Wolfswift's page

So, my friends and I are getting ready to start into our first foray into Pathfinder Second Edition playing Abomination Vaults. (No spoilers for that please) Our friend who's GMing has some experience with 2e and advised us to have a healer, but uhh... besides Cleric's Divine Font, I didn't see much in the way of dedicated healing, I also didn't feel like being the healer. I picked Bard, it has Soothe, s'okay for healing... figured someone else could handle main healing... everyone else picked Fighter, Rogue and Witch...

Our Witch is primal, so Heal spell is good. But I'm concerned if we run out of spell slots. I got Battle Medicine, but it's just once per person per day... Treat Wounds should help out of combat, but I'm concerned if we need more healing in combat... I was considering the Medic atchetype, but it only grants one more use of Battle Medicine and more medicine options... I'm most strongly considering Blessed One because it could grant up to 3 Lay on Hands uses per combat, but I'm also considering Herbalist or Alchemist Multiclass for bonus free elixirs per day.

What do you all think would be the best archetype to supplement healing?

So my friends and I are getting ready to start a second edition game and I wanted my Awakened Animal character to have been a former character's familiar who'd been holding a chaege of a spell when her spellcaster died, since they always gained intellect as the spellcaster leveled up and there was no information on what happens to a familiar if the spellcaster dies. But my GM says familiars don't gain intelligence at all anymore and so I was hoping to have her be from before the Laws of the world changed, but it is seeming to me that there was no major event in the Lore that explains how everything changed? Am I missing something?

The spellcaster in question was also a wizard/cleric/mystic theurge, which also wouldn't just translate over... I'm considering if nothing major lore-wise seems to have happened, she's instead from some kind of alternate universe or something.

I'm upset with the remaster… they had a perfectly reasonable, viable spellcasting system… and they broke it! Spells which were previously verbal no longer seem to officially require any actual words or even sounds now, unless they actually have the auditory trait, (which most don't) they just need the ability to concentrate…

Spells that previously required somatic, material, or focus components now just have the manipulate tag, which just seems to require you have applicable limbs and maybe gesticulate a little… so all the various flavor methods various classes had to forgo non-costly material components are out the window…

(noncostly) Material components and focus components seem to just be gone, in it’s place there is mention of spells sometimes need a locus or loci, which seems to be related to a location, the only spell thqt seems to need one is Interplaner Teleport which uses a “planar key” as the locus… costly material components are now just costs and they don't officially seem to need a free hand to retrieve, so presumably they're just consumed now…

The silence spell specifically stops all spellcasting now, unless the spell has the subtle tag evidently… Before, binding and gagging a spellcaster would usually stop basically all spellcasting… not now… The only non-magical, non-lethal means of subduing spellcasters now seems to be a blindfold to stop line of sight/effect, except they can prolly cast some personal things still and free themselves… so… blind them permanently I guess, but even then, paralyze or maim all limbs and render them basically braindead or somehow torture them constantly to render them incapable of concentrating. It makes capturing enemy spellcasters peacefully near impossible and it makes being captured as a spellcaster absolutely terrifying unless the enemies have no idea how broken spellcasting now is.

Am I just missing something, or can all spells basically just be silent and (mostly) still now?

Hey all, I'm looking to play an awakened animal in an my first ever upcoming Pathfinder 2e game and I was wondering what all effects would be neat to be treated as an animal for? I searched up Animal Growth remembering it was always a Greater enlarge spell, but couldn't find it. Not sure what effects the Awakened Mind ability is actually useful for.

I like the overall flavor of it, but without context on what it can be used for, I'm just left with being able to talk to one kind of animal only... a bit underwhelming then. So I am hoping the community can give me some ideas for what being treated as an animal for effects is good for.

So I'm looking at playing a stealthy master of disguise Arcane Trickster character in an upcoming Pathfinder 1e game and with the Rich Parents trait I'm getting Sleeves of Many Garments to augment my disguises. Now I know they are illusion and can't mimic tactile benefits like pretending to be a Swarmsuit and actually conferring the benefits of that is right out, but as the +2 stealth of a Shinobi Shozoku is largely visual, does anyone think that's reasonable?

My GM is on the fence about it. I mentioned I could even augment the illusory Shozoku color and pattern to match the terrain and be extra camouflaged, better than the original. So it seems entirely plausible it could confer a +2 circumstance bonus to stealth, right? My actual clothes underneath is a Monk's Outfit, which I'm just saying are comfy silken pajamas, but they should be just as quiet, and my armor is a Haramaki, which meets the Shozoku's no base AC higher than +1 to function as well.

I just need to know, if you were GM and a player asked you thus, how would you rule it and why?

