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Balthazar Picsou's page
 97 posts. Organized Play character for hogarth.
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I was leafing through a copy of the North York Post yesterday (a free community newspaper) and there was an article about board game cafes in Toronto ("Snakes & Lattes" and "For The Win Cafe").
They asked the cafe owners "What is your all-time favourite board game?" and Pat Chung of For The Win Cafe answered:
Quote: Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. It's a dungeon-crawling role-playing game. So you have at least one fan out there who's spreading the word!
Can a deaf caster hear the answer to a Commune spell? Or Contact Other Plane?
Do you need to hear to understand a Sending spell?
PRD wrote: To have any chance of activating a scroll spell, the scroll user must meet the following requirements.
-The spell must be of the correct type (arcane or divine). Arcane spellcasters (wizards, sorcerers, and bards) can only use scrolls containing arcane spells, and divine spellcasters (clerics, druids, paladins, and rangers) can only use scrolls containing divine spells. (The type of scroll a character creates is also determined by his class.)
-The user must have the spell on her class list.
-The user must have the requisite ability score.
Suppose a summoner with 12 Cha finds a scroll of Haste scribed by a 5th level wizard. Can the summoner use the scroll (without using UMD, etc.)? A Cha of 12 is enough for a summoner to cast Haste, but it's not enough to cast 3rd level spells and Haste is a 3rd level wizard spell.
(Don't need answer fast, just curious how other people would rule.)
There are a number of threads that discuss the best Words of Power spells (this one, for instance), but I haven't noticed any threads discussing which words to stay away from.
Here's a few duds that I've found. Prove me wrong!
Dimensional Shift: When I first saw it, it looked kind of like the spell Plane Shift except it only works on willing targets. But when I took another look at it, I realised that by default it only works on the caster; in order to get it to work on multiple targets, you need to boost the target word and raise the spell level by 3 (making it an 8th level spell for clerics and a 10th level spell for wizards). I guess it could be useful for an emergency escape, but it's pretty crummy compared to Plane Shift or the wordspell Dimensional Gate.
Force Block: A +1 armor bonus that lasts for one round. I'm hard-pressed to think of who would ever cast this (either as a standard action or as an immediate action); armor bonuses just aren't that rare.
Sense Hidden: Being able to detect invisible creatures is a huge advantage, but the duration is a killer (concentration, up to minutes/level). At least the boosted version acts like True Seeing which has more out-of-combat uses.
Alignment Aura: This suffers from the same problem as Dimensional Shift -- it works like Holy Aura (et al.), except it can only affect one creature instead of a whole party. Definitely not worth it as an 8th level spell (Resist Arcana + Alignment Shield is almost as good as a 6th level wordspell and lasts 10 times as long).
Rumble: It's like the spell Earthquake, except 1/64 the size and with 1/16 the range! And you can't boost the target key word because that would make it a 10th or 12th level spell.
Special mention goes to the Barrier target word: it allows you to make a wall that's 10' or 20' long per level, but you're still limited to Close range which really restricts the area you can affect.
(Note: I actually like the Words of Power system, so please don't think I'm just being negative!)
The oracle class states:
"Oracles do not need to provide a divine focus to cast spells that list divine focus (DF) as part of the components."
The words of power rules state:
"Each wordspell is assumed to have a material, somatic, and verbal component. Divine casters using this system must provide a divine focus instead of a material component."
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Would a WoP oracle need a divine focus, or a regular material component, or neither?
Also, an oracle "adds all of either the cure spells or the inflict spells to her list of spells known (cure spells include all spells with “cure” in the name, inflict spells include all spells with “inflict” in the name)". Would that include effect words with "cure" in the name? (I presume not, although personally I'd prefer to just say that words of power oracles get all of the effect words in the Healing group rather than adding cure spells to their spell list, like the spontaneous casting ability for words of power clerics.)
Answer: The lemure. (Source: Ultimate Magic's section on binding outsiders)
I'm torn between thinking that it's a goof or that it's a subtle commentary on modern society.
