.seth's page

im in agreement with myself.

it inherited the language from the 3.5 version which caused instant death or some damage, instead of some damage or less damage. most of the save or die spells are now save or be harmed spells because the design philosophy changed in regards to balance between melee and casters.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/slayLiving.htm
"You can slay any one living creature."

there also used to be a system shock rule that caused instant death, now its optional.
Massive Damage (Optional Rule)
If you ever sustain a single attack that deals an amount of damage equal to half your total hit points (minimum 50 points of damage) or more and it doesn't kill you outright, you must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If this saving throw fails, you die regardless of your current hit points. If you take half your total hit points or more in damage from multiple attacks, no one of which dealt more than half your total hit points (minimum 50), the massive damage rule does not apply.

1 level dip for the correct mystery then ring of revelation to get the one you wanted even though its higher level than you are qualified for. you can also take a 3rd party feat from kobold press.

strange revelations

You can learn a revelation from a mystery other than your own.

Prerequisites: Mystery class feature, Knowledge (religion) 5 ranks

Benefit: The next time you select a revelation or take the Extra Revelation feat (including if chosen at the same level you take Strange Revelation), you may select a revelation from another mystery instead of your own.

pallid crystal makes all cures and inflicts heal you whether you are living or undead, and lets you cast death knell, but you have to be a follower of a urgathoa. otherwise it just lets you use the cooking profession skill to season rotten corpses with spices that make it taste good to either living or dead palates.

notice it doesn't effect channeled energy or the effects of the energy plane, only cure and inflict spells and effects that mimic them.

spell specialization says specifically that you can take it multiple times. its odd that the wording on the greater version doesn't account for that. it should say something like "choose one of your specialized spells" or "can be taken multiple time, each applies to a different one of your specialized spells" if it means to only work on one of them. it should say "this works for all of your specialized spells" if it means to apply to them all. i agree this needs to be clarified with errata or a faq.

there are two kinds of rules sets, those that allow everything except those things which are forbidden by the rules, and those that disallow everything except those things for which permission is given by the rules. pathfinder is that second kind, so unless a rule specifically says you can do X, you can't do X.

since it doesn't specifically say that it works with all the different specialized spells, i think rules as intended is to pick just one it applies to like a fighter's weapon specialization. in a home game i would absolutely let you apply it to them all as a cool laid back guy not afraid of some power creep and mild exploits of rules as written, but i would not think you would get away with it in society games.

so the plane of negative energy is constantly radiating you with negative energy, has no light, no air, no ground,and no landmarks to navigate by across a literally infinite expanse of identical nothingness. you need the ability to see in the dark, know where to go, fly, breathe, and not take negative energy damage.

undead master archetype IS amazing. another good one is dhampir cruoromancer. it gets +1 caster level to necromancy spells per 4 levels and animates 3x caster level instead of x2. undead master lets you keep the item familiar option so you can pick up a necromancer's athame later, but with cruoromancer you'll have to burn feats on skill focus and eldritch heritage arcane to get it back if you want to rock one.

undead master is a must have feat. double the duration on command undead spell and +4 caster levels on animate undead are amazing.

you'll want deific obedience urgathoa for +1 caster level to necromancy from the obedience and +5 temporary hp for undead that pray at the altar. the first boon gives desecrate 2/day which is CRUCIAL for animate dead builds, but at 12th its fairly late. the cruoroomancer gets a watered down version at 10th but you might be better off picking up an early magic item like a void stick.

take spell specialization feat for +2 caster levels to a spell of your choice that updates for free every even level when you learn new spells.

pumping caster level for stronger animate dead spells, and later stronger create undead spells is never a bad plan.

dont you have multiple turns? cast one in front and one behind them, so they have to take damage no matter how they move. also dazing metamagic +3 spell level causes them to not be able to move or act in any turn that they get damaged by the spell.

also final embrace and kraken style feat chains.

well i would be refreshing the command an hour earlier each day so i could order them to fail the save against it while they were still under control, with plenty of time left to think of an alternate plan if that failed. there was some wording on what charmed or commanded intelligent creatures consider an act they would never do, and someone argued that something like a vampire would never let itself be controlled at all, never refrain from eating me, etc etc, so that every check ever got the bonus as if you were ordering a paladin to commit rape and murder.

can you command it to fail its next saving throw?

if instantaneous didn't properly describe the spell effects, and "thats how it acts" were the case, you would expect to see that in the spell description or the faq page, which we don't. you don't have to like it, but that is how it has worked since 3rd.

