Talk:Biblos, the Missing Page (3.5e Vestige)

Influence Mechanics

It's pretty clear to me how this influence is supposed to work. Whenever you see some sort of writing, either magical or mundane, you have to try to read it... no matter what the consequences of reading that magical writing are going to be. If you refuse to read, you violate Biblos's influence. That's all fine and good. But what happens when you encounter a text that would take a long time to read, like, say, an encyclopedia, a Book of Exalted Deeds (which explicitly takes an entire week to read, IIRC), or a Book of Vile Darkness (which also takes an entire week to read, IIRC)? I would assume that the influence would require you to at least start reading the text, but do you have to read all of it (or at least as much as you can before the pact ends; they only last for 24 hours, after all), or can you stop after a certain (hopefully reasonable) amount of time? And what happens if you find yourself in the vicinity of several separate writings (like, say, a room with several explosive runes in it, or an entire library)? I would assume that the influence would want you to read all of the writing, but would each piece of writing count as a separate influence test (therefore causing you to be penalized for each piece of writing you refuse to read — potentially causing you to wind up with something like a −500 penalty if you don't stay in the aforementioned library to read everything), or would they all count as one influence test (therefore penalizing you if you refuse to read any of the pieces of writing, but only penalizing you once (read: −1 penalty) regardless of how many you refused to read)? These are important questions! --Luigifan18 (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Then you're SOL.

No no, but more seriously you have to try to read when you can, you don't have to read all of it in one sitting, especially if you can't. Some anecdotal evidence; recently we've had a binder in one of our games who is perma-bound to Biblos. Running into libraries is very distressing, and the party has to pull said binder away when they left the room. No violations were present since they did try to read everything they could given the circumstances.

Likewise, you won't read if someone is going to kill you or your life is in danger. But you would try to save unread books for reading for as soon as you could.

For your Books of Exalted/Vile, in this case you'd spend the next week reading barring any interruptions (or until pact's end). You can keep up eating and sleeping as normal too.

IMO, each "event" is an incident, not necessarily each book, each page, etc. Otherwise you can get excessively granular with it. So ignoring a library is just −1.

Oh, and yes. Explosive runes is terrible for you, because you totally want to make sure it says EXPLOSIVE RUN- aw crap... -- Eiji-kun (talk) 01:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

All right, thanks for clearing all that up. --Luigifan18 (talk) 04:20, 22 November 2015 (UTC)