DharTook's page

You and I might be into different comedians if your impression of comedians is "non-loud".

All joking aside, depending on what level you're starting at and what level you think you're going to get to, I would note that sing and wind cover non-overlapping skills and are quite effective via versatile performance. For flavor, you could sing in smaller quarters, where everyone can hear you anyway, and whip out a horn if you want to be heard far and wide.

Good, we resolved that. Now to the issue of a chakram used as an offhand light weapon in two weapon fighting (at a -2/-3 penalty). Pretty nice offhand, seems to be the only 1d8 martial light weapon in the game. So, any thoughts?

Claudekennilol's final thoughts on the matter are my preferred answer to this question. I would rule a Chakram is neither a light weapon or a one-handed weapon. Therefore it can not be wielded in two hands, as a one-handed weapon can, nor does using it as the off-hand weapon reduce penalties for purposes of TWF.

PRD wrote:

Power Attack: You can choose to take a –1 penalty on all melee attack rolls and combat maneuver checks to gain a +2 bonus on all melee damage rolls. This bonus to damage is increased by half (+50%) if you are making an attack with a two-handed weapon, a one handed weapon using two hands, or a primary natural weapon that adds 1-1/2 times your Strength modifier on damage rolls...

The question comes down to, does PA allow you to grip a light weapon with both hands?

Ah! I see where the disconnect is coming from.

The important point is that a light weapon is not a one handed weapon . The rules draw a very clear distinction. "One handed weapon" does NOT mean "any weapon you can weild in one hand" . It is a specific type of melee weapon, as is light.

So the bolded sentence you cited does not apply to light weapons.

Yes, it is strange. But it does appear to be the intent of the rules.

I think you're misunderstanding what I said. I said that if I Power Attack with a light weapon in 2 hands, I do not get the 1.5 str bonus but I do get the 1.5 Power Attack bonus.

Possibly I am indeed the one misunderstanding, but I don't think so.

You do NOT get a 1.5 Power Attack bonus with a light weapon if you use two hands.

You are correct that you ALSO do NOT get a 1.5 STR bonus for a light weapon in two hands.

... Hmm. Okay, an alternative occurs to me. What if the intent here is that that's a further restriction, so, you can't prepare spells at all unless it's been a day since you prepped spells, but you can also not prepare spells in slots used within the last eight hours?

That is indeed the position that I hold.

No, wait, we still have a problem, because wizards can unambiguously prepare spells more than once a day; you're allowed to leave slots open and fill them later.

The text reads: "When he prepares spells for the coming day, all the spells he has cast within the last 8 hours count against his daily limit."

The spell slot is taken for the rest of the day as indicated by the reference to daily limit. In other words, a wizard rests 4 hours, is awoken in the middle of the night by an ogre, fireballs him, goes back to bed, rests another five hours. The act of resting allows him to prepare spells, and he may even wait as long as he likes to prepare as many spells as he likes, but no matter how long he waits, he may NOT use the 3rd level spell slot for fireball at ALL today.

I can't find any such thing in the rules. Only the spells cast within the last 8 hours count against your limit, you can reprepare everything else after 8 hours of rest.

The rules say "spells per day". The words "day" and "daily" are used repeatedly throughout the text. That is where the text states there is a per day limit. The text mentions 8 hours rest in the context of: "To prepare his daily spells, a wizard must first sleep for 8 hours." This sentence does not state, and I cannot imagine was intended to imply: "A day means since a wizard rested last."

"Per day" is used repeatedly throughout the core documents, and I've never seen any indication that it bears any relationship to when you last rested.

Resting for 8 hours does not override or subsume the per day restriction. It is simply another condition wizards must meet to prepare spells.

So in summation, while melee wielding a chakram I can not get the 1.5 str bonus ever but can get the 1.5 Power Attack bonus.

I figured that about strength, but I never realized Power Attack was worded differently so that light weapons could get 1.5 power attack bonus.

I think you may have misread? Oceanshieldwolf's longer post was more clear than my explanation, for sure.

But no, you CANNOT deal x1.5 power attack damage by wielding a light weapon in two hands. You might be getting confused by his/her (correct) statement that you CAN power attack with a light weapon. There is just no damage benefit for using two hands.

