Overkill
Unfortunately, I’ve already told you guys the story of ROCKET POWERED JELLYFISH SUPER PUNCH GO! While it remains the most flavorful attack of my gaming career, it is not the biggest. That honor goes to the bucket of white mice.
It all started when I was theory crafting methods for killing Cthulhu. While there are other, even-more-spectacular methods for slaying squid gods, this one is mine. I remain quite proud of it because, insult to eldritch injury, you wind up delivering the KO with feather fall. Here’s the step-by-step:
- Be a 20th level mythic wizard in Pathfinder 1e.
- Get to Mythic Tier 4
- Take Mythic Feather Fall
- Obtain 40 mice.
- Place mice in a convenient container.
- Fly above your enemies.
- Dump mice on your enemies as a ranged touch attack. (Or as a splash weapon at the easier-to-hit empty square.)
- While the mice are mid-flight, expend two uses of mythic power to cast Augmented Mythic Feather Fall on the mice.
- Deal 200d6 points of force damage to your enemies with your mouse grenade.
- Laugh maniacally. (optional)
I’m sure you could really crank this one, but even if you “just” add the maximize and empower metamagic feats, you’re looking at 200d6 –> 280d6 –> all sixes –> 1680 force damage, give or take 40 saves to half.
My GM let me get away with it exactly once in-game, winning my round of an exhibition match in spectacular style. I think there were only twenty-something mice, since we hadn’t hit max level. That turned out to be more than enough though. Happily for the entirety of His Majesty’s Royal Wizard Force, it was a magically non-lethal mouse grenade.
What about the rest of you guys though? What’s your biggest and best hit? Share your most ludicrous kills, biggest bombs, and highest-ever crits down in the comments!
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I can describe this one pretty briefly. Exalted, Juggernaut, and the spell Gaia’s Rebuke cast from five miles above Thorns.
You can see where this is going… the undead behemoth — and the fortress on its back, and all of its contents — flung a mile into the air, before coming crashing back down again on the battlefield in a pile of rubble. There aren’t many opportunities to use that spell effectively, but this was unquestionably one of them. The Mask of Winters wasn’t happy with us after that…
Wait a minute… Is this another Jojo meme?
https://youtu.be/i1YcJkYBAxQ?t=47
😛
Not familiar with the reference, but from the video — yes, pretty much.
Strictly, Gaia’s Rebuke is only one target and everyone else can get out of the way, but given Juggernaut is basically a walking citadel, the storyteller ruled that anyone actually inside would be sharing in the damage. Not the full 150-odd dice, but the Deathknights stumbling out of the wreckage were looking pretty ragged even before the rest of the Circle showed up.
Don’t worry. You aren’t missing much:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-jojo-reference
I feel like there’s gotta be some reason why Gaia’s Rebuke wouldn’t work on the Juggernaut (aside from the audacity). I mean, could you theoretically cast it on Autochthon? At what point does a creature become too big to target?
Well, the spell just says “target: creature”, no qualifications around size or nature. I think Autochthon would be too much of a stretch — if nothing else, because Autochthon is an entire world floating in Elsewhere, and isn’t going to be sitting on the surface of Creation.
But an Autochthonian city — i.e. a high-Essence Alchemical — would be an interesting edge case…
Kinda makes you wonder if the spell would even function in Autochthon. Weirdness.
My biggest would be the fighter with darts. For a level 18 one-shot, I played an old samurai fighter who just wanted to go back to retirement, who had a belt of storm giant strength, sharpshooter feat, and an effectively endless supply of +1 darts. Over the course of the one-shot, he would walk up to demons, throw a few darts, and then deal over a hundred points of damage. Eventually, at the end of the one shot, we came upon the Demogorgon, the Prince of Demons himself. I rolled a middling initiative, then on my turn walked up, threw nine darts, and dealt 250 points of damage, killing the Demogorgon before it even took its turn.
The players and DM then collectively agreed to retcon Tiamat into being the true final boss of the dungeon, and we didn’t do quite as well in that one, but I’ll still savour the time my tired old man murdered the Prince of Demons with a 1d4 weapon.
“You thought it was Demogorgon! But it was me, Tiamat!”
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Jojo-Dio-Mcree-Meme.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5
In the climax of our Return of the Runelords campaign, the killing blow to the final BBEG was delivered by our witch via a Harm crit.
Before that, our occultist regularly did melee crits that we joked erased people from existence.
