Elan

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Organized Play Member. 251 posts (254 including aliases). No reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 5 Organized Play characters.


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Liberty's Edge

Obviously it's because wizards are nerds.

The real question is why don't sorcerers rule the world?

Liberty's Edge

"An inquisitor who slips into corruption or changes to a prohibited alignment loses all spells and the judgment ability."

At this point the next time they try to use a judgement or casts a spell inform them nothing happens.

From there as others have said they have the option of Atonement, the Heretic archetype or finding a new deity who's okay with slaughtering the innocent.

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There are times when removing someone else's agency to act is the correct thing to do, there are times when it is not.

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It takes a free action to end rage. You can't take actions if you're unconscious.

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The real question here is if supernatural effects have magic auras to begin with.

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With death

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Heaps of ways. Infernal/Celestial Healing, class based auras, Misdirection, possession by something with an evil aura, holding an item with an evil aura, Imbue with Aura. It's so easy to fake an alignment aura even if there was a good god okay with murdering all evil creatures you meet they still would want you to take steps to make sure they've actually done something horrible to make sure.

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Go back to where you met the mother, ask people questions, find out what happened to her and how she died. Follow the plot thread and you might just find something or someone useful.

Liberty's Edge

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You know what'll discourage the spamming of it? Remind the Paladin that every time they use Detect Evil they provoke attacks of opportunity, it takes them 18 seconds of standing and staring to narrow down the aura, and if a high enough evil cleric is in the cone they get stunned.

Liberty's Edge

As a GM: NPCs will attempt to identify the spell being cast but probably fail and take attacks of opportunity to disrupt the Paladins concentration, then either run away from the scary person who casts spells at them without their permission or get violent.
Paladin commits murder, Paladin falls, if they fail to hide the body local law enforcement will use Blood Biography, and possibly Red Hand of the Killer, to hunt down the murderous ex-Paladin.

As a player: I react IC to my party member committing murder in front of me. This may involve revoking their weapon privileges, possibly their freedom privileges. If for some reason the Paladin has been able to get away with this repeatedly while still maintaining a lawful good alignment and powers my character will either lose faith in the gods or assume something has gone terribly wrong in the upper planes.

Liberty's Edge

Assuming they didn't break the magic circle it should still be active and have 2 abjuration auras; one faint aura for the magic circle, one moderate aura for the dimensional anchor effect (there has to be one as accuser devils can teleport). If they did break the circle the auras linger for 1d6 rounds for the faint aura and 1d6 minutes for the dimensional anchor.

Liberty's Edge

Definitely some good option already mentioned, I'll add Dazzling Blade, Bladed Dash, Sense Vitals, Versatile Weapon & Primal Scream.

Liberty's Edge

The fighter is obviously Evil if that's normal behaviour for them.

The warpriest is fine, they couldn't have stopped the fighter and the code of Iomedae talks more about protecting your allies than punishing evil. The Paladin code does, however, require them to punish those who harm the innocent.

What might be a good way of handling this is having law enforcement, good adventurers, or maybe just a friend or family member of the hobgoblin try to hunt down his murderer through a spell like Blood Biography or Red Hand of the Killer. Have consequences to this beyond getting stuff without having to pay for it or the dwarf's just going to keep murderhoboing.

Liberty's Edge

This is why you delay action to hit them with the spell during or after their turn.

Liberty's Edge

It would be a DC 21 Knowledge (Arcana) check. Knowledge (Arcana) because Bard is an arcane spellcasting class, DC 21 because the masterpiece can be learned at a minimum of 11th level.

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Disintegrate to dispose of the evidence.

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In a spellcaster heavy group a Magician Bard can do pretty well. But at higher levels even a core bard has Dirge of Doom to lower all enemy saves by 2.

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Of course not, there's no RP police forcing you how to roleplay your character.

Liberty's Edge

Looking through the other Witch archetypes, all the ones that actually replace hexes uses the word replace. Archetypes that use the word alter tend be ones that add more options, like granting access to Shaman hexes.

Given this, my conclusion is that the bonus hex granted by Season Witch is in fact a bonus in addition to the normal 1st level hex.

Liberty's Edge

Just a heads up, the reprint of the Thundercaller in Ultimate Wilderness made Thunder Call always a standard action.

