It’s meant to be reasonably hard fantasy, not necessarily conformant to Pathfinder canon because that doesn’t describe a world in near-equilibrium relative to the smart people running around with +6 headbands of vast intelligence (that do exist in-universe), but once the characters see something it ought to go on being true. Above all it’s hard decision theory.
Well… but in that case there’s still a problem: as I noted elsethread, the first use of message in the story (when Keltham first learns to cast it) does actually seem to be correct as per Pathfinder RAW. Uses later in the story are inconsistent with that one.
I certainly wouldn’t think to hold Project Lawful to a standard of conformance to Golarion setting canon; that would be somewhat silly, from a literary standpoint. But as far as mechanics go, if you’re trying to do “hard fantasy”, then, yeah, it does seem like there are flaws. The message thing is one; another is protection from [chaos/evil/good/law]. (Does the spell’s protection against mental control work only against mental attacks made by opponents of the targeted alignment, or all opponents? In Pathfinder it’s the former, and that is how it’s described in the currently most recent section of story, but earlier it is described in the latter way. I suspect this might be a case of one of the authors getting the 3.5 and PF versions of the spell mixed up, as its anti-mental-attack functionality was changed in PF to function in the alignment-limited way.) There’s more, but I haven’t been keeping meticulous track; those two inconsistencies are just the ones that jumped out at me.
More broadly, while I am not quite sure what you mean by “hard fantasy” (I can make the obvious inference from context and by analogy to “hard sf”, of course, but mapping that concept to fantasy, with magic and so on, seems non-trivial, though not impossible), I do think that aside from any questions of internal inconsistency, changes like “buffing” message in the way that you did are problematic. As I say upthread, this is a noticeable boost to the power of (at least) low-level spellcasters, relative to the PF RAW baseline. A world such as described in the story, and where anyone who can cast a cantrip effectively has at-will, robust, undetectable-by-bystanders telepathic communication with nearby targets of their choice, should look noticeably different from a world where all else is equal but message merely works the way that it does in Pathfinder. It does not seem to me that the world of the story is worked out with such a capability in mind from the start (which makes sense if this change was made accidentally midway through).
(And then, aside from all of this, there is one deviation from the Pathfinder rules that is so big and so bizarre that I genuinely can’t tell whether it’s deliberate or… some sort of very, very odd house rule / practice that I’ve never heard of… or what. But it’s not an inconsistency, at any rate…)
So the main thing I missed about Message was the chance of it being overheard. Most of what you are reading as ‘pseudo-telepathic’ communication is usually a character having their mind read by Security running Detect Thoughts, and then those thoughts being relayed to others via Security using Message, rather than by characters Messaging each other.
I remember checking Protection pretty carefully at the time and I think at the time it blocked against all the mental control, not just mental control originating from the targeted alignment. Possibly a rules change to PF2? But if not, Keltham is still running Enchantment Foil at the time.
There’s multiple big deviations from RAW; the main one I can think of that I homebrewed for this is ‘oracles go with gods and a god can have at most one oracle’. If that’s not what you’re referring to then I don’t know what you’re so coyly hinting about, and that kind of coy hinting is not something I find particularly pleasant.
So the main thing I missed about Message was the chance of it being overheard. Most of what you are reading as ‘pseudo-telepathic’ communication is usually a character having their mind read by Security running Detect Thoughts, and then those thoughts being relayed to others via Security using Message, rather than by characters Messaging each other.
Yes, there is definitely some of that, but also cases where that can’t plausibly be happening. (Also, in cases where it is happening, there ought to be a noticeable communications lag, e.g.: think message → Security reads via detect thoughts → Security transmits to recipient via message. In some cases there are intervening walls, etc.—i.e. the characters are in different rooms—so there would then be the additional step “Security transmits to another Security via message”, which second Security then transmits to recipient.)
I remember checking Protection pretty carefully at the time and I think at the time it blocked against all the mental control, not just mental control originating from the targeted alignment. Possibly a rules change to PF2?
Indeed not. All functions of protection from [alignment] are alignment-limited in PF1, and always have been. (You can verify this, if you’re so inclined, by checking early printings [in PDF] of the Core Rulebook; if you don’t have access to such, feel free to PM me, and we can rectify that. But probably this is not important enough to go to any such lengths.) My best guess remains that you accidentally happened to look at the 3.5 version of the spell text.
