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Am I reading this correctly that all magic items require 1 hour to identify now unless you take a feat? We didn't even bother identifying any of the magic items we found in the playtest because it didn't make sense to stop for an hour.
Overall, I feel like the time for Quick Identification should instead be the normal time, and Quick Identification should instead allow you to do it in 1 minute or less.
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Agree. Alternatively, 10 min/1 min should go for consumables and 1 hour - for really big, complicated items.
Or 10 mins for all common/uncommon items and 1 hour for rare items (that's where rarity actually makes sense!)
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Well, you can identify it in 1 action by taking it.
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I kinda like the idea of rarity dictating the amount of time needed to identify the item.
Or you could do it by level:
It takes 10 minutes to identify an item of your level, 10 min per level above you, and subtract minutes for each level below you. Rarity could add 10 minutes each for Uncommon and Rare. But that is a lot of math and probably not much fun at the table.
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Its fine, the intent with skill feats is clearly to encourage a party to diversify across areas like this. No one owes you instant gratification on found treasure to be used in the very next encounter. Spend the time, spend the feat, or put in a sack and forget about it until you rest for the day.
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I find it difficult to even detect if a single item is magical to even decide whether it needs to be identified. You basically have to clear a 30 ft. radius area of anything else that might potentially be magical. While I am all for making detecting magic less trivial than in first edition (for example, I changed it to touch range in my house rules), this version seems a bit impractical.
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The choices on timeframes for many actions seem to be driven more by a sense of mathematical balance. Rather than by any kind of in fiction realism or facilitating enjoyable gameplay.
Identifying one potion takes an hour. Cleaning and bandaging wounds takes two seconds flat. (Battle medic.) Its all over the place.
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It also gives the casters something to do while the fighter hammers on his shield for an hour.
K-Ray
That's fine if there is a "short rest" mechanic and they do something like "Identify up to your Int or Wis mod + 1/2/3 E/M/L items during this hour." Otherwise, finding 5 potions means spending 5 hours to identify them, one by one.
It also gives the casters something to do while the fighter hammers on his shield for an hour.
You mean 10 minutes. The fighter will almost certainly--for one reason or another--have the Quick Repair feat.
If they missed picking it up as their background feat (hint hint, one of the playtest's background feats gives it) they can get it at 3rd with their first general feat.
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From 3 rounds in PF1 to 1 hour in PF2 by default. I find this ridiculous as well. Heroes don't sit around for 8 hours identifying their loot.
I think drastic changes like this are bad for the game, and I see a lot of them in PF2. If you want to make it 1 minute by default (or even 10 minutes), then fine, but I don't understand why you think this makes Pathfinder a better game by sitting around for hours at a time. Changes like this make me not want to play PF2.
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Scrolls only take a minute of the spell is on your class list, that is kinda neat^^ not sure long it should take, I am a bit worried about the hour in the context of some time-sensitive adventures, where the author wants the group to use the items they have found.
Maybe one approach would be to reduce the time for identification for anything with the consumable trait to about 10 minutes?
Ah, the one thing the alchemist is good at:
it's one action with ALCHEMICAL SAVANT
"You can identify alchemical items quickly. When trained in the Arcana skill and attempting to use its Identify Magic action (see page 145) on an alchemical item you hold, you can do so as a single action with the concentrate and manipulate traits instead of taking an hour. If you have the formula for the item you are attempting to identify, you gain a +2 circumstance bonus to your check and treat any critical failures as failures instead."
If there is no magic involved I would say 1 hr is a decent amount of time for potions. Maybe even too short, but for game purposes it should not be any longer.
Stop watching variuos CSI shows, you do not put a sample in a machine and get printout spectogram in 2 minutes.
Some analysis take days!
I would say that if you have better lab, it could be little shorter and you could do multiple samples at once.
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CSI: Alchemical Savant? :P
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If there is no magic involved I would say 1 hr is a decent amount of time for potions. Maybe even too short, but for game purposes it should not be any longer.
Stop watching variuos CSI shows, you do not put a sample in a machine and get printout spectogram in 2 minutes.
Some analysis take days!
I would say that if you have better lab, it could be little shorter and you could do multiple samples at once.
