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Water elementals have this ability:

The elemental’s touch puts out non-magical flames of Large size or smaller. The creature can dispel magical fire it touches as dispel magic (caster level equals elemental’s HD).

So it's not unreasonable that it could just move into a square to extinguish it, or maybe even 4 squares at once. The caster would need to know aquan in order to ask it to do that, though.

No. There are no rules at all for oracles losing their powers.

I don't think there's a 100% complete list anywhere, but there's various efforts to do so.

One of the more recent ones I've seen is this map

To answer your second question, they should be pleased to hear that more people are gaming and having a good time. If you reach out to Venture Officers they'll try to help you out as much as they can, but it's not at all necessary that they be directly involved in every single location.

I'm failing to see how this would matter. Is your GM telling you when it's your turn(or various other things that typically happen once initiative is rolled) before asking for initiative? Because even if the GM doesn't say "Roll Initiative" he's still going to have to tell people it's their turn, etc.

The way you're talking I feel like you're misundertanding something:

Neither spell combat nor spellstrike grant an extra attack of any kind. Casting a spell with a range of touch grants a melee touch attack as a free action on that round. Spellstrike allows a magus to replace that melee touch attack with a weapon attack.

I strongly recommend reading the guide that KingOfAnything linked to. It's a great explanation of how the Magus works.

Really good stuff in here. Thanks!

Quote:

Spell-like abilities are much less noticeable. If someone goes through the effort and gets Charm Person as an SLA with Minor Spell Expertise or Spell Hex, I'll let them cast it without being noticed.

I did not know that SLA's didn't involve all that glow stuff. That's pretty cool.

SLAs in general work like spells except they don't have verbal, somatic or material components. That's it. So they're still just as identifiable as a silent, still, eschew materialed spell.

That said, your original premise is baffling to me. Why would spells become ineffective just because the target knows you're casting a spell?

Person A casts suggestion on Person B. B sees this happening. One of two things happens:
- Person B fails the will save. They get the brilliant idea of following whatever the suggestion was. It doesn't matter that they saw A casting a spell.
- B passes the will save. They get a funny feeling right after noticing A casting a spell. They react accordingly.

been about six months sense this was up visible...

I'd be interested in any PFS legal ideas for giving a PC the Scent ability. Especially if it's an Alchemical item...

I know:

a) Alter Self (2nd level spell) to something like Bugbear.

b) Hounds blood - but that mainly works for Gnomes...

c) Crypt Breaker Alchemist Draught.

d) 1/2 Orc alternate racial trait.

??? any others???

Rhinarium paste, although it's unfortunately only legal for ratfolk PCs.

You are remembering correctly you can find the rules in the glossary of the CRB. However, there's no rule like that for Sickened and Nauseated.

Fatigued to Exhausted:

Fatigued: A fatigued character can neither run nor charge and takes a –2 penalty to Strength and Dexterity. Doing anything that would normally cause fatigue causes the fatigued character to become exhausted. After 8 hours of complete rest, fatigued characters are no longer fatigued.

Source

Fear Effects:

Becoming Even More Fearful: Fear effects are cumulative. A shaken character who is made shaken again becomes frightened, and a shaken character who is made frightened becomes panicked instead. A frightened character who is made shaken or frightened becomes panicked instead.

Source

1. They are aware something just happened.

Succeeding on a Saving Throw: A creature that successfully saves against a spell that has no obvious physical effects feels a hostile force or a tingle, but cannot deduce the exact nature of the attack. Likewise, if a creature's saving throw succeeds against a targeted spell, you sense that the spell has failed. You do not sense when creatures succeed on saves against effect and area spells.

Source

2. There's not specifically a rule for this but:

Verbal (V): A verbal component is a spoken incantation. To provide a verbal component, you must be able to speak in a strong voice. A silence spell or a gag spoils the incantation (and thus the spell). A spellcaster who has been deafened has a 20% chance of spoiling any spell with a verbal component that he tries to cast.

Source

Hearing the sound of conversation is a DC 0, which you can find on the table of perception DCs in the perception skill description along with any modifiers you may want to apply.

