Joey Cote's page

So I have been planning on running an adventure path in the near future and it seemed that other then a series of artifacts that is core to the story (Shattered Star), the treasure seems to be a bit light. At the end of the adventure I noticed that the characters are supposed to receive points for Pathfinder Society play, and it sounds like those points can be spent to purchase some items or benefits. Since I hadn't planned on running the game with the PFS system would it be reasonable to add some more treasure to the adventure to make up for the loss of the point spending? I have no idea if the points are figured into the treasure amount for the adventure.

This is from D20

"Natural Attacks
Most creatures possess one or more natural attacks (attacks made without a weapon). These attacks fall into one of two categories, primary and secondary attacks. Primary attacks are made using the creature’s full base attack bonus and add the creature’s full Strength bonus on damage rolls. Secondary attacks are made using the creature’s base attack bonus –5 and add only 1/2 the creature’s Strength bonus on damage rolls. If a creature has only one natural attack, it is always made using the creature’s full base attack bonus and adds 1-1/2 times the creature’s Strength bonus on damage rolls. This increase does not apply if the creature has multiple attacks but only takes one. If a creature has only one type of attack, but has multiple attacks per round, that attack is treated as a primary attack, regardless of its type. You do not receive additional natural attacks for a high base attack bonus. Instead, you receive additional attack rolls for multiple limb and body parts capable of making the attack (as noted by the race or ability that grants the attacks)."

Does that mean if you have and eidolon with two tails which can be used to attack and no other natural attacks that the tail attacks don't have the -5 to hit for being secondary attacks?

Looking at the dragonslayer's shield and comparing it to lvl 8/9 dragons(young dragons) since its a lvl 9 item it seems as if the average damage from one of these would give the shield the broken condition. A lvl 9 shield specific to fighting two types of dragons doesn't seem like it should be wrecked by the breath weapon of the youngest dragons of that type. At that age the dragons are immune to the specific element of their breath weapon, why isn't the shield far more resistant to that element?

Am I misunderstanding something in these rules or is it very difficult to use these two ritual to create a minion that is near your spell level cap?

Example, animate object to make an alchemical golem, a lvl 9 monster. According to table 7-1 the animate object spell to create a lvl 9 construct needs a lvl 6 spell, so the caster needs to be 11/12th minimum, lets go with 13. A maxed out lvl 13 wizard with a 22 int (18 base, 2 from level increase, 2 from item), mastery in Arcana (13 lvl + 6 for mastery) and a Greater Hat of the Magi (+2 item bonus) would have an Arcana base of 27. The rules for rituals say that the DC is treated as a level twice the spell level and is very hard as well. So the ritual is treated as a lvl 6 spell, which makes it a lvl 12 challenge, making it a base 30 + 5 for very hard (table 10-5 and 10-6). Now, according to the rituals in order to create a minion it must be 4 levels lower then you and you need to make a critical success. So the lvl 13 wizard above needs to roll a 18+ and spend days and 2100gp, for a 15% chance at creating a minion. If they succeed (animate object version) but don't get a critical success the construct created can be given one order, which it obeys and thereafter ignores all other commands from the creator. In the case of create undead the undead is friendly (unless it is unintelligent in which case it ignores the creator but goes on a rampage) , so it might choose to follow the creator's instructions.

15% chance after spending thousands of gold and days of work seems pretty bad. If the wizard had gotten a critical success on the secondary roll (which is only a standard DC twice the spell level as level) the wizard gets a +2 to the Arcana roll. But that means the wizard (assuming the same base for the skill) needs to roll a 13+. And that means the wizard has a 25% chance to make a minion. I don't see any spell or ability that will give the wizard a better chance. And 2100gp is pretty huge even at level 13, 1/3rd the starting wealth of such a character.

Now, the alchemical golem does appear to be a tough guy with good damage and hp even considering it is four levels lower then its creator, so maybe my problem is I need to expect less? But if you go much lower then that, the minion becomes significantly less useful in combat.

Lets take a situation where Combatant A has Come and Get Me and has activated it. Combatant B uses (for example) trip combat maneuver (and has the improved trip feat).

Is the trip considered an attack for the purposes of triggering Come and Get Me?

If it is (and I think it would be), if the attack of opportunity Combatant A gets hits, is the damage caused by the attack subtracted from Combatant B's roll to trip Combatant A?

I must be missing something about this spell. It basically seems to be spiritual weapon (but does 1d10 instead of 1d8) that allows you to "protect" someone (by spending an action to concentrate) that absorbs 10hp per hit, up to the guardian's 30hp limit, that also can create a flanking bonus.

So you can spend an action to concentrate, have it attack, spend an second action to concentrate to attack again (with a -5 for second attack penalty) and then spend your third action to have to "defend" an ally.

Ok, that all seems pretty decent, except this is a 5th level spell. Spiritual weapon is a 2nd level spell. I just don't see the two potential additional effects as being worth spiritual guardian being a 5th level spell when the damage is barely more then a 2nd level spell.

