Fuzzy-Wuzzy's page

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

"Oh no don't make the GM do any work"---you seem to be postulating a bad/stupid GM, Finoan.

In my scenario it is more that the GM is being ambushed by the players.

And you keep insisting on that possible-but-not-inevitable scenario when the OP provide no such context.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Put yourself in the shoes of the GM - or worse, a published AP writer. The party has a Wizard as an enemy. That Wizard must have a spellbook around somewhere at least at the start of their day. If the party is able to get their hands on that spellbook......

So not something that the GM was originally intending to give out, but the players insist that 'the spellbook must be around here.'

"Not something the GM was originally intending to give out" was neither stated nor implied in my scenario. You keep thrusting it in everywhere.

So basically what the alternative comes down to is 'don't create an encounter with a Wizard unless you also account for the undetermined amount of wealth of their spellbook'. Which isn't something that is intuitive or signposted in the encounter creation rules at all.

Oh no, the GM could need to think for themselves a little. How awful.

Also, there's still this: The rules do not list a price for a partially-filled spellbook, they explicitly list only the price for a blank spellbook. The latter sets no expectations for the former. So by your reasoning, the partially-filled spellbook is worth... nothing at all, because the rules don't supply a Price for one. So stop this "5 sp" nonsense.

I would allow someone to use prestidigitation to paint without brushes or paint (they would still need a canvas or similar surface, however). In any case, it would take just as long and be just as difficult as painting with brushes and paint would be (including skill checks if appropriate).

Are you ruling out tricks like "painting" a stone statue, or is that similar to a canvas? In the second case I'm not clear what you are ruling out. Splashes of color hanging in the air by themselves?

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Calliope5431 wrote:

The Raven Black wrote:

Calliope5431 wrote:

An illusory familiar doesn't debuff anyone, so there's no good reason to attack it at all. This is only about familiars that actively contribute to combat...

How can you tell ?

Because it hisses or glows and my condition's duration gets extended.

This gets into the meta of the game. But I don't think it's fun for PCs and NPCs to not know what is causing effects on them.

Have you tried it both ways? (With and without everyone knowing where effects come from.)

My default is more transparency, yes.

With less transparency the PCs got pretty confused.

But you know that some people run it otherwise? Do you consider that legit? By which I mean "are you willing to discuss the question of NPC RK without having your way of running transparency taken for granted?"

Not knowing the duration of effects is similarly frustrating, because "you're slowed indefinitely, I'll tell you when you aren't" just feels bad. It's hard to play tactically with that setup, too.

Well, if an NPC (witch or familiar) is extending the slow round by round, even the GM doesn't know how long it'll last---when will the NPC get taken down?

Admittedly that is a rare case, and even in my group everyone knows how long something has been slapped on someone for, because we tried it the other way and it didn't add enough to be worth it.

I agree with Hammerjack. If Conceal Spell made the Manipulate trait vanish or semi-vanish, which AFAICT is what your player is advocating, it would say so.

What happens is the opening is there but the fighter doesn't know that it's because you're casting. Could be a nervous twitch for all they know.

The Raven Black wrote:

Calliope5431 wrote:

An illusory familiar doesn't debuff anyone, so there's no good reason to attack it at all. This is only about familiars that actively contribute to combat...

How can you tell ?

Because it hisses or glows and my condition's duration gets extended.

This gets into the meta of the game. But I don't think it's fun for PCs and NPCs to not know what is causing effects on them.

Have you tried it both ways? (With and without everyone knowing where effects come from.)

So certainly a cantrip can replicate the effects of Artisan's Tools for crafting a painting.

With the GM's cooperation you could even research such a cantrip yourself, specifically meant to work with Art Lore (and similar Lores). It wouldn't have the other functions of prestidigitation, of course. And I'd expect it to take more than a moment to function for anything more complex than a splash of color, but OTOH it shouldn't need a set of paints to work with so you'd never run out.

Eoran wrote:

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

I see no reason either the players nor, more importantly, the characters would know the hissing is harmful. Whether GMs report such things varies by table---as does whether players are expected to avoid metagaming with it. Apparently at your table it's "Yes" and "No"; at others, including mine, it's the reverse.

If you want to claim your table's way is actually the one and only way, supply rules citations.

Oh, I won't say it's the only way. Bad ways are ways. Here goes another discussion on blindsiding players which I'm not remotely interested in. Do as you like.

OH NOES WE'VE BEEN HAVING BADWRONGFUN THIS WHOLE TIME!!!

