Magical Knack and the finer points of levels


Advice

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Greetings -- my apologies if answers to my question are posted elsewhere -- I've had no luck finding them; as an Urban Barbarian, I do know how to use Google, but I sometimes get frustrated and hack my laptop in two. This is costing me a lot of gold.

I'm enjoying the idea of multiclassing with the new Unchained Rogue and spellcasters, so this is coming up for my half-elf mostly rogue w/bit of witch, as well as my tengu cleric w/bit of rogue.

For regular spells, it's fairly simple how Magical Knack affects a character. For instance:
rogue 3 / witch 1 with "Magical Knack (witch)"
could cast a "cure light wounds" as Caster Level 3, assuming I got the basics right.
However she could not cast a 2nd level spell that a witch might get due to being level 3 outright.

However, there are a lot of murkier wordings in classes and magical abilities... mostly, my questions arise when the wording in a magical ability is something like,
"the witch's level" or "the cleric's level".
It's probably not total hit dice in these cases (that should be written as "character level", I think.)
Yet I cannot find clarification on whether Caster Level precisely equals the matching Class's Level...

Example 1:
Witch Hex (Supernatural Ability): "Slumber"
"...If the save fails, the creature falls asleep for a number of rounds equal to the witch's level..."
Would my witch's slumber last for 1 round, or 3 rounds?

Example 2:
Suppose my tengu has 3 levels Cleric, 1 level Unchained Rogue, Magical Knack, and
Air Domain (as a dedicated follower of Ylimancha) gives:
Granted Cleric Power (Spell-like Ability) "Lightning Arc"
"...deals 1d6 damage plus 1 for every 2 cleric levels you possess..."
So... 1d6+1, or 1d6+2 ?

Please note that both cases use the language of (class) level...
One case is Su, one case is Sp. In many other instances I've noted that Sp abilities follow the rules for Spells more than Su abilities, at least re. provoking etc.

Thank you all for your thoughts -- special thanks for official-decision-sorts-of-thoughts that I can talk about with local PFS GMs!


Witch Hex (Supernatural Ability): "Slumber"
"...If the save fails, the creature falls asleep for a number of rounds equal to the witch's level..."
Would my witch's slumber last for 1 round, or 3 rounds?

1

You are a first level witch. you didn't become a second level witch just by getting a level boost just to one spell.

1d6. plus one half rounds down to 0. Its not a spell so you don't have magical knack with it.


Class abilities that refer to your level always mean your level in that class unless otherwise specified. Character level means your total levels, plus racial HD if any. Caster level pretty much only matters for spells, and can be modified by a variety of traits and feats.

Sovereign Court

There's several different levels to keep track of; the most common are:

- caster level
- class level: the levels you have in any given class
- character level: the sum of your class levels of all your classes (plus racial HD, if applicable)

These are all different things. Magical knack only raises caster level.

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