If a caster uses Cunning Caster to cast a spell, while in a position where some of the spell's components cannot be detected, does she still need to take the penalty for said component?
For example, normally you would take a -12 penalty for casting a spell with verbal, somatic, and material components. But what if the caster was hiding in a fog bank? Is the penalty now only a -4, since there is essentially no hope of anyone seeing the somatic and material components of the spell (and those no need to further conceal those aspects of the spell)?
Replacing the components is not optional? So by your interpretation, Silent Spell, Still Spell, and Eschew Materials would not reduce the penalties either?
If you are in a fog bank, you aren't being observed and Cunning Caster is not necessary to begin with.
If you are in an area of silence, you couldn't cast a spell with verbal components anyway.
If you're in a fog bank cunning caster could be used to prevent people from hearing you casting a spell with verbal components and thus determining that you were casting a spell.
You would still need it in an area of silence to suppress non-verbal components as well as the spell's identifiable manifestations.
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C'mon R.D.
You know as well as anyone what
Between inherited inconsistencies from DD3.5, shared assumptions about spell manifestations (which were not nearly as well-shared as some wanted to believe), partial solutions created here and there by different designers (without the degree of consultation and collaboration we've come to expect from Paizo) and several bouts of retconning and backpeddling, our respected and venerated Paizo team has come up with a disparate set of partially incompatible game mechanics regarding both hiding and detecting spellcasting and magic in general.
Your twinned situations of fog cloud (to block visual clues) and silence (to block auditory clues) cuts at one of the central design tenets of PF, the conflation of Spot and Listen into a single Perception check, and its extrapolation for use in spellcraft checks used to identify spellcasting.
We also know that Cunning Caster, conceal spell, deceitful, bluff and their erstwhile pals do not present a nuanced, comprehensive and self-consistent system for concealing spellcasting.
It would have been nice if some developers had sat down with a couple of your posts from as far back as 2010 to deal with the problem of spellcraft checks to indentify spellcasting in a variety of circumstances. But that never happened. Instead we have a mish-mash of systems at cross-purposes with one another, and only a carefully thought-out set of houserules can really effectively deal with the extant situation.
Does that about sum things up, R.D.?
That's not really what this thread is intended for, but yes, that seems to sum up the history of spell identification pretty well I suppose.
Also, if I were in a fog bank and a silence effect, I wouldn't even bother with cunning caster. No one can see or hear anything to determine who cast the spell anyways.