ParasiteHouse's page

Finoan wrote:

So if Wolf Jaw unarmed attack uses your hands and behaves like a Free-Hand weapon, then you definitely can't use Wolf Jaw attacks while your hands are full.

None of the attack forms being discussed have the Free-Hand trait, so I fail to see why you think it the least bit relevant.

Getting into dangerous territory here: the difference between "is" and "behaves like" is a cursed tarn carved in time immemorial by the glaciations of the primeval rules lawyers.

Let's break this down, shall we?

A dork after my own heart. Thanks for the excellent breakdown. I've actually been on Paizoboardia for a long long time under a few different names, but I don't post much and I don't think you and I have ever interacted (though we probably did and I just forgot because my memory is terrible).

To describe it with a bit of inside baseball, I was present for the birth of the First Great "Can you trip a snake?" Argument.

Kinda nice to post now. Feels right. Feels like home.

Obviously you cannot drop your hands, this option is not available.

I was thinking maybe there had been some ruling on this that I hadn't been able to find, or at least a common alternative to Captain Buggy stance. Obviously you can't drop your hands (unless you can) but maybe there was something I was missing.

Firstly, I'd like to offer some insincere apologies for using this forum solely to air out pedantic interpretations of PF2e's rules. I've been gaming too long and the wrackworms in my brain keep telling me to read into things maliciously.

What does Wolf Stance do and how does it do it?

"You enter the stance of a wolf, low to the ground with your hands held like fanged teeth. You can make wolf jaw unarmed attacks. If you’re flanking a target while in Wolf Stance, your wolf jaw unarmed attacks also gain the trip trait."

Are these jaw attacks made with the jaw because they're jaw attacks, or are they made with the hands as implied in the text? Depending on the answer, being in wolf stance could (or couldn't) allow you to perform trips while armed with two weapons that don't have the trip trait or a two handed weapon without the trip trait.

If they're made with the hands, then you have to have free hands to use them, hence you can already trip, right? Does this trait give any benefit outside of adding an item bonus to the check once you get handwraps? It seems like you could more easily grab a sickle, stick a rune on it, and be able to trip outside a flank too. Come to think of it, that sounds like a fine choice even if you took wolf stance because now you've got all the physical damage types covered with one weapon and a free hand and all the sources have finesse, but I digress.

The trip trait itself stipulates that, if you roll a critical failure to trip, you can bump that up to a regular failure by dropping the weapon. How does that work for unarmed strikes in general? Do you get honorary dentures when you join the wolf clan and you can pop them out when things go pear shaped? Can you detach your hands like you ate the chop chop fruit? Can you simply not benefit from this part of the trait?

Has anybody else run up against these issues? This may be relevant to my game in the near future.

I keep hanging around even if I'm quiet. I'm still here and in fact right now I'm working on a big batch of new* (new to me) PF1 content from both Bloodstone Press and Legendary Games (specifically, OGL content from The Priest, Copyright 2016, Bloodstone Press, and Ten Exotic Clubs from Bloodstone Press and Mediterranean Races from Legendary Games. (All of those products are also available in my store.)

Hey d20pfsrd.com, just swooping in to tell you that I'd never have started playing Pathfinder without your services. Having it all laid out before me on your srd let me make a well-informed decision to upgrade from 3.5 when I hosted my first campaign.

Twelve years later and I'm still hosting that campaign. Its players have become my closest friends.

Just wanted to thank you.

I am not sure I understand the nature of your project, but Assurance would not be at the top of my list for feats to recommend to new players. Knowing when to use it and when not to requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of DC progressions. I personally like it for Athletics, Survival, and very little else. (Those two skills often rolled against static environmental DCs and face chunky penalties.)

Trip.H wrote:

Automatic Knowledge is another Skill Feat that is easy to recommend, especially if Assurance is already being considered.

