Has there been a ruling on this? Are people completely immune to incorporeal undead if they have a personal force field up? Is it just the touch attack that they're immune to and everything else still has its normal effect such as ranged attacks of special attacks?
Has effect?
Ghost's Corrupting Touch Attack [Yes/No]
Witchfire's Witchflame Bolt [Yes/No]
Caller in Darkness's Wrap in Despair [Yes/No]
Radiactive Wind's Rending Wind [Yes/No]
In case anyone is curious why I've got all of these specific examples, I'm running Dead Suns 06 Empire of Bones and my players wanted to visit the 'Special Cargo' section of the ship so I have to come up with something since that's not addressed in the module. I decided their special cargo is every single type of Incorporeal Undead I can find sealed into metal pokeballs in individual containment fields, each marked with a symbol denoting what it is. Fire for Witchfire, Shadow for Caller in the Darkness. I figure the idea is the ship keeps these guys contained and then launches them at enemy ships/ground forces in combat. By this point, every player has a personal force field and I'm trying to figure out just how much of a threat these creatures will be if they start opening pokeballs.
Has there been a ruling on this? Are people completely immune to incorporeal undead if they have a personal force field up? Is it just the touch attack that they're immune to and everything else still has its normal effect such as ranged attacks of special attacks?
Has effect?
Ghost's Corrupting Touch Attack [Yes/No]
Witchfire's Witchflame Bolt [Yes/No]
Caller in Darkness's Wrap in Despair [Yes/No]
Radiactive Wind's Rending Wind [Yes/No]In case anyone is curious why I've got all of these specific examples, I'm running Dead Suns 06 Empire of Bones and my players wanted to visit the 'Special Cargo' section of the ship so I have to come up with something since that's not addressed in the module. I decided their special cargo is every single type of Incorporeal Undead I can find sealed into metal pokeballs in individual containment fields, each marked with a symbol denoting what it is. Fire for Witchfire, Shadow for Caller in the Darkness. I figure the idea is the ship keeps these guys contained and then launches them at enemy ships/ground forces in combat. By this point, every player has a personal force field and I'm trying to figure out just how much of a threat these creatures will be if they start opening pokeballs.
I think the armor would only help with your PC's AC, in my opinion the ship should have built-in safety features making that a little more difficult then just randomly picking it up, if I was the person that put all of them in the Pokeballs I would also leave a bunch of ghost killer ammunition packs around, to increase the safety of my goals. I Love this idea by the way!
I'm not even so sure about that being the way they wrote them. The incorporeal entry says that incorporeal creatures can move through objects, gives rules for how to handle incorporeal creatures that are in objects, and then gives the important statement that they cannot pass through force effects.
Corporeal creatures cannot pass through walls. That doesn't mean corporeal creatures can't attack walls to try to bring them down and then be able to get through. So, do we have any reason to be so sure that an incorporeal creature can't try to break down a wall of force that they couldn't float through?
Now, if an incorporeal creature had an attack that requires touching the victim, and that only affects living creatures, like the ghost's corrupting touch, it seems reasonable to reach the force field immunity conclusion for that attack. If either of those two conditions is not met, though, there should still be some threat.
For the specific ones listed in the OP, I can't see any reason why the witchflame bolts couldn't be used against someone with a personal forcefield, though I would expect corrupting touch not to work.
And of course any of them would work either before the character had a chance to activate their force field, or after its charges ran out.
There is a Starfinder Society adventure that has a forcefield trapping an incorporeal undead that had possessed a body, though the NPC that pulled it off had to attach her field to a starship battery. Dead Suns 1 also has a jury-rigged shield prevent a creature that can walk through walls from getting into her hiding place.
I would say that an undead creature can't pass through a character with a forcefield, say with a possession attack, but any normal physical attack from an incorporeal creature that could affect a physical creature could damage a forcefield as normal.
Basically make it a plot-dependent ability of forcefields, but not a silver bullet for dealing with ghosts.
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I am sure that this is 100% intentional given that the very first AP features JUST this situation.
Personal Force Shield/Fields are absolutely supposed to work in this manner, as far as wheather they are able to damage the shield... I don't know, I'm tempted to give a "Hard No" because otherwise the protection offered by the Shield is pointless to a fault.
This seems like an intentional design decision so that 1 incorporeal creature cannot simply solo LITERALLY ANY encounter in the game by phasing into some reactor core, destroying it, and then floating away unharmed.
I did think of that example... but it's more of an example of plot armor than anything. It's a corporeal creature most of the time, and more than strong enough to bash past that personal force field with its totally corporeal attacks.
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Well an attack that only damages living creatures can't really damage a forcefield, because a forcefield isn't a living creature.
That's different from a corporeal creature taking a hammer to a wall. Hammers aren't restricted to hurting living creatures. If the corporeal creature was using an antibiological weapon, then yeah, they couldn't hack through that wall.
So look at the incorporeal creature's attack. A Pathfinder Witchfire does fire damage - that can affect a forecefield. A ghost's corrupting touch does magical aging. That doesn't do anything to a forcefield.
Undead have all the time in the world. I imagine that if they couldn't immediately hurt you, they might try to fin a way to disable or trap you until your batteries run out.
A ghost might spook or possess a cave critter to get it to cause a cave-in, trapping you in its tomb, for example.