That was my ultimate goal with occultist VMC magus. I wanted to spellstrike that mess, then order my damage so that harm would drop ’em to 1 before the weapon damage finished ’em off.
Does it actually work like that? I dunno. I was eager to watch the smoke coming out of my GM’s ears though.
Unfortunately, it never materialized. Wound up moving out of state before I could hit that high level silliness. Glad to hear that someone got to live the dream though!
So, it was nearing the end of our kingmakery campaign, and we had to fight against enemies who were essentially invading our plane of existence from their plane, which has no magic whatsoever
We had by this point also found the divine font of all magic, which had been broken and was slowly leaking out power (which seems a good excuse for why current magic never matches to ancient magic, but hey)
After a lot of research, managed to figure out a way to force magical power out of said font, which before when it was leaking a bit, was just kinda roaring upwards from it and making a ton of elemental wind and energy
So.. I made a permanent gate spell right above the font, which led to a smallish created demiplane in the shape of a corridor, with time acceleration. Then in the final battle, when we were attacking the enemy foothold into our plane, I cast another gate spell, which linked to the other end of my demiplane, and pointed out at the portal to the enemy plane
Then we sorta blew up the font of all magic and effectively turned it into an accelerate super laser of magic which blasted through all the dragons and stuff they had guarding the portal, and flooded their plane with magic and stuff, so we could counter invade them and kill them on their own turf
It did work, but apparently sorta wrecked most magic use for the world for several hundred years after as the (re-fixed) font slowly filled up again
You ever see the Peacekeeper Wars? Spoilers for Farscape I guess, but the trick was to open a wormhole: one end pointing at your inconvenient planet of choice, the other inside the nearest star.
Going back to AD&D 2e for this one. Not me, but hubby’s mage threw Grease on the top stairs of a 200 foot tower, flung open the door and taunted the BBEG wizard and took off down the stairs, using a fly spell and pretending to run. The wizard charged after him and went head over heels down the 200 foot spiral stone stairs. Dm just looked on helplessly while his big bad bit the big one.
It’s extremely silly, but I cannot help but recall this moment from Game Grumps as I imagine your dude falling down twenty flights of stairs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCC5b5n1RDs
Goo! Ooh! Dah!
Oh boy, a chance to tell the legend of the Vorpal Sword again.
Less a tale of high crit damage and more a story of woe, woah, and wow from the perspective of a bunch of young and new players and DM.
We were all young (late teens, early 20’s), and playing D&D for the first time for some of us. I knew a bit, our DM knew a bit, but it was his first time DMing.
We were all level 2 to 3 (this was 2nd Edition, aka Advanced Dungeons & Dragons), and experience milestones were not even a glint in most designers or players eyes. We had each come from a different background (and game) at the time, as finding a stable group was a rarity. So it was always a start of asking what items we were allowed to keep from our previous adventures, and hoping that whatever we got from this one, the next DM would let us keep as well.
What followed was a fairly standard dungeon delve. Catered of course to our low level selves. A few zombies, some skeletons, and a crypt with some form of clue toward a greater threat of vampiric origin. (Ooo, foreshadowing!)
We found loot in the final chamber, as you do, and the DM rolled on a random table (at this point, we are fairly certain he either rolled on the wrong table, or he thought the lower tables sucked, so chose to roll higher). Everyone got one magic item. Everyone was happy with what they got. Some of us, happier than others. The DM rolled the percentile dice (not even a D10 with two digits on it. No, that set of dice was not a standard back then. He rolled one d10 of one color, and one of a different color, each designated for a different slot of the 1-100 roll. Imagine now, if he had decided the colors were different… ), the number was high, he checked his table, looked at me without a blink, and said that I get a Vorpal Sword.
None of us knew the true danger that all of us were in.
I checked the stats, and was strangely disappointed. Oh sure, it would cut of the head of anything I struck with a crit, but how often would that happen. Otherwise, it was “just” a longsword with a bit of magic. Oh well, it was slightly better than my current longsword after all.
We returned to the town to turn in our adventurous tale to the mayor who would pay us our reward for… whatever it was we were doing in that crypt, lost to time and the greater tale about to unfold.
The mayor thanked us for our heroic deeds, but instead of giving us a reward, he began to monologue about how what we did in that crypt was not for the towns benefit, but his own. For it was HE that was the vampire in question, and we had just done something there to help him instead of the town! Oh noes! He revealed his true self as the vampire lord! A much greater threat and foe, about to reign death, destruction, and other things on the town and the surrounding kingdom. A set up to many more adventures to follow, with the ultimate goal of trying to end his bloody reign!
