FlyJonat's page

As an aside, I personally think that making Animal Empathy require diplomacy is asininely stupid. I have druids who SHOULD be awful at social skills from their character concept but are masters at diplomacy so that they can deal with animals. And once you're a master at diplomacy its awfully hard to avoid the temptation to talk to people too.

A good example I can think of a character being awful with people but good with animals is Ace Ventura even if that's from a comedy.

Most herd animals will flee as much as they can away from anything that appears dangerous. Calming them would require removing any cause for alarm first.

BTW someone teleporting in their vicinity is a cause for alarm.

Now, a Druid with very high Nature would know all of this and the GM should have told the player about it.

I think that I needed to teleport because the GM said that the animals started running very fast the moment the rogue did something even though the GM made us roll an initiative. I think the animal should have been added to the initiative to have the opportunity to act rather than react, but that's another discussion.

Given the scenario presented, I can understand the GM call, even if I probably would have been more lenient if I was running this specific encounter.

The main concern to me isn't the level of skill, but the amount of time needed to make the check. Most diplomacy-style actions require a minute of time to be able to do. Tame Animal, which a lot of folks here are citing, requires an hour. If the animal is running away from an active threat, that means the timeframe is being measured in rounds, not minutes.

In the example of "Tame animal", it takes one hour if trained, 10 minutes if expert, 1 minute if master and 1 round if legendary.

FlyJonat wrote:

BotBrain wrote:

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

The feat literally says that it doesn't work on hostile animals. I'm not seeing why it's unreasonable to apply that to an animal being actively threatened by a dragon.

I get your frustration here but this just isn't a failing of the rules, as is being framed. Your GM decided a check was impossible and didn't let you do it. Legendary proficiency doesn't let you override that.

It does not talk about hostiles animals

"You attempt to reduce panic. Attempt a Diplomacy check, comparing it to the Will DC of creatures in a 10-foot emanation around you who are frightened. Each of them is temporarily immune for 1 hour"

BotBrain wrote:

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

By the way, the feat I was talking about here is "no cause for alarm". It is mechanically possible to reduce panic from creatures with just diplomacy.

FlyJonat wrote:

BotBrain wrote:

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

Generally speaking, the point of a skill feat like Tame Animal is to let you do something you can't otherwise do.

If you have the feat, you can tame a non-hostile animal.
If you don't have the feat, you can't.

There are Paizo devs who literally said that you can try certain actions without a specific feat, you will just have a penalty.

The magus in our group at level 14 was able to negociate with a valstrax during combat without "legendary negociation" so that it would stop attacking us.

But now the conversation is leaving the original topic.

I don't think this is a contradiction, really. We could have the same conversation about why a legendary in athletics can't jump 1000 feet in the air unaided, or a legendary in survival can't forage when there is literally nothing around. Some things just aren't possible with skills, and attempting to calm an animal that is in active danger (against a dragon no less) is one of those.

Is is really impossible when there is literally a level 1 skill feat to reduce panic of creatures? This exact feat is diplomacy instead of nature but you get the idea. And yes, my PC has +30 diplomacy.

From my perspective as a DM, I would have let you calm a level 0 animal with no roll. Not sure why the DM was trying to make a level 18 druid have trouble calming a rabbit or little level 0 animal even if a magus was around transformed into a dragon.

Sounds a bit like the DM and group are messing with you.

But let's try to get more information. Why exactly did the magus turn into a dragon while you were trying to catch and calm a level 0 animal? What was going on to even set such a scenario up? Why would the DM be adamant that a level 18 druid would have trouble calming a common lvl 0 animal? Why would that even be the concern of a level 18 group of characters?

The whole thing seems strange.

To add context to this. We arrived at a monastery in an AP. To see the leader to progress, we needed first to do a few task for monks (getting wood from a tree, catch a yak, ring a bell, make a drawing in sand). Te second one, catching a Yak alive (no official stats for this animal, a cow is level 0 though). I don't know if the official AP added this as filler or the GM was trying to gain more time to prepare future encounters.

We track a pack of them. We couldn't agree on which course of action to choose to catch a yak so the GM made us roll an initiative to structure who would do something first. The rogue started first and used his madcap top which summoned skeletons musicians as a random effect. The GM said the yak started running away. The magus for his turn decided to transform into a dragon because he wanted to go after them (because the gm said they were really fast). For my turn, I wanted to teleport to a single yak with "water to water" and try to calm it with my druid skills at legendary. I also asked if using "fresh produce" could help my roll somehow.