Personally, I might agree with you on a potion if it weren't for the fact that there is a pretty significant dearth of alchemical potions in the book. An Alchemist who comes across one should have a pretty good idea where to start and should be able to get through the process pretty rapidly.
"Hmm...this potion smells of cinnamon and ash. Only a couple of potions have similar smells, let me start with the most common one. Yup, this is a Heal Potion."
For other magic items, the various classes have both Detect Magic and Read Auras (2 separate spells to do 1 thing, they should be combined, but that is another thread) which should give them an indication of which school of magic an item is from and help to rapidly narrow those options.
"Look at this wand. It has a low level Abjuration Aura on it. There only a couple of low level abjuration spells commonly placed in wands, so I suspect it will be one of those. Let's start there. Yup, it's a Wand of Mage Armor."
Now I could buy into the idea of a Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Ranger, or Rogue having this issue, but not the core magic and alchemy classes.
What the current rules have is something akin to a geologist walking up to a rock formation and saying, "It is going to take me an hour to figure out what kind of rock this is guys. Go take a break while I do this." When in fact, they can usually figure out what it is just by looking at it, and the test is to confirm their hypothesis. And even then, it usually only takes, at most, a few minutes. 10 minutes is a long time except in special circumstances.
Also, one reason it takes so long in real life for actual identification is that there are not as many crime labs as one would suspect from watching TV and most departments actually have to share or send out to labs that are overwhelmed with a backlog. However, once the scientists actually get their hands on the evidence it tends to go pretty fast because they generally have a pretty good idea where to begin due to familiarity with the kinds of things they specialize in.
for example:
Detective finds a thread and sends it to the lab.
Scientist looks and says to themselves, "this is some form of polymer thread."
Knowing that it is a polymer thread, they run tests to confirm which polymer.
Knowing which polymer they the cross reference materials books they have that could tell them what uses that kind of polymer thread.
Now, if the Identification in-game worked on a similarly tiered system I could get behind an hour to figure something out completely.
Tier 1: figure out the base item you are looking at
Tier 2: in depth info on how it works
Tier 3: traditions or schools that use the techniques and materials used to create the item in question
Tier 4: the specific individual that created the item. (This might require a slightly higher DC)
Unique items I would also understand taking more time. In fact, I would say that a breakdown for the Tier 1 above should look more like this:
Common Items = 10 min
Uncommon Items = 30 min
Rare Items = 1 hour
Unique Items = 1 day
This makes the rarity of the item play better into the timing of identification and makes more sense within the game.
But that is my feeling on it.
YMMV
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I'm having trouble to even find WHAT to identify.
Sure you can spend 1h or 10mins with a skill feat to identify a magic sword, but that's only if you know it's a magic sword.
Since detect magic doesn't work (at least in hoards of items) then you have to waste 10mins per item casting read magic on each and every individual item to find that it's magic in the first place.
So a typical treasure chest with gems, chalices, jeweled daggers and swords in it (all of which can potentially be a magic item after all), may take dozens of hours to actually go through...
Or you may do 100% silly things like taking each individual gem 30ft apart from one another and start walking around them to see when you'll feel a magical aura with detect magic...
This is a good catch. Until characters reach 7th level you can't use Detect Magic to pinpoint a 5' square, not even an individual item, with unknown magic auras. And you need to be 5th level to Read Aura on 10 items and not waste 10 minutes per potential magic item.
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After the playtest I may invent labeled potions to make identification much faster.
ROGUE: I found a minor healing potion.
WIZARD: How do you know? You can't cast Read Magic.
ROGUE: The label says, "Rodrick's Alchemy Shoppe, Potion for Restoring Most Excellent Health, 3 gold pieces."
As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
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After the playtest I may invent labeled potions to make identification much faster.
ROGUE: I found a minor healing potion.
WIZARD: How do you know? You can't cast Read Magic.
ROGUE: The label says, "Rodrick's Alchemy Shoppe, Potion for Restoring Most Excellent Health, 3 gold pieces."As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
I'm very tempted to do the same. My group has never bothered with the identification and Appraise rules in PF1. I will probably have to remind my players that I won't be automatically telling them if they find a magic item.
