How does a familiar switch wands? The same way most creatures switch items. It puts one away and gets one out. Familiars can carry many of the same pieces of equipment that PCs can. Animal Archive has demonstrated this.- Gauss
Where the heck does all that room come from? I've looked at birds. They don't have much belly or back space to store ANYTHING.
oh, and it's damned impossible to store a sword on one's back and still draw the thing quickly. I expect it would work the same with those large (compared to the bird) stick wands.
I dunno, putting ranks in Use Magic Device is kinda a waste for Wizards.I plan on getting my UMD from a headband of vast intellect. I see no reason why those ranks wouldn't also transfer to the familiar.
I was just about to correct you, but the write up does clearly say ranks. I thought it was just a bonus.
Aura moderate transmutation; CL 8th
Slot headband; Price 4,000 gp (+2), 16,000 gp (+4), 36,000 gp (+6); Weight 1 lb.
DESCRIPTION
This intricate gold headband is decorated with several small blue and deep purple gemstones.
The headband grants the wearer an enhancement bonus to Intelligence of +2, +4, or +6. Treat this as a temporary ability bonus for the first 24 hours the headband is worn. A headband of vast intelligence has one skill associated with it per +2 bonus it grants. After being worn for 24 hours, the headband grants a number of skill ranks in those skills equal to the wearer's total Hit Dice. These ranks do not stack with the ranks a creature already possesses. These skills are chosen when the headband is created. If no skill is listed, the headband is assumed to grant skill ranks in randomly determined Knowledge skills
Piccolo,
You realize we're talking about magic, magic animals, and sticks with magic.
I think a genius level person could figure out how to incorporate something that allows an intelligent flying cat with thumbs to manipulate things.
Piccolo,
You realize we're talking about magic, magic animals, and sticks with magic.
I think a genius level person could figure out how to incorporate something that allows an intelligent flying cat with thumbs to manipulate things.
Oh aye, but I have never heard of any sort of extradimensional holding space designed for a frickin bird, let alone some other animal.
Like I wrote before, maybe just getting a homonculus or some other humanoid beastie is the solution if you want your familiar to use a wand. Monkeys don't work, since they can't talk in the game. Closest thing would be sign language, and that just plain seems silly when it's also supposed to be doing the gestures for a spell.
I don't like the new bit about how the Headbands of Intellect assign skill points to one or two skills. I'd rather it was just a blanket increase in Int, retroactive so you get all the skill points you are supposed to. That's a lot less bother than the other version!
You can spend money on a homonculus so it can actually have feats of it's own and higher hit dice.
In fact you can technically have other homonculi that aren't your familiar since they are constructs.
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Piccolo: if the headband gave you skill ranks for free allocation, that opens up the following abuse. Today you start with Skill A, but you need Skill B. So you take off the headband, put it back on, and the next day you have skill ranks available to take B. The next day you repeat this for skill C.
Here's one video about trained ravens solving an intelligence test on youtube.
Here's a bit of a different style of thing from Nat Geo
And this is one of a crow using sticks (dare I say wands?)
Almost forgot a video of a raven speaking.
These being non-magical real world birds, it's fairly easy for me to admit of a Magical Beast fantasy creature with orders of magnitude greater intelligence being capable of whipping a Wand -- or reading a Scroll!
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Did I mention I LOVE Wizards? My best wizard build is a battlefield control wizard specializing in conjuration (teleportation) with Greater Spell Focus in both Conjuration and Necromancy. He has all 3 saves covered and loves pits, clouds, summoning, and a variety of necro debuff spells. :D
- Gauss
Yeah, that's pretty much every wizard I've ever built ever.
Yeah, that's pretty much every wizard I've ever built ever.
Probably 90% of all Wizards ever generated under Pathfinder, too... Smells to me like Shift is due for a nerfing.
The spell list could probably do with a major reorganization, too. My god, have you seen the size of the Transmutation school?! Now compare it with, say, Enchantment.
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Well, the problem is that Conjuration is just so much better than the other schools of magic.
Every time I try to make a wizard that isn't a conjurer, I end up sitting down and going "I could do this, but a conjurer could do it better."
I mean, we all know the schools just aren't created equal. Enchantment is just and AWFUL, AWFUL, AWFUL choice for a school.
I actually was laughing the other day, playing a wizard in PFS and ran up against an enchanter wizard.
