spells per level for Harrower Prestige class


Rules Questions


I was leveling up my Cartomancer witch with the Harrower Prestige class to level 7 and noticed that hero labs wasn't letting me add the free spells to my spell deck. thinking that it was a glitch i decided to look at the RAW from the inner sea world guide that my friend lets me use, to make sure I had proof for the bug report. To my surprise I found that the Harrower only gives spells per day, not caster level and definitely not the free spells per day...

I'm Hoping that this is not the right interpretation of this.


The faq for the CRB addresses this

"Prestige Class: If I take levels in a prestige class that advances spellcasting, does that give me access to my higher-level bloodline spells?
No. Likewise, it doesn't give you any additional bloodline feats.
If you were an oracle, it wouldn't give you any additional mystery spells. (However, it would give you higher-level cure or inflict spells, as those are part of the oracle's Spells class feature.)
If you were a witch, it wouldn't give you any additional patron spells.
If you were a wizard, it wouldn't give you access to your higher-level school powers.
And so on.
Prestige classes which advance spellcasting only advance caster level, spells per day, and (for spontaneous casters) spells known—essentially, the spellcasting features described in your class's Spells class feature description.
(Note that the dragon disciple class has the blood of dragons ability, which explicitly states that you get your bloodline powers and bloodline spells; this is a special ability of that class and not the normal state for advancing spellcasting with a prestige class.)"


Inner Sea World Guide wrote:

Spells

When a harrower gains a level, she gains new spells per day as if she had also gained a level in a spellcasting class she belonged to before she added the prestige class. She does not, however, gain any other benefits a character of that class would have gained. This essentially means that she adds the level of harrower to the level of whatever other spellcasting class she has. If the character had more than one spellcasting class before she became a harrower, she must choose which class she adds each harrower level to for the purposes of determining spells per day.

A harrower adds the harrowing spell to all of her spell lists as a 3rd-level spell if it is not already on a spell list.

Bold mine.

As Stated in the raw it is specific to spells per day. I can only hope that your reference to the FAQ for the core rule book instead of any reference to the ISWG is how it's supposed to be run.


The wording for prestige classes in the crb is a bit more clear, the the middle sentencd in the harrower text "Esentialy..." seemz to indicate that it follows the crb pattern.


I had assumed that it did follow the CRB pattern seeing the table stating the standard "+1 level of spellcasting class".

Sovereign Court

Yeah, nobody has a prestige class giving you access to higher-level spell slots without giving you the spell level to go along with it :)


Setting aside the literal text, this issue can be trivially resolved by looking at the outcomes of the permissive ruling versus the restrictive ruling. Without an advancement to caster level, the Harrower prestige class is completely dysfunctional and its primary class feature ceases to continue scaling with character level. This will very quickly reach a point where the character has no meaningful class features and is no longer viable as an adventurer. What if we take the more permissive ruling? We get a functional prestige class that's arguably a little bit worse than just sticking with your base class. This is a pretty stark difference in outcomes, and makes the resolution of this ambiguity in the rules text obvious. I'd go so far as to say that any GM who takes the more restrictive ruling is being punitive and unreasonable.

(Edit: just to be clear, I'm talking about situations where there's legitimate ambiguity in the rules wording leading to multiple valid interpretations of the same text. Showing that one of these interpretations leads to an illogical or dysfunctional outcome provides strong evidence that the other is correct. However, sometimes the rules are just dysfunctional with no ambiguity. Good example of this is the chakra subsystem; well-written in the sense that it's very obvious how it's supposed to work, but terribly-designed in the sense that it's unplayably bad)

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