beowulf99's page

Player Core, p297, the example given under "Heightened Spontaneous Spells" makes it very clear you can't use higher ranked slots for lower ranked spells:

If you’re a spontaneous spellcaster, you must know a spell at the specific rank that you want to cast it in order to heighten it. You can add a spell to your spell repertoire at more than a single rank so that you have more options when casting it. For example, if you added fireball to your repertoire as a 3rd-rank spell and again as a 5th-rank spell, you could cast it as a 3rd-rank or a 5th-rank spell; however, you couldn’t cast it as a 4th-rank spell.

My bold.

See RD's quoted rule above. While you are correct in that you can't freely Heighten a spell you don't know at a higher rank, you absolutely can cast a 1st rank spell with a 10th rank slot.

It will just be a 1st rank spell. If instead you knew the spell at a 10th rank, then casting it with that slot will produce the effects of a 10th rank version of that spell.

Are you asking if the Fire Aura Junction, which causes enemies to gain Weakness to Fire while in your aura, stacks with the Impulse Junction, which increases your die size?

If so, then yes. Why would they not?

In PF2E Paizo decided to lean into the concept of Failing Forward with success effects on spells and some abilities that have effects on a failure.

In PF2RE they have apparently decided that Succeeding Backward should also be a thing.

I'll probably allow my players to set a DC and only mess with their "success" on a failure at my table.

As Impulse Junctions do not have a standard duration, I assume they are in effect for the entire duration of the Impulse they are modifying, unless otherwise noted.

Earth for example specifies that you only gain the bonus AC until the start of your next turn, even if the triggering impulse would still be in effect.

Since the fire junction does not provide a duration, I think that it is fair to conclude that it's effects last until the end of the impulse, which in the case of Ignite the Sun is when you fail to Sustain it. If that was not meant to be the case, then it would read similarly to Earth and have a duration specified.

We have been down this road before you and I SB. And it appears that we are still at an impasse on the subject.

But to summarize the linked post, the question was could a grappling creature ignore Mirror Image due to having a physical hand on an opponent while Mirror Image is in effect.

Your position on the subject is that in this circumstance Touch would be a precise sense, and you additionally would allow a character to close their eyes to make them essentially immune to visual effects, like Mirror Image while benefitting from having a Precise sense of your grappled opponent.

My position on the subject is that touch being a precise sense is not a base line assumption of the system, and requires the GM to fully decide how relying on it in combat works. Touch is un-labeled where senses are concerned by the CRB and, in my opinion, ends up being relegated to the only category of senses that is used as a catch-all for non-specific senses, Vague Senses.

If touch is a vague sense, then you gain little benefit for using it as your primary sense to detect a creature.

At best, a vague sense can be used to detect the presence of an unnoticed creature, making it undetected. Even then, the vague sense isn’t sufficient to make the creature hidden or observed.

At best a creature you have grappled, while you are deprived of all other senses, should be undetected. Saying otherwise is, in my opinion, a house rule, and should be looked at carefully to ensure that it doesn't have any unintended consequences when applied to other situations.

In the OP's situation, with a blinded fighter, the fighter still has their sense of hearing as an imprecise sense, so would treat their grappled opponent as hidden instead, barring any other ability in play that can mess with that detection.

I mean, the CRB kinda answers this imo.

Sometimes a spell has an area, which can be a burst, cone, emanation, or line. The method of measuring these areas can be found on page 456. If the spell originates from your position, the spell has only an area; if you can cause the spell’s area to appear farther away from you, the spell has both a range and an area.

Since the spell has both a range and an area, it is reasonable to assume that you can have it project from any square within it's range. Could be nice for shooting around a corner or something I suppose.

And that feels far more in line with a 6th level spell than a standard 15' cone.

What I think Baarogue is trying to say is that nothing about Channel Elements indicates that you don't have to fulfill the prerequisites of an impulse to use said impulse as a part of Channel Elements. Also note that Channel Elements doesn't force you to use an impulse, it states that you "can".

You tap into your kinetic gate to make elements flow around you. Your kinetic aura activates, and as a part of this action, you can use a 1-action Elemental Blast or a 1-action stance impulse.

Being that Channel doesn't state anything to the effect of, "You do not need to meet the prerequisites of this impulse," it stands to reason that you would still need to meet them.

No free hand, no impulse requiring a free hand.

These should just be Archetypes.

I mean, good enough for Cavalier and Vigilante, good enough for Samurai and Ninja. Samurai always was just a reskinned Cavalier after all. Ninja was basically a Rogue with some specialty Ki powers.

Full disclosure, I didn't read the entire thread, so apologies if anyone else brought this up but...

You follow a code of conduct, beginning with tenets shared by all champions of an alignment (such as good), and continuing with tenets of your cause. Deities often add additional strictures (for instance, Torag’s champions can’t show mercy to enemies of their people, making it almost impossible for them to follow the redeemer cause). Only rules for good champions appear in this book. Tenets are listed in order of importance, starting with the most important. If a situation places two tenets in conflict, you aren’t in a no-win situation; instead, follow the more important tenet. For instance, as a paladin, if an evil king asked you if you’re hiding refugees so he could execute them, you could lie to him, since the tenet against lying is less important than preventing harm to innocents. Trying to subvert your code by creating a situation that forces a higher tenet to override a lower tenet (for example, promising not to respect authorities and then, to keep your word, disrespecting authorities) is a violation of the champion code.

I understand that the OP is referencing Edicts and Anathema specifically and not the baseline Tenets of the class, but I think the logic still holds, even for Saranrae.

She may not like it a whole lot, but reality is reality. Not every decision made by a character is going to be black or white. There is a whole lot of gray out there. If Saranrae de-Championed every character who uttered an untruth immediately after they spoke it, then there would be a pretty large cottage industry of Spellcasters who specialize in Atonement. Because if there weren't, there would be no Champions of Saranrae left.

