TOPIC: Detecting Incorporeals?

Is watching to see if a monster fades in and out a reliable way to quickly tell if it’s Incorporeal?

I ask because we’re going into an undead-heavy year, so I bought a bunch of loaner Figurine: Moon Dogs to cheaply let everyone in my PUGs hit incorporeals. However, you have to activate them and they only work for one room, so if you don’t activate them before attacking an Incorporeal or if you activate them on a non-incorporeal undead you’ve wasted your shot.

So – is having a cheaper token in a lesser slot but having to use your eyes/brain enough to hit incorporeals, or do I need to get Rare neck/bead/eye/ring slot-using tokens?

It's a decent chance it would be but not guaranteed, having a bard in the party pass a bardic lore check would be the most certain bet and if you don't want them to waste a turn your can get a necklace of the song bird to do it for free. Kusig I think it's selling one of those for a dollar along with some other really good one dollar tokens

Cause this is how my group rolls, bard check and then activate our statues and it's done us great on hardcore

Impy wrote: It's a decent chance it would be but not guaranteed, having a bard in the party pass a bardic lore check would be the most certain bet and if you don't want them to waste a turn your can get a necklace of the song bird to do it for free. Kusig I think it's selling one of those for a dollar along with some other really good one dollar tokens

Including bead whole vision x2

I'm not sure when I last encountered something which actually counted as incorporeal - the last several enemies which seemed like they should have been incorporeal (ghosts, etc) didn't cause any additional miss chances during combat. With that said, I'd still use a FoP: Moon Dog immediately on an enemy which fades in and out as that'd seem much more likely than anything else to be incorporeal. I'd be pretty disappointed if a ghost was fully corporeal and something with a solid appearance in a later room on the same run wasn't.

tokendb.com/Misc/bypasses-incorporeal-50-miss-chance/

Bead of Whole is probably your best bet but there are few other options including a ring, necklace and goggles at the rare leve. Note that only the bead was from packs the others being completion and appreciation rewards but they still might be cheap.

I intentionally didn't equip the group with anything to counter incorporeal monsters, I figured it's just an added level of difficulty for us to kill them.

I might add FoP: Moon Dog to my build if I guess that a run might have incorporeal monsters. If the DM or recorded room intro says the monster is flickering or translucent, I might go ahead and tell the DM I’m using it to negate the 50% miss chance for incorporeal (and risk being wrong). If I don’t activate the FoP and we do a round of attacks that results in the DM telling us about 50% of our attacks “seem to have passed right through” the monster, I definitely activate it for the next round.

If I *know* a run has incorporeal monsters, I will adjust the FoP as needed. That will either be (1) planning to use psychic power to negate the 50% miss chance or (2) equipping Bead Whole Vision or the new Ring of Soulsight, or maybe the Goggles of Ethereal Vision. Sort of depends if it’s just one room with an incorporeal monster (FoP might be a good choice) or if there are several (ring or bead is probably the better option). Or if Reflex saves really matter and I’d rather use FoP: Pixie. Or if I “need” the psychic power for something else, like walking on water or negating a potential failed Will save.

Visual ques are helpful but not reliable when detecting incorporealality just due to limitations of physical prop and digital assets+time constraints.

Bard clues are also helpful but not 100% reliable. Like the cops and your DM they are allowed to commit certain details.

The only real way to 100% detect incorporeal is to sus it out by swinging a weapon.

That said someone will usually find a way to let you know even if its just in so many words.