Clingy Boyfriend
I bet you think that necromancy is the evil school of magic. Well it is, no arguments here. It isn’t the only one though.
It was during my stint as a Pathfinder evocation wizard that I learned the evils of the enchantment school. We’d been tasked with defending this dwarf hold from a band of marauding stone giants. They’d been raiding the breweries and pillaging gem mines, and it was our task to find the dickbag of a stone giant chieftain causing all the ruckus and cut him down to size.
So there we are, hacking apart the big lugs pretty as you please. It gets to the last one and I shout to our fighter to take him alive. She obliges, and we’re left with a pile of oversize corpses + one concussed giant. I do my thing, the cleric heals the giant, and we suddenly have a cooperative prisoner. He’s only too happy to take us back to the hideout. He’d be more than happy to introduce us to his boss.
Now my wizard happened to be of the chaotic good persuasion, so I did my best to actually befriend our new companion. As we travel overland into the Mindspin Mountains I learn that my mind-whammied buddy has ambitions and a backstory. He’s got hopes and dreams. The DM tells me his freaking name, and now I’m invested. So when we go through the inevitable dungeon, slaughter half the tribe, and it finally comes time to turn my new pal loose, I was feeling all happy on his behalf.
“Looks like your tribe needs a new chieftain,” I say. “Why don’t you take the job?” Then I hold out my hand to shake on it, dropping the spell as I do. “No hard feelings, right?”
The giant looks at me like tragedy incarnate. “I… I am a kinslayer,” he says. Then he just hangs his head and cries. That’s the day my wizard swore off the enchantment school.
What about the rest of you guys? Any tales of mind control gone wrong? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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But Charm Person isn’t Dominate Person, it doesn’t let you command anyone to slay their kin any more than being friends with someone lets you command him to murder his family.
Roll enough persuasion checks and you’ll get there.
That is akin to “my Bluff is high enough that I can convince the king that I am him and he is a frog”.
No offense, but either you and your GM mixed up Charm Person with Dominate Person back then, or you placed the letter of the rules before common sense.
Anyway, it seems that you all had fun back then, so all is well, I guess.
Here’s the rule from Pathfinder’s charm person spell:
“The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton, but it perceives your words and actions in the most favorable way. You can try to give the subject orders, but you must win an opposed Charisma check to convince it to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
The giant in question was conflicted about the newly risen evil warlord in the first place. I roleplayed the shit out of convincing him it would be for the good of the tribe to help us. When we got to the dungeon’s inner sanctum and he saw all the generically evil shit going down, the charm person spell + successful Charisma check was enough to convince him to fight with us against the evil cult that was growing within his tribe. Without a magical charm effect, he likely couldn’t have been convinced to help us.
Now I could type all that up within the original story, but it risks moving “interesting anecdote” into the realm of “overlong gamer story.”
Unless of course they were already disposed to do so anyway
Building on this, I wonder how Charm person would interact with someone like Order of the Stick’s antihero Belkar; someone who would not be above stabbing their friends.
That was actually the punchline of a strip:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0383.html
What I was getting at is that, in the strip in question for example, he might realistically still killed Nale because the spell just makes you percieve the caster as a trusted friend and that’s not necessarily enough to stop Belker or someone like him from killing someone
Well, the chance that you’ll get stabbed will go down regardless, from presumably 100% to maybe 50%.
But the question is, if someone like Belkar can even be considered to have any friends in the conventional sense of the word.
One of my parties has a charm/compulsion specialist Sorcerer. Like REALLY specialist. Fey Bloodline Kitsune with Spell Focus/Greater Spell Focus to be precise. We’re Level 8 and her spell DCs are usually 23 or so. Did not have a very good time in our repeated battles with the ghoul gangs (though her Create Pit spells have had as much use as the charms), but she tears squads of ogres apart without breaking a sweat. Due to player turnover we had three new players this year, and they weren’t too impressed with her for the first session or two. Then she single-handedly killed three zombies on the first turn of combat (Spiked Pit) and disabled a Displacement-and-Mirror-Image-using boss for coup de grace. The new guys are kind of afraid of her now, especially since the party PALADIN only has a ~50% chance of resisting one of her spells.
The best part is, roleplay-wise, she’s shy, polite, nonconfrontational and always attempts Diplomacy first (and she’s good at that too). Only after she’s asked nicely for you to stop will she snap your mind in two with a wave of her hand.
