Protectors of Golarion (Wrath of the Righteous AP)

Game Master Sensen

I just realized that I never responded to GM’s post about the holy water. I’ll buy 2 (bringing my total to 4), and ‘borrow’ 4 more, to be returned if I don’t use them (so, I have 8 total, currently).

Sounds good to me, Azira.

The dice roller was most unkind this time around.

I'd like to bring up three things:

First: well that sucks :)

Secondly: merixia has heroism, which *should* grant her another +2.

Third: mythic surge is a thing here. She could, if she wanted, spend 1 mp after rolling the check to add 1d6 to her check. Surge states that it can be used retroactively after knowing what the result would be, so she would know she is about to fail it and what happens when deciding what to do. That would give it a 50% chance to beat the perception and avoid the fight, though it's unclear if in tabletop we are supposed to know by how much we fail it.

All good points. I totally forgot about Heroism boosting the skill check, so she should be at 22. And yes, I'll say that she can mythic surge for this, since, well, I forgot about it. xD

Yeah, the dice roller interfered with what could have been a very clean plan. :(

Verene's surprise round action can certainly be undone if Merixia chooses to Mythic Surge and makes it, I just figured I should get a post up now in case we proceed with the fight.

I've been holding off to see what Merixia's chooses to do. Thesius is confused so I believe I need to roll on the chart if we do go into combat.

That sounds reasonable to me to both of those things.

I’m also waiting to see if Meri chooses to (and succeeds at) avoiding combat.

Oops, I totally missed that Planes check. Verene can't fail it though, with her base modifier of +15 and another +4 for the combined effects of heightened awareness and tears to wine. So everyone can read that spoiler if they like.

Yay, we get to avoid combat! This one at least.

@GM: If Merixia whispers, can she cast muffle sound without the vescavors hearing?

Sweet! Great rolling :)

@Everyone How should we handle Mythic Surge going forward? It's potentially very useful/powerful like here, especially since as written it can be done retroactively, but I recognize that it can also break progression in a way. Should there be some system where we give Wolrwound GM permission to roll it for us on specified critical checks if we were to barely fail them?

That is a good question - I'm happy to do mythic surge for you folks, but I don't want to jump the gun on it.

For the muffle sound question, I don't think so - that's why Silent Spell is a feat.

If Merixia finds it important to cast the spell, it would not be hard for her to pull the team back into the prior room since we're actively working to stay together.

That is also true.

Elliot: I'd be fine with that, but I think people won't remember and sometimes won't know in advance to specify (especially for saving throws that often don't happen with warning or on our turns.)

GM: as far as I'm concerned, if Verene ever fails a d20 roll in a case where, in your judgment, you think a reasonable player would use Mythic Surge, please feel free to just roll it for her and I'll mark the mythic power expended.

Also, could I get a ruling on this question please?

P.S. If Merixia chooses to cast muffle sound, don't include Verene as one of the targets, please.

Oh, shoot, sorry. Uh... I'd say that lacking any further context, I'm leaning towards "no." Some level of balancing its significantly powerful spontaneous spellcasting, perhaps? Does anyone else have any opinions?

This is an odd question perhaps, but can any knowledge check on vescator queens help us to find them? Like, if they use scents/pheromones to control the swarm like bee/ant queens, can we use scent to locate them or such?

Uh... that's an excellent question. I can't think of any hints that would make sense, I'm afraid.

Wild Arcana is strong, but I don't think being able to use it for the few spells that were always intended to be swift/immediate actions is unreasonable. The big problem with the original wording was that you could routinely cast two standard-action or longer spells per round without the use of Quicken Spell. It's currently still possible by the wording of the proposed errata to cast things like summon monster spells (1 full round cast time) and scrying (1 hour cast time) as a standard action. Allowing Wild Arcana to work with swift/immediate action spells like feather fall (which it would have before the errata, and clearly just wasn't a use case considered by the person writing the errata) is definitely not more powerful than that.

If it were up to me, I would have written the errata to say that activating Wild Arcana is a free action and then actually casting the spell you choose is the same kind of action as the spell would otherwise cost. I would leave all the other text of the ability in place. That way, feather fall is castable, but summon monster takes a full round. If you actually have the Quicken Spell metamagic feat, you can choose to apply it to a lower-level spell than your max spell level, one that you didn't prepare it with that morning, but you still can't cast an essentially Quickened version of a max-level spell you don't know when you don't have the metamagic feat.

