I suppose since the rules for Activated Ammunition specifies magical ammunition:
If magic ammunition doesn’t have an Activate entry, it’s activated automatically when it’s launched.
that some GM somewhere is calling that to not be good enough.
Though I would be interested in hearing the argument against using that and what said GM is proposing using instead. I'm sure it would be fascinating.
Edit: Of course, if a type of alchemical ammunition does have an activation entry, it would also have to be activated according to those same rules for activated ammunition.
I do think you should be able to activate the ammunition while the ammunition is already loaded.
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The issue is it says magic and alchemical stuff is specifically not magic, so RAW that rule would not apply
All alchemical ammunition have an activation line and this means they must use what's in that line to activate them: Activate [one-action] Interact. It doesn't matter if they have their own section explaining them like magic ammo, as it doesn't have to. The RAW is in the entry for every alchemical ammo: the activation line. It's hard to argue that they made a mistake with the entry not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, not 5 times, not 6 times but they accidently and incorrectly put the activation line in wrong 7 times... I find that chance infinitesimally small and not worth considering.
On the other hand, regular gunslinger activation has the activate line, and we know from various sources that you don't need two actions to prepare and load a firearm.
So there's evidence that activate in this context doesn't mean the same thing.
If Interacting to reload and Interacting to activate alchemical ammunition could be done as the same action, that'd be awesome. I never even thought about that. I highly doubt that is intended, but still.
So yeah, this plus all other mentions of "magical ammunition" (e.g. that magical ammunition "disables" property runes for that Strike) could really use an update.
On the other hand, regular gunslinger activation has the activate line, and we know from various sources that you don't need two actions to prepare and load a firearm.
So there's evidence that activate in this context doesn't mean the same thing.
Well, if we're talking context, black powder is describing 2 items: ammo and also an explosive. I'll 100% agree the entry is dumb/stupid for doing it this way: I was one of the people trying to figure out how you made various ammos when the black powder is its own entry and it's a component of shots but then an dev come in and said they somehow are the same thing...
All that said, it's hard to point to it as an example when it could be an activation for the explosive part and not the ammo part: "A fuse for a dose can be created with a few twists of paper and causes the dose to explode the round after it's lit" could be the activation line without it impacting the ammo. It's hard to separate ammo from the pseudo-bomb and parse what pertains to each.
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On the other hand, regular gunslinger activation has the activate line, and we know from various sources that you don't need two actions to prepare and load a firearm.
So there's evidence that activate in this context doesn't mean the same thing.
Well, if we're talking context, black powder is describing 2 items: ammo and also an explosive. I'll 100% agree the entry is dumb/stupid for doing it this way: I was one of the people trying to figure out how you made various ammos when the black powder is its own entry and it's a component of shots but then an dev come in and said they somehow are the same thing...
All that said, it's hard to point to it as an example when it could be an activation for the explosive part and not the ammo part: "A fuse for a dose can be created with a few twists of paper and causes the dose to explode the round after it's lit" could be the activation line without it impacting the ammo. It's hard to separate ammo from the pseudo-bomb and parse what pertains to each.
Yeah, that entry is really unfortunate. They were obviously trying to put the rules for black powder in a central location, but the "use as explosive" and "use as ammunition" got muddled up in a way that is quite unhelpful.
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Alchemical ammunition isn't the same as magical ammunition, so I suppose we shouldn't look at those rules. So then we go a step back and look at the rules for consumables, which they both are (because they have that trait).
Some items produce their effects only when used properly in the moment. Others always offer the same benefits as their mundane counterparts when worn, but have magical abilities you can gain by further spending actions. Either case requires you to use the Activate an Item activity. Activating an Item works much like Casting a Spell, in that the activity takes a variable number of actions and can have different components depending on how you Activate the Item. This information appears in the item’s Activate entry.
If an item is used up when activated, as is the case for consumable items, its Activate entry appears toward the top of the stat block. For permanent items with activated abilities, the Activate entry is a paragraph in the description. Activations are not necessarily magical—for instance, drinking an alchemical elixir isn’t usually a magical effect.
All of the alchemical ammunition in GnG and TV has an activation entry exactly in the indicated part of the item description.
In almost all cases, it's a standard 1-action activation, but the Trustworthy Round (GNG 171) is a free action to activate. If it had really been the case that activating alchemical ammunition was supposed to be a freebee together with reloading or firing a ranged weapon, that wouldn't make sense: why print activation entries everywhere, and why make one of them free and the others not?
Now, there is indeed a bit of a gap with the rules for alchemical ammunition. The CRB rules only cover magical ammunition, not alchemical, and GnG doesn't really give details for alchemical ammunition. So there's quite a couple of open questions there:
- Do property runes apply?
