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Hello everyone,

I'm currently DM'ing a great group of players but one of them is having an issue that I wanted to share with the board and see what kind of feedback we could get.

The problem is that when it comes to knowledge checks (nature, arcana, religion, etc) this players character excells at getting high results.  He built his character around the premise of having a high amount of knowledge, and so, has all of the knowledge skills trained.  I believe the lowest he has is +10 to his roll.

Now this creates an interesting dynamic.  The recommended DC's for the level the party is currently on (7) is 11 for low, 16 for medium and 23 for hard.  Meaning that, with a little luck he will almost never see a medium range roll total, especially in Arcana where he has something like +15 or something.  The player's issue that he wants to feel more of a challenge when it comes to knowledge checks and wants to feel more of a difference between low, medium and high DC's.

Now on my side of things I've proposed that the possible issue that he's having is that I can't remember the last time he actually rolled low enough on a knowledge check (he has utility stuff to reroll etc.) to only beat a medium DC.  He mechanically can't get the low DC only either other than by rolling a natural 1 on his die which in the current group means automatic failure.  Natural 20 means auto success of course.  I've also suggested that I could set custom DC's specifically for his character as raising the DC's for everyone is unfair to others in the party.  But I'm not sure that would actually fix the problem.

As an added note, the player is roleplaying a character that is a young teenager.  Around 12 years of age or so.  I don't want to use the roleplay of the character as a barrier.  That being said I've noticed that the party is starting to mechanically rely on the 12 year old wizard for everything knowledge related.  I've somewhat worked on this issue by giving roleplay knowledge check to specific players.  Like when the party was hearing drum calls in the plains, I gave the half-orc barbarian a chance to roll for knowledge since it made the most roleplay sense.  Having the 12 year old wizard roll history on that and the rest of the party watching seemed lackluster and I wanted to give the barbarian a chance to shine.

The player has told me that he understands that even though he specializes in knowledge, that it does not make his character omniscient.

Anyway I'm curious to know what the board thinks of all this.

hey Matyr, thanks for the prompt reply.

I can propose the idea of having the player deduce things logically but what would that change exactly and how would we make it work ?

Raising DC's is something I don't really want to do because then that only further causes the party to depend on the wizard for this stuff.  When the Elf Ranger starts depending on the 12 year old wizard to track bad guys through a forest, it takes some of my immersion away.

I was saying don't give him full info on the checks, but give him some things that made a lot of sense. Personally I'd try to give him two possible answers to some of the questions and maybe one (or both or neither) is correct but they make sense.

@ Bohrdumb

1.  He's playing a control wizard, saying he's focusing on skills instead of combat is probably not accurate haha

2.  I do support and encourage it for everyone at the table, the problem is that the player isn't content with beating every knowledge check.  He on average rolls between 20-25 and if he doesn't roll high enough to his tastes, rerolls or boosts his result with his utility powers if he can.

3.  I don't really want to raise the DC's since that would make it unfair for the rest of the party.  I do like the idea of spreading out the DC's however like I explained, the problem isn't that the DC's don't provide enough info it's that the character always beats the hardest DC.  So having more DC's in between 11 and 23 won't really help all that much.

4.  I've also never penalized any player for succeeding on a DC.  I do, of course, want the game to be rewarding for everyone at the table.

@ Matyr

That is an interesting option.  I'll present it to the player and see what he thinks.



@ SpacyRicochet

Thanks for your post.  I think that the player and me also agree that just because the character has really high knowledge with a lot of things it doesn't mean that the character knows everything.  For example recently they came upon a lost underground city and although the player in questions character was able to use history to figure out some things about it, I didn't give him everything even though he rolled very high simply because it's a lost city.  He just got there.  I didn't feel that giving the player everything right away was appropriate.  I had another situation where the party was moving through a recently built tunnel and the player tried to recognize the architecture.  He once again rolled very high and I gave him basic information but I wanted to create a kind of dread about where they might be heading so I told him he had a bad feeling and the answer was on the tip of his tongue but he just couldn't find it.  Afterwards I gave him insight checks to see if he could figure it out. 

His character is actually the most fleshed out among the group.  He's playing a young girl who is the daughter of the leader of a countries military secret police (he created this).  He spent the last years cloistered in study.  Not allowed to leave her father's estate. 

So basically his response when I've pointed out in emails that based on his own roleplay he might not be able to know things about the outside world, is that the whole point of knowledge skill checks is to allow him to roll and see if his character knows things his roleplay might not allow him to know normally.  So to me it just seems like circular logic sort of.  He roleplays a cloistered child but via his super high knowledge checks he expects to know everything about the world and yet gets frustrated when those same super high knowledge skills, that he invested in, grant him the answers.

I want to make the player happy but I don't want to cause problems for the rest of the table.