Jacenat's page

shadowkras wrote:

Quote:

There is also NOTHING IN THERE that says it CAN'T last longer.

"open-ended task" = 1 day/level.

I can make statements without backing them up as well. Show me rules that define it as such or stop making bs up.

Like he said:

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/planar-binding

Impossible demands or unreasonable commands are never agreed to.

If you assign some open-ended task that the creature cannot complete through its own actions, the spell remains in effect for a maximum of 1 day per caster level [...]

It clearly says that an open ended task makes the spell last 1 day per caster level and that unreasonable or impossible demands are never agreed to.

shadowkras wrote:

Quote:

If a player is not in direct violation of the rules he should be allowed to do what he wants.

Here is your mistake on the rules. If the rules dont say you can do something, they you cant do something.

Otherwise, there would be nothing (sans GM) preventing a mage from clapping his hand and exploding the planet, because no rule or spell says he can or cant do that.

How does that even compare? There is no spell supporting your "clapping and boom" example

But there is, kinda:

If a bag of holding is placed within a portable hole, a rift to the Astral Plane is torn in the space: bag and hole alike are sucked into the void and forever lost. If a portable hole is placed within a bag of holding, it opens a gate to the Astral Plane: the hole, the bag, and any creatures within a 10-foot radius are drawn there, destroying the portable hole and bag of holding in the process.

This is essential a one hit kill on any imaginable creature. There is even this design:

http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1374/03/1374030368304.jpg

This is clearly against the intentions of both items (albeit powerful and valuabe) being used not for dealing damage. Everybody smirks at the arrow, but it's essentially the same exploit.

IMHO (I don't do this very long, so please indulge my inexperience) a spell description in the PF SRD is not a constitution but a precedent. The PCs may be laywers while the GM acts out the supreme court judges panel. Other, more fundamental rules, such as the rules for attack of opportunity, or movement in combat, are more similar to paragraphs in a constitution. They may be subject to interpretation, but most of the time are seen as universal truths. It's a layered system and not everything written is set in stone in a particular interpretation.

[...] but thanks to the context it strongly suggests that it refers to tasks which are not per definition impossible but are very close to that. Like suicide or collecting 1 billion GP.

There is literally nothing directly stating that in the rules. Unreasonable and impossible are logically separated by an explicit "or" within the rules. So the unreasonable branch does not need to meet, or closely meet the impossible branch. That may be your interpretation, but it is just that, an interpretation. And for interpretations, see the above argument.

I think folks are missing the part in the spell description that limits the spell to 1 day/level that also grants a second save to resist if the task is open-ended.

I think one of the key problems is the very definiton on what is open ended. To my knowledge only Geas and Planar Binding use this term and it does not occur anywhere else in spell descriptions. It is also not defined independently.

If the limitations on the service where this harsh I feel that it should have been included in to the wording of the spell.

As others have pointed out, the spell is poorly written. It allows for all kinds of logical contradictions depending on the definition of it's limitations. Since it's also powerful, that will probably be the reason why it is banned often in games.

Jacenat wrote:

Rikkan wrote:

If your CR 7 players feel upstaged by a CR 5 monster, you might consider offering your players some advice or giving out some good equipment.

And then what? Having to up the CR of the encounters down the road "just because"? Also this makes for stagnat development into late book3 and early book 4 when they experience a slower power increase.

If a CR 5 creature (shadow mastiff) can tackle encounters on its own created to challenge 5 CR 7 creatures (your players), then it might indeed be better to up the CR of the encounters somewhat.

I did not say "on it's own". But another creature ads another turn for the Party and another threathing range to flank against. With currently 5 PCs and 1 pet (ranger - wolf), this would up to 5+2. This tips the action economy grossly in the favor of the players in most encounters.

Compare that with a party of 3 with no pets (but should tackle most encounters similarly well) and you see that this needs adjustment or it will turn into a cakewalk.

i'd roll a d10 to see who's pet he just stole and bound and then have them come after the party. side quest

Derailing the story? Potentially killing of PCs that had no influence on the sorcerers decision to bind the outsider (because that's what would happen)? I could just let them re-roll characters on the spot, no? Would be easier, right?

I am looking for a way to include it in RotR without having to distort CRs grossly to avoid the aforementioned weaker boss than random enemy syndrom. Also I am looking for a way to include it without the other PCs feeling de-valued. I am still looking btw :)

300 feet is about 100 paces. Must be a very small town or the sorcerer is taking it to the market on market day.

If you know RotR and what happens in book 3 ... well :)

or have it cause problems.

Excuse me? The players know that RotR is an essential good vs. evil story. They know they essentially play heroes. How could an evil outsider that can't be directly controlled and traveling with them not cause problems? I would really like to hear that.

Jacenet. It seems to me that you don't want him to get this creature, and your looking for someone to tell you that you shouldn't allow the sorcerer to get it.

