Randomknight's page

Figured I'd be a late comer and add my two cents since some people may actually read the end of the post and gain some benefit from it now that they are relaxed and near sleeping...
My take on it is, Supernatural ability = standard action because the act of passion was not specified. Even while grappled, you can take an action via light weapon etc instead of trying to reverse or break the grapple, but it is not automatic, you have to roll to succeed. What is needed to succeed? A touch attack with the mouth to perform the kiss or the act of passion. I think they said "such as a kiss" because they couldn't specifically say what else could be done with the mouth in regards to an "act of passion" And since a touch attack should be fairly easy to perform on a person you are grappling with, the succubus is very likely going to get away with it anyway.
As far as being pinned, I would rule no, her head would be controlled by the pinner, and though she may like that, drain could not be done without the pinner's consent.

The only such feat I'm aware of in Pathfinder is Selective Spell, which lets you exclude a small number of targets. This would prevent you from hitting some of the people you knew about, but doesn't do much good against a creature you're unaware of (since you can't target them to exclude them).

It still sounds like it could apply as an adaptation to an FPS from an RPG without bending existing intent much, if at all. And note I said "Good". Were I a good caster I would play this way almost exclusively. Were I neutral, I might let it slide for a while in battlefield environments and then cover my butt by toggling on the "Hostile targets only/Selective metamagic". If I were evil, I might pay that metamagic no mind at all and prefer "Heightened Spell" or something in its place.

Oh, also wanted to address the whole AOE ripple affect. Would this mean that a party could effectively apply immunity/resistance spells to themselves and then target themselves with a weaker AOE spell that is easily absorbed by the immunity in order to prevent others from casting on them? Just pointing out a possible exploit ahead of time.

I'm more for the "the highest current affect of that particular element" is what takes place over the next second or so, superseding all weaker affects of the same element.

Here is my reasoning for this:
If you can overlap all the same elemental damage all at the same time, you could have the case where several players with the same fiery aura that they have made themselves immune to(for example) could run in and decimate another party by running in circles around them as everyone would be taking 5 times the damage except for the immune characters.

If same-element damage DIDN'T overlap, you would only take the "highest damage fire source" currently hurting you and the "highest damage cold source" etc. so in order for players to try to take advantage of this same type of scenario it would be far more difficult for them to provide all the immunities necessary because they would have to overlap several types of damage.

Conditions of particular spells that were not saved against would apply as normal I would assume, so as not to penalize a caster for simply casting the same element of a spell that happened to go off before his. So if in the above example all five fire auras caused a save or be fatigued, despite only the highest aura causing damage to a particular target within range, the target would have to save against every fire aura in range versus being fatigued (or you could apply the same reasoning to conditions, only saving against the strongest one this current second, similar to only the worst bleed affect, etc). This would give players in an FPS environment more of a chance to react to overwhelming odds and yet still be able to throw AOE's, and tactics in this particular environment still apply and would reward proper planning in a party ahead of time.

Have we forgotten about metamagics and sculpt spell? Could a good person not toggle on "only hit targets I can perceive in the AOE" while applying a sculpt spell metamagic, thereby only hitting perceived targets and keeping one's reputation intact, but sacrificing a metamagic slot in order to do so?

And as for 3D and how to carry out the actual casting, I would go for something like once a caster starts casting a spell, they have to stand still and target the spell during that time (which should give a semi-transparent, 3D idea of where the spell is going to go) and subjects them to attacks of opportunity.

Edit: And I might add Hostile targets, not friendly targets of course