Today I was catching up on a recent Dice Exploder episode about the chit-based inventory mechanic in Mausritter – which is a great system, which the hosts come up with some excellent extending ideas for – and found myself pausing at a statement near end. In talking about the fun of setting up little item chits to give players, Sam says:

What struck me about it was how little I agreed – indeed, how oppositely I felt. Which isn’t to say that Sam is wrong here in any capacity: I believe the report of his internal emotions and couldn’t possibly describe it as a negative way to look at games. The statement merely revealed how different we are in how we experience tabletop games as a hobby.

To me, going out to play a tabletop game and going to a party are two different activities that ask for rather different mindsets. Playing a game is about the satisfaction of skillfully engaging my brain: when I play a board game I’m trying to win, when I crawl a dungeon I’m trying to problem-solve, when I roleplay I’m trying to entertainingly embody a character. A party, on the other hand, is about the relief of turning my brain off: it’s an invitation of have a drink or two, talk with friends, do some dancing, and sing karaoke. I might end up doing some thinking along the way (and usually do, as I find that hard to stop) but it’s on my own terms.

Both of these pastimes bring joy, but along different angles. I start eyeing the exit if someone pulls out a card game at a party, because it means I’m going to be locked into performance mode for the next while, which isn’t what I came to do. It’s entirely likely that I’m among the outliers here, as party games have been popular as far back as we have records, but there’s a reason why they’re typically quite simple and short. Even so, I’m rarely interested in games that are too simple or too short: if I’m going to play a game I want to sink my teeth into it a little.

I imagine there’s a personality dynamic reason for this: potentially something about my natural trait of relative introversion. A number of years back there was a study that found, somewhat unintuitively, that extroverted people were more likely to play games with lots of action in them, clustered together with seeking games with social elements. This can be explained by the fact that although sociability is what people think of as the core element of extroversion, underlying that tendency is a relatively high level of excitement seeking, energy, and dominance. I can see how a more extroverted person would find games to be peanut butter to party chocolate, simply another way to fulfill those same desires.

For my own part, though, I see the game designer and party-thrower parts of myself as separate spheres. There’s a joke in there about adventuring parties, but I’ll leave coming up with that for the next time I’ve had a couple drinks.

Every time the topic of bleed in roleplaying games comes up, people polarize into one of two spectral ends:

A

Bleed is thrilling but dangerous, something games should be built to both foster (in the right ways) and guard against growing overwhelming in the wrong ways.

B

Bleed is a fairly prosaic phenomenon of emotional response to art, and in the case that it becomes a problem, it can generally be handled the same way you would other interpersonal issues.

We can pointedly dismiss the third possible perspective “bleed is fake and safety tools are useless” as uncivil and unconstructive – it’s not worth spending time on intolerant kneejerk reactions. Instead, I want to focus on the above two perspectives as equally good-faith responses to a meaningful topic of discussion. My thesis: both of them are true, but describe different kinds of people, and those two kinds of people tend to disbelieve that the other exists.

For those not already deep into the discourse, “bleed” is a term used in the context of roleplaying games to refer to emotions that “bleed” in or out between the imagined scenario of a game and reality: sometimes acting as a fictional character can carry that character’s emotions over into one’s real emotions. This phenomenon (sometimes divided into the positive, secondary type “catharsis”, but henceforth just called bleed for simplicity) can be exciting, delivering an aesthetic satisfaction similar to getting scared watching a horror movie or elated reading a romance novel. For some people, it’s the central reason they play roleplaying games, to experience powerful emotions under the controlled conditions of simulated situations. Yet, bleed can also manifest as inappropriate transfer of negative feelings about a character into negative feelings about the person playing them, the triggering of traumatic memories, and other stressful outcomes. Hence, the development of techniques (debriefing, X-Cards, and the like) to manage that kind of spillover.

Theory of Mind

However. At the risk of invoking the dread specter of GNS theory, it must be affirmed that, although great disagreement exists in how to delineate and subdivide the categories of desire, different people approach roleplaying games looking for fundamentally different kinds of enjoyment. In this particular case, we can reasonably assess that some people get into roleplaying games because they want to immerse themselves in the mindset of fictional characters to feel what they feel, while others look at their characters at a bit more of a remove, taking pleasure in them the way an author puppets a protagonist to tell an interesting story or a driver enjoys sitting behind the wheel of a car.