In our Carrion Crown game, we have one PC who's a halfling rogue 1/sorcerer 4. The player would like for the PC to be more "rogue-y" next level, but none of us are sure what the best way to go about it is.
One option is to take some more levels in rogue, possibly even taking levels in the Arcane Trickster prestige class some day. That would mean more skill points to bump the PC's rogue skills up a few notches, but on the other hand the PC is our only arcane spellcaster so there are some mixed feelings about a PC that will knows one level 2 spell at class level 7.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to get some more skill points for this sorcerer? Maybe a prestige class, although I'm not sure what the PC would qualify for (for feats she has PBS, Precise Shot and something else that I'm forgetting at the moment).
This suggestion is almost certainly more trouble than it's worth to implement, but sometimes someone will mark one of my older posts as a "favorite". The problem is that the list of "Favorited by Others" posts is always sorted in chronological order by posting date, so it's kind of tedious checking every post in the list one at a time in order to figure out which one has been most recently added as a favorite.
If you could sort the posts by "favoriting date" (i.e. the same way the "Favorites" list is sorted), then it would be much easier to identify new favorites.
The Catastrophe subdomain has a level 8 ability called Deadly Weather, which says (in part):
"Each round, the storm has one of the following effects: driving rain (–4 on all Perception checks and ranged attack rolls), howling winds (–8 on Fly skill checks and ranged attack rolls), heavy snow (all terrain is considered difficult), or lightning bolt (as call lightning). Other effects depending on the weather might also apply (at the GM's discretion). You choose which effect takes place each round, but no effect may be repeated on the following round."
With respect to the lightning bolt, does that require a standard action on the caster's part, or does it just take effect without an action like the other effects?
The Heal skill says...
PRD wrote: Treat Disease: To treat a disease means to tend to a single diseased character. Every time the diseased character makes a saving throw against disease effects, you make a Heal check. If your Heal check exceeds the DC of the disease, the character receives a +4 competence bonus on his saving throw against the disease.
Action: Providing first aid, treating a wound, or treating poison is a standard action. Treating a disease or tending a creature wounded by a spike growth or spike stones spell takes 10 minutes of work. Treating deadly wounds takes 1 hour of work. Providing long-term care requires 8 hours of light activity.
How does the timing work in terms of when the 10 minutes of work needs to be done? For example, if a character gets exposed to a disease at 2 p.m., can I treat him at 10 p.m. in order to help the next day's saving throw (presumably at 2 p.m.)? Specifically, I'm thinking of an oracle with the Guiding Star mystery who gets a bonus to Wis-based skill checks "when the night sky is visible".
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Here's the description of Sunlight Bomb:
Quote: The alchemist can throw bombs that explode with a searing radiance equivalent to that of sunlight and that act as blinding bombs. Undead, fungi, molds, oozes, slimes, and creatures to which sunlight is harmful or unnatural take +2 damage per die from the bomb. Undead that are harmed by sunlight and that fail their saves against the bomb are staggered for 1 round. My question: does the staggering effect require a direct hit (using a Fort save, a la Blinding Bomb), or does it work on a splash (using a Reflex save)?
My first thought was that it requires a direct hit and a Fort save, but it's a bit confusing because undead are immune to the blinding effect (it's a non-harmless Fort save effect that doesn't say it works on objects), so the line "Undead that [..] fail their saves against the bomb" wouldn't make sense.
Why is there no FAQ button in some/most forums? There are quite a few frequently asked questions that don't relate to rules or PFS (like "Why don't you make a Savage Tide hardcover collection?" or "Will you ever make a psionics book?"), and there are perfectly good FAQs to put them in (e.g. the main FAQ), but there's no way to flag those type of questions.
I guess this is partially a matter of taste, but on the product pages for old issues of Dragon (e.g. Best of Dragon #1), there is a line of links (highlighted in grey) that says "Messageboards News Products Resources".