Myself & another player were making our characters for an upcoming Tyrant's Grasp campaign with a couple other friends & we were talking about being tribal folk, or at least raised in a tribal setting, as my character is going to be barbarian-like & savage (it's a Harbinger from path of war) and his is going to be a shaman. We had been thinking we might be raised amongst the orc tribes having been kidnapped from Rosler's Coffin around the age of 6 and barely remembering out parents. We'd take the Reclaimer campaign traits. DM hand waived it, but in trying to better define it, I keep stumbling into minor spoilers. I'm becoming concerned if the orc tribes might play a vital role in the story and it might not be feasible if we knew them too well... But of course I can't confirm this without spoiling the plot for myself too much, so I'm at a loss.

Half of me is thinking maybe we could've been kidnapped to be used as slaves by the orcs, but saved by Shoanti tribesmen and raised by them instead, before returning home when we came of age about 18. But... That kinda feels like a cop out, but I don't know what works best for the story without getting too spoiled.

So I'm playing a Mystic in an upcoming game and a few things have been asked with little to no answer. So I thought I'd pose my questions here and see what people think.

1. If I'm using a healing maneuver from Silver Crane or Radiant Dawn, if I can negate the damage with a counter, can I still slap myself or someone else and initiate the healing maneuver even out of combat?

2. Is hitting yourself actually an attack? Is that a thing you can do? Does it require an attack roll? Can you even miss?

3. If I were to utilize one of the discipline stance feats that let me expend readied maneuvers, like say Veiled Moon Shunt, it lets me teleport an opponent 30ft away, even up, after hitting them with a maneuver, presuming I expend a readied maneuver to use it. Now for Mystics, their readied maneuvers are divided into granted and withheld maneuvers, but both sorts are readied, can I burn a withheld maneuver to essentially cut down the turns required before I can ready all maneuvers again?

It feels like the answer to this is yes, but that somehow feels too strong with the Mystic's mechanic for resetting maneuvers.

4. If I added a readied maneuver via a feat, would it be added to my granted maneuvers or withheld maneuvers?

5. So, on archetypes, Knight-Chandler's Illumination ability is a bit confusing, they get Illumination instead of Animus, but then they also get Tap Animus as a bonus feat? Isn't that exactly the same as the Animus class feature just with a weak sauce starting pool? Like it can still be used for all the same things and all, right? It's not more limited than that is it?

6. I read somewhere that Aurora Soul's Defensive Aura had errata somewhere that made it not work with light armor as well, is that right? Because it seemed to me they were wrong.

7. Gunsmoke Mystic is supposedly from the Path of War: Expanded book, but I can't find it inside there anywhere, nor in the Mystic specific book. Is it homebrew, errata or like actually from a blurb somewhere or something?

So a friend of mine GMed for the first time last night and didn't know how to calculate the exp for traps. He set the DCs moderately low thinking that would make them only decent exp, but he made them instant death traps. Now the other players are saying its so much exp because AoE instant death traps have to be based off the sphere of annihilation spell and it's minimum CR is 10, we're shooting up to 3 or 4 easily because of this. But he seems unhappy with that... he said it wasn't supposed to be spell-like, it was supposed to be mechanical, high tech lasers and like falling into an arc furnace or something. I'm just wondering if there is a way to salvage his mistake, he's quit GMing in the past over such mistakes and I don't want him to give it up again now.

I've never really GMed before, and was preparing to start Rise of the Runelords with some friends. I did technically try to run this once years ago with a couple of other friends I thought it'd be easier for me to start with a preset campaign like Rise of the Runelords, so I bought the book. But I kind of broke down when they wanted to ask Ameiko if she was native born or if she immigrated and follow up with how was life in a foreign culture and so forth. I looked all around frantically and could not find an answer to this and was not sure if it was important or if I could fluff it and wasn't really sure how to answer even if I did fluff it and ultimately I gave up GMing back then.

But recently my new group seemed more chill and less into asking a million hard to answer questions and I thought I might could try again. Thus far my group consists of a Kitsune Wizard(Spellslinger), a Gnomish Tiefling Alchemist(Mind Chemist), a Dhampir Gunslinger(Mysterious Stranger), and a Human Vigilante(Magical Child), there is a potential 5th person who might join, no idea what they'll play, anyhow, been running into a few problems.

1. Spellslinger and Gunslinger want to know what kind of guns are available in Golarion, but as far as I can tell they are only mentioned much in Alkenstar, I suppose there they'd be "Guns Everywhere" but I'm not fully sure what guns are like outside there as they keep their gun technology a closely guarded secret, I've tentatively told them "Emerging Guns" but am not fully sure. How common should guns be in Golarion?

2. The Gunslinger's player insists that Pistol is a family of firearms and any pistol type gun is acceptable to start with and threatened to quit if he can't start with a Double-Barreled Pistol. I looked into it and it seemed to me they were only refering to the gun named "Pistol" exactly, but he argued and argued and eventually I noticed the Blunderbuss they can start with is worth a higher value even and the double-barreled pistol has a higher misfire chance and is otherwise mostly like a double weapon, it can fire twice, but takes -4 on each shot if they're both fired in the same round, so it seemed mostly balanced, but is that alright?

