Channel Energy: Is Alignment / Elemental Channel illogical?

[Lilkinsly]

I can understand how people are reading the feat as written, which is kind of a mess. The “4 choices” end result would seem to make sense to the letter of the rules as written. But does that make sense for the system?

First you channel the energy of your God, that energy is the same no matter what. Due to feats and such you can “tweak” the frequency of it, but the energy never changes.

Second you have a list of what that energy is damaging too. You start with Undead, then with a feat like Alignment channel you can choose say Evil Outsiders. Now you have 2 things on your list Undead and EO. So you can choose to damage one of them at a time. Trying to do both at once would take more then you could handle.

The third part is where it gets all confusing. Because when you heal, it heals living creatures for example and not undead. Does it do that because you swap energy types? No, your Gods energy is the same, heavenly light is still heavenly light, even if you tweaked it a bit. Did you switch from positive to negative? No, your gods energy is the same. What does change is your INTENT, you are focusing on either doing damage or healing. You can only have one intention at a time, damage a specific type, damage undead. Taking the Alignment Channel again let’s you add one more damage intention as you add another type to the list.

If a type is on the “list” it can NEVER be healed by your channel, you have tweaked the frequency and it is now poisonous to those on the list. You don’t harm them when you are healing, because you a mere mortal don’t have the capacity to do that. The same do damage you can only focus group type when dealing damage.

I think the reason this gets so confusing is because people consider living as the polar opposite of undead, like Good and Evil. But (I think) It’s poorly worded saying living, when it really means anything that is not in the Undead category. That’s why constructs and such can get healed. None of them are categorically Undead. Right now people are reading Alignment channel as if you pick Evil Outsider, then you can cast Heal Good Outsider and it will only heal them. The thing is that’s not how anything else in the system works as said above. Your not healing a “living” group, your healing everybody but undead. You would just channel regular heal, and everything except undead and EO would heal.

The same thing goes for every other Channel feat, your gods energy never changes, you just tweak the frequency and control it better.

****TLDR The whole thing is a ton easier if it was just looked at as you pick a type like Evil outsider, and that name goes on the “can harm” list. Nothing on your can harm list will ever be healed by your Gods energy.

[SheepishEidolon]

A deity provides way more than either positive or negative energy. They also offer you spells, domain powers and more (if you pick up an Obedience feat, for example).

IMO Alignment Channel and Elemental Channel have nothing to do with positive or negative energy. Your deity gives you power over a certain subtype of outsiders, and you are supposed to further your deity's goals by healing or harming these outsiders, depending on the situation.

The classic pick is probably Alignment Channel against evil outsiders. As a good cleric, it seems straight-forward - you want to harm them to protect innocent people. Without the feat, you can't, but now you can. A neutral cleric might want to heal their fiendish summons, or harm a daemonic invasion force. And an evil cleric might ally with devils but battle demons, so having both options is very welcome.

[Azothath]

as the game is a "work of art", logic is not a requirement.

[Balacertar]

While at table we often say 'I channel to harm' or 'I channel to heal', that is not in reality how channel energy works.

PRD wrote:

[..] Channeling energy causes a burst that affects all creatures of one type (either undead or living) in a 30-foot radius centered on the cleric. The amount of damage dealt or healed is equal to 1d6 points of damage plus 1d6 points of damage for every two cleric levels beyond 1st (2d6 at 3rd, 3d6 at 5th, and so on). Creatures that take damage from channeled energy receive a Will save to halve the damage. [..]

When you channel what you do decide is what type of creature you want to affect, either undead or living. How your channel affects the creature depends on your type of channeled energy (positive or negative) and on how that type of energy affects that type of creature.

Because undead usually are harmed by positive and healed by negative, and living are usually healed by positive and harmed by negative, we usually simplify and say 'I heal for X hit point' and 'I harm for X damage'.

But then, that is not true for all creatures. Some living creatures might have an ability that makes negative energy heal them. And the other case could be true although I am not aware of it.

Have a look at the Death's Embrace (Death Domain power):

Death's Embrace (Ex) wrote:

At 8th level, you heal damage instead of taking damage from channeled negative energy. If the channeled negative energy targets undead, you heal hit points just like undead in the area.

It seems they are repeating themselves twice. But not. The first sentence overrules how negative energy affects you. The second one makes you affected by channeled negative energy even when it is targeting undead instead of living. So you are both healed by negative energy when it targets the living and when it targets the undead.

Actually the type of damage dealt by Alignment Channel seems a bit confusing to me. As it is not specified in the feat, I guess it means it is the usual type of energy of your channels. But it might be it is untyped. A few interesting scenarios arise:
- Alignment Channel to harm an Evil Outsider with the Death's Embrace domain power, result?
- Alignment Channel to heal an Evil Outsider affected by death ward, result?

You can make a fun exercise thinking what happens if your channeled energy is negative or positive, and compare with what happens if the feat is actually using untyped energy (let's call it sacred damage/heal).

[Reksew_Trebla]

Y’all are about 7.5 years too late.

[Balacertar]

It is never too late for search engines :)

I actually asked myself this same question this week, this thread really helped me a lot to clarify the feats and some corner cases. It seems kind of a lost opportunity to consider it a closed topic where nothing else can be added, isn't it?

[glass]

Lilkinsly wrote:

I can understand how people are reading the feat as written, which is kind of a mess. The “4 choices” end result would seem to make sense to the letter of the rules as written. But does that make sense for the system?

Yes, absolutely.

Lilkinsly wrote:

First you channel the energy of your God, that energy is the same no matter what.

Except by definition the energy does change, somehow, because you can choose different effects (even without these feats, although they obviously expand the choices available considerably). It does not explicitly say what kind of energy you are channeling when you Alignment Channel, but it is implicitly different from your normal positive or negative energy (even more different than chanelling vs undead and chanelling vs the living already are).

Lilkinsly wrote:

I think the reason this gets so confusing is because people consider living as the polar opposite of undead, like Good and Evil. But (I think) It’s poorly worded saying living, when it really means anything that is not in the Undead category.

No, they really mean "living". Constructs are not affected by Positive or Negative Energy.

_
glass.