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Uknits?  TelinArtho?  Eluria?

Jul 23, 2012 -- 2:08PM, Yitzi wrote:

I think we'd better take an official vote, and then put the results into the court rulings.  There are really 3 issues here:

A) Is it possible to start deciphering a stolen scroll before the fight starts?  (I vote no.)

B) How long does deciphering take, 1 minute or only one standard action?  (I abstain.)

C) If it does take 1 minute, should we houserule it down to one standard action?  (I vote no.)

I'm just not sure this is the clear-cut issue to vote on

b/c want to just answer the whole thing, and if vote A, doesn't answer, B, doesn't answer, and C, doesn't answer.

Want an actual practical answer.
But I guess it answers it if vote A: no, B: 1min, C: no ...

I think the question is:
can you:
scroll at rd 0, cast read magic rd 1, decipher scroll rd 2, then can use
vs.
Rob scroll at rd 0, cast read magic rd 1, deciphering scroll takes 1min/page, then can use
vs.
Rob scroll = you automatically also decipher it and can use it immediately (no one seemed to propose this, but I suppose it's an option)

And I am totally ok w/ either Houserule 1, actual RAW 2, or houserule 3 -- I think any of them are fine.  I think from a balance perspective, 1 is the most balanced.  But any seem like they're a rules interpretation that comes down to "should rob store include use of scrolls/stones or not"

Well, the thing is, I think it should be a standard action but I can't actually say for certain whether I think that should be a house-rule, because it's not really clear to me what the RAI are (I think RAW would probably be 1 min, but as I said, the Spellcraft entry makes that seem ridiculous). So, my vote would be to chose to interpret the rules as "1 standard action", even if that is tenuous, because it would make sense as a house-rule anyway (but whether it's classified as a "house-rule", I couldn't say).

IMO if robbing scrolls is allowed at all, standard action makes most sense because that still gives 3 rounds for someone to alpha-strike you, and not ruling that was is akin to just banning robbed scrolls (which is a view), with the exception of super-high-Spellcraft people.

Jul 23, 2012 -- 2:08PM, Yitzi wrote:

I think we'd better take an official vote, and then put the results into the court rulings.  There are really 3 issues here:

A) Is it possible to start deciphering a stolen scroll before the fight starts?  (I vote no.)

B) How long does deciphering take, 1 minute or only one standard action?  (I abstain.)

C) If it does take 1 minute, should we houserule it down to one standard action?  (I vote no.)

I'm not sure if I have a vote here, but I thought I'd just share some thoughts.

I think that stealing items is a cool mechanic. I agree with the argument that the thievery happens in Round 0 and therefore the answer to A is no.

I think the answer to B is not clear. I say this not because of the spellcraft ability (which is entirely seperate), but because of the way the sentence is phrased:

You can read at the rate of one page (250 words) per minute.

Maybe this isn't an RAW interpretation, but it seems odd to me that Read Magic would specify a words per minute in parenthesis after a description of the speed at which you read scrolls. It seems like instead this was meant to talk about reading texts that might have glyphs in them, or reading pages of a spellbook or something, since neither spellbooks NOR scrolls have words on them in any official status.

That being said, I think that, as written, it takes a minute to read a page, and a page is a scroll. I think though that what this really adds up to is "do we want scrolls to be stealable" in terms of a houserule. I'm not familiar enough with the meta of scroll stealing at this level to give a quality opinion on this. So here's where I stand:

A: no
B: RAW, 1 minute
C: I'm a noob, but this is the most important question here.

OK! I thought as much, just thought I'd chime in. I feel like the rules, as they are written, indicate that it takes 1 minute to read a page. There IS a quicker way to read scrolls using spellcraft, but just because spellcraft is fast doesn't mean that Read Magic is also fast-- they're not the same thing. Although maybe the RAI or a reasonable houserule would say that Read Magic would be as fast as Spellcraft, that's not what the spell description says-- it says 1 minute per page.