Nyacolyte's page

So, it's April 16th. The day Paizo killed your favorite PC's god. Or your favorite god.

How will you proceed, and what does the death of this deity mean for your character (true believer or cleric etc) and your Golarion campaign

Since paizo/fantasy gods are really just powerful individuals, I don't really think it will effect much, or that I would care much. Most fantasy games have a very simplistic and ahistorical view of religion and belief.

Captain Morgan wrote:

As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.

If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.

While I appreciate seeing "general rule" and other qualifiers, your example of "waiting five minutes" paired with absurdly unlikely "what if mind control" caveats seems a little disingenuous and avoids engaging with the messy reality (of the fiction).

It's always about "how much is reasonable? How much can we afford?"

How much can a party of PCs afford to derail their current travel/objective to forcefully transport captive bandits to the regional justice?

Two day's delay?

A week? 3?

When does the simple burden of moving the prisoners for imprisonment/ect become a greater cost than executing them?

.

People can be *extremely* uncomfortable with putting a price to a life, especially devaluing one beneath your own, even if they are cannibal bandits (99% the GM did NOT want the party to detour & cart the bandits).

Yet, that's the messy truth of it. No matter how you approach your judgement process, someone needs to say

Quote:

"Yes, the detour will be 3 days, we can risk delaying our rescue of the princess and take these bandits to town."

or

Quote:

"No, I'm sorry you lot, but we can't afford the delay, and we

...

That is a super long way to say that evil is justified by logistics. I really don't see what you're saying as any kind of ethical or meta-ethical argument about when an action is moral or immoral, just a detailed explanation of what makes being truly good very inconvenient.

Players in my game constantly take and then release prisoners. And, in fact, by my light your quote either undermines your post, or undermines itself, because if these bandits are free willed it's impossible in principle to know whether or not they will commit future crimes at all.

I just pray that monster stat blocks don't wrap around art like they did in the previous bestiaries. Please just follow 5e's design on this and just have a clean and literal block.

Well, the takeaway here is that I correctly interpreted the rules. ('v')/

Yes, it is powerful, but I don't think it is broken levels of powerful. Which is the best place for something to be.

Each of those spells would still cost actions to cast.

Yes, you could cast a 5th rank spell using Bonded Item on round 1, a 3rd rank spell using the recovered Bonded Item usage on round 2, and a 1st rank spell using the re-recovered Bonded Item usage on round 3. But that means that on rounds 2 and 3 you probably don't have enough actions to also cast a rank 5 spell.

With Unified Magical Theory you could do that trick starting with a 6th rank spell in one fight - getting a 4th rank and 2nd rank spell in later rounds. Then you could do that trick starting with a 5th rank spell in a different fight later in the day. Things like that. Which seems appropriate for how Unified Magical Theory is balanced with Bonded Item getting multiple uses per day.

It IS complicated by the fact that Bond Conservation specifically says the spell you gain has to be used by the end of your next turn, BUT, if your wizard is in a safe place and can just sit and cast magic without worrying about anything else, they can kinda just hunker down and blast.

Unless I'm wrong it takes 3 actions and a free action every round to run this routine.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but the feat and class feature in the title combine in an interesting way. Maybe I'm wrong? Was this intended?

Unified Magical Theory allows you to use "Drain Bonded Item" 1 per day per spell rank.

So, if you're a third level wizard, you could use the "Drain Bonded Item" action once for a Rank 1 spell, and a second time for a Rank 2 spell.

The feat "Bond Conservation" works when you use the "Drain Bonded Item" action - something you can normally only do once per day... except that UMT wizards can do it up to 9 times a day once they have 9th Rank Spells.

Also... even if you aren't a UMT wizard, it would seem that once you're high enough level you can use this feat/action recursively.

Cast 9th Rank Spell w/ "original" use of Drain Bonded Item-> Use Bond Conservation -> "You gain an extra use of Drain Bonded Item... 2 ranks lower" ->
Cast 7th Rank Spell w/ Drain Bonded Item -> Use Bond Conservation -> "You gain an extra use of Drain Bonded Item... 2 ranks lower" ->
Cast 5th Rank Spell w/ Drain Bonded Item -> Use Bond Conservation -> "You gain an extra use of Drain Bonded Item... 2 ranks lower" ->
Cast 3rd Rank Spell w/ Drain Bonded Item -> Use Bond Conservation -> "You gain an extra use of Drain Bonded Item... 2 ranks lower" ->
Cast 1st Rank Spell w/ Drain Bonded Item

But if you're a UMT wizard, you can run the same above routine for EACH spell rank that you have.

https://imgur.com/ArabdrZ This imgur link takes you to a screen shot of the relevant rules text for these three features.

Nyacolyte wrote:

YuriP wrote:

The only thing that changed this was the Staff Nexus Thesis that allowed Wizard to have up to 36 charges in the staff making the Spell Strike practically daily unlimited but this isn't a item and is restricted to full wizard in place of other thesis.

Shadow Signet isn't that game change. It's very effective but many casters still prefer to not use it due it's not a true save (no failure effect) and many times they don't really knows what the opponent weakness (but many times can be easily guessed as you said).

The what now? I am not at all familiar with this, can you tell me more??

About what exactly? Staff Nexus Thesis? or the Shadow Signet?

How people are squeezing 36 castings of true strike out of their staff

The only thing that changed this was the Staff Nexus Thesis that allowed Wizard to have up to 36 charges in the staff making the Spell Strike practically daily unlimited but this isn't a item and is restricted to full wizard in place of other thesis.

Shadow Signet isn't that game change. It's very effective but many casters still prefer to not use it due it's not a true save (no failure effect) and many times they don't really knows what the opponent weakness (but many times can be easily guessed as you said).

The what now? I am not at all familiar with this, can you tell me more??

roquepo wrote:

Casters are in a fine spot, and are destined to get stronger, as spells will be added at a faster rate than feats for current martials. Don't try to reinvent the wheel.

I had this hope a year ago for both spellcasters and alchemists. But after many book launches I've come to the conclusion that that's not going to happen. I don't expect any game-changing spell/item mechanics from Paizo like they did in PF1/3.5.

Just slip this bad boy and you're good-to-go.

Between the Shadow Signet, True Strike, and some metagame knowledge/common sense you really shouldn't be missing your shots.