In terms of mind control going wrong, it’s thus far always worked out for us, but the party’s old OTHER Sorcerer kept getting targeted for mental stuff. Once he was even mind-controlled via Suggestion and was about to Glitterdust the party when the Cleric cast Circle of Protection from Evil with him in it, clearing it out. The was an accusation of metagaming since the sorcerer had not yet taken action to indicate his status as mind-controlled, but it quickly became clear that the Cleric’s player hadn’t realized that Circle of Protection from Evil could do that – she was just trying to buff the party and control those few tiles.
I guess it’s not exactly mind control, but the above-mentioned Cleric once knocked herself unconscious by repeatedly hitting herself under the effects of Confusion. I have never had a more Pokemon-like day of Pathfinder (though I’ve never dealt with a Summoner in person before).
Man… I think that if an evil spell caster throws out a bunch of arcane gestures, commands an ally to “Aid me! Distract your friends,” and you’ve got access to preventative measures, you’re not dealing with metagaming in any case.
It wasn’t really Mind Control gone wrong, so much as, they forgot about the party member who they rendered unconscious after HE was mind controlled, but not before catching him on fire…
He was a good sport about it though, and just sat there with the whole “Dead men tell no tales ideal of role playing and waited to see if they just let him die.
They remembered before he hit critical negatives though so it worked out just before the end…
As for the pic though, the first thing that came to mind is the “Fated” comic by Jasmine Walls and Amy Phillips. It’s not mind control, but got a similar effect. XP
Here’s the comic if you haven’t read it. It’s only a few pages but so funny!
https://mythjae.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/fated-3/
There may have been a slight degree of inspiration for today’s comic. 🙂
HA!
I wondered.
that was amazing lol
I HATE Enchantment. It is the Worst School of Magic. It Matters not what i play. Be it a Fighter a Cleric, whatever. It matters not how high my Will save is. It matters not how many Abilitys i have to reroll.
I. Always. Fail. All. Rolls. Against. Dominate Person. I fail them so often, that it’s actually become a running gag in my Group, and every Enemy Spellcaster with access to Spell casts it on my Character First. Because when it comes to Dominate Person the Dice Gods hate me.
Oh How many times have my Characters become the braindead drooling Idiot that mindlessly whacks away at his Friends. Special Mention goes to my Fighter, who beats up his own Party half the Time, there is an Enemy Spellcaster present.
Lets start a Group here! Fighter Minds Matter or something!
Sigh. Sorry had to get that out of my System. Funnily enough my Group rarely uses Charm or smiliar kind of Spells. We either beat them up/intimidate them until they what we want them to do, or we let our Psychic Rape his mind until we know what we want know.
Yo… You need to get a ring of protection from evil STAT!
I Already got one, but thanks anyway. As Well as a Cloak of Resistance. One Time, due different Reroll Abilitys, i could roll that one Save 3 Times. I failed it every Time. I would have needed an 8 to succeed.
https://i.memecaptain.com/gend_images/08XuZQ.jpg
And a hat made out of foil!
I know exactly how you feel. I always seem to fail every will save, its become a joke in my party as well. Even when i significantly spec my characters to succeed will saves, they still often fail. One time when doing a heavy psionics campaign, I went as a half elf druid, and decided to go all the way with will saves, reaching a +15 or +16 at level 4 I think. I still failed half of them, though that was at least better then the other party members.
Of course, since those other players had either a -1 for the fighter, or around +3-5 for the bard and sorcerer, that really isn’t saying much.
I’ve got an Alchemist buddy who got sick and tired of failing his Will saves. Poor dude bought the biggest cloak of resistance he could, took Iron Will, and still biffs his rolls.
I got sorry for him and decided to bring back an incubus that messed with him on an earlier level. I was like, “Hey, here’s a softball. Beat the wimpy Will save DC and you can get a little revenge.” Natural 1, and the dude is possessed all over again. Sad times.
Necromancy’s got a use. Enchantment is the school of “Make the entire team irrelevant by turning enemies into tools” or the school of “This monster’s immune to Enchantment.”
That’s why I stick with good old Transmutation. No major moral concerns beyond Petrification and as long as you avoid those spells you’re perfectly on the straight and narrow for Goblin-Slaying.
I do wish there were more “save to partial” effects within Enchantment. Single-handedly winning an encounter thanks to mass suggestion is cool the first time, but it tends to take the excitement out of the game when becomes a recurring tactic.
I don’t have any good mind-control stories, but I will rant about how the various magic schools in 3.5 were a load of horse-bollocks.
