Can my highly knowledgeable character make a roll to recall something about this?

>Can I make a knowledge check to recall something about X?
>Yeah, sure
>*result is really fucking high, equals to nearly impossible check according to the rulebook*
>Nah, you don't know shit about it

X turned out a fucking sapient kelp plant. My rage knows no bounds.

I think the best way to implement knowledge skills is to use them backwards. The player makes up a fact about the setting, and if the GM okays it he can then roll appropriate knowledge skill. If he succeeds the fact is true, if he fails the information is flawed in some way - exactly how is left up to the GM to reveal at an appropriate moment.

Half of Veeky Forums will bury you for this proposal.

Letting players anywhere near my setting!? REEEEEEEEEEE

Muh immersion

>seriously thinking that players give a shit about your half-empty half-ripped-off setting or your npcs that no one ever sees

This is what is wrong with a good deal of GMs.

>Scholarly character isn't flipping hisbshit excited and taking notes on what could be the single greatest new discovery of his time.
>Keeps asking if he's ever read anything in old books about something he is the first to discover

You are the worst scholar

As shitty GM behaviour would be, seriously this. That faggot you call GM just said that it's something really fucking new. Use his own bullshit against him. Take notes, take pictures, name that thing after yourself and make money off it.

And if he tries to refuse you all that, beat the shit out of him and piss on his unconscious body.

...which is why it's a good idea to involve the players in crafting the setting, it makes them, well, more involved (and makes the GM's job easier).

Knowledge "declarations" work well enough in "blank slate" settings, but they become unwieldy in settings that already have many of the details filled in, whether due to being a published setting or a game world that the GM has already put plenty of thought into.

In pre-detailed worlds, knowledge "declarations" often have to be met with the GM by "That is invalid, because it is established that in this setting..." followed by either an attempt at wrangling a compromise with the player, or the player spending time to come up with something new. It is awkward, and it might not suit all groups.

Furthermore, these "declarations" can eventually pile up into a mountain of setting facts that hardly make sense when taken as a whole, and which make it harder for further "declarations" to be made without invalidating any of the previous "declarations." This can be even more awkward for a group.

"Declarations" work best in "blank slate" settings and short-term campaigns. They are clunkier in pre-detailed settings or long-term campaigns, and especially unwieldy in games that involve both.

Logically, such a scholar should be better-equipped than any other character to understand such new phenomena and relate them to preexisting knowledge. It is appalling from gamist, narrativist, *and* simulationist perspectives for such a sage to be met with nothing more than "Your vast knowledge is inapplicable."

In my experience, "collaborative world-building" has never worked out, even with players who are good friends with each other and skilled roleplayers. To start, a few players object on principle for one reason or another, such as:
- They think themselves unqualified to add even a bit of roleplaying.
- They take on a traditional view on the duties of GMs and players.
- They emphasize strong immersion in their character, so they want no part in anything their character would not have had a hand in.
- They want to be surprised and awed as they explore a new world, and thus want to avoid being "spoiled" on the setting.
- They are perfectly willing to put the effort and investment to develop and play a good character, but lack the effort and investment to do the same as part of world-building. ("I just have a cool character I want to play.")
- Specifically for mid-session lore declarations, they find themselves poor at "thinking on the spot" for world-building.
- Again, specifically for mid-session lore declarations, they consider it "cheating" to be able to come up with a conveniently beneficial piece of lore.

Even assuming all of the players get past these doubts, however, I have found that it encounters the "too many cooks spoils the design by committee" issue.

The group can nail down a precise genre, subgenre, tone, and theme and parcel out setting aspects to each player (player A handles B race and C nation, player X tells us about Y race and Z nation, etc.), and yet the end result is a jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces make sense on their own, but the aggregate setting is a preposterous farrago that would make Golarion look like a masterpiece. Additionally, some players simply are not that good at world-building because they lack context, data, critical thinking, standards, motivation, and/or free time.

Finally, the GM has to detangle this chaos of disparate ideas and reconcile everything together, which can be more difficult than it sounds.

Can confirm, had this happen before.
And when my PC started writing things down and doing their own research, the notes got pocketed by NPC Rogue, reported to local church a I got inquisition on my ass for witchcraft.

Just like some player can only play a murderhobo, some GMs can only run games for murderhobos.

Kill that piece of shit and feed him to the pigs.