- How long does alchemical ammunition stay activated for before it has to be fired? Magical ammunition allows you to activate, load, fire. Which means it can be used with various feats that let you make nonstandard strikes and such, because you don't have to interrupt the sequence of the feat to activate an item, you can pre-activate the item. Technically alchemical ammunition doesn't say you can.
However, if you look at the CRB text for magical ammunition, you could easily replace "magical" with "magical and alchemical" and you'd get reasonable answers to all those questions.
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The one thing we can be absolutely sure about is that alchemical ammunition generally needs to be activated, as their stat blocks state. This does not include regular rounds, the part of the black powder stat block is purely there for using rounds as a miniature explosive.
The things that are almost as certain are that the activation duration (until the end of your round) and effect of firing when not activate are the same. It'd be weird for those rules to be different.
It seems fairly clear that the rules for magical ammunition are intended to apply. There is only one thing I'm really unclear about, but only for balance reasons. Are you supposed to not apply the property runes for alchemical ammo as well? Because I often find that questionable on magical ammo already. If applied to alchemical ammo, it becomes functionally useless very quickly. There is no way I'm paying such a large sum of money (or class resources) and an action to do very slightly more damage or some other minor effect.
Your reload action also activating the ammo would be cool and would be throwing a much needed bone to reload weapons, but I highly doubt that is how it works, not without a rule explicitly stating it.
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There's one thing that I find unclear about activating ammunition: When do you do so?
The rules for activating items say that you need to touch them. Which is quite ok for arrows as they are generally easy to touch in their quiver.
But for other types of ammunition, it's less clear.
Can you activate an ammunition which is stored in an enclosed container? How can you activate a "loose shot packed in manually" (the description of firearms ammunition)? Can you activate the ammunition of a loaded weapon (for a crossbow bolt, I'd find that quite logical)?
It puzzles me. But it's a minor concern as I've still never seen anyone activating ammunition.
We posted at the exact same minute!
Great minds think alike!
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1) the designers got a bit crazy and made all these Activate entries for most/all alchemical ammunition for absolutely no reason (and also several mentions that only activated ammo works)
Or it just got copy/pasted from black powder and it made it through editing.
Its not actually that unreasonable considering they literally all use the same template.
The only problem with this stance is that it shows up in more than one book: they show up in guns and gears then Treasure Vault. I'd hope if it was in error in the first book, they'd change it for the next books. It'd require missing the error in editing, missing the error in print, missing the error in 2nd edit and missing the error in 2nd print.
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The general rules for activating an item would seem to allow the Interact to load ammo to overlap with the Interact of activating the ammo.
Where is that implied? I am not aware of any place in any rule for any action that allows two different actions to overlap. The closest I can come up with is subordinate actions, but that is always explicit.
Now, it is clear that basic firearm ammunition does not need a separate activation action. As others have already mentioned, the activate line in black powder is for when the black powder is used as an independent item like a black powder horn or black powder keg. So basically, a black powder dose has an activate action just like the horn and keg do, a black powder round does not.
Normally, a consumable activated item is consumed when you activate it, and takes effect immediately with that action. That doesn't make sense for ammunition, unless the activate action were Strike (like it is for bombs).Also of note - the general rules for activation via interact requires touching the item (a held item has to be wielded, but ammo isn't a held item). This poses an issue for ammunition in guns (but not crossbows) for obvious reasons.
My read of this is that you spend an action to activate the ammunition, which will boost it, and then spend an action to Strike with it. It’s similar to casting a spell, (which are often 2 actions). Here you are using two actions to have a much more effective strike with your normal weapon (if you hit).
In my mind, worrying about how ammunition in a firearm is being activated is way too much in the weeds. We play a game that abstracts a LOT of the real world. Why split hairs too much on something if it’s punishing some builds more than others (e.g., firearms vs. bows and crossbows)? Make something up so they’re not punished. Maybe they only need to quickly dump some powder into the barrel and the gunpowder and bullet already in ithe gun delivers the alchemical boost? Be creative with your storytelling. That’s the name of the game!
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I'm pretty sure that steelhead is saying that you do need to use an action separately on activating the activated alchemical ammunition. In addition to the action spent on loading the ammunition and firing the ammunition.
But it also sounds like steelhead (and I would agree) is allowing the action to activate the ammunition to work while the ammunition is already loaded in the firearm.
I think that is one possible use case for activated ammunition and a capacity weapon. You can use one chamber like a normal firearm and have the other chambers loaded with special ammunition. Then even if you have your first chamber loaded with regular ammunition, you can spend one action switching to a different chamber with special ammunition.
