Breath of Life vs Swallow Future is a very unfortunate place to have table variation. My party was level 11 (except me, who was level 10), so this was a PL+3 boss. And the DC for Swallow Future is 39 (extreme for level 14), so we were looking at a 40-50% chance of a critical failure. Even if breath of life works against it, 2 or 3 party members could easily lose this coin toss and die simultaneously. It also doesn't help that the monster's Strikes can inflict misfortune on all checks for 1 minute.
If there only was a mechanical way to define how much of them believed wizard and this wasn't up gm...
This is precisely the problem that confuses me in the first place with some design decisions and there purpose. I don't say that it's impossible to come with solution. I'm saying that this is why I should come up with up-to-gm solutions. Of course I'll set DC and say my player to roll intimidation to see how much of them run or succumb, based on his result. But by raw this is coercion action, and technically by RAW it's impossible.
By RAW, the GM controls the army and decides how its soldiers respond to the players' actions. There is a difference between roleplay and rollplay. You don't need to make an Intimidation roll for the enemy to figure out they're in over their heads after you've wiped out 75% of them. The GM might have some of them Sense Motive to figure out that, yes, you really are as dangerous as you claim. But it doesn't have to involve any roll of Intimidation. There are innumerable examples in published adventures of enemies surrendering or fleeing once the fight turns against them. Coerce is not the be-all-end-all of threatening NPCs.
If you're mid-battle, you typically don't have time for Coerce, nor do you need it. Such a demonstration of terrific violence will likely be enough to make the survivors flee of their own volition.
But to summarize my counterpoint, a stat block is a set of rules that defines how a creature works. Monster Core's introduction even says "Each creature’s rules appear in a stat block".
I think the line about "opening a door and accidentally freeing a horrible monster" shouldn't be used to imply that deliberately freeing a horrible monster does or does not count as a hostile action. I think the line is just there as a detailed example to contrast the one about fireballing a crowd of people.
I think it's best if we primarily consider whether the harm (direct or indirect) is being done to the targets of the action. Considering creatures beyond that is likely too broad.
...As an aside, this is a good example of "the GM could have made different choices to make the game more fun."
Just because one can kite the players indefinitely, doesn't mean one should. From my perspective, a GM can make that fight feel difficult without making it effectively impossible (and a potential TPK). But that's the GM's choice (or responsibility).
Actually, the GM told us after the session that he did deviate from the written tactics for a better experience.
Thick as Thieves:
The boss was originally supposed to cast invisibility (4th rank) on himself at the start of the fight, then spend the rest of the fight Flying and spamming fireball.
Oh, and I forgot to mention there were about 5 encounters earlier in the day (I think 1 complex hazard, 2 fights, 1 chase scene, and 1 surprise underwater fight) so we had no resources left for the extreme fight.
I remember playing through a mystery scenario, and we found the culprits almost immediately. We didn't have definitive evidence, but their testimony was unbelievable. So one of our players wanted to flex their skills by Coercing them into confessing.
Our GM gave us an error message. "I really want to allow that, but I have to stick to the scenario as written, and there's no written outcome that anticipates this."
Having reviewed the rules, this is very wrong. PFS does require the scenario to be run RAW, but it also expects the GM to adjust the adventure as required. This includes fixing obvious rules typos/errors; reskinning monsters that trigger phobias; and resolving players' creative attempts to bypass challenges.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, I remember the quest giver telling us not to threaten witnesses without evidence. So Coercion was a bad idea. This is still a problem I've run into with GMs in other scenarios though. "You all made it to the end in record time, but the author made a typo when copying the chase rules, so everyone takes damage, and you miss a Treasure Bundle."
The Axe weapon group has this critical specialization:
Axe wrote:
Choose one creature adjacent to the initial target and within reach. If its AC is lower than your attack roll result for the critical hit, you deal damage to that creature equal to the result of the weapon damage die you rolled (including extra dice for its striking rune, if any). This amount isn't doubled, and no bonuses or other additional dice apply to this damage.