The need for 2 Skill Feats does really start to eat into one's build budget, but if simplicity and utility are in high demand, I think the Feat is worth mentioning directly.

How do you figure? Automatic Knowledge always felt like a trap to me. Assurance isn't good for hitting DCs your level or higher, and knowledge DCs in particular are rife with increases (as opposed to penalities on the roll a la MAP for Trip.) And once you fail that Automatic check, you can't retry it at your full bonus that could actually succeed.

All right, I finished my evaluation this morning. I can explain myself, and I suppose I should if I'm going to vaguepost about it.

My project was to create a basic evaluation of Pathfinder 2nd Edition's skill feats within a limited scope. I laid out all the common skill feats from the core books and main sourcebooks (so no adventure paths, no lost omens) and did a little feasibility study for each one. I sorted each one into six categories emphasizing the play experience you'd get out of them, with the categories being,

Forager (Forager)
Mandatory (Things that you're definitely taking if you focus on the skill)
Consistent (Great stuff you'll get consistent use out of.)
Situational (Potentially great but with limited use cases.)
Miserable (If you're getting use out of these, the overall game is probably worse for it)
Uncertain (Not totally sure what they do)

I wanted to do this for several reasons.

1. It was personal. I was intrigued by the ocean of terrible skill feats, and I wanted to determine why so many of them were bad as a creative exercise.

2. General improvement as a game master. Having more knowledge of the game would help me create better scenarios for my players.

3. I like having solid options to present to my players and I hate knowing I gave somebody bad advice, which is easy to do when you don't know which way is up in a confusing landscape like this one.

4. I wanted to determine which skills were most lacking in the feats department so I could write some skill feats myself.

My findings were troubling, to say the least. Around 1/3 of the skill feats I evaluated went into the miserable category, and the distribution is not even at all.

Edit: For what it's worth, I measured assurance by whether or not there were fixed difficulties for skill activities present to use it with and whether or not there was anything definite opposing your checks. For skills like medicine, assurance is a consistent friend. For skills like diplomacy? Not as useful, as many difficulty classes for diplomacy are at the GM's discretion. For skills that recall knowledge, it's almost a trap, so assurance is all over the place.

If anybody cares, this project is making me a little crazy. Whatever happened to get skill feats in the state they're in must have been too complicated to reckon with at the time.

Eye for Numbers is making it so I can't count things accurately and every time I use divine guidance my bible keeps quoting Stone Cold Steve Austin to me. I think I'm just going to tell my players to pick assurance.

I would say no, personally. It helps to consider the pre-remaster version:

"If you’re an expert in a tradition’s associated skill, you take 10 minutes per spell level to learn a spell of that tradition, rather than 1 hour per spell level."

It made hour long increments into 10 minute increments. I think the remastered feat's intent was to further improve upon this, not to create an incredibly janky divide between succeeding and failing at the check.

I think you're correct with a strict RAW reading, but PF2 really isn't meant to be run strict RAW.

My interpretation does result in jank. I think I've read so many skill feats that I'm expecting jank now. The original language helps clarify the intent. Given that, this is a great skill feat.

Edit: Probably.

I'm working on a skill feat tier so my players don't have to dig as much when they level up. I've hit a little pothole with magical shorthand, specifically in how it interacts with the activity it modifies.

The learn a spell activity takes 1 hour per spell rank. Magical shorthand modifies the activity in the following way,

"When you succeed at Learning a Spell, it takes 10 minutes regardless of the spell’s rank."

That's pretty narrow language. It doesn't seem like magical shorthand modifies the duration of the activity if you fail the check, so what happens here? Are you forced to commit to the normal duration of the activity if you fail the check? If so, does that not mean you still have to be prepared to spend hours attempting to learn a spell if you fail your check?

Haven't seen much talk of any barbarian changes. I heard rage is getting buffed in some way. I'd like to see a change to the balance of the animal unarmed attack choices. What else is likely to change or that you'd like to see?

