Feat conversion check - Darkstalker

[JusticeZero]

In my P6 game, a new player wants to use (on a Cryptic) a 3.5 feat that I'm not familiar with. The feat offers Hide vs. Scent, tremorsense, blindsight, and blindsense, as well as flanking vs. All around vision. The only eyebrow raiser in there is blindsense, but it seems a bit broad for a feat. I already allow stealth vs tremorsense or scent, as long as they are specified instead of normal vision. At the least it looks like it would be a psionic feat, but I'm not sure if there is an already existing PF equivalent. I'm not particularly worried about it making stealth overpowered, it just seems like a less than elegant fix. Also, that I can't put my hands on the source to verify it. Thoughts?

[JusticeZero]

Forgot to mention: Source was listed as "Lords of Madness" pg 179. I have never seen this book, though it appears to be 1pp WotC. I don't know if there is any context for it.

[Fax Celestis]

It's mostly there for aberration hunters. I wouldn't worry about it, honestly. Even with HIPS it really means the rogue can still do his sneaky thing against more dangerous targets, which is where sneaky matters.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Lords of Madness is the WotC splatbook about eldritch horrors - Mind Flayers, Aboleths, Beholders, etc.

Darkstalker is just a simple feat tax to make Hide not completely useless against high level monsters like the listed guys, dragons, and pretty much any other non-humanoid with a CR above 12. It's basically required for a high-level stealth character who doesn't want to delve into the vague world of intangibility rules, and probably doesn't require any converting to Pathfinder, unless you really just don't like the idea of a rogue sneaking up on a dragon (who really ought to have Spot maxed anyway, and not just rely on his Blindsense as an auto-notice.)

[JusticeZero]

Well, part of the issue is that it is a feat tax. It looks clunky and stapled on. Plus, IIRC, the character getting it does not get Sneak Attack anyways. (3/4 manifester with an energy blast instead.) I don't know if it is even needed in this case.

[Psyren]

Without it, your player will need to use their psionics to defeat blindsense, tremorsense, scent and other enhanced senses. It's certainly doable, but Cryptics don't have an awful lot of spare PP or powers to throw at these problems. As NOR pointed out, just about every nonhumanoid monster above a certain CR has at least one of these.

To answer your question, it's not strictly necessary - Cryptics don't rely on sneak attack and they can usually stay out of range of some of these senses while still doing damage. But for myself, I do like to let players (especially skillmonkey playes) roll skill checks whenever possible since doing so makes them feel "cool." Besides. these monsters typically have huge Perception modifiers anyway so the feat isn't going to make him a complete ghost. I would say allow it.