So if I use an Axe weapon with Hand of the Apprentice and I crit a faraway enemy, can I damage an adjacent creature, or is that creature disqualified because they are beyond my character's reach?
Just because the devs haven't errataed something doesn't mean they won't. Inner Radiance Torrent has been slated for errata for years and they only just got around to it. The devs really have been that busy remastering their books.
As for whether the two rules contradict each other, it reminds me of an argument I had with a high school teacher. She tried telling us that all squares are rectangles but no rectangles are squares. I was like WTF? That's not how words work.
I think it's mostly the feats Dual Studies [eidolon gains skill] and Skilled Partner [eidolon gains skill feats] that people bring up the most. Even those have some remedies like Improvise Tool for Craft or Magical Understudy [Healing Plaster] for Medicine.
I thought about healing plaster but if you rule that you cannot use healer's tools, then by the same token you shouldn't be able to use the healing plaster.
The spell doesn't make you treat wounds (which would work) but creates healer's tools that you have to use.
It doesn't manipulate the plaster per se. Neither is it an identifiable item. It says it "can be used in lieu of healer's tools" but doesn't say it must be held or worn to do so either.
It's a restorative substance presumably to be applied to the wounds directly. I find it hard to believe it can be used without being held or worn.
If you want to disable a hazard with Thievery, you use the Disable a Device action. If you want to disable a hazard with a different skill listed in the hazard stat block, you use an unnamed 2-action activity that does the same thing as Disable a Device except using the chosen skill.
It technically works as written, but why didn't they just write Disable a Device as a general skill action like Recall Knowledge or Identify Magic?
I think RAW force barrage does not interact with concealed.
Concealed p. 442 PC1 wrote:
You are difficult for one or more creatures to see due to thick fog or some other obscuring feature. You can be concealed to some creatures but not others. While concealed, you can still be observed, but you're tougher to target. A creature that you're concealed from must succeed at a DC 5 flat check when targeting you with an attack, spell, or other effect.
Targets (under spells) p. 300 PC1 wrote:
Some spells allow you to target a creature, an object, or something more specific. The target must be within the spell's range, and you must be able to see it (or otherwise perceive it with a precise sense) to target it. At the GM's discretion, you can attempt to target a creature you can't see, as described in Detecting Creatures on page 434...
While Concealed does say that you need a flat check to target a concealed creature, targeting for spells states that you only have to be able to see the target and Concealed is distinguished in the rules by Hidden, which means you can't see them. I would note that targeting for spells, p. 300, is more lenient than the general targeting rules under Effects, p. 426.
The real kicker is that you can target a creature you can't see by RAW if the GM allows. Under this circumstance I think the flat check (at a minimum) is appropriate.
Automatically hitting is part of the effect of the spell, but if you fail to even target the enemy with the spell, you can't achieve the effect. Some spells circumvent this by saying they ignore concealment, and magic missile was such a spell in 1e. But 2e removed that language, taking that capability with it.
You fire a shard of solidified magic toward a creature that you
can see. It automatically hits and...
Concealed: Fog or similar obscuration makes you difficult to see and target.
Hidden: A creature you’re hidden from knows your location but can’t see
you.
Undetected: A creature you’re undetected by doesn’t know where you are.
.
.
All of the above have been copied from Player Core 1. You can see something Concealed, so it's auto hit. No flat check required.
You can't see someone Hidden or Undetected, so you can't even use Force Barrage.
The phrase "automatically hits" doesn't have that kind of power. Acid Grip says the enemy is affected depending on the results of the target's Reflex save. Since it doesn't mention the result of a concealed flat check, we can ignore the flat check, right?
No, of course not. Concealed applies to every targeting effect except for area effects, and those few effects that ignore concealed actually tell you to ignore concealed. "Automatically hits" is just there to keep people from reading it and saying "Oh, they forgot to say what save it is. I'll just assume it's supposed to be a basic Reflex save."
If you fail the flat check with concealed, then the target is unaffected. No auto hit property of the spell can help with that.
Choosing Adversaries' Actions says to have the enemy act on the information it actually has, not the information the GM has. It also clarifies that enemies do act on wrong information and are at least as susceptible to mistakes as the PCs.
