MannedPanda's page

Look at this line from the Vitalist's level 2 ability, Spirit of Many:

Quote:

Whenever a vitalist manifests a power with the Network descriptor targeting only members of his collective, the power loses the mind-affecting descriptor (if it had it) and bypasses any power resistance, although it still provokes an attack of opportunity to manifest as normal.

Why would you need to be able to remove the mind-affecting descriptor if you can't put creatures immune to mind-affecting effects into the collective in the first place? Therefor, the collective is not a mind-affecting ability.

Well, there you go. That makes sense, could try and bring that up next time I roll this class. Thank you for pointing that out.

Another indicator that being mindless doesn't affect the Collective is that it requires a Wisdom of 1, NOT an Intelligence of 1.

Yeah, he would argue well wisdom and intelligence are both mental stats.

Abilities that are mind-affecting are called out as such. The collective ability is not, flavor text aside.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to convince someone that an absence of a descriptor is deliberate. You're looking for an explicit statement "this is not mind-affecting", but you won't find one just like you won't find "this is not a purple-frog-asteroid-taxation effect", because that's not how this game is written. We don't write what isn't, we write what is (with the exception of exceptions which need to be pointed out.)

How many spiders are you going up against anyway? There aren't very many non-undead, con-construct creatures which are still mindless. Vermin and plants being the obvious ones.

Anyway, take a look at the bestow curse spell in Core. Will negates, not mind-affecting, so there's precedent for such a thing. Clearly that spell is impacting some aura or essence of a creature even if it's mindless, so there's no real reason why a collective can't as well.

The lack of rules is what he is worried about, he feels that if there are no rules then there isn't a game, so yeah just got my character killed and rolled a "healstick" Cleric. However thank you, i'll keep this in mind for the next time I try this class.