Forum: Public Forum

Dear Players,

Game rule clarification.

While reading the chapter on spell design in Ultimate Magic I realised that we have been misinterpreting true strike since the beginning.
The target of true strike is "you" with "Range personal" and not "Target creature touched" with "Range touch". This makes a lot of difference to our game. This means "No free automatic hit from martial classes" anymore.

Sure, Marcus can still activate his wand for himself and ensure some precision damage on a flank. As pointed out in Ultimate Magic this spell would just be too good if cast on the front-line Fighter every round. However, it is balanced for Wizards or Sorcerers who want their next ranged touch attack to hit. Basically it costs the caster a spell and an action, and as we know from playing at high-level, an action gets more valuable as the game gets more complex.
Marcus being a Thief thus a class that has use magic device as a class skill makes it also balanced by design. His BAB is worse than that of a martial class and he needs to spend some skill points to ensure a decent rate of success with UMD.

Limitations to power-gaming.

By game design, it is not possible to have a potion of true strike, due to the target not being "creature touched". Oddly enough it is now possible to cast mage armour on other PCs in Pathfinder RPG, or even make potions of it because it has a target of "creature touched", while in the old days of D&D 3.5 the range was "you", thus forbidding the manufacture of related potions.
The spell shield is another spell that has a range of "you" so as to not have only a two-handed weapon martial class PC built.

See you next week as a GM, and tonight for the Legacy of Fire game as a player.

Laurent,