I do want him to have it. What I don't want is the other PCs suffering and play deteriorating because of it. I think it's a great idea and would certainly be fun, just that I think the other PCs would be majorly annoyed if they get feared at least once a day, with the ensuing chaos allerting the wole area and potentially have dire consequences to the other PCs who did invest more into their characters. Also I think others might feel cheated because their investment (while more long term) will leave them behind for the next 5 or more sessions. Some have invested in Belts of Giant strength recently. That's roughly the same investment, but only gives +2 to STR. Sure it's more sustainable as you can invest in more bonus later in the campaign.

But, as mentioned previously. I already resolved in letting things happen. I still think it's a bad idea, but I'll let it surprise me if it's not.

I personally envision the sorcerer going into town ( if you let him ),and the hound baying panicking the entire town ( if its a 300' radius ) or at least a very wide section of it. Causing mass panic, and mayhem, ( and headaches for the party ) with people wanting to kill it, or suitable other consequences.

Which would effectively mean the money he invested is immediately gone since he plans on calling it inside a house in a densely populated area. You can bet your ass the hound would bay immediately and cause a rukkus, but that would effectively only waste the PCs money he invested into the scrolls. The first thing he would say is that it was a DM cop out to take the creature away from him, followed by him siding with the creature and wanting to be killed by the guards so he can roll a new character.

I really want to avoid this secenario as it only furthers metagame agendas. I would like to allow the Mastiff, just not for such little investment. But now that I think of it, It would really not all that bad. If he really want it to serve for a year he essentially locks himself out of social interaction for a year. He won't get rewards and will have much more difficultiy surviving in the wild alone when the party is it's comfy tavern. And since the Mastiff can not be directly controlled, he has no effective way to terminate the agreement early.

Maybe this is a harsh enough consequence.

If your CR 7 players feel upstaged by a CR 5 monster, you might consider offering your players some advice or giving out some good equipment.

And then what? Having to up the CR of the encounters down the road "just because"? Also this makes for stagnat development into late book3 and early book 4 when they experience a slower power increase.

And for 2000 GP they can get a CR 9 Mastodon

How is this comparable? The Mastiff acts autonnomously in combat. It can enter every space the PCs can and it has 2 special abilities (one very useful, one only par). The Mastiff does not require any feats or skills to be trained by the PC while the Mastodon is a glorified pack animal in most encounters without such secondary investment.

I suppose it is an attempt to lower the mastiff characteristics to give it a penalty to his charisma check. If you don't ask questions it will not break the geas not responding, if you ask them he can give its answer, so I don't se any use for that.

No. It's a fail safe to prevent the outsider from lying to you about the agreement on the service. If you order it to respond truthfully with the geas and it agrees to your services, you can be sure this agreement is truthfully. It can't lie this way.

"Guard this treasure chest against the first thief." So the service can be fulfilled, after dispatching the first thief the job is done. I would argue that this is also not open ended. (But what happens if no thief ever shows up?)

This task can not be completed solely by the actions of the creature carrying out the task.

"If you assign some open-ended task that the creature cannot complete through its own actions, the spell remains in effect for a maximum of 1 day per caster level, and the creature gains an immediate chance to break free"

The creature can not know at the time of the agreement when and if a thief is every going to show up. So this would not be open ended, but not completable solely by the actions of the creature. I am pretty sure the passage I quoted was meant to reflect this. But with the poor wording, you can interpret virtually anything into it, even services that break the open-ended clause and enslave the creature to it's eventual demise.

If you use this logic, you can learn Abyssal and bind a Bebilith to multiple years of service as soon as you can afford the ~5000 gp and have a reasonably high CHA bonus. It doesn't have any SR, it's will is only marginally better than that of the Mastiff and it has 13 CHA. It's not unreasonable to be able to bind it to you at level 5 or 6. At this stage , the creature would destroy every encounter it would take part in without any difficulty and aprt from it being huge, it would handle identical to the Mastiff.

This is most obviously not intended to be able to do for a character that invests just 5000 gp, a week and one skill point in linguistics. It's completely out of proportion.

This is why I think it's a bad idea to go ahead with the Mastiff, because the only thing changing would me bumping up the difficulty of the encounters and reverting the difficulty once the Mastiff is killed or otherwise removed from the party. The there is a obvious discontinutiy where bosses would actually be weaker than previous enemies. I think this is a very bad idea, and against the sense of progression in the campaign. And since we do play a pre-written campaign, I can only insufficiently react without sacrificing prepared materia, coherency with previous and later event and overal themes of the story.

> You could easily rule that it's stupid enough to take that literally, and never leave his side until the service is completed. Could be more than a bit inconvenient for him, no?

Well the wording would include to attack anything the sorcerer designates and he is fine with having it by his side and possilby be bared entrance to taverns or other locations just because he has a monster by his side that he can't get rid of anymore.

> The service isn't actually far off from what it would want to do anyway

Just because it is used as a servant does not mean it likes to do it. To mee the ecology description seems that it wants to hunt (in pack, if possible) and not travel with a boring ass adventure party that fights every other day.

> The former involves forcing something against its will into a trap and then outright bullying it until it complies.

Well the spell does include

> Impossible demands or unreasonable commands are never agreed to.