But if not, Keltham is still running Enchantment Foil at the time.
True enough. (Of course, enchantment foil is only a +4 bonus to the save, not immunity… but there’s certainly no reason not to assume that that +4 bonus did happen to make the difference between success and failure, on that particular save.)
There’s multiple big deviations from RAW; the main one I can think of that I homebrewed for this is ‘oracles go with gods and a god can have at most one oracle’.
Ah, I don’t think I’d consider that a deviation from RAW, as such. It’s true that this is not at all Golarion canon, but I don’t think there’s actually any rules that forbid this from being the case in a setting, or even in Golarion as such. (I don’t think it’s a particularly consequential change from setting canon, either.)
If that’s not what you’re referring to then I don’t know what you’re so coyly hinting about, and that kind of coy hinting is not something I find particularly pleasant.
Apologies; it wasn’t my intent to “coyly hint”, only to avoid cluttering up the comment thread with what might not be of interest to you.
What I was referring to was the idea that gods can, e.g, bestow seven cleric levels on someone, or four oracle levels on someone else, etc., i.e. that a god (in Golarion) can decide to just give a mortal a bunch of character levels. This is definitely not how things work in Pathfinder, where one gains character levels when one gains experience points, and where it’s not clear what it even means for someone to spontaneously become, e.g., a 7th-level cleric without “leveling up” in the usual “acquire XP, gain character levels” way. (What is Ione’s base attack bonus, for example, or her base save bonuses? How many feats does she have, how many skill points? Do these questions have any meaning, even? It seems like they should, given the other references to [very close in-world analogues of] game mechanics, but who knows… Is there a connection between character level, class level, level-dependent benefits such as BAB/BSB/feats/skill points, or should we assume that there’s no such connection? If there is a connection and it’s the usual one, then is there consequently no connection between these numbers and what they normally represent, i.e. improvement of ability via training and practice? If a 16th-level cleric cast blasphemy and Ione were caught in the area of effect, would she be killed, or only paralyzed? etc., etc.)
(Of course, one could make the argument that as the gods are not given game-mechanical definitions in Pathfinder, we can therefore ascribe any powers we like to them without violating any rules, but then it’s not clear why we should expect any kind of predictable world at all.)
As I said, this isn’t an inconsistency, as such (at least, not definitely one, though it does seem hard to square with the other limitations that the gods are described as having with respect to their involved in the mortal world—but I wouldn’t lean too hard on that impression), it’s just… very, very strange, for multiple reasons. I would have to give more thought than I thus far have, to all the setting implications of this apparent divine capability. (Any potential conclusions I might draw would probably also be underdetermined by what we’ve seen in the story so far.) At the very least, I am fairly confident that Golarion as it is described in canon is built with the assumption that this is not a thing that the gods can do.
Well, that one is standard in lintaGolarian, not an innovation of ezerGolarion, and happens in an earlier continuity as well. We’ve reinterpreted a lot of mechanics like that for reasons of “They are not actually living in an RPG and experience points are not actually a thing.” Spell durations go up continuously rather than in discrete jumps per level, similarly.
Hmm… I am not quite sure how to take the “lintaGolarion” / “ezerGolarion” stuff (it doesn’t seem relevant? but possibly I am just not familiar enough with this terminology to get the implication)… but I think that perhaps I’ve not gotten my meaning across. Let me try again:
That the characters in Project Lawful are not actually living in an RPG and are not actually governed by literal game mechanics is clear enough. The same is almost to the same extent true of characters in an actual Pathfinder game, though! As mechanics in 3e-like systems, including Pathfinder, tend overwhelmingly to be associated, those mechanics do represent things that are ostensibly true from an in-world perspective.
With that in mind, here’s a concrete example. The blasphemy spell, which affects nonevil creatures, has an effect that is determined by the difference between the caster’s caster level and the hit dice of potentially affected creatures. If cast by, say, a 16th-level cleric, blasphemy will kill nonevil creatures of up to 6 hit dice (assuming they fail their Will save), but will only paralyze creatures of 7–11 hit dice (ditto).
We can accept that experience points are not actually a thing in-world, likewise “levels”, etc., but it remains the case that if an evil “eighth-circle” cleric walks up to Ione and casts blasphemy, and she fails her save, there does need to be an answer to the question: what actually happens to her? Does she die, or is she only paralyzed?