I'd say blacksmithing and/or woodworking would work for the bulk of snares, minus edge cases. I'd lean more towards Woodworking personally to reinforce the "woodsman" image of snares, but the flavor is up to you.

Identify Alchemy Exploration Activity

It's not the easiest to find, but it is there.

I will say that the advent of virtual table tops has largely made remembering actions a non-issue for a sizeable portion of the ttrpg market. Probably not the majority by any stretch, unless we go back to the bad times of 2020, but a large enough number that it bears consideration.

I would be interested to see a TTRPG specifically designed with VTT's in mind, and what sorts of things that system would do differently taking automation and automated record keeping into account.

Or I guess I could just go play a CRPG. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I contend they are not. They do not have the Thrown trait.

Ah. Here it is. I finally figured out where I had seen this precedent being set.

Doubling Rings wrote:

The rings also replicate property runes from the weapon in the gold-ringed hand, so long as the weapon in the iron-ringed hand meets all the prerequisites for a given rune

So with the general requirements of runes

Quote:

Runes must be etched onto permanent items

I don't know how much more clear the rules need to be.

Problem is, Thrower's Bandolier does not contain that sentence. While I agree that Doubling Rings and Thrower's Bandolier are alike, they are not exactly alike. So we have to use their individual wording to evaluate them.

For example, Blazon's of Shared Power share Doubling Rings wording on prerequisites. However, Gunner's Bandolier does Not share that language. This is likely due to the fact that you can only place runes for Ranged Weapons on them, so any weapon placed in the Bandolier would already meet such prerequisites.

In other words, Doubling Rings having that rider does not mean that Thrower's Bandolier must have it either.

Big Spicy However. This leads us to probably the best argument against this working: Bombs are Not Thrown Weapons, so should not be able to be placed in the Bandolier in the first place.

Since it can be etched with runes as if it were a Thrown Weapon, like the Gunner's Bandolier can only be etched with Ranged Weapon Runes, then there is no need for the Prerequisite language.

Bombs not being Thrown Weapons, mean that they aren't able to be placed in the Bandolier in the first place, and even if the gm allowed it, they should not benefit from the magical effect of the Bandolier in any case, similar to non-ranged weapons that happen to be placed in a Gunner's Bandolier.

Thoughts?

beowulf99 wrote:

It is a buff to unarmored characters. Just like Attack potency or Devastating attacks is a buff to weapon dabblers and truly unarmed characters.

I don't think that's quite an equivalent comparison though. It saves money for weapon dabblers, and lets you carry more weapons, but none of those weapons will actually be stronger than they could have been otherwise.

For the unarmored character it's a pure numbers buff that eventually makes them better than anyone else in the game.

Also probably worth pointing out that being able to carry more weapons can benefit anyone who would have had a weapon anyways (and even characters who normally wouldn't), whereas unarmored AC only improves a specific subset of characters at a specific level range.

I mean it's fine if you want to run it that way at your tables, but the comparison isn't great regardless.

I suppose I see what you are getting at, given they would have no cap on their Dex. I had not thought of that tbh.

I still don't have an issue with it though. At worst I would impose a universal max dex of 5. I still would not require players to purchase gear to take advantage of the ABP bonuses however. Especially given how they are worded.

If Simone the Monk wants to run around buck naked, then by Shelyn she should have that right.

Yeah, I would simply allow alchemist mutagens and mage armor to function as they would have normally.

The goal of ABP isn't to screw over a class normally reliant on items, it's to put the power into the characters instead of their items but also prevent things from stacking in ways they couldn't under the normal rules.

As long as your not ending up with bonuses higher than what you could normally get under the normal rules, I'd say it's fine.

This is how I handle it. And given that ABP is an optional rule anyway, I don't find it particularly troublesome to tweak it. I find ABP is great for low magic games, where Alchemists should be in their element. Making them weirdly worse instead is just not a great feeling.

I'm not sure what chafted means, but it sounds painful! ;)

Ah yes, Chafted. Equal parts chafed and shafted. For when you feel wronged, AND irritated.

If you successfully counteract a magic item, the item becomes a mundane item of its type for 10 minutes.

I see no reason why you would need to check against each rune. Just a single check against the weapons level, which is determined by the highest level rune present.

Edit: To clarify, magical weapons are single items, even though they are composed of multiple parts. A Firearm with multiple augmentations and runes and every other bit or bob you can think of adding to it is a single item when it comes to Dispel Magic, or really most effects that target items.

The Rules Answer: There is no current way that I am aware of to get rid of shield block for a Fighter without GM fiat.

And I don't think there needs to be one honestly. People tend to have a diverse range of skills. It is fairly unrealistic for someone to ONLY be good at, or have applicable or special skills in, one topic even if they make a conscious effort to do so.

graystone wrote:

And my point would be that snares in fact DO NOT have separate rules for activation: there is NO activation line, meaning it activates when used and in this case it's when crafted:

Hold up there. 'No activation line' doesn't mean 'activated when crafted'. That certainly isn't how items in general work.

And while it doesn't have an 'activation' line, it does have rules for 'triggering'. Which are a separate step from 'crafting'.

So while you don't like the comparison to Talismans because it weakens your argument, I think it is a valid one.

Talisman steps: craft talisman, attach talisman, activate talisman.
Ammunition: craft ammunition, load ammunition, fire ammunition.

Snare: craft snare, trigger snare. according to the rules
Snare: craft snare components, set up snare at location, trigger snare. according to what is implied by some of the found snare loot in some books

-----

So, I'm curious. What is the balance reason for not allowing snares to be picked back up?

You have mentioned the daily free snares from certain class features. I would agree that those shouldn't be re-usable. Just like how Quick Alchemy creates a non-permanent version of a consumable that can't be used for more than the round that it is created in, and Advanced Alchemy also creates a non-permanent version of a consumable that can't be used on future days - these quick snares are a non-permanent version of a consumable. Once used, they become non-usable if you try to pick them back up.

Is there something else balance-wise?

