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Religion is about spiritual forces, like gods, angels, demons and souls. Works off of wisdom; much of that has to do with inner faith and intuition, not just analytical understanding and school learning.Nature is more about the living and elemental forces in the natural world. It works off of Wisdom because it's about instinct and feeling a deep inner bond with the world around us.
I mean I sort of get this but I still think it's weird to say that understanding animal anatomy or being able to categorize religious rituals and classify demons are things based on 'instinct' or 'intuition.'
I mean it is what it is but it still bugs me.
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I feel like any use of Recall Knowledge should be able to run on Intelligence rather than the given skill's original ability. This is already a thing for niche RK checks on physical skills like Acrobatics, I'm not sure why it isn't for the applicable Wisdom or Charisma skills. :o
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I feel like any use of Recall Knowledge should be able to run on Intelligence rather than the given skill's original ability. This is already a thing for niche RK checks on physical skills like Acrobatics, I'm not sure why it isn't for the applicable Wisdom or Charisma skills. :o
I sometimes switch up what attribute recalling knowledge is for. GMs are free to do it, but there are just not many guidelines for it.
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People keep saying Arcane is about study and experimenting. But the Wizard has little to any actual study or experimenting. The thesis doesn't convey that at all, and the schools definitely don't.
The issue I've always had with this research and experimentation concept as regards magic, since way before Pathfinder, was that when the party runs into a 1000 year old lich, his magic missiles and fireballs do exactly the same thing as the shiny new one your PC learned 2 levels ago.
Did every spell that currently exists not improve *at all* over the last 1000 years? Where's all this 'spell research' happening, if those Runelords are waking up from centuries of slumber with all the upgrades and enhancements I thought were the result of all the latest discoveries by the Academae and Arcanamirium and fresh out of Nex?
I ran a game ages ago, again, pre-Pathfinder, where the party faced an ancient lich who cast magic missiles that had to roll to hit, and whose fireball took a full-round to cast and shape (and exploded in his face if he was hit during the casting). Cutting age magic, in his day and age! He was pissed that the party's magic was so much more developed!
His spellbook was twice as valuable for it's insights to 'old magic' and as a historical bit of lore (it certainly sold as such to the kingdom's wizards guild) than for just the value of the spells in it, since those spells were almost all older and less effective than the versions the party already had.
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People keep saying Arcane is about study and experimenting. But the Wizard has little to any actual study or experimenting. The thesis doesn't convey that at all, and the schools definitely don't.The issue I've always had with this research and experimentation concept as regards magic, since way before Pathfinder, was that when the party runs into a 1000 year old lich, his magic missiles and fireballs do exactly the same thing as the shiny new one your PC learned 2 levels ago.
Did every spell that currently exists not improve *at all* over the last 1000 years? Where's all this 'spell research' happening, if those Runelords are waking up from centuries of slumber with all the upgrades and enhancements I thought were the result of all the latest discoveries by the Academae and Arcanamirium and fresh out of Nex?
I ran a game ages ago, again, pre-Pathfinder, where the party faced an ancient lich who cast magic missiles that had to roll to hit, and whose fireball took a full-round to cast and shape (and exploded in his face if he was hit during the casting). Cutting age magic, in his day and age! He was pissed that the party's magic was so much more developed!
His spellbook was twice as valuable for it's insights to 'old magic' and as a historical bit of lore (it certainly sold as such to the kingdom's wizards guild) than for just the value of the spells in it, since those spells were almost all older and less effective than the versions the party already had.
That's really cool. That's the kind of arcane development I want in setting
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I feel like any use of Recall Knowledge should be able to run on Intelligence rather than the given skill's original ability. This is already a thing for niche RK checks on physical skills like Acrobatics, I'm not sure why it isn't for the applicable Wisdom or Charisma skills. :o
It's because it'd be kinda dumb for Clerics to be bad at identifying religious symbols.
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I'm actually not sure I agree with that. Clerics should know a lot about their own religious practices, but nothing about the profession necessarily indicates they should be general theological scholars.
It makes more sense to me that, say, an investigator might know more about the religious iconography and rituals of various shady sects and cults than an Iroran priest who lives in a monastery. Much in the same way that you wouldn't expected a Catholic priest to be an expert on Sikhism.
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The Catholic priest is likely an expert on Sikhism if it is a recognizable fact that both faiths are real and their deities interact regularly (impossible since both faiths believe in One True God but you get the idea). If religion is int based then you end up with Clerics who have a pretty reasonable chance at failing checks related to their own faith, a frequent occurrence in PF1.
Pathfinder assumes general knowledge of a subject, the idea of being expert in something specific is Lore. Clerics are trained in Religion because all Clerics are assumed to have general knowledge of the wider pantheon of gods that meddle in Golarion affairs; it's less suspect than a Ranger who's just a woodland huntsman necessarily also being an expert on identifying fey.
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Highlighting positive change in the development of arcane spells over the course of history could be really cool, and so could giving Wizards the ability to make experimental upgrades to the spells they learn. A Wizard's Thesis represents this to a slight extent, but all of them are more about the way magic is practiced than the magic itself. (Of course, it could also be a slight nightmare to come up with experimental upgrades that wouldn't result in some niche overpowered combo somewhere...unless the upgrades were to specific spells, like little feat/feature versions of speciality wands. Naturally, there'd probably need to be some significant trade-offs in any case.)