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Level 1:
Barbed Chains
Burning Disarm
Protection from Alignment

Level 2:
Spear of Purity/Arrow of Law/Shard of Chaos/Dread Bolt
Blinding Ray/Burst of Radiance
Boneshaker
Calm Emotions
Hold Person
Life Pact
Pilfering Hand
Spiritual Weapon (if you let Oracles use CHA)
Sound Burst

Level 3:
Archon's Aura
Bestow Curse
Blindness/Deafness
Chain of Perdition
Dispel Magic
Invisibility Purge
Magic Circle Against Alignment
Prayer
Stone Shape
Summon Monster III
Wind Wall

Level 4:
Aura of Doom
Blessing of Fervor
Holy Smite/Chaos Hammer/Order's Wrath/Unholy Blight
Debilitating Portent
Summon Monster IV
Terrible Remorse
Warp Metal
Spiritual Ally (if you let Oracles use CHA)

Liberty's Edge

Arcane and divine spellcasting requires certain amounts of vocal and manual dexterity.

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The Order of the Godclaw is full of Lawful Evil Hellknights who count Iomedae and Torag as two of the five deities they venerate.

Liberty's Edge

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If you believe my regular playgroup I play exclusively bards. My dozen or so bard characters are, of course, bards. But also my druid is just a bard that likes nature a lot, my witch is a creepy debuff bard, my oracle was Princess Mononoke as a genderqueer bard, my swashbuckler was just a bard who really liked stabbing things with his sword (wink wink nudge nudge say no more). Even when I play other RPGs like World of Darkness; my werewolf, my vampires, my hunter; all bards.

Liberty's Edge

Amulet of Natural Armour
Othwrworldly Kimono
Orange Prism Ioin Stone
R8ng of Freedom of Movement/Spectral Shroud/Boots of Escape/Shoes of Lightning Leaping
Multiple Snapleaves

Liberty's Edge

You know it really should require some actual Imperious blood considering it contains actual preserved blood but yeah RAW you can craft it yourself and just ignore the prerequisite.

Liberty's Edge

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An Ampoule of False Blood can do it, all you need is 20,000 gold and a blood donor with the Imperious bloodline.

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Time and Trickery are both good options with strong low level spells. There's also Deception for Invisibility and Blink, Elements for Fireball, Peace for Calm Emotions and Wind Wall and Protection for Sanctuary and Resist Energy.

Liberty's Edge

Chuck Mount wrote:
Actually, Con Flame might not be that common. You need rubies and the world would quickly run out of rubies if even a city used that much light. That's a bit too expensive. If Con. Light was still around, though....

Summon Monster fixes this problem, Lantern Archons have Continual Flame as an at will SLA.

Liberty's Edge

The Fortuitous weapon property would let you get a second riposte at -5 if the first hits, once per round.

Liberty's Edge

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graystone wrote:
PrinceRaven wrote:
Also, paladins should never fall from a catch 22 unless they deliberately take a third even worse option.

That's 100% wrong. I've seen option 1, 2 and 3 make the paladin fall. Some games it's only a matter of WHEN a paladin falls, not if.

"Oh no, you didn't save the innocent villagers!! Fall!
"Oh no, you attacked the natives that are fighting back against the invading people!! [the villagers] Fall!!!

Failure never makes a Paladin fall, alignment shifts and committing evil acts make a Paladin fall. Picking a side in a battle where no one's the good guys is neither of these things.

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Goth Guru wrote:
Atheists believe Gods are monsters.

Looking at the Pathfinder gods, this does seem like a pretty reasonable belief. In fact I would argue most of Golarion would consider quite a number of deities to be monstrous.

Liberty's Edge

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I feel like there's a difference between "tricking" the party and putting innocent people in front of a party that thinks NPCs only exist as bags of loot and XP or servants and having them stand up for themselves.

Also, paladins should never fall from a catch 22 unless they deliberately take a third even worse option.

Liberty's Edge

Very small armies, defence spending is best put towards training, paying and equipping high level spellcasters and their bodyguards as a military force rather than large numbers of low level troops easily wiped out by AOE damage spells. The exceptions would be areas that have spent decades at war.

High populations due to magic bolstering food production and magical healing keeping people alive longer and curing disease.

Every nation will be ruled by a magocracy. The actual sitting leaders may not be spellcasters but they will require the support of spellcasters to lead and will bow to the whims of the spellcasting elite. The position of spellcasters in society would be very privileged but there would also be systems in place to ensure that they progress in their magical aptitude as quickly as possible (The Bartimaeus Sequence does this pretty well).

Non-spellcasters, treated like second class citizens, will try to rebel. Most of these rebellions would be run by idiots and easily squashed, but the smart ones will first try to level the playing ground with magical items and rapid advances in technology.