Except I made a foolish decision. Or brave… depending on your perspective. With my new found vorpal blade in hand, and my classic old school mentality of murder first, ask questions after looting the corpse, I rushed the vampire lord and took a single swing with my sword.
The dice were rolled. Just one, as I was so low level, it wouldn’t matter. 20. A critical hit. The DM checks the rules on the vorpal sword. I check the rules on the vorpal sword. Off comes the head of the vampire lord in a single strike…
Threat ended, campaign over, plans done, DM done… a learning moment for all.
Was I sad? HECK NO! I just got a critical hit with my brand new Vorpal Sword and ended a HUGE threat. Let the EXP rain down on me from the heavens baby!
I never did get to keep that vorpal sword in future games with that character, and eventually that character and everything about the games they were a part of was returned indefinitely as new games were played, new editions were used, and new ideas were utilized (such as the idea that instead of letting an entire campaign die because of one lucky hit, there are a hundred things a DM could do in that moment to keep it all going exactly as intended, just with some minor changes to the post battle scene… )
But this has since become for me one of “those stories” of gaming. The one you always remember fondly and well. The one where you are not just the hero in the game, but at the table as well. Where everyone cheered for you (yes, in the end, even the DM, laughing away his entire campaign of hard work and the luck he saw unfold before him that day), where one die roll can win the entire day… because it was that much fun and that is why we really play these games.
You remember my buddy the cavalier?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/best-laid-plans
Same deal. Players love it when their actions topple empires, whether those empires are fictional nations or simple The Empire of DM’s Notes.
Two favorites in this house:
-) Mine: Classic AD&D, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. We snuck inside and reconnoitered the main room where the giants were having their meeting. My actions: Rd.1-shaped Wall of Fire to seal off the exits in the room, save for the one we wanted to funnel the giants through (fire damage to all points inside room and hallway). Rd.2-cast Pyrotechnics to extinguish the normal bonfire in the firepit and fill the room with choking, blinding smoke. Rd.3 would theoretically have involved standing at the safe end of the corridor prepared to pitch Produce Flame down the hallway while my teammates lobbed arrows and such, but it never got that far, since my efforts destroyed the keep, its treasure, and most of the giants (who could not evacuate downstairs thanks to the wall of fire). I think, statistically, some of the kitchen staff made it out through the cellar stairs. The module says the fire burns for a week, and our party got tired of waiting.
-) My son’s druid: 3.5 Homebrew. His Druid (with a mounted combat focus) had an elf-made thundering, human-bane scimitar (since the druid was human, the sword always glowed, since it always detected the wielder as a human within 30′). He executed a mounted charge–trampling one bandit in his path–and swung at a second bandit as he rode past. NAT 20, NAT 20 to confirm crit. The victim fails his save vs. deafness with a 1. (As DM, I rechecked the math. This also exceeded the bandit’s current hp total by x3 or so.) Our decision was that a) the victim was decapitated in a single stroke like a mannikin on Forged in Fire, b) the trauma was so severe that when he was later Raised from the dead, c) he instead Reincarnated as an elf, and d) his next life was permanently deaf. The Neutral healers who performed the raising/remove deafness later met the party again–they weren’t angry, but they did express interest in at least *seeing* the weapon “that could deliver such a wound.”
“You idiot! You burned the loot.”
“Don’t care. It was awesome.”
XD
Also, good on ya for giving continued feedback for the kill. Having NPCs directly reference combat actions helps them to feel more like a part of the world than mechanics-first events. I’m sure your son loved feeling like his legend was growing as well.
Also Pathfinder, also Mythic.
I had a Tiefling named Lucelle, who was an Aegis (Psionic class), and Mythic Champion. The latter part is more important, as is the fact that, despite being in a defensive class, she dedicated all her mythic abilities, magic items, and whatnot to hitting hard.
In the final encounter of the campaign, we were all dropped into a Demon Lord’s personal sanctum in the Abyss, with entry point determined by dice roll. The Psion and Cleric landed alone, while Lucelle landed alongside the party’s Kineticist, and a pair of Balor Lords.
In the distance, we could see that our Psion was 1v1 with the Demon Lord and needed help, so Lucelle told the Kineticist to go to him while she handled the Balor Lords.
To quote the Kineticist’s player: “I thought you were making a heroic sacrifice. How was I supposed to know you could do that much damage?!”
