Session 18B: Missed Opportunities
“The Crimson Coil?” Elestra said. “I think I’ve heard something about them. Random acts of violence. Vandalism. That kind of thing. I got the impression they hadn’t been around for years, though.”
“That’s right,” Tee said. “I was still living here. The cult members wore blood-red robes and hoods. They’d spontaneously appear in huge gatherings to wreak random chaos. Then, about two or three years ago, the Knights of the Pale tracked them to their stronghold – I think it was called Pythoness House. Reportedly the whole cult was wiped out.
Last year I wrote Rulings in Practice: Gather Information, which discussed how to handle information-gathering tasks like canvassing and research.
The 3rd Edition of D&D, however, features a very interesting and fairly clear-cut distinction between “information you gather” (in the form of a Gather Information check) and “information you just know” (in the form of a Knowledge (local) check). Given that the information in question was often the exact same information, I found it necessary to really figure out exactly what the relationship was between these skills and how they should be handled in play. It’s a distinction that I think remains valuable in subsequent editions of D&D, including Pathfinder (which has the exact same distinction) and even 5th Edition (which lacks the specific skills but nevertheless will run into similar issues of adjudication).
The short version:
Knowledge (local) gets you the same information, but at +5 DC.
Knowing something off the top of your head is simply more difficult than going to look it up. From a balance standpoint, the +5 DC is also the cost you pay for not needing to spend 1d4+1 hours (in the case of 3rd Edition) looking for the information.
This same basic principle can be applied widely, even in systems that don’t mechanically distinguish between different forms of knowledge acquisition: In some cases, depending on the exact mechanics involved, you might test to see if they know something off the top of their head and then, if they spend the time necessary to actively look for that information, you can apply a bonus to their check.
(If you wanted to focus even more attention on this aspect of game play, you could even vary the size of that bonus based on how they actively look: Better libraries give better research bonuses, for example.)
In practice, there are some forms of information that very specifically require canvassing and, therefore, Knowledge (local) simply isn’t applicable for. (Did anyone see Bob Anonymous in the silver light district on Friday night? You need to actually go down there and ask around.) In practice, though, I recommend generally being pretty liberal in what you allow people to now.
ACCLIMATION
The other issue raised by Knowledge (local) was exactly what “local” consists of and also what happens with the skill when you leave one “local” and go to a different “local.”
As a loose guideline, I would apply a -4 penalty to Knowledge (local) checks on a scale from whatever your “local” was: Different city in the same area. Different region in the same kingdom. Different kingdom. Different continent (or similar divide). Different plane.
(So the penalty would be -8 if you were from the boondocks and went to the capital.)
This penalty could be quickly abrogated by a character who became acclimated to a new locale. At various times I would use a period of a fortnight or a month, but at the end of each period the size of the penalty would be reduced by -1. (That reduction was against the base -4, not the total penalty.)
The logic was that part of your Knowledge (local) skill is, in fact, the knack for picking up local knowledge.
On one occasion a player wanted to speed this process up, so I allowed them to make Gather Information checks once per day (and with the normal time required) vs. DC 15. Each success reduced the number of days required by the margin of success on the check.
This never really came up in the Ptolus campaign, of course, because it’s all set in one city. But in other campaigns I found it was a nice balance between making the Knowledge (local) skill useful for globetrotting characters and also allowing characters to enter strange places f without instantly being experts on their minutia.
