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By the rules no they can't but I would let them take non spirit hexes for sure. Shamans have some very nice buffing hexes. For some reason they flat out made witches evil which closes off a lot of good character ideas. So I see giving them shaman hexes as a way to expand out of that forced hole.
^Wait, where and when did they flat out make witches evil?
By the rules no they can't but I would let them take non spirit hexes for sure. Shamans have some very nice buffing hexes. For some reason they flat out made witches evil which closes off a lot of good character ideas. So I see giving them shaman hexes as a way to expand out of that forced hole.
Alignment: Any.
There are some hexes that are Evil actions, but the class is not Evil.
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^Wait, where and when did they flat out make witches evil?
The class is evil flavored, it was designed that way. About half the hexes are evil/evil tinted along with a good deal of [evil] spells. You don't have to be an evil witch but it makes it a pain to justify certain things that have no reason to be evil besides because, for example child scent. Why? Couldn't it just be scent? Why child scent if only to waste space?
Glinda, the Witch of the South, was not evil but still was a Witch. I'm pretty sure she never took the Child Scent hex. Or a few of the other evil themed ones. (Eating intelligent creatures as a buff food?)
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Glinda, the Witch of the South, was not evil but still was a Witch. I'm pretty sure she never took the Child Scent hex. Or a few of the other evil themed ones. (Eating intelligent creatures as a buff food?)
But why bake that into the class and not just have that as the flavor to abilities functional to everyone not just the evil? I'd like to have scent on my nature themed witch but nope can't, I'd like to cook or prepare rare herbs for buffs but nope can't. What I said was they themed the witch towards evil and well they did for no good reason other than the wicked witch type and didn't bother with the good witch types. Sure you can make a good witch, I'm playing one now, but it locks out a lot of options that are thematic in principal, like scent not child scent.
No I'd like non evil focused hexes. I don't understand why this is hard to understand. There is zero reason why "child scent" should exist, it should just be scent, now add whatever flavor you want . There it's fixed for both with reduced word count.
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A shaman is allowed to take one witch basic hex. Is a witch allowed to take one shaman basic hex? If it is not by RAW, as a GM would you allow it?
Um, yes, but only in that limited circumstance.
Mixing CLA's is one thing that lead to the rogue's current sad state...Also, I like that there are evil-only hexes. Child scent is one of the most thematically appropriate and flavorful abilities in the game, IMHO. "Pick a scent" would be boring to me and much more powerful.
-TimD
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A shaman is allowed to take one witch basic hex. Is a witch allowed to take one shaman basic hex? If it is not by RAW, as a GM would you allow it?Um, yes, but only in that limited circumstance.
Mixing CLA's is one thing that lead to the rogue's current sad state...Also, I like that there are evil-only hexes. Child scent is one of the most thematically appropriate and flavorful abilities in the game, IMHO. "Pick a scent" would be boring to me and much more powerful.
-TimD
Well sure its more powerful child scent is useless in nearly any game, any other hex is more powerful. Also thematic shouldn't bring down or buff up options, they should be flavor. I also don't see it as flavorful I see it as limiting and a waste of useful word space in pricey books. I pay to have usable things not something I have to fix. I'm not afraid to make my own flavor.
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From your argument, I take it you're from the "flavor should be separate from rules" camp rather than the "rules should reinforce flavor" camp I tend to side with. We're obviously not going to agree, but I bid you good gaming none-the-less.
-TimD
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Well sure its more powerful child scent is useless in nearly any game, any other hex is more powerful. Also thematic shouldn't bring down or buff up options, they should be flavor. I also don't see it as flavorful I see it as limiting and a waste of useful word space in pricey books. I pay to have usable things not something I have to fix. I'm not afraid to make my own flavor.A shaman is allowed to take one witch basic hex. Is a witch allowed to take one shaman basic hex? If it is not by RAW, as a GM would you allow it?Um, yes, but only in that limited circumstance.
Mixing CLA's is one thing that lead to the rogue's current sad state...Also, I like that there are evil-only hexes. Child scent is one of the most thematically appropriate and flavorful abilities in the game, IMHO. "Pick a scent" would be boring to me and much more powerful.
-TimD
To be fair-ish, PF has lots of useless waste-of-space options all over the place, for everybody.
But I agree, that much forced flavor isn't a good thing.
From your argument, I take it you're from the "flavor should be separate from rules" camp rather than the "rules should reinforce flavor" camp I tend to side with. We're obviously not going to agree, but I bid you good gaming none-the-less.
-TimD
Well kind of, for pathfinder I find that I tend to go hard function then fill in my flavor. Why? Well pathfinder seems to have issues with functional flavor so if one has to go then I want something concrete to base my efforts on.
Now take the cortex+ system in which the narrative is above all and dictates the implementation of the game rules. You have a functional complete character from the start that you narrate through the story. It's a great deal different that pathfinder and some people find it difficult to narrate your why/how. I in fact love this system because it does the thing I want the most, providing functional creative options that go hand in hand with theme/flavor.
What he is saying is that none of those are inherently good. All of those can be used by any aligned witch to further again any alignment. The evil hexes are just that evil by rules, note that I also have issue with [evil] spells too.
And yes I do want more options, or more specifically functional rules options instead of hyper narrowed ones. Again I'm not afraid to make my own flavor, I don't need the game to artificially do it for me. Even still if we are going to have hyper restricted flavored options at least make them good. Also I see nothing wrong with wanting better options for a game I pay for. Magic the gathering manages to do functional flavor leeps and bounds better with a lot more to tweak, so I ask the same of all the things I devote my money to.
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From your argument, I take it you're from the "flavor should be separate from rules" camp rather than the "rules should reinforce flavor" camp I tend to side with. We're obviously not going to agree, but I bid you good gaming none-the-less.