You keep your Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, level, class, base attack bonus, base save bonuses, alignment, and mental abilities.

The indication I get from this is you are a witch with the Twin Soul ability in your new body, and therefore the death of you or your familiar triggers its effects.

Thanks again DharTook.

Thank YOU for sifting through my sloppily worded answer. But yes, we're on the same page now.

Well, two things:

1. We do have the FAQ saying that there is no difference at all between temporary and permanent.
2. Fine, so I wait 24 hours, without doing my wipe-and-reprep thing. Do I have those spells prepared now?

I really should double check the faq before I open my mouth sometimes.

Backtracking to your original question (which I think should make the follow-up clear), my thought now is yes, you have your spells. You prepared them. Nothing happened that specifically caused them to be unprepared. You are capable of casting them. So you can cast them. The fact that you couldn't cast them say, 1 hour ago, is besides the point.

As an example: Magus (Kensai), Int high enough to case 1st level spells, not high enough to give any bonus 1st level spells (so 11?), so he gets a single 1st level spel per day.

He casts his spell (shield, just for the sake of having a spell named, but it works for any spell), so he has used up his single 1st level spell for the day.

After the combat, he activates one of the (several) PoP1s he owns, so he regains the prepared shield spell.

Can he cast it again?

A thought provoking question.

I'm not Jiggy, but as a GM who agrees with Jiggy but also has a player with a PoP, my ruling is yes. The pearl does not explicitly mention spells per day in particular. But I would think the text on the pearls "The spell is then prepared again, just as if it had not been cast. " intends that effect.

But let's be honest about my own bias. From a results oriented perspective, ruling as Jiggy does with regard to ability score decreases gives me results I personally like: there ARE serious consequences to a spellcaster taking a hit to the primary stat, but it does NOT require nearly as much bookkeeping or ad hoc rulings as taking away prepared spells. I would prefer nerfing pearls of power not be a consequence of my ruling, so I'm going to avoid ruling that way if I can.

Okay, I'm sold on that.

That does leave open the question:

You get a "permanent" int buff. You prepare extra spells. You lose it temporarily, and get it back, but you don't do a "prepare spells" ritual since you didn't actually use any spells.

Do you still have those (extra) spells prepared?

Even though you have your INT back, I would think the bonus counts as "temporary" until you have it back for a full 24 hours. So the spells may be prepared, but your per day limit has yet to go back up.

Can someone link me to the relevant info for being unable to get the Strength bonus with light weapons? I'm assuming this would affect Power Attack damage for light weapons wielded in two hands too?

Please forgive my poor ability to link. In the PRD, this

The descriptions of light, one-handed, and two-handed are not far down.

Power attack does indeed work differently for light and one-handed weapons. Note that light weapons are NOT defined as one-handed weapons. Power attack explicitly allows only one-handed weapons to get extra damage if wielded in two hands.

EDIT: Found the edit button for the first time. Replaced an annoying URL with an actual link. I am really bad at this forum stuff.

Percentage dice are intended to be 1-100, not 0-99. If you treat the 00 as 0 rather than 100, then the target for a particular percentage has to be dropped by 1. So, if 00 is 0, and you have a 20% chance, you would be looking for 0-19, not 0-20.

There are other conventions to think about too - if there is a 50% miss chance, is 1-50 a miss, or is 51-100 a miss? So long as you declare ahead of time, it doesn't matter, but if you don't declare or follow a convention, arguments can happen. For myself, I follow the convention that low is bad and high is good, so 1-50 is a miss.

I too prefer 1-50 is a miss, but using the convention that "whatever is described happens when the roll is low." That is, I use 1-50 because it is described as a 50% MISS chance rather than HIT chance. I use 1-20 for 20% miss chances for the same reason.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with using a different convention. My concern with a good/bad division is that it depends on perspective. ("Good" from the player's perspective? "Good" from the attacker's perspective?)

Well you don't have to be proficient in the weapon to make AoOs. (But as a houserule, my group has always given monks proficiency with spears and made spears monk weapons so they can flurry with them.)