Advancing that a step further: different people’s brains respond to stimuli differently, and that affects their behavior. Not everyone gets the “runner’s high” from exercise, but it can be reasonably assessed that those who do experience that enjoyable mental state are more likely to exercise. We tend to seek those stimuli that our brains reward us for – if you like how a certain food tastes, you prefer to it eat over other foods less suited to your palate. Therefore, we can also say that the differing modes of enjoyment people seek in RPGs is based – at least partially – on which aspects of gameplay give them the most pleasure, or more generally the strongest aesthetic satisfaction.

To put it another way: the kind of person more invested in the concept of bleed is probably the kind of person who experiences bleed more intensely. Conversely, someone for whom bleed is a relatively academic subject probably doesn’t experience very much bleed innately. These aren’t RPG-specific tendencies: I hesitate to pin down definitive correlates due to my lack of psychological credentials, but in my (limited) experience bleed-sensitive people tend to be attracted to theater, possess facility at entering meditative states, find that rituals create distinct moods, and find live performances more engaging than recordings. Those less susceptible to bleed usually get less out of those things, because they don’t lose themselves in roles, nor do they get carried away with group “energy” to the same extent. I emphasize: neither type of person is wrong, and neither type of person is better than the other.

Bleed-sensitive people will tend to seek out styles of roleplaying game that generate engrossing emotional experiences: among other things, Nordic LARPs are crafted precisely to accomplish this goal. Meanwhile, a person relatively unsusceptible to bleed might play a game like that, think it was pretty fun, but not have the same kind of strong psychodramatic experience the former person did, and thus gravitate instead towards (for example) OSR/NSR play, which focuses on clever problem-solving as the primary fun of game. Likewise, this type of adventure game may bore the bleed-sensitive person due to its relatively low degree of immersion in character headspace.

All of these are generalities: individuals can show idiosyncratic blends of these traits, and by the general law of bell curves we can expect that most people fall somewhere in the middle rather than at the extremes. Even so, when discussion of bleed comes up, people tend to polarize into one camp or the other – and start talking past one another. It’s difficult for someone who barely experiences bleed to neutrally state “debriefing after a session doesn’t do anything for me” without it being interpreted as an unsympathetic, reactionary position, and feeling isolated when their accurate experience isn’t acceptable to express. On the other side of the aisle, bleed-sensitive people can grow frustrated when their concerns and desires receive indifferent dismissals or even implications of pathology.

Conclusions

You, the reader, may already be fully cognizant of this axis of psychological variance, and find all of this obvious. However, it is well worth saying as many times as necessary, when this divide regularly manifests in RPG community discourse. Distrust in one another’s motivations hampers meaningful discussion and fosters resentments. Arguments can flare up over even minor points of disputation, which end with no one feeling understood. It’s not healthy and it’s not productive. We ought to be able to collectively agree that different people require different frameworks to have fun without getting hurt, and address those specific sub-groups without stigma attached to any of them. We don’t have to leave anyone behind.

To put my own cards on the table: I don’t experience much bleed. I wholly accept and respect that other people do, and can happily play games (LARPs, dungeoncrawls, and otherwise) together with them, but I recognize that we’re experiencing those games (and, perhaps, the world in general) in profoundly distinct fashions. Certainly, I can get into character, and feel some of what my character feels, but “immersion” isn’t something I’m capable of sinking deeply into. I feel my own emotions as strongly as anyone else, but the throughput of vicarious ones is low. As a result, I’m resistant to the harmful excesses of bleed, but also locked out of its highest joys. It is of possible relevance that I sit somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but all conjectures about matters of the mind are murky. Honestly, I wish I could get caught up in acting, audience, and ceremony, that I might feel the ecstatic catharsis others seem to be able to, but alas, I am the person that I am – and the same goes for everyone else.

Whenever I enter a new campaign and start thinking about what kind of character to make, I ask the same question: “what characters are other people playing?”. Not only does the answer give me a sense of the tone the rest of the group is leaning towards, and give me an opportunity to link my backstory to someone else’s, but it also lets me know the composition of the party as a whole. Knowing what roles others already show a preference for lets me focus on filling one of the remaining gaps. By “role” here I mean both on the narrative level (there’s probably no need for two identity-questioning synthetics or world-weary veterans) as well as the mechanical level of hacker, face, and so on.