I feel like any use of Recall Knowledge should be able to run on Intelligence rather than the given skill's original ability. This is already a thing for niche RK checks on physical skills like Acrobatics, I'm not sure why it isn't for the applicable Wisdom or Charisma skills. :oIt's because it'd be kinda dumb for Clerics to be bad at identifying religious symbols.
Please note that I said "should be able to", not "must". As in, Recall Knowledge on Nature or Medicine or Religion could use either Wisdom or Intelligence, Recall Knowledge on Performance could be Charisma or Intelligence.
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Btw Razmir straight up does not work well as a Wizard right now. His entire stick was "I am a high level wizard pretending to be a god". But most of the spells that would allow a Wizard to do that are gone or in the Occult/Primal list. Divination being the #1 spells of use for a "god".
Even in PF1, with the Runelords and Nex and Geb and Tar-Baphon and Aroden and Old-Mage Jatembe being wizards, I felt like Razmir should totally have been a sorcerer instead.
The sorcerer has always felt like an afterthought in the setting, already dripping with high level wizards, so having at least one of the 'big name' spellcasters being one would help, I think.
Plus the notion of him having a high Charisma kinda fits with the cult angle, and if he had the Destined bloodline (or the Celestial one), it would also flow pretty well.
The idea of wizards approaching magic with a scientific progress mindset only works in game if every wizard is very self serving and not interested in raising a general understanding of magic and its applications forward. I can believe that is true of many wizards, but the Magaambya academy feels exactly opposite of that. I guess that hycalon magic is a new progression in magic, which is pretty cool. I hope we see more of stuff like it in the secrets of magic book and then a lot more in the strength of thousands AP. Maybe I am just getting impatient for how awesome that AP mis going to be.
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I mean, I think the problem with Sorcerers is ultimately the same problem with Wizards in that they don't really have a strong mechanical backing for their flavor.
Granted PF2 Sorcerers are better than PF1 Sorcerers in this regard, seeing how the latter were just variant wizards.
There's no real fix though, this has been a problem for years. D&D magic is too sterile, too logical and too static to really encapsulate any of the ideas that a lot of magical flavor would imply... but people like the mechanics and like the flavor on their own enough they don't really change.
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People keep saying Arcane is about study and experimenting. But the Wizard has little to any actual study or experimenting. The thesis doesn't convey that at all, and the schools definitely don't.The issue I've always had with this research and experimentation concept as regards magic, since way before Pathfinder, was that when the party runs into a 1000 year old lich, his magic missiles and fireballs do exactly the same thing as the shiny new one your PC learned 2 levels ago.
Did every spell that currently exists not improve *at all* over the last 1000 years? Where's all this 'spell research' happening, if those Runelords are waking up from centuries of slumber with all the upgrades and enhancements I thought were the result of all the latest discoveries by the Academae and Arcanamirium and fresh out of Nex?
I ran a game ages ago, again, pre-Pathfinder, where the party faced an ancient lich who cast magic missiles that had to roll to hit, and whose fireball took a full-round to cast and shape (and exploded in his face if he was hit during the casting). Cutting age magic, in his day and age! He was pissed that the party's magic was so much more developed!
His spellbook was twice as valuable for it's insights to 'old magic' and as a historical bit of lore (it certainly sold as such to the kingdom's wizards guild) than for just the value of the spells in it, since those spells were almost all older and less effective than the versions the party already had.
I really like that twist! Also really solves the problem of why people keep studying magic when it's literally been solved, but I'd like to propose my vision:
Magic isn't about innovation or improvement, but about application. People know how to cast a Fireball or a Heal spell, like you know can know the number and arrangement of molecules in an object. It's static, you can't simply alter it. Shaving off molecules will fundamentally alter the makeup of the object, and altering a spell will alter how the spell functions. Spells are already as efficient as can be, there are no "cheat codes" to magic (apart from metamagic, but there's usually a cost associated with that). You can't optimise it like you can optimise a machine. Technology can improve to grow smaller, faster, and more efficient, but magic is like a fundamental building block of the universe. It works as reliably as gravity and any other natural force (input A generates output B). You can't alter gravity, and the same goes for magic: we know the formula for different spells and how to bruteforce reality into bending to our will, but discovering new applications by combining known quantities in new ways is what magical research is all about.
In the example of your old Lich, he might have formula and/or spells that are lost to modern civilisation, and vice versa we might have come up with applications that he's never thought of. Many "ancient civilisations" have magic that's unheard of for characters in-game, but could easily be reverse-engineered by the players. And I bet once the characters in-game do, the magic will become accessible to them as well. There's tons of examples of spells and rituals in APs and modules and such that do amazing things that aren't in the rulebook, because they're derivatives of existing magic. A Burning Hands is a short burst of magical flame, but you can for example sustain it to have a magical flamethrower. Or you "invent" a new spell by combining two existing ones: Aqueous Orb and Ray of Frost (both from PF1) to create Instant Snowman or something.
TL;DR: magic can't be "improved," but it can be expanded.