And especially for the playtest, where these items either won't persist, or won't be useful to a vastly higher-level character, there's not really a reason to waste time on it.
I agree that the identification time for a magic item should be shorter. I like Culach's suggestions above.
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I... didn't even think about recognizing magic items from non-magic items. Shroudb is right.
I never ran into this problem in PF1 because Detect Magic could pinpoint precisely where the magic items were, and because Detect Magic was mandatory to identify magic items.
While now, with the new version of Detect magic, you cannot pinpoint items. You can only tell approximativaly where is the strongest magic item in your vincinity.
At first I just thought "oh, Detect magic got nerfed" and shrugged it off, thinking it was just in order to prevent lvl 1 wizards from cheating through lvl 20 illusions. But now, with its interaction with identifying items... it's somewhat ridiculous. As Shroudb said, you would need to identify every single item, which can take you a incredible amount of time (you should also identify coins. Coins can be enchanted too. That would make you have to identify every single coin individually)
I'm fine with Detect magic not being mandatory, and its current mechanics could work well with areas of effect and illusions. But for the sake of not having to spend a weak in order to recognize magic items from non-magic items and to identify them, maybe we could go back to how Detect magic worked in PF1 ?
(I know, I know, some people won't want to go back to the old Detect Magic because it's a way for wizards to cheat their way while martials have to spend more time. But that's the point of magic : making your life easier. Plus, you rarely go to adventure without someone who can at least use low level magic, soooo...)
As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
When my players can't identify an item, I usually give them the number or the name of the room they foung it in so I can find it later :) It's a bit meta, but since they don't have my notes, knowing the sword was from B12 doesn't really change how they will play.
After the playtest I may invent labeled potions to make identification much faster.
ROGUE: I found a minor healing potion.
WIZARD: How do you know? You can't cast Read Magic.
ROGUE: The label says, "Rodrick's Alchemy Shoppe, Potion for Restoring Most Excellent Health, 3 gold pieces."As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
There are APs where loot includes healing potions labeled as poison and poison labeled as healing potions.
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There are APs where loot includes healing potions labeled as poison and poison labeled as healing potions.After the playtest I may invent labeled potions to make identification much faster.
ROGUE: I found a minor healing potion.
WIZARD: How do you know? You can't cast Read Magic.
ROGUE: The label says, "Rodrick's Alchemy Shoppe, Potion for Restoring Most Excellent Health, 3 gold pieces."As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
I once upgraded a minor villain in an adventure path to a more significant villain and gave him more treasure, too. I decided that this chaotic evil wizard also had a collection of cursed magic items that he kept in a separate chest from his operational items. These were not the kind designed as deliberate traps, but just miscast items with annoying side effects, such as a cloak of resistance +3 that also conjured biting insects under the cloak, a broom of flying that sometimes quit in midair, etc. The DC to find the flaw was higher than the DC to identify the item.
Once they realized that some items were cursed, they could not remember which items came from which chest. The party was honest enough to buy back the items they had sold to merchants at no loss. Then they put all the items, cursed and uncursed, into a vault and never mentioned them again.
As for poison marked as healing:
ROGUE: I drink a healing potion, 5 points healing.
GM: Where did that potion come from.
ROGUE: My inventory.
GM: Was it a potion from the room with the ogre?
ROGUE: I don't know. I just have 6 healing potions listed in my inventory.
GM: Three are poison. We have to track that. Roll 1d6 to see if you grabbed a poisonous one.
ROGUE: I rolled 5.
GM: Okay, that one is safe. You healed for 5.
ROGUE: Guys, we have to check our healing potions.
WIZARD: Isn't that player information rather than character information.
ROGUE: Darn.
Four game session later, both player and GM forget and all the poisoned potions are treated as good.
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Dislike detect magic as it stands. I sat in a room with no unknown magic, and other PC's carted in the items we found one at a time to determine if they were magic.
Felt really gamey, and everyone hated it.
We also really hated how long it took to identify the items. Even with Quick Identification, 10 minutes per item. It felt off to have to roll to identify when spending time with the item.
As for poison marked as healing:
ROGUE: I drink a healing potion, 5 points healing.
