that have the incapacitation trait which are decidedly less effective against creatures that are higher level than double the spell's level so a spell like polymorph can be devastating against creatures up to a certain level but if they are higher level than you or higher level than double the spell's level it's going to be much weaker because they count their saving throw as one degree of success higher so it is useful to know what level relative level a creature is and i think it's completely valid uh for that to be a subject topic of a recall knowledge check okay now to summarize i am finding this a very difficult video to record because it's of the topic the topic itself is quite amorphous in nature i'm trying to draw lines in the sand about something that's amorphous but here is a summary of how i would be running recall knowledge from now on okay first i'm not going to be using uh the rules for identifying creatures and hazards the way they are in the book i think that when they recall knowledge about something they have the option of recalling generally what do i know about this creature and then you run it as written but they might want to have a more specific uh piece of information such as uh i see that it's incorporeal how do i damage it or uh this creature um is it nimble or is it does have a weak mind they can ask those kinds of questions and so i would assign a dc using the simple dc chart as a guideline uh and maybe a level based dc but it's not it's going to be independent from the level of the creature to figure out how hard it is to know x piece of information then i roll i also have handy the level based dc of that creature which is also modified by whether it's uncommon or rare and that is the number they need to get in order to identify the creature or the thing the other dc is to get the answer to their question also i don't require them to define what skill they're using at their first attempt at a question i just look at my notes to see what their best skill that's appropriate to that piece of knowledge is then they're free to repeat checks even if they failed on them before they may argue that they want to use a specific skill uh to know more about something let's say they encounter a wood golem and after the gm has rolled a check using all of that players skills maybe the player will say okay i want to know how i can damage it given that it's wood and i want to use my knowledge of being a woodworker on that now the gm could treat this as a repeat check on the same topic but with a lower dc given that they've called out that skill or consider it also a question about a specific topic and give it its own appropriate dc in this case the topic of the weaknesses of wood i will adjust the dc or give a circumstance bonus behind the screen to improve your chances of getting it finally if it's a character that is trying to get a temporary advantage against a creature that they're recalling knowledge about i do not limit how many times they can try that on that creature and they can try it on a new creature of the same type however succeeding on their ability requires succeeding on the level based dc lastly i think that checks that you are making in combat that you fail can be repeated because you are under duress at the time just didn't know it in that moment or you are also considered as just observing the creature and drawing the appropriate conclusions from what you see also players should be able to make checks on things they observe in combat such as the hydra regrowing its head over the course of a combat so that's my video on recall knowledge i hope people found it useful and i'd love to know what you guys think about it whether you'll use them in your games whether you disagree with me and why it's a constant community me and my channel and also the discord channel discord server that i have which you should all join and maybe i'll have a new video if i turn out to be wrong i plan to do more videos uh including uh the next part in my series on alchemical items i also i'm thinking of doing a video in the future about exploration mode and pathfinder 2e another area of the rule set that's kind of vague and leaves it open to the gm and can be run very differently at different tables and could use some clarity and best practices so if you like the video please uh like the video and subscribe to my channel and join my discord and support my patreon okay so that's it i hope you enjoyed it and i will see you next time

Channel: The Rules Lawyer

Views: 35,879

Keywords: rules lawyer, rpg, dnd, d&d, pf2e, pfrpg, pathfinder, pathfinder 2nd, pathfinder 2e, recall knowledge, house rule, houserule

Id: CWWH9GjfNGk

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022