Talk:Knowledge (local)
While I was looking at prestige classes today, I noticed that the use of knowledge (local) didn't fit into the model I expected. I did some reading, and I found out that Knowledge (local), as written, doesn't require a regional specification. There is a lot of discussion on this on the internet, and here are the worthwhile bits:
- [1] - Poster James Jacobs is apparently one of the PF bigwigs.
- [2] - The #1 google search.
- [3] - PF society organized play discussion.
Forgotten realms is the published setting that specifically made regional focus/requirements, but also applied them to history, geography, and nobility (albeit as a bonus on the non-local skills, not as an exclusive skill). Depending on your reference, you could either specialize knowledge skills, or you got a syn bonus on all of them if you had a high enough local skill. Also, there is a comprehensive set of regional feats that you had available when making characters. They defined about 30 regions for the world.
- [4] - errata clarifying that knowledge (local) no longer exists, and that regional specialties exist for other skills.
- [5] - 1st chapter is entirely dedicated to regional rules, and is quite long.
We definitely use something closer to the FR setting, especially around starting languages and granularity of regions, although they've taken it to the next unfortunate level. I'm not proposing we change anything, I just had no idea that this was not RAW for the base game and there were such extensive FR modifciations to support it. Is there anything here we want to incorporate? I would think a list of regions would be as far as we'd want to take it.
--Msallen
- I liked this one:
If you must have it separate, treat it like the Linguistics skill. It remains a single skill, but every time you take a rank in it you select a new region in which you have expertise.
You may make Local checks and get the full bonus to any of your specialized regions. If there are only 40 nations in the setting, that means you can learn of half of them in great detail by 20th-level.
Makes sense to me.
- I lurrrrrrve that one! Let's go with it! -gm
