Fuzzy-Wuzzy's page

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.)

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.

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!

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'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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Dubious Scholar wrote:

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Megistone wrote:

What happens if a minion has persistent damage going on and you don't spend an action to command it? A literal interpretation of the rule would be that it doesn't take damage this round.

A non-acting minion is no different from an non-acting PC. Does a PC who is slowed 3 or stunned or outright unconscious stop taking persistent damage?

Not quite - the question is when the minion's turn in initiative is to begin with. A PC who can't act still has a turn come around.

Minions don't get their own initiative, they use their master's. "Your minion acts on your turn in combat" makes that clear.

I think the confusion comes into *when* in your turn does the familiar act. At the beginning? At the end? Does it need to take all its actions together or can it alternate those actions with its master's.

Maybe I should have included more of my previous PC1 quote before.

Minions are creatures that directly serve another creature. Your minion acts on your turn in combat, once per turn, when you spend an action to issue it commands.

It acts when you command it, and since it only acts once per turn it must take all (both) its actions together. I don't see how that's at all ambiguous. The way you've been running it is clearly the correct way. What more formal text would you prefer the rules to use?

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Megistone wrote:

What happens if a minion has persistent damage going on and you don't spend an action to command it? A literal interpretation of the rule would be that it doesn't take damage this round.

A non-acting minion is no different from an non-acting PC. Does a PC who is slowed 3 or stunned or outright unconscious stop taking persistent damage?

Not quite - the question is when the minion's turn in initiative is to begin with. A PC who can't act still has a turn come around.

Minions don't get their own initiative, they use their master's. "Your minion acts on your turn in combat" makes that clear.

Gortle wrote:

Timing of a Minions turn. Does it actually have a turn. What about end of turn and start of turn effects? When are they applied to minions?

There is a solid rules argument that minions are immune to persistent damage...

I'm pretty dang sure I've read a hard rule somewhere that specified that a familiar's turn is always simultaneous with the character it's tied to.

You might be thinking of this:

Minions are creatures that directly serve another creature. Your minion acts on your turn in combat, once per turn, when you spend an action to issue it commands.

Anathema: let your emotions dictate your tactics, hunt felines for sport, permit others of your rank or lower to calculate tactics on your behalf

At the beginning of every session, announce, "Hey, please don't make tactical suggestions to me. If you do, I'll be forbidden from performing it, and have to do something else. Ask, don't tell. Except for the party leader, of course."

Or you could declare yourself the lowest-ranking member of the party... ;-)

If this was about the money than you might have had a point. Again, with either interpretation, the financial gains are so miniscule as to have no practical impact on game balance as a whole throughout the vast majority of the game.

Remind me why you want (and want it a lot) the more lucrative interpretation when it's not going to have any practical impact? Or does it somehow manage to have an impact in general but not on balance?

It feels like they were deliberately trying to "remove ability mods from cantrips for consistency" not "change how much damage spells tend to do" because it looks like they set the remaster damage as close to the original damage, on average, as they could.

Haven't they said the change was mostly so that archetypes' cantrips would do decent damage even if the archetype KAS and your class KAS were different?

Plus forcing the GM (and PFS!) to allow Teleport/Interplanar Teleport is BS.

Hear, hear! It's like the people who designed the schools and the people who designed the rarity system had no overlap and weren't in each others' meetings. Which... could well be true, the remaster being a rush job. Doesn't make the result non-BS, unfortunately.

For PFS, though, don't they get to declare things like that non-eligible for play there? Or least AoN has little "(in)eligible for PFS" icons on everything for some reason.

People do go to college to major in civil engineering IRL, you know.

A batch of 4 of these consumable items is going to take 2 days of setup time, it will cost 20 gp up front, and it will take another 20 days to get it for the full 50% price. So 22 days and 20 gp. Or 2 days and 40 gp.

If for some reason you wanted to craft 4 of the consumables but without batching them, crafting it at 50% cost by spending a lot of time on it would need 28 days and 20 gp. Or paying full price to get them as fast as possible would be 8 days and 40 gp.

That six-day difference is the real benefit to batching. You can monetize it by finding work (of whatever sort) of higher level than the consumable. (If it's not higher level you may as well just make more of the consumable.)

To quote myself in the previous thread, "time is money."

Kaspyr2077, you know posts with actual, applicable information on the real world are not allowed on these forums. Please delete your post before the moderators see it and lock the thread. And in the future please stick to half-baked guesses and wild assumptions like the rest of us!

;-)

What the heck is a shire?

That gasp you just heard was the sound of Tolkien fans reading your comment.

