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So from making a 1st level oracle and playing through the beginnings of CoT, I've come to the realization that my DM and I are confused about the negatives of the curse. Beyond the obvious (not hearing), the Core Rulebook lays this out:
Deafened: A deafened character cannot hear. He takes a –4 penalty on initiative checks, automatically fails Perception checks based on sound, takes a –4 penalty on opposed Perception checks, and has a 20% chance of spell failure when casting spells with verbal components. Characters who remain deafened for a long time grow accustomed to these drawbacks and can overcome some of them.
However the part that confuses us is the "overcome some of them." The DM ruled that the negatives went down to -2 to both the opposed checks as well as -2 to initiative, and of course the 0% failure chance because of the curse bonus. However I think it would be good if the final book specified what the negatives are to this because almost every Oracle with this curse would be accustomed to being deaf.
If anyone else has suggestions on how to adjudicate negatives, please say anything!
I was wondering about this myself. I know that both the blinded and deafened conditions say that characters can overcome some of the drawbacks, but don't expand upon that.
For the Oracle class, I probably would leave the full penalty for deafened, given it being part of the curse. For other characters, I would reduce the penalty if it came to a character who didn't get it as a class feature along with automatic bonuses for having that condition, like a blind Fighter.
Its tricky, technically that detriment seems to be aimed at a character that was recently deafened; not only are you deaf, but you are probably extremely disoriented (thus the pretty significant minuses to perception and initiative). An oracle probably has had a lot of time to overcome this disadvantage, though. I guess a static "improvement" such as OPs -2 (as opposed to -4) would account for this. I kind of like the idea of the disadvantages going away in line with the curse advancements (there are 4 curse advancements, at each point, reduce the negative modifier by 1, so -4 at 1, -3 at 5, etc). Deaf seems to have its disadvantages, but free silent spells are pretty good...you can just walk around a dungeon constantly casting resistance, for example, without worrying about anything hear you.