3. No, the wording indicating that a rogue cannot choose a ninja trick with the same name as a rogue talent was added in the second printing of Ultimate Combat. You can download the errata from the Ultimate Combat Product Page

Page 70—In the Rogue Talents class feature, in the Ninja Trick entry, add the following after the first sentence:

The rogue cannot choose a ninja trick with the same name as a rogue talent.

I implied nothing! I wrote exactly what I wrote and nothing else.

Now go back and read it again! Don't add any words this time. Notice the word familiar. Do you know what the word means?

I added no words and made no assumptions about implied meaning. Did you actually read my post? Maybe you inverted "about all" to "all about" when reading what I wrote? I don't know. But fine since you want to be pedantic and condescending. These are your exact words:

As a GM I have to be at least familiar with:

27 base classes and who knows how many archetypes and prestige classes
13 races (the 11 now legal plus aasimar and tiefling)

This is false.

Okay, ignoring the fact that Core mode's existence is not a valid reason to expect them to deliberately increase the complexity of the normal mode, and ignoring that the fact that the vast majority of published material is legal, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the alternate systems are mutually exclusive, and a lot of them increase not only the complexity of play, but also the amount of time taken, especially if only one player is familiar with them. Remember, scenarios running long is an issue they already have. They're not going to do anything to deliberately make them longer.

Not to mention that many of them were written with everyone in a game using them at once, as well as a heavier than normal reliance on GM calls due to lack of support and you have a bad fit for organized play.

That all seems reasonable and I agree with what you're saying here.

That's great, if you have players that are both trustworthy and have enough system mastery to not make mistakes. Unfortunately, not everyone has that luxury.

If you can't trust that everyone is there to have fun together that's a completely different issue from how many rules you need to know.

If you have time for that, great, but it can also severely disrupt the flow of gameplay if you need to stop and ask the player for rules every time something new comes up. And that's for individual feats, spells, or the like, not entire new systems.

This is true, it does take longer. Which is why my first suggestion was to just trust the players.

It isn't, no, but that doesn't stop a lot of people from feeling that it is. That feeling is one of the reasons they made Core Mode, after all.

Yes, that is a big part of why Core mode exists. So then why is it still being presented as a reason to restrict standard PFS?

I just reread my post twice to be sure. Now I want you to. Where did you find the part where I wrote something about needing to know every spell, feat and class feature?

In the future read what I write not what you wish I'd wrote!

You heavily implied that you think you need to know everything that a player might make use of. But okay, let's say you meant that you need to know exactly that list that you wrote. I can unequivocally say that you do not need to know about all of the base classes, or every possible playable race in order to GM.

What I would like to see is if instead of rounding to the closest whole number when determining APL we round to the closest number that is in one of the actual subtiers. I can't guarantee it's better for all situations but I'm pretty sure for the situations I've been a part of that would work out better.

In cases where the APL works out exactly to the level between the subtiers I'm afraid I don't have a suggestion other than the current system.

Some examples to clarify what I mean, assuming a Tier 1-5 scenario:

4,4,4,1 = 3.25, the closest level in an actual subtier is 4, round to that.

2,2,2,5 = 2.75, the closest level in an actual subtier is 2, round to that.

I think this would be an improvement as far as most people are concerned, although the ideal is still not to have these situations because it's almost guaranteed that someone won't be having as much fun as they could be having.

the level 3 version counters Deeper Darkness and causes the area to be its native lighting, and the level 4 version completely nullifies it and glows normally.

Everyone else has covered your various questions so I'm just going to point out that you're not quite right here. The level 3 version will work in regular Darkness but will not work at all in Deeper Darkness.

Check out Jiggy's guide to Light and Darkness for a full explanation.

Linkified for the lazy:

Survey

Results

For people asking for a rules quote that says turns happen sequentially and not simultaneously:

Combat is cyclical; everybody acts in turn in a regular cycle of rounds. Combat follows this sequence:
[list]

When combat begins, all combatants roll initiative.

Determine which characters are aware of their opponents. These characters can act during a surprise round. If all the characters are aware of their opponents, proceed with normal rounds. See the surprise section for more information.

After the surprise round (if any), all combatants are ready to being the first normal round of combat.

Combatants act in initiative order (highest to lowest).

When everyone has had a turn, the next round begins with the combatant with the highest initiative, and steps 4 and 5 repeat until combat ends.