Unless of course it's a situation where his vast knowledge is inapplicable. You can paint as many purple prose as you want putting some ticks in the knowledge column doesn't give you carte blanche on all fields of expertise. Especially on unknown undocumented phenomenon.

Just feed him to pigs, those vicious bastards will kill him for you.

... No?

...which is why the GM should put the minimum effort possible into making the setting. Problem avoided!

I actively encourage players to design their own home town.
Players are a valuable tool for setting creation.

Actually yes. Taking the knowledge column and filling it with ticks does literally give you carte blanche because your character would know. If the GM wants to be a dick and introduce something into the campaign that other people have studied but no knowledge skill is applicable to that's bullshit.

>Unless of course it's a situation where his vast knowledge is inapplicable
Well if he's trying to roll Knowledge (Botany) to try and figure out why the noble considers this particular jeweled ring to be important, then yeah. I don't think that's what anyone was talking about, though.

>Especially on unknown undocumented phenomenon.
Even then, if you have knowledge in a broadly related category, some of that is going to be indirectly applicable. Anything that's extant and makes sense within the setting is going to have some relation to other forms of it and there will be things you can extrapolate. That guy with Knowledge (Botany) might not know what species of flower he's looking at if it hasn't been studied and described, but he'll be able to tell you if it's a tree, shrub, herb, forb, whatever, and make informed guesses about if it's perennial or annual, how much water it's used to getting, rates of herbivory, and even its internal chemistry as well.

The only time an outright "your knowledge is inapplicable" should come up (outside of a very specialized character working outside of his specialization) is if you're Derleth memeing and something is unknowable just because it is and you're not that great at horror.

>as many purple prose
Don't use terms that you don't know the meaning of. Whatever your first language, Google translate is only good enough for fairly simple things, not literary critique.

Basically yes that's exactly it. You are removing the initiative from your DM to yourself. Now he is no longer in control. Bad DM's cant handle this. You learn important information when they are ready and not a moment sooner. Bad DM's are also self centered egotists. You knowing something out of turn may mean he has to give up his "Totally awesome" adventure area that you would of gone to to figure out that information.

If each player is responsible for things related to their own character (background region, how their class/skills are acquired) and then the GM takes those and builds around them, it can work okay. That's maybe a bit of a hybrid option, and still suffers from the "some players don't want to" and "places the onus on the GM to make things work together" problem, but they're more surmountable if player contributions are smaller and mostly separate from each other anyway, I think.

Oh my DM HATES when I take notes. He loves to drop little hints so that when the big reveal happens we can go "Oh my god it all makes sense now!" and he knows how good I am at puzzling things out. He views me taking notes as a threat to him and his DMing.

Personally I hate when people take notes because I don't like it when people are fiddling around on paper rather than being part of the group. Why don't you just "take notes" in your head by actually paying attention?

Because its only logical? When you go through a 50 room dungeon its difficult to separate one room from another. A quick jot that "room twenty has an alter" helps significantly. Or say your in an extreme long term adventure. Those notes can seriously help you remember what your character would remember. For your character its been two weeks in real life it could be a year later.

>retards without even a hint of scientific expertise of any kind try to define a "realistic" use of theoretical knowledge in games

It's basically the same as
>basement-dwelling virgins try to run a "social intrigue" game while having next to zero social experiences aside from tabletops
>fat neckbeards try to have "realistic combat" when the heaviest thing they ever held was a computer mouse

>A quick jot that "room twenty has an alter" helps significantly.
It helps you say "okay, let's go back to the room with the altar"?

>I'm insecure and afraid players will call me out on my plotholes

>retards without even a hint of scientific expertise of any kind try to define a "realistic" use of theoretical knowledge in games
>implying nobody here is a scientist
There's a reason I used Botany as my example upthread a bit. I'd imagine I'm not the only one, though. In the first world, becoming a scientist is actually kind of common because it's what happens if you're middle class and directionless for two long; schools are designed to funnel you in that direction if you don't leave them.

and if there are more than one room with an alter? Or your trying to avoid certain rooms that the DM may say you enter because you didn't say what path you were taking? What if your trying to figure out a puzzle in one room but the clues are in other rooms and there are say 15 of them? making a note of them lets you keep all the clues correct and lets you look at all of them at once.

>It's perfectly acceptable to be fucking about with a notepad instead of interacting with people in a social situation
Why don't you just read a book if all you want to do is analyze a plot?

