Hi,
I've got a wizard in my group, who is an illusion specialist (a pain in itself already, but balanced by having conjuration/necromancy as barred schools) and has access to permanency. While he already had cast detect magic on himself and had made it permanent, he now is going to do the same for see invisibility.
Since Shackled City is a complex and challenging campaign, I do not want to discourage min-maxing as long as it isn't too exaggerated, but I do have some worries about how to handle this ability. I also don't want to punish the wizard player for making very sensible choices.
It is bad enough, that since the first permanency the group attitude has changed from "do we need to cast that detect magic now or can it wait" to "(to DM) Is this sword magical ?" - "You don't know" - "I ask the wizard, of course", essentially assuming that the whole group now sees magic as if they were the wizard (and completely neglecting in-group role-playing opportunities, but that's their style). Now I fear the same is about to happen to invisible opponents. Whenever a battle starts, I can either openly state that invisible foes are present or pass a note to the wizard player, which in itself would tell every player that something fishy is going on. The only obvious workaround would be to pass a note every combat, which would lead to the player receiving the note immediately reading it aloud.
Does anyone see a good way out of this ? How have other DMs handled this sort of situation in their groups ?
How is upcoming battle with the assassins and later with Ike going to change regarding the invisibility seeing wizard. Does it matter ? Or is Ike's flame strike a surprise nonetheless and after that he's visible to everyone anyway ?
Thanks for any input.
Cheers,
Nib
Well, there's a few things that you should be aware of. First, true seeing, see invisibility and similar spells are divination spells. This means that they are vulnerable to nondetection and similar counter spells. Second, even if the wizard has true seeing or something to that effect, he still has to Spot an invisible assassin who's also hiding.
Many of your enemies will know of your ability to see invisibility and change tactics to compensate. Such as using deeper darkness and hiding in the darkness (it has occurred to our group that the use of the term Shadowy Illumination allows for hide attempts even when being observed)
or line-of-site blocking spells like Solid Fog.
mmm, Acid fog... and a quickened Evards black tentacles on the same location.
and since he's forbidden conjuring (and therefore glitterdust), its not like his ability to tell his friends about the invisible character is helping them very much.
That's a pretty creative solution to many of the problems that can arise in any game. I'd say, applaud your player's inventiveness and move on. At higher levels the party's reputation will proceeds them everywhere and after a few encounters adversaries will learn of their new abilities and begin to react accordingly.
Personally, I'd just roll with it and adjust as logic dictates. Be sure to enforce the amount of talking they can do in combat about sharing information. I've had to do this in my current game because only the ranger has ranks in Knowledge (dungeoneering) so he sometimes thinks of lore about the opponents as they appear and can't always tell that to the other easily. Recently I had them stuck underwater and unable to speak to each other at all, that was fun, especially when the ranger got swallowed by the dire shark...
All told, I don't think it will need to derail your campaign as long as you account for the fact that some enemies may change their tactics if they are aware of the party's abilities and, as has been stated, there are plenty of counters to see invisible. The assassins are pretty well informed if I remeber correctly so they may come at the party a little differently.
I'm preparing Shackled City for my next game, poised to start in a couple weeks, and my wife will be playing a Drow (gestalt) rogue/sorcerer. She saw this post and has been giggling maniacally for a few minutes now.
Doesn't Dispel Magic work against Permanency? I am reading that the caster must be higher level then when you cast the spell, so I think you can.
Surely the players will encounter someone who can dispel it at some point? They surely won't want to pay the XP cost every time to recast it.
Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Depending on how you rule in-combat conversation, you might consider not putting the invisible foes on the map until the turn of the PC who can see them. After all, if he can't act, he can't communicate that information in any way, so maybe it's best not to give it yet. (If you let PCs speak before their first turn, this isn't appropriate. We don't, though.)
Invisibility is a pain if your players don't firewall well. I have been lucky in always having groups that firewalled rigorously, and would do things like casting fireballs onto invisible PCs if their characters wouldn't know where their allies were (easy to do in a complex fight!)
Our SCAP party had a ring of See Invisible by this point, so it's not at all unusual that a PC should be able to do it. We didn't find it to spoil the game, but we found SCAP absurdly hard and every edge the PCs could get helped.