I'd like to see the barbarian's 1st level feat selection improved. It doesn't have to be much, as there are some strong ideas there that could stand to be a bit less situational.

It's a cascading problem, see. Fury instinct isn't good because the suite of 1st level class feats isn't good. Fighter tends to outshine the barb at low levels primarily due to a lack of great feats. The high flat damage vs. high accuracy dynamic between the two classes has them about on par while feeling different, but once you throw feats into the mix the barb feels lacking.

Finoan wrote:

I would still go with "5 foot burst centered on a corner of the familiar's square". That seems to be the closest to the intent of the ability.

I think the emanation answer is more plausible, tbh. We've had numerous instances of writers forgetting that bursts can't be centered on squares, and that's both functionally what an emanation is and essentially what the text is suggesting.

More subjectively, having it only hit 4 squares seems kind of bad.

It's not amazing coverage, no. Right now I'm falling on the 5 foot burst interpretation because it seems the most likely, unfortunately. If it were an emanation, it would be pretty strong, and...well.

It seems like strong options in this system are frequently accidents.

Personally I feel that Emanation should always be attached as an Aura on a creature and that if the spell is instead in a fixed location on the ground that it should be a Burst area.

But I don't write the rules.

I would still go with "5 foot burst centered on a corner of the familiar's square". That seems to be the closest to the intent of the ability.

Technically, being a tiny creature, a familiar's space is only a quarter of a grid square too... And if you cast Enlarge on the familiar, it's space would take up multiple squares...

I'm right there with you and that's what I'm going with. I like the ability. I tend to like abilities that force some kind of engagement with them (even through avoidance) so I'm all about this difficult terrain, but I do at least try to come up with some kind of RAI on an issue before I throw it at my players.

Thanks for your response. Going back to making my snowchild now.

"Your familiar is cold to the touch, its breath always visible. When you Cast or Sustain a hex, you can cause ice to form in a 5-foot burst centered on a square of your familiar’s space. Those squares are difficult terrain until the start of your next turn."

Surely this was meant to be a "5 foot burst centered on a corner of your familiar's square" right? Is there something I'm missing here? Is language like this used elsewhere? Does the familiar being tiny create some interaction I don't know about? Was this meant to be an emanation (centered on a square) and they got the term for the area wrong or was it meant to be a burst (centered on a corner) and they got the origin point wrong? Is anything wrong? Am I wrong? What is happening? Where am I?

Off the top of my head:

-Don't force players to take a bad DaS roll to fight an enemy; DaS is feast or famine in most fights, and in some fights (solo bosses) is completely useless if you have a streak of bad rolls. Even third actions have their limits, between Demoralize, Battle Medicine, etc. And having to take two third actions because you roll bad once isn't compelling or helpful gameplay.

-Intelligence is a bad stat in the game, so forcing them to boost it instead of a stat they use for combat is pretty feelsbad. Also, if the Investigator is meant to be the detective type, having them be Wisdom-based makes more sense IMO because it becomes more of a sense of intuition than book smarts. That isn't to say book smarts is bad, but the best detectives use good intuitions to solve cases, not textbook knowledge.

Might post more later, but I would need to actually sit down and think it out.

My twisted fantasy for devise a strategem is that you have to use the result of the roll, but you can either use it for your roll or sabotage the enemy by forcing them to take the roll as a reaction. It's still got that "I have to use the thing I came up with" bit, but instead of spending an action to limit your options with a bad roll, you just dump what would otherwise be failure onto the enemy and now they have to deal with it.

You could always take a page out of the rogue's book and let the investigator pick a different key attribute based on their subclass.

If the highest design priority is still to make the investigator great at investigating to the exclusion of combat prowess (ill-advised IMO), letting them choose their key attribute would help put them over the top in that regard. Right now you've got an interrogator who can't be that charismatic, an empiricist who can't be that observant, and what's basically a chirurgeon who can't use intelligence for medicine.