See… Lucelle’s damage output was so high that it hadn’t really been tested in a while. More minor foes were always dismissed with: “and Lucelle’s minimum damage kills it, so don’t bother rolling”. The Balor Lords were the first thing we’d encountered in quite a few levels that could actually survive a hit from her… But they couldn’t survive two hits.
The Kineticist was barely out of range of the demons’ death throes when they exploded behind him. One, and then the other.
The Demon Lord, at the very least, put up a good fight until the Psion blasted him hard, and the Kineticist decided to maximize an entire turn’s worth of blasts.
I feel a bit like you and I are cheating, as mythic is notorious for breaking the game almost by accident. I do love the complexities and different flavors of “game breaking” though.
So:
If you can recall, what was Lucelle’s build?
Greatsword, Power Attack, Demon-Spawn Tiefling, pump everything you possibly can into Strength and damage. I believe some of the Aegis abilities can also aid that, but her sheet was on an old computer, so I don’t have all the details any more.
She was honestly a pretty simple min/max build, which mythic took to horrifying levels.
Sounds like Laurel’s fighter from that same game. She had to make custom spreadsheets to calculate the permutations for her damage and to-hit bonuses. Shit was wild.
“Is it still Investigation to loot the body?”
That’s not how Investigation works. Intelligence(Investigation) lets you infer information from your environment. For example if there’s an arrow in the wall you could figure out where it came from by using Investigation to infer from the angle where it was fired from. If there’s a room-plan where there’s a chunk of space committed to a secret room Investigation would let you realize that there’s a room-sized gap between the rooms you’ve been in. Perception is “Do I notice it” Investigation is “What do I infer from it?”
I played Disco Elysium recently, and the Visual Calculus skill does a really good job of demonstrating how a high Investigation would work.
Let me quote a fellow redditor on this point:
> I have my players roll investigation whenever searching bodies, and regardless of the roll (barring nat 1 sometimes) they get what the body had. I do this so that the few times there are hidden pockets etc on a body, and it does require an investigation check to find, I’m not telegraphing that info to the players.
It’s the same reason I roll Sense Motive behind the screen.
This seems to be a page full of Crit stories. My tale is no different. It’s a 2E dark-sun campaign, and my human gladiator-turned-preserver was guarding a caravan travelling from Balic to Altaruk. We encountered half-a-slew of giant lizards, and from the back of her kank, my preserver readied her bow. First shot: crit! the DM had a house rule where you rolled a 1d4 and added one, and multiplied the total damage by that amount. Mastery in the longbow added 3, bone-tipped arrows subtracted 1, and my high-strength and custom bow added 8, for a total of 1d8 (sheaf arrows)+10. 16 damage from the first arrow, and mt 1d4+1 multiplier resulted in multiplying the damage by 5. 80 damage from a single arrow! I fluffed it as going through the eye into the brain. The rest of the party wanted to fluff it as a nuclear explosion.
Next round I did almost exactly the same thing, putting an arrow throw the brain case of another giant lizard. I recall a couple of other PC crits that combat.
On the receiving end, my air cleric was investigating a warehouse, and 6 trin (7′-tall preying mantises) climbed out of a hole in the ground. The lead trin attacked with its claws, rolled a nat twenty to hit, and rolled a 3 or 4 for the crit multiplier. Went from full health to 19 below zero in a single strike.
Gah! Typos. Oh well, hopefully you can still figure out what I meant.
Crit multipliers are no joke. That’s how Laruel died the one time:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/white-haired-witch
Friggin scythes, bro. O_O
I forgot the exact details because it’s been too long, but in 3e Forgotten Realms (Magic of Faerûn I think was the splatbook involved for the exploit), I had found a way to create a magical chain reaction which I called the Holy Elephant Grenade. Basically there was an area effect spell that converted magic energy (not necessarily from spells, it worked with spell-like and supernatural abilities too) into a preset spell, so there it was Conjure Celestial Elephant. You conjure the first elephant, and it attacks your target in the area with Smite Evil. The Smite Evil is swallowed by the effect (so it’s just a normal attack) but that fuels the summon of another Celestial Elephant, which can attack with Smite Evil again, causing another Celestial Elephant to be conjured, and so on.
Alas, I never got to reach the level where I could actually cast it. But the Holy Elephant Grenade served as a table in-joke anyway for years upon years.
Geologists tell us this is how the Grand Canyon was formed.
Pretty sure the spell you’re thinking of is Energy Transformation Field (https://dndtools.org/spells/magic-of-faerun–20/energy-transformation-field–1756/) Gets ridiculous really fast if used to summon monsters with SLAs. Gets really ridiculous if used by an Incantatrix to make the linked summon spell Persistent.