The argument mentionned at the beginning happened. The group heavily refused my argument. They added "If a serial killer chases me, I wouldn't stop if a random person would to try to calm me". To that I replied that it would be a different situation if you replace that random person by a superhero like superman and that my PC isn't level 4 but level 18.

After that, I gave up and just casted "wall of stone" instead to trap a yak.

Furthermore, dragons don't have the Animal trait, so Animal Empathy and Command an Animal won't affect them any more than they would affect a human.

You misread the post. My druid wasn't calming a dragon. The magus transformed into a dragon. I wanted to calm a basic animal that was probably around level 0 with a level 18 character.

Nothing To See Here wrote:

There isn't really a mechanic in the game for calming an agitated animal. If I was your GM, I would just set it as a standard DC of the animal's level which would mean that your +34 would likely have succeeded.

No. The rules are clear. "Calming an agitated animal" (changing the hostile attitude to indifferent or better) requires the use of Animal Empathy and a Diplomacy check (or a spell).

This is an attempt to circumvent the rules to use a different skill in place of Diplomacy. Because the OP probably didn't invest in Diplomacy.

My PC is master in diplomacy with a +30.

I would like to know people's opinions about how high level PCs are allowed to be powerful.

Recently I argued with my group about what I can do as a level 18 druid with legendary nature and +34.

We needed to catch an animal and the magus in our group decided to transform into a dragon. I wanted to use my legendary nature to try to tame to calm it. The whole group said that it was impossible, that I don't understand how high levels work and that it made no sense, not even a dc 50, because it was afraid of a huge dragon.

My argument was that high level pcs can summon meteors, stop time, jump 150 feet, fall 5 kilometers and take no damage, skyrim stealth to be hidden from everything, break curses in 10 minutes, cure doomed and drained (even from artefacts), be immune to extreme temperatures, create earthquakes, scare people to death, yet calming an animal with legendary nature skills is seen as impossible?

The contradiction makes me frustrated and I don't know how I'm allowed to play high level PCs right now.

I was wondering if creatures with immunity to mental are protected from both mental effects and mental damage like mindless creatures or just mental damage. I'm not too sure of the distinction between the two.

I just gained level 16 in a campaign and I chose the class feat to sustain as a free action. I want to be sure to choose the right creatures to summon in a fight.

I'm currently playing a samsaran druid in the First of Ruby campaign. I use the free archetype rules, our group is about to reach level 14 and the archetypes I'm currently using are medic, wood/water kineticist, acrobat and cosmos oracle. My group also has a magus, rogue and examplar.

For the level 14 I plan to take the sixth pillar archetype to get the dedication and the feat "Maneuvering Spell". The dedication is pretty useless to me but I really need the other feat because almost every creature in this campaign has reactive strike so the cost of always using step is a bit frustrating (especially when my character was stunned during a fight versus Tino's group at level 12, couldn't do anything for the whole fight except run and become unconscious).

I really want this feat (also because my character having studied at some kind of fighting/magical academy at Goka would fit a lot with my second chance champion background) but I feel like the rest of them in the archetype are useless to me.

I wonder if I should still do it or pick a regular class feat with another archetype that I already planned to pick (I already have suggestions on my list like mortal herald or envoy, but if my GM doesn't approve them for obvious reasons, I have imperial sorcerer as a backup).

Thank you for your time.

I'm currently playing a level 12 samsaran and I plan to pick the "water to water" ancestry feat at level 13.

One thing confusing me is the action cost. The feat says 1 action on foundryvtt and the pdf, but it doesn't mention a cost on archives of nethys. The feat allows me to cast translocate twice a day and that spell is 2 actions so I don't know if I need to use the 1 action cost of the feat or the 2 actions cost of the spell.

I have a question concerning the oracle feat "Debilitating Dichotomy". I picked oracle as an archetype for a druid in a high level campaign. For level 16, I plan to pick "Debilitating Dichotomy". My gm says that this feat use the spell dc of the oracle because of the cursebound trait, but when I tested in foundryvtt it used the spell dc of my druid. The cursebound trait doesn't specify which spell dc exactly and foundry might have some problem with "advanced mysteries" so I'm really not sure which dc I need to use.

Edit: By spell DC I meant to use wisdom or charisma because this is what changes the dc in the end.