And don't get me started on alchemical sciences, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about.

ParasiteHouse wrote:

I could go on, but uh...yeah.

That's fine. This is a good mix here. Thanks.

So what I am seeing is that some of these are just for fun and harmless. Notably, 1, 5, 7, 12, and 13. I don't see any reason to prevent that from happening. In fact, I think it would be time consuming and pointless - as well as being a bit antagonistic - for the GM to have observers making perception vs stealth check to see if they notice the subtle casting. What are they going to think if they do notice that someone is casting a spell?

Some of these are for while combat is already in progress. 6, 8, and 14 most notably. This is where having a perception vs stealth check to see if the other combatants can notice the spellcasting going on - or correctly identify who is doing the casting - makes the most sense from a game balance perspective.

Then many others are for use in exploration mode or social encounters. Some are likely to start combat - such as casting Shocking Grasp against someone - whether anyone notices the spellcasting itself or not. A lot of these would be a good way to start a skill encounter rather than combat.

Can the party figure out which of the guests at the event is subtle casting Daze (or Malicious Shadow) before the victim dies from the attack: This will play out in 4 rounds. The 4-player party needs to gain 16 Detection Points. Standard skills are Perception DC X to sense motive and notice who is doing the casting, or Diplomacy/Intimidation DC Y to get people to leave the area and eliminate themselves as suspects.

Solid adjudicating. I was having fun with it because I really like the creative capacity of the feat, but even some of the fun things could be turned into socially significant activities. Blaming somebody else for a fart is only the beginning of the potential framejobs, I think.

I don't know about anyone else, but I am getting a bit lost in all of these hypothetical situations where Subtle spells or Conceal Spell is being claimed to work or not work or possibly work depending on dice rolls and which are houserules and which are not.

Does anyone want to put forward a few concrete scenario encounters to better illustrate the mechanics?

Let's see if I can come up with some. Mind you, this is kind of off the cuff. I do have the arcane spell list up to reference.

So we know that there's no explicit means of countering conceal spell. They don't mention anything even though they usually do. If there's nothing to see, then there's nothing to see. The language in the spell claims the manifestations are hidden, but the subtle trait says the spell can be cast "without" them. So...yeah nothing to see, right? This is probably going to turn into a list of creative uses of this feat, maybe with some questions it raises.

1. You could use approximate to get an incorrect count of a given collection of items and nobody would be any the wiser. (Sorry I had to.)

2. If you were in a tight crowd, could you bump up against somebody and shocking grasp them without anybody being sure of who did it? Is having to reach out and touch somebody a manifestation, or is it an explicit thing you have to do, or is it an abstraction of the shortest possible spell range? I dunno!

3. Daze has a range of 60 feet and it doesn't specify that it's a beam or a ray or anything like that. You could torture somebody mentally in public without it being detectable.

4. The same could be said of tortuous trauma, which is explicit in its lack of external evidence.

5. Turn all the lights on and off like Nosferatu in that episode of Spongebob with illuminate.

6. Could you have somebody else in the party (somebody with more hit points) use a reaction to wave their arms around pretending to cast a spell when you cast using concealed spell? Would you need to roll a deception check for that? I guess. How long would it take to wave your arms around as 1 action? The lie activity takes a least a whole round, so I dunno! If I were a player, and my GM told me the rules did not permit me to wave my arms around and go "hbogobugugurhburughauoodlydoo" as a reaction, I'd feel cheated.

7. I want to scare some onion farmer that wouldn't let me sleep in his onion coop or whatever so I conceal cast TKP on anything I have a line of effect to from outside his window. I do this in the middle of the night. Suddenly he's got a poltergeist. Beforehand I conceal cast grease around his bed.

8. I stand around stoically, magically birthing trees in my space by conceal casting timber. The trees fall and vanish. Sometimes they fall on you. I lie and say I'm not doing it and I can't make it stop. To what end? No idea. It's funny.