Having a monster automatically know that it's undetected is simply not supported by the rules. A rule has to be made up here because there is a hole in the rules. If you want to make up a rule that says monsters with Aquatic Ambush always know whether their Sneak succeeded, that's your call.
Why Hide? Because Sneak doesn't work if you are observed.
Sneak wrote:
At the end of your movement, the GM rolls your Stealth check in secret and compares the result to the Perception DC of each creature you were hidden from or undetected by at the start of your movement.
If you don't Hide or otherwise become hidden before Sneaking, you won't become undetected.
I do think cooldowns should have been mentioned in the Duration rules. Perhaps something like:
"If an ability says you can't use it again for a certain number of rounds, don't decrease that duration at the start of your next turn after using that ability. This is because the round in which you used the ability isn't a round in which you cannot use the ability."
Because those are the rules for the hidden condition. Once you are hidden, your square is known until you succeed at a Stealth check to go back to being undetected. Ergo, if somebody without See the Unseen successfully Seeks you as you are undetected, and you decide to Sneak and failed, they know which square you moved to. Invisibility and Disappearance does not change this.
In order to reach a worse stage of detection, the observer needs to actually be capable of sensing you. If no sense can detect you at all, you are undetected by default. You don't know where I am IRL. I'm undetected. I didn't have to Sneak to get that way.
Darksol wrote:
It doesn't matter if you do or not, the flat check is still the same (flat 11 since the goblin is hidden inside the bush), and targeting doesn't matter because being undetected doesn't exist in either case, as even an imprecise sense makes a creature automatically hidden. And no spell effect can overcome it (other than maybe Destroy Foliage).
The goblin is hidden? OK, but that goblin can't take the bush with them. And if the goblin leaves the bush, they're observed. And if the goblin Strikes, they're observed. And the bush can be set on fire. What point are you making? That bush is stronger than Disappearance because See the Unseen doesn't work against it? Is bush stronger than Invisibility?
No, it doesn't, because if it truly thwarted all senses, that would include sight; you know, the most common precise sense in the game, and the one required for See the Unseen to apply. It doesn't thwart sight, because if it did, then See the Unseen wouldn't be applicable, because your sense you are using to apply See the Unseen is being thwarted.
See the Unseen un-thwarts vision, letting you see invisible creatures as though they weren't invisible. That's the whole point.
Quote:
And really, if you want to be semantic, 4th rank Invis + Foil Senses trumps it, so it's much closer than you think.
Foil Senses applies when you Sneak. With Disappearance, you do not even need to Sneak.
Quote:
Legit, being in a bush or having a Blur spell is more efficient than Disappearance if you want to avoid detection or have an unconditional miss chance.
Neither of those things mutes you, and Blur doesn't even let you Hide. And even if See the Unseen reveals you while you're under Disappearance, you are still concealed.
Disappearance wouldn't be useless if See the Unseen worked against it. How many monsters have See the Unseen at those levels? 10% maybe? And even if they do, they still can't hear you Stride. If you walk behind a wall, you're gone. Other monsters will typically rely on special senses, which Disappearance thwarts. See the Unseen is not a sense. It's a revelation effect.
And counting as invisible is just like being invisible, just like counting as undead qualifies effects that target undead.
Yes, it would, because then it is literally no different than 4th rank invisibility besides instead lasting 10 minutes; at that point, Disappearance shouldn't exist as a spell, and it should just be a heightened entry in the original spell.
Again, Disappearance thwarts ALL senses. The target can't hear you, so audible things that would normally require a Stealth check or reveal you outright simply can't do that. 4th rank invisibility doesn't come close.
Disappearance wouldn't be useless if See the Unseen worked against it. How many monsters have See the Unseen at those levels?
Monsters use Disappearance, too. And See the Unseen, at the level you cast Disappearance, is cast by most casters for an 8 hour duration. So it'd make a level 8 spell mostly useless.
Breaking line of sight is all it takes to become undetected again since the PCs can't hear the monster move. And monsters get pretty high Speeds at those levels, too, so players might not even know where to Seek.