The majority of spells were alright I guess, if a little poorly defined. But there’s also a significant pile of stuff that is clearly being thrown around without regard to rhyme or reason or what the the definitions of each school were supposed to be. Cause Fear is one of my personal peeves- it’s CLEARLY an enchantment effect, but it’s stuck in Necromancy because… it’s evil to cause people to be scared, I guess? This just makes no sense at all IMO. Then later splatbooks pretty much just gave every sort of effect to every school, and any kind of dividing line went straight out the window.
I remember one of the Magic: The Gathering devs talking about bleed between colors. It would take me a backhoe and a month of searching to find the actual comment, but it was something to the effect that certain colors were known for types of effects (red is all about direct damage; white has lots of combat tricks) but that other colors have the occasional secondary concentration too (virulent swipe is a black combat trick, hurricane is green direct damage, etc.). I think that it’s the same theory in 3.5. Enchantment gets most of the mind control, but Necromancy gets fear because “overwhelming terror of the dead” is thematically appropriate.
If you want to design your system like that, and have the schools be mostly about flavor, that’s fine with me. But with 3.5 it was done in such a shoddy and slapdash manner- look at the definition for the Evocation school: “Evocation spells manipulate energy or tap an unseen source of power to produce a desired end. In effect, they create something out of nothing. Many of these spells produce spectacular effects, and evocation spells can deal large amounts of damage.”
Barring the bit about damage, to me that basically seems like the definition of MAGIC. And you might say that Evocation is about the “elemental”effect, but then you have stuff like Orb of Fire/Acid/Electricity/chocolate-pudding in the Conjuration school, but nothing about summoning or controlling a creature made of fire with Evocation.
A later splatbook added the concept of “Dual-school spells”, but AFAIK they didn’t go back and erratta any of the problematic stuff, they just make a bunch of new spells. I remember one from something dragon-themed that was like “grow a pair of wings and gain flight speed, then loose your wings to cast a gust of wind”. It wasn’t one hard-classify effect, it was two entirely separate things crammed together into one spell for the sake of a mechanic that was never the fix it needed to be.
And why the hell was healing in conjuration?
Because they couldn’t think of anywhere else to put it. Ideally IMO it should be in Necromancy, too, as the school of Death AND Life magic. Having both positive and negative energy effects would have been a nice dynamic, but because Necromancy was “evil!” and healing was “good” then never the twain shall meet!
Having played a Beguiler, I would argue Enchantment is a much more evil school than Necromancy. Necromancy is like a sword. Sure it basically only hurts stuff. But it just hurts what you tell it to hurt. It’s not really any different from Evocation in that way. Except sometimes there are things necromancy does that aren’t hurting things, which actually makes it less evil than Evocation really…
Enchantment’s often results in violations of the mind. Even at just Charm Person, you’re basically magically drugging someone to get them to more them more compliant or more willing to do things they’d be barely willing to do normally. In a way such that they remember it later as having been a consenting party.
Sure some spells/editions state that they realized they were enchanted after it ends. That doesn’t mean they don’t remember their actions.
And the spells where people don’t remember them? Man you can basically, even accidentally, screw up a creature’s very identity or the lives of others with them. Like what’s your low estimate for the number of ways you could use a single casting of Suggestion on a single creature to ruin it’s life or the lives of others? (That’s rhetorical, I don’t want you to wear out your 0 key.)
Oh. And on the player perspective Enchantment is also evil because it’s the only school where half the monsters (and if you have a certain kind of GM, all the important NPCs and shopkeeps too) are just straight up immune to it, making your specialty often totally worthless, leaving you often going “well I guess I’m just a really really terrible fighter today?”
Yah. Might be nice to see some enchantment based buffs. When your main thing doesn’t work in a given combat, it’s nice to have a fallback. Easier said than done when you’re an enchantment sorcerer though.
Being able to grant a Rage-like effect to an ally seems (IMO anyway) like it would be right up Enchantment’s ally.
*Enchantment’s alley
Well I mean… It is.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/r/rage/
I guess I’d just like to see MORE options that move beyond “mess with the enemy’s brain.” I’m thinking weird Magic-inspired enchantments that offer weird battlefield control options.
Oh, sorry. There’s a hundred pages of spells in the PHB alone and I’m a little behind on memorizing them all.
😛
Anyway, the issue I see with “battlefield control” seems like it would have to mainly target the enemy, and so would be subject to the same immunities as the rest of the school. And a lot of buffs feel like they would fit in Transmutation or maybe Divination better. Magic can, in theory, do anything you want it to for no other reason than “balance”, but in my experience players like some kind of internal consistency. So in that vein, I feel like Enchantment is kind of limited to morale-boosting sort of effect and the like.
