| 2 people marked this as FAQ candidate. |
Hey, so I've been reviewing the Technomancer very in-depth recently and was wondering about the wording of some features.
Magic Hack says: "When casting a spell, you can apply no more than one magic hack that affects the attributes of a spell (such as distant spell or extended spell)." Key word attributes.
Selective Targeting says: "When you cast an instantaneous spell with an area effect, you can shape the spell so it doesn’t affect one of your allies. Choose one 5-foot square within the spell’s area to be unaffected by the spell."
So, after searching a bit, it seems like people refer to the CRB p333 as the "attributes" of a spell, but doesn't that mean Selective Targeting technically doesn't apply, since it doesn't change the attribute of the spell, it still has the exact same area (30-foot burst doesn't change into a 25-foot burst), you just choose a square to not be affected. Additionally, Selective Targeting is the only one among other hacks like Harmful SPELLs, Subtle SPELLs, Debug SPELL, Distant SPELL, Extended SPELL etc. that doesn't have "spell" in the name, though it may be just a coincidence.
Curious to hear what you think!
Baring an exact game definition of attributes to use, plain english would apply it to everything about the spell.
Even limiting it to an inferred list, you have altered the area from a 30 foot boom to a 30 foot BOOM minus one square.
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This came up recently, and I am inclined to agree with Yoonki. It came up with regards to Arcing Surge, and if you can use Selective Targeting in conjunction with Energy Alteration. Like Yoonki says, none of the "attributes" of the spell have changed from the Selective Targeting. Its Range is still 120 ft., and its Area is still a line-shaped burst; one part of the line-shaped burst Area in the 120 ft Range is just unaffected, is all.
...granted, it's a pretty generous interpretation that relies on being able to accept that a 5 ft square can be in the spell's area but unaffected by the spell. Feels like a CS problem to me: is that 5 ft square a value = 0 or a value = NULL :D In the first case, the square is targeting by the spell and the effect is "no effect," and in the second case the square is not targeted by the spell. This is getting pretty deep into weeds and the semantics, I guess.
Further musings: what about if you did the RP-boosted version of Energy Alteration, which doesn't change the casting time? In that case, arguably, no spell "attribute" has changed. One could further argue, though, that changing the spell's damage type should change it's spell school, from evocation (electricity) to evocation (whatever else), which mean a "spell attribute" did change. Somehow Energy Alteration doesn't have that school-change verbiage, though? (Unless it's implied?)
Anyways. Lots of grey area. Metamagic, man.