Gjorbjond's page

I'm having a little trouble finding this verbiage. Where do the rules say that the drone can use your skill ranks while it is under direct control?

It's in the description of Skill Unit instead of under Master Control:

Additionally, whenever you are directly controlling your drone, it can use any of your skill ranks if you wish, assuming it has the appropriate tools to do so (a drone without manipulator arms cannot use Engineering to disable a device, for example).

Your interpretation would mean that there's no reason to take Direct Control in combat...

And your interpretation means there's no reason to ever take Skill Unit Computers or Engineering. All the checks with those skills are full actions. If you have to be using Master Control for the drone to get full actions it uses your skill ranks anyway and has no need for a Skill Unit to select that skill.

Once a drone gets True AI at level 20, it can operate completely independently. Prior to that, it can only use the skill in it's Skill Unit when not under your direct control.

It's unclear if the Skill Subroutine mods are also able to be used unsupervised, but I would tend to think so. If you take the mod twice, you'll get the drone's Int up to 10 and it would be halfway decent with Computers or Engineering.

I wouldn't count on it being able to do much in starship combat though given the high DCs.

3-Our house rule is you can only take a weaker caster cohorts, are built on 15 rather than 20 points and must generally be of the same race.

I think a lot of people overlook the fact that Cohorts are NPCs and should follow the Heroic NPC rules for character creation. That includes such things as a lower point buy, less starting equipment, and no traits without taking the Additional Traits feat.

If you really want to implement a house rule to discourage taking the feat, you could further limit it to non-heroic NPCs. You'd have even fewer points and only NPC classes. Even an Adept cohort is better than pretty much any other feat.

SLAs in general work like spells except they don't have verbal, somatic or material components. That's it. So they're still just as identifiable as a silent, still, eschew materialed spell.

If it doesn't have components, what basis do you have to identify the spell? I know that there was a recent FAQ saying that all spells have visible effects that make casting them obvious, but I know I'm not going to follow that in games I run. If that is true, then Invisibility is useless for casters because they'll throw off sparks and rainbows with everything they cast.

You can multiclass sorcerer and bloodrager. If you do, you have to pick the same bloodline. Their powers don't stack and you end up with redundant abilities.

If you make a draconic bloodline bloodrager, you can go into dragon disciple, but you'll start getting redundant sorcerer bloodline powers.

Even though the bloodlines provide different abilities based on which class you take, they're still bloodlines and EH says it has to be one you don't already have.

Go with Orc bloodline and you're fine.

Though if you are going for a stealth based fight, a ring of counterspell and putting in glitterdust can be a good investment.

The ring only affects spells that target you, not spells that include you in the area.

I'd let a detailed painting or map probably count as "viewed once". Also, you can find someone from the area you're trying to go to and ask them to Share Memory of that area.

Most of the bardic performance options are supernatural. A harpy's captivating song is supernatural. All the FAQ does is clarify that Cackle also falls into the category of supernatural powers that are basically sonic effects.

I prefer to leave Energy Attacks as an available option for Evolution Surge. That way you can pick the most appropriate energy type for the situation. Since you can't take Energy Attacks more than once, you're locked into a particular choice if you take it as one of your eidolon's evolutions.

Actually, you can use Minor Image to duplicate the effects of an Ice Storm just fine. As long as no creatures interact with the illusion, it's just as good as a real one. Same with Silent Image and most wall spells.

If you cast Mirror Image, then cast Form of the Dragon, your opponents will see a bunch of dragons flying about in the same area, not a dragon being orbited by a bunch of wizards.

Heck, I've even seen wizards cast Mirror Image and Invisibility. Opponents generally can't see them at all, but if one of them has See Invisibility up, they'll see the images.

I generally rule that people who are swallowed have total cover from attacks not originating in the same stomach. They're in enough trouble as it is.

The spellcraft skill represents your character's knowledge of the programming language of magic. Each spell formula is different, which is why you have to make spellcraft checks to understand a spell you already know if that spell was developed by a different wizard. You can develop new spells every time you level and scribe them into your book. Those spells are uniquely your own creation. The fact that many other wizards have developed spells that have the exact same effect is irrelevant.

When you hear your enemy chanting:
for (DiceOfDamage = 1; DiceOfDamage <= MyLevel; DiceOfDamage++)
{d6Fire}

You can make a spellcraft check to realize a fireball is coming online. You may also realize that if you had written that spell, you'd have used a do-while loop instead of a for loop, but the results are the same.