Overall, I think this would decrease the power of the ability, because there are more use cases where decreasing a longer spell to a standard action is good than there are cases where you want to be able to cast a spell that would usually be less than a standard action. What would you all think of this change?

That would work for me, verene. Actually, it might be a buff for elliot, as i'm not sure if wild arcana would work in conjunction with spell combat when used as its own standard action. It probably should RAI but might not per RAW as spell combat is a full round action that allows casting spell alongside making a melee attack. Whereas wild arcana seems to count as a seperate standard action that may or may not be overriden by the spell combat clause of allowing a spell to be cast as part of that full round.

Really? I would think it would work for standard-action spells even with the errata as written.

I guess you're right that it wouldn't if using Wild Arcana is considered its own kind of standard action separate from casting a spell, and thus wouldn't be compatible with the full-round action of Spell Combat, which combines "all of his attacks with a melee weapon at a -2 penalty" with "cast any spell from the magus spell list with a casting time of 1 standard action."

But that seems like a sort of unintuitive interpretation. Since as you point out, what you're doing with the standard action of Wild Arcana is exactly casting a spell from the magus spell list, with a casting time of 1 standard action.

As I understand it, Elliot is right about the RAW on wild arcana and spell combat, for exactly the reason he gave (spell combat is a special full round action that allows for casting a spell, not for activating a mythic power).

Regarding wild arcana more broadly… I never want to vote against something that benefits my allies (especially when I have a simple build that easily benefits from straightforward abilities and others are trying to navigate more complex classes/builds), but as someone who is running a mythic campaign right now I feel like I should really point out that wild arcana (even with the errata that it takes a standard action) is arguably the best mythical ablility there is. Arcane magic is the most potent tool in the game (and often the most potent weapon too), and the one real check on that power is the fact that you won’t always have the exact spell you need known/memorized. Wild arcana almost completely removes that and the restriction to only applying to spells with a specific casting time is the only thing that keeps it from being completely gone. I do allow the casters to use it for spells with a shorter caster time (due to a standing rule in my games that you can always take a shorter action as a longer action- eg a swift as a move action, or a move as a standard), but I make it still take a standard action to use wild arcana. Even with those restrictions every single player who can use arcane magic at all has either chosen the archmage path or taken the dual path feat to add archmage, specifically to take wild arcana.

As a player, I’d love for Elliot and Verene (and presumably Merixia, since the hierophant path ability is so similar) to be able to just cast any spell any time, but as a fellow GM it has been my experience that making wild arcana even less restricted would probably be a bad idea. YMMV?

Minor detail @aganhei, Elliot took the muffle sound buff from meri so his stealth should be +30 instead of +26. If he were to fail tbe stealth check by a little im fine with you using an mp point to try and make it succeed.

On the wild arcana bit, i dont particularly mind either way. It would be nice if Elliot could make his basic attack and cast wild arcana in the same full round action, which might be argued to be balanced as his magus spellist is weaker than a full caster's because he should be able to add a physical attack to each cast. However, i don't expect that to come up often in actual play as for one he tries to save mp for mythic arcane strike and spells and for two he would prefer not to be in melee when he needs to cast the spells he doesn't typically prepare.

I might be misunderstanding what you said Elliot, but I do believe that you can still use spellstrike to deliver a touch attack spell you cast with wild arcana through your normal weapon attack. So, you couldn’t use spell combat to full attack, use wild arcana, and deliver the WA spell with a bonus weapon attack, but you could just use WA to cast any touch spell on your list and then get 1 free weapon attack to deliver it. At least, that’s how RAW looks to me- obviously Worldwound GM gets to decide how it works here.

From my understanding, yes, that way you can get exactly one weapon attack, rather than the normal number of weapon attacks you would have in a full attack plus one. Assuming you are casting a touch spell and using spellstrike to deliver it. It works for when you need to cross distance to an enemy first or very maybe if it is the start of a large fight. Otherwise that should very rarely be used especially since we're now almost entering the level range where haste and similar effects become oftenly used buffs and iteratibes become a thing for nonmartials. .

I'm inclined to say that you can cast spells like feather fall using Wild Arcana, but not that it would reduce any other spells it would allow you to cast to standard actions. I think that it might also clash with spell combat, but if people object to that, I can be flexible.