Snares don't need to be activated. They just work. Not every thing that happens has to be activated to happen, especially when it comes to reactive effects like snares or traps.

As to the cost vs. balance argument, I will play devil's advocate. Snares would be hilariously better than any other consumable if you could pick them up, even if only speaking of untriggered snares. Think about it. You decide to use a scroll, it doesn't matter what effect that scroll has, it is spent. You decide to quaff a potion, it's drained even if the effect fails or has no meaningful impact.

But you decide to use a snare, you deploy it. It doesn't have an effect. But unlike every other type of consumable, you can just, "pop" it back into your pocket. Instantly Snares go from maybe not triggering to ALWAYS triggering. Because if it doesn't trigger, you'll just pick it back up right?

graystone wrote:

SuperBidi wrote:

But if it hasn't been triggered, the whole "you can't salvage anything" seems completely illogical.

A lot of the game doesn't follow strict logic instead following balance and playability.

I see the rules arguments and you have a point. It is still unclear if disabled snares count as destroyed.

I don't think it makes sense from a balance and playability basis either. I am going to be allowing the player who crafted the snares to be able to deactivate their snares and recover them providing they haven't been triggered. Snares are difficult enough to use as is and I don't want them to be irrelevant.

Which is really the main point. Are you seeing snares used by appropriate characters in your games at all? If not and it is because players don't think they work, then you should probably reevaluate your position.

Ravingdork made this thread to discuss what he saw as a legitimate, supported by the rules method for retrieving snares. I don't personally believe that his method is supported by the rules, and I have done what I can to explain why.

That doesn't mean I don't think there should be a way to retrieve snares not locked behind a feat or spell. I think there should. I think Snares should have been redesigned to be more permanent items that a Ranger chooses to carry around with them, sort of like a non-scaling/mystical version of the Thaumaturge's implements. But this is not the place to discuss that just like it is not the place to recommend house rule solutions, even if they are better than the rules as printed in my opinion.

The rules in this case just don't support the retrieval of a Snare in my opinion. They actively prevent it by my reading. Which is very different from many of the, "expect table variation" issues that we tend to see crop up here on the forums.

Except not really. When they do have the same level, it about 20% maximum. But most often they don't have the same level: snares are even-levelled and alchemy and especially scrolls are mostly odd-levelled. When you take that in account (also rarity matters) prices are very much in line. Maybe with a small discount.

They still tend to be cheaper overall than most on level consumables. The only consumables that tend to be even cheaper are Magical Ammunition, and there the margin tends to be pretty thin.

I only meant to imply that Snares are in no way particularly expensive where consumables are concerned, and definitely not by a margin that will break the bank. Not that they are singularly the cheapest consumable or a particularly cheap category.

Decent snares cost tens of thousands of gold--in a game where you cap out at about 112,000 or so at level 20.

If you can't recover unused snares, then they're pretty much useless. Who the heck would spend their entire fortune in the mere HOPE of getting a cool ability to trigger maybe ten times in their whole adventuring career?

Snares simply don't work as a mechanic if you assume they're expended the moment they touch the ground.

Snares are cheaper at any given level than an on level scroll.

Snares are cheaper at just about every level than an on level bomb, elixir or some poisons.

Snares actually feel like a pretty good deal given they take a few extra hoops to use.

Imo the bulk of snares a player is likely to set up are going to be Snare Specialist/other free snares in exactly the same way as the bulk of bombs you are likely to see be thrown are going to be incredible alchemy versions, and not store bought.

The discussion is long and I haven't read it entirely so I don't know if someone raised the reverse-engineering rule: "If you have an item, you can try to reverse-engineer its formula. This uses the Craft activity and takes the same amount of time as creating the item from a formula would. You must first disassemble the item. After the base downtime, you attempt a Crafting check against the same DC it would take to Craft the item. If you succeed, you Craft the formula at its full Price, and you can keep working to reduce the Price as normal. If you fail, you’re left with raw materials and no formula. If you critically fail, you also waste 10% of the raw materials you’d normally be able to salvage."

You obviously don't care about the formula and can choose to just fail the check automatically but you can get the raw materials back.
Even if it's not an obvious ruling, I think it's an appropriate one when you want to dismantle a Snare to reuse it.

The item’s disassembled parts are worth half its Price in raw materials and can’t be reassembled unless you successfully reverse-engineer the formula or acquire the formula another way.

I could see allowing this, though I don't know if it would be altogether that useful. You only get half resources back, minus another 10% on a crit fail, so would have to spend downtime recrafting the snare to craft it back to 100% without additional costs. Or you would have to reverse engineer 2 snares to recraft 1, so there is a sharp diminishing return involved without hefty downtime or gold costs for on level snares. Does make doing so with cheap low level snares pretty viable at higher levels since they wouldn't cost that much additional work/gp to get back to 100%.

A few other considerations. Can a character who can craft a snare in 3 or less actions reverse engineer a snare in that same number of actions? How about a character who can only do so with special daily versions of a snare, are they allowed to reverse engineer "regular" snares at their higher speed (with their daily snares), or are they stuck with 1 minute/snare?

Snip for Brevity.

RD, you just described Snares backwards.

Crafting Snares tells you that you build a snare within a single 5 foot square. Not in your workshop or some other place. Then it goes on to tell you that, once built, the snare Cannot be moved without destroying it. Destroy, not disassemble or recover or any other similar word.

This is how Snare Specialist and similar abilities tend to describe their special daily snares,

Each day during your daily preparations, you can prepare four snares from your formula book for quick deployment; if they normally take 1 minute to Craft, you can Craft them with 3 Interact actions. The number of snares increases to six if you have master proficiency in Crafting and eight if you have legendary proficiency in Crafting. Snares prepared in this way don't cost you any resources to Craft.

If either one of these two can possibly be described as having been prebuilt, it is the Snare Specialist daily snares, not standard snares. And even these note that they are still crafted. Not placed or thrown down. Crafted in the 5 foot square where they will remain barring one of the two ways I am aware of "legally" moving a snare, both of which are much more limited in utility than simply being able to pick up and move a snare.