I thank the gods for supplying Errenor the Wise to make it all better.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

If a party of PCs that does not happen to include a witch or other person with a familiar comes across a group of NPCs with the proverbial black cat that hisses at them during combat, should they

(a) assume it's just a cat, leave it alone
(b) assume it's a familiar or something, attack it
(c) attempt RK on it
?

It's a bad example by the way. You forgot to mention that PCs know that this hissing is harmful to them. And players very probably even know what exactly it's doing. GMs don't hide such things and shouldn't do so. Most they can hide are afflictions and curses/cursed items at onset/inactive stage.

I see no reason either the players nor, more importantly, the characters would know the hissing is harmful. Whether GMs report such things varies by table---as does whether players are expected to avoid metagaming with it. Apparently at your table it's "Yes" and "No"; at others, including mine, it's the reverse.

If you want to claim your table's way is actually the one and only way, supply rules citations.

If a party of PCs that does not happen to include a witch or other person with a familiar comes across a group of NPCs with the proverbial black cat that hisses at them during combat, should they
(a) assume it's just a cat, leave it alone
(b) assume it's a familiar or something, attack it
(c) attempt RK on it
?

Ok I just thought of the WORST possible way to buff Intelligence: Since it reflects the character's thinking skills, tie it to how long the player gets to choose their actions in combat.

Ooo! My high school group did something like that for a while!

It was players' fault, the DM would try to get a quick answer to "what do you do" (in or out of combat) to keep the tempo up and the player would say "look, my character is a lot smarter than I am, give me time to reflect that."

Formalizing it didn't last very long, but it did get the notion out of our systems. Gods be thanked!

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

How do intelligent weapons reproduce?

One of the example cultural groups of intelligent weapons, the Smiths, are trying to make more of their kind.

So they don't reproduce, yet, but they're trying. That's different than wyrwoods, for instance, who have a specific creation ritual that they discovered and now keep to themselves. That's the kind of information I was looking for, thank you. Is there a lot of TK among them? Or other substitute for hands?

How do intelligent weapons reproduce?

I agree with Calliope5431 that followers of a god in a pantheon should be cognizant of the other gods of the pantheon. BUT...

Bacchus, Mars, Apollo, Venus, Jupiter et al. form an actual pantheon. So do the Hindu gods (as I understand it). The Core 20 do not. They generally have nothing to do with each other, which is the opposite of a pantheon. AoN categorizes them as a pantheon but I think that's because it doesn't have anything else to call "a group of gods." (A flock of gods? A worship of gods?)

So I end up with Xenocrat on this one.

Yeah, there is the potential edge case of an intelligent undead who, through personal choice and dedication, has made themselves not-unholy (like an ethical vampire, say) wouldn't be damaged by holy water. But people who want to use holy water to harm undead probably aren't that interested in fighting those kinds of undead.

Pharasmins are. "It's nice that you're nice but still you must go!

I am checking my reading of the new Remaster version of Discern Secrets.

Previously Discern Secrets read as follows:

Discern Secrets wrote:

You call upon your patron's power to better uncover secrets. When you Cast the Spell, the target can Recall Knowledge, Seek, or Sense Motive. The target gains a +1 status bonus to the skill or Perception used for the roll, and this bonus remains as long as you Sustain the Spell. The target is temporarily immune to discern secrets for 1 minute.

So when I cast the spell on an ally, the ally immediately makes one action of their choice between Recall Knowledge, Seek, or Sense Motive. They also gain a +1 status bonus to that action as well as any other actions of that type that they use for the duration of the spell.

The new version is:

Remastered Discern Secrets wrote:

Your patron deigns to whisper a few secrets. The target can Recall Knowledge, Seek, or Sense Motive as a free action. The target gains a +1 status bonus to the statistic used for the roll (a skill or Perception) on the roll and as long as you Sustain the spell. The target is temporarily immune to discern secrets for 1 minute.

So when I cast the spell on an ally, they do not immediately take an action out of turn. They instead get an ability granted by the spell to make Recall Knowledge, Seek, or Sense Motive actions as a Free Action for the duration of the spell. They also still get the +1 bonus to all such actions taken.

I agree with your reading of RAW. However, I suspect this was not the intent. For one thing, the Free Action has neither a trigger nor a frequency, which means it can be done over and over again in one turn, which can't possibly be RAI. I don't know if it should have a frequency of "1/round" or "once." So check that with your GM before relying on it.

I'm not the OP, but maybe the question of the relative power of Witch abilities deserves its own thread? Recall Knowledge hasn't been mentioned for a while. Does anyone have cases of NPCs using it (or not using it) for subjects other than familiars?

