When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s, the game didn’t have much of a skill system. The only skills were possessed by thieves – their abilities to pick pockets, open locks, find and remove traps, and the like. A character might have had a previous profession, which allowed the possibility of knowing a few things related to that profession, but for the most part, the mechanical aspects of your character’s knowledge about the world were absent.
The first skill system that applied to all characters and covered non-combat material was added late in the life of AD&D through the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. Then, it was incorporated into the main books with the release of AD&D second edition. However, it wasn’t until the release of Dungeons & Dragons third edition in 2000 that we got a significant change to how we learnt about monsters with the Knowledge skills.
In the early days, the ways you’d learn a troll couldn’t regenerate from acid or fire or that you needed a magical weapon to hit a gargoyle was either by fighting them or by another player telling you. For the most part, your knowledge of the situation trumped what your character knew about the situation. There was also the possibility of consulting a sage in the game world and paying them a lot of money to research a monster, but such was relatively rare.
With Third Edition, the Knowledge skills gave you the possibility of rolling well and learning about a monster. It was with the release of 3.5 in 2003 that this was explicitly codified: A successful check of DC 10 + monster hit dice with the appropriate Knowledge skill would tell you the monster’s powers, resistances and vulnerabilities.
One of the primary reasons for this was that there were so many monsters that no player would have fought them all, and the DM could keep using new monsters again and again with the players having no idea what they were facing.
That’s remained in the game since then, but – in an interesting point – the Nature and other knowledge-type skills of fifth edition do not call out learning facts about the powers and vulnerabilities monsters with successful checks. (The idea remains partially in the Pathfinder 2nd edition system, but it is not as codified as 3.5E was).
So, if you’re playing with a group that played third and fourth edition, you might find yourself making rolls to learn about monsters. If you play with players who started in fifth edition? I don’t know. Tell me!
The learning of knowledge thrills me. Discovering at the table that the troll requires fire or acid to kill? That’s awesome, especially if before it was a mystery and we were forced to flee from trolls in the past. I don’t want it to be handed to me because I made a good roll; I want it to be because I’ve personally learnt it through experience, or – in the context of the game – my character has travelled to a sage to discover how on Oerth we get to kill a troll!
And that adds to my player skill. Now, it can be entertaining to role-play a character that doesn’t have this prior knowledge but learning, again and again, the traits of common monsters doesn’t interest me. There are times when I approach D&D as a game, not a role-playing one, and learning about the abilities of monsters is one of those things I put in the “game” aspect. Your character isn’t making decisions for you, you’re making decisions for your character – and the line between player and character knowledge is something you should decide for yourself, probably in consultation with your group.
In-game, you can justify this knowledge for any number of reasons. Common lore the people of the world know. Uncommon lore that a bard visiting your town mentioned, and you remembered.
Now, part of what makes this gathering of knowledge interesting to me is due to the reuse of monsters. If I fight a skeleton and learn about what weapons best work against it, then I want to fight skeletons again so that knowledge comes into play. For me, a “good” D&D game has a core of monsters that you come across again and again, while also having unusual or unique monsters that you need to discover the way to overcome.
I’m happy with having monster types we never fight again! Part of the fun is discovering the best way of overcoming challenges about which we know nothing. But if every monster were like that, then it wouldn’t be as good for me.
I’m not that enamoured with trying to draw borders around my player knowledge and getting into discussions about what my character would or wouldn’t know.
It should be noted that learning about the monsters also depends significantly on the Dungeon Master giving proper feedback. If I slash the golem with an unmagical sword, I need to know I didn’t deal damage! If I hit the skeleton with a mace, I would like to know I did additional damage! If the DM doesn’t give this feedback, then you can’t learn anything.
There are excellent reasons why you might want to allow ability checks to learn about the combat capabilities of monsters. However, I find, as I play more, that I’d prefer to learn this through experience in play rather than through a roll.
That said, there are times when making a roll is preferable, and I’d like to determine when that is – and how this then translates to learning other lore about a creature. I would imagine my wizard who specialises in planar lore would know that Modrons come from the plane of Mechanus, for instance, even if I didn’t. It’s a fascinating issue to consider!
I handle this differently depending on the situation. For one, I use different checks depending on the monster. I’ll ask for Nature checks on humanoids, beasts, dragons, giants, and plants; but then Arcana checks on aberrations, constructs, elementals, fey, monstrosities, and oozes; and Religion checks on celestials, fiends, and undead.
Then, if its a creature that there’s just no way their character could know about, like if I dropped the Lord of Blades from Eberron into a Realms campaign for some reason and a player asked what was that, I would just say “You have no idea. It looks like a big metal golem covered in whirling blades,”
And I typically only ask for the check if a player asks me “What do I know about flumphs?” or what have you, and then I set the DC appropriate to whatever likelihood there is of their character knowing anything. I might give a dragonborn character advantage on a roll about giant bats, and I might not even ask a drow for a roll about driders, instead just telling the player. I think its reasonable to give a player information their character should reasonably know if they ask for it.
But usually if the player doesn’t ask, then they get to figure things out for themselves and learn as they go!
Furthermore, depending on the degree to which they exceed the DC I may give more or less information. The information is typically lore from the MM flavour text, damage resistances/immunities/vulnerabilities, and attack types/damage. I’ll never give actual ability scores, skill proficiencies, AC, or HP ever – primarily because I consider those as unique to individuals (even if we use the same stat block every time anyway) and there’s no way for a character to know them other than broad descriptions like “their hide is tough,” “they tend to not be very bright,” or “they’re very perceptive of the world around them.” But also there are some subclasses like Battle Master, Monster Slayer, and Mastermind, that explicitly give abilities that let a player get that very specific information, and I never like giving players the ability to do for free what some players at the table have a special class for or needed to take a feat for. That seems unfair.
The best description of a monster and its resistances/abilities during combat I’ve read was Poul Anderson’s “Three Hearts and Three Lions” where he describes combat with a troll. The book was the inspiration for both the first edition troll and Paladin class.
I’m only a player so I’ve experienced a few DMs now. Some just give the monster’s name. Some show a picture with or without a name. Any further info is based on skill rolls such as Arcana, nature, and sometimes history.
As a player, I’d prefer a description and a picture. Giving just a name is the worst. At a convention I attended recently, I heard the DM say we see six “lemurs.” So I thought we were fighting monkeys. It turned out he meant “lemures,” which are the lowest form of devil’s.
If none of the characters have any reason to know what it’s called, I tend not to use a monster’s name, just a descriptor. Discovering what it is has often been part of encountering it, unless they’ve had the presence of mind to do some research beforehand.
Merric, I love this. As a DM, I’m big on starting my PCs with as little knowledge of monsters as possible, so I re-skin like crazy. I like the middleground here, and the reminder to bring lore and RP into the world for the little things like monster knowledge more often. As always, thanks for your insightful thoughts!
Ben, you lay out the way I think I do things, the way I’ve aimed to do things. I don’t always do that stuff, but when I do, it always makes the game better.
I’ve taken to writing up recaps of sessions as I prep for the next session; it could be fun to start accumulating a library of monster knowledge for the party, even going so far as to add a little more than they might have explicitly witnessed, under the assumption that the PCs would chat about their battles some, putting some pieces together from shared knowledge. Of course, I’m an evil enough DM that I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to a little incorrect information if there were in-game things that happened that could have led them astray.