I would find one year slavery for basically no compensation quite unreasonable. In a homebrew campaign I would just make sure the story would not conclude within a year and then haunt the player with the creature later on in the campaign. Since we run RotR though and I would prefer to stick roughly with the script, this would not be possible (or at least pretty unlikely).

> I would allow it unless I felt that it would seriously unbalance the party.

That is exactly the problem. We have 5 PCs at level 7. He would basically get a pet for 4000 gp that is strong enough to make him tackle some of the early upcoming encounters alone. I fear the other PCs would feel borderline useless.

Hey you! We had the same idea, I just made this account a few minutes ago to ask for advice.

I'm the Sorcerer in question, I wanted to inquire what constitutes "a service" and what would be considered "open-ended".

I don't want to abuse the spell / suck all the fun out of our game, but since we had some downtime and I had some cash floating around I though I could get a bit creative.

Get out of here :D

So because he has some time between chapters 2 and 3 of our RotR AP, our sorcerer (level 7) decided he want to do something funny (I am all for that btw, just want to make it balanced).

1) Magic Circle against evil (scroll he bought)
2) lesser Planar Binding: Shadow Mastiff
3) lesser Gaeas on the Shadow Mastiff ("You have to respond to 50 <arbitrary finite number over 20> questions truthfully. For yes, sit, for now you lay down within 5 seconds.")
4) Compelling the service of "For one year, you must stay at my side and you must attack every creature I designate without interfering with any other creature, including my own."
5) "As reward for this service I promise you many possibilities to hunt and kill in the darkest corners of the world."

Now provided all rolls (to cast the scrolls above his level, to succeed the gaeas and a charisma roll +6 for the creature because of the lousy reward) succeed: Would this creature essentially behave like a pet and complete the service aside from any subverting? He essentially has 7 tries/days to succeed before the Magic Circle dissipates.

I argued that this would be an unreasonable demand because the reward offered is miniscule for the service. I cited Planar Ally (which would value this service at about 300.000 gp ... while the sorcerer can mabye afford another 5.000gp, if at all) for this. The players response was that "There is no reward necessary. This is what the CHA check is for." and technically Planar Binding does argument that, but I feel it goes against the spirit of the spell.

But because I really do not want to shut him down in this quest (this is funny after all), I gave the condition of modified CHA checks. The creature gets additional +1 to his CHA checks for each magnitude you are off from a comparative compensation. So if he only promises that the creature can "hunt and kill in the darkest corners of the world", I would value this as 0 gp (since it's what the creature does anyway). If he throws in 1.000 gp, he can set the modifier to a cumulative +8 for the creature (still possible to succeed).

I already feel this is very generous because

1) I my interpretation the service can not be completed by actions of the creature and thus is considered "open ended".
2) A 6d10 HD creature with a bunch of SUs is clearly to powerful for a level 7 sorcerer to have as permanent pet.
3) He investet "only" ~4.000 in the scrolls, which strikes me as very cheap.

Is my reaction too negative? Am I shutting this down prematurely? Should I not let the creature respond to this service since it's unreasonable? Anything other you want to comment on this?

I will note that what you're talking about would count as a "play-by-post or play-by-email game" for the purpose of determining what permissions you have.

Yeah this specifically only lists

dialogue, plots, storylines, language, and incidents

So using maps from the AP PDFs seem off limits. As well as flip mat and map folio products. I get where this is comming from, since it's technically an unlicensed reproduction to roll20's servers when you upload it to your library there.

I just wanted to have a statement and see if there are some special rules for virtual tabletops that I might have missed.

Thanks for your reply and keep on pumping out those APs :)

Matt Thomason wrote:

While you wait on an official answer, I'd suggest taking a look at Paizo's Community Use Policy, which defines a certain amount of material you can reference in non-commercial use.

The Official Answer is... what he said.

So if I create a campaign for a Paizo AP on roll20, include the statement that it uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo and then invite another player and promote him to GM so he can DM the module (to potentially players unknown to me) it's still not against the CUP and the general TOS of the site?

Also, using maps and/or artwork included in APs on roll20 is prohibited? In the CUP it does not mention you can use artwork and specifically states:

You may not use artwork, including maps, that have not been published in the blog,

Additionally creating maps that look too much like the ones in the AP is also prohibited per

you may create your own interpretations of material presented in our artwork and maps, provided that your interpretations don't look substantially similar to our materials.

So stuff like linked here:

Hey guys,

I am sure you heard of roll20.net. Now someone on reddit brought to my attention that you can share premade adventures. Now what is Paizo's official stance on:

1) Using artwork from the Adventure Path PDFs and importing it into Roll20 (provided the person importing/using it has bought the AP)?
2) Making pre-built Adventure Path settings on Roll20 and sharing it with others? Pre-built to an extent to include maps, locations, names and character descriptions from the official AP PDFs.

Before we get all crazy sharing these things across roll20, I wanted to know an official word from you guys if at all possible.

Also I heard you are planning your own Virtual Tabletop. Any news on when it will be out?

One minor thing: The map for the Clanhold has the squares set to 10 ft.

Would have been nice to have a 5ft. grid, but your work is still stunning :)