Mary
Thanks for the input !
Surely I don't want to punish them for good thinking, but for starters, I hadn't accounted for the fact that dispel magic can indeed dispel permanency and part of the problem comes from the mentality of the majority of the players to "Roll-play" instead of "Role-play".
Still, the assassin encounter is now bound to become a bit simpler as the application of permanency on see invisibility was made during the journey back from Occipitus and even scrying upon them couldn't reveal that easily.
But I don't regret that. They made very good decisions (be it luck or good thinking, doesn't matter) and they shall be rewarded.
The party also decided to enter town in disguise and with a seeming spell on top. There is no way, any assassin group could be perfectly prepared for that. I even feared, I couldn't find reasons to attack them at all, but they contacted nearly every associate they had in town and actively spread rumors about the return of the group to the region (not to Cauldron, but still). Some of those meetings took place in public places (Drunken Morkoth), it is well conceivable (at least to me ;) that someone has overheard their talking and sold the information to the Last Laugh which reports to Orbius, who then immediately briefs Ike. However, since there are no more than 36 hours between their arrival and the scheduled attempt, I'm bound to make this battle doable.
Thanks again. I'll let you know how it progresses.
Cheers,
Nib
Glad any input we gave helped you work it out. Let us know what happens.
Hi,
the ambush went pretty much as expected.
The assassins were able to seriously frighten them, although I allowed them listen checks to NOT hear anything (due to the silence) and they realized something was wrong, so a regular initiative order started combat. The half-orc went to work on the cleric (He could have killed the wizard pretty much with guarantee but he had a rough time earlier due to bad rolls so I stuck with the cleric as the prime target. Two rounds of attacks with scorching rays and greatword brought him down to 5 hp (from above 100), which should have been easy prey for Tulrak, but then he needed a three for the finishing blow - and rolled a 1. Avoiding the fumble, he got his second attack, which needed a nine to hit. Needless to day, he rolled a 7. From there, the tide turned. Zaenna got grappled and pinned by the monk/fighter with his several attacks, the rogue stepped over and sneak attacked her, using 2 weapon fighting, with 4 attacks to -30 hp. The lightning bolt by Kennock meant for this tag team got counterspelled by a dispel magic from the invisibility seeing gnome wizard and after taking a last swing at one of the PCs, Tulrak decided to leg it. Kennock dicharged a farewell "cone of cold" into the tavern, killing many innocents and made his leave. The rogue tumbled after Tulrok and managed to sneak attack him again (using improved feint), bringing the body count up by one. Kennock got away and will be waiting for them with Ike.
After the battle, I realized that my stat blocks had all the buffs in, but were lacking the haste, so I missed out on extra attacks by Tulrok and faster movement by the other two. Especially the extra haste attack would have made a tremendous difference to the survival of - at least - the cleric. Had Tulrak killed the dwarf quicker, he might have prevented Zaenna's death and then, the PC party would have been in real trouble. Be it as it may, it was a good session and they even managed to correctly identify this as a targeted ambush and after resorting to "speak with dead" came up with the proper questions to point them to the church. Now they suspect that they have been scryed upon and are looking for a spell to shield them from further observation before they discuss their tactics about how to take revenge on the church.
Another intelligent move, which I will reward with the church not counteracting their exact plan, but I will definitely throw the full might of the encounter at them - just as planned. And this time, I won't be forgetting that "haste" or the fact that Kennock is a sorcerer, who can cast the most effective spell several times...
Good fun, nonetheless.
Cheers,
Nib
Glad to hear it was still a challenge and was fun. Personally, I hate it when I get most of the way through an encounter and realize I have forgotten something that would have made it more challenging.
EATERoftheDEAD wrote: Glad to hear it was still a challenge and was fun. Personally, I hate it when I get most of the way through an encounter and realize I have forgotten something that would have made it more challenging. I absolutely agree. I have had too many encounters where I have forgotten some effect that would have made it more challenging. Luckily, most of the time it's something that would have tipped the balance against the party so much that they would likely have suffered some deaths. Specifically, the fight with Skaven in the spider lair would have been too tough if I remembered that he cast displacement.
One way I have fixed this "memory" issue is that I am using DM Genie. It tracks everything. I'm loving it.
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