GM: Where did that potion come from.
ROGUE: My inventory.
GM: Was it a potion from the room with the ogre?
ROGUE: I don't know. I just have 6 healing potions listed in my...
This actually came up in my campaign recently, the parties slayer had one cursed potion and five normal ones. I just rolled a percentile every time he drank a potion to see if it was the cursed one.
Off topic slightly:
As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
I just tell them the room number whenever they fail to identify loot (due to time or bad rolls). Then they mark that down with the item, so i can look it up later. "Sword with an ornate hilt (B12)". The room numbers mean nothing to them, so it doesn't give away anything, but it makes tracking it down later much easier.
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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Off topic slightly:
I just tell them the room number whenever they fail to identify loot (due to time or bad rolls). Then they mark that down with the item, so i can look it up later. "Sword with an ornate hilt (B12)". The room numbers mean nothing to them, so it doesn't give away anything, but it makes tracking it down later much easier.As a GM, I found that unidentified items are a pain. When the party finally had time to sort the treasue, they asked me about the details, but their notes are terrible. What is the sword with an ornate hilt? Let me see your treasure list. Okay, the sword is listed between the gold idol and the seven blue potions, so let me page through the module until I spot the idol. The sword must be the +1 elven orc-bane longsword from the next room, B12.
I'm using Item Cards in my playtest game. I put the room code on the back, so I know which thing is which. If the players want to drink an unidentified potion, good luck to them! :-)
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How does these changes affect gameplay?
With the increased identification time it moves back towards the fantasy of it taking careful inspection to identify a weapon. So this is the group bringing the stack back to camp and wizard picks and chooses the highest priority items to inspect first. This attempts to make magic items feel more special, you don't identify items immediately after looting and will have a stash of gear with unknown properties (that a character may be tempted to use). This can add pacing to the game, explore then rest then explore, making camping feel like its own event instead of just getting your daily abilities back (it gives the group another reason to stop and rest, helping rationalize stopping the camp?).
With detect magic toned down it is no longer such tactical spell (detecting the location of an invisible ambusher hiding in a house). The first loot pile we found we immediately said the cleric used trial and error to find all the magic items with detect magic, so maybe some acknowledgement that picking out what vials are magic is going to be handwaved would help. Read aura and detect magic are not required to identify magic items as far as I can tell, so I'll try moving back to narrative descriptions of magic items to make the spell unnecessary for looting. (potions glow, weapons and wands have runes). This hopefully will make detect magic good for finding traps, and read aura good for a 'quick' identify (it's necromancy, it might heal you...).
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I would like to point out on the "how do I know it's a magical sword?" side of things: Runes are the only way for a weapon to be magical now. Seeing a rune sounds easy to me, and the GM can easily say "that's the same rune that gives the figbter's sword the Flaming ability."
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I think it is interesting for the bigger magic items, and I like the fantasy of magic things you find being mysterious and intriguing, and needing you to spend some time trying to figure out what it is, but I'll admit I'd like to be able to identify some things more quickly, mainly potions and other consumables. Maybe they could make it 10 minutes to identify all common consumable magic items (up to your level?)? It leaves room for some potions and such being very strange and mysterious, as well as all the big items.
When I GM, I was thinking of just straight up saying: "You find a bottle, and if you check it closely with your senses you can tell it's magical. It says: "Uncle Ben's Basic Cure All!" You know Ben is an apothecary in the city center. The bottle looks pretty disgusting though, caked in sewer detritus in a goblin cave. Are you sure it is what it says it is?"
That way they can take the potion if they dare, and add some verisimilitude to the world. Also gives me a place with a bit of story for them to go later, if they want to buy stuff. Also it can lead to fun moments.
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Am I reading this correctly that all magic items require 1 hour to identify now unless you take a feat? We didn't even bother identifying any of the magic items we found in the playtest because it didn't make sense to stop for an hour.
Overall, I feel like the time for Quick Identification should instead be the normal time, and Quick Identification should instead allow you to do it in 1 minute or less.
I'm perfectly fine with this.
Each time the party finds magical treasure, we retreat for the day while we identify it and come back fully rested the next morning.
/s