Each round's activity begins with the character with the highest initiative result and then proceeds in order. When a character's turn comes up in the initiative sequence, that character performs his entire round's worth of actions. (For exceptions, see Attacks of Opportunity and Special Initiative Actions.)

At the start of a battle, each combatant makes an initiative check. An initiative check is a Dexterity check. Each character applies his or her Dexterity modifier to the roll, as well as other modifiers from feats, spells, and other effects. Characters act in order, counting down from the highest result to the lowest. In every round that follows, the characters act in the same order (unless a character takes an action that results in his or her initiative changing; see Special Initiative Actions).

Emphasis added by me in the above.

Linkified

It's repeated in each of the first three sections of the combat chapter.

Have those of you arguing the perspective that everything happens simultaneously and we should try to resolve things that way actually considered all of the implications of that?

Does that mean that if a spell caster is attacked at any point during a round they need to make a concentration check to cast their spells?

If a creature's ally moves through a location that would give them flanking, but they're not actually providing flanking on that creature's turn do they still get flanking bonuses?

If a spell is cast affecting an area does everyone in the area of effect get to move out of it on the same round and be unaffected?

If a creature is knocked out or killed can it still take its actions for the round?

The list goes on and on.

Either due to the players being aware of a situation, or just using technically legal rules that are just trying to game a combat advantage from a turn based system. Can a GM not allow purely metagame actions.

Two actions I take some exception to. Readying a 5ft step to avoid an attack. Readying a total defense (this getting the benefits while still threatening and take AOOs). Both feel metagamey to me and an artifact of the turn based system. In a real time combat situation, neither would make "sense", in a world with magic that makes sense.

No, you can't arbitrarily ignore rules you don't like for whatever reason.

I don't see why people wouldn't be allowed to do either of these things. Remember it takes a standard action to ready, and it will change their position in initiative if their readied action is actually triggered. They also need to state conditions for their readied actions that their characters can actually observe.

Thejeff more or less adequately responded to your questions, Jiggy, but there's one in particular I felt I should address...

Jiggy wrote:

How are your restrictions any less "arbitrary" than those in PFS?

Well, I don't change them for no apparent reason based on the season, for one thing. Let's take my example of the tiefling, and their holier cousins, the aasimar.

What, exactly, was broken about them before Blood of Angels and Blood of Fiends came out, to where they were forbidden?

Whatever it was, did those two books "fix" it to make them more balanced? If ANYTHING, it made them considerably more powerful, yet they were added as acceptable races.

Change of the season, however, and suddenly they're broken again, and not allowed, despite nothing in particular coming out making them more powerful.

At no point has anyone actually involved in making decisions about what is or isn't banned in PFS said that Tieflings or Aasimar are banned for being "broken". They were removed as an option for storytelling reasons. I'm sure plenty of home games have things banned for storytelling reasons.

Undersized Mount from the Advanced Class Guide.

If there's any one rule I would handwave/ignore it's probably encumbrance, try to make sure people keep it reasonable, but I feel like tracking every little bit of weight can be a bit tedious.

Have one person be a diviner wizard and everyone takes lookout. Move around in a huddle of fear and paranoia.

Make sure at least one person has reasonably good perception so you might actually get a surprise round instead of your enemies.

Unfortunately, some people define a character by how much damage they can do in a round and that is too bad.

While I can't speak for everyone I judge Harsk by his inability to do much of anything in combat. If you actually focus on using his crossbow at first level every other turn his only action is reloading his weapon. And if the fight starts with his crossbow stowed and not loaded you won't be able to do much of anything until the third round. And it's not like he's making some other contribution to combat while that's all going on. Sure, he's got some things that he can do outside of a fight and that's great, but combat tends to take up a significant amount of time at the table and if you're barely doing anything for all of that time I just don't see it being very fun.

One final thought (you didn't think I'd miss the chance to promote my favorite cause, did you? ;)

Scenarios like 6-01/02/03 reward characters who are well-rounded. If all you can do is one thing really well, you are hooped when that one thing doesn't work. (Of course, in this case, if your one thing is "hulk smash!" with a big adamantine weapon, you can probably still do what you always do.)

The idea of Pathfinders as specialists in a team is fine, until only one member of that team can do anything at all and the others are reduced to ineffectiveness. Having a back-up plan, back-up combat style, back-up everything usually doesn't reduce your main thing by much, and lets you play an active role no matter what the situation.