However, that last facet of the question often triggers a dismissive response if I let on about the purpose of it. “Oh, party balance? Nonsense, we don’t care about that here”. This perhaps indicates something about the kind of people I play with – I doubt that the members of an organized play group speedrunning a module are opposed to making sure someone plays the healer. However, I’ve encountered it enough times that I feel it warrants an elaboration on why I care about role allocation, and it’s not just “balance”.

The Needs Of The Many

Of course, how functional a party is at fulfilling its stated goals does matter to play. Lacking a keystone skill can force creative solutions outside of what you normally expect, but can also frustratingly limit the party’s ability to engage with the core aspects of what that setting is about. It’s perfectly okay to lack a healer (or a hacker, or a face) intentionally, but wandering into it through disconnected character creation can lead to the campaign dying early out of frustration because the party isn’t up to handling the basic business of the genre. However, that’s not what I’m interested in discussing here.

What I’m actually getting at isn’t about mechanical efficacy at all, it’s about interpersonal dynamics. Put all thoughts of game roles out of your mind, and think about story roles. When you read a book or watch a show about an ensemble cast, the main characters usually fit into some kind of pattern. This manifests most obviously in heist movies: typically you get an entire first-act sequence about putting together a team of people with specialized skills to slot into necessary functions for the job.

It shows up in ways far beyond skills, though. The health of a long-running series depends on characters developing just the right ratio of friction to coherence that reliably generates conflicts while still managing to resolve them in a satisfying but not boring fashion. To do so, writers give characters a range of personalities – optimistic, honorable, irritable, et cetera – to maximize how many kinds of situations they can get in to with one another while maintaining audience interest. They also give them contrasting likes, dislikes, social standings, political views,, and other traits to round out and delineate them. Characters also represent differing philosophical stances that contribute to the thematic purpose of the story: two people might take two sides of a spectrum to demonstrate how the author feels about those two angles of the issue.

I bring this up because all of that matters to tabletop RPGs, too! You want that varied juxtaposition of traits to create the kind of interesting situations that players get invested in. You see this type of advice aimed at GMs sometimes, but even then there’s a tendency to focus on individual NPCs rather than the social situations they’re enmeshed in. A character exists within the context of the audience’s (or player’s) perception: seeing essentially the same personality twice usually dulls its impact, especially in close proximity. This applies to groups of PCs just as much as it does NPCs.

Gestalt

So that is the thesis of this post: groups of characters (PC and NPC alike) can be – and, I would argue, ought to be – considered as wholes, as composite characters unto themselves. A group can have collective wants (a shared quest or goal is already normal to establish for the party in many games), needs (food, rest, repairs, as well as emotional needs of excitement and attachment), personalities (usually discussed in terms of the overall tone of the party but comprehensible as a personality unto itself), and internal contradictions (personified to a much greater extent than in non-composite characters) that make it exciting and memorable. When a group of NPCs or a party of PCs is crafted together, you remember them in aggregate instead of only their individual members.

Which means that it’s okay to have, say, everyone play a wizard! That’s a strong high concept right there, you’d always remember that game. The important thing is that everyone play a different kind of wizard. Even mechanically similar characters can remain strongly distinguished by their personalities. Think about tokusatsu (Power Rangers and the like) teams: their shared goals, methods, and aesthetics give them a strong identity as a group, but despite not seeing their faces half of the time, they remain individuals as well. You don’t have to go anywhere near that close to uniformity – indeed, the average RPG party is a collection of oddballs – but even a motley band can feel like it fits together.

In practical terms, what all of this means is that we can intentionally form interesting groups by deciding their gestalt personality and then defining the individual members as subsets of that. Pick a central idea or core emotion you want manifest in a group. Then, tune the characters to orbit around that theme: for example, if you want to address the sociopolitical turmoil going on in a city-state, represent it by a group of four characters who each hold a different opinion about what needs to be done, and build their other traits around those opinions. If the mood you want for a campaign is desperate struggle, then decide up front that the personality of the party is going to be “hungry and scared”, and make characters that all have their own ways to responding to that constant stress.

What follows is an overview of common patterns, arranged into types according to how many members comprise the group. The suggestions focus on the relationships between the members and how they fit together, so you supply the moods and themes you want them to cluster around. The next time you write up an encounter or form a party, note how many members it has and consider applying one of these models to it.

One

A group with a single member isn’t exactly a group in the way most people mean it, but taken in the context of larger assemblies, patterns still manifest. The question an individual implies is “why are they alone?”. The answer tells you something about them.