SuperBidi wrote:
SuperParkourio wrote:
And counting as invisible is just like being invisible, just like counting as undead qualifies effects that target undead.
No. Disappearance has 2 effects: Counting as Invisible is just one of them, the other one is being Undetected. So there's definitely a weird interaction that can lead to 2 interpretations. One being too bad to be true and the other being much more balanced, hence why the general consensus is on See the Unseen and other spells beating Invisibility not working on Disappearance.
Disappearance forces the enemy to waste actions Seeking you just to gain a 50% chance to be able to target you, and it only lasts until your turn, at which point you can do literally anything you want and no one will know what happened because they can't perceive it. See the Unseen working against it isn't too bad to be true. It's throwing the dog a bone.
The undetected condition being separate from the counting as invisible is an interesting argument, though. But what would be the point of writing a spell that lets you count as invisible only to give you an undetected condition that renders counting as invisible moot?
Disappearance wouldn't be useless if See the Unseen worked against it. How many monsters have See the Unseen at those levels? 10% maybe? And even if they do, they still can't hear you Stride. If you walk behind a wall, you're gone. Other monsters will typically rely on special senses, which Disappearance thwarts. See the Unseen is not a sense. It's a revelation effect.
And counting as invisible is just like being invisible, just like counting as undead qualifies effects that target undead.
Hydraulic Push is another effect that doesn't use the word "push" in the description. It says "knocked back". But it would be ridiculous to not count that as pushing.
There's also the Pull action added in Monster Core. It doesn't say "pull" anywhere in the description except as capitalized to refer to the action itself. The Pull action is literally just performing a MAP-less Reposition.
I can understand not being able to
use teleportation or dance choreography to yeet someone off a ledge, as those can be explained by inherent spell restrictions and common sense respectively. But pushing someone aside? Why would the presence of a cliff stop that from working? And why would it suddenly work if it was forward instead of aside?
I bring it up because it was the same argument being made for Live Wire; because it frontloads all of its damage, it's "too powerful" from a scaling standpoint because it's got higher burst. It's referenced because the overall damage takes two rounds to pull off, with added risks, all to have the same DPR as if you just cast it twice consecutively, the only difference being it was done with one spell slot instead of two, even though all of the damage occurs in a singular round. Sure, Live Wire doesn't have this two round build-up, but honestly, even ignoring that, damage comparisons show that IRT heightening currently still isn't the most powerful.
I'm not following the logic here. Are you saying that because IRT's two-round option exists, damage now is as good as damage later? That's just not true. Let's say you have two enemies who each deal the same damage to you per turn. If you only use Electric arc on each of them, you get hit 8 times, 4 from each enemy. If you only cast Live Wire on them, the first enemy goes down halfway through the battle and can't hit you anymore, so you only get hit 6 or maybe 7 times. As another example, imagine if ignition dealt an extra 4d4 damage on a crit instead of 1d4 persistent damage.
Darksol wrote:
It's potent, sure, but it doesn't break the game, and comes across its own issues later down the line, such as its range and effects being outpaced; the only possible outlier is its damage, and even that's not that much of an outlier to be a problem.
Not gonna argue with this. I still think the scaling on IRT is a bit too high, but not egregiously so. But Live Wire's scaling is enough to competely invalidate all other attack cantrips. What sounds more appealing? 6d4 fire damage or 5d4 slashing + 5d4 electricity damage?
Darksol wrote:
The same can be said for Live Wire; I don't think 2D4 per rank is overpowered since we have Electric Arc doing 4D4 plus 2D4 per rank in terms of raw damage. An outlier by comparison, sure, but I'd almost rather we boost attack-based cantrips to justify their "nothing-on-a-miss" mechanic, or just give them the same benefits as save-based cantrips, doing half damage on a miss, to justify their reduced damage.
Unless the game's rigorous balance was designed around a cantrip that didn't exist 5 years ago, boosting everything else to keep up with it is a bad idea. That would require reevaluating almost the entire game and leaving behind a lot of OGL content due to power creep.
