AnthonyHJ's page

I always understood Sense Motive to be the instinct which tells you that someone is trying to lie to you combined with a dose of common sense. Not at all a RAW thing, but...

When you suspect someone, you analyse the person first and then the statement, sometimes the other way around. If they won't meet your eyes or keep blinking or touching their face / hair, a wise person will suspect that they are lying. Similarly, if the thing they are saying makes no sense, you will question it.

Of course, most DMs I have ever met answer answer a Sense Motive check with one of the two following responses.

"He is being completely honest with you, as far as you can tell."
"You are convinced that he believes what he is saying."

In those cases, the Sense Motive covers the body language and it is up to player wisdom (never a good thing, in my experience) to work out if the statement is likely to be true.

I think we are all ignoring the more pressing question of why a player is that scared of sunder attempts against a ranged weapon. I mean, I lose more weapons doing stupid things (like attacking caryatids with a bladed weapon) than to sunder-attempts.

A bow is just a fragile bit of wood on some level, but a melee character ten feet in front of you (threatening five feet in all directions) will do more to protect your bow from sundering than finding an exotic material to make it from. Even if you do get hit, anything under 10 points of damage (5 hardness + 5 hp, magic items needing another 12 points of damage per +1) only leaves it broken, which can be fixed by any mage with the Mending cantrip.

As mentioned, remember that CMD is your friend; a ranger will usually have good BAB and a good score in both Dex and Str, so your CMD should be pretty good. Anything that boosts your Dex boosts your CMD too, so that's two reasons you have to keep Dex high.

Generally though, if you are being attacked by too many enemies who would use the sunder action with a less than 50% chance of success rather than just trying to hurt you, you have angered the DM.

For what it's worth, Enlarge Person is on the Magus list and gives the same increase in weapon size. I think the two spells might even stack...

Personally, were I the DM, I'd look at it this way; a large-sized creature would be doing 2d6 with a longsword and could use Perfect Strike, so it's hardly metagaming to use a spell (Enlarge Person or Leaden Blades) to achieve the same effect.

If in doubt, ask your DM whether they would allow it. If you are the DM, think about whether you feel it unbalances the player; it uses up two resources (arcane pool and a spell-slot) to achieve, so it's not something they can keep doing, and it doesn't even offer double their average damage. When you add in the strength-bonus, it's even less of a significant boost.

I have the guards perform aimed shots on the PCs. They target them in the knee.

Isn't that the normal recruitment method?

Since my day-job involves designing game-mechanics (video games), I'd like to weigh in on this one by looking at the main purpose of those three metamagic feats and the issues they are (probably) meant to counter.

Still spell allows a mage to cast a spell when they are unable to move their arms or body, such as when tied up or buried up to their neck in sand. This seems to be the primary purpose of the feat.

Silent spell allows a mage to cast when they cannot speak, such as when they are silenced or gagged. In many cases, they may also be unable to move their body (such as Hold Person or bound and gagged) and need both of these feats. This seems to be the primary purpose of the feat.

Eschew materials allows a mage to cast when they don't have access to their normal (cheap) spell-materials. Stuck in a prison cell, they are likely to need this feat. When they have emptied their spell-component pouches, they will need this feat. This is the purpose of the feat.

As to using all three together... Anyone who thought to bind and gag a mage probably knows enough to take away their spell-component pouches too. This makes a perfectly-normal case for using all three together.

Since there are strong justifications for using the three feats together and in pairs, I don't see that 'stealth casting' adds anything to the game except unbalancing the counter-spell rules.

Also, I second the idea that there will be other visible signs of spell-casting going on; magic in pathfinder is tearing at the walls of reality to create effects which break the normal laws of physics, so glowing lights, strange smells and odd noises would be quite likely.

Finally, the rules say nothing about any of these feats making a spellcraft check harder. Normally, the rules will tell you if a certain mechanic affects another one in this way - look at how they explicitly tell you that you cannot hide while holding an uncovered light-source, even though it should be obvious - and so I would rule that the feats are designed to allow spell-casting under difficult circumstances, not to make it invisible. That is, until we get some errata from the development team...

I noticed the key a couple of weeks ago while staring at the DM's screen (which has all the iconics on the player-side) and wondered about it. I assumed it was explained somewhere in the deep lore about her background.