Knowledge local

[Calthropstu]

Knowledge local seems a tad silly with how it works. For example, I currently live in Phoenix and can tell you where many great restaurants are, I could direct you to the nearest hospital and can name many people of note within the city.
But if I went to Tuscon or Las Vegas etc, I'd be completely lost within minutes. I houseruled in my campaign that knowledge local has epicenters with checks recieving stiffer penalties the further from its epicenter you are, and you can't put skill points into an epicenter you haven't spent time in, or haven't been to in a while.
Does this seem a reasonable houserule or should I just leave it alone?

[zlefin]

it's not entirely unreasonable, as knowledge local is rather odd.
i'm pretty sure i've heard of others using simliar rules.

just keep in mind skill points are a limited resource, and don't make it too expensive for the skill to be worth taking.
and make sure to keep the expenditure useful if adventurers move to other areas.

[ShurikVch]

It's remind me about the FR RAW:
Local Knowledge: The Knowledge (local) skill per se does not exist in a Forgotten Realms campaign. Instead, a character who chooses Knowledge (local) must specify the region his knowledge applies to. For example, someone familiar with the legends and personalities of Sembia would take the Knowledge (Sembia local) skill.Also, from the same page:
Regional Focus: A character may choose to add a regional focus to the geography, history, nature, nobility and royalty, or religion areas of the Knowledge skill. The regional focus provides a +2 bonus on Knowledge checks that pertaiun to the region in question. For example, a character may choose Knowledge (Sembian history) instead of Knowledge (history) in order to be particularly adept at Knowledge (history) checks pertaining to Sembia.

[GrayDeath]

We usually do Knowledge Local like this:


Player picks his Area of Action/Influence/whatever". It counts as full for that area and any beings unique/overtly obiquous to that area.

It counts as a -2 for areas influenced/strongly influenced by his PoA.

It does not work otherwise UNLESS we are playing a campaign where moving around is done on the GM`s "decision" (say you start in Tewinter, move to Amn for 4 levels, then move to Thai for 3 or somesuch), in that case after levelling up once they may simply switch all their Knowledge Local pts to the new area.
Or not, if they dont want to.

Doing otherwise always seemed really unfair, given the far tighter scope oif this skill compared to say, Knowledge Planes (yeah, )I can only apply my K. Local to one town, but I know about ALL the Planes!).

[Mike Miller]

I consider local knowledge usable if the player's have gathered information and/or spent at least a few days in a newer location.

[daremetoidareyo]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21683960&postcount=6

everything you need to know about knowledge local from a nondragmag 1st party source.

[Calthropstu]

We usually do Knowledge Local like this:


Player picks his Area of Action/Influence/whatever". It counts as full for that area and any beings unique/overtly obiquous to that area.

It counts as a -2 for areas influenced/strongly influenced by his PoA.

It does not work otherwise UNLESS we are playing a campaign where moving around is done on the GM`s "decision" (say you start in Tewinter, move to Amn for 4 levels, then move to Thai for 3 or somesuch), in that case after levelling up once they may simply switch all their Knowledge Local pts to the new area.
Or not, if they dont want to.

Doing otherwise always seemed really unfair, given the far tighter scope oif this skill compared to say, Knowledge Planes (yeah, )I can only apply my K. Local to one town, but I know about ALL the Planes!).

Actually, knowledge planes lets you know what plane you are on and what kind of planar entities may be found there. It doesn't tell you what stores may be found in the city of brass unless it's a major planar destination. That would be knowledge local. So you would be able to identify that you were in the plane of fire at the city of brass with knowledge planes, but otherwise you'd need knowledge local to get around and identify the locals.

[GrayDeath]

True.

But it also tells you if any effects of a particular plane are affecting a particular portal, where (planewise) the being in front of you comes from, and so on.

