Fear Family lacking Fear descriptor

[Ravingdork]

Apparently, if you add horror, spook, or terror power words to your spell, fear immunity does absolutely nothing against it as it's lacking the fear descriptor. Surely this is a mistake.

[A Man In Black]

They're also missing the mind-affecting keyword.

[Varthanna]

But if you did give them the fear descriptor, wouldnt the entire spell have said descriptor, and thus the paladin would not only be immune to the fear part of your horror fireblast, but also to the fire damage?

[Ravingdork]

Varthanna wrote:

But if you did give them the fear descriptor, wouldnt the entire spell have said descriptor, and thus the paladin would not only be immune to the fear part of your horror fireblast, but also to the fire damage?

As others have already pointed out, this is something else that needs to be clarified.

I personally think the paladin would be immune to the fear effect, but not the fire effect. Doesn't the paladin fear immunity say that he's immune to "fear" and not "spells with the fear descriptor?"

In fact, I think that most immunities are written the same way, which is probably why the designers haven't clarified the issue yet (as it is already pretty clear one what gets through and what doesn't).

A better question to ask would be "does the paladin's allies get the +4 bonus to their saving throws to negate the fear and reduce the fire damage in half, simply because they were standing in the paladin's aura of courage?"

I personally think they would get the bonus, but there is still a clear disconnect there.

[ruemere]

I'd also argue that all Armor words starting with "Force ..." should contain [Force] descriptor, just like Barrier spells contain elemental descriptor.

Regards,
Ruemere

[Thanatos95]

The simple solution I see would be to add a line to the effect saying that it is a mind affecting fear effect, but resistances and immunities negate only this specific effect, not the entire spell.

[Ravingdork]

Thanatos95 wrote:

The simple solution I see would be to add a line to the effect saying that it is a mind affecting fear effect, but resistances and immunities negate only this specific effect, not the entire spell.

That shouldn't be necessary. RAW doesn't say anywhere that being immune to an effect makes you immune to the entire spell.

[Jason Bulmahn]

Yeah, sorry about that. Those should certainly have those key words. As a matter of fact, I need to do another pass on the entire document for keywords and types.

Jason Bulmahn
Lead Designer
Paizo Publishing

[ruemere]

It's hard to imagine anything being first after first iteration.
I'd prefer though that you were able to churn up updates at faster pace - there is no need to prettify the document. Actually, I would argue that producing highly polished visually items is secondary to providing accurate and up to date content.

It would be my humble suggestion for you (you = Paizo publishing folks) to use something as simple as LaTeX/Scribus/OpenOffice [1] for intermediate beta PDF products (if you really need to use DRM, just touching it up with some tool with Adobe in the last stage of an update).
I know that someone may take a dim view of the product looking plain, still, personally and absolutely subjectively, my own project management experience says that one should not delay the process by being overly attentive to details which are unlikely to influence the final product.

IMHO.

Regards,
Ruemere

[1a] LaTeX. Probably the best tool for publishing scientific documents. Myself, I used LEd - Latex with MiKTeX.
[1b] Scribus - self-contained publishing suite.
[1c] OpenOffice - probably the easiest method to produce bookmarked PDFs out of Word files (just make sure that you apply Heading styles). Best support for styling documents, period. Some folks would argue that Lotus Symphony is better (the interface is quite a bit more on the par with times), but I do not like its low speed. [2]
[2] I do work with variety of Office suites (including MS Office 2003, 2007, 2010), and while there are quite interesting developments in other areas, I would recommend OpenOffice (or one of its branches - like LibreOffice, Go-OO) for the simple fact of providing compatibility of MS Office and for consistent approach to styling documents (page styles, for example).