most gms keep track of material components, and even if you bypass the need for several thousand gold worth of black onyx gems with words of power, blood money, or some other shenanigans you are still going to need corpses. the normal assumption is that you fight a battle then animate the bodies afterwards, which is why people want a higher control pool and a lower single animate. if you are in a home game you can easily just go to any battleground or graveyard instead and get a reasonable sized pile of skeletons dug up. you can't really do that in a society game, and i think they remove all your minions between sessions even if you do.

so the problem really continues to be where are you getting hundreds and hundreds of hit dice of corpses.

the reason dm's actually hate undead armies isn't anything rules related, its all about time and effort. if your turn takes 30 minutes to adjudicate i would find ways to kill off your character or remove your minions just as fast as the next guy. the dms that are trying to read the rules as intended rather than as written to prevent the situation from happening in the first place can't really be faulted for that.

the evolution of animate dead through multiple editions can be found here.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Animate_dead

as we can see 3rd is when they allowed the "all from this cast, only lose from prior casts" language to slip in. the problems now are a holdover from then.

what i tend to do in my games is let the necromancers have their full HD from the single cast, but keep a few powerful monsters with multiple templates stacked on them instead of nearly infinite smaller monsters that just bog down the combat and won't even land their claw attacks anyway.

if you have trouble getting a single big monster to animate, try crafting a life size statue and using stone to flesh or possibly one of those polymorph anything to anything kind of spells.

yes, it has worked this way for several editions now. the wording of the spell is clearly broken and not working as intended, but that is exactly how it works as written.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/coreRulebook/magic.html#duration

"Instantaneous: The spell energy comes and goes the instant the spell is cast, though the consequences might be long-lasting."

once you cast a fireball at +5 caster levels, the damage is done. taking off your magical gear or retraining your feats doesn't bring your victims back any of their hp. to argue that taking off your magical gear makes the undead you already animated that "remain under your control indefinitely" suddenly go berserk means all burn victims would spontaneously be cured as well.

even if that were not the case, and the control numbers all dropped, it still wouldn't matter, because you would only lose the ones from prior castings. you keep all the ones from a single cast no matter how far over the control number they are, which is why i keep saying the one dose animate number is all that really matters.

the spell specifically says "If you exceed this number, all the newly created creatures fall under your control, and any excess undead from previous castings become uncontrolled."

incidentally, if it didn't work this way, ignoring the control pool entirely, no one could use magic device a scroll of animate dead without having the proper class casting levels.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/occult-adventures/occult-rules/magical-possession

"Supernatural abilities (with the exception of class abilities) are not considered mental abilities, as they generally rely upon a creature's physical form."

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/basics-ability-scores/glossary#TOC-Supernatural-Abi lities-Su-

"Supernatural Abilities (Su)

Supernatural abilities are magical attacks, defenses, and qualities. These abilities can be always active or they can require a specific action to utilize. The supernatural ability's description includes information on how it is used and its effects."

i am of the opinion that these are both automatic, because there is no daily usage noted in the monster description and do not require standard actions to turn on and off. if someone wants to show me where it says the mohrg chooses to activate those powers or not, i will reconsider.

otherwise yes you get the create spawn and paralysis.

pretty sure the contingency would work, although it isn't fool proof. dispel magic or mage's disjunction to end the contingent teleport or the magic jar, dimensional anchor to block the teleport, etc.

1) "Add +1/4 to the wizard's caster level when casting spells of the necromancy school." So, an 8th level dhampir wizard would cast necromancy spells like a 10th level wizard. yes, CAST not learn or prepare. (a) yes, animating 40hd at one time with desecrate.
(b) your control amount doesn't change. you dont care though because you get them all from one cast and only lose hd from previous castings. if you have 20hd from the first cast and cast it again to get 40hd more you lose all 20hd from the first cast and keep all 40hd from the second cast.

2) your control pool is only ever checked when you first cast the spell. if you pick up a + cl bonus from praying at an evil shrine or something that lasts 24 hours, you don't lose the bonus undead the next day all of a sudden.

3) you only need to boost your caster level for the single cast animate number, which most things do just fine. down lower i have a list of the things i abuse, but it is not comprehensive.

