I am curious what people think about veil of privacy as a spell, and especially why a spell like this would last 8 hours instead of until the next time you prepare spells?
Anti-scrying measures can be powerful, and powerfully annoying in certain campaigns, or as a player, but it feels a little weird to have an 8 hour duration spell. Like, if it important to the plot that an NPC is memorizing 3 copies of this spell a day, at ranks high enough to make overcoming it a challenge, a GM can arbitrarily decide that easily enough, but it becomes a massive drain on an adventuring party to do this.
Lasting only 8 hours does have the consequence of opening up a weird cat and mouse game of catching the caster sleeping, but it would require a lot of time management for GMs to decide when various NPCs using this are going to be casting it in advance to avoid situations where players will not just end up feeling like it is being used against them by the GM when it is a plot based convenience.
Meanwhile, if the PCs are playing in a campaign where they are trying to avoid detection from a powerful caster, it becomes pretty useless as a spell, because the caster could just keep on switching up when they are being scried on.
Overall, the 8 hour duration feels like a weird legacy hold over to me, that I would probably change to “until the next time you reprepare spells,” but am I missing something? Is there a good reason this is supposed to be a work shift protection that can’t be relied upon as your all day protection?
I am curious what people think about veil of privacy as a spell, and especially why a spell like this would last 8 hours instead of until the next time you prepare spells?
I feel that it didn't get included in the 3rd CRB printing errata regarding long duration spells because it has an 8 hour duration instead of a 24 hour duration and so didn't show up in the list of spells when the devs were searching for the spells that needed updated.
With it not lasting long-term (until next daily preparations), I haven't found a good use for this spell.
Probably because of Mindblank (with new name) at rank 8 doing the same thing at that longer duration. Mindblank also gets that +4?status to mental saves, but maybe they thought more was needed to differentiate the two.
Nondetection in PF1 was hours/level while MB was 24 hours, so a simple conversion would lead you to 8 hours and until preparations.
Nondetection in PF1 was hours/level while MB was 24 hours, so a simple conversion would lead you to 8 hours and until preparations.
Good find. I would agree with that.
Though that also leads me to think that this should instead be one spell with the level 3 version also having a duration of 'until next daily preparations', and the Heightened 8 version adding the +4 bonus and +1 effective Rank to counteract checks.
Some other differences that are less important are the casting time and range of the spell. For a spell that is probably going to be cast during daily preparations, the difference between those seem pretty trivial.
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Hidden Mind also counteracts as if it was one rank higher, making it a pretty powerful total counter to magical detection, revelation and scrying, as well as giving that +4 bonus, so it is still a vastly better spell, but I guess the the Veil of privacy is more like the "I am about to go attend a secret meeting" spell that you cast before you go to the meeting, and it will last until you get back. I guess it has its place, but I agree that it does feel like a collection of spells could have been grouped together with heightening effects.
Hidden Mind also counteracts as if it was one rank higher, making it a pretty powerful total counter to magical detection, revelation and scrying, as well as giving that +4 bonus, so it is still a vastly better spell, but I guess the the Veil of privacy is more like the "I am about to go attend a secret meeting" spell that you cast before you go to the meeting, and it will last until you get back. I guess it has its place, but I agree that it does feel like a collection of spells could have been grouped together with heightening effects.
Agreed on both counts.
I kinda feel that way about a whole bunch of pathfinder (1e and 2e) options sadly, I love pf2e... but so many spells seem to be printed to give more spells.
I was happy to see some spells getting compressed in the remaster... but not enough imo.
That said I also have a friend and GM who prefers class spell lists to traditions and thinks spells and feats should be broken into as many unique variants as possible. So I know I do not speak for everyone.