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Would a Handy Haversack alleviate a Haunted Oracle's curse?

Retrieving any stored item from your gear requires a standard action, unless it would normally take longer. Any item you drop lands 10 feet away from you in a random direction. Add mage hand and ghost sound to your list of spells known.

Sean Duggan
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rojomoke
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    Few words about the curse would make this question better. We shouldn't have to click links to get a grasp on what you're talking about. – Mołot Jul 30 '20 at 09:57

1 Answers1

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The description of the handy haversack covers how the item works for the user if nothing about the user specifically changes how the haversack works. For average folks, "[r]etrieving any specific item from a [handy] haversack is a move action, but [doing so] does not provoke the attacks of opportunity that retrieving a stored item usually does."

However, a creature with the curse haunted isn't average. For such a creature "[r]etrieving any stored item from your gear requires a standard action, unless it would normally take longer." This makes it so the specific rules of the haunted curse override the general way in which the handy haversack functions. (For more about exception-based design in Pathfinder see here.)

For the handy haversack to function normally when used by the cursed creature, the haversack's description would have to say it was an exception to the haunted curse.

Hey I Can Chan
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    I tend to agree with this interpretation. However, both the Handy Haversack and the curse could both be read as more-specific than the other (when "this specific character" retrieves and item vs. from "this specific bag"); I think the answer could be bolstered by mentioning the incongruity of a relatively cheap, standard piece of adventuring gear negating a class drawback, especially when most (all?) of the other curses' drawbacks are significantly more difficult to work around (if possible at all). – minnmass Jul 30 '20 at 14:32
  • @minnmass I considered that as a possibility, but I think the haversack is the generalest of cases here: the haversack functions like it says it functions for everyone then exceptions are made, and one of those exceptions would be the haunted curse. Maybe? Also, yeah, it would be a pretty inexpensive almost-escape from an otherwise nasty curse. (It still wouldn't help with everything—I briefly played a haunted oracle who wielded a longspear, and being unable to drop the longspear and pick it up again immediately came up surprisingly often!) – Hey I Can Chan Jul 30 '20 at 14:43