3. The party has no Trapfinding, I told the Alchemist he might consider taking Trap Breaker instead of Mind Chemist but he's dead set on Mind Chemist not only for the Cognatogens, but also for the Perfect Recall that replaces Poison Use at level 2, which is what makes it incompatible with Trap Breaker, the Trapfinding from Trap Breaker replaces Poison Use and Poison Resistance +2. No one else has any method of obtaining Trapfinding, so unless that potential 5th person makes a Rogue or something I'm worried the group might be missing a crucial role, but I'm not sure how nessessary it is in Rise of the Runelords, can a party survive without it?

4. I'm struggling to pool together information and study as much NPC and Sandpoint lore as I can, but I'm really worried I might not be able to answer any question a player might have, are there any good resources for this sort of thing?

5. I'm worried I might not have everything I need for GMing, I have a GM Screen, the Rise of the Runelords book, I'm trying to print all the important rules for reference as well, a dry erase board for keeping track of time, date and initiative or other information, loads of dice, pencils, I have some miniatures for players and NPCs and I'm planning to buy a Bestiary Box for the various size stands and printing off extra monster cut outs on card stock to stand in them as nessessary. I can't afford to use miniatures for everything and I figure it's good to have something different for the enemies so players don't try to wail on NPCs by mistake. I also plan on trying to blow up the maps in the books and get them printed with a 1" scale soon. But I constantly feel underprepared and nervous, am I forgetting anything important?

6. Also, I'm concerned if the Wizard and the Alchemist(With Mind Chemist's Perfect Recall ability) both focus on knowledge skills so much and step on each other's toes about who's the knowledge expert, similiar case with the Vigilante and the Gunslinger, they're both specializing in charisma skills heavily, I'm afraid if they might argue over who's the proper face of the party. I want to give everyone a chance to shine but am afraid of these double ups that might cause one or the other of them to shine a lot more than the other. I don't want anyone to feel left out.

I'm just really anxious and want everything to be great. I have so little experience GMing and I thought asking these things here could really help. Thank you for any advice you may have.

If a medium wonderous item was aquired by a tiny adventurer, it would shrink to 1/4 it's size to fit them, right? So would it's weight also decrease to 1/4? What about a Huge character, would it quadruple in weight? Do magic items resize and just become more or less dense?

For that matter, if a Bag of Holding was shrunk to tiny size, would items put inside while it was medium still fit out magically? Would mundane items coming out also be resized for a tiny character? Would the tiny character need to put the bag down so it could return to normal size to retrieve items? Would it return to normal size if set down?

So in an upcoming game I'm looking to play a Tiny race and possibly even smaller, my issue comes with realizing that while size bonus makes you hard to hit, it somehow makes you easier to grapple? How does that make sense, like a Tiny pixie flying around is hard to hit but easy to grab? In 3.5 grappling and other combat maneuvers required a melee touch attack to initiate contact before calculating what you roll vs the opponent to succeed or fail. So smaller creatures were still hard to initiate contact with, but once grabbed we're easy to hold onto and crush. Now in Pathfinder it seems like if you're fighting tiny and Smaller enemies grappling is easier to initiate and hold, but Why? Am I missing something?

So I previously played a healer Witch, I liked healing hex being usable once per person per day, but that campaign ended prematurely. I decided to pick up the character again, but remix her, I decided a Shaman of the Life Spirit would make a better healer, with channel energy and healing boosts. But I've been considering swapping to Oracle for some of the Life Revalations, I considered multiclassing, but many of the shaman hexes and oracle revalations depend on the shaman or oracle level...

So I'm looking all over for a feat or archetype or magic item or something that grants Shaman some Oracle Revalations or maybe grants Oracle some Shaman Hexes? I just wanna make the greatest healer/buffer support.

So for a while now I've been making magic items, often adding new effects to existing magic items, the DM has okayed it all, following the rule of adding a new ability to an existing magic item costs 1.5x the price for the new effect.

But it was getting a bit hard to remember, I was going to go ahead and catalog the effects on my items when I remembered, some of the effects are of different caster levels, I mostly made them at low CL at first to make the Spellcraft DCs easier to achieve, but since then my spellcraft has gone through the roof, due in no small part to magic items boosting it.

But were a dispel effect to hit one of my magic items with multiple effects, how might that work? Would each effect on the item save using it's CL and the magic item may have some effects continue and some stop? Would the item only use the highest CL on it for it's save? Have I been doing this all wrong and all effects on the same item should always have had synchronized CLs? If I put a new effect on with a higher CL, does it overwrite the lower CL effects and synchronize them all with the highest.