And most attack cantrips already have features to offset having no damage on a miss. Gouging Claw does persistent even on a regular hit. Telekinetic Projectile has a lot of options for what type of physical damage to deal. Ignition provides both melee and ranged options. Needle Darts can exploit metal weaknesses.
Darksol wrote:
Really, the biggest benefit behind Live Wire is that it still does half damage on a miss, the same as other save-based spells, as an attack cantrip, while being able to make comparable raw damage to Electric Arc (which, in my opinion, is overtuned). If it still did nothing on a miss, its damage would be perfectly justified IMO, since still doing damage on a miss is quite valuable, as most enemies can very easily succeed on saves.
Doing damage on a miss is the least offensive thing about Live Wire. If it's heightened entry were changed to Heightened (+2), the damage on a miss would be fine. It can be Live Wire's niche.
I asked in an older thread here if giving doomed 1 to a dying 3 creature with regen would kill it. The first response I got was "No. I don't negotiate with devils."
IRT has innate issues with it being a 2 round spell (because reducing it to a 2-action or 3-action spell literally makes its damage beyond garbage, and its range/effects suffer as a result as well), so it doing more damage on average than spells of its equivalent rank by requiring 2 rounds (even heightened) means it outright loses on action economy alone; that's why it doesn't matter if it does the same or even higher damage than spells of its equivalent rank. It takes two full rounds, and it requires the enemies to just sit there and be willing to take it, and for you to not be downed or disrupted in the process. It's very easy to lose the spell and do nothing with it as a result of tactics. Really, if you cast a different spell of equivalent rank followed up by a cantrip, you're probably going to more reliably land those spells, and you are doing similar or higher damage, all while saving actions. Really, the 2 round spells doing bonkers damage is the only saving grace for those spell types; they're otherwise literally trap options.
It's the two-action damage that was considered in the analysis. It's that damage that is good enough to compete with spells of higher ranks. It is not garbage damage.
Darksol wrote:
They do, because Paizo believes that a single target spell doing 6D6 at rank 3 is the same power equivalent as an AoE spell doing 6D6 at rank 3. In short, it's a flat projected damage value for spells and effects of those ranks. As you posit, at-best, single target effects impose debuffs/conditions, and very rarely (if at all) do more damage. Look at 4th level, Vision of Death does 8D6 with Frightened on a save, whereas a Fireball heightened to that value does 8D6 in an area, and if extrapolated IRT, it does 24D4 over the course of 2 rounds (so 12D4 per round). The average damage for both of these effects is 28. (30 for IRT, so it averages 2 more DPR with its added stipulations and action costs; wow, so gamebreaking, Paizo better nerf it!)
You know the initial damage for IRT is getting heightened, too, right? You don't need to spend extra actions to get IRT's damage to compete with spells of much higher rank. It's just that powerful.
And the point I was making about Condensed Fireball was to illustrate the power of live wire compared to electric arc. All of live wire's damage is against a single target, so that damage is inherently more valuable because that target is reaching 0 HP faster. The total damage may be slightly lower, but each individual enemy will die faster.
Are you talking about the half of a miss or the scaling twice as fast? Because I was talking about the scaling twice as fast. There's no way that's not a typo.
Additionally, sometimes rarity is used to demonstrate options that aren't overpowered but still cause headaches for the GM. Why engage with a murder mystery if you can just ask the corpse who did it? Or better yet, just bring him back to life and ask him. Or you can just ask God who did it.
But it is never used to communicate that an option is overpowered for its level. PF2E doesn't have such options (at least not on purpose; I hope they fix live wire).
I think OP is talking about this part of Game Conventions in PC chapter 8.
Duplicate Effects wrote:
When you're affected by the same thing multiple times, only one instance applies, using the higher level or rank of the effects, or the newer effect if the two are equal. For example, if you were using mystic armor and then cast it again, you'd still benefit from only one casting of that spell. Casting a spell again on the same target might get you a better duration or effect if it were cast at a higher rank the second time, but otherwise doing so gives you no advantage.