4. undead master is an amazing feat, people that don't like it can't read. +4 cl that doubles under desecrate is awesome. if you take spell perfection its even better, doubling again.

example
16th level cruoromancer
16 caster level +1 gifted adept trait +4 dhampir wizard fcb +1 varisan tatoo +4 undead master +2 spell specialization +1 ioun stone +1 deific obedience urgathoa +7 spell perfection +3 death wine +1 death knell
total 41 cl x3 hd because of commanding infusion x2 because of desecrate

so in one cast you create 246hd and they immediately fall under your control, losing all the undead you already had under your control from previous casts.

this is instead of the 16 x4 = 64 you would normally get with just desecrate. so we can see that focusing on animation with items, spells, and feats does make a significant difference. the real problem is finding a pile of corpses worth 246hd in one spot, ESPECIALLY in one of those lame society games.

you actually don't care how many you can control, and instead only care about how many you can animate at once. this is because you keep all the creatures created from a single cast and only lose the ones from previous castings.

from spellstrike
"At 2nd level, whenever a magus casts a spell with a range of “touch” from the magus spell list, he can deliver the spell through any weapon he is wielding as part of a melee attack."

it specifically says any weapon, makes no mention of choosing only one.

from the spellstrike faq
"For example, if you are an 8th-level magus (BAB +6/+1) and you cast chill touch, you have up to 8 uses of that spell touch attack. If you make two weapon attacks in a round, you can deliver two spell touch attacks per round (one for each successful weapon attack)."

so are you hoping to get the corpse moved to the material components line just to come at us with some eschew materials type of thing next? that would be hilarious imho.

is the spell school you care about necromancy? death whine and death knell are both spells that i use to boost the caster levels on my animate dead. you could probably get some favored class bonus, like dhampir curoromancer wizard does for +5 at 20th. i also didn't see anyone list bloatmage initiate.

I love the idea of an unsworn shaman that selects all of his hexes when he prepares spells for the day, but i don't even know how many "slots" i should get. The pfsrd archetype tables are so frequently wrong about the class abilities being traded i do not believe the table showing you lose every hex at every level.

if plane shift worked like teleport then wouldn't you have needed to scry his demiplane to avoid landing inside terrain obstacles?

And how many rounds is the target of a Rime Ray of Frost entangled?

Beckoning Chill (Su): When a creature takes cold damage while under this effect, it is entangled for 1 round. If the creature takes cold damage while already entangled by beckoning chill, the duration of the entangled condition increases by 1 round.

you don't even need the metamagic, you could throw a net or tanglefoot bag and still stack rounds with ray of frost indefinitely after that.

you just need greater grapple and rapid grapple to get the maintain checks to be reduced to move actions.

next time lie about what color it is. this is incredibly effective for certain hues of mold and slime.

ray of frost is a cantrip and deals damage. good for stacking rime.

when crafting each requirement you ignore is a minus 5 penalty on your craft check.

as it is now we are stuck applying the class levels or racial abilities onto the creatures as templates instead, and it is slightly more work that way. would pay to unlock the template dlc.

i think if your players want to be dragons, you should make them ALL dragons. maybe someone has done a council of wyrms campaign setting conversion?

i like a rime metamagic frostbite with the enforcer feat.

Even while you can't fly due to mitigating circumstances, you are probably aerodynamic or buoyant enough to fall with style. Terminal velocity is the highest velocity attainable by an object as it falls through air. It occurs once the sum of the drag force and buoyancy equals the downward force of gravity acting on the object. Since the net force on the object is zero, the object has zero acceleration.

you could dip white haired witch archetype. you get extended reach with a primary natural attack that automatically grabs and constricts without you being considered grappled. low level touch attack nasties from the witch spell list that automatically stack in as well.

the question shouldn't be whether or not an action is objectively evil, its whether your pcs can properly role play the reasoning for why it clearly isn't.

whole list of cursed items can be found here. http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advanced/magicItems/cursedItems.html

GIRDLE OF OPPOSITE GENDER, GRAVESOUL ARMOR, ROD OF ARSON, all sorts of hilarity just waiting for your creative trolling.

it seems like most people don't understand your question at all. they are talking flavor text mumbo jumbo when what you really want to know is "can i get extra powers?" the answer is YES WE CAN! you might want to take some ranks in religion and the deific obedience feat to qualify as "truly devout".

In this context, "priest" means any spellcaster who worships a deity and casts a summoning spell.

We keep it vague because that way it covers spellcasting classes we haven't invented yet, or classes from 3rd party publishers as well.

And yes, this DOES mean that if a wizard worships a deity and is truly devout in his faith, he should be able to access those alternate summon monster lists as appropriate for his deity. Whether or not said religious wizard qualifies for those alternative summons is left to that wizard's GM.