Too Strong To Need Help: A supercompetent agent, a hard-bitten survivor, an inordinately clever jack-of-all-trades, a monster that killed their companions, hivemind (many bodies, one personality), destined hero.

Can’t Get Help: An obsessive introvert, an emotionally callous lone wolf, an exile from their people, someone simply lost and afraid.

Two

These show up all the time. You can encode virtually any kind of polarity into a pair of people: emotional, philosophical, relational, functional, visual, or otherwise. Commonly, they take opposite sides and generate situations through that clash: an obvious example is the Straight Man/Funny Man (tsukkomi and boke in the manzai tradition) pairing of numerous comedy sketches. Alternatively, both members can present themselves in a near-identical way, producing a humorous or unsettling effect. A third option is pair of people who may represent opposing sides but are primarily defined by naturally binary social roles, such as married couples.

Opposite: Straight Man/Funny Man, Red oni/Blue oni, By-The-Book and Loose Cannon, Strong-but-foolish and Smart-but-weak, Skeptic and Believer, Noble and Rogue, Sensitive and Assertive, Apollonian/Dionysian, Type A/Type B.

Similar: Eerie twins, Mister X and Mister Y (typically polite henchman of some kind), Clones, Robots.

Couples: Loving husband and wife, squabbling brother and sister, master and apprentice, hero and sidekick, bumbling henchman (usually one lanky, the other squat), Heterosexual Life Partners (same as henchman).

Three

Trios tend to either present a trinity of types, or two ends of a spectrum plus someone representing a middle ground. The former can sometimes map to a tri-stat system, such three members who exemplify Mind, Body, and Soul respectively – party-as-character, indeed. The latter is evident in the classic Star Trek team of Kirk, Bones, and Spock: one espouses reason, another argues for emotion, and a third mediates between them. You can take many of the duos listed above and add an in-between member to turn them into a trio. A final option is taking any duo and adding a “third wheel”, an odd one out who doesn’t quite mesh with the relationship of the other two. Love triangles are a popular addition to any of these types.

Trinity: Id/Ego/Superego, Brains/Beauty/Brawn, Fighter/Mage/Thief, Mother/Maiden/Crone, Guitar/Bass/Drums.

Spectrum: Law/Balance/Chaos, Reason/Emotion/Unity, Masculine/Feminine/Androgyne, Child/Parent/Grandparent.

Four

With the lowest prime numbers out of the way, from here onward groups often consist of smaller assemblages fused together: a four-person team can easily be made out of two groups of two. However, naturally four-valued typologies are not at all uncommon: the four temperaments a classic example everyone knows of, and have spun off into all manner of more modern variation. You can also construct a team by extending the two-person binary method into a two-dimensional scheme: plot two perpendicular values and make a person to fit into each of the four resulting quadrants, as with the well-known (if imperfect) political compass or D&D alignment chart.

Fourfold Taxonomies: Humours (Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic, Sanguine), Blood Types (A, B, AB, O), Four Horseman (War, Famine, Death, and Conquest/Pestilence).

Two-Dimensional Spectra: Left/Right plus Authoritarian/Libertarian, Law/Chaos plus Good/Evil, Optimism/Pessimism plus Apathy/Action.

Five

Five person teams run up against the edge of fully coherent typologies: more often than not, they decompose into sub-groups of two plus three. Another common mode is taking a four-person group and adding an odd-one-out: this can be a normal person in a group of bizarre characters, a balanced middle-ground of four extremes, or something that transcends the standard four. However, true, holistic sets of five exist, such as the Big Five model of personality typing.

Three Plus Two: Core trio of friends plus two newcomers, often a rookie and veteran.

Four Plus One: Four Temperaments plus Supine/Leukine, Four Elements plus Aether/Spirit/Void, Four Aliens/Robots/Mutants plus one Human.

True Quintet: Big Five (Open, Conscientious, Extraverted, Agreeable, Neurotic), Wuxing (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water).

Six Or More

Past six, tightly bound examples diminish: you can usually break groups down into smaller component groups. In fact, it may be useful to think of them in terms of a layered structure: a nine-person group can be made up of three sets of trios, the three of which correspond to a trio structure when contrasted with the other sets. You can always, however, intentionally form arbitrarily large groups by taking something with a certain number of items (the Seven Deadly Sins are popular) and fitting members into each slot. Listed below is a brief survey of possibilities.

