Info roll crit fails

[Inky]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think it's quite that bad. At least at TL8, it would be assumed that IQ includes general education, which in most Western cultures means that you got through secondary school. So you would have been exposed to whatever general science was included in the curriculum. On the other hand, while a college prep track in the US could include physics and chemistry, and the tracks for students in other countries who passed exams to get into an academic curriculum would as well, a student with GURPS IQ 9 probably wouldn't get into that track; their general science would be very general indeed. But they would have whatever they remembered from school lectures as their default Physics/TL8-3 and Chemistry/TL8-3.

Originally Posted by johndallman

In many cases, that is "nothing". There is a terrible tendency for elementary science to be taught by people who don't grasp how it joins up and how fitting parts of it together explains things. So it comes over to the students as stuff they have to memorise, which all seems very arbitrary, and hard to relate to.

Sounds like a case of "Those that can, do"... :-D

But yes, I forgot about defaults including what you remember from school.

A standard (difficulty +0) roll actually represents a reasonably difficult question, though. According to the Basic Set, a skill that somebody uses regularly for their job might be at 12 or 13. So somebody who actually does it for a living wouldn't know the answer to such a question 25% (for 12) or 16% (for 13) of the time. In which case it doesn't seem so surprising that somebody who only knows whatever they remember of what they learnt at school, plus whatever random hearsay, might critfail it 25% of the time.

[khorboth]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I actually instituted mandatory knowledge checks for all delvers in my DFRPG game....

This is fantastic. I did this voluntarily in a forgotten realms game. My character had the full Gullible disad and had worked in a bar for a while. The patrons had played the game "what will the bouncer believe" while drunk. As a result, he always had random ideas about monsters.

There are not albino alligators under Waterdeep (where we lived), that's ridiculous. There's a giant octopus which reaches its tenticles up and grabs anyone who goes too deep.

Be careful of mummy-liths. Mummies so old that they've turned to stone and are immune to fire, but not cold.

The purple dragons of cormyr are called that because they're all shape-shifted dragons. But you can always tell a shape-shifted dragon because their tails don't change.

etc.

He spiced up every encounter.