I think the better fix, for balance, would be to do away with more of the blanket communities, which I don’t like anyway, and replace it with a mere resistance or lessened effect instead. Maybe make enchantment spells cause the enemy to be Confused instead of their normal effect, with the fluff that it’s interfering with their base instincts and/or magical compulsions, but not completely; like trying to run a computer program designed for a Mac on a PC.
lol. “blanket communities”
https://i.warosu.org/data/cgl/img/0066/55/1361939424785.jpg
I do like me some tasty save-to-partial effects, but I’m imagining weird effects that you can’t get anywhere else. And when I say inspired by magic cards, I’m thinking stuff like this:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=22289&part=Aether+Barrier
Spell effect: Whenever a creature within X radius casts a spell or spell-like ability, you may make a dispel attempt on an magic item or ongoing effect within Y radius.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=370763
Spell effect: Whenever you cast a summon spell, target creature gets (insert buffs) until end of turn.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=15142
Spell effect: When you cast an enchantment spell with a duration of rounds per level, it also counts as a creature with with [insert stats related to caster level / remaining spell duration].
I guess that the word “enchantment” makes me think of metamagical and weird magical effects in an area more than it does “emotion magic.” Certainly that’s not how the school is written, but there could be some fun places to expand its portfolio.
Blanket IMMUNITIES dammit! This is why I need a forum with an edit function.
Anyway, those are actually some really cool ideas, and they are the kind of thing that I think could readily qualify for dual-school status. Some of them almost feel like the should be class-features, but I do certainly appreciate taking inspiration from a variety of sources.
My standard humanoid race’s cultures are a mixture of fantasy-classic, MtG, cartoons, webcomics, and other people’s weird variants I read about.
After playing a witch, I fell in love with the enchantment and necromancy schools (if just for the curses, not the raise dead part… except reincarnate) but then we had the undead arc of our campaign. Witch vs Undead (or constructs) is the worst. Immune to fort saves, immune to mind effecting stuff. And if they’re mindless, immune to magic jar (though I possessed a phantom once, that was cool.) And because my witch didn’t have many buffing abilities (spamming fortune cackle gets old quick) I was literally punching undead with my hair.
By the way, is that Bard? Have we seen bard before? (we must’ve, right?)
Bard comics:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-11
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/ambiance
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/portraiture
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diss
This is why my pirate witch has a catch-and-release program with her use of Dominate Person. She mind controls the captain of an enemy ship? It’s still a fellow captain, so they should be treated with some degree of respect. Demand of them what you need, and nothing else. And when you’re done? Release them from their bondage, with their stuff intact, from a very safe distance if need be.
It really cuts down on those pesky attempts at revenge.
I’d think “murder” would be an equally effective option for preventing revenge. Honor among thieves though, right?
I think it’s about what happens when you fail. “Oh no you attempted to MURDER me- I will have my revenge!!!” vs. “Oh no you attempted to slightly inconvenience me- ….meh.”
Or it could be about family- “You killed my father, prepare to die”, etc etc etc.
Now see, that’s just a lack of good murdering right there. “The six-fingered man leave me alive…but he gave me these. [points to scars on cheeks].” And as a fellow practitioner of the murdering arts I’m sitting here like, “More murder you idiot! Kill the kid too!”
Yeah, if you think Necromancy is evil, you haven’t been in a game with a properly played Enchantress. ^.^ I turned an entire dungeon that was supposed to be hard into a cake-walk by Charming an Ogre from the random encounter earlier. Later, I did something similar with a Troll. (Fun fact, Pathfinder eliminated Giant Type, so all Giants are Humanoids now.) Scary part is I was playing likely a very similar build to the Fey Blooded Kitsune Sorceror mentioned above, so I also sprinkled my list with the occasional blaster spell for when something was immune to mind effects.
And for the Witch Vs Undead problem, I feel your pain. I’m a witch in Carrion Crown right now. But remember, Summon Monster is your friend.
Summoner Monster: Making friends for 1 round/level since 2000.
As a DM the only evil school of magic is divination. I just want to let mysterys work
I remember a Mutants & Masterminds game where a buddy of mine had time travel powers. Basically, he could create a portal to see into the past. Once the BBEG got away, he flew along the path of the escape helicopter with the portal in front of him. Then he found its landing place. Then he saw the BBEG get into a limo. He tried to track that.
GM: “The limo merges into line with eight identical limos. They split up. The mad genius of it!”
Player: “OK then. We track them one at a time, and–”
GM: “Come on man. For my sanity’s sake, just let it go.”