Liberty's Edge

It might help to think of the gods as a bunch of level 20 mythic 10 wizards.

There are 3 main purposes of the godwizards:

1. Explaining things you don't actually understand - Storms are manifestations of Gozreh's will / I dunno, a wizard did it.

2. Maintaining social order - If you're bad you'll go to one of the lower planes / if you're bad a wizard will scry and fry you.

3. Justifying oligarchies and autocracies - I have all the money and power by divine mandate / I rule because the wizards picked me and they'll totally smite you with Lightning Bolts if you don't obey me.

Liberty's Edge

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I think we can all agree that having the burden of proof has never stopped people from believing whatever they want to believe.

Also the Pathfinder gods are actually lizard people who are keeping our characters' brains in jars and all of Golarion is just a mindscape they're kept in.

Liberty's Edge

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The gods exist, but they're undeserving of worship.

The gods exist, but I am not beholden to them, they have no right to judge me or interfere with my life/soul.

The gods exist, but they're not really gods, they're just very powerful souls who can mimic godlike abilities.

The truth of creation is hidden to us and the things claiming to be gods are charlatans taking advantage of our faith.

The gods don't exist, any proof that they do is just part of an aboleth conspiracy.

Liberty's Edge

If you ask me, Neutral Evil is one of the best alignments to have in a party. Neutral Evil characters place a high value on maintaining valuable alliances and will do their best to avoid compromising their relationship with any party members or the overall mission of the party. The only downside is that their strong self preservation instinct makes them more likely to betray an ally who becomes a hindrance than other alignments.

Lawful Evil characters make good party members too, and their code of honour means you don't have to worry about them betraying you as much as a Neutral Evil character. At the same time they tend to be a lot less willing to compromise than a Neutral Evil character, which causes issues when you need a chaotic solution to a problem.

Chaotic Evil, however, is the worst alignment to have in a party. It's the ultimate "doesn't play well with others" alignment.

Liberty's Edge

Getting drunk and singing bawdy tavern songs, charging into battle to the beating of drums and rhythmic war chants, Dwarves are clearly a race well suited to being bards.

Liberty's Edge

False Life and Mage Armour, never leave home without them.

Try not to rely on your hexes too much, sometimes it's better to keep your distance. Alternatively, invest in ride, cast Mount and have an extra move action to move back after using an offensive hex.

Witches do have access to the cloud spells, I would consider investing in Fogcutting Lenses in the future if you find you like using them to keep yourself alive. Bleed for your Master and at later levels Die for your Master allow you to shunt off incoming attacks to your familiar. Life Pact is also an option.

Liberty's Edge

Plus the only way to know someone's alignment with absolute certainty is if they resurrect you, and even then you only know what their alignment was during the casting of that spell. There are all sorts of reasons someone might detect as Evil without having an Evil alignment.

Even if they are Evil, "because they're evil" isn't a good justification to murder someone, and is contrary to the respect for sentient life that Pathfinder mandates is part of a good alignment.

Liberty's Edge

The most obvious way a Paladin would fall to Chaos is that they break their code in a non-Evil way.

Liberty's Edge

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Killing a good person is an evil act because you're taking their future from them and causing pain to their friends and family by robbing them of a loved one.

Liberty's Edge

With Startling Shapechange and Swift Kitsune Shapechanger you can Dazzling Display as a Swift action.

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Healing patron of course! You want to make sure your food is clean and free of disease right?

Erastil definitely wouldn't be keen on cooking people but as a Witch you don't have a direct connection to your deity anyway so really it comes down to whether or not your character believes his priests and how fervent they are a follower of him.

As far as Hexes go I'm a fan of the utility Hexes like Healing and Flight. If you don't mind spending feats on Extra Hex you can get Misfortune at level 1 and Cackle at level 2 to give you a good combat Hex that isn't Slumber.

Liberty's Edge

Less than 50% actually, even after getting past the concealment you still have to succeed at a touch attack.

OilHorse wrote:
Also allowing you to allow someone to freely move through your square while you are invisible will open up the the ability to move through an enemies square while invisible with no checks.

Um, no it doesn't? The occupant of the square determines if they will allow creatures through it, not the person attempting to move through.

I guess if they're letting their own invisible allies through their square you could take advantage of that but otherwise there's no reason to assume that they'll allow you through their square.

Liberty's Edge

If only there were rules for someone on the alert for an invisible enemy, something involving checking squares to try to find them...