Of course you can evade this question by altering blasphemy to not be HD-dependent, or removing it entirely (but I think it’s been mentioned in the text already? but perhaps you could retcon that, if so); but then are you going to remove all HD-dependent or level-dependent effects that have discrete “breakpoints”? There are quite a few of those! Deciding to remove from Pathfinder all mechanics that force you to make determinations of what level a character is, or how many hit dice they have, etc., seems to me to commit you to making some rather substantial changes to the system (with non-trivial knock-on effects).
Let’s assume that you don’t make such sweeping changes, and in particular that you leave blasphemy unchanged. Well, we know that Ione is (at the start of the story, anyhow) a ~3rd-level wizard (again, we do not need to believe that “levels” are a real thing in-world, only that Ione’s relevant properties map, for the purposes of resolving interactions with spells such as blasphemy, to “3rd-level”, give or take a level). So if our hypothetical “eighth-circle” evil cleric walks up and casts blasphemy, and Ione fails her save, she instantly dies.
So far, so good. Now we read on, and see that Ione has been granted four oracle levels. Now if that same evil cleric walks up to Ione and casts blasphemy, and she fails her save, then… what? Does she still die (as would be the case if Ione gained the spellcasting ability[1] and class features of a 4th-level oracle, but did not gain any hit dice, nor increased in character level)? Or, is she now only paralyzed (as would be the case if Ione did gain character levels and hit dice)? Note, we’re still perfectly happy to concede that there’s no such thing as “character levels” and “hit dice” in-world, but “what actually happens to Ione in this in-world quite coherently describable scenario” does need to have some answer!
I can keep going, but I think my point should be clearer now (if not, by all means let me know and I’ll try to clarify further). Note that we can construct similar scenarios for the other questions I asked in my parenthetical, i.e. we can construct those questions in such a way that we’re asking about concretely describable, observable, in-world facts, rather than making reference to dissociated game mechanics. You can answer all of these, I’m sure; my point is only that however you answer them, it seems to me that you’ll end up with a setup which is, at least, very weird and not really anticipated by the Pathfinder system (and which is therefore likely to require unforeseen alterations, adjudication of unusual interactions, etc.).
Do we actually see Ione or Pilar cast any oracle spells, by the way? It now occurs to me that I can’t recall such a case, so perhaps they only gained the class features and not the spellcasting? Or did I miss them using oracle spells?
Yup! I originally didn’t understand how Message works very well. Having misunderstood it, I played it consistently from there.
If you think this is Terrible then you’re holding the story to a standard it’s not particularly intended to meet.
I admit, I’m curious to hear what standard the story is intended to meet / “what you think is your principle”.
It’s meant to be reasonably hard fantasy, not necessarily conformant to Pathfinder canon because that doesn’t describe a world in near-equilibrium relative to the smart people running around with +6 headbands of vast intelligence (that do exist in-universe), but once the characters see something it ought to go on being true. Above all it’s hard decision theory.
Well… but in that case there’s still a problem: as I noted elsethread, the first use of message in the story (when Keltham first learns to cast it) does actually seem to be correct as per Pathfinder RAW. Uses later in the story are inconsistent with that one.
I certainly wouldn’t think to hold Project Lawful to a standard of conformance to Golarion setting canon; that would be somewhat silly, from a literary standpoint. But as far as mechanics go, if you’re trying to do “hard fantasy”, then, yeah, it does seem like there are flaws. The message thing is one; another is protection from [chaos/evil/good/law]. (Does the spell’s protection against mental control work only against mental attacks made by opponents of the targeted alignment, or all opponents? In Pathfinder it’s the former, and that is how it’s described in the currently most recent section of story, but earlier it is described in the latter way. I suspect this might be a case of one of the authors getting the 3.5 and PF versions of the spell mixed up, as its anti-mental-attack functionality was changed in PF to function in the alignment-limited way.) There’s more, but I haven’t been keeping meticulous track; those two inconsistencies are just the ones that jumped out at me.