Six: HEXACO (Honesty, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness).

Seven: Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Virtues, Seven Liberal Arts (trivium plus quadrivium), Colors of the Rainbow.

Eight: Eightfold Path.

Nine: Enneagram, D&D Alignments (full possibility set).

Sixteen: Myers-Briggs Personality Types (if you must).

Closing Thoughts

I’ve described these patterns in a general fashion convenient for writing up groups of NPCs, but I want to strongly assert their functionality for PC parties as well, as this use is more likely to fall by the wayside as institutional momentum takes over when starting a new campaign. The next time you form a party, pick an overarching party personality and use the models above to give each player’s character a different subset of that shared theme to make their own. You may find it eases option paralysis and more reliably produces fun social dynamics.

[Featured Image: Ruvim Matskin, Mechanics, 1973]

I have a confession to make: I like rolling knowledge checks. It’s bad game design, I know! The general arc of the hobby for the last 15 years or so has aimed  towards removing randomness from anything that gives players information, knowledge and perception checks most of all. It started with Gumshoe back in 2007, replacing all investigative rolls with the GM simply giving information to players with correct skills, and continues in recent games like His Majesty the Worm giving you a refreshing pool of points to “bid lore” with rather than getting any dice (or in that case, cards) involved.

I absolutely agree with the principle, too. It’s one thing to create uncertainty about whether or not you manage to shrug off a spell or sneak past a guard, but quite another to hide potentially crucial intel from players. Making meaningful choices constitutes the lion’s share of what a TTRPG is about, and one cannot make meaningful choices without sufficient information. Mystery scenarios, in particular, completely fall apart if the PCs miss clues, prompting the Gumshoe solution in the first place. Even that primary issue aside, the GM did all that prep, they deserve a chance to show off all the neat details and interesting backstories written in their notes.

However. From my earliest days playing RPGs, I’ve made a career out of knowing things. I’ve created two separate characters (one in d20 Star Wars and one in D&D 3.5) who maxed Int and grabbed basically every skill on the list. I don’t care nearly as much about being the person with the highest DPR as much as being the person who gets to raise their hand when the GM asks if anyone has a particular knowledge skill. Yes, that function still holds entirely in the Gumshoe model, and it remains satisfying even without a roll. However, it feels odd to remove uncertainty from knowing things and not from every other kind of skill in the game. It leaves intellectual abilities feeling like an afterthought, and makes the player wonder if anything would have actually turned out differently if they hadn’t invested character building resources into that history degree – would the GM have just given out that information anyways to move the plot along?

Even though it worked in my favor, the relative cheapness of buying up the equivalent of an advanced degree in nearly all forms of study gave the off-putting sense that the game authors didn’t respect that character archetype as much as they did someone who could stab people very slightly more accurately. Certainly, stabbing is a core part of the standard TTRPG experience, but if people want to pay lip service to exploration as one of the three pillars of their elfgames, then the rules ought to reflect that. Being an adventurous archaeologist, a hardboiled detective, or a tactical genius is fun, none of those things are so far outside of the expectations of play as to not be worth modeling with mechanics.

So as bad practice as it is, I must admit I kind of enjoy getting to pull out my huge positive modifier for appraising art or deciphering a dead language. It feels good in the same way that having a big to-hit or damage value is for other people. I want to live the fantasy of being the Doctor (of Who) and going around already recognizing (and having strong opinions about) every new place, obscure custom, and rare creature the party meets.

What Is To Be Done

How to thread that needle? The first, simplest option is rectifying the rest of the system not to use dice as well, bringing it into congruity – this option I’ve explored a great deal in the past, and is too large a subject to cover in a single post. So instead, let us think about how to employ randomness in knowledge skills without recreating the problem of failing to provide crucial information.

A fairly obvious solution presents itself immediately: you get most information simply by having a relevant skill, but you can make a check to get extra, more secret information. Gumshoe does something close to this (albeit with currency instead of dice) and it’s similar to the Landmark, Hidden, Secret model of dungeon design. It’s a start, but it’s hard to define what information is special enough to warrant a roll: you don’t want a GM to feel the need to carve out some information they might have otherwise provided just to make sure there’s a reward for making a check. Additionally, the secret information ought to provide some pertinent benefit to justify sinking points into getting a higher percentage chance of learning it, which is extremely case-by-case and often nontrivial to engineer.