Pretty much this. I don't believe that the developers intended you to be able to reuse a limited use ability more times per day than it grants.

And I don't believe that Paizo intended for you to be able to reuse snares in their current form. That is likely the price you pay for them scaling so far in damage instead of staying limited in that regard. I would have preferred if snares would have been more about inflicting debuffs than doing damage, even more so than they are now. That would probably free up enough "power budget" to allow the reuse of snares, not to mention dropping their price to a more reasonable amount.

I disagree that it makes Recycled Cogwheel a dead feat as that only applies to temporary one-and-done snares granted by feats.

You know that makes it worse right?

Since Recycled Cogwheel only allows you to pick up your daily "free" snares, allowing a player to pick up any snare they like makes that specialized ability to pick up your specialized snares worthless.

Since you could just pick them up anyway without it, right? Or are you saying that you should be able to pick up any non-snare specialist/snare genius/ what have you snare, but for some reason are unable to pick up said special snares?

So what purpose does the feat serve then in your opinion, assuming that your interpretation of snare portability is true?

I would also like to note that the existence of snares in loot does not mean that said snare happens to be in a complete form. In fact, we know that it cannot be since snares must be crafted in place. Instead you are likely finding all of the components for said snare, not the complete snare. Think of it like finding all of the parts of a longsword as loot. You wouldn't argue that you use it as a longsword right? Not until it is properly assembled.

I haven't really played in too many pf2e adventure paths, as my group tends to prefer home brew campaigns, but to quote Gortle slightly up thread, "and they keep all the components needed to quickly construct a spike snare handy here."

All of the components and notably not a complete Spike Snare.

Ventnor wrote:

The Recycled Cogwheel feat from the Trapsmith Archetype is needed if you want to deconstruct and later redeploy a snare that you have already set up.

"You're able to scavenge the cogwheels from your daily quick-deploy snares that use gears." <- That looks like something specifically different.

Traps that haven't deployed? Yeah, we re-use if disabled. Why not?

This feels like a case of "keep reading".

You're able to scavenge the cogwheels from your daily quick-deploy snares that use gears. This allows you to deconstruct a snare that didn't trigger in order to set the snare up somewhere else. Doing so takes the same number of actions as setting the snare did. When you do, you recover the snare and can deploy it in another location.

The whole purpose of the feat is to allow you to do something not normally allowed by the rules: Collecting an un-triggered snare to re deploy it elsewhere. This feat in essence does what OP wants to do, which leads me to believe that doing so without this feat is not possible.

Since if it was possible to disable, pack up and redeploy a snare as a baseline, what purpose does this feat even serve?

beowulf99 wrote:

Otherwise instead of noting multiple times that placed snares (no matter who placed said snare) are destroyed or cannot be moved or sold in their complete form, we would have rules telling us what sort of value we get out of a disabled or triggered snare.

Multiple times? I've only ever noted it in a single location. Where are all the others?

Snares ends with,"Unlike other items, found snares cannot be collected or sold in their complete form. Snares have the snare trait."

The first paragraph of Crafting Snares ends with, "Once constructed, it can’t be moved without destroying (and often triggering) the snare."

Triggering Snares just states that, "Unless stated otherwise in a snare’s description, when a Small or larger creature enters a snare’s square, the snare’s effect occurs and then the snare is destroyed."

There is not a single reference to anything being possible to do with a Snare other than destroying it aside from disable device which just renders the snare inert. It does not make them mobile.

Id even argue that the only ways that disable device even interacts with snares is to either trip it on a crit fail, essentially destroy it on a success, and disable it with the option to reset it on a crit.

Imo, even with your own snares, you would have to crit pass a disable device to temporarily disable it without destroying it. And even then you still can't move it, you can just reset it later if you want, in place.

beowulf99 wrote:

After all, nothing would stop any snare crafter from just pre-crafting all of their snares and carrying them around.

This strikes me as little more than semantics. Nothing is stopping that anyways.

Interpretation 1: I buy or craft the raw materials for my snares. Then assemble them in the field with a modified Craft action, taking 1 minute apiece.

Interpretation 2: I buy or Craft ready-to-go snares. Then set them up in the field, taking 1 minute apiece.

Literally nothing has changed in how it is mechanically handled, only in how it is described.

The difference is that you can freely manipulate snare components while you are prohibited from freely manipulating a completed Snare.

To be honest, I wish snares were more flexible and treated like real items. Especially where some clearly reusable "irl" ones are concerned like Alarm or Biting snares. Instead, it is best to think of them as abilities like Castilliano recommends.

So when your character sets a snare, they aren't slapping down a pre-built version (unless you are a snare specialist or equivalent who specifically CAN do that), they are literally cobbling it together in place, making the components useless on their own in the process.

Why are they made useless? Because the rules tell us they are. Otherwise instead of noting multiple times that placed snares (no matter who placed said snare) are destroyed or cannot be moved or sold in their complete form, we would have rules telling us what sort of value we get out of a disabled or triggered snare. We do not have that.

No one is arguing that. you can reuse a snare that has been triggered by an enemy, beowulf99.

Triggering Snares disagrees with you pretty hard RD.

Unless stated otherwise in a snare’s description, when a Small or larger creature enters a snare’s square, the snare’s effect occurs and then the snare is destroyed.

You cannot reuse any snare unless it specifically states that you can.

Edit: Oops, reread what Ravingdork posted and realized the period was not intentional. I had read his comment as if he was saying that you could reuse such a snare. My bad.

To actually reply to RD, I will say that even if you disable one of your own snares and the GM graciously rules that this counts as a Critical Success on your disable device check, meaning you can re-enable the snare, you would not be able to move the snare without destroying it, making whatever you were trying to get out of it worthless due to the following line of Crafting Snares.

