Many role playing systems make the mistake to include a skill or attribute called "knowledge," or similar. This is just plain wrong: Knowledge is an abstract concept. Knowing something means knowing a distinct, particular thing. Which means: You don't just know, but know something. The value a character has in its "knowledge" skill tries to describe that. But it completely fails at that since it's too abstract.
Let me precise this with an example. Suppose some guy named Jern, thief by "profession" has a value of 80 in knowledge. Fine. Now what does that mean? The question obviously answered is "how much does he know," but that doesn't help: During the game, the question obviously asked is: "What does he know?" and more precisely: "Does he know XYZ?" Ok, so there's an ancient artifact with hieroglyphs all over it, and Jern wants to find out what it is. He get's to roll a knowledge skill check, makes it, and finds out that this artifact will cloak him for an hour. Good for him! Some hours later, Jern has just broken into a library, looking for valuable books to steal. He gets to roll a -- you guess it -- knowledge check, which he not-so surprisingly pulls off. That rare book describing a forgotten, powerful teleport spell from that famous magician over there in the shelf is his now, thanks to his high ranks of knowledge!
Quite obvious is that the "knowledge" skill completely fails at what was its sole intention: Figuring out what a character knows, and figuring out whether he has a clue what's going on in a particular situation or not. Because it's abstract, but has a concrete value.
Enough of the ranting, I think it's clear what I am trying to express. More interesting is how to overcome the problem. First of all: Make that "knowledge" thing something concrete. If you don't want to change your character sheets, assume that "knowledge" is actually knowledge about a character's main field of interest. If it's a wizzard, it's knowledge about magic. If it's a warrior, it's knowledge about battle tactics, weapons and fighting skills. That makes a warrior a good member in a CSI team, by the way. In any case, whatever a character could know but isn't covered by her profession or interests means rolling a check against a penalty. The less it has to do with her profession, the higher the penalty gets. General knowledge works the same way, but the penalty is a fixed value.
However, that also means that there's more trouble ahead. Sleek as it sounds, consider this: Suppose you decided to apply a -20 penalty to all checks for general knowledge. Also consider Grungh, an orcish warrior with a knowledge of 20. Poor Grungh seems to know nothing except wielding his weapon. Which is probably wrong, too, since everybody has some general knowledge. Grungh, too, will know about the deities of his folks, something absolutely not connected with his warrior profession. This will lead the game master to make an exception of his rule and allow Grungh's player to roll dices without the -20 penalty sometime later in the game when it comes to that strange weather phenomenon. But any rule that needs exceptions isn't well thought of.
I, personally, like the idea of having a "general knowledge" skill and some more, specialized knowledge skills for the character's professions. For each and every character, unless monstrously tuned, this will result in about two to four skills. They don't necessarily need to get enhanced separately, but can be interconnected in some way, since they are interdependent. Let's say three points more in any knowledge skill raises all other by one. Of course, that's only a proposition.
Please tell me how you would handle this in a comment.
Oh, and by the way: Welcome to our new blog. :-)
For common knowledge I usually let all players make a simple Intelligence roll. For more obscure but still commonly available information I let them make a harder roll.
I have no problem with characters that are knowledgeable about certain fields. Mages usually buy arcane lore skills, nature-types dabble in survival skills. I do not let characters know everything, however. Very obscure or specialized knowledge may not be available using a skill roll - at my discretion.
There is one issue I have with knowledge skills, though, and that is how they are advanced. Character gain experience and advance their skills. The problem I see is that knowledge cannot actually grow out of doing unrelated things. Why a mage that spends five years in the wilds, throwing fireballs at the natives, suddenly knows a great deal about dimensional spheres just because he spent points on his planar theory skill totally escapes me ;-) I think skill systems that define what a character can do/know with a specific skill at a specific level are very helpful for starters. Maybe experience invested in knowledge should be handled as follows:
- add knowledge/expertise in an area the character has encountered or dealt with
- add the potential to gain knowledge/expertise in an area of the character's choosing, but requires the character to spend time and have access to required materials; without the character might still draw some conclusions, but can only advanve very slowly
Example 1: A mage and his group storm the tower of an evil necromancer. They fight undead beasts and explore sinister laboratories filled with the necromancer's failures and successes. The mage is allowed to increase his arcane lore skill and adds necromancy and undead creatures to his areas of study.
