I don't think that those necessarily count as creatures; ordinary plants don't. But if they do then there's no reason the caster would be forced to take them.
In game terms, they are an infestation, not creatures. Unless you can tell me what is the CR of a single flea.
Even if it was a swarm, it would still count as a single creature for many purposes, just with the swarm subtype.
I know this wouldn't work but I just had the image of things going the other way.
wouldn't an angry mob of villagers be a swarm?
then a wizard could teleport angry mob somewhere with it only counting as one creature. :p
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
My point is that PF doesn't have a definition of what is a creature and what is not. So standard English definition rules. Anything living is a creature. At least everything that has a brain.
It does, actually:
Creature: A creature is an active participant in the story or world. This includes PCs, NPCs, and monsters.
Note that this even covers things that aren't creatures at all by "standard English definition rules", such as undead or animated objects.
It kicks the can a bit to "what's an active participant", but that's what GMs are for. If a GM wants to rule that paramecia or gut flora are creatures and have teleport be fatal due to the loss of necessary internal bacteria, they're welcome to do so (Rule 0), but their players aren't likely to take it well (Rule -1).
The most commonly accepted upon definition of "creature" I've come across is anything that's has stats (explicit or implicit) like a creature. This could mean anything with a Bestiary entry (e.g., a dire tiger), a race (e.g., a human), a one-off stat block in the published/homebrewed material (e.g., "That Which Smacks Loudly At Movies, see page 231"), or rules dictating that one of the previous things ought to be assumed or constructed (e.g., "Treat this phenomenon as [insert creature stuff and/or exceptions here]."). All of these things fall under the category of PC, NPC, or monster (which is really just another word for NPC).
Most GMs would not rule that a louse is a creature in most circumstances, including teleport, though in particular cases they might--maybe you really, really want to acid splash that louse who's been pissing you off, or maybe an awakened louse is hanging out on your head and spying on you for its master. A bacteria is even less likely to be considered a creature in a given circumstance. (Who wants to roll a few *illion saving throws for this area debuff spell?)
Regarding familiars, you're gonna get some table variation. Generally, I allow anything that a PC has stuffed in a container they're carrying as part of that creature, but it's a bit ad hoc.
Even with muleback cords, I'd like to see this totem pole of PCs from a practical standpoint. : )
Blaphers beat me to pointing out the fatal consequences of losing gut bacteria.
Of course it doesn't work that way in Pathfinder, but I'll keep the idea of bacteria-excluding teleportation kicking around the back of my head to use for something later. :)
Old school thinking. I like it! Mwahahahaha....
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I like to rationalize that sort of thing as that the spellcaster using the spell (in this case teleport) didn't actually create the spell, and only controls the aspects that the spell specifically says he does, and that the spell doesn't generally do more than it has to, within the limitations of 'stuff that's necessary' for it's intended function.
The caster is using a 'product' that works how it works, and doesn't really micro-manage minutiae like which gut bacteria, internal parasites, ingested poisons, etc. get to come along for the ride, some of which he might even understand (as his knowledge of the human(oid) micro-biome and which parts of it he can or cannot live without could be zilch).
As I see it, teleport is 'intended' to transport a person and their gear from point A to point B. It's not intended as a free delousing spell *and* it's not intended to effectively murder anyone who uses it by purging them of their gut bacteria (and all sorts of other beneficial / symbiotic microlife) if they use it.
Maybe when the spell was first being designed / researched, earlier versions of it proved dangerous or even fatal to the casters, as it did this very thing (or teleported you into rocks, or failed to maintain your relative velocity to the planet you were on, or all sorts of other persnickety details), but by the 'modern' age, the spell's been fine-tuned for thousands of years, at least, and this sort of thing is no longer a problem (and modern-day spellcasters treat spells as black boxes, that only work as sold to them, and don't 'hack' them and try to make them do other things, barring such simple 'hacks' as using metamagic to change some very basic parameters).
Other, even more common, teleport questions involve teleporting out of grapples (or even if swallowed whole!), teleporting away from attached creatures like weasels or stirges or ticks-of-unusual-size, teleporting out of handcuffs (do they come with, or drop to the ground where you vanished from) or even larger items of confinement (such as a 'wizard jail' where they lock the prisoners in suits of full plate armor, to restrict spellcasting). Ditto teleporting out from being bound by nets or tanglefoot bags or lassos, or teleporting a weapon stuck in your body (like a harpoon or porcupine quill) free, or even teleporting away from something like alcohol in your bloodstream (instant sobriety!) or tattoo inks under your skin (no more lifetime of regret for that drunken decision!) or a STD (no more lifetime of regret for *that* drunken decision...) or other disease or cancerous growth or cursed item or whatever. (Or 'offensively' teleporting someone away from their peg-leg, Hand of Vecna or artificial heart pump or whatever.)
When the rules don't cover such corner cases, we have GMs. Hopefully most will come up with a reasonable and consistent ruling that the player in question can at least accept, if not necessarily like. :)
|
Forget lice... what about all the symbiotic bacteria in your digestive track? Or the fact that the mitochondria in human cells are themselves 'living creatures' with their own separate DNA?
You teleport once and BAM suddenly you are no longer able to generate cellular energy from food and fall over dead.
Or maybe this is all very silly.
Animated broom is a creature. These creatures are objects. They are objects that are intelligent, but they are not "Intelligent Objects". Those have Ego scores.
so you can do it, you just have to mentally abuse the creatures that are objects so that they don't have egos any more.....
The game has a tendency to become more or less granular as things matter. Things like lice or intestinal flora just don't matter when it's time to fight a minotaur, so they're disregarded.
Lice don't provide cover. Gut bacteria don't need swarm rules. They just don't exist in the simulation. Not until something specifically makes them matter.
The easiest way to view all of this is to just recognize the game zooms in and out to more and less detail as required, and accept that teleport does what it does as the level of resolution it talks about. Given there are no creature sizes for "microscopic" or "smaller than a grain of rice", even if such creatures exist, they can safely be disregarded.