More broadly, while I am not quite sure what you mean by “hard fantasy” (I can make the obvious inference from context and by analogy to “hard sf”, of course, but mapping that concept to fantasy, with magic and so on, seems non-trivial, though not impossible), I do think that aside from any questions of internal inconsistency, changes like “buffing” message in the way that you did are problematic. As I say upthread, this is a noticeable boost to the power of (at least) low-level spellcasters, relative to the PF RAW baseline. A world such as described in the story, and where anyone who can cast a cantrip effectively has at-will, robust, undetectable-by-bystanders telepathic communication with nearby targets of their choice, should look noticeably different from a world where all else is equal but message merely works the way that it does in Pathfinder. It does not seem to me that the world of the story is worked out with such a capability in mind from the start (which makes sense if this change was made accidentally midway through).
(And then, aside from all of this, there is one deviation from the Pathfinder rules that is so big and so bizarre that I genuinely can’t tell whether it’s deliberate or… some sort of very, very odd house rule / practice that I’ve never heard of… or what. But it’s not an inconsistency, at any rate…)
So the main thing I missed about Message was the chance of it being overheard. Most of what you are reading as ‘pseudo-telepathic’ communication is usually a character having their mind read by Security running Detect Thoughts, and then those thoughts being relayed to others via Security using Message, rather than by characters Messaging each other.
I remember checking Protection pretty carefully at the time and I think at the time it blocked against all the mental control, not just mental control originating from the targeted alignment. Possibly a rules change to PF2? But if not, Keltham is still running Enchantment Foil at the time.
There’s multiple big deviations from RAW; the main one I can think of that I homebrewed for this is ‘oracles go with gods and a god can have at most one oracle’. If that’s not what you’re referring to then I don’t know what you’re so coyly hinting about, and that kind of coy hinting is not something I find particularly pleasant.
Yes, there is definitely some of that, but also cases where that can’t plausibly be happening. (Also, in cases where it is happening, there ought to be a noticeable communications lag, e.g.: think message → Security reads via detect thoughts → Security transmits to recipient via message. In some cases there are intervening walls, etc.—i.e. the characters are in different rooms—so there would then be the additional step “Security transmits to another Security via message”, which second Security then transmits to recipient.)
Indeed not. All functions of protection from [alignment] are alignment-limited in PF1, and always have been. (You can verify this, if you’re so inclined, by checking early printings [in PDF] of the Core Rulebook; if you don’t have access to such, feel free to PM me, and we can rectify that. But probably this is not important enough to go to any such lengths.) My best guess remains that you accidentally happened to look at the 3.5 version of the spell text.
True enough. (Of course, enchantment foil is only a +4 bonus to the save, not immunity… but there’s certainly no reason not to assume that that +4 bonus did happen to make the difference between success and failure, on that particular save.)
Ah, I don’t think I’d consider that a deviation from RAW, as such. It’s true that this is not at all Golarion canon, but I don’t think there’s actually any rules that forbid this from being the case in a setting, or even in Golarion as such. (I don’t think it’s a particularly consequential change from setting canon, either.)
Apologies; it wasn’t my intent to “coyly hint”, only to avoid cluttering up the comment thread with what might not be of interest to you.
What I was referring to was the idea that gods can, e.g, bestow seven cleric levels on someone, or four oracle levels on someone else, etc., i.e. that a god (in Golarion) can decide to just give a mortal a bunch of character levels. This is definitely not how things work in Pathfinder, where one gains character levels when one gains experience points, and where it’s not clear what it even means for someone to spontaneously become, e.g., a 7th-level cleric without “leveling up” in the usual “acquire XP, gain character levels” way. (What is Ione’s base attack bonus, for example, or her base save bonuses? How many feats does she have, how many skill points? Do these questions have any meaning, even? It seems like they should, given the other references to [very close in-world analogues of] game mechanics, but who knows… Is there a connection between character level, class level, level-dependent benefits such as BAB/BSB/feats/skill points, or should we assume that there’s no such connection? If there is a connection and it’s the usual one, then is there consequently no connection between these numbers and what they normally represent, i.e. improvement of ability via training and practice? If a 16th-level cleric cast blasphemy and Ione were caught in the area of effect, would she be killed, or only paralyzed? etc., etc.)
(Of course, one could make the argument that as the gods are not given game-mechanical definitions in Pathfinder, we can therefore ascribe any powers we like to them without violating any rules, but then it’s not clear why we should expect any kind of predictable world at all.)