Another way is making intelligence-type checks into a sort of escape valve for when you don’t have an appropriate skill, or no skill directly applies. I’m particularly fond of the rule in Dolmenwood where, if you spend an hour smoking some good pipeweed while mulling over and discussing how to deal with a situation (in-character of course, although one could, strictly speaking, do a LARP version), you can make a roll to force the GM to give you a hint about what to do. This rule has a lot of character to it, it’s both genre appropriate and almost believable from a realism perspective – it’s also exceedingly funny, even to a non-smoker like me. That’s just one application, though. It’s a piece of the puzzle but not the solution on its own.

Another very easy drop-in mechanic is allowing players to make knowledge skill checks to generate one-time advantage against a relevant target: make a Nature check targeting a snarling beast facing the party down, and the fighter gets a reroll the next time they attack it – or when attempt to calm it down with an offer of rations. This makes utility-focused characters much more useful in combat situations, as well as pretty much any situation.

I think that concept can go further, though. The following system is one that I’ve implemented in various stages of refinement over multiple campaigns, streamlined into a generally understandable common parlance. I won’t argue that it’s wholly groundbreaking, given that the fundamental components of it came from other games I admire, but it’s a synthesis worth presenting in a distilled format all the same.

Study

You automatically know any information about things you encounter, as long as you have a relevant skill. Also, as a camp action, you can study a topic – a person, place, organization, object, event, or anything else relatively narrow in scope – to learn a secret about it. To do so, you must have a substantial source of information about the subject: having the thing itself on hand always works, but any firsthand observation or reliable testimony fulfills the requirement, including a report from a spy, a textbook, blueprints, or the aid of an expert. Make an Intelligence (or equivalent) check: if you succeed, you gain Secret: [Topic]. Failures or mixed successes may provoke wasted time or enemies finding evidence of your party, depending on the system.

A secret is like an item but doesn’t weigh anything or take up inventory space. At any time, you can spend a secret to declare one fact about its topic, temporarily speaking about that aspect of the game world with the authority normally reserved for the GM. A fact is a single, concise sentence describing something about the topic. Although it can be crucial in the current situation, it cannot be overly far-reaching in scope, nor can it contradict anything previously established unless you provide a convincing explanation for how the apparent nature of things was misleading. If you’re playing a game with treasure-hunting as a focus, disallow placing magic items and other valuables into rooms and chests.

The first time you or an ally uses the new fact to their benefit, they gain advantage on a relevant check. It can also make things happen that obviate needing to make a check at all. The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible applications. For a less free-form variation, tie specific applications to relevant skills and classes.

• Person: Reveal something they’re very fond or afraid of to use as leverage. Use knowledge of their daily schedule to declare that they walk into the room just now. Disclose a crime or scandal they were a part of and have been trying to hide.
• Place: Recall a map showing a hidden room, trap, entrance, or shortcut. Point out a spot where a well-placed charge could bring the whole building down. Find a useful piece of equipment stashed in a drawer.
• Thing: Say that you’ve crammed yourself on the basics of the subject, and can act as though you have a skill for the rest of the day. Reveal an exploitable weakness in a suit of armor, a monster’s physiology, or a program’s security.

The fact that this action briefly puts narrative authority in the hands of someone other than the GM may rub those of a more traditional mindset the wrong way. Yet, I’ve used it for years in games that otherwise follow an entirely standard player/GM split, with minimal friction. The big difference between this and, say, spending a Fate point to add a detail to a scene, is that it’s not based on spending metacurrency from an top-down authorial perspective, it’s simply an easy abstraction of in-universe research and planning that the PCs are spending time and resources on. In my experience, players loved getting to declare “I’ve looked over the schematics, and there’s a secret passage right here” to skip past a troublesome room; it rewarded them for advance scouting and research (something often not worth doing in RPGs) and made their character seem clever. You could even find secrets already in the world (such as discovering a naturalist’s journal in a locked drawer), letting you treat knowledge as a type of treasure with real mechanical value to players.

This is by no means the only way of handling knowledge checks, but it’s one I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of. It’s a powerful and flexible enough ability that you could write a scholar-type class (call it the Lorekeeper, Sage, or Genius) based around entirely around using it and still be able to keep up with many spellcasters – it’s already preparation based, much like a wizard. It fulfills the fantasy of competence for academia as much as most systems do for warfare. I think nerds ought to get the spotlight sometimes, too.