Fine, I will concede that if your DM is a dick who makes things needlessly convoluted for no reason, notes may be helpful. If you're talking about some weird fringe scenario and everyone else is talking about normal play, of course the ideas of what's a good idea is gonna vary.

Why don't you just go to a bar if all you want to do is chat and fuck about with your pals?

If things are that complicated, shouldn't the GM provide a battlemat with the map sketched out, or some kind of appropriate images and things for the puzzle? If the GM makes things that complicated in the first place, it's the GM's responsibility to make it intelligible.

>implying I don't
Having a constant supply of wine and snacks makes the game like three times more comfy.

I'm not talking fringe play at all. Any DM afraid to let his players take notes is a bad DM. Any player that does not take notes for any reason outside of an RP reason is a bad player. Its called a pen and paper rpg for a reason. As a player I want to be challenged. I dont want stuff handed to me. Any puzzle I instantly figure out is a failure on the DM's part. As a DM I challenge my players to think. Everything has a trail and a reason. If the players dont follow the trail or figure out the puzzle on their own with no help from me besides what I planted in game they have to accept the consequences. That shipment log is there for a reason. If they are trying to not be caught and refuses to copy it down that's their own problem.

I have had 6 DM's in my life and I am a DM myself never have I had a game where anything was assumed. The players dont just get to say "I copy it and we go to X location." They copy it for real return to their HQ and then they plan their next move. In fact every DM I have ever had has actively punished me for trying to cut corners and just ask him what my character remembers. Its my job to be my character not my DM's.

>I'm not talking fringe play at all.
>examples are all examples of bullshit situations that no same DM would put you in'
Okay

Because i don't know you, your game or your players i am honestly not sure if you are
Trolling,
Sperging out if somebody isn't paying attention to you 120% of the time,
Sperging out because you have awesome memory and can recall the color of a Background NPCs hair from three Sessions ago,
Running a game where "Go to the northern Hill and kill the Dragon" is the max depth of the plot
or
Your players are turbo Autists who take notes of absolutely everything, to a genuinely unnecessary degree.

That's my brother of African descent.

Howewer, the bar has to be relatively quiet.

>he doesn't have his background NPCs' hair color-coded

also, do you happen to be German?

>Its called a pen and paper rpg for a reason.
Because the mechanics are handled manually (with pen and paper) rather than digitally (vidya). It has nothing to do with you scribbling away like an autist while the rest of the group is having a good time.

It's give and take. You REALLY need to trust your players not to intentionally fuck with things if you go this route, and not many groups are capable of doing it in a smooth fashion.

It also requires a high skill level on the part of the GM because it means he essentially isn't allowed to plan anything because everything he writes can be instantly dashed by his players without any prior consent or warning.

As always, the best way to implement knowledge skills is a compromise between the two.

Probably a combination of the last two. There's a plot but if it requires some seemingly minor detail actually matters, I'll bring it up again multiple times leading up to when it's relevant, including during the scene where it matters. And it's not most of my players, just one who decided to be the dedicated book-keeper when I just want that sorry fuck to be a dedicated fun-haver like the rest of us.

Ah, yeah. Thought I implied that by saying wine rather than beer, but I guess that's specific to this country.

im going to assume you wanted to invent a machine gun or some shit and you are the idiot

Personally I depend on my players being prepared to take notes and make knowledge checks because otherwise they would get horribly outmaneuvered by the BBEG and fail to make progress at anything but the most simple of tasks because I really love hiding little tidbits of relevant information all over the place and those often add up to vital clues when it comes to confronting enemies.

Not that guy, but how are you getting so triggered about someone caring so much about your plot, that they're actively taking notes? That makes them more engaged, not less. And if things are simple enough to not need notes, he's hardly going to he spending any time on it. Writing down 'Green dragon in northern woods' isn't going to make them miss a bunch of RP

Everything I have mentioned in still applies even when players are constrained to their PCs' home nations.

Even when you tell the players something like "high magic, high fantasy, commonplace magic," you could very well wind up with one player writing up a vast empire of immortal animal-people archmages who live in floating archipelagos and ride dragons and airships, and another player writing an unassuming petty kingdom that simply has plenty of humans who can use cantrips. Then the GM has to reconcile how these two polities can coeexist without the empire running roughshod over the little kingdom (or indeed, anyone else), and someone is going to have to compromise and have their feelings hurt at the end of the day.