I was a bit surprised that the "Messageboards" link took me to paizo.com/dragon/messageboards and not paizo.com/paizo/messageboards. I suppose it's probably too much trouble to change a piece of legacy message board code like that, though. And I guess it's not an error (in the sense of sending you to a dead link or whatever). So I guess I'm just grumbling.
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One thing I've noticed is that if I mark one of my own posts as a favorite, it ends up on both my Favorites list (which makes sense) and on my Favorited by Others list (which makes less sense). Is there a rationale behind why it shows up in both places?
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The title says it all: does a scroll with multiple spells count as one item if I want to get one with prestige points? E.g. can I spend 2 prestige points to get one scroll with 5 copies of Scorching Ray?
This is a sad day. Professor Lorrimor is dead and buried now; may he be closer to Irori's perfection in death than in life.
The trip from Molthune was uneventful until the final stage, when the stagecoach broke a wheel several leagues outside of Ravengro. We had to wait a seeming eternity until the wheel could be fixed, but I spent the time in meditation so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
After I refreshed myself slightly at the local inn, I headed to the local graveyard (the so-called "Restlands"). The professor's daughter (Elena) was there to meet us, along with several local dignitaries. Never before have I seen such an unlikely group of pallbearers: besides myself, there was a tough-looking dwarf and human (male), and a more raffish-looking halfling and elf (female). One can imagine the difficulty five such people would have keeping the coffin steady and the pace dignified. On the way to the gravesite, we were accosted by a gang of ignorant, superstitious locals who accused Professor Lorrimor of necromancy and insisted he had no business being buried in hallowed ground. What nonsense! I asked them what possible evidence they could have against such an honourable man, and they reluctantly dispersed without incident.
The funeral service was competently performed, if poorly attended, and we all had a chance to eulogize the late scholar. I told the story of how I met him as a student at Lepidstadt and how he had continued to correspond with me on matters of interest (particularly the Great Beyond and the race of inevitables) even while I was taking my holy orders at the monastery in Jalmeray. Zane (human) met the professor in conjunction with a ghoul attack. Jemini (halfling) knew him as a friend of her mentor; the professor was interested in her as a magical prodigy. And Buiwen (elf) -- from what I gathered from her rather scattered and brusque comments -- shared Lorrimor's interest in alchemy.
After the funeral, we adjourned to the Lorrimor residence for the reading of the will. The professor must have had some presentiment of danger, for he asked two things of his friends. First, that we would look after the welfare of Elena for a month, and second, that we would return some tomes of knowledge to Lepidstadt afterwards (for which we would receive a substantial honorarium). We all agreed that it was the least we could do for him, and Elena invited us to stay with her in her home.
Once the will reading was complete, we went to examine the tomes in question. Professor Lorrimor's interests often tended towards the dark and disturbing ("the better to know one's enemy", he would say) and these tomes were no exception, with subjects ranging from the rites of Urgathoa and Zon-Kuthon to the physiology of aberrations. Another tome had a title referring to "the Palatine Eye" (which rang no bells with any of us), but it was locked tightly shut; Buiwen made an exhaustive effort at jimmying the lock, but to no avail. He also left a journal with a hastily scrawled note indicating that we should read it.
An examination of the more recent entries in the journal suggested that his death in the ruins of Harrowstone Prison was possibly no accident. He made reference to the spirits that reportedly haunt the prison and to "the Whispering Way". Searching through Professor Lorrimor's personal library, Buiwen was able to piece together that the Whispering Way refers to a secret network of necromancers who seek eternal life (or unlife); the most famous of these necromancers is reputed to be the notorious Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant of old.
Also in the journal was the suggestion that a false crypt in the Restlands contained some "tools" that were to help the professor in his researches at the prison, as well as a reminder to get a list of names of those who died in the Harrowstone fire from the church of Pharasma. We all agreed that the crypt and Harrowstone Prison were worth investigating (for Elena's sake, if not the safety of the whole town), and we retired for the evening.