9. I conceal cast noxious vapors and blame it on my familiar.

10. I'm so boring, I can make people fall asleep by being nearby.

11. Worse yet, sometimes magic items just stop working while I'm around.

12. Two jerks are trying to use a language I don't know to talk about me behind my back, but as it turns out I just cast comprehend language using conceal spell.

13. What if I conceal cast a spell without any obvious effects, such as fly? Surely there are a lot of spells that don't have any immediate or obvious indicators produced by their effects. You'll know when I fly off, but until the time comes you might not.

14. What if I'm being held at glaive point by some henchmen who have readied reactions to strike me if I start casting a spell? What does that reaction key off of? Surely it would key off the manifestations of the magic. If there are no manifestations, do I stand a better chance to get away because *poof* I just turned invisible without doing a four second light show. Can you react to a concealed spell or do you have to wait until the effects of the spell kick in?

I could go on, but uh...yeah.

It is remarkable how quickly threads like this answer their own questions.

You have someone asking if this is how it works, someone else saying yes and it is fine because only players will use it, but the op is the GM wanting to do exactly what the “yes, it’s not a problem” poster said wouldn’t/shouldn't happen.

In my opinion, this is a mechanic that will cause many problems for both players and GMs when players think they have cart Blanche to cast spells without anyone possibly knowing that is going on.

Fast turnaround time is always nice, isn't it? Truth be told, my goal was to assess whether or not my interpretation of the rules was sound and to hopefully get ahead of any major issues this interpretation could cause. I reckon I got what I wanted, so that's good.

Thanks for your input, for what it's worth. Your opinion is meaningful, and I think you're accurately zoned in on the potential hazards here.

My check to this would probably be a low level homebrew feat improving counterspell if interpreting the rules this way becomes destructive.

Unicore wrote:

@ParasiteHouse,

You are not the only one asking these questions and there is no current consensus or Developer statements clarifying the intention. This is a conversation you currently need to have with your GM because tables are going to be running it very differently. What you will likely get from asking the question here is several different responses that you can consider for yourself and your table.

My word of warning about assuming subtle spells cannot be countered is to point out that it is a level 2, common feat for wizards that completely negates certain character builds without even requiring a roll. Many players will become irate if GMs start building NPC casters who have the feat and just can't have their spells countered. What wizard, in a world of wizards, is not going to place a lot of value on such a feat? I am personally resistant to giving players access to options that they would hate to have used against them, and will be letting casters make a stealth or deception check (their choice) against any potential identifier's Perception DC when they use conceal spell to see if can be identified.

It is bonkers the way Paizo go from taking an ability that was really difficult to use because most of the time it required 2 checks to be successful - and that is before any saving throw. Then they decide to fix it by just making it automatic no check. I feel like I've said this before but there was a middle ground choice they could have made here.

I don't think it is a bad decision in this place. Because this is encouraging people to use indirect tactics and options other than charge in and smash. I want the players to be innovative. So I approve of the change.

The GM can always fall back on the spell effects themselves to keep things noticeable.

That there is a defence against counterspell, doesn't upset me there is a defence to most other things. Every tactic should have a response.
If the players or enemies are going to soak up actions using spell shape...

It is a profound change, and I'm wondering why they buffed it to this degree, but I think it has some interesting potential that I'm going to explore when I sit down to do my campaign work tonight. There's a serial killer I've been needing to roll for awhile now. This might be just the thing.

Surely this was side a cornercase issue they didn't foresee and connect the dots on because Counterspelling was already one of the trickiest and most finicky aspects of spellcasting and new easy-to-grab options that makes doing that impossible to do outright... that doesn't seem correct.

I agree. If we consider the remaster version of conceal spell without relating it to counterspell in any way, it's already quite powerful. I don't currently have the data necessary to determine how powerful, and it's probably hard to quantify, but this one seems like an oversight, or at the very least an exploit that emerged from the language staying consistent.

