Synesthesia and Non visual senses


Rules Discussion


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Hello Pathfinder 2 Comunity,
we recently had in our group a Discussion if Synesthesia is inteded to only coneal you if a cratures uses only visual (eyes) as precise sense or if it should effect all precise senses.
Rules in them selfe state:

Synesthesia wrote:
... The target's difficulty processing visual input makes all creatures and objects concealed from it. ...

In our case it would have been a spider with web sense where we were not sure about if it is now exlcuded from this effect or not.

Blinded Condtion seems to be a bit more clearer on this:
Blinded wrote:
You can't see. All normal terrain is difficult terrain to you. You can't detect anything using vision. You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to Perception checks. You are immune to visual effects. Blinded overrides dazzled.

Grettings

Humming Swordsman


Synesthesia has neither the visual nor the auditory trait.

It just has the mental trait.

If the target is immune to mental ( like oozes or golem ), then they are going to be immune to synesthesia.

Otherwise, they are not.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Creatures without vision don't have to worry about the concealment in this case.

Web sense (precise) would wholly bypass the need to roll a flat check against concealment, as it's intended to do.

Traits add additional, codified rules to effects; their absence doesn’t necessarily mean that rules can't apply to them.


HummingSwordsman wrote:

Hello Pathfinder 2 Comunity,

we recently had in our group a Discussion if Synesthesia is inteded to only coneal you if a cratures uses only visual (eyes) as precise sense or if it should effect all precise senses.
Rules in them selfe state:
Synesthesia wrote:
... The target's difficulty processing visual input makes all creatures and objects concealed from it. ...

In our case it would have been a spider with web sense where we were not sure about if it is now exlcuded from this effect or not.

Blinded Condtion seems to be a bit more clearer on this:
Blinded wrote:
You can't see. All normal terrain is difficult terrain to you. You can't detect anything using vision. You automatically critically fail Perception checks that require you to be able to see, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 status penalty to Perception checks. You are immune to visual effects. Blinded overrides dazzled.

Grettings

Humming Swordsman

It ultimately depends what your GM says, and really, that's the only answer that should matter for your table. This is really corner-case, so no one answer would be correct.

In my opinion, Synesthesia having the Mental trait means it, in essence, re-routes your mental faculties processing external stimuli and executing internal stimuli. This is why you appear far more clumsy than normal, have difficulty concentrating, can't pin-point creatures as accurately, and move slower than normal, as your body and brain are forced to adjust to these changes. It also explains why, when something is immune to Mental effects, it's not affected by this.

While the spell says it has difficulty processing visual input, this is because Sight is the most common Precise Sense in the game, and the rules go out of their way to make this an assumption in the Senses section of the book, meaning it most likely refers to vision as a baseline, rather than as a hard-coded rule. I would find it hard to believe that a creature whose senses are re-routed would not also have their other senses affected if it refers to being able to pin-point creatures, especially when the entire premise of the spell is "Your ability to interact with and process stimuli is all messed up."

Synesthesia wrote:
The target's senses are suddenly rewired in unexpected ways, causing them to process noises as bursts of color, smells as sounds, and so on.

Maybe having the spell affect other non-specified senses is too powerful for a 5th level spell (even though Foil Senses, which covers those things, was available 2 levels earlier), maybe the effect was written especially not to include them to make those senses more powerful and stand out. I'm not sure. But I'd much rather believe that a spell which re-routes senses isn't so lazy as to not include other non-standard senses than it is that it is incapable, given there isn't a higher level spell that does. (No, 9th level Synesthesia doesn't count.)

HumbleGamer wrote:

Synesthesia has neither the visual nor the auditory trait.

It just has the mental trait.

If the target is immune to mental ( like oozes or golem ), then they are going to be immune to synesthesia.

Otherwise, they are not.

The Visual and Auditory traits are there because a creature needs to be able to see or hear the effect in order for it to affect them. This is clarified by the Blinded condition mentioning that they are immune to "visual" effects, which I assume to mean effects with the Visual trait. Those traits being present on a spell would mean the target has to see or hear the effect to be affected by it, respectively, not that they affect one's vision or hearing.

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