So one action to switch chambers, one action to activate the alchemical ammunition loaded there, and one action to fire it.
What you don't have to do is spend even more additional actions unloading your firearm in order to load special ammunition into it.
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It would just be too strong to let a character spend 5gp to get a +1 to tracking an enemy by scent if they didn't have to spend an extra action activating that round first. I'm so glad that Paizo just keeps making the action economy for guns even worse so baby's first bow fighter gets to keep being special by default.
By that logic, your Fighter would be shooting Spellstrike Ammunition at no action cost and add d12s of damage to each attack.
Magic Items are circumstantial. You want to get a +1 to tracking, then you can use the item to get that. It's no freebie, it's a choice, you pay for it in combat action. If you don't care about a +1 to tracking, then you don't buy such hyper specialized ammunition.
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By that logic, your Fighter would be shooting Spellstrike Ammunition at no action cost and add d12s of damage to each attack.
Magic Items are circumstantial. You want to get a +1 to tracking, then you can use the item to get that. It's no freebie, it's a choice, you pay for it in combat action. If you don't care about a +1 to tracking, then you don't buy such hyper specialized ammunition.
I know I was picking on the weakest of the bunch, I did it for comic effect. That said, I would have preferred that they balance the alchemical and magic ammunition around not needing any extra action. It's just a feels bad that an already action constrained weapon gets even more constrained when using what should be a cool new item.
I know I was picking on the weakest of the bunch, I did it for comic effect. That said, I would have preferred that they balance the alchemical and magic ammunition around not needing any extra action. It's just a feels bad that an already action constrained weapon gets even more constrained when using what should be a cool new item.
That would make Alchemical and Magical ammunition a must have if it was for free. I'd prefer stronger effects (a +1 to track is ridiculous, even when used on purpose) so you can justify the action cost.
Paizo is looking for a good position for magic items and hasn't found it yet. They are too strong in PF1, but in general too weak in PF2.
In my opinion, they got something with the Invested Trait. Generalizing it to all magical and alchemical items (including consumables somehow) would prevent the Christmas tree effect of PF1 without having too low effects like it's the case in PF2.
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That would make Alchemical and Magical ammunition a must have if it was for free.
There are already plenty of must-haves in the game even beyond the fundamental rules and Paizo keeps adding more with all these little class fixes disguised as items. People might not agree that firearms need a boost, but I could see a feat that allows using ammunition some item level below your current level without first activating it as something that could potentially work.
I'd prefer stronger effects (a +1 to track is ridiculous, even when used on purpose) so you can justify the action cost.
That's the other way to do it I just really dislike how Paizo's go to move for balance is tacking an action cost onto everything.
There are already plenty of must-haves in the game even beyond the fundamental rules
There was a discussion about that, and there was extremely few items (beyond Runes) that were considered must haves by everyone. So I disagree on that. Beyond Runes, it's mostly up to players.
People might not agree that firearms need a boost
I have no point of view on that, except that I don't think an item is the best way to solve the issue (even if I agree they did it for the Investigator, but it's the only one that got such boost).
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By that logic, your Fighter would be shooting Spellstrike Ammunition at no action cost and add d12s of damage to each attack.
Magic Items are circumstantial. You want to get a +1 to tracking, then you can use the item to get that. It's no freebie, it's a choice, you pay for it in combat action. If you don't care about a +1 to tracking, then you don't buy such hyper specialized ammunition.
That is not the same logic. Comparing a +1 to tracking a creature to Spellstrike Ammunition is simply not a valid comparison. That is like comparing a fighter with the Eldritch Archer dedication to a wizard using a bow.
Alchemical and magical ammunition are vastly different in terms of power. Even most magical ammo is already debatable due to its inherent cost in gold, actions and losing all property runes. Alchemical ammo is almost always worse and literally all of it is very situational.
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There are already plenty of must-haves in the game even beyond the fundamental rulesThere was a discussion about that, and there was extremely few items (beyond Runes) that were considered must haves by everyone. So I disagree on that. Beyond Runes, it's mostly up to players.
Coffee for the Investigator seems up there. The new scrolls attached to everything gear seem like a must-have for many spellcasters. Blazons and bandoliers are designated fixes for otherwise unsupported playstyles. The new stink bombs for the Alchemist will see play at pretty much every table. Ways to fly will always be incredibly popular.
We'd be kidding ourselves if we said there wasn't a strong meta for items and that there aren't some items that are just best in slot for optomizers.
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about alchemical ammunitions, what's the activation part?
I mean, if have a weapon loaded ( i decide to load it with a specific ammunition ), do I also have to pay to activate it before I shot?
resultin in
1 action to reload
1 action to activate
1 action to shotevery single round?
