Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|18: The Commutative Property of Pizza.
Apologies for running late this week, but consider it the downside of my living in an older, slightly drafty house. My furnace can handle the 20s and even teens, but when the temperature gets down into single digits, my furnace struggles to keep up and I retreat into the pile of blankets and dogs known as Blanketopia and hibernate until it’s over. Now sure, I could take my laptop to Panera and write there, but again, that would involve leaving the house in single-digit temperatures, and that’s not happening.
We start this week with the continuation of the battle against the T-Rex, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s just the universal nature of dinosaurs. There are so few things in this world that EVERYONE seems to love – dogs, pizza (the concept itself, though the battle over toppings can get ugly), Tom Hanks… and dinosaurs. I just love how the idea of dinosaurs immediately connects to everyone’s inner five-year-old and brings that level of giddiness. Though let’s be honest: if a 50-foot long reptile came stomping into the local grocery store, most of our reactions would be QUITE different. And not just because it’s not wearing an N95 mask.
Unfortunately, the dinosaur doesn’t really get to stick around very long, as the party has done a pretty solid job spacing out the encounters and can pretty much focus all their attention on the beast. Yeah, it stomps Darius into the ground in an amusingly cartoonish fashion, but other than that, the KING OF THE DINOSAURS makes it 2, maybe 3 rounds before going down. The T-Rex reveal? Fantastic. The actual fight? Kinda underwhelming, if I’m being honest.
The stone golem, on the other hand, not only took us provided much more of a challenge, but it also took us down an extensive rules rabbit-hole, figuring out what did and didn’t count as a magic attack. But before we get to that, let’s get to the reason why it was such a challenge: the golem’s ability to inflict paralyzed, which is… let’s be honest… right up there with doomed as one of the worst status effects in the game. It’s one thing to lose an action or take a -1 to rolls… but basically losing your whole turn (except mental-only actions like Recall Knowledge) and being flat-footed to all attacks? Well, that just sucks.
And of course, paralysis also managed to ruin what HAD been shaping up as one of Alhara’s best days in recent memory. She managed to one-shot a xulgath with a crit. She got a chance to showcase her Combat Reflexes ability that gives her a second attack-of-opportunity (much to Steve’s dismay). For a brief shining moment, this was Vanessa’s build finally running on all cylinders and it was a joy to behold. And then… paralysis followed by a full round of attacks by the golem, and she’s down again. (sigh).
But let’s talk about these magic rules for a bit, because we’ve got a few things worth clarifying there.
At the 30,000-foot “what were the game designers trying to do?” level, golems are designed to mess with casters who get into too much of a pattern and don’t diversify their spellbook enough. If you you’re a caster who doesn’t have a variety of ways to do damage, you’re kinda screwed. And… although Loren did it for roleplay reasons rather than min-maxing, Hap is particularly golem-unfriendly since most of her spells are fire-based.
But at least in this fight, she gets around it with the decanter of endless water, which gives her a water spell, albeit a Level 1 spell that’s got a lower DC. And she can turn into an elemental, which it turns out is a way of getting around the restriction.
Because here’s the thing: golem anti-magic is not the same thing as vulnerability and resistance. It’s kinda pedantic, but I’ve gotten into things with Second Edition where I fall back on keywords when I don’t understand how something’s supposed to work. Vulnerability and resistances are pretty much always spelled out, and if you look at the golem’s statblock, its only resistance is Physical 10, and it has NO vulnerabilities. Among other things, that implies that non-magical versions of those damage types don’t really apply against the anti-magic and should go through normally, right?
So, when it comes to Hap’s elemental form, her interpretation was correct. Yes, the spell that turned her into an elemental form was magical, but once she’s in that form, the attacks are her base attacks, not a “spell or magical ability” and the damage should be treated as non-magical fire. At that point, it would’ve still been relevant if the golem had fire resistance, but golem anti-magic would not factor in.
And OK, I probably would’ve given Ateran their telekinetic projectile as well. The magic doesn’t target the golem directly; they’re using magic to throw a rock – if they picked up the same rock off the ground and threw it, it would only be subject to physical damage reduction. Not sure why using magic to fling the rock makes it a spell attack, unless the idea is that the object does more damage that the same object would have done if flung non-magically.
On the other hand, these same interpretations would imply the party got away with one they shouldn’t have: Vanessa’s trick with the bag of holding and the lake water. The golem isn’t vulnerable to water, which would be the “Wicked Witch Of The West” thing where ANY water touching it would harm it. It’s part of the golem’s anti-magic, which means only magical water spells or effects would’ve triggered the extra damage. So take that away, and the water was just ordinary water. While I’m sure having 25 gallons of water dumped on your head is uncomfortable, it wouldn’t really damage you; it would just be a really awkward reenactment of the scene from Flashdance.
Going back to the last episode for a second, it’s also unlike that the Aroden boon to raise the water level in the area would’ve done anything either. In this case, it’s a spell, yes, but it’s not attacking the golem directly, it’s just raising the level of non-magical water in the area. The extended language on golem anti-magic’s Harmed/Healed/Slowed effects says “any magic that targets the golem” (emphasis mine). The Aroden boon doesn’t directly target the monster; it targets the surrounding water. Hence… no bonus damage, and therefore probably no damage at all – you don’t take damage from your bathtub filling either.
If there’s a gray area in this whole business, it’s probably where it intersects with magical weapons, and specifically property runes. The fundamental runes integrate into the weapon itself and just increase the ability to hit and the PHYSICAL damage of the weapon. But the property rune? On one hand, it’s still part of the base attack; on the other hand, one could argue it’s a “magical ability” and therefore the extra typed damage should be subject to the golem anti-magic. If there’s a tiebreaker here, it would be the expanded text of the Harmed/Healed/Slowed sections of the golem anti-magic, where it says “magic of any type”… that makes it sound like property runes should DEFINITELY be treated as subject to golem anti-magic.
Also, I feel like the math in Pathfinder is SO tight that an effect that COMPLETELY negates magical weapons, coupled with physical damage reduction, would just screw melee characters over so completely that it would be game-breaking. The rune system is one of the KEY mechanisms to keep characters competitive with monsters; if you pull that rug out from under them, that’s halfway to sending them into battle as Level 1 characters.
So yeah… golems turn out to be a lot more complicated than we realized. Part of me feels like this is getting off into the weeds like this; another part of me feels like this sort of deep-dive is EXACTLY why we keep this column around.
The real question is: is anyone gonna send ME a pizza for grinding through all these different parts of the rulebook?
The good news is the party eventually gets the golem down, and the overall battle is over. (Love how we just kinda glossed over the xulgaths, for the most part.) So now the decision is whether to continue on and hope most/all of the resistance was outside the tower, or continue on. The main danger is that Ateran is mostly out of healing, though the party still has consumables and most of their battle medicine timers are up. I’d also observe more at the metagame level that the stone itself was unguarded at the last tower; it’s just that getting to it was the tough part. If that pattern holds (because among other things, this chapter of the adventure expects us to visit three towers), that makes me feel like this was the big resistance and the tower itself should be mostly unguarded.
Am I right? I guess we’ll find out next week. While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you back here next week.