-TimD
Well kind of, for pathfinder I find that I tend to go hard function then fill in my flavor. Why? Well pathfinder seems to have issues with functional flavor so if one has to go then I want something concrete to base my efforts on.
Now take the cortex+ system in which the narrative is above all and dictates the implementation of the game rules. You have a functional complete character from the start that you narrate through the story. It's a great deal different that pathfinder and some people find it difficult to narrate your why/how. I in fact love this system because it does the thing I want the most, providing functional creative options that go hand in hand with theme/flavor.
You should totally check out the HERO system.
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What he is saying is that none of those are inherently good. All of those can be used by any aligned witch to further again any alignment. The evil hexes are just that evil by rules, note that I also have issue with [evil] spells too.
You have to bear in mind the baggage of legacy here. The game assumes that you are a Good or Neutral character and that Evil is antithetical to your nature. This goes back ALL THE WAY to the very beginning of D&D. Tagging things with the [Evil] descriptor is more along the lines of "players shouldn't take this" than anything, since the core assumption is that only enemies/monsters are Evil.
It's just like how the 9 alignments are viewed from the perspective that Lawful Good is the highest-and-best Good. That's why it's Law-Chaos and not Freedom-Oppression. You don't need to necessarily say things are Good-aligned unless you specifically DON'T want enemies/monsters to have them.
Part of the problem with Scent, let alone Child Scent, is that D&D and Pathfinder act as if that most Humanoids have no sense of smell at all, which may be a common condition, but certainly flies in the face of my personal experience. Apart from the Evil connotations, Child Scent is almost as if you had to take a Feat to be able to hear anything short of a rock concert, but the only version available to the Class you want to play only lets you hear yappy dogs.
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Part of the problem with Scent, let alone Child Scent, is that D&D and Pathfinder act as if that most Humanoids have no sense of smell at all, which may be a common condition, but certainly flies in the face of my personal experience. Apart from the Evil connotations, Child Scent is almost as if you had to take a Feat to be able to hear anything short of a rock concert, but the only version available to the Class you want to play only lets you hear yappy dogs.
That's not really true. Scent is covered by Perception, its just that people rarely put scent-based Perception checks in adventures.
The DCs for smelling things are in the Perception description though, and you don't need the Scent ability to make them.
^Let's see, they have 2 or maybe 3 scent things described under Perception:
Notice the stench of rotting garbage
Detect the smell of smoke (granted, a lot of people actually fail at this)
Determine if food is spoiled (not sure if they mean to include this in smell or just taste, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt)
The first 2 of these are hard rock concert equivalent (at least to my nose), and the third is the equivalent of that awful stuff they play in most stores as background music (and I use the term loosely).
They don't have anything like "Creatures with the scent ability can identify familiar odors just as humans do familiar sights" without having the Scent special ability. Also, they say: "A creature with the scent ability can detect opponents by sense of smell, generally within 30 feet. If the opponent is upwind, the range is 60 feet. If it is downwind, the range is 15 feet. Strong scents, such as smoke or rotting garbage, can be detected at twice the ranges noted above. Overpowering scents, such as skunk musk or troglodyte stench, can be detected at three times these ranges." Come on, I can detect some co-workers' perfumes and in some cases body odor at the lower of these ranges (although admittedly these are often at the equivalent of yappy dog level). I have run into a few people whose body odors I could detect at more than 180 feet, around corners, and with interfering other bad odors, or whose breath I could detect in a moving full size bus with nearly all windows open, although admittedly these cases were an issue of sources being of truly legendary power (breath range is usually much shorter -- this one must have been weaponized).
Granted, some kids don't need beans to make a stink, but in my experience, contrary to Child Scent, this is not unique to children, and I certainly don't need a Child Scent Hex to pick it up from children or adults, so I would say that Child Scent is overrated as a sensory option available to Witches, particularly since that is the only such sensory option available to them unless they are Half-Orc or Orc.
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Rotting Garbage is rock concert, and it's as easy to hear as a rock concert, -10 DC.
Smoke is more like a conversation. DC 0, hard to miss if you're right next to it, but if it's happening farther away or you're distracted you might not notice it.
The ranges for the scent ability are the ranges at which creatures automatically detect scents. You can smell a stinky person from 180 ft. away because you're succeeding on a Perception check (if that stinky person smells as strongly as rotting garbage, that's only a DC 8 check! Not hard for someone with an average Wisdom score). If you're distracted, or you're starting to come down with a cold, or someone curses you and drops your Wisdom to 2, you'll have a harder time detecting that scent.
A critter with Scent on the other hand automatically smells that odor. They have such a good sense of smell that they don't need to make a check.
I don't take the statement under Scent to mean that people without it can't recognize familiar scents, only that creatures with Scent automatically recognize them. I don't know about you, but unless someone has a particularly unique or pungent odor, I can't really recognize them by smell alone. My dog, on the other hand, surely can.
^Trust me, I have run across some people whose scent triggers automatic recognition, although like I said, in some cases their scent was of Mythic proportions . . . :-P
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The only class that is inherently evil is the antipaladin. Everything else comes down to the choices a character might make in terms of abilities and how he uses them. Some abilities are evil. Some spells are evil. But the inclusion of a sinister-seeming option doesn't make a class evil at all. I can make a very effective lawful good witch right now. The existence of child scent or cook people doesn't make the witch class evil any more than the existence of unhallow and create undead makes cleric and evil class.
All I wanna know is if a witch can take a shaman hex. Since some spirit hexes seem more powerful than regular witch hexes, and no language specifically says they can, I guess the answer is no. Sad face.
Nice necro, steve, as for witches being able to take shaman hexes, it looks like, as per RAW, only the Spirit Talker feat allows something of the sort. Non spirit, shaman hexes are off limits to witches.