So I don't think Resist Energy would stack. Even if you pick a different option, you are still casting the same spell again on the target so only the higher rank - or failing that, the more recent - casting would apply.
Bizarre is certainly how I would describe the entire implementation of the fascinated condition, and unfortunately the way it works means that the more enemies you have, the less functional it becomes.
Which is bad news for any enemy relying on fascinated, since they'll usually be facing parties of 3 or more.
The Angoyang can inflict fascinated with Slow Blink. If the Angoyang attacks the target, they can make another save at the start of their turn. Fascinated ends if a creature uses hostile actions against the target or its allies.
Some creature families have a set of rules that can be used to turn other creatures into members of that family. This usually entails increasing level by 1 and increasing most of the check and DC modifiers by 1.
What's confusing me is the increases and decreases to Hit Points. The werecreature is straightforward enough. The creature gets a massive amount of HP, and the explicit reason for this is to offset the silver weakness. Likewise, the vampire has its HP lowered by a massive amount, and this is explicitly to offset its new fast healing and nonsilver physical resistance.
Then I look at the ghoul adjustments and I see that HP does not increase at all. And the divine warden gets the same HP as an elite adjustment. And I don't understand the reasoning behind either decision. The divine warden's abilities don't look much weaker than the ghoul's. Is the ghoul's stench (or paralysis for legacy ghoul) really so powerful that the HP couldn't be increased? Does it have something to do with the immunities and becoming undead?
And the ghost creation rules say "Do not modify the ghost's Hit Points due to its new level." Huh? Was I supposed to be doing that for the ghoul?
Also, I remember that the elite adjustment increases the creature's level by 2 when used on a level -1 creature. Do similar precautions need to be taken when using a -1 monster to create a ghoul? Would such a ghoul be level 1 instead of 0?
Also, given that the entry is written in a Weapons chapter, not a Spells chapter, the argument of the paragraph also applying to spells is a non-sequitur.
What are you talking about? It's in the Playing the Game chapter.
That looks like a wording collision. Two concepts using the same word.
Unaffected by the spell at all.
and
Unaffected by the spells listed effects.
You don't make a save against the spell if you are unaffected by the spell at all.
If you make a save against the spell, then you have been affected by the spell even if the result of your save is to be unaffected by the spell's listed effects.
If there are two definitions of unaffected to consider, why are you using the one that contradicts the text instead of the one that doesn't?
The use of the word "another" is only a contradiction if having to make a saving throw at all counts as being affected. And since the most common result of critical successes on saving throws is "the target is unaffected," that is clearly untrue.
When I posted the OP, I was thinking of turning the weapon into a second clan dagger so I could use the crit spec granted by Dwarven Weapon Familiarity. But it turns out the clan dagger isn't a finesse weapon, so it doesn't work with my build.
Success If you’re trying to stabilize, the creature loses the dying condition (but remains unconscious). If you’re trying to stop bleeding, the creature attempts a flat check to end the bleeding.
PC wrote:
Success If you're trying to stabilize, the target loses the dying condition (but remains unconscious). If you're trying to stop bleeding, the target benefits from an assisted recovery with the lowered DC for particularly appropriate help.
In any case, the Huge creature in my example is two sizes larger than both me and the enemy, so any cover granted would be standard cover, not lesser cover.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, if I fire the lightning bolt at a 45 degree angle (such as southeast as shown in the Area diagram in the area effect rules), then for any Medium creature inside the lightning bolt area, the line calculating cover is essentially equivalent to the line that determines what squares are included in the area. Whether you draw from my center to the enemy's center or from the southeast corner of my space to the enemy's center, it's the same line.
So I'm trying to wrap my head around why grazing the corner of a square is sufficient for determining if an obstacle provides cover against the lightning bolt, but not for determining what is getting zapped with the lightning bolt. The Huge creature is providing cover against the lightning bolt without being affected by the lightning bolt.
The troll option is even worse than that. The summoner is alive at zero HP and can't gain more HP because the eidolon is dead. And no one can resurrect the eidolon because it's on another plane, and the only person who can summon it is unconscious.