Mine is Battle Medicine works on Undead for no reason but because Battle Medicine does not say limited to Living Creatures.

In the heat of battle there isn't always time to pause and check that your patient is still alive.

If you can’t be creative, why would you get someone else to do it for you? It doesn’t matter whether it is a machine or not. As Nick Cave said, art is supposed to take effort, not shortcuts.

That's absurd. Say I want some nice paintings on the walls of my domicile. Sadly I lack the talent to create them. So then it's a bad thing for me to hire an artist---let's say a human---to make some for me? I get my paintings, the artist gets the money they need to survive. But somehow I've sinned against creativity itself?

I can think of many more such examples, but not of any that come close to justifying "If you can't be creative, why would you get someone else to do it for you?" It's nonsense.

Just a quick further thought: If "stance" meant "the way you stand [on the ground]," then any way of standing would be a stance. Which would be fine except that you can only enter or be in a stance in encounter mode, so anyone in exploration or downtime modes would not be able to stand....

Okay, Finoan and Super Zero are right about exploration activities; I withdraw that suggestion.

<blink> Who here claimed that stealing non-physical objects doesn't count, whom Finoan and SanityFaerie are disagreeing with? Xenocrat certainly said no such thing, just that thefts of non-physical stuff are different than thefts of physical stuff, AFAICT. Which is true legally, morally, philosophically, and economically.

One is a madeup category based on highly questionable property rights that people are trying to meme into existence in a quixotic effort to get paid.

I kinda think many of the claims are rooted in the Berne Convention, which gives significantly more rights to authors than U.S. copyright law does... and to which the U.S. is not signatory. Dunno who is signatory, maybe it'll work better in those countries.

EDIT: Oops! The U.S. is signatory as of March 1989 (convention dates to 1886) but I think may not enforce all provisions properly? Nm, ignore me.

It's the familiar who consumes it, so they should be able to do so while riding on your shoulder or in a satchel, while you do some other activity. Perhaps sleeping, if you hand it the writing at bedtime. Or when the party is about to have its own meal.

I'd say don't attack him during the small interval between armors (unless an intelligent NPC who knows about his habits is at work!), but don't let it stay on while he's asleep. It's hard to renew something every 10 min in your dreams. Plus if he did keep it on while asleep he'd wake up fatigued, which is no good.

Otherwise, I might call "keep impulse armor refreshed" its own exploration activity. Might not limit your speed, but does conflict with other exploration activities.

If you don't want him doing this, rule that if he keeps it on for an hour (ignoring the short bits when it's off) he becomes fatigued. The Sustain a Spell activity does that after only 10 min, so this seems fair.

Do you only get this shade from the roleplaying community, not elsewhere? Err, for other uses of AI than character portraits, that is.

calnivo wrote:

Let's remember that a single +1 Striking weapon has a regular list price of 100 gp - i.e. the equivalent of 100+ days lodging in a private room. Or about 2 years of comfortable standard of living. (And we're talking about a level 4 item. As you know, prices for more powerful items go up in a nonlinear fashion.)

Let's also remember that such items are freaking everywhere.

There is a lot of expensive jewelry out there IRL, but its merchants still spend a lot on security.

Are Kasatha a Medium race or a large Race?

They haven't made it to PF2 yet, but Kasathas in 1st ed and Starfinder are Medium.

I think that void damage is an exception for "being able to overcome immunity to it".

Let's hope so.

But what if someone Charms me into thinking the sky is falling?!?

Greater/Decaying rune

D4 void damage with 2d4 persistent on crit. Greater version doubles the persistent and bypasses resistance and immunity

<twitch> I hope we're not going back to the days of "this fire is so hot it can even burn a fire elemental!" Bypassing an immunity that something has for being tough is one thing, bypassing an immunity it has by virtue of its core nature is quite another.

This benefit doesn’t apply to a simple weapon with a damage die greater than d8 or a martial or advanced weapon with a damage die greater than d6. (Apply any abilities that alter the damage die size first.)

I doubt the writers were meaning to invoke a fine-tuned technical game meaning of 'abilities' far from the English meaning. IMHO they meant the same as "apply any effects that alter the damage die size first" or "apply anything that alters the damage die size first."

So I don't think it matters whether the damage die is being changed by a weapon trait, character trait, feat, spell, etc; just that it's changed.