I never said it was more powerful than Knowledge Local, just much MUCH wider. As are all Knowledge Skills compared to K:L. :smallcool:

[Psyren]

Yeah, Local is weird. If you go with the Core approach, a single skill will make you a savant in every town on the planet, including the ones you haven't even set foot in or couldn't even find on a map. But if you go with the FR approach, Knowledge Local becomes 20 different skills that all still cost the same, making it impossible for even the most well-traveled character to actually learn anything about the towns they visit, or forcing them to dump every other skill they have to try. It's madness.

Personally I would just do this - leave it as a single skill, raise the difficulty for all the checks, and then give the player a circumstance bonus for any town they've read about or visited, with a much bigger bonus for anywhere they've actually lived. A high roll for somewhere they haven't been to would then represent an interesting fact they picked up somewhere. like a book or idle conversation. Leaving Local as a single skill makes it a much cheaper investment, while the bonuses for places you've been exposed to preserve the realism of knowing places you've been to or lived in far better than places you haven't.

[daremetoidareyo]

Yeah, Local is weird. If you go with the Core approach, a single skill will make you a savant in every town on the planet, including the ones you haven't even set foot in or couldn't even find on a map. But if you go with the FR approach, Knowledge Local becomes 20 different skills that all still cost the same, making it impossible for even the most well-traveled character to actually learn anything about the towns they visit, or forcing them to dump every other skill they have to try. It's madness.

Personally I would just do this - leave it as a single skill, raise the difficulty for all the checks, and then give the player a circumstance bonus for any town they've read about or visited, with a much bigger bonus for anywhere they've actually lived. A high roll for somewhere they haven't been to would then represent an interesting fact they picked up somewhere. like a book or idle conversation. Leaving Local as a single skill makes it a much cheaper investment, while the bonuses for places you've been exposed to preserve the realism of knowing places you've been to or lived in far better than places you haven't.

In the link I posted there's a web article from ebberon, where every skill Rank and knowledge local gives you another locality to use your knowledge local skill in.

Also in Forgotten Realms those are 20 different skills but if you have five ranks you have a plus 2 bonus to All skill Checks In Those territories

[Calthropstu]

Hmm.
I get the arguments here.
I think I may just do away with knowledge local complefely and redo it. Seriously, a small child with zero ranks in knowledge local can tell what kind of people lives in his city and where the major landmarks in the area are.
Likewise, a trucker would be able to tell you how to get from one city to another, but very little else about those cities.
Someone making a year long trek through the frozen north near Neverwinter would be able to tell you what dangers to look out for, but wouldn't know much about Neverwinter if they hadn't been to it. And even if they had, they wouldn't be able to tell much if they had spent little time in it.
Think about the difference between someone who recently moved to New York, someone who's been there for a year, someone who has been there for 20 years and a tourist who read up on it.

So I think I may eliminate knowledge local entirely.

[daremetoidareyo]

Hmm.
I get the arguments here.
I think I may just do away with knowledge local complefely and redo it. Seriously, a small child with zero ranks in knowledge local can tell what kind of people lives in his city and where the major landmarks in the area are.
Likewise, a trucker would be able to tell you how to get from one city to another, but very little else about those cities.
Someone making a year long trek through the frozen north near Neverwinter would be able to tell you what dangers to look out for, but wouldn't know much about Neverwinter if they hadn't been to it. And even if they had, they wouldn't be able to tell much if they had spent little time in it.
Think about the difference between someone who recently moved to New York, someone who's been there for a year, someone who has been there for 20 years and a tourist who read up on it.

So I think I may eliminate knowledge local entirely.

Just roll it into gather information. Make the heal skill be the thing you use to identify humanoids.

[Calthropstu]

Just roll it into gather information. Make the heal skill be the thing you use to identify humanoids.

I may just not have a roll for humanoids.
Seen a dwarf? You know what a dwarf looks like. Seen a bunyip? Know what a bunyip looks like. Seen an orc? Know what an orc looks like. I mean seriously, RAW 50% of humans will fail to identify each other as such. No. That is silly.