True, but if I'm going to use a weapon that I'm not proficient with, only flavor considerations would lead me to pick the longspear over a better polearm. Which, if you'd prefer your monks use longspears when they use a reach weapon, is a pretty good justification for the house rule.

Sadly, a Monk is not proficient with a longspear, or with any other reach weapon. Monks ought to be proficient with all Simple weapons, but are not. The Qiang (longspear) is one of the traditional 'big four' ancient chinese battlefield weapons, and was a staple of Shaolin monks.

Indeed you are right. I had mistakenly conflated spear and longspear!

I just realized that I failed to comprehend the ACTUAL heart of the issue: Should 00 be a success or a failure for the 50% invisible hit chance?

First off, if you actually want a 50% hit chance, it's probably easiest to ignore the d100 and just use one die. For 50%, you can use any even sided die. Make evens a success and odds a failure. The probability will be exactly 50%.

If you DO use a d100, then you should count 00 as 100 IF you make sure to include 50 itself as belonging to the "50 and below" group.

Or, to simplify: Under the standard convention, for a 50% miss chance, 01 - 50, including 50 itself, should be a miss. 00 and 51-99 should be a hit.

If you are using two d10 to simulate a d100, 00 should be read as 100, but 02 should be read as 2. This gives the results you'd like from a d100: an equal probability of every number from 1 to 100.

If you'd like, think about one die as the tens place and the other die as the ones place. They don't specify any other information. When you roll 100, your tens place is 0 and your ones place is 0. Lots of numbers have a tens place of 0 and ones place of zero, but the only number that meets that criteria that I want a d100 to roll is 100.

Unrelated: You can tell from the formatting error that I don't have a lot of experience with this or any forum.

I was skeptical at first, but I am increasingly swayed by Jiggy's reading. It is certainly bizarre to imagine a wizard could have a spell prepared that they are incapable of casting. But the rules explicitly anticipate a situation occurring in a similar case:

[quote = Wizard] To learn, prepare, or cast a spell, the wizard must have an Intelligence score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. The Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a wizard's spell is 10 + the spell level + the wizard's Intelligence modifier.

Note the intelligence restriction applies, individually, to all three actions. So a wizard clearly could have prepared a spell when she had a high enough intelligence score but be presently unable to cast it.

If one accepts that a wizard could be unable to cast a prepared spell because their intelligence has fallen below 10 + the spell level, it seems pretty consistent to imagine they could be unable to cast a prepared spell because it exceeds their currently allowed spells per day.

Worth noting: If you are getting those bites and claws from the alternate racial trait, that trait only grants a bite attack OR a claw attack, not both.

Minor addendum that does not alter my overall opinion: I erroneously stated the rules allow you to deliver touch attacks with weapons. Natural weapons is what the rules actually say.

Frankly, the extreme lengths that that the rules go to in specifying that monks don't need a free hand for unarmed strikes make me suspected that using spears in that way was intended as an option for monks (or more generally, monks were intended to wield weapons with uses other than a primary attack).

A spear wielding monk sounds like an appealing option to me. At least one possible disadvantage is if you have both hands on your spear, you may NOT deflect arrows. So it does introduce a vulnerability to ranged attacks.

As far as I know, nothing in the rules would make this explicitly impossible.

As a GM, I would personally would rule yes and no.

There are, to me, two distinct questions:

1. Can you discharge a touch spell while tripping someone? To me, the answer is unambiguously yes. Touch spells discharge if you touch something, including with a weapon. Tripping someone definitely qualifies.

2. Casting a touch spell gives you one free touch attack THAT round, so the second question would be: can you substitute a trip for that attack? I would rule no. Because the free attack only applies for a very specific purpose, I would rule it is not eligible to be replaced with a trip the way other melee attacks are. That said, I can find no explicit support for this view in RAW.

So my personal ruling is I WOULD allow you to cast shocking grasp and, on a future turn, trip someone, simultaneously discharging the spell. I would NOT allow you to cast the spell and immediately trip someone as a free action.

But, of course, I am not your GM and my opinion is not the one that matters. But those are my thoughts.