Mark Seifter (Archmage)
Mark Seifter's legendary spirit offers the power of Mark Seifter. Unlike normal archmage spirits, Mark's legendary spirit grants insight into the arcane workings of the Pathfinder ruleset. Mediums channeling Mark's legendary spirit eventually gain the knowledge needed to create a Spirit Dancer.
Taboos: If you accept a taboo while channeling Mark, you are seized by creative fervor and must make a Linguistics or Perform (Storytelling) check each week to create an awesome archetype.
Legendary Developer (Supreme, Su): Once per day, you can edit your class abilities. Choose a lesser, intermediate, or greater power (including powers normally available only to legendary spirits) to replace an archmage power you possess. This change is permanent.
Gaining Favor: To gain Mark's favor, you must travel to the ever-shifting plane known as the Paizo Rules Forums. Once there, you must swear an oath to be courteous, keep discussions on topic, and avoid posting Rules questions in the PFS-specific forum section. You must then create a thread and succeed at an Intelligence check before Mark will answer your call.
I am doggedly attempting to create the Spirit Dancer Medium of my dreams, but I am having difficulty parsing some of the mechanics. I have asked several knowledgeable friends, who have made it clear to me they have no idea how to answer my questions and that the only person they know that has spent more time obsessing over the Medium than I is Mark Seifter.
So I put to you forum-goers in general (and Mr. Seifter in particular) two very important questions regarding this archetype's abilities:
1) When exactly do you gain influence for channeling a spirit with this archetype? The base Medium states that channeling a spirit incurs one point of influence; and channeling said spirit is normally done as part of the morning seance. However the Spirit Dancer 'makes choices as if channeling a spirit of each legend' in their morning seance, and actually channels the various spirits when entering Spirit Dance. The archetype also states that all influence incurred 'while Spirit Dancing' is pooled.
Do I gain 1 point of influence in the morning seance, when I contact all 6 of my spirits? Or do I gain 1 point of influence each time I Spirit Dance and channel a spirit? I very much doubt the intent is to gain an additional influence each time you Spirit Dance, considering how painfully restrictive influence gain is.
2) In light of the drastically different seance and channeling rules, how exactly does the new Medium "flex" feat work with the Spirit Dancer? Essentially the feat states that when channeling a spirit at the beginning of the day, you can incur an extra 1 point of influence to gain access to a special feat for that spirit. Would I have to spend 6 points of influence (which is impossible) to gain access to the feats for my various spirits?
Thank you for any insight.
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1) You just gain just 1 influence in the morning, when you do your seance. Technically, you contact one spirit (otherwise you would need to be at one hell of a location to get all 6) but you make decisions as if you had channeled each spirit, which then apply during the spirit dance.
2) Since whether to use Legendary Influence would be a decision you would make while channeling a spirit, and you make decisions for each of the 6, presumably you would make the decisions involving Legendary Influence for each of your 6 spirits, on a case by case basis. This will wind up using a large amount of influence if you take the feat from multiple spirits in the same day, though on the other hand you can access more than one of the feats you took with LI in the same day, which most other mediums couldn't do. Overall, while it does have the latter advantage, it's not going to be as good a feat for spirit dancers as for other mediums for that reason. It's certainly not a bad houserule to allow spirit dancers to just spend the 1 and get access to each feat when doing the corresponding dance; this does give the spirit dancer the advantage over other mediums on what is already a pretty effective feat for mediums, but depending on your group's playstyle, that may not be an issue.
Looks like I made my Intelligence check. Thanks Mark!
I don't think any other class in the game loses class features if "pushed" on a particular adventuring day, but that's exactly what happens with the Medium currently. It's even worse than the "wizard is out of spells, we need to rest for the day" problem-- if the fighter opens the door to a pile of scary monsters and you need to pull out all the stops, you can essentially become deprived of 100% of these abilities the following day.
Now either you're stuck in a loop of sadness because you can't use any of your fun abilities (literally none before Propitiation, since it takes 1 Influence to channel a spirit and you only regain 1 a day), or the party has to wait -days- for you to recover. It's very difficult to reconcile the idea that you can get "locked in" to a spiral of never being able to use your abilities, as the second you have any Influence breathing room using any of the abilities puts you right back where you started.
Has there been any official word on how the medium spells and the spells when using Archmage and Hierophant work?
What feat is this that give 1 feat for a 1 influence point?
What feat is this that give 1 feat for a 1 influence point?
Legendary Influence and Improved Legendary Influence from Ultimate Intrigue (for a total of 2 feats for 2 influence).