[RPG] How does Blood Crow Strike really work

pathfinder-1espells

The way Blood Crow Strike is written does not make sense.

The casting time is 1 Round, and the duration is Instantaneous. Now this can be taken two ways:

  1. The change is instantaneous, and permanent, allowing a Sacred Fist to have a permanent ranged attack. This seems totally overpowered, and I can't believe this is what was intended; or

  2. The spell takes the whole round to cast, the effect is instantaneous, but leave no time for the Sacred Fist to attack. Next round the spell is spent, and the character gained no advantage from it. This seems even worse than Option 1.

What was really intended with this spell, and how can a Sacred Fist benefit from it?

Best Answer

It's instantaneous the way a fireball is instantaneous: the spell effect happens, hurts people, and then is gone.

You cast the spell, taking a round to cast it. When it is complete, it has the effect in its description: you hit the target with a variable number of crows for X [fire/negative] damage per crow, with the number of crows being equal to the number of successful attacks you roll as if you were using your normal number of unarmed attacks / flurries, and X being whatever normal damage those attacks would have dealt. At no time do you actually use an unarmed strike on the target — the unarmed strikes only power the spell.

The confusion seems to be that you're reading it as if it changes your unarmed attacks, and then you make some attacks afterwards. That's not what's going on.

Picture it like this, instead: the monk stands 100 feet away from their target, punches the air a lot, and each well-executed punch turns into a blood crow that flies 100 feet to the target and slams into them as if the monk had been standing right beside them. (Plus it's fire/neg damage instead, and looks pretty cool.)

It's just a fancy way to make a variable number of variably-sized magic missiles, basically.