I haven't actually played or GMed those scenarios yet, but I find this assertion a bit unlikely. Unless your definition of well-rounded is that you must have the Technologist feat I don't see how requiring a specific feat to make various skill checks is going to be rewarding for a well rounded character that doesn't have that specific feat.

Well-rounded character
"A locked door! Good thing I have disable device trained. Oh, I can't use that because I don't have Technologist?"
"Some unusual item/architecture/whatever, surely I can get some idea of what it is with my many trained knowledge skills? Or perhaps I can try to activate it with UMD? No? Not without the Technologist feat?"
"A strange creature, maybe all of those knowledge skills will be useful here? No, still need Technologist?"
"Can I try to steal that thing on his belt that looks like a weapon using Sleight of Hand? Nope, apparently not without Technologist."
"Some strange writing? Surely I can interpret it with Linguistics? No, still need Technologist."

Hello. I am making a Magus for one of my game and I found out that Spell Combat must absolutly be used with a free hand. However, since I want to make the badass orc weilding greataxe, I won't be able to use it.

Unfortunatly, there is no feat to help me with that. So I was wondering if you guys would help me create a balanced feat for that.

Something along the lines of:

Improved Spell Combat
Your intense training with Combat Spell gave you the ability to cast without needing a free hand.
Prerequisite: Magus Class.
Benefit: This feat gives you the opportunity to use Spell Combat without needing a free hand as long as both hands are used to weild the same weapon and if the spell is a touch or a personal spell.

So basically what it does is it gives you access to better weapons in exchange of only being able to use touch or personal spell using Spell Combat in that situation.

Do you think this would be too strong? Too weak? I'm waiting for your opinion.

Why not just use a battleaxe instead of a greataxe? It's more or less the same weapon just a bit smaller and it works just fine with Spell Combat without needing to make up any new rules.

Make sure you read up on the mounted combat rules: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/combat.html#mounted-combat

That should help answer several of your questions and possibly future questions you might have.

You seem to be making the assumption that you need several skills and feats that are actually skills and feats that your animal companion would need.

You wouldn't need the Fly skill, your mount would. You wouldn't need the Hover feat, your mount would. Although you don't need the hover feat to hover, without the feat the hovering creature needs to make a DC 15 fly check and it doesn't create a cloud of debris.

Also, you and your mount act on the same initiative. You decide what type of actions you and your mount will take and make the appropriate skill checks and take the appropriate penalties all as a single turn.

Flying isn't a special type of action. If a creature with a fly speed wants to fly it uses a move action to move up to its fly speed, or two move actions to move double its fly speed or a full round action to "run" quadruple its fly speed. The only restriction is that certain types of movement require fly checks, see the fly skill for more information.

Well I think most GMs would rule that the Damage Reduction from Invulnerability works with other effects just like a standard barbarian's damage reduction.

But, if you want to go with extremely strict RAW then yes, Dragon Totem Resilience specifically references the Damage Reduction class ability which is replaced for an Invulnerable Rager. Increased Damage Reduction, however, has no such reference to the class ability.

Arkhios, make note that Covering Defense only applies the Shield's Shield bonus, not the Enhancement bonus to the Shield bonus, so only a +6 due to Shield FFocus/Greater Shield Focus.

An enhancement bonus to the shield bonus increases the shield bonus. The way you're trying to interpret it enhancement bonuses to armor and shield wouldn't stack on a single player.

TriOmegaZero wrote:

kinevon wrote:

Do Native Outsiders radiate their alignment at 1st level if they are not a Cleric/Paladin?

Yes, actually.

wow... learn something everyday! Thanks.

Somebody got a reference on this so I can pass it on to other people? This would be worth noting, with the increase of Aasamir and Tieflings and other plane-touched PCs (that they will "ping" on detect alignment spells at levels below 5).

It's in the Detect Evil spell, the table at the end indicates aura strength based on various categories. An "aligned outsider" with 1 HD has a faint aura.

You could train Use Magic Device and carry a wand of Longstrider.

Had a player reroll a ninja and just wanted to makes sure I'm not missing something here.

