I have a player, who is playing arcanist, and I'm curious about the level of "optimization vs. reality" that is happening. Would you guys allow this if you were the GM?
So this arcanist has the quick study exploit. This allows him to swap spells as a full round action. However, quick study also states that you must have a Spellbook available for use during the quick study action. In order to do that, a player must pull a spell book. This presents 3 problems. First this eats a move action. second, this provokes an AOO, since spell books are not drawn as weapons. And third, spellbooks might need to be dropped or otherwise put away afterwards. That is either using more actions, or leaving valuables on the ground. So what this player proposes, in order to get rid of as many issues as possible, is to wander around with spell books in hand ready to go. When I pointed out that she has multiple spell books, he has decided to put them all on weapon cords, and then in order to not provoke, put them in a handy haversack. I stated that I do not understand how an item could be inside a handy haversack yet also have a cord extended out and attached to his body somewhere.
What do you think about all of that? I think it would be fine if the books were stored in real physical space with a real physical cord attached to his body, or if they were not corded, and were stored inside of a haversack's extradimensional space. What decisions would you make?
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So the arcanists hands are both tied to her backpack? Probably without much slack? With cords 2' long? That'd be...awkward, at best. The entangled condition, more likely.
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A couple of RAW issues:
1) A spellbook is not a weapon (usually; outside of certain archetypes, at least). Just like Quick Draw cannot be used to retrieve a non-weapon item ("Alchemical items, potions, scrolls, and wands cannot be drawn quickly using this feat"), weapon cords only allow retrieval of weapons.
2) The weapon cord has been errata'd to a move action instead of a swift action.
3) Any item in a handy haversack will take a move action to retrieve ("Retrieving any specific item from a haversack is a move action, but it does not provoke the attacks of opportunity that retrieving a stored item usually does"). Having weapon cord tied to it doesn't change this (magic only does what it says; nothing more, nothing less).
Now, there is a way to "pull out" a spellbook when needed for the Quick Study exploit without losing a round: a glove of storing. With the 20 lb weight limit, that can be a sizable tome.
There is the Book Lariat which is a "weapon cord for books" though it's substantially worse than a weapon cord, at best it lets you drag the book around with you.
If you want to be nice you could allow the player to have a variant of the Weapon Tattoo that can only be used to store a single book. When the book is out instead of showing a sheath it could show an empty bookshelf. Otherwise as Dragonchess has stated a glove of storing is probably the best option. The nice thing about the tattoo is that they have a separate set of slots. So, while the glove of storing eats up a glove slot the weapon tattoo doesn't. It only takes up a hand slot for tattoos.
Weapon Cords are completely out as addressed above, but I think you might be able to do that with Apport Object, at least the get-into-hand part. You can even have multiple instances of the spell active.
Thank you all so much. I think that my player and I we're envisioning the weapon cord similar to the book lariat. We expected it to be attached to a belt or something. And longer than 2 feet if needed. I was more skeptical about the "rope dangling out of an extradimensional space" aspect. But I guess the logistical issues you guys described are also relevant. You've come up with some great solutions, so I thank you for that. I've mentioned to them to the player, hopefully there's something good there.
Glove of storing is expensive, but the best. Hard to beat a free action and the book is still available if you end up in an extra dimensional space.
A pricey option, but one with flair, is to enchant the book as an intelligent item. The book, as a creature, gets an action it can use to force an ego check to be used. The arcanist can voluntarily fail the check to take the book out on its action rather than his.
Cheesy, but no worse than other action economy exploits.
Tenser's Floating Disk
Have your familiar ride around on it and hand you items.
Bonus points if you take the feat Disk Rider and wear silver.
I'd start with the easy thing first. While the character may well have multiple spell books, their are a finite number of spells that really desirable as an 'I really need this right now" spell. I would expect that a little bit of thought could reduce the needed spells to a single book (particularly a blessed book which is a good investment anyway.) This would greatly reduce the need for extra-dimensional shenanigans.
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I'd start with the easy thing first. While the character may well have multiple spell books, their are a finite number of spells that really desirable as an 'I really need this right now" spell. I would expect that a little bit of thought could reduce the needed spells to a single book (particularly a blessed book which is a good investment anyway.) This would greatly reduce the need for extra-dimensional shenanigans.
The arcanist must be able to reference her spellbook when using this ability
You will need bookmarks to rapidly find the right spells. With 1,000 pages and a few hundred spells in the blessed book, it would be difficult to have access to all the content.
The best system, I think, is to have booklets with a few spells in them (a normal spellbook has 100 pages, but there are examples with fewer pages) and a way to get them rapidly.Honestly, I think that the constraints of needing to reference the spellbook and the time requirement aren't in syntony with each other. Either you should be able to use the ability without the need to reference the book, maybe at a higher cost (similarly to the spell recall of the magus) or you need to reference the book, but then the ability should require a bit more time.
Currently, we have an ability that says that you need 1 full round but actually require one or more actions plus a full round.
BTW, accepting/taking an item from an unseen servant (or a friend) isn't a free action, so you end using actions for that, too.
I assume that finding the right page is just part of the supernatural ability.
Tenser's Floating Disk
Have your familiar ride around on it and hand you items.
Bonus points if you take the feat Disk Rider and wear silver.
The feat is Magic Trick.
Here is what you might look like: image
Also, there is Secluded Grimoire to offload a spellbook.
/cevah