This is more in relation to the polymorph spells then anything else. Aerial form and animal form refers to the form having unarmed attacks but elemental, dino and dragon all refer to the form having natural melee attacks. Is there somewhere that defines a difference between the two?

Unarmed attacks specifically says its any attack you make with your hand or any part of your body. So I would assume that natural attacks are considered unarmed attacks. But, then why do the spells list the attacks differently (other then the obvious idea of a mistake).

Compounding this, if you had a druid with barbarian multiclass. And the druid wildshaped into a dinoform, it does not seem raging adds to the attack and damage rolls, because rage specifically calls for giving the bonus to melee and unarmed attacks (doesn't even effect ranged attacks because an angry barbarian wouldn't throw an axe or hammer harder?). The barbarian dragon transformation feat actually calls the dragon form melee attacks unarmed (as does the animal form).

Natural melee attacks don't have an entry on page 182/183 to describe them unlike unarmed attacks.

There is something I don't understand in regards to druid's using wildshape to polymorph themselves. In all the self polymorph spells I have looked at they all say "If you prepare this spell, choose from the options below." But druids with Wild Shape can use one of their Wild Shape pool to cast any of the polymorph effects they picked up as a class feat as a spontaneous effect, with the free heightening.

Which means, as far as I can see, the druid doesn't actually get any actual attacks since there is no base damage for any of these forms without a picked option. I guess we could default to unarmed damage of 1d4, but that seems more then a bit silly for dinosaur and dragon form. Plus, those forms also seem to give base movement for things like aerial form.

I am I missing something? I am not seeing anything on druids in the errata.

Our group just finished the 4th section of Coundown and we ran into what felt like a huge problem.

One of the creatures had a fairly powerful poison. One of the characters cast neutralize poison. Then we tried to figure out the level of the poison and basically just decided it must be half the monster's level+1 as if it was a spell, which made it a 5th level poison. Which gave neutralize poison a -10 to remove this effect using the relevant skill, which we assumed was spellcasting.

So on to new table 10-2. Now, the GM has to make a call here as to easy to ultimate for the difficulty. Considering the creature, medium or hard would probably be correct, but lets just say the GM was kind and decided medium. That would make the target 31. So the character is 7th, which means at best they are rolling 7+4 plus the d20. Which means the character needs to roll a 20. Pretty much an autofail on a 3rd level spell.

Removing poisons is literally the only thing this spell does, and only to one player. And this is a 3rd level spell. Using medicine is literally more effective (since it won't have the built in -10 in this example) then a magic spell that only intended effect is to get rid of poison!

Dispel magic is done the same way, but is vastly more effective since there are a lot of lower level effects that opponents can have on them that are very difficult to deal with, such as mirror image and invisibility as examples. Heightening dispel is something casters are going to do frequently specifically because as you deal with higher level opponents you know you are going to end up facing powerful spells that you will want to remove.

Against low level opponents, the opponent's poison generally is only going to be a minor annoyance to players, and is easily remedied after the fight. Especially with the new rules for out of combat healing. What Neutralize Poison needs to deal with is more powerful poisons.

Heightening it to the highest level a caster can use is a fairly bad option since the character will only have two such spells, and without some form of knowledge about the opponents before spell preparation these could actually be "dead" spells in MTG terms. Even worse, if the spell's level isn't higher then the ability (which against higher level monsters (I will use the term "boss" after this for simplicity) is will never be) then you have to use table 9-3. So lets say a group of lvl 11 characters fights a level 13 monster (Boss). Someone gets poisoned, caster has neutralize poison memorized at his highest spell level (6th), which is lower then the boss's lvl 7 poison. So we look at table 9-3, and notice something. The table doesn't scale linearally. So the level 6 Neutralize poison, against a poison that is at least the same level or (in this example +1) has a -15/-20 to the check because it has a counteract of 3. Which means going to table 10-2, assuming a medium difficulty, the target to remove this creature's poison, using a max level spell, is 45. Character would have a 11(class level, I don't see any casters getting expert until 12) +5(stat maxed) total 16 trying to hit a target of 45.

Maybe I am missing items that give a bonus, but I don't see many spells/powers that effect this, and even then its a small bonus. That is insane! The caster has almost no chance blowing their highest level spell!

Either our group is completely misunderstanding this process, this is broken, or the game developers intended for characters to absolutely not be able to remove higher level effects.

Ok, so now we get a free heritage trait in addition to the ancestory trait. You pick a heritage at first, only gain one, and can never change it.

But Hardy and Unburdened and Ancient blood where made into heritage, meaning that you can only ever gain one.

Which makes Unburdened an almost auto take for any dwarf even considering taking heavy armor.

Which makes Hardy almost an auto take for any class that that doesn't start at expert in Fortitude.

Ancient Blood is still awful considering its a reaction and permanently reduces your Resonance by 2. The classes that could use it the most either have something similar (paladin) or have so many things using their reactions that they wouldn't bother taking this.

