The deafened condition states "If you perform an action with the auditory trait, you must succeed at a DC 5 flat check or the action is lost; attempt the check after spending the action but before any effects are applied.". Until recently, I assumed this applied to spells with verbal components, but I was made aware that such components do not actually add auditory. With that in mind, I have questions.
1) Am I still missing something in the rules? It's possible there's something I've still overlooked, and the deafened condition actually does affect spells with verbal components.
2) Does this mean the deafened condition is nigh useless in combat? Out of all the actions that could reasonably come up in a fight with some frequency the flat check seems to affect Demoralize and... that's about it? It doesn't affect spells with the traits (such as command) since while the effect of Command has the auditory trait, the Cast a Spell activity to cast it does not. It's also possible I'm missing something here, maybe there are common monster abilities with the trait. But to my current understanding, the condition is at best negligible and at worst it helps a combatant more than it hurts them (since it grants immunity to auditory effects).
3) Assuming my understanding of the condition is correct, is this an oversight? It seems a bit strange to me that the condition seemingly does so little when it's so intuitive that a deaf caster would have a hard time with their incantations. It's also a departure from how the condition worked in 1E, which doesn't mean it wasn't their intention to change how the condition worked but I figured I might as well bring it up.
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Well you can still deafen yourself on purpose to avoid being effected by Sirens, Banshees, spells, bullies and liars (imagine Cop Land the movie).
Apart from that I too find it strange that it does not interfere with spellcasting.
Well you can still deafen yourself on purpose to avoid being effected by Sirens, Banshees, spells, bullies and liars (imagine Cop Land the movie).
This is kinda the weirdest part to me. Deafening yourself seems to have more combat uses than deafening an enemy which is pretty unintuitive if true.
Deafened requires a DC 5 check for minion use p301
Good point. That's a legitimate, if somewhat situational use.
Auditory trait and verbal components are not the same. Just because an effect does not impact verbal components, does not mean it is useless for all spells. The rules say that casting any spell (or activity) with the Auditory trait are impacted by the deafened condition. Thus, Command and other spells with the Auditory trait would suffer the DC5 check (the rules are quite explicit about that). I think of it as meaning that Auditory trait layers on top of the normal components and requires a finer pronunciation :)
I do not believe this is the case. The Cast a Spell Activity does not mention getting the traits of the spell. Thus, the spell effect has those traits but the Cast a Spell activity does not.