[denthor]

Knowledge local seems a tad silly with how it works. For example, I currently live in Phoenix and can tell you where many great restaurants are, I could direct you to the nearest hospital and can name many people of note within the city.
But if I went to Tuscon or Las Vegas etc, I'd be completely lost within minutes. I houseruled in my campaign that knowledge local has epicenters with checks recieving stiffer penalties the further from its epicenter you are, and you can't put skill points into an epicenter you haven't spent time in, or haven't been to in a while.
Does this seem a reasonable houserule or should I just leave it alone?


I do not like knowledge local.

But if you use it with say a check to know where to go to get information. Example you can find things like who sells potions on the side. Who used to be
adventures. So you have an idea where to start asking questions. So you use gather information then you get knowledge local.

[Calimehter]

My method of making it work:

- Knowledge Local is for where you have been, Gather Information is for where you are new (or trying to learn something new about where you have been, i.e. a failed Knowledge check). How long you have to be in a given locale to Know it varies depending on settlement size and complexity, usually pretty easy for DM and player to figure out even without rigid guidelines.

- Villagers get good circumstance bonuses for the important shops/people/races they encounter every day, which gets rid of the whole "fail a DC 10 check half of the time for your own race or your own town" problem. Bob the human villager has an easy time identifying fellow humans and finding his own butcher shop, but might struggle with otherwise-common races not common to *his* settlement, and he also has a chance to not know much about the butcher shop across town in a larger settlement.

[Enixon]

I've always seen Knowledge: Local as basically being Knowledge: Anthropology, You might never have been to (insert city/country/etc. Here) but you've read and studied about it at some point. Just like how someone with Knowledge: Nature can know about terrain types he or she's never been to or how someone with Knowledge: The Planes can know about all sorts of planar stuff even if they've never left the prime material.

[Caelestion]

I call it Streetwise and bundle it with urban Survival and with Gather Info for the low/criminal classes.

[Psyren]

Hmm.
I get the arguments here.
I think I may just do away with knowledge local complefely and redo it. Seriously, a small child with zero ranks in knowledge local can tell what kind of people lives in his city and where the major landmarks in the area are.
Likewise, a trucker would be able to tell you how to get from one city to another, but very little else about those cities.
Someone making a year long trek through the frozen north near Neverwinter would be able to tell you what dangers to look out for, but wouldn't know much about Neverwinter if they hadn't been to it. And even if they had, they wouldn't be able to tell much if they had spent little time in it.
Think about the difference between someone who recently moved to New York, someone who's been there for a year, someone who has been there for 20 years and a tourist who read up on it.

So I think I may eliminate knowledge local entirely.

See, I think my method captures this stuff. That child with zero ranks would still get a hefty bonus for growing up in that town, and be much better positioned to answer questions than an outsider trying to study it. That trucker would have a smaller bonus due to having visited, but still be better off than someone who's never been. So you have a method of realistically capturing that stuff while still allowing the skill - as a means to track foreigners becoming knowledgeable, or for measuring one townsfolk's knowledge vs. another - to remain.

[Rijan_Sai]

I may just not have a roll for humanoids.
Seen a dwarf? You know what a dwarf looks like. Seen a bunyip? Know what a bunyip looks like. Seen an orc? Know what an orc looks like. I mean seriously, RAW 50% of humans will fail to identify each other as such. No. That is silly.


Human: Hey elf, you look like a girl.
Elf: To a human, everything must look like a girl.
Human: What?
Elf: Half-orcs, half-ogres…
Human: …shut up.
Dwarf: Half-dragons, half-kobolds.
Human: I said shut up!
Elf: …
Dwarf: …
Human: …
Elf: Centaurs…
:smallbiggrin:
I take no credit for this; just seemed relevant!

Unfortunately, I don't really have anything to contribute to the conversation at this time...

[Lazymancer]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21683960&postcount=6

everything you need to know about knowledge local from a nondragmag 1st party source.
Is "Sharn of two towers" instead of "Sharn: City of Towers" deliberate?