Liberty's Edge

I'm saying that the inability to end your movement in an occupied square is simply that, you can't end your movement in the square. The rule that says that does not say "you automatically succeed a touch attack as you bump into the occupant of the square before being placed in an appropriate square." Therefore assuming that there is an invisible occupant in that square is indeed metagaming, as your character has not pinpointed the location of said creature, only you have, because you know the movement rules that your character doesn't.

OilHorse wrote:
So being flat out pedantic, there is no way to get by the invisible guy because movement rules. Or do you think that people can just walk over a waist high retaining wall because they don't see it and it is obviously not an enemy.

I'm pretty sure waist high retaining walls are not capable of choosing to allow someone to move through their square, being both stuck to the ground and presumably not sentient.

How about an invisible guard who is ambivalent to the party, or even just didn't notice the party as his back was to them as they came down the 5' corridor he is standing in the middle of?

No GM is going to suddenly apply combat movement rules in this situation. But if you were to apply them:

Ambivalent guard & someone moves through square: Guard chooses to let them through the square, no issue.
Ambivalent guard & someone tries to end movement on square: They end their movement a square back, on the next round the above applies.
Oblivious guard & someone moves through square: Player is told something invisible is blocking their movement through that square, guard gets a perception check, if he succeeds he gets an attack of opportunity.
Oblivious guard & someone tries to end movement on square: They end their movement a square back, guard gets a perception check, if he succeeds he gets an attack of opportunity.

Liberty's Edge

OilHorse wrote:
PrinceRaven wrote:

Or you could not be silly and have it go

Player: My PC walks over here.
GM: [hmm, there's an invisible creature in a...

Interesting. There is a finite and specific list of invisibility detection. Care to post a link to it?

Here it is

Quote:

A creature can generally notice the presence of an active invisible creature within 30 feet with a DC 20 Perception check. The observer gains a hunch that “something's there” but can't see it or target it accurately with an attack. It's practically impossible (+20 DC) to pinpoint an invisible creature's location with a Perception check.

...
A creature can grope about to find an invisible creature. A character can make a touch attack with his hands or a weapon into two adjacent 5-foot squares using a standard action. If an invisible target is in the designated area, there is a 50% miss chance on the touch attack. If successful, the groping character deals no damage but has successfully pinpointed the invisible creature's current location. If the invisible creature moves, its location, obviously, is once again unknown.

Also goes on to list various other methods of detecting invisible creatures, such as them attacking, picking up a visible object, following tracks, scent, blindsight... It does not however list metagaming the movement rules as a valid means of detecting an invisible creature.

Liberty's Edge

DM_Blake wrote:
PrinceRaven wrote:
The fact of the matter is there are rules that tell you how to find invisible creatures with touch and they do not include zig-zagging back and forth with move actions until you find a square you can't enter or end your movement in.

Except some people here are arguing that this is exactly how you can do it. No, the rules don't say "do it this way" but the rules do say that it will work. For, uh, reasons.

For example, two posts above yours, Numerak (indirectly) advocates this very thing. By his response, the rules prevent you from entering this imaginary "square", roughly the square footage of a common elevator, even if you don't know there is a person standing there invisibly. Even if that person is TRYING to let you in. The RAW says "NO!!!" so it must be no.

Then he goes on to say you can finagle the "ally" rules by pretending your enemy is your ally to get around this hard-coded rule.

He's right. That's all true. Except the ally finagling might be more of a judgement call than an actual rule.

Although, this allows for this funny conversation:

Player: My PC walks over here.
GM: Uh, well, that only partially works. After the first three squares, you feel a mystical need to use Acrobatics to tumble through that fourth square.
Player: Why?
GM: I dunno. You just do.
Player: Can you explain that better?
GM: Well, the first three squares went OK. YOU walked normally, no problems. But then at this fourth square, some karmic mystical energy in the universe seems to prevent you from walking into that square. But you instinctively know that you might be able to enter it if you tumble.
Player: Why?
GM: Reasons.
Player: How do I know about the tumbling?
GM: Uhhhh, instinct, I suppose.
Other Player: Hey, Fred, stop there and ready an action to attack. On my turn I cast Glitterdust on that mystical tumble square.

Or you could not be silly and have it go

Player: My PC walks over here.
GM: [hmm, there's an invisible creature in a square he wants to move through. The rules don't 100% cover this but the intent is pretty clear you shouldn't be able to just walk into invisible creatures to find them since you need to use your standard action and make touch attacks to find someone invisible, so I'll let him pass by without incident as he isn't treating the square as being occupied by an enemy and the creature isn't going to take hostile action like an attack of opportunity or otherwise attempt to impede his movement.] Okay sure, anything else?

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