Unfortunately fatal is still an edge case since its damage die change is conditional on a crit. So... back to the previous proposed solution for that particular case. :-/

The interaction between sneak attack and fatal is a bit undefined. At worst, if you crit with the fatal weapon and it increases the weapon's die size to a size that is too large for sneak attack to apply, then you wouldn't get the sneak attack damage on that attack - just the normal critical weapon damage. I would probably let you as the player choose whether to use the fatal trait to get the larger die size, or forego the fatal trait and keep the sneak attack. I think in most cases the sneak attack doubled due to crit is going to be better than the die size and extra die from fatal trait.

Agreed on all counts. I've seen the question come up in other threads but I haven't seen any better solutions.

Well, the king might well have a bodyguard whose job is to cast detect magic on them continually (as in the exploration activity). A shopkeeper, guard, or random priest probably wouldn't.

The most technical defn provided is

ability This is a general term referring to rules that provide an exception to the basic rules. An ability could come from a number of sources, so “an ability that gives you a bonus to damage rolls” could be a feat, a spell, and so on.

Beyond that, it's basically the English word "ability."

Do you have an ambiguous use case where it matters?

So the example leaf order druid has two feats; Green Empathy and Green Tongue, which aren't in the book anymore. Were these consolidated into a general feat or another skill? Because I cannot find it. Were they removed accidentally?

The new (post-Remaster) feat Plant Empathy seems to be all that's left of them. I presume they had to drop the old names to placate WotC, but I don't see why there isn't a Plant Tongue now, unless it was mistakenly dropped while changing levels: the Green feats are 6th & 12th but Plant Empathy is just 1st.

EDIT: If your table wants to use the old Green feats, they're available on the Archives of Nethys: Green Empathy, Green Tongue.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Unicore wrote:

[...]players will throw tantrums when GMs “ruin their fun,” by asking for deception or stealth checks when the player’s plan is clearly using a spell to pull some deception or covert operation.

Needing a check to use subtle is, under the present rules, a house rule. (I make no claim as to whether it is a good house rule.) If the GM included it when going over the house rules in/before Session Zero, the player should have b*@*$ed then and is 100% in the wrong if they wait and throw a tantrum when it comes up in play. If the GM wanted it but did not include it, they screwed up, and should not be "fixing" the screwup by introducing a new house rule in the middle of play.

Well, technically, the cast a spell activity is something that would inherently break stealth and draw attention to you. Conceal spell specifies that they won’t realize you are casting a spell per se, but if you are flailing your arms around and a fireball goes off, what should people assume just happened?

Um, no. Conceal spell says it "hides your spellcasting actions" and renders them "barely noticeable." Flailing your arms around does not qualify as hidden nor as barely noticeable. Anything that picks you out of a crowd of people who are not standing perfectly still does not qualify. GM fiat is not called for. Any unexpected demand for a check at that point is a house rule which should have been discussed at Session Zero.

The rest of your post is all justification for having such a house rule (though you refuse to call it that), and I don't really care if people do have it (as long as they acknowledge it), so I'm not replying to it.

Oh, you mean how long you need to rest to avoid becoming fatigued in the first place, not to recover, got it. I agree, we have no guidance, but "half the time" does sound reasonable.

(BTW I was using detect magic not as an example of causing fatigue but as a specified exploration activity you can't do while fatigued.)

I think the closest you'll get to Christmas on Golarion is the winter solstice, which is lightly covered on the wiki. The Shelynite Crystalhue looks nice!

As someone who has grown up on a Christmas tree farm in a family of foresters,

A Ravingdork origin story! Much is now clear.

[...]players will throw tantrums when GMs “ruin their fun,” by asking for deception or stealth checks when the player’s plan is clearly using a spell to pull some deception or covert operation.

Needing a check to use subtle is, under the present rules, a house rule. (I make no claim as to whether it is a good house rule.) If the GM included it when going over the house rules in/before Session Zero, the player should have b@%#*ed then and is 100% in the wrong if they wait and throw a tantrum when it comes up in play. If the GM wanted it but did not include it, they screwed up, and should not be "fixing" the screwup by introducing a new house rule in the middle of play.

The whole "standard action, move action, swift action" thing, and the feats you name, were first edition Pathfinder. None of it made it into second edition Pathfinder. I'd figure you were in a group that had decided to stay 1e, in which case your query belongs here---but you said PFS, which I didn't think had 1e tables now. PFS-specific questions would belong here. (This forum is for non-PFS-specific discussion of second edition rules.)

All that said, I believe the answer is Yes, but my 1e memories are hardly fresh.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

[...] So, I'd take out at least a factor of three from the exploration-mode tree-generation.

Completely fair, but we don't have much guidance on this topic. The only thing I can think of for guidance is that sustaining for 10 minutes makes you fatigued. Although it doesn't mention how long you need to rest.