Once constructed, it can’t be moved without destroying (and often triggering) the snare.

That is as cut and dry as you can get.

Due to the odd and inconsistent language, some people interpret snares as being un-purchasable. I've been told that, rather than purchasing a ready-to-go snare (like a bear trap), you're actually purchasing the components and raw materials for the snare (such as wire, blades, and pressure plates), which you would then Craft in the field.

Snares are small annoyances and simple traps you can create using the Crafting skill if you have the Snare Crafting feat (page 266). Creating a snare requires a snare kit (page 291) and an amount of raw materials worth the amount listed in the snare’s Price entry. Unlike other items, found snares cannot be collected or sold in their complete form. Snares have the snare trait.

It is pretty clear that you don't purchase ready to go snares. You purchase all of the things you would need for that snare, and a snare crafting kit, then use those things to craft the snare. What does this stuff weigh? No idea. But we do know what it costs, the price of the snare.

I have a feeling that snares being automatically "destroyed" when being tripped or disabled is to stop players from obsessing over carrying around bits of trash scrounged up from triggered snares to resell or recraft into new snares. In other words, it is purely a balance convenience.

I mean, we all know that a Biting Snare is just a beartrap right? And beartraps tend to be pretty reusable. But in PF2 they are not. Saying otherwise is a pretty thin stretch imo.

We could fall down a rabbit hole of dozens of subordinate actions if every step that required an action to perform on its own created a subordinate action whenever performed as part of another action. Reloading a crossbow requires drawing a bolt, so the Interact action to reload must also require an Interact action to draw. For playability, a line must be drawn after which the lesser actions are absorbed into the overall action without a chain of subordinate actions. I believe that for Reload 0 the line is drawn before creating a subordinate Interact action.

I don't think there is a reason to draw any line. There are only a finite number of things your character can or will be doing at any one time. For reloading a crossbow, that means drawing and placing the bolt in the crossbow. For a bow that means drawing and knocking the arrow.

I don't see how one is more or less complicated than the other. In one case you draw and load without shooting. In the other you draw and knock then loose.

Trying to claim that there are so many, "dozens of subordinate actions" involved feels like blowing it way out of proportion.

beowulf99 wrote:

It is possible to use Perform in combat. Does that make it a combat action?

Yes, for some classes and feats, as far as I remember :-P

Ah. That is a check using Performance the skill for another purpose, not the "Perform" action.

Related, but different. Those abilities you mention, mostly bard stuff but also from archetypes like Gladiator, are not themselves a Perform action. They are a separate action or activity that happens to use a characters Performance skill, in the same way that Recall Knowledge using Crafting wouldn't be a Repair or Craft activity.

Edit: Clarity and linked relevant AoN pages.

I say we split the difference. Everyone gets cursed.

The enemy for striking it, and the player for holding it up in the first place, the party for not calling the magus on their shenanigans and the GM for letting this happen in the first place. And possibly the GM's cat for planning this in the first place. You would have no proof that the cat was involved, but you also cannot be sure that they weren't.

Oprah Winfrey this situation, and it will likely never be a problem.

There is currently no way for a player character to create any elemental, aside from summon spells which don't last long enough to create a spell circle.

If you wanted to do this, you would have to talk your GM into giving your party a custom ritual to create such an elemental, or some other means of gaining one as a companion.

As to what happens with Inhabit Vessel:

1: Inhabit is pretty clear that only the casters mind inhabits the vessel. It uses the casters mental scores for any checks, but retains everything else about itself as far as I can tell.

2: By my reading, the caster could not use their own spells while inhabiting the vessel. Mechanically this is because the "active" actor is the Vessel, and the only thing that inhabit vessel calls out as coming from the caster is their mental scores, not abilities, feats, or spells.
During their turn, the caster forgoes any actions to instead control the vessel. Think of it like using Dominate with a result of a failure. You get to determine the vessels actions, but those actions must be actions that the vessel could take itself.

I suppose it depends on how good the GM is at bluffing the player when presenting the incorrect information.

If the player actually can't tell the difference between the true information and the false, then I would probably allow the interaction to work - with Unmistakable Lore increasing critical failures to failures and then Dubious Knowledge gives both true and false information.

But for a GM that is bad at bluffing... Well, personally I think that the best solution would be to have Dubious Knowledge marked as Uncommon. The GM could also tweak the order that the feats are applied in - making Dubious Knowledge apply first - so a critical failure would cause Dubious Knowledge to give no information and Unmistakable Lore would upgrade the result to a regular failure, which removes the incorrect information from critical failure result.

But since critical failures don't happen all that often outside of trying checks that really shouldn't be tried, limiting Dubious Knowledge for GMs that have trouble with it would be better.

That's great and all, but Thaumaturges come with Dubious Knowledge built in. So unless the GM decides to replace it with a different feat, or just restrict it entirely from the class chassis. There are also backgrounds that grant dubious knowledge like the Street Preacher or Acadamy Dropout. Uncommon doesn't stop a character from gaining feats and abilities granted by such things unless the GM decides to flat ban it.

The best advice for running dubious knowledge, which for the record I don't like as a rule because bluffing is difficult to pull off convincingly on the fly for me personally, I can give is to prepare some general bluffs that can be used for different types of creatures.

So for undead you can pre-prepare a more general bluff to throw the party that sounds reasonable. Say they are looking at a Plague Zombie. You could include that they have weakness 10 to good instead of positive. It sounds plausible at first blush but is factually incorrect.

Generally the GM will know what the party will be fighting, so they can use that to pre-prepare their bluffs, especially for higher difficulty foes that the party has a higher chance of rolling that failure against.

On Topic, I did bring this combo up during the Thaumaturge playtest since it basically removed any chance of a Thurge being unable to use Find Flaws. I haven't watched Nonat1's video yet, but I skimmed the tldr reddit post and it seems that the check made for exploit weakness isn't specifically a Recall Knowledge, instead being a lore check, so neither dubious knowledge or Unmistakable lore would probably apply. I'll have to wait to read the exact wording to make a real decision on that.