I have a campaign listed in my Previous Campaigns list (this one) because I dropped out of it at one point. Now I've rejoined it, but using a different character.
Is there a way to get it changed from a Previous Campaign to a Current Campaign? And to get me changed from a Previous Player to a Current Player? Or is that a tick box that the GM has control over?
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3 people marked this as FAQ candidate.
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I know this question has been asked many times before, but I thought I'd put it in a thread by itself, suitable for hitting the FAQ button. :-)
Character A is grappling character B and successfully pins him. How long does the pin last?
a) One round -- when A maintains the grapple next round, he has to choose the "pin" option or the pin stops.
b) As long as the grapple lasts -- when A maintains the grapple next round, he can choose any valid option (move, damage, tie up, etc.) and B will still be pinned.
c) Other.
I always assumed it was (a), but it's certainly not as clear as it was in 3.5.
Rules to follow.
3d6 ⇒ (5, 5, 4) = 143d6 ⇒ (5, 4, 5) = 143d6 ⇒ (1, 5, 1) = 73d6 ⇒ (3, 1, 6) = 103d6 ⇒ (5, 1, 4) = 103d6 ⇒ (6, 1, 1) = 8
This may be of limited appeal, but sometimes I wish there was a way to roll 4d6-drop-the-lowest or 2d20-take-the-highest.
I understand that would be pretty far down the implementation list, though...
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Like the subject says, I think that Large or Tiny size races should be restricted to the Advanced or Monstrous level. The benefits of large size (for melee characters) and tiny size (for spellcasters) should be restricted in a normal campaign, I think.
Just curious -- how would my fellow GMs rule on Beguiling Gift working in combination with the Reach Spell metamagic? Would you say the target of the spell has to move forward to accept the gift, or would you say that the spell fails since the gift isn't within reach?
Latest PFS Guide wrote: At the end of a scenario, a PC may have been afflicted
with any number of possible conditions, such as
blindness, curses, deafness, diseases, and poison. If
these conditions are resolved before the scenario’s
conclusion, then you have nothing to worry about. If,
however, a character is unable to resolve a condition
before moving on to the next scenario, you will need to
write the condition in the Items Sold/Conditions Gained
box on that player’s Chronicle sheet and initial next to
what you wrote (see below).
It’s specifically important
that you write conditions legibly as not doing so could
cause problems down the line. If the condition is
resolved during another scenario, that GM will list the
condition as cleared under Items Bought/Conditions
Cleared on the Chronicle sheet for the scenario in
which the condition was cleared.
Huh...in past PFS games, whenever a PC caught a disease the GM allowed us the option of rolling it out to see if the PC recovered on his own. Was that ever a legal option?
I'm having problem accessing the thread "Level 10 character builds" on the Advice forum (posted by Ravenath).
Can someone give that thread a poke? I'd provide a link, but there's no link...
Does anyone else think it's kind of sad that there are only two 7th level effect words for a cleric or oracle? I was thinking of making a Words of Power oracle and I noticed there were pretty slim pickings at that level. At least they could have tossed in a Holy-Word-equivalent and maybe a Repulsion-equivalent...
Here's a question I just thought of:
An oracle can choose to get all cure spells as bonus spells; it says "cure spells include all spells with “cure” in the name". So would a Words of Power level 1 oracle get Cure Light Wounds as a bonus spell, or Lesser Cure (the Words of Power version), or both?
Does anyone want to take bets as to how popular the Separatist cleric archetype (from Ultimate Magic) will be in PFS play? Being able to cherry-pick a domain seems like it might be pretty tempting for some folks.
(This is a pretty minor quibble, but I'll just toss it out there.)
On every page of the PRD, in the upper right corner there is a linked path showing what page you're visting. E.g., for the Feats page, it says
Quote: PRD Home > Feats at the top of the page, and "PRD Home" and "Feats" are links to the appropriate pages.
