Quote Originally Posted by Lemmy View Post
Wouldn't a Knowledge check just tell you about the race and/or society of a character? I wouldn't allow it to give character-specific information unless he's some sort of notable, well-known individual such as a noble or famous general.
To my knowledge there's nothing that distinguishes the results you get from Knowledge. If you make a Knowledge check about a creature with a template, you get the info about the creature + the template. Knowledge checks scale with the CR of the individual, so properly IDing a higher level humanoid is harder.

I've always taken it to be like in certain heroic fantasy things where you've got that one guy that picks the otherwise normal looking guy out as being the supreme badass. Like in Rurouni Kenshin, where the mob boss calls down all of his men and apologizes to Kenshin, even though Kenshin doesn't really do much of anything...because to Mob boss noticed certain signs that Kenshin was in no danger from the entire room of them (in the anime he says he has the eyes of a battousai or something), but in D&D terms the boss made his Knowledge: Local check and understands not to muck with Kenshin.