Essentially with vanishing trick, a ninja in melee on his turn can do the following:

Swift-Vanish
Full Round- First Attack Sneak, Vanish Removed, Remaining normal attacks

And when the ninja gets invisible blades:

Swift- Vanish
Full Round- All sneak attacks, remains invisible.

From a GM perspective it seems once he hits level 10 everything gets obliterated unless they happen to have detect invisibility up. Accurate or inaccurate?

Or they're immune to precision damage.

I'm sure there's other things I haven't thought of.

Anyways, how else does smokey the bear put out forest fires?

He doesn't. Only YOU can prevent forest fires.

(Power Level):

"I can do 150 HP in a melee round!"
"Yeah, but can you dance?"

"Of course I can! I needed ranks in it to get Dervish Dance."

More seriously, do what seems fun to you. If you don't have fun playing characters that don't do a bunch of damage then build characters that do damage.

But don't feel like you need to be capable of knocking everything out in one round to not be a burden to the rest of the table. A lot of people love having someone along that can handle the social aspect. Or someone that may not do any damage in a fight but can run around buff the party and debuff the enemies.

There's plenty of ways to contribute. As long as you can do something you should be good. Just don't be that person that insists they can't do anything at all and pouts about it, that's a downer for the whole table.

As a full-round action, he can make all of his attacks with his melee weapon at a –2 penalty and can also cast any spell from the magus spell list with a casting time of 1 standard action (any attack roll made as part of this spell also takes this penalty)

Spell Combat does not allow a full attack. It allows "All of your attacks". I'm quite confident that it is neither RAI or RAW to use Spell Combat and Flurry of Blows together.

-Are there any play styles that would work for a home game that can't/shouldn't be played in societies? For example, the god wizard or the guerrilla rogue or the pokemaster?

As long as it isn't something that's banned by FAQ or additional resources you should be fine. Perhaps of note to you, you're only allowed one permanent combat companion.

-Are there any classes that one should generally avoid? Not because you think of them as a poor choice for whatever reason (such as the general dislike for monks and rogues) but because something about their class just doesn't fit into the way adventures work. For instance, I don't imagine that a lot of the adventures grant gear for the Gunslinger class (beyond loot that might be useful to any ranged character). Would this greatly reduce the usefulness of the class?

Your gunslinger concern shouldn't be an issue as fame will make whatever you need available. Based on this question you may have misunderstood item availability in PFS. You can get access to an item in three possible ways:

1. On the Always Available list (Mundane items, +1 armor/weapons)
2. From a Chronicle Sheet
3. By having sufficient fame

Most of your item access is likely to be through fame.

-Are there any classes that are preferred? Like, gosh, those Bardic Knowledge rolls are incredible in societies and they help a lot or you fight a lot of Smite Evil targets, so Paladins all the way!

Nothing in particular. Just keep in mind that you can't be entirely certain who else will be joining you for any given scenario. So be prepared for there to be no one filling various roles. Exactly what those roles would be will depend on the groups you play with.

-Or am I overthinking everything and they work pretty much the same as the home game, just with different exp and loot rules?

Mostly, yes, it's not that different. Just create a character that you'll enjoy without being disruptive and you should be good to go.

Why would you still have a tent? You tore it up. There's no special disconnect that I'm aware of. If an item is destroyed, consumed, lost, whatever then it's gone.

1 XP is earned for completing 3 encounters.

1 PP is earned by completing secondary objectives. Season 5 scenarios have these explicitly specified, for Season 0-4 there's a document coming but until it's ready this PP is awarded for completing 3 encounters, same as the 1 XP.

1 PP is earned for completing the primary mission assigned by the society, which typically means defeating the BBEG.

And gold is like you said, based on what the group managed to collect before the player left.

kinevon wrote:

@nosig: I don't think they want to conceal the difficulty, but they want to make the situation more conducive to the role play side, instead of the roll play side.

Sometimes, though, you gotta roll with the roll play, instead of trying to force everything into role play.

It baffles me to think that someone's roleplaying could be hindered by hearing a number spoken aloud.

This just conjured an odd mental image of running combat the same way.

GM: The goblin slices at you effectively. Does he hit?
Player: I don't know, what did you roll?
GM: If I told you that it might remove you from the roleplaying.

Now I'm sure no one is suggesting anything like that, but the thought amused me and I felt like sharing.