Example 2: A mage and his group traverse the depths of an endless jungle. While they are fighting off dinosaurs and nasty diseases, the mage commits his mind to the principles of teleportation - if they could only get out of there in an instant! When camping for the night, he makes notes and calculations. After a while of this, the mage is allowed to increase his arcane lore skill by a small margin and gains basic insight into teleportation theory. If he were able to consult arcane writings dealing with the matter or other suitable sources of knowledge, he would be allowed to increase his skill even more and gain a deeper understanding of teleportation magics.
Of course, it is totally understandable and perfectly okay if people just wish to use a simple and abstract system that can handle the basics: Points spent for knowledge allow a character to know important stuff.
A system like the one described above might add to the game of players that prefer, rules- and background-wise, more detailed and specific play.
Cheers,
Sven
When I was last mastering Cthulhu I found myself demanding general Knowledge rolls on several occasions. In these cases, the specific knowledge reflected mostly "common knowledge" about the world and that worked out OK.
Granted it would be an sweeping simplification to just have one knowledge skill in the game period. In that case, that score would also reflect domain-specific expertise where the GM has to take the character's background into consideration.
I believe the generic knowledge skill works when you're having a roleplay-intensive session where actual skills and character progression is not as important as the story at hand.
Honestly, that very Cthulhu session made me write this blog entry.
I like rules nice and easy. Character sheets filled with tons of several skills just to make sure a character *could* evolve into a peltmonger actually sucks, don't get me wrong there. :-) However, when there's just "knowledge" and "intelliegence" available for checks, it becomes far too abstract for me. "Intelligence" rolls are IMHO required whenever a character doesn't know something but has to figure it out at that moment, and knowledge describes what he has learnt.
And at that it fails. There's no distinction between certain fields of knowledge, and that would allow a character to invest XP into knowledge and later on know things he never could have actually learnt just because he spent is XP to increase knowledge! That's why I'd like to have a special "general knowledge" plus 1 to 3 specialized knowledge skills.
Note that some systems define the intelligence attribute as a character's ability to figure out and understand things when encountered, while in other systems it also includes a character's common knowledge and education. You should look to the attribute's definition instead of the normal meaning of the word.
Apart from that, what you want is what most systems have, like I said. If you follow my suggestion for more detailed knowledge or not - you usually have several knowledge skills you can take, and some systems have lots.
By the way, Cthulhu does actually NOT have just a general knowledge skill. In Cthulhu you can develop any skill you can think of. Be it accounting or biology, asian literature or forensics, wicca rituals or zen buddishm - your choice. In published modules NPC's even have hilarious skills like "be on time for work" ;-)
Okay, I realize I'm taking a nice beating here, but I didn't suggest that Cthulhu has just one knowledge skill. But that Knowledge x5 saving throw DID come in handy when general common knowledge was required that otherwise wouldn't have been available to the characters AT ALL. I'm sorry that pissed you off.
Eh? Sorry, I fear you got me wrong. I didn't know we could have had a ... say, secret agent lore skill, to begin with. So neither the blog entry nor any comment could have been aimed at you, but at any rule system that allows such a construct.
I know, but I stand by the way we (I) did it. Sure, you could have had a "secret agent lore" skill (that's why I asked at character creation if there was anything, anything at all you would like to be skilled at). But even then, that skill wouldn't have convincingly covered what we used the general Knowledge indicator for (e.g. "what's the BFU?", "how does time travel work?" and stuff like that).
I might be totally wrong here but isn't it totally up to the GM what a character knows or doesn't - and that is totally up to what the characters already experienced. The only situation you actually have to define basics is at character creation where you put your points into the specific fields you choose. Now let's say you have "common knowledge" and put 10 into that and "time travel theories" and put 2 into that.. now in order to improve your skills in "common knowledge" all you have to do is gain experience - it's common knowledge after all no need for specific research. To improve your "time travel theories" you'd really need to have some kind of involvement though - at character creation you basically choose what past your character had - anything after that can only be based upon your characters experience inGame - and then it is solely in the hands of the GM to decide whether or not you know that stuff or not.