I dunno. I have 180d6 (physical) for one specific game.

Also: Rolling apps.

Hmm. Imperial Guard player perhaps? There is a guy at my FLGS who carried a fanny pack of dice, and removed them as his guardsman were killed. Nobody ever wanted to call him on exactly how many dice were in that bag.

On Topic: I think 6-8 of pretty much any die size is about the most I will roll physically. Though all of my gaming for the last... forever... has been via Foundry, so no physical rolling anyway.

I say no. Just because you "missed" on the die, doesn't mean your weapon didn't strike your target. It means that you failed to deal damage.

Any time you would be trying to throw a "Strike" at yourself feels like a pretty important event that probably has stakes. Stakes that the CRB call out likely require a check of some kind to randomize. Now it is the GM's final decision on whether a check is needed in basically any situation, but the rule of thumb is; if there are stakes, there should be a check.

I could see an argument that a character is capable of inflicting harm on themselves automatically otherwise, by say impaling themselves on their weapon or taking their slow deliberate time to do so... but then those kinds of situations are not ones that I tend to include in my games. Really there are few reasons I can think of that even require you to decide to strike yourself. And none I can think of that are mechanically required by the game.

I'll say that my personal experience is that AoN and the PFSRD were my points of entry. When I have conversations in which I can evangelize (sadly, not yet particularly successfully) they're things that i can point people to as well.

Part of this is game store economics. One of the things that you must have to be a thriving FLGS is a place where people can gather together to actually play games. They come, they play games, they hang out, they feel a sense of community, and they know that them handing money to the store in one way or another is a necessary part of keeping the whole ecology of it alive, so they buy things. The things they buy... may or may not have anything in particular to do with the games they are playing, but there's a direct causal link. AoN is basically out there being a bunch of empty tables in a room. People will come, and they will play, and the person at the desk in the front lets them, regardless of who it is, or how much they've spent... but they all know that money is the thing that keeps it all alive, so... sure. I mean, Book of the Dead sounds cool, right? I suppose I have enough money built up in my "personal obligation to Paizo" budget to buy Book of the Dead... and all of the chunks in there that aren't in AoN help me feel that I'm getting something real for my money that I can read and enjoy.

Make no mistake. Providing the core of the crunch of the game for free is a key part of the business model. They want as many people walking in that door as they can get.

This is a big one for me as well. It is much easier to get your friends to play a TTRPG with you when you can easily point them at free resources that they can use to build a character and learn the rules.

I remember starting up my TTRPG experience having to pass around the one copy of the Core Rulebook that the GM happened to own at my FLGS. It makes everything a pain. Being able to easily hop onto AoN or just use Pathbuilder for that matter is WAY more convenient for getting new players into the hobby without hand holding them the entire time they want to read the rules.

And it makes using a VTT much easier for basically the same reasons, which is pretty important in todays world where game groups had to adapt to lockdown conditions. My group hasn't had a single full face to face session since the before times. Being able to drop AoN links into discord between sessions to talk about character builds and what have you is Real nice.

beowulf99 wrote:

The only way Death Grip works is if you treat the Doomed condition and the "Curse" itself as two different properties, with the Curse only being dependent on Doomed in the singular case of doomed being "reduced" to 0.

Well, yeah. This is literally what the text says, isn't it? There's a curse. The curse gives the target Doomed 1 and also does this other thing. If Doomed is reduced to zero, then the curse is broken entirely, and the other thing goes away. If the doomed is removed by some other means, then the curse is not broken, and the other thing does not go away. I mean, is there some part of the rules text that I'm missing that makes that not the correct interpretation?

A curse is an effect that places some long-term affliction on a creature. Curses are always magical and are typically the result of a spell or trap. Effects with this trait can be removed only by effects that specifically target curses.

Afflictions with this trait are manifestations of potent ill will. A curse either lasts a specified amount of time or can be removed only by certain actions a character must perform or conditions they must meet. A curse with stages follows the rules for afflictions. (Gamemastery Guide pg. 251)

The discussion essentially boils down to this: Does removing the Doomed Condition satisfy the condition set by Death Grip of reducing the characters Doomed value to 0?

I say it does, as not having a Doomed value at all is equal to having a Doomed value of 0 in my opinion.

I agree that the way it should work is that the curse continues on into death until removed by a Remove Curse or the subject is resurrected, triggering the birth of a new Unrisen. As written, I do not interpret it that way.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

Hmm.

Your touch grants a reprieve to a cursed creature. You attempt to counteract one curse afflicting the target. If the curse comes from a cursed item or other external source, a success indicates that the target creature can rid itself of the cursed item, but it doesn't remove the curse from the item.

Some effects try to counteract spells, afflictions, conditions, or other effects. Counteract checks compare the power of two forces and determine which defeats the other. Successfully counteracting an effect ends it unless noted otherwise.

So would Remove Curse prevent a person cursed with Death Grip from being raised into an Unrisen?

It doesn't reduce the doomed value to 0, it instead counteracts it which, "ends it unless noted otherwise."

I say it should since that makes sense. If that is true then the creature dying, thus becoming un-doomed, would also un-doom them, right? The only way Death Grip works is if you treat the Doomed condition and the "Curse" itself as two different properties, with the Curse only being dependent on Doomed in the singular case of doomed being "reduced" to 0.

I see how this is intended to work, but OP is right in that, in my opinion anyway, it can definitely be interpreted to just plain not work. Luckily, it's easy enough to figure out what is supposed to happen with context.

No, that is how the rules read (and how the rules tell us to read the rules). There is a meaningful difference between the verbs "reduce" and "remove" in this game. While reducing a condition value to zero has the same effect as removing a condition, the two are not identical for triggering other rules. It's the same difference as between counteracting an effect enfeebling a character and reducing the value of enfeebled on a character. One removes the condition, the other reduces it to zero.