Even if a wizard has never heard of another wizard casting a particular spell, his knowledge of spellcraft gives him all the tools he needs to develop any spell whose effects he can dream of and that his current level of skill will allow him to cast.

Since this is such a corner case, I'd just house rule it as DR/Cold Iron.

In our games we do this:

If an animal companion has an Int of 3, and you've spent a rank in Linguistics to allow it to understand a language, you can tell it to do any trick it's learned without needing to roll. It can even understand other members of the party and follow their directions. You still need Handle Animal to train it and to push it to do tricks it hasn't learned yet.

The summoner I'm currently playing has close to max ranks in handle animal and linguistics so he can communicate with anything he summons.

It was covered before in this thread when Ultimate Magic came out.

The spellbooks there use inscription price + price to copy from another wizard's book (i.e. 1/2 inscription price) divided by 2.

0 level spells = 5 gp to inscribe and 2.5 gp to copy from another wizard
1 level spells = 10 gp to inscribe and 5 gp to copy from another wizard
2 level spells = 40 gp to inscribe and 20 gp to copy from another wizard
3 level spells = 90 gp to inscribe and 45 gp to copy from another wizard

18 x 7.5 = 135
8 x 15 = 120
4 x 60 = 240
4 x 135 = 540
--------------
1035 / 2 = 517.5 gp

Defensive Primer:

0 level spells = 5 gp to inscribe and 2.5 gp to copy from another wizard
1 level spells = 10 gp to inscribe and 5 gp to copy from another wizard

18 x 7.5 = 135
7 x 15 = 105
------------
240 gp inscription + copy cost

120 gp value of spellbook (1/2 cost)
40 gp lock
-------------------------
160 gp price in Ultimate Magic

I use the list of animal companion tricks as a guide to what you can order mindless undead to do.

Heck, even thought the spell says it, I don't allow "attack a specific kind of creature". They have no intelligence, they automatically fail knowledge skill checks to identify creature's, so I don't see how they'd be able to tell the difference between a human and a halfling much less a human and a half-elf.

The best I'd allow is "guard this place from anything except me and my companions". Even then, they'd be fooled by anyone with a reasonable disguise.

1. Correct. It's only a limit on its natural attacks.
2. Correct. A high BAB allows iterative attacks with manufactured weapons.
3. Nope. Weapon Training is a single ability that either costs 2 or 4 points based off of what level of training the eidolon has. If it were listed as two separate abilities with the second ability requiring Simple Weapon Proficiency prereq, then you could do it.

Keep in mind that if you're mixing weapon and natural attacks, you have to give up the natural attacks of the hand or hands wielding the weapon, and any remaining natural attacks become secondary attacks.

Here's about the best example I can come up with to show how it works as I understand it:

You have a Figher and a Cleric, with the Fighter protected by Shield Other and both protected with Resist Fire 10. Both are hit with a 60 point Fireball and both fail their saves.
The Fighter takes 25 HP damage (60 - 10 fire resist = 50, 50 /2 = 25)
The Cleric takes 75 HP damage (60 - 10 fire resist = 50, 50 + 25 transfered from Fighter = 75)

Any DR, SR, Resistance, etc. that the Cleric may have doesn't apply to the damage transferred because all of those things are already applied on the fighter end of things. They only apply to damage targeting the cleric.

I had a similar issue in 3.5 with a mummy cleric casting Shield Other on his two Wight Monk "hounds". Mummies take 1/2 damage from lots of attacks, so if read one way, it potentially meant the mummy was taking insignificant damage and effectively doubled the wights' hp. Then there was the matter of the Mass Inflict Wounds spells....

The damage the mummy would take from the Shield Other spell would be untyped and not subject to reduction by DR or Resistance.

It's almost best to think of it in reverse. Effectively you're transferring hit points from the cleric to cover half the damage the spell's subject ends up taking from each attack. Anything that would prevent the transfer of HP from the cleric also prevents the transfer of HP to the recipient.

Solution 2

Basher's DR reduces 20 to 10, then Shield Other reduces it to 5.
Cleric takes the other 5 through Shield Other

Since the spell transfers half the subjects wounds to the cleric, the subject has to actually be wounded by an attack for there to be something for it to transfer. Apply all DR, Resistance, etc. before splitting it up.

The subject's and cleric's damage should never differ by more than 1.