The new desert runner is good considering how often players typically run into fire damage. And heat exhaustion is a thing.

But at the start of the racial section for the update it says they added new feats to replace the existing ones, and basically they said the new feats would be better.

So we get a new ancestory feat at lvl 9, Mountain Stoutness, which gives +1hp a level and +1 to recovery saves. Nice, but its the same as toughness (and stacks) which is a general feat you can take at humans and everyone at 3rd.

Stonewalker at 9th, and that is a very powerful feat, especially for a rogue. Meld into Stone

Weapon Expertise at 13th with dwarven weapons. Frankly, pretty niche. Some classes will gain a bit of use from it, clerics primarily coming to mind. Really ... cleric only thing coming to mind.

This really seems pretty bad for dwarves below level 10.

Is holy water and ring of the ram treated as an improvised weapon for attack purposes since it doesn't have a type?

Maybe holy water could be treated as a bomb, and alchemist get a formula for it?

Like most people on this forum I think that alchemist fast alchemy and advanced alchemy should be based on an entirely different new pool of points other then resonance. But, if they did keep resonance as the basis of those two abilities, what could be done to make alchemists more able to make use of magic items? My thought was what if the flat check to invest or activate magic items for an alchemist was 0 + points overspent rather then 10 + points overspent. I suspect at high levels (15+) this might still fall down, but maybe not considering how often the magic items don't provide significant advantages and it might be possible to have a small pool of potent items.

I really hope that we get the ability to use slings and halfling staffslings to throw alchemical bombs and maybe even the touch and inhaled poisons. It would be a nice way to give us a bit more range, accuracy, and even potency and property runes could even apply. Sure, we wouldn't get as many attacks per round. But the advantages might balance that out.

There is a section that says that specific magic armor and weapons cannot have property runes added to them but may have potency runes added. In the section on staves (such as staff of fire, healing, etc not a regular staff) it says the staff is expert quality and can have runes added as normal. Potency runes absolutely can be added to these staves, but I wonder if the property runes can be? What exactly is a "specific" weapon/armor becomes the question.

I went through the forum and couldn't find this being brought up. Quick Alchemy states that it requires an alchemist's kit and one free hand. It requires two hands to hold an alchemists kit, which means you now don't have a hand free for Quick Alchemy. Are we to assume that all the alchemist needs is to have the kit somewhere near by? Is having it in a satchel ok? How about a backpack? Or a bag of holding? And does this mean other skills that also require the use of a kit (medicine being a prime example) also don't require the character to have the kit in hand to use, but to merely have it on their person somewhere?

So, here is an area where there is some murkiness. If a character has access to a spell as a power, and that spells is one of those that is on the spell list for a staff, can the character invest the staff at the start of the day and then use the charges from the staff to cast the spell?

An example of this would be a paladin with the channel energy feat. This gives him the ability to cast the heal spell, but as a power, not a spell. So could he make use of a staff of healing to cast heal using charges from the staff?

On page 379 under Investing a Staff it says "When invested during preparation the staff gains a number of charges equal to your highest-level spell slot." A paladin of course doesn't have spell slots, which would seem to indicate that he wouldn't be able to invest. Under Casting Spells from a Staff it says "To be cast a spell from a staff, you must have the spell on your spell list...." Again calling for a spell list, which paladins don't technically have.

Then we go to page 194 on the Non-Spellcasters with Powers section. Which says that if your class cannot normally cast spells the highest level of power you can cast is half your level, rounded up and your powers are automatically heightened to this level. Then it goes on to say that "Though the ability to cast powers does not mean you become a spellcaster, you gain the ability to use the Cast a Spell activity."

Not really sure how staves work in regard to Trick Magic Item feat either. Can the person trick it and invest it? If so how many charges does it get? If you are of a different magical tradition tricking it to invest, does it gain charges equal to your highest spell level or something else. If you cannot cast spells at all, can it gain charges from you? If not, does that mean you can only use the stored charges? Since the way staves seem to work is that you are drawing on the stored magic in the staff but casting the spell yourself, if you don't know the spell, can you somehow still cast a spell from the staff's list?

There is a section that says that specific magic armor and weapons cannot have property runes added to them but may have potency runes added. In the section on staves (such as staff of fire, healing, etc not a regular staff) it says the staff is expert quality and can have runes added as normal. Potency runes absolutely can be added to these staves, but I wonder if the property runes can be? What exactly is a "specific" weapon/armor becomes the question.

What I have been trying to figure out is if a golem can fall into the extradimensional space created by a spell from the create pit line. The part of the create pit series of spells that creates a pitfall for me is

"You must create the pit on a horizontal surface of sufficient size. Since it extends into another dimension, the pit has no weight and does not otherwise displace the original underlying material."

If the pit extends into another dimension, then the opening of pit is a doorway that transports the creature into another dimension. If that is true, then wouldn't golems' immunity to all magic other then those listed for each individual golem mean the doorway couldn't transport the golem into the other dimension, leaving the golem standing on the pit?