Read the rules so that they do something, otherwise you are breaking "Rules as Written".

This doesn't make sense. The difference between ending a condition and reducing that condition to 0 are nil when the effect of reducing that condition to 0 is... ending that condition.

The curse ends automatically if the creature's doomed value is reduced to 0.

Spoken like a programmer. Devops?

The quick and dirty answer is that in reality there is no such thing as a strict environment in TTRPG's anyway. Well, setting aside PFS or other organized games anyway. Everything is up to GM interpretation at the end of the day.

If there happens to be something you dislike about the game, you can easily rollout or rollback whatever changes you'd like.

Also, Archives of Nethys sort of fits some of that criteria. It tends to be up to date with errata, at least in a reasonably timely fashion, and is much easier to keep up than physical print versions of the rules.

This is JUST a feeling right, but based on my limited PFS play I have a feeling that this feat would be useless with organized play because every session I've played really only EVER includes things that are relevant to the actual story due to the fact they have to be focused to keep the game session able to be run within a single session.

Most of the Investigator feats that mess with narrative are marked Restricted or have PFS specific notes for this reason. Red Herring probably isn't that way because it shouldn't really give you all that much information to be honest.

It helps an Investigator by cutting out unimportant stuff that a player may latch onto and think is super important. We've all been there right? Where you think this shiny golden statue in a ruin is important or something, so you spend 10 irl minutes trying to figure out what is so special about it just to have the GM inform you that it doesn't matter in the slightest.

Remember that Red Herring ONLY applies to things that an Investigator chooses to try to Pursue a Lead on. So in my earlier foot prints example, the Investigator latches onto the idea that animals have been in the area. They try to Pursue that as a lead, probably to get the bonus on a Nature check to determine what kind of prints those are. The GM then informs them that the animal tracks are inconsequential to the disappearance. The Investigator (character, not player) now knows that he can ignore those tracks in relation to the disappearances. That doesn't mean that there isn't a wild animal nearby, or that those tracks don't exist anymore. It just means that for his purposes, he can ignore those tracks.

Edit: If I wasn't clear enough, what this means is that 90% of the time, the only things Red Herring will apply to are things that the player Thinks may be important but the GM knows is not. Narrows the possibilities considerably.

I'd personally let the player tell me what they think of their Lead. Because as a GM, you have information the players don't have, you nearly always find a meaning to anything. But the player may find that your meaning is meaningless to them.

So, if they find tracks, just let them tell you where they think it leads. And if they are far away from the actual meaning of the tracks, you can just tell them they won't lead there, allowing them to choose to use Red Herring or not.
That way, you'll avoid cases where what you think is consequential is inconsequential to them.

There isn't really a "choose to use" in Red Herring though.

You have a keen sense for avoiding spurious lines of inquiry. When you Pursue a Lead, the GM tells you if the lead you chose is inconsequential. For example, if you found a splatter of gray mud on the wall, thought it was suspicious, and Pursued it as a Lead, the GM would tell you if there was no greater mystery related to it. When the GM tells you a lead is inconsequential, you can decline to Pursue the Lead, keeping any leads you were already pursuing. You still can't use Pursue a Lead again for 10 minutes, as normal.

The GM just informs you that such and such lead is or is not inconsequential. So by default, Red Herring assumes that whatever the GM sees as inconsequential is true.

This is good for the Investigator because, by default, you can only track two investigations at a time. If you had two topics being investigated, and found some juicy clue not directly tied to either of those, you would have to drop one to pursue the new lead. With Red Herring, the GM must tell you up front whether or not that lead is a good lead, saving time.

Imagine you as an investigator are investigating a bunch of disappearances in a town. You already have an open investigation into the widower who lives alone at the edge of town, and the gravedigger who has been making shady deals with the townsfolk. Your party finds the location of one of the disappearances. You note that there are animal tracks leading into and out of the area that look more fresh than the act itself, but in reality this is just a bit of detail the GM included to set the scene a bit better, and nothing more.

Without Red Herring, you would have to Pursue a Lead, drop one of your active investigations and pursue those tracks as their own investigation, probably wasting a bunch of time.

With Red Herring, the GM just tells you that those tracks are inconsequential to what you are trying to investigate. You wasted your Pursue a Lead for the next 10 minutes, but saved maybe hours of fruitless investigation into nothing.

The only real input that the Player has where Red Herring is concerned is telling the GM their suspicions about the clue. And it is possible that the clue IS important in some way but is technically inconsequential to what the Investigator is currently trying to do.

For a strike a critical success is defined as doubling all the damage you deal and we know that you double persistent damage on crits.

Sure. I don't see how that is relevant. The crux of the argument is not whether or not a character can deal Persistent Damage. It is whether or not the character counts as dealing the damage suffered from a Persistent Damage that they inflicted. A slight, but important, distinction.

I say the character inflicted Persistent Damage, the condition, but not necessarily the damage inflicted by that persistent damage.

In other words, Burn It! works because it alters the Persistent Damage condition that the goblin inflicts, and not the actual damage dealt by that condition.

I don't think the disintegration example is good because they deal the damage when it is applied rather when it damages them so the goblin would need to be alive for the effect to work.

I don't think I am catching your point here. Are you saying that Persistent Damage was meant to be applied to the Goblin in my example? Or that the disintegrate was inflicting it?

Or were you saying that if the Goblin dies, then the creature with Persistent Damage would take the standard amount of damage (1d6 in the examples case)?

I do not believe that any effect that modifies the damage of a characters attacks should effect persistent damage unless specified. I follow the, "the character is not dealing the damage, the condition is," philosophy there.

As to the Goblin's Burn It and similar abilities that do specify effecting persistent damage, I see them as modifying the "Condition" that the character places on the opponent.

Say a Goblin with an effect that inflicts Persistent Damage Fire (1d6) gains Burn It. In my opinion, they no longer deal PD Fire (1d6). They now deal PD Fire (1d6+1).