That's not even hard, though. The sky furries just aren't that interested in fucking about with surface beings since they've got dominion over the sky. It's like wondering why China didn't run roughshod over the little kingdoms of India: It just wasn't worth the time or effort and politically nobody cared about it. That kind of thing only confuses people who can't comprehend decommissioning the treasure fleet.

You didn't get a college degree, did you?

What I had in mind there was "use air superiority, commonplace high-powered magic, ships, and isolation to conquer the ground," like a far more exaggerated version of the British Empire's circumstances with its relatively isolated home and its naval supremacy.

I have three.

Well, you just put this British sky furries far away then. And they can be a plot point later.

And that itself is a compromise that has to be made with the players. By keeping the super-advanced empire far away from the campaign's "main action" and reserving them as a "plot point for later," you are effectively telling that player that their contribution is to be shelved until some indeterminate date in the future (which might not even come up before the game dies off).

Also, I am speaking this from experience as a player who has had exactly this happen to them. The GM asked the players to create their PCs' home countries; not a single other player bothered to do so, yet the GM let this slide. I, on the other hand, wrote up an overview concerning the magical empire my character hailed from.

The moment the campaign started, the GM literally teleported the party off to the other side of the world. It has been several sessions into the game, my character's homeland has not even been obliquely referenced, all of the plot points towards the area we are now in, and the GM later decided to name the campaign after said area. All I have been told about my character's homeland is that it "might come up later."

The game is still ongoing.

It's inherent in the premise (everyone creates your own homeland) that the game will not use all of this information directly. You can't start out simultaneously in everyone's home country, and no player is going to assume that you will. That doesn't mean you can't go there at some point or meet ships from there.

>The moment the campaign started, the GM literally teleported the party off to the other side of the world. It has been several sessions into the game, my character's homeland has not even been obliquely referenced
While that's bullshit, and I understand your frustration, it's not bullshit inherent to the practice of designing your area of origin. While it's not necessarily wrong, if you want to do a "stranger in a strange land" scenario, to have players define where they come from, it should be made clear from the beginning that this is what you're doing.

Clicked send one sentence too early, I meant to append that this is basically a communication issue regarding the purpose of the backstories, assuming this was planned ahead of time by the DM.

>Why don't you just "take notes" in your head by actually paying attention?

t. dropped out of college but will claim that no he actually is that good

It's people like you that make GMing boring and trite.

>Yes, I absolutely want to run a game where I do nothing but tell a story I have no investment in and fellate others' characters when I have no right to exercise any creativity of my own

fuck right off

Wisdom.

Today's GMs are just lazy and don't particularly want to take charge of their own game.

It's nice to see someone speaking out against the meme advice that gets passed around Veeky Forums's armchair GMs like hotcakes. The fact of the matter is that 99% of players are actually really uncomfortable designing part of the setting, and if they aren't, they'll let you know by being those fags who do a bunch of world building in their shitty backstory that I tell them not to write because it's invariably garbage that blathers on endlessly about meaningless shit nobody cares about, myself least of all.

There are people who will actually think I am baiting, but I am completely serious; if you are the type of player to write five page essays about your character's home town, stop it. Just fucking stop it.

You play dungeons and dragons at a bar?

>The fact of the matter is that 99% of players are actually really uncomfortable designing part of the setting

Do you have a single citation to back that up?

Well user, I actually GM games, as opposed to the people who parrot meme advice around on Veeky Forums.

Anecdotal evidence.

You don't really have a counterpoint; all you're going to do is insist that because I have not sampled ten thousand players, that you can't be wrong. It's some absurd god of the gaps tier shit you've got in lieu of any real defense.

Get back to me when you start actually GMing games, user.

That's exactly how I remember it working for the scholarship skill in the Dresden Files RPG.

And now you know what a degree in gender studies feels like

>also, do you happen to be German?
Yeah, i was in a hurry to post before i went out and i forgot to not capitalize the nouns.

When I make a setting, or anything that you might know about in any way, I always make sure to have it clear what people know about it and what they don't. And, what is the truth and what is the official version.

This is in my opinion very important if you have players playing sage-like PCs.

nice blog post, nigger

>actually criticising making notes

I had no idea people this moronic actually existed. If you are investigating something or trying to solve puzzles you should be making notes, if you are exploring a dungeon you should be making notes AND drawing a map of the dungeon so you don't get lost.

It's pretty clearly icyhot.

Tried so hard not to laugh irl to that.