I started mocking him in game for being an enchanter because none of his spells could overcome my 1st level protection from evil.
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I actually was laughing the other day, playing a wizard in PFS and ran up against an enchanter wizard.
I started mocking him in game for being an enchanter because none of his spells could overcome my 1st level protection from evil.
What a douche thing to do.
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On a side note, 1. Pro (alignment) is well..alignment based for all parts of it (in 3.5 it wasn't). So unless the enemy has protection from Good up, they won't get the protection from a good aligned caster..so on and so forth.
Yes, but how often do you run up against a good aligned caster in a game normally? The VAST majority of the enemies you fight are going to be evil.
So your mocking of him should be turned around the next time he sits a table with you...
Dude, It was an NPC! Not a player. I would NEVER mock a player for a character choice. But I will totally make fun an NPC for being bad; heck every time I fight against a rogue foe I job an obscuring mist on them and say "Your class is bad and you should feel bad." My wizard likes to break the 4th wall a lot.
And the NPC is totally dead. I hit him with a stinking cloud and it was all she wrote.
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What a douche thing to do.I actually was laughing the other day, playing a wizard in PFS and ran up against an enchanter wizard.
I started mocking him in game for being an enchanter because none of his spells could overcome my 1st level protection from evil.
It was an NPC. He was kinda a douche. He tried to charm, I called him a scrub for memorizing charm person and dropped a stinking cloud on his head.
Then our fighter chased him around the room with a greataxe.
EDIT: I mean, I know I can be abrasive sometimes on the forums, but do you really think I would sit at a table and pick on someone for what kind of character they play? Or that a GM would let me do that?
My mistake. Sorry.
Well, the problem is that Conjuration is just so much better than the other schools of magic.
That's because it was poorly designed. It has too much of everything whereas other schools (Divination and Enchantment, namely) have a bare handful of hyper-specialized spells.
The way to rebalance the arcane schools would be to redistribute all the spells from scratch.
Enchantment should have a great many buffs and debuffs that currently reside in overbloated schools: Bestow Curse, Haste, Slow, Feather Fall, Levitate, Fly, Sepia Snake Sigil, Bear/Bull/Cat/Fox/Owl/Eagle buffs, Blind/Deaf, Spider Climb, Keen Edge... Eyebite... Fear... I think a good case could easily be made that these fit more the motif of "enchantments" than they do anything else. Remember that "Enchanters" of myth and legend are by far more established than D&D's nomenclature which has so narrowly specialized them into "mind control".
And besides, D&D is not self-consistent on this matter. If there's to be a school just for "mind manipulation", why is Illusion still a separate school? Merging Illusion and Enchantment would solve a huge number of balance issues with a single stroke.
Conjuration would still be incredibly powerful even if all it had was Summon Monster and Teleport, and I don't see why the Fog/Cloud spells aren't Evocations or Transmutations: they have nothing to do with transporting anything. At the very least, it makes far more sense for them to be under Transmutation (changing the nature of the atmosphere or whatever), but they might fit under Evocation just as easily (producing things ex nihilo). And what... the ... F~+~ ... is Joyful Rapture doing under Conjuration instead of Enchantment?! The entire subschool of Healing should be under Necromancy anyway! What do the powers of life have in common with extra-dimensional travel?! Isn't Life far more similar to Death than Transportation?
The Mnemonic Enhancer and Mage's Lucubration -type spells should be Evocations if not Enchantments. Contingency should be a Divination, not an Evocation. Shouldn't Telekinesis be an Evocation, not a Transmutation? How is the spontaneous generation of a force considered to be "changing the substance of an object", I ask you.
The Wall spells should all be Abjurations, as should Secret Page, Twisted Space, Blink and Time Stop.
Why is Darkvision not under Divination? What the crap is Trap The Soul doing under Conjuration instead of Necromancy?!
Bah, the more you look into it, the more ludicrous it becomes. Conjuration, Transmutation and Necromancy were obviously considered to trump all other schools when spells were being divvied up -- so it's lead to those three schools losing all distinction (Necromancy is probably the most thematically specialized of these three though). They're just "anything and everything" schools, bloated and bland.
The inconsistencies are rage-inducing. I would like nothing more than to have a week of free time to just sit down and reorganize all the spells in all of D&D canon -- because the way PF has them is just stupid to the point of grotesque.
In terms of balance and logical consistency.
This is a bit off-topic for the thread, though.