LeafGreen's page

Love the bloodlines and how you get granted spells and blood magic that synergizes with them.
I'm really liking the undead bloodline so far, it's one of my favorites.
But I've noticed that of the spells that you get all of them are able to gain a benefit from the blood magic effect by either gaining you temporary HP or adding to the damage of the spell, except for false life.
I think it's kind of odd to have a spell granted by your bloodline but then not get any benefit from the blood magic effect when casting it. So maybe I'm misreading this or is it maybe an oversight from the devs?

Necromantic energy flows through you or one target.

Either you gain temporary Hit Points equal to the spell’s level for 1 round,
or a target takes 1 negative damage per spell level (if the spell already deals initial negative damage,
combine this with the spell’s initial damage before determining weaknesses and resistances).

You can have temporary Hit Points from only one source at a time.

If you gain temporary Hit Points when you already have some,
choose whether to keep the amount you already have and their corresponding duration or to gain the new temporary Hit Points and their duration.

Vampiric exsanguination for example wouldn't be able to gain the blood magic benefit of the temporary HP because the spell itself grants temp HP(or you could choose the temp HP from the bloodline if it would be more than what the spell grants), but it would be able to gain the bonus damage.

False life on the other hand does not damage a target, so it can't gain the bonus damage.
Since you can only gain temp HP from one source at a time, you would have to decide between false life and the blood magic, and false life gives you more at any level. So you do not get any benefit.

Some rephrasing to let the temp HP from the blood magic effect be added to those granted from a spell (like the negative damage adding to the spell) would fix this.

So do I misread something or is this RAW?
Would you rule it to stack anyway or think it is intended to be this way?
Would like to hear your opinions on that!

The staff (trait) is simply regular trait the magical staff has, nothing more. It is no seperate mechanic to weapon traits as the CRB defines traits as:

trait A keyword that conveys information about a rules element. Often a trait indicates how other rules interact with an ability, creature, item, or other rules element with that trait. Individual traits appear by name in this appendix

Lets take the Animal Staff as an example.

It has the "Divination, Magical, Staff" traits.
In addition to all that the rules section tells us that it IS a melee weapon with the stats of the staff from the weapons table.
So it gains the "Two-hand d8" trait from that.

I would argue etching and using a shifting rune on the staff should not cause it to lose the "staff (trait)", since otherwise that would go against "This doesn't alter any of their spellcasting abilities".

I agree with that etching the shifting rune onto it indeed does not cause it to lose the staff trait. It IS meant to be used as a weapon.

You can put any rune on it, attack and cast spells with it, my interpretation does allow that too.
The ruling "This doesn't alter any of their spellcasting abilities" even states that you can use it to attack and cast spells since it is a weapon.

The difference is see is in the shifting runes effect itself

The weapon’s runes and any precious material it’s made of apply to the weapon’s new shape.

It explicitly says the runes and material apply to the new shape.

Shifting itself is a new mechanic that gets explained here and it explicitly states to transfer the runes and the precious materal.
So no wording of applying traits.
If you would be able to apply the previous traits the whole shifting mechanic would be broken, everyone would put a shifting rune on a weapon with the fatal trait and transfer it into another weapon without losing it and start to stack traits on weapons that should not have them.

The shifting rune does transform it into a whole different weapon, so the new weapon traits do apply.
Since the other weapons lack the staff-trait you can not cast with them.
But when you transform the weapon back to it's default form, it regains its original traits, enabling it to cast again.

Every other way of reading would lead to the shifting rune being broken IMO, since it would allow to apply traits to weapons not meant to have them.

Was only reading the forum so far, thought would be time to share some of my findings after all the great information I got from here ;)

Magic staves simply happen to be staff weapons with extra magic properties. So if the base were to become something else (like a sword), then there's no reason the magical properties would cease working because of weapon type.

It's not the base that enables it, there is indeed a trait that enables them to cast magic :)!

Generally agree with Hiruma Kai. There's nothing that seems to strongly imply shifting should suppress those traits.

It's kinda hidden but in my opinion is clearly explaining that a staff shifted into another weapon can't cast spells.

The shifted weapon does lose the old weapon traits and gains those of the new weapon. I think we all can agree on that one.
So if you look into the CRB Page 280 in the weapon table the staff in there clearly only has the "two-hand" trait.
So regular staves can't cast spells as stated by Hiruma.

Sadly looking at the magical staves section from CRB page 592 we can't see any mechanic that does enable a staff to cast spells.
I think here lies the problem, it should be stated in the text, it's the obvious place to look for it.

The important part for that ruling is hidden in the glossary and index!

The magical staves in the book all do have the staff trait.
So I looked it up and there lies the item/weapon trait that gives them the ability to cast spells, which they lose when you shift them.
It can be found on any magical staff, for reference look at the Animal Staff.

staff (trait) This magic item holds spells of a particular theme and allows a spellcaster

to cast additional spells by preparing the staff. 592–595

Link

So the staff trait does not mean a magic weapon can be used as a regular staff weapon (that is indicated by the text in that chapter), but instead is the trait that enables them to cast spells with.