Sub-optimal weapons are useful to have in game because you can arm NPCs with them to lower the danger level a bit.

Batching saves you time, and time is money.

If I have a week of downtime, and I make a batch of something, it takes me a day minimum and N gold pieces to finish. Now I have six days of downtime to screw around with. If instead I make a single one of the thing, and then another, etc, it takes me four days minimum and the same N gold to finish---but now I only have three days to screw around.

If my screwing around is no more profitable than crafting was, it's a wash. But if I can find a higher-level job for the rest of the week, I make a very real profit by having batched, proportional to the increase in screw-around time. With this example, batching nets me three days at some better job.

That's my understanding. Not sure who I'm agreeing with or not here....

The only issue with quarterlings is the confusion with future generations. How do you vocally express the difference in between a group of "three eighthlings" verses a group of "3/8-lings"?

Decimals! "Three .125-lings" vs ".375-lings" is perfectly clear. :-P

My interpretation is "Making anywhere from 1 to 4 of a particular consumable takes the same time as one non-consumable; you save no time by trying to batch different consumables."

So you can't make one of A and one of B and one of C and one of D simultaneously, and the time to do them sequentially is the same as for four of A (one simultaneous batch of A) and four of B and four of C and four of D.

Otherwise they'd just say either "You can make a single consumable in one-quarter the time for a non-consumable," or if for some reason they really like the number four then "You can make any four consumables in the time for a non-consumable."

The GM Core has the following Glossary entry for Creature (p328):

Quote:

creature An active participant in the story and world. This

includes monsters and nonplayer characters (played by the Game Master) and player characters (played by the other players).

creature is whatever the GM's story considers an active participant. It can be an animate or inanimate. The example definition describes a sub-set of creatures "monsters, NPC, and PC" included as creatures, but not all things. A door blocking your path forward or any other object that is actively part of the story can be a creature.

think of creatures as being the important things in the story vs the background things that PCs don't interact with.

Doors are not active participants. That's the whole point of including that word, to exclude passive objects. Your sword is not a creature either, important though it is to the story.

Fuzzy-Wuzzy wrote:

Find a dead but intact cat, eviscerate it, stuff imp inside, sew shut.

It's probably easier just to start with a living cat than it is to find a dead but intact one. ;)

Noooooooooooooooo!

Like RD, I like (living) cats. :-P

Find a dead but intact cat, eviscerate it, stuff imp inside, sew shut.

In this case the excuse/flavor text would seem to make the writers' intentions clear. If you cast it three times, you have disturbed your patron three times, which is a no-no.

Didn't the devs explicitly say that due to alternate timelines etc PF2 and SF need not form a consistent history? Something about godly deaths/births/shifts in particular, IIRC.

Depending on your deity, their sanctification can make you holy or unholy. This gives you the holy or unholy trait, which commits you to one side of a struggle over the souls of the planes and may be referenced in other abilities. If you “can be” holy or unholy according to your deity, you make that choice, and if you “must be” holy or unholy you gain the trait automatically. If you gain the opposing trait in some way, you lose the previous trait until you complete an atone ritual (page 390).

So you can be holy or unholy. The same usage is present in the compatibility errata, like "fiends/undead who are/aren't unholy."

Fiends are automatically committed to the Mean side of the great planar struggle, being partially made of Meanness, so they're unholy. I suspect undead are damaged by holy w/o being unholy because free-willed undead don't have to take that side in the struggle, or any side. They're damaged by holy because the Nice side hates them anyway.

If you get trained in Crafting anywhere else during character creation, you get the Specialty Crafting feat, because you can always rearrange things in chargen to put the ancestry feat last. You don't have to formally work out the order, just say "I get this feat after I get trained."

After character creation things aren't so flexible. If you took the ancestry feat at 1st level, you're now trained in Crafting (it trains you), so you can't "get trained later." If you don't take the ancestry feat until later, then if you're trained in Crafting when you take it you get Specialty Crafting, and otherwise you just become trained.

Jatembe doesn't hide behind rocks. He's constantly running off to deal with universe-shattering perils far beyond what the PCs could imagine, much less handle. You don't hear about them because he does such a good job and is far too modest to brag.

ISTR the myths of dwarf-like and elf-like things that Tolkien worked from all imply better-than-normal eyesight, esp in the dark. So it's from real life, kind of.

Portable Holes IMHO are fundamentally D&D in a way that goes past their name. I'm betting they vanish completely with the loss of OGL because if not they'll need really radical alteration in how they work. That would have to include their classic interactions with bags of holding.