A thought experiment: A goblin with Burn It inflicts PD Fire (1d6) to a creature. They are then subjected to a Disintegrate and hit 0, turning them into a "was". In other words, they no longer exist. What fire damage would that creature they lit on fire take from then on? 1d6+1? Or just the standard 1d6?

I see it as a reinforcement of the idea that you no longer have any free hands. Basically, while it is detached, you no longer control the arm directly, instead using it as an extension of whatever it is holding.

Hence gaining reach but not being able to use the detached hand to grab tall stuff and/or manipulate things at a distance.

beowulf99 wrote:

Hmm. This is an interesting thought. I don't think "attuned" is very well defined, or at least I've never seen a limit to how many things an item can be attuned to.

I'm not sure what you mean. The Bandolier is pretty clear about how its attunement works.

Quote:

When you invest the gunner's bandolier, you can attune it to each of the 4 weapons holstered in it.

Oh, I get how Attunement works in regards to the bandolier, it's just that the term "Attunement" isn't really used in too many other rules, so we have a small number of examples to judge how this application of attunement should work. In other words attunement isn't a trait and doesn't have a system definition we can use to judge if an item can be attuned to multiple things at the same time. Nothing says no, but nothing says yes either. Leaving it gray.

beowulf99 wrote:

Snip for Brevity

That's the question. I note that the language for the Bandolier seems to support the idea that the actual runes, not just the effects or benefits of the runes, transfer to the activated weapon and are removed when another weapon is activated.

Quote:

You empower one of the attuned weapons in the bandolier, granting it the runes etched onto the gunner's bandolier and removing the runes from any previously drawn weapon.

The Rings also seem to actually refer to replicating the runes rather than just duplicating their effects.

Quote:

When you wield a melee weapon in the hand wearing the golden ring, the weapon’s fundamental runes are replicated onto any melee weapon you wield in the hand wearing the iron ring.

That's a little different from the language of the Blazons which reference the benefits of the runes rather than the runes themselves.

Quote:

As long as you're wielding both the primary weapon and the secondary weapon, the secondary weapon gains the benefit of the fundamental runes on the primary weapon.

Good catch on the subtle differences in wording there. By my estimation, the difference between the Blazon's and Rings could be chalked up to language drift, or different designers using different verbage. It could mean that there is a fundamental difference in how each of those items works, but it equally could not. I am undecided.

As far as too much power is concerned, consider that the action economy for doing this really wouldn't be great in combat. To switch a pair of weapons you'd have to put the current pair away (or drop them and maybe lose those Blazons), draw the new pair, and activate the primary weapon. It wouldn't let you quickly switch weapons like in the Matrix lobby shootout. It would mostly just give you several options at the start of combat - which is what the Bandolier is intended to do.

Yeah, I went through and tried to game out what you would have to do to make this work, and it's not pretty. Quick Draw doesn't help, since you have to activate the bandolier to grant a pistol the runes. So at best, starting with an activated pistol and it's blazoned twin drawn, you could:

(Assumptions: Gunslinger with 8 pistols, 4 blazons of shared power and 1 Gunner's Bandolier. You attune the primary pistol to the bandolier and wear the secondaries as normal. You have access to Paired Shots, which is not that important but feels thematic to me)

Turn 1: Paired Shots with Pair 1, drop them both, activate bandolier to draw Primary 2.

Turn 2: Draw Secondary 2, paired shots, drop both (can be done at any time really).

Turn 3: Activate bandolier to draw Primary 3. Quick Draw to strike with Secondary 3, Strike with primary 3. Drop both.

Turn 4: Repeat turn 3 for Pair 4.

So in 4 turns, you made 6 shots at max MAP, 2 at -5 map, and all of them have been with what I can only assume are your best, most expensive, runes. Compare to using Slide Pistols, where you have to interact between shots, or to leaning on Risky Reload to make an extra shot each turn with some other gun. The ability to use Quick Draw to fire a preloaded pistol just barely beats that option imo.

Now I'm wondering if there is a sort of "transitive property" for these rune-sharing items.

Imagine you had a pair of firearms with Blazons but no runes, and you attuned the primary firearm (but not the secondary) to the Bandolier. If you drew both firearms, what would happen?

The Bandolier's runes would obviously transfer from the Bandolier to the primary weapon, but would those runes then also duplicate onto the secondary through the Blazons? I don't see a rule that would override the normal functioning of the Blazons, but maybe I'm missing something.

If it does work then you could have up to four pairs of weapons all powered by a single set of runes. (Of course you would have to buy a set of Blazons for each pair, but 52 gp per set is pretty cheap compared to the cost of runes.)

Hmm. This is an interesting thought. I don't think "attuned" is very well defined, or at least I've never seen a limit to how many things an item can be attuned to.

The only quibble that I have with using Blazons with a Gunner's Bandolier is the following wording:

...the secondary weapon gains the benefit of the fundamental runes on the primary weapon.

So, do the Bandolier's runes count as being "on the primary weapon" where Blazons are concerned? Hard to say.

I probably wouldn't allow it personally, as it is basically a way of bypassing the limit of 4 weapons on the Bandolier. Anything that bypasses a restriction, without specifically saying that it bypasses that restriction anyway, is usually a no go for me. Unless it is hilariously overpriced or something similar.

But yes, it's a bit sad, because this means if a GM wouldn't give players this specific formula for this specific combination (or this specific item directly to reverse-engineer with a chance to lose it and still not get a formula) they can't make what they want at all. Even the feat Inventor won't help because it only allows to get common formulas and apart from cold iron and silver all other precious materials are at least uncommon (may be some new ones? don't know all of them).

I mean, if the GM isn't willing to make a formula available to a player, what would be stopping them from preventing that player from getting the formula, or the item itself, without their direct approval?

Even in more "serious" games, the GM and Party should work together to maximize everyone's fun, right? If a character wants to craft their own gear, the GM should recognize that and work with that player to make that happen. Otherwise, why allow crafting in the game at all?