Sunos's page

My issue is: Wall of Fire doesn't say it CAN be shaped, but it doesn't say it can't. My other question is this: if I filled a 5ft wide hallway with a wall of fire from end to end, would running from one end to the other incur ONe application of 2d6+lvl fire dog, or as many squares as I ran through?

My opinion on the first is that it can be laid down in 20 ft segments, and each segment could have a 90 degree turn (if you wanted to make a cube for instance)

And on the second: it says that running from one side of the wall to the other incurs 2d6+lvl. Which means dashing through it and spending a mere second in it does that much. It follows (to me) that dashing through 6 such squares would incur damage 6 times, like running through 6 walls of fire?

I'll post the spell for clarity:

Wall of Fire

School evocation [fire]; Level druid 5, magus 4, sorcerer/wizard 4, summoner 3; Domain fire 4

CASTING
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S, M/DF (a piece of phosphor)

EFFECT
Range medium (100 ft. + 10 ft./level)
Effect opaque sheet of flame up to 20 ft. long/level or a ring of fire with a radius of up to 5 ft./two levels; either form 20 ft. high
Duration concentration + 1 round/level
Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance yes

DESCRIPTION
An immobile, blazing curtain of shimmering violet fire springs into existence. One side of the wall, selected by you, sends forth waves of heat, dealing 2d4 points of fire damage to creatures within 10 feet and 1d4 points of fire damage to those past 10 feet but within 20 feet. The wall deals this damage when it appears, and to all creatures in the area on your turn each round. In addition, the wall deals 2d6 points of fire damage + 1 point of fire damage per caster level (maximum +20) to any creature passing through it. The wall deals double damage to undead creatures.

If you evoke the wall so that it appears where creatures are, each creature takes damage as if passing through the wall. If any 5-foot length of wall takes 20 points or more of cold damage in 1 round, that length goes away. (Do not divide cold damage by 2, as normal for objects.)

Wall of fire can be made permanent with a permanency spell. A permanent wall of fire that is extinguished by cold damage becomes inactive for 10 minutes, then reforms at normal strength.

Sunos wrote:

Also, I couldn't find clarification in the book about how to treat race/feat abilities that give bonuses to certain spell schools and keywords.

If you clarify what you mean by this, I'll point Jason at your reply (he wrote WOP so he's the best person to answer questions about it).

That would be awesome! I'm happy to clarify: The gnome alternate racial trait Magical Linguist:

"Magical Linguist: Gnomes study languages in both their mundane and supernatural manifestations. Gnomes with this racial trait add +1 to the DC of spells they cast with the language-dependent descriptor or those that create glyphs, symbols, or other magical writings. They gain a +2 racial bonus on saving throws against such spells. Gnomes with a Charisma of 11 or higher also gain the following spell-like abilities: 1/day—arcane mark, comprehend languages, message, read magic. The caster level for these effects is equal to the gnome’s level. This racial trait replaces the gnome magic and illusion resistance racial Traits."

Does that apply to all words of power, being entirely language-based spells?

Or an ability that, say, increased the caster level of all your fire spells, would that give you an extra spell level on fire effect words to wrap in metas and the like? One of our groups periodic DMs feels that anything that effects spells doesn't apply to WoP.

Also, about the domains issue, we house ruled it so that most domain powers stay the same, but we try to find WoP to replace the domain spells, is there an official conversion for this sort of thing?

I have a question/criticism.

Let me start off by saying UM rocks my socks off, I LOVE the expanded options for all the previous classes, and the Magus is the latest iteration of one of my old favorite archetypes.

That being said, I am extremely disappointed by the words of power section. When I first started reading it it sounded amazing, like a beautiful, flowing reincarnation of the Truthspeaker from 3.5 DnD. But I am only 3 hours into my first play through of one and the magic is already long gone.

It seems like a more complicated and more restrictive version of playing a regular caster, with the locks on target/effect combos and the lack of freedom and choices for everything except sorcerer/wizard giving the impression of something half-finished.

Now the rest of the book more than makes up for the price of my subscription, but I was SO excited by this that the disappointment feels huge. I've read through the playtest posts, and saw some really good suggestions about having a base spell for an effect that scales with level, allowing room for a larger variety of spells.

I'd REALLY like to see cleric's domains, sorcerer's bloodlines, and the like grant access to more wordspell options rather than just making them into awkward half-word casters. The Fire domain should give you the full line of flame spells, the fae bloodlines should give you illusion and charm words, the witch's Agility Patron should give body enhancements and such. So many of those such class abilities look to me like they would translate quite easily into word bonuses that cement the transformation into a truly unique combination, as opposed to how it feels now.

Also, I couldn't find clarification in the book about how to treat race/feat abilities that give bonuses to certain spell schools and keywords. It seems like it would not be hard to draw a line between most of them and words descriptors, but I'd like some confirmation for my DM. Maybe I missed it, I have just started playing, but I feel like the words of power deserve their own book, not just a chapter.

Ah well time to sell a kidney.

I hear you can get $90,000 for a testicle. And with roleplaying being almost as expensive a habit as hard drugs, you may just need it.

As a matter of fact, Sunos, you might be confused by the titles of books :

The Player's Handbook is the main core book of Dungeons & Dragons.
The Core Rulebook is the main book of Pathfinder. And it is a guide for both players and game masters.

Ah yes, I did misspeak. Where ever I said "Players Guide" I meant the Core Rulebook, which is, as you guessed, a habit left over from DnD 3.5. Just replace that phrase with Core Rulebook and you'll get the question I meant to ask.

This new book will be an extension for players, presenting more options for their characters.

The same way there will be in may another book destined to game masters, the Game Mastery Guide.

So no, this Advanced Player's Guide is not made to replace the Core Rulebook, just to complement it, as a suppplement.

Think of it as a Player's Handbook 2 or one of the Complete series from 3.5.

It just adds some new baseclasses, feats and other stuff to the game and is not a replacement for the original book.

Thank you to both of you, this is exactly what I wanted to know, and exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. ^^

By the way, welcome on the Paizo messageboards :)

Thank you very much! A pleasure to be here. ^^

So I'm really new to the website, so I apologize in advance if I ask a question that is answered in big bold letters at the top of a page somewhere else, I'm still getting a feel for the place.

I absolutely love Pathfinder, and my group has switched to it with gleeful exuberance. We all loved 3.5, tried 4.0 and were unimpressed, and felt happy that someone was continuing to rework and refine the rules we knew and loved.

But most of us are putting ourselves through college, and don't have the money to throw away on a whole new library. in fact one of the things that drew us to Pathfinder was it's compatibility and that 95% of the information we needed was all in one giant book.

My point is that it is unclear wether this book is an addition to the current Core Rulebook, (similar to the Players Handbook 2.0 from WotC kind of thing) or a replacement for it (like AD&D was to classic DnD). We are just getting to the point were most of the people in my group have their own copy of the current Core Rulebook, and if they find out that a bunch of the rules and information in the books they JUST dropped money on will be replaced with new stuff when this book comes out, It's going to depress a lot of people.

I love a continually growing and evolving game, thats how they stay fresh and work out problems, but if there are going to be rules clashes between people still using the CR and the ones who have managed to get a copy of APG, that will be really aggravating.

(Edited by Sunos to fix the misunderstanding mentioned in the following post)