Another question, would such a magic item with multiple different effects also thereby have multiple magic auras? I was looking back at cataloging effects and noticed aura listings for effects.

So I'm in a campaign where our party is staying in a large house together, but they are all rather hostile toward each other, but we are forced to work together and unable to kill each other, my character is trying to urge them to work together better and grow together as a party, but they keep on being jerks to each other. I'm the only good and only non chaotic one.(I'm NG, the rest are 3 CN and one CE(He openly says he'll murder every enemy we encounter, even if we need to interrogate them, what a jerk)) So far their hostilities haven't pointed at me, and I know they can't try to kill me,(I am their only healer even if they did want to) but apparently stealing stuff is okay. I am currently a level 2 Witch, intending to make magic items with Craft Wonderous Items next level, I have so far rolled the best magic items consistantly, and I don't want my stuff stolen.

I got Detect Secret Doors and searched the house for a secret room to call my own, DM rolled, but said there wasn't one, good to know regardless, no secret passages people can sneak in through. So I searched around if there was a cellar and the DM rolled and said there was a cellar door in the garden outside. I asked about it, it has an iron door and a good lock, and inside it has some good space for a magic workshop, and it has only one door to secure, so I replaced the lock with an amazing lock and got a scroll of Arcane Lock and cast it on the door, so it has a Disable Device DC of 50 now and a break DC of 38, that feels fairly secure. I also went ahead and cast Mask Dweomer on it to hide it's magic aura so people detecting magic don't take it as a challenge,(or at higher levels, just dispel my Arcane Lock and get in much easier, they won't just dispel it if they never know it's there) I'm recasting that every other day for now, but looking for a more permanent solution.

I also went ahead and against my better judgement had the party's roguish sort(the type likely to steal from me) to help me conceal the entrance because DM said it'd be a disguise check, I tried to argue it could be like a Craft(painting) check to camoflage it(I have 5 CHA and 20 INT) but he said it'd be disguise, so I got some help. I think I'm pretty well protected against my party, but if we're raided and they have a big party blasting away at the door, I would be cornered, so I'm trying to figure out if I can make a secret passageway out, just in case. I mean, I guess I could hire some kind of construction crew to carve out a passage, but that'd be pretty obvious, I was looking for a spell for it.

I was looking at spells I can get as a witch later and saw Sentry Skull and figured that'd be cool,(I know it's evil, but a little evil spell just once shouldn't make me evil right away, and I still intend to help the sick and the wounded and such, much more good) being woken up automatically if someone manages to open the door or get in or w/e. I do wonder if the skull would have a base perception based on the creature it came from that then got boosted by +5, or if it only has a d20+5 ever. I also wondered if the skull would then be rotting and stink since it has to be no more than 24 hours since the creature's death, and if then I could just cast Decompose Corpse on it and then it wouldn't be rotting since it was already a clean skull. So yeah, I'm trying to set up a secure bunker where I can work in peace and sleep and keep my things and not worry about the rest of the party or other intruders stealing or wrecking my stuff. Any other wards I could use would be good to know about, preferably on the Witch spell list, but I can probly get scrolls if they aren't,(like I did with Arcane Lock) those preferably being more permanent effects, I don't want to have to buy scrolls all the time.

What is the big difference between drawing a weapon as part of a regular move over retrieving an item similiarly? I know it doesn't say anywhere that you can, but I don't get why. Draw a dagger off your belt as part of a move, but not your wand loaded with an attack spell from a similiar location? And I mean, presuming the item was in easy reach like on a bandolier or strapped to your belt just like a weapon would be, why is it different? I get it if you have to rummage through your bag for it, but not if it's on a bandolier or on your belt like a weapon would be, so why can't we retrieve an item located similiarly to our weapons as part of a regular move?

So in Craft Wonderous Item it says

"Note that all items have prerequisites in their descriptions. These prerequisites must be met for the item to be created. Most of the time, they take the form of spells that must be known by the item's creator (although access through another magic item or spellcaster is allowed). The DC to create a magic item increases by 5 for each prerequisite the caster does not meet. The only exception to this is the requisite item creation feat, which is mandatory."

But then there are items like Gloves of Elvenkind which says "creator must be an elf" and items like the Corset of Dire Witchcraft says "creator must be a witch" and the Pages of Spell Knowledge say "creator must be able to cast the spell contained in the page"

So my question is, all these "musts", are they also exceptions to the +5 to the DC to waive them or can they be waived with a +5 as well? Or for that matter, if my tiefling is making an Elvenkind item, can I just get an elf to touch it at some point and provide that requirement? Or what if they aided me in making it? (more than just a mere touch I mean) Same with other such requirements, if they are actual "musts"(or even if they aren't) can these be met through others like access to spells through another caster can? For that matter, would a polymorph spell to turn me into an elf help make Elvenkind items?