Dealing with enemies casting spells without a list of PC's spells


Advice


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I'm pretty sure that if there was ever a game that's crying out fon an electronic GM assistant, PF2e is it, so I hope that Lone Wolf can pull their fingers out.

Per page 305, anyone can always identify any spell they have in their repertoire. This means that if an enemy casts a spell, whether or not the GM should tell the PCs what it is will be determined by if any PC knows that spell or not. Since the GM cannot ask "does anyone know X...?" without giving away what the spell is, presumably this means the GM has to keep a list of all the spells the PCs know. Is there any better way around this?


You could ask players what spells of level X they know when you cast to narrow it down, and only ask players of applicable traditions to narrow it down further.

Scarab Sages

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I recommend doing it like so:

GM: "The enemy wizard casts fireball. Everyone make a basic reflex save or take *rolls* 15 damage. If anyone has Fireball in their repertoire you know he just cast fireball. Otherwise all you know is that he just made a big ball of fire appear unless you use your reaction to make DC X Arcana check."


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hyphz wrote:

I'm pretty sure that if there was ever a game that's crying out fon an electronic GM assistant, PF2e is it, so I hope that Lone Wolf can pull their fingers out.

Per page 305, anyone can always identify any spell they have in their repertoire. This means that if an enemy casts a spell, whether or not the GM should tell the PCs what it is will be determined by if any PC knows that spell or not. Since the GM cannot ask "does anyone know X...?" without giving away what the spell is, presumably this means the GM has to keep a list of all the spells the PCs know. Is there any better way around this?

I just tell the players what the enemy is casting, since at that point there isn't anything they can do about it. If someone has a reaction, then we stop and determine if the character knows what was cast.


This can work with Fireball. It doesn't work with illusions. Thanks to Rakshasas not having any feats to hide their casting it makes a massive difference to them if their specific spells are detected or not (since they can't hide the fact that a spell is being cast, their only real strategy is to lie about what spell they are casting)

Sovereign Court

You could narrow it down a bit by only bothering to keep track of those spells that either have no visible effect, or a misleading effect.

As Bartram pointed out, you don't really need to make a fuss about identifying Fireball. You only need to know if your players know any of your monster's illusion spells that could fake a Fireball.

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