@ParasiteHouse,

You are not the only one asking these questions and there is no current consensus or Developer statements clarifying the intention. This is a conversation you currently need to have with your GM because tables are going to be running it very differently. What you will likely get from asking the question here is several different responses that you can consider for yourself and your table.

My word of warning about assuming subtle spells cannot be countered is to point out that it is a level 2, common feat for wizards that completely negates certain character builds without even requiring a roll. Many players will become irate if GMs start building NPC casters who have the feat and just can't have their spells countered. What wizard, in a world of wizards, is not going to place a lot of value on such a feat? I am personally resistant to giving players access to options that they would hate to have used against them, and will be letting casters make a stealth or deception check (their choice) against any potential identifier's Perception DC when they use conceal spell to see if can be identified.

I am the GM, man. I run the underdark, guy. I roll the dice. I deal the loot.

But no really. You dredge up what I feel is a significant design issue with the system. I love PF2e partly because it was designed with enough prudence to be functional. However,

Many of the standout options in this game result from accidents or oversights because 1st party material is published in such a narrow power band. This may be one of those options. Since they result from accidents, they aren't balanced well, and they have potential to invalidate other modes of play. If they were balanced well, they wouldn't be accidents, but they probably wouldn't be powerful, satisfying options either, would they? Bad options are usually working as intended, but great options are often malfunctional. The remaster has fixed a lot of that, but it introduced a lot of new problems.

So this cool thing I found might not be working like the devs meant it to work. Its strength comes from it being aberrant, but now that I have it, I like it even though it has the capacity to damage the game. So what do I do? Your solution is functional and consistent with the rest of the game, but that's not my bag I guess.

I'm going to roll an assassin who uses conceal spell to eliminate his targets in plain sight and then we can do a little murder mystery. They'll be more invested because I dared to challenge them in an unexpected way. If they turn my weapons against me I might have to go make a deal with a bunch of barbazu.

Stuff

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm absolutely behind casters having more powerful feat options (even if it's accidental in some ways), and it's important to me that my evaluation doesn't come off as fearmongering about strong options. I'm here for it.

My initial thinking is that this is super exploitable, but I'd need to figure out some use cases.

I haven't been able to find anything explicit saying this in the PC, but the consistent use of the word "manifestations" makes me think that spells with the subtle trait can't be counterspelled RAW.

Counterspell states that you must be able to "see the manifestations" of the triggering spell.

"Manifestations" are loosely defined on page 299 as obvious sensations created by a spell, such as flashing lights or glowing runes or what have you, but it's not a word that's defined in the book's glossary.

Conceal spell, which works for any spell, states that it hides the "manifestations of a spell, but not its effects," and that language seems to distinguish a spell's manifestations from its actual mechanical effects. Conceal spell grants the subtle trait, and if we look at the subtle trait in the glossary, it says a spell with the subtle trait can be cast "without incantations" and "does not have obvious manifestations." By that definition, conceal spell doesn't just hide a spell's manifestations, but eliminates them.

Since you need to be able to precisely sense a spell's manifestations to counter it, it would seem that all spellcasters have access to a level 2 feat that can, for a single action with no daily limit, make their spells uncounterable in addition to the myriad of other benefits conceal spell provides.

Is this interpretation off base?

Yes absolutely. My primary gripe with the class is that a given inventor is probably only going to have one unique invention. Even though others are alluded to through flavor text (like the gizmos that engage overdrive), the inventor basically takes a bunch of exploding whirligigs and welds them to a pole or a breastplate or a clock so you end up with this inexplicable thingamabob. I found myself struggling on the first session to improvise how my weapon was managing to bend and flex and stretch and grapple and trip and stab and explode from moment to moment.

Don't get me wrong though. I like my stretching shrinking exploding ranseur with the whippy bits. I just wish I had a gumball machine or something to go with it.