[Geddy2112]

I normally mix it into nobility(and maybe history) and just have it called "culture" so even if you have never been somewhere you can know things about places you have read, or with some knowledge in anthropology at least take an educated guess.


I call it Streetwise and bundle it with urban Survival and with Gather Info for the low/criminal classes.

Second using streetwise. It can tell you things about a city, even if you have never been. Big cities have things in common, and if you have street smarts from growing up in New York City, those are transferable skills you could use to get around Tokyo, Japan. In a lot of ways a streetwise skill could be governed by wisdom.

[Dragovon]

So in Pathfinder they changed some skills. One they changed was Linguistics (which combines a few other things). The relevant portion, here is that I took an idea from their use of Linguistics (each rank you put in you get to add a language) and applied the same to Knowledges. Knowledge(Local) each rank lets them apply it to a specific region. Knowledge (Planes), each rank lets them apply to a specific plane, etc... I may allow them to make a roll from a nearby (or similar) region (or plane) at a penalty if I think it applies.

[rrwoods]

Knowledge: local is a sensical skill with a terrible name. According to the SRD, it pertains to "legends, personalities, inhabitants, laws, customs, traditions, humanoids". A more appropriate name for the skill is "Knowledge: anthropology", or, honestly, "Knowledge: humanoids". It pertains to general ideas of the listed things among humanoid civilizations. Basic things like "it's probably illegal to murder someone" obviously don't require a check here. As a reasonable real-world example, "it's common for people to light trees or menorahs in the wintertime" is a Knowledge: local check.

[BWR]

I treat Knowledge: local as tied to a specific area and it can function as a replacement for pretty much any other Knowledge skill. Want to know the dominant religions in the area? K:L
Want to know the basics of its tenets? K:L
Want to know about famous historical events in the area? K:L
Want to know about the flora and fauna in the area? K:L
Want to know what the terrain is like? K:L
DCs might be a bit higher if you use K:L to stand in for another skill, but it means K:L is pretty much the most useful Knowledge skill you can get if you stay within an area.

[Bohandas]

Knowledge local seems a tad silly with how it works. For example, I currently live in Phoenix and can tell you where many great restaurants are, I could direct you to the nearest hospital and can name many people of note within the city.
But if I went to Tuscon or Las Vegas etc, I'd be completely lost within minutes. I houseruled in my campaign that knowledge local has epicenters with checks recieving stiffer penalties the further from its epicenter you are, and you can't put skill points into an epicenter you haven't spent time in, or haven't been to in a while.
Does this seem a reasonable houserule or should I just leave it alone?

Splitting it into different epicenters is definitely a good start. I haven't played enough to know whether or not the rest of how you handled it is good too though.

Another simpler alternative though would to handle it like 3.0 perform and have it apply to a number of locations equal to one's skill rank.

EDIT:
Another, more complicated alternative, would be to have it gradually catch up in new areas at a rate determined partially by skill checks. At the end of each week in a new area you would make a gather information check and/or a knowledge (geography) check and if either succeeded your effective knowledge (local) about the new area would increase by one up to a maximum of your actual rank in knowledge (local). The DC of the skill check would be equal to your current effective knowledge (local) about the new region + 10

[heavyfuel]

Personally I would just do this - leave it as a single skill, raise the difficulty for all the checks, and then give the player a circumstance bonus for any town they've read about or visited, with a much bigger bonus for anywhere they've actually lived.

Alternatively, go for the FR approach and divide it in many different skills, but drastically lower the difficulty for all checks. This way, a single rank (especially if you're playing Pathfinder) goes a long way around knowing about specific cities.

[Psyren]

Alternatively, go for the FR approach and divide it in many different skills, but drastically lower the difficulty for all checks. This way, a single rank (especially if you're playing Pathfinder) goes a long way around knowing about specific cities.

While this works a lot of the time, if your campaign ends up spanning the continent (or several continents) then it becomes impossible to learn anything. Whereas there is no upper limit on the reverse, bonus-driven method.