"You recover from fatigue after a full night’s rest."--PC1 p444. Also, when fatigued "You can’t use exploration activities performed while traveling, such as those on pages 438–439."

I'm thinking tree-making takes at least as much energy as repeatedly casting detect magic, so you won't be able to do it (on any scale larger than encounters) while fatigued. And I can't think offhand of any magical way to de-fatigue.

This won't make a huge difference, but you can't just extrapolate from encounter mode speeds (a minute or so at a time) to exploration mode speeds (hours) like that. In encounter mode everything is sped up to its max.

If you used Claxon's method to find how far you can travel in an hour (i.e. Striding 20-30' every two seconds) you'll get figures much larger than are given in the table for exploration traveling (PC1 p438) by a consistent factor of three.

So, I'd take out at least a factor of three from the exploration-mode tree-generation.

"Oh no don't make the GM do any work"---you seem to be postulating a bad/stupid GM, Finoan. I prefer clueful GMs & AP writers. In particular, if the adventure writer (GM or not) is planning to have the party find a spellbook, and knows that the party will or may contain a wizard, they already need to determine what spells are in it. And if the party is going to confront a wizard in their lair, there should be either a spellbook around or a darn good reason there isn't one. The latter isn't hard to come up with, so the GM has no excuse for providing a partially-filled spellbook and then insisting it sells for 5 sp, which is the player-frustrating part.

The "spellbook might be missing" option is why my original statement was

Certainly if my party slew a wizard and looted their spellbook, we'd expect to get a helluva lot more than five silver for it!

[5 sp] is what the game rules list a spellbook's price as, so that is the expectation.

The rules do not list a price for a partially-filled spellbook, they explicitly list only the price for a blank spellbook. The latter sets no expectations for the former.

Oh, and a blank spellbook's 5 sp value isn't "because it's a spellbook," it's because it's a blank spellbook. A filled-up spellbook has value only because of the spells it contains. So if the spells aren't valuable themselves, a filled-up spellbook shouldn't be worth 5 sp but 1 cp (my estimate of the value of 100 pages of toilet paper).

None of that applies to a magical item. It’s the difference between selling a computer and selling the right to copy an application on the computer in a world without internet. The computer buyer knows he can ship it to a big city with a market. The software buyer knows copies of it are all over the big city and either worthless or already available locally.

So... copies of spells are all over the big city to the point where they have no sale value? Then why can't my Absalom-dwelling wizard buy every spell they want for coppers at most?

The same applies to buyers for almost any magical item, Xenocrat, yet the rules say that you can sell for half Price anyway. Why should spellbooks take so much extra effort/luck?

Yes, congratulations on reprising Rule Zero.

And if a party defeats a king and thinks their crown should be worth a lot, the GM can decide it is, and the GM can decide it isn't. So what? The only interesting question is what the GM should do, not what they could do.

Also, there's a lot of room between "more than five silver" and "hundreds of gold." Don't introduce false dichotomies.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Finoan wrote:

So who is paying more than 5 sp for a spellbook?

Any wizard who doesn't already have every spell in it. You can't Learn a Spell just by wanting to, but you can Learn from someone else's spellbook.

Like I said... Other adventurers.

There are no NPC wizards in your campaigns? Or their spellbooks are all chock-full?

EDIT: And no I don't mean NPC adventurers, I mean non-adventuring wizards, of the sort you should be able to find in, for instance, any metropolis, and many smaller settlements.

So who is paying more than 5 sp for a spellbook?

Any wizard who doesn't already have every spell in it. You can't Learn a Spell just by wanting to, but you can Learn from someone else's spellbook.

Certainly if my party slew a wizard and looted their spellbook, we'd expect to get a helluva lot more than five silver for it!

It's hard to argue that you shouldn't be allowed to have a bird familiar, or that a bird familiar shouldn't be able to fly (aside from penguins). Once birds can do so and can get other abilities like manual dexterity it's hard to argue that non-bird familiars shouldn't fly, or that it changes game balance for them to. So I consider flying familiars a foregone conclusion. But that doesn't mean they can do everything a flying PC could do.

ISTR a long-ago discussion concluding (more or less) that a familiar's Bulk limit is Light. Pushing their limit down to negligible would prevent a lot of flying shenanigans while still allowing scouting. For instance, the GM could have made your egg big enough to have non-negligible Bulk. And a 50' rope is Light, so they couldn't carry one across a chasm. (They could carry a string, but it's harder to solve the problem with that.)

This question has come up in this thread already but I'll repeat it: how much can a familiar carry?