Question on Occultist Transmutation Focus Power, "Philosopher's Touch"


Rules Questions


So I have a question about Philosopher's Touch. Specifically, what materials can I change my weapon to using this power? The power is to cause a weapon to 'gain the properties of a special material.' Limitations are given for materials that bypass DR- cold iron or silver are available immediately, and at 11th level you can give the properties of adamantine.

But the power is to gain the properties of a special material. So could I turn the weapon to, say, crystal, or Viridium, or some other special material? It does not say that silver, cold iron and adamantium are the only possibilities, just that, for DR purposes, adamantium is saved for later.

As written it looks like I could use any special material a weapon could be made from, but I want a sanity check before getting my DM's opinion on whether he'd allow it.

Philosopher's Touch (Su)
As a standard action, you can expend 1 point of mental focus and touch a weapon, causing it to gain the properties of a special material. You can cause the weapon to be treated as cold iron or silver for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction for 1 minute per occultist level you possess. At 4th level and every 4 levels thereafter, You can touch an additional weapon as part of using this ability to grant that weapon the same benefit (still expending only 1 point of mental focus). At 11th level, you can cause any weapon affected by this ability to act as if it were adamantine instead (but only for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction, not for overcoming hardness).

Liberty's Edge

You're having the good-old fashioned trouble parsing the Flavor Text from the Crunch.

What this does:
1st Level: You can cause the weapon to be treated as cold iron or silver for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction for 1 minute per occultist level you possess.
4th Level: As 1st Level but you can touch an additional weapon as part of using this ability to grant that weapon the same benefit (still expending only 1 point of mental focus). Every 4 Levels after 4 you may apply this to an additional Weapon.
11th Level: As 4th Level but the weapons act as if it were adamantine instead (but only for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction, not for overcoming hardness).

Sorry, it would be nice if it was more adaptable but as it stands it can only function based on the named Special Materials.


So flavor is "you can turn your weapon into various materials," and crunch is the following text explicating exactly what that means. That's sensible, if disappointing, but being fair, if they really did intent for all materials to be possible, I suspect they would have said so explicitly.


What would this do to ranged weapons like a crosbow? Would it transfer the material change to the ammo, or would it only change a single arrow/bolt/etc?


Ballistic101 wrote:
What would this do to ranged weapons like a crosbow? Would it transfer the material change to the ammo, or would it only change a single arrow/bolt/etc?

No it would only change the crossbow itself, not the ammunition (so it's probably useless).

If you're using ranged weapons I'd recommend buying some WEAPON BLANCHES. Silver and Cold Iron are cheap enough that you can probably have them when you start a new campaign with a beginner character. In this regard Ranged characters already have this option, so don't worry about spending a standard action on it.

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