Use of All Weapons

One of the areas where the current group really falls down, and something that causes them a huge amount of unnecessary grief, is in the use of preparation to make their adventures easier.

By high level, PCs have access to some very powerful spells and abilities. When it comes to optimising their use of high-level attack spells, optimising AC, or getting some extra bonuses with their chosen weapons, the group are masters. However, they rarely, if ever, think of using divinations to find out about their foes beforehand. Divination, Commune and Scrying are all available to Clerics at this level, and can make a huge difference to adventures. Druids have admittedly fewer options, although they do get access to Scrying, while Wizards have a huge range of options, including Legend Lore, Scrying, Contact Other Plane and Vision.

But magic doesn't provide the only options: Knowledge skills can also be extremely useful, provided you've been investing the skill points as you go. Of the Knowledge skills, six provide information about particular monster types (Architecture, Geography, History and Nobility do not). It is not beyond the means of a party of four adventurers to max out all of those skills between them. Granted, this would probably hurt, since the Cleric would need to spend points on Knowledge(religion), when he also needs to spend points in Concentration and, probably, Spellcraft as well (and only gets two skill points by default). The Wizard can probably afford to max out Knowledge(arcana) and Knowledge(the planes) in addition to the essential Concentration and Spellcraft (due to high Intelligence). It will also probably hurt the Rogue to have to max out Knowledge(local) and one other Knowledge skill, for although the Rogue has lots of skill points, he also has lots of skills to buy. And that leaves the Fighter to pick up a Knowledge skill.

Of course, the Fighter would have to take the Knowledge as a cross-class skill (and likewise the Rogue with one of his Knowledges, since only Local is a class skill). And the Fighter also has a paltry two skill points per level. However, skills are really not the forte of the Fighter class. To be honest, he isn't really going to miss out on much by sacrificing even half of his skill points on this venture.

The use of libraries and the like to improve Knowledge skills is something that has been mentioned a couple of times in the game. It's worth noting that a library will give a circumstance bonus to a Knowledge check of up to +5 (for the best libraries), after a full day's study and consultation. However, this bonus does not allow the character to make a Knowledge check untrained, and cannot exceed the ranks that the character has in the skill in the first place. Regardless of how good the books are, unless the character knows enough to ask the right questions, he's really not going to get much benefit from them. That said, the use of a library would allow a character to take 20 on a Knowledge check, but at the cost of taking 20 days checking the library.

Finally, there is always the option of consulting a sage. Typically an Expert with the appropriate Knowledge skill maxed out (assume a Knowledge check of level+8), a sage will be able to find most answers in an appropriate time-frame. Of course, they are also expensive - hiring a sage probably costs 100 gp per level per day (or per question), plus 100 gp per point of library bonus per day. A really easy question requires a DC 10 Knowledge check, so can be handled by even a low-level sage most of the time. A 'normal' question requires a DC 15 check, so is within the range of a low-level sage as well. Harder questions require checks of DC 20 or 30, or even higher.

For knowledge about a monster, the difficulty of the check is 10+hit dice (so, 21 for a Beholder). However, the check only yields one piece of information at that level - each additional piece of information requires that the DC be beaten by 5 points. So, the costs quickly rack up, especially once the sage needs to start taking 20 on his checks. Better to try to have the knowledge to hand oneself.