[DarkRanger]

Are summon spells excluded from the magic tattoo? Because I tried casting animate dead, unextended, and got an error message saying I could only store spells of 3rd level or lower.

[Gatalis]

My guess would be it's registering as a higher level spell due to the tiered summons of animate dead.


Could try a summon creature spell

[Balanor]

Bug. Will be fixed tomorrow.

[DarkRanger]

Is it intended to be based on innate level, or simply slot occupied?

[Balanor]

The innate level from the spells.2da is what is used to determine a 3rd level spell or lower. Just like the Brew Potion feat for anyone that has used it.

[DarkRanger]

Ok, then it's also a bug that Petra can't cast haste or extended magic vestment onto the tattoos. Not sure if it's the same bug affecting animate dead.

[Balanor]

No, not being able to cast extended magic vestment is not a bug. Because for magic tattoos, metamagic prepared spells are considered higher level spells. Extend adds 1 to the innate level, Empower adds 2, Maximize adds 3, and so on. In other words, if the spell is an innate level 3, no metamagic-prepared version of it can be bound to a tattoo since that will raise it to a spell slot of 4 or higher. So if Brew Potion does actually allow you to use metamagic versions of the spells to create potions I guess they aren't alike, although I admit I never tried casting a metamagic version of a spell to create a potion.

Regardless, magic tattoos are setup this way for game balance purposes. For example, consider a mid-upper level who PC gains immunity to something like fire, and who has an insanely high ability score so they have a bunch of level 6 spell slots. They then load up 10 Maximized fireballs on their tattoos (from their level 6 spell slots), run through a dungeon to attract all the bad guys in a kamikaze-type suicide attack, get surrounded by dozens of bad guys, and then activate their 10 maximized fireball tattoos for a guaranteed 600 hit points of damage to everything around them. I admit this is an extreme example but even half that (5 maximized fireballs resulting in a guaranteed 300 hit points of damage), is very obtainable and possible for the right PC.

The alternative to ignoring the effective spell slot of a metamagic-prepared spell would be allow only non-hostile spells to be cast on tattoos. This will eliminate things like fireball, darkness, etc tattoos – but then I don’t have to worry about people setting up their tattoos to chain-cast maximized versions of X hostile area spell. So I guess if you’ve got this far and you have a compelling reason that this should indeed be changed, send me a PM with your argument.

[DarkRanger]

Not really, metamagic adding to innate level makes sense.

[Wids]

I'm running into a problem with the tattoo imbuing system. I've tried casting Magic Vestment, Invisibility, Darkfire and Negative Energy Protection (all of which are 3rd Level spells or lower) on the little Magic Tattoo doodad in my inventory, and all of them failed with the "Object is not a valid target for this spell" error.

That could be a problem. Is it just a problem for clerics, or are other spellcasters running into this problem too?

[Balanor]

A change will be occurring with the next server reset which will give you a new tattoo item that will fix this problem.