[PFS] Celestial Obedience

[Slacker2010]

So I need to hammer down my level 7 feat for my PFS paladin before tonight. I was considering Celestial Obedience instead of Extra Lay of Hands. I worship Ragathiel, and its a fairly cookie cutter build. Feats are 1-Fey Foundling, 3-Greater Mercy, 5-Powerattack.

Anyone have any experiance with the Obedience?

Obedience:

Slay a proven wrongdoer in Ragathiel’s name.
It is not enough for the sacrifice to have an evil heart or
evil intentions; the sacrifice must have committed evil or
unlawful deeds. Gain a +4 sacred bonus on saving throws
against spells and effects cast by evil creatures.

So killing evil isnt enough, they have to have done bad things.

My questions is: If they have not done evil or unlawful deeds, how would their alignment be evil? If I have a person that never does an evil or bad thing in his life his alignment should have shifted to neutral at best. Everyone wants to make strikes against pallys whenever they do something bad. Shouldn't this translate into the rest of the game? Or is assuming an evil person has done an evil act going outside the box? I guess you could argue that the Ragathielite would need to know they had done an evil act. I would assume that detect evil would be enough for that.

There is a post by the developer a while back when the book came out where he said the envelope could be pushed. He could see a high level paladin keep imps or such caged so he could make his daily sacrifice. Im going to go look for the comment.

[Shfish]

All of the role-play element requirements of feats and PRCs are considered fullfilled in PFS. That is the generic answer you need to run with man.
Now, if an adventure takes longer than 1 day, you could start running into issues, but I would point them to the default rule and move on.
As I don't have inner sea gods, is this feat allowed in the additional options page?

[Shfish]

But the debate about killing someone because they detect as evil is a long hard debate. To kill someone outright as a paladin you should never do it because they detect as evil, but because their actions are evil (like attacking you, a "holy" warrior). This advice comes from PFS rule 0: if it's gray, expect table variation, therefore run the most restrictive course.

[Imbicatus]

This is actually from Chronicles of the Righteous, and it is legal on the Additional Resources page.

[Rogue Eidolon]

You definitely can take this Obedience in PFS. But in some scenarios, you wind up on a wagon or a boat directly leading up to the adventure, during which you probably don't have any evildoers to kill, so you might lose access to the feat's powers (you could activate it again after the first battle if you have enough time for the ritual killing).

[Slacker2010]

Its not a ritual Killing, well at least not in the terms I think of Ritual Killing. You just need to slay an evil doer.

[Imbicatus]

It's just slay in combat. You don't need to make a Dexter kill room or anything.

[Slacker2010]

Imbicatus wrote:

You don't need to make a Dexter kill room or anything.

You Sir, have good taste in Television.

EDIT: Back on topic, Anyone have any actual PFS experience with this?

[Rogue Eidolon]

The obedience calls them "the sacrifice", and it specifically mentions taking one hour for all obediences in the feat

Celestial Obedience wrote:

Each empyreal lord requires a different obedience, but all obediences take only 1 hour to perform.

So it's an hour-long ritual sacrifice.

[Slacker2010]

Copy Pasted from the CoR pdf wrote:

Celestial Obediences

Empyreal lords welcome prayers and tithes from all
mortals, but reserve their divine gifts for those willing to
sacrifice more. Such acts of sacrificial devotion are known
as obediences. An obedience is typically an hour-long ritual
that must be performed daily; unless otherwise stated, it
does not harm the creature performing it.

That is the rule of thumb, by reading Ragathiel's entry it seems its intended to be in combat.

While this post from the developer doesnt say its not an hour long, by following the thread and links, I get the intent that its ment for combat.

EDIT: I lied, Its in that post under "Power gained in combat". Its not ritual.

[Rogue Eidolon]

Slacker2010 wrote:

Copy Pasted from the CoR pdf wrote:

Celestial Obediences

Empyreal lords welcome prayers and tithes from all
mortals, but reserve their divine gifts for those willing to
sacrifice more. Such acts of sacrificial devotion are known
as obediences. An obedience is typically an hour-long ritual
that must be performed daily; unless otherwise stated, it
does not harm the creature performing it.

That is the rule of thumb, by reading Ragathiel's entry it seems its intended to be in combat.

While this post from the developer doesnt say its not an hour long, by following the thread and links, I get the intent that its ment for combat.

EDIT: I lied, Its in that post under "Power gained in combat". Its not ritual.

Hmm, the feat and the obedience description disagree on whether it is typically or always. Well, presumably the other way to fulfill the hour while giving the foe an honorable death in combat is to have an hour-long contemplation/ritual after the fight. I don't think any GM would see a problem with that, honestly, particularly with your excellent links.

Of course, you'd need to watch out for a situation where the rest of the party wants to spare the bad guys. With the hidden secondary success conditions, sparing people might even be what they need to do, and they can't really know.

[Slacker2010]

Rogue Eidolon wrote:

Of course, you'd need to watch out for a situation where the rest of the party wants to spare the bad guys. With the hidden secondary success conditions, sparing people might even be what they need to do, and they can't really know.

Well when I RP my character, He wants to be an end to all evil doers. He has been tasked with purging the taint from this world. So that gets kind of hard, I dont auto kill everything due to not wanting to mess things up for other characters so its a line i have to walk.

BACK ON TOPIC (damn you hijackers)

Anyone else use this in PFS?

and

Think its worth it? I already have amazing saves. Kind of leaning towards Extra Lay of Hands.

[Imbicatus]

I use the Obedience for Falayna in PFS, but she is much less demanding than Ragathiel.

[Grace!]

And I will use the Obedience for Arshea once I can teach myself all that planes stuff to learn it.

I suggest taking Obedience for flavor reasons, but it's true that it might not be the strongest for power reasons. Not that I'm sure what those mean. Look, a bird!

~Grace!
(Not the world's wisest paladin of Arshea)