To be fair, you all seem to have a decent damage output without it.

Fair, like i said, i dont really mind either way. Raw spell combat with wild arcana doesn't work; there is 3rd party support specifically to fix that for mythic magi as semi proof.

I actually looked at the errata text again and Azira is right. Unlike the original, it does specify that the spell to be cast has to be one that is normally castable in a standard action or less, so summon spells etc. wouldn't work. My mistake.

Just as a heads up, this month is going to be insane at school. I have so much work to do. T_T So if I take a while to respond, just bot me. I'll probably have fried my brain doing statistics.

Good luck, Merixia!

Yes, good luck!

Same! Good luck Meri.

On where to go, it feels like we have no real method to determine where we are supposed to go or find the queen. As such every intersection is essentially a coin toss. I rolled east on a random roll (btw reading back the post it seems there are two paths going north?). Let's just try that, keep things moving and see what happens? I don't mind the GM fast forwarding intersections if we have no information to really base decisions on.

Good luck Merixia! I'll be playing some catch up later today. Long weekend and being on-call is causing some stress. Thankfully it will be done for the rest of the year after next Monday.

On second thought, is dismissing a spell as noisy as casting a spell? As if that is the case Elliot would instead suggest to attack despite the 20% spellfail chance.

Apparently you have to speak words of dismissal in order to dismiss a spell. Boooo. I don't want to risk 20% spell failure, though. Especially if we're still planning to reach Drezen today. Fellow spellcasters, what do you think?

Alternatively... muffle sound is 1 min/level. How much time is left on it?

If we wait until muffle sound is gone, so is invisibility sphere, since that was cast at least a minute or two before muffle sound. (300 feet before reaching hole, then we snuck to the hole, descended, got into the first big cavern, and went back one room to cast the spell.) So, it's your choice whether to start by dismissing the spell, Merixia. At a minimum, I would think the standard action with verbal component to dismiss could be your surprise round action. Verene will delay until just after Merixia, cast haste, and then everyone else can take their surprise round actions. Sound good?

At the moment, muffle sound still has 7-ish minutes left, I think? I forget if she spontaneously cast it, and if she did, whether or not that increases effective CL. If it does, it's 7 or so minutes left, which is, as Verene says, a bit longer than your invisibility sphere.

Looks like the gauntlet is thrown! Let's hope this works out as Elliot without his defensive buffs is sorta squishy.

By the way, I wanted to ask just in case: according to an F.a.q. i read, it should be possible to use a swift action in a surprise round, as you can use free actions during a surprise round and a swift action can be used whenever a free action is used, to a max of one per turn. For Elliot, this mostly matters in that he is able to use one of his two sword buffs before we go into actual rounds.

That seems reasonable to me, Elliot. I'll get a post up shortly.

uh-oh, I better get over to gameplay and see what happened... I hoped we moved to within a single move of the queen before attacking!

edit: huzzah!

Huzzah! Thesius, I think you also get a second attack on turn 1 due to haste and only using a 5-foot step to move.

You would be correct. Thanks for the reminder. I threw it on there really quickly. I'll be catch up more later tonight.

I think Azira gets a third attack at level 6 with haste and iterative too, right?

That's a lot of rolls and debuff effects on Elliot's last turn, first time I actually get to use his preferred bread and butter spell in spell combat!

I realize there's probably a decent chance the vescavor queen has spell resistance; if it matters Elliot rolls at +12 vs SR, roll twice take better. I could roll it here to save the GM the effort if it's relevant.

Oh my gosh, I forgot my haste attack! Thank you, Elliot.

Elliot's caster level checks to overcome SR are +12 against anything? How are you getting that high, Elliot?

+6 normal, +2 crusading magic aasimar racial trait.

I would say riftwarden orphan adds the remaining 4, but upon rereading that is only against demons. So the actual number should be +8 roll twice unless it is a demon, in which case it's +12,×2. Good catch.

Ah, I see, the Crusading Magic racial trait. That's a good trait. Although the standard racial traits it replaces are also good, so that's fair.

Yeah, especially losing the skilled racial bonus hurts, but still getting the aasimar resistances and essentially a bonus feat of sorts is pretty good. Also getting a flat +2 knowledge planes added on top will help with piercing demon resistance through the studied spell metamagic so the overall package is still solid game-mechanically.