Well, that's not quite correct on my browser (Internet Explorer 7 on a PC); in fact, it looks like "PRD H" is not part of the hyperlink (even though it's underlined) -- I can only follow the URL if I click on "ome".
Any idea what might be causing this behaviour?
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1 person marked this as FAQ candidate.
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Does anyone have an opinion on how the preservationist alchemist (from Ultimate Magic) is supposed to work? I presume you're not supposed to drink the bottled creature, but uncork it or something and presumably the uncorking still takes a full round action. I'm thinking of pink smoke pouring out of the vial a la "I Dream of Jeannie", but maybe that's just me. :-)
Can you use the Infusion discovery on an extract of Summon Nature's Ally? Infusion states "An infused extract can be imbibed by a non-alchemist to gain its effects", which is not totally clear to me -- does it only work on extracts that you would drink, or are you supposed to drink all extracts regardless of what they do (e.g. you still drink an extract of Summon Nature's Ally or Nightmare even though you're not the intended target)?
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As the title says, did the Disguise bonus from polymorph spells ever get clarified in some errata? In the description of the polymorph subschool, it says +20, but in the Disguise skill description it says +10. The online PRD doesn't say.
I notice that sometimes a particular ability seems to pop up all over the place in Pathfinder. For instance, there are about eleventy zillion different feats, class abilities, etc. which let you make someone shaken (although I think the flow of new "shaken" abilities is starting to taper off).
After looking through the "what's so good about the ability to treat your weapon as if it were magic" thread, I was inspired to comment about another popular(ish) ability that I find pretty useless: a bonus (either to attack rolls or AC) when confirming critical hits.
I can understand why someone might take Critical Focus: a +4 bonus is large enough to notice, and it's a prerequisite to some other useful feats. But Shield Specialization? Am I really supposed to care about a +2 bonus to AC versus critical hit confirmations?
I'd love to hear an impassioned defense from someone who has taken Shield Specialization or the Low Blow halfling racial feature or the elf ranger favored class option and has found it useful. Any takers?
Here's the statement I'm referring to.
FAQ wrote: Can you Take 10 on the Intelligence check in the contact other plane spell?
Having your Int and Cha blasted down to 8 by an extraplanar entity is a significant and distracting threat, therefore you can't Take 10 on that check.
—Sean K Reynolds, 03/04/11
I give Sean's answer ("you can't Take 10") a B-plus, but I give his logic a D-minus.
The problem is that, if you can't take 10 on an action when the only danger is from performing that action itself (i.e, there's no other dangers or distractions around), then taking 10 is useless for most skills.
Take 10 to climb a rope? Sorry, you might fall down.
Take 10 to pick a lock? Sorry, the lock might be trapped.
Take 10 to swim? Sorry, you might drown.
Take 10 to jump over a 3' gap? Sorry, you might trip and fall.
Take 10 to make a disguise? Sorry, someone might see through the disguise and kill you.
Take 10 to bandage up your friend? Sorry, you might fail and let your friend bleed to death.
Etc.
A much better answer would be to say "you can't take 10 using Contact Other Plane because concentrating on the spell is too distracting".
I'm wondering if anyone has thought of a creative use for the metamagic feat Lingering Spell (other than slapping it on Fireball, Lightning Bolt, etc.).
For instance, I had the idea that if you could find some kind of buffing spell, you could have a whole bunch of people run through the "cloud" and get a benefit. But the snag is that the spell has to be "an instantaneous spell that affects an area"; I couldn't find anything that matched that description in the Core Rulebook other than the usual suspects (e.g. Fireball).
Can anyone smarter than me come up with a cool idea? :-)
I'm curious whether other GMs would allow PCs to train animals with tricks outside of those explicitly listed under the Handle Animal skill. It notes that the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
I'm thinking of giving my cleric an ape animal companion with the Throw Anything feat and a supply of barrels...
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2 people marked this as FAQ candidate.
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What's the range increment for a lasso supposed to be? I'm guessing that 10 ft is reasonable (like a net), but it doesn't list one in the Advanced Gear section of the PRD.