As I said, this isn’t an inconsistency, as such (at least, not definitely one, though it does seem hard to square with the other limitations that the gods are described as having with respect to their involved in the mortal world—but I wouldn’t lean too hard on that impression), it’s just… very, very strange, for multiple reasons. I would have to give more thought than I thus far have, to all the setting implications of this apparent divine capability. (Any potential conclusions I might draw would probably also be underdetermined by what we’ve seen in the story so far.) At the very least, I am fairly confident that Golarion as it is described in canon is built with the assumption that this is not a thing that the gods can do.
Well, that one is standard in lintaGolarian, not an innovation of ezerGolarion, and happens in an earlier continuity as well. We’ve reinterpreted a lot of mechanics like that for reasons of “They are not actually living in an RPG and experience points are not actually a thing.” Spell durations go up continuously rather than in discrete jumps per level, similarly.
Hmm… I am not quite sure how to take the “lintaGolarion” / “ezerGolarion” stuff (it doesn’t seem relevant? but possibly I am just not familiar enough with this terminology to get the implication)… but I think that perhaps I’ve not gotten my meaning across. Let me try again:
That the characters in Project Lawful are not actually living in an RPG and are not actually governed by literal game mechanics is clear enough. The same is almost to the same extent true of characters in an actual Pathfinder game, though! As mechanics in 3e-like systems, including Pathfinder, tend overwhelmingly to be associated, those mechanics do represent things that are ostensibly true from an in-world perspective.
With that in mind, here’s a concrete example. The blasphemy spell, which affects nonevil creatures, has an effect that is determined by the difference between the caster’s caster level and the hit dice of potentially affected creatures. If cast by, say, a 16th-level cleric, blasphemy will kill nonevil creatures of up to 6 hit dice (assuming they fail their Will save), but will only paralyze creatures of 7–11 hit dice (ditto).
We can accept that experience points are not actually a thing in-world, likewise “levels”, etc., but it remains the case that if an evil “eighth-circle” cleric walks up to Ione and casts blasphemy, and she fails her save, there does need to be an answer to the question: what actually happens to her? Does she die, or is she only paralyzed?
Of course you can evade this question by altering blasphemy to not be HD-dependent, or removing it entirely (but I think it’s been mentioned in the text already? but perhaps you could retcon that, if so); but then are you going to remove all HD-dependent or level-dependent effects that have discrete “breakpoints”? There are quite a few of those! Deciding to remove from Pathfinder all mechanics that force you to make determinations of what level a character is, or how many hit dice they have, etc., seems to me to commit you to making some rather substantial changes to the system (with non-trivial knock-on effects).
Let’s assume that you don’t make such sweeping changes, and in particular that you leave blasphemy unchanged. Well, we know that Ione is (at the start of the story, anyhow) a ~3rd-level wizard (again, we do not need to believe that “levels” are a real thing in-world, only that Ione’s relevant properties map, for the purposes of resolving interactions with spells such as blasphemy, to “3rd-level”, give or take a level). So if our hypothetical “eighth-circle” evil cleric walks up and casts blasphemy, and Ione fails her save, she instantly dies.
So far, so good. Now we read on, and see that Ione has been granted four oracle levels. Now if that same evil cleric walks up to Ione and casts blasphemy, and she fails her save, then… what? Does she still die (as would be the case if Ione gained the spellcasting ability[1] and class features of a 4th-level oracle, but did not gain any hit dice, nor increased in character level)? Or, is she now only paralyzed (as would be the case if Ione did gain character levels and hit dice)? Note, we’re still perfectly happy to concede that there’s no such thing as “character levels” and “hit dice” in-world, but “what actually happens to Ione in this in-world quite coherently describable scenario” does need to have some answer!
I can keep going, but I think my point should be clearer now (if not, by all means let me know and I’ll try to clarify further). Note that we can construct similar scenarios for the other questions I asked in my parenthetical, i.e. we can construct those questions in such a way that we’re asking about concretely describable, observable, in-world facts, rather than making reference to dissociated game mechanics. You can answer all of these, I’m sure; my point is only that however you answer them, it seems to me that you’ll end up with a setup which is, at least, very weird and not really anticipated by the Pathfinder system (and which is therefore likely to require unforeseen alterations, adjudication of unusual interactions, etc.).
Do we actually see Ione or Pilar cast any oracle spells, by the way? It now occurs to me that I can’t recall such a case, so perhaps they only gained the class features and not the spellcasting? Or did I miss them using oracle spells?