The Component Substitutions Sidebar on page 303 of the CRB2e says that...
"If you’re a sorcerer Casting a Spell from the magical tradition that matches your bloodline, you can draw on the magic within your blood to replace any material component with a somatic component."
If you are casting a spell with both material and somatic components, such as black tentacles, would you be unable to cast the spell, would the somatic components combine into a single action, or would you have two somatic actions for the spell?
You would have 2 somatic actions.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
It's worth noting that in the final version of the game, there's no such thing as a "somatic action" (or any other type of component action.) The number of components generally correlates with the number of actions that the spell takes to cast, but the rules no longer state that you spend one action on each component or anything like that, the way that they did in the playtest.
Cast a Spell is now simply an activity that takes a specified number of actions that depends on the spell being cast and which has a set of traits and requirements that come from its components. No matter what happens to the components of a spell, it always takes the specified number of actions unless something else specifies that it doesn't. Similarly, something like Quickened Casting doesn't change the spell's components even though it reduces the number of required actions. As another example, Magic Missile always has a somatic component and a verbal component regardless of whether one, two, or three actions are spent to cast it.
In other words, you don't really have "two somatic actions" for the spell. You're spending two actions on the Casting a Spell activity, and because the spell has a somatic component, it has the Manipulate trait and requires you to be able to gesture freely. This distinction matters because there are things like Silent Spell that outright remove a component, but which do not change the number of actions required to use the Cast a Spell activity.