Greetings Pathfinder Team,
during my last session my lvl 10 elven witch got grappled by Chuul (with templates of Fiendish and Divine Guardian, I think; it was during the Wake of the Watcher book of the Carrion Crown adventure).
This lead to several questions:
1) Does any Hex necessitate concentration checks while grappling or under any other situation? (For that session, the GM decided that they do, but he himself admitted that he was unsure)
2) Can Prehensile Hair be used to grapple (or get out of a grapple for that matter) and thereby essentially replacing the witch's usually lousy strength modifier with her usually superb intelligence modifier? (my GM decide after some debate that I got a simple +2 bonus on grapple; the Str of my witch is 7 and the Int 26; it wasn't enough, but she did survive thanks to our bloodrager's meat tenderizer^^)
3) Can the witch's Prehensile Hair be used to normally grapple at a distance (much akin to a mancatcher) so that the witch does not provoke an attack of opportunity and/or to stay out of reach (and still keep grappling) if the grappled foe tries to attack? (this particular question did not come up during the session, but thinking my way through the whole situation made me wonder)
4) Is activating Prehensile hair a standard action or only is only it's usage once grown a standard action? The description mentions "instantly" but that was about growing it and that is also more akin to flavor text as opposed to a precise rules description. (also pondering on my part, it did not come as a problem)
Many Thanks in advance,
Platinius
1) Supernatural abilities do not require a concentration check.
2) Nope. Even the white haired witch, an archetype with super-prehensile hair that can be used to grapple an opponent can't use her hair to escape someone grappling her.
3) Nope, see above for an archetype that can, and you can see the specific rules that let that archetype do that.
4) I don't believe that Prehensile hair requires an activation at all, there are other hexes like this, see the nails hex as an example. Taking the hex means you have hair that can instantly grow as well as manipulate manipulate objects and make a natural attack.
Thanks for the answers, but they leads me to more:
1) Can a regular witch use Prehensile Hair to initiate a regular grapple at a distance (or at all for that matter)?
2) And if so, would that be with the intelligence modifier instead of the strength modifier?
I don't believe you can. It gives you a natural attack, that is all.
Some combat maneuvers can be used in place of a melee attack (trip, disarm etc.) and those you could use with prehensile, but others, like grapple and bullrush are their own actions and don't have anything particularly to do with a specific attack type.
So you could trip with your hair, and you would use your INT for that, just like you could trip with a sword and use your weapon focus as a bonus, but grapple doesn't work that way.
It does mean that a witch can trip/disarm and so on with Prehensile Hair without provoking an attack of opportunity IF the witch is outside the reach of the foe.