Hi folks,
I'll be GMing a Pathfinder Society game at Hairy Tarantula North (6979 Yonge St -- by Yonge and Steeles) on Monday, May 2.
link to event
I'll be there starting at 6:15 pm and the game will probably run until 11ish. The module I'll be running is "Silent Tide" (module #1 of Season 0). There will be room for a maximum of seven players and it'll be first come, first served. So after you've voted, maybe I'll see you there!
Cheers,
Chris
APG, Serpentine bloodline wrote: Serpentfriend (Ex): At 3rd level, you can use speak with animals at will with reptilian animals (including various forms of dinosaurs, lizards, and other cold-blooded creatures), and you gain a viper familiar using your sorcerer level –2 as your effective wizard level. Question of the day: Would you allow a serpentine bloodline sorcerer to take the Improved Familiar feat and choose something other than a viper?
I'm just curious what other GMs policies are on changing an action once it's been interrupted (by a readied action, for instance).
As an example, I once saw a game where a PC cast the spell Grease in order to trip up a charging lion and the GM ruled that the lion leaped over the grease and continued to charge. That seemed a little unfair to me at the time.
This morning I was thinking of the spell Spike Stones and how it could potentially cause a lot of damage to a charging enemy; 1d8 per 5' of movement can start to add up. But how far would you let a charging enemy move before changing his mind?
I don't know if I'm getting old or what, but I really, really have difficulty reading a PDF where there's black characters in a dark brown box. I wish you would get rid of the dark box. A man can dream...
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According to the Combat section of the rules, if you mix natural attacks and melee weapons, you suffer penalties as if using two-weapon fighting:
Core rules wrote: You can make attacks with natural weapons in combination with attacks made with a melee weapon and unarmed strikes, so long as a different limb is used for each attack. For example, you cannot make a claw attack and also use that hand to make attacks with a longsword. When you make additional attacks in this way, all of your natural attacks are treated as secondary natural attacks, using your base attack bonus minus 5 and adding only 1/2 of your Strength modifier on damage rolls. In addition, all of your attacks made with melee weapons and unarmed strikes are made as if you were two-weapon fighting. Your natural attacks are treated as light, off-hand weapons for determining the penalty to your other attacks. Feats such as Two-Weapon Fighting and Multiattack can reduce these penalties. However, none of the creatures in the Bestiary have two-weapon fighting penalties for their weapon + natural attack routines.
Werewolf wrote: Melee longsword +6 (1d8+6/19–20), bite +1 (1d6+1 plus trip and curse of lycanthropy) Lizardfolk wrote: Melee morningstar +2 (1d8+1), bite +0 (1d4), or claw +2 (1d4+1), bite +2 (1d4+1) Hound Archon wrote: Melee bite +8 (1d8+3), slam +8 (1d4+1) or mwk greatsword +9/+4 (2d6+3), bite +3 (1d8+2) So which is wrong -- the rules in the Combat section, or every example in the Bestiary?
Would wearing a buckler give a -1 penalty to grapple attempts? It only mentions it gives a penalty when "wielding a weapon".
(I'd probably say it would, but I'm curious about other opinions.)
Like the title says, can a paladin's mount speak? They all have at least 6 Intelligence.
Looks like it's fixed now.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but would it be possible to remove the present tense of the word "cocked" from the profanity filter? It's getting less and less amusing every time I see the result of writing something like "Hogarth cocks his ear, trying to figure out the source of the noise" or "Hogarth cocks his hat at a jaunty angle" or "Hogarth cocks the hammer on his revolver".
Today I noticed Pathfinder products at a Chapters store (in North York) for the first time, specifically the Core book, the Bestiary, and the Gamemastering Guide. (For those in the U.S., Chapters is the largest bookstore chain in Canada.)
Good to know that they've decided to carry some Paizo products other than Planet Stories. Maybe they started doing so a while ago and I just didn't notice, though. :-)
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