NOTE: I suspect that we're not 100% consistent on these entries for the alternative summon lists in the various deity articles... but the point is to allow spellcasting worshipers of a deity, regardless of their actual class, to be able to customize their summons to match their deity. And in sidebars, where word length is more important than running text, it's better to use shorter words like "priest" than things like "spellcasting worshipers of any class" or something like that.

from this thread http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2lv85&page=2?What-are-considered-priests-fo r-customized#77

they could wear a sock as a sweater.

you actually should double the amount of monsters, slap advanced template on everything, and max hp for everything, regardless of whether your players are min/maxers or not, because the official adventure paths are min/min/min/snooze.

lesser animate dead, but it can't create variants, and you only get one monster.

they should be getting the undead mastery feat that adds four caster levels to the amount they can animate and doubles the duration of command spells.

the monster subtypes each correspond to a knowledge skill that they can make checks to learn information about, like how many hd they have. or they could add one 25gp onyx at a time until the corpse gets up and starts dancing around?

he has an oath against fiends that doesn't care whether the monster pretends to have been redeemed or not. if you are so determined to tell a story about this paladin falling, maybe you should consult with that player about it first. you know, since its his character, and the game is about cooperative story telling, not having the dm dictate your character's motivations and actions to you.

i don't understand how society play is appealing to anyone when you can just as easily play online with the "correct" rules. errata to make feral combat training worthless? not in my games.

dhampir wizard favored class bonus, karma bead, ioun stone, death knell, death wine, deific obedience, altar of X (diety), mage's tatoo, bloatmage initiate, spell perfection (doubles effect of mage tatoo and bloatmage), dark magic affinity (teifling racial trait), gifted adept. my necromancer has 50 caster levels with animate dead using this sort of stuff.

sight isn't an extra-ordinary ability, it is an ordinary ability.

you said " Crazy is defined by chemical imbalances of the brain outside of a given range of societal norms. We can demonstrably see that mentally ill people's brains operate differently and have different chemicals at play. Thus they are "crazy"."

you don't have any idea what you are talking about. there is zero evidence for the failed chemical imbalance theory. it's pseudoscientific garbage designed to legitimize eugenics against "undesirables". no scientific test has ever measured the contents of a synapse of a living human, "crazy" or not because the gap between neurons is microscopic and inside your skull. the alleged benefits of psycoactive drugs similary can't be accurately measured because you have to rely on the self reporting of people you have already labeled as needing treatment for being mentally ill. often times they are locked up with a bunch of "crazy" people and pretending the treatment works is the only way to get out. it's certainly not demonstrable as you claim and it's not observable even by medical professionals. the diagnostic and statistic manual is what really defines "crazy" and the "disorders" it vaguely describes are designed to be all inclusive catch-alls. you are spreading offensive misinformation which has a negative impact on reality and you should be ashamed of yourself.

treat their Charisma score as 2 points higher for all sorcerer spells and class abilities. it doesn't say EXCEPT for x,y,z. it says ALL class abilities. spells per day is a class ability. it does in fact grant you those bonuses and lazarx is describing house rules not raw.

u want to know it's miles per hour? take the listed fly movement speed it gets per 6 seconds and multiply by ten to get its ft per minute, times 60 minutes per hour, divide by 5280 feet per mile.

the reason i play pathfinder instead of dungeons and dragons 4/5 is the srd. wizards doesn't want me to browse their material? fine then, i WON'T. their loss, your win paizo.

raw? no. you dont get desecrate bonus and no variants either. that is the price you pay for no material components and a lower level spell for earlier access.

i think a better clarification would be whether or not applying a fire effect word that deals 1d6 fire damage would allow you to create variant burning undead, and things of that nature. also important is whether or not these undead are under a different control pool than the animate dead spell. would a mystic theurge with experimental spellcaster feat gain the word of undeath on their arcane and divine class both from the single feat like they do metamagic feats? how does it interact with the feat undead mastery that gives four extra caster levels for the animate dead spell? the juju oracle mystery that gives 6hd per rather than 4? so far im thinking your theurge necromancer would have 4hd x cl on two classes from word of undeath, 4hd x cl+4 for your arcane animate, and 6hd x cl+4 from your juju animate.

animate dead let's you control all that you can create in one cast, no matter how many it is. the undead over the limit are only released from previous castings. so the feat +4 to animate dead caster level is worth 16 extra hd of undead when you cast with desecrate to get x4 cl hd instead of x2 from a single cast. the feat doesn't need to grant you control because animate dead already is. this makes the feat worth slightly less to juju oracles whose control pool is x6 and requires two castings to fill even with desecrate.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/d/dream

it seems like this spell allows your designated target to deliver a message of ANY length, to any sleeping target. neither of which gets a saving throw or the option to wake up. what if my message takes 2 weeks to read? can i essentially filibuster two target's minds in never ending comas until they die of starvation? there is no stipulation that the message only contain information known to the caster. if the message is "the entire history of the entire multiverse including all campaign settings and all editions" and it somehow does get delivered before the messenger or target die of dehydration, the messengee "remembers the message perfectly". can this be abused to gain knowledge skills or access information impossible for the caster to know? what if the message is the entire contents of a high level spell book? do they wake up with all spells prepared?