Yes. You also can't preload it into a weapon before a fight or fill a magazine with it because by RAW you need to activate it the turn you fire it.
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There are already plenty of must-haves in the game even beyond the fundamental rulesThere was a discussion about that, and there was extremely few items (beyond Runes) that were considered must haves by everyone. So I disagree on that. Beyond Runes, it's mostly up to players.
People might not agree that firearms need a boostI have no point of view on that, except that I don't think an item is the best way to solve the issue (even if I agree they did it for the Investigator, but it's the only one that got such boost).
I mean, there are plenty of essential items, though not for everyone. It usually depends on the class. The investigator, as you said, got its coffee, the alchemist gets what feels like a dozen, the gunslinger has customizations, heavy armor classes get full plate, ranged martial characters get the composite shortbow (debatably). There are probably more, but this is definitely a thing.
As far as firearms and reload weapons in general go, yeah, item bandaids are not the solution. They already have way too many of those you have to pay for.
Where does it say that, in order to be activeted, they have to be not loaded?
I can think of a weapon with 8 healing shots loaded, then every, round I activate the shot and make a ranged attack.
The Activate an Item entry has the following requirements:
"You can Activate an Item with the invested trait only if it’s invested by you. If the item requires you to Interact with it, you must be wielding it (if it’s a held item) or touching it with a free hand (if it’s another type of item)."
If the ammo is loaded inside a magazine, you have no way of touching it. Similarly, when using a two-handed weapon with repeating, you do not have a free hand, meaning you cannot activate it at all. Without the whole process taking 3 actions at least, which defeats the point of having a repeating weapon.
The rules around special ammunition in general are really janky.
Where does it say that, in order to be activeted, they have to be not loaded?
I can think of a weapon with 8 healing shots loaded, then every, round I activate the shot and make a ranged attack.
For magical ammunition it says:
"If magic ammunition doesn’t have an Activate entry, it’s activated automatically when it’s launched. Types of magic ammunition that have an Activate entry must be activated with additional actions before being used. Once you activate the ammunition, you must shoot it before the end of your turn. Otherwise, it deactivates (but it isn’t consumed) and you must activate it again before you can use it. If you shoot the ammunition without activating it first, it functions as non-magical ammunition and is still consumed.
The action required to activate the ammunition doesn’t alter how many actions it takes to reload. For example, you could activate a beacon shot arrow by touching it with 1 action, then draw and shoot the arrow as part of a Strike as normal. For a beacon shot bolt, you could activate it, load it into a crossbow, then shoot it, or load it into the crossbow, then activate it, and then shoot it."
Alchemical ammunition doesn't have the same broad-stroke ruling covering it, at least not that I can see, but does require an interact action to activate. Presumably, it wouldn't be possible to interact with ammunition already in a weapon, and preactivating the rounds, such as would be required to make a magazine of such ammo effective, would violate the idea that it costs an action in combat to get these bonus effects.
It seems just an assumptiom that you can't activate a loaded bullet ( I still see no rules about activating a loaded ammunition).
So, in terms of actions, I can have a magazine full of healing shots.
And I have to activate every single shot before making a strike.
Kinda pointless.
But since it's alchemical, and alchemical is linked to alchemist, and the alchemist class is worthless, everything makes sense.
I don't think that works by RAW but if your table is down for that reading of the rules it's a significant buff to already questionably useful items.
It seems just an assumptiom that you can't activate a loaded bullet ( I still see no rules about activating a loaded ammunition).
So, in terms of actions, I can have a magazine full of healing shots.
And I have to activate every single shot before making a strike.
Kinda pointless.
But since it's alchemical, and alchemical is linked to alchemist, and the alchemist class is worthless, everything makes sense.
As there are no more specific rules, you use the general ones I mentioned above. So it isn't an assumption, that is the actual RAW. Of course, that is also extremely stupid, so I don't think anyone plays this RAW.
That said, I've seen special ammo being used exactly once, anyway. That is purely anecdotal and Bola Shot might change that for a few people, but I don't think this is a very popular type of consumable in any case.
Coffee for the Investigator seems up there. The new scrolls attached to everything gear seem like a must-have for many spellcasters. Blazons and bandoliers are designated fixes for otherwise unsupported playstyles. The new stink bombs for the Alchemist will see play at pretty much every table. Ways to fly will always be incredibly popular.
We'd be kidding ourselves if we said there wasn't a strong meta for items and that there aren't some items that are just best in slot for optomizers.
Some of your items are build dependent and I disagree with some others. So you kind of made up my point: There's no agreement on how to equip characters. I don't think there's any meta on items besides the fundamental/elemental Runes and a few basic items (like a way to fly for melee martials).