Intro
This primarily meant for players in my existing Pathfinder 2e games. Should somebody else stumble upon this… I’m sorry? But maybe you can find something useful here, who knows.
I would like to describe my thoughts on how to possibly change ruling of Recall Knowledge (and other secret) checks.
Current situation is a mixture of Remaster and Homebrew. The result I have in my mind is much closer to Remaster. One of the main difference is that I do not give out false information, or I make it very obviously false. The other difference is that I’ll tell you that you can reroll upon failure.
But as I’ve gained some experience as a GM, my opinion on this has started to shift.
Proposed ruling
Any secret check
- If the check is secret…
- …you can’t use Hero Points after the roll, because you don’t know the result.
- but you can use it before the roll to give yourself an advantage.
- …and you roll it as public, I can ask you to roll again in secret (depends on severity of the check).
- This is more of a way to stop any attempts at soft cheating
- …you can’t use Hero Points after the roll, because you don’t know the result.
Recall Knowledge
- RAW ruling is here.
- Basic flow should follow the description in the link.
- Below are proposed differences and clarifications.
Repeated attempts
- You can try to Recall more information after the first attempt
- Unless you failed critically.
- Additional attempts will be with higher DC
- Unless you have new information. Example of this would be a monster using an ability for the first time. Recalling on this specific ability would use the base DC.
Feats and abilities
For builds heavily relying on Recall Knowledge, there might be exceptions/changes to previously described rules.
Example: Mastermind Rogue Racket
- You can choose to do Recall Knowledge to purely serve as a way to make an enemy Off-guard. In that case, you can use the base DC even on repeated attempts.
Example: Investigator Known Weakness Class Feat
- You can choose to use you free Recall Knowledge only for the bonus to attack rolls, thus using the base DC.
Closing words
This is only an idea for my current games (original date of publishing this text is March 2024), but I’m heavily in favor of some change.
If you are a player in an active game, fell free to voice your opinions in the Discord server, or in a private message.
This is a subject to change.