Imagine if, instead of summoning a single celestial elephant, the spell summoned 1d3 celestial polar bears or 1d4+1 celestial griffons or something. Instead of absorbing a single 11-HD creature’s smite, it could absorb ~2 8-HD smites or ~3.5 7-HD smites. Then the smites would fully power multiple summons, instead of just one and a half or so, and things could get exponential stupid fst.
This is a funny mental image, but reading the text of Energy Transformation Field it seems like it doesn’t actually work, or at least it’d be a whole lot slower:
“The field automatically triggers its linked spell if it has enough stored spell levels and the duration of its previous casting has expired.”
So the first Elephant (who you summon yourself) would give 11 spell-points to the field from it’s 11-HD smite evil (really should have halved that for aesthetic reasons, but I digress).
This would be plenty to summon elephant number two (spending 6 points on summon monster 6) whose smite would then also get absorbed resulting in the field having (5+11 = 16) points.
Assuming you have the minimum needed caster level of 11, the field would then wait 11 more rounds for the duration of the summon monster VI spell to run out before summoning the third elephant (and then 11 more for the fourth and so on). If there’s still something for them to smite the reaction keeps going, but in all likelihood whomever you where targeting would have moved on long before the first 11 round ran out.
Possibly it might get speed up if something kills the elephant, but RAW I don’t think that ends the spells duration (same rule would determine whether spells cast by a summoned monster would end if it died or only when the full normal duration ran out).
I don’t have a story myself, but I remember reading a dnd story of someone who Fumbled so hard it became a Crit.
1d4chan.org/wiki/Sameo , the tale of a paladin going down swinging.
Sometimes those crit fumble charts come up money, lol. I mean sure, Clown Shoes is a jerk…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/fearsome-foe
…But when the dice hit right the randomness can make for some truly epic moments. 🙂
There’s no such thing as overkill. There is only open fire and reload.
-schlock mercenaries
Good old maxim 37. But I’d also recommend maxim 34, which notes that if you’re leaving scorch marks, you need a bigger gun.
Sounds maximally effective. 🙂
Oh, that’s easy. It was the time I could just not stop critting. A fully enhanced scimitar with Keen, Thundering, Flame, and Holy, with a Bane Baldric and Sneak Attack for extra damage on one character. A +3 Tusk Blades with Keen and Frost on the other character. The feats Pack Flanking, Outflank, and Paired Opportunists shared by both. You can guess what happened next. I didn’t get to finish the rounds of AoOs OR EVEN START Irlana’s regular attacks since Mick had attacked first and started the chain. The poor GM eventually went “Stop! It’s dead! Stop rolling!”
I’ma need to see the meme on this one:
https://www.pinatafarm.com/templates/stop-hes-already-dead-meme
The only way my character would have been more OP is if I had been able to go for Touch AC rather than regular. I’d have probably made my GM ban all crit builds.
What springs to mind for me was something I never actually used due to both myself and the DM agreeing it was overly broken. My mythic enchantress (sorceress) could use Dominate Monster plus Infectious Spell (Archmage ability) to dominate an additional 10 creatures every round. The infection would only stop once either the spell’s duration ended (20-ish days) or no new creatures were affected in a round. The idea would be to use this combo to essentially dominate entire armies, countries, planes of existence… ; )
For a less broken example, I am reminded of a quote from Thunk, my half-orc archer back in Living Greyhawk days (3.5e): “Well, we don’t actually know the two-headed fanged dracolich was hostile, it didn’t get to go.”
There is only one acceptable use for that combo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfO_OfmGOl0&t=94s
Played in a homebrewed system based roughly on Call of Cthulhu as its core. Through fantasy and such. Played as a rogue, who had gotten pretty good at backstabbing people. Through the use of some blades that got a bonus to back stabbing damage, various skill interactions and some buffs I managed to backstab someone for well over a 100 points of armor piercing damage.
In a system where 20 was an insane amount of health. The poor guy just exploded, and it was collectively decided the table that my rogue had to make a sanity check. Which failed resulting in me getting a deep seated phobia of blood. Pretty much every battle after that involved me murdering the shit out of someone, and then spending several rounds after that dealing with panic attacks. Which was not made easier by the curse that made me weightless, so I also had to always drag a rock around with me.
So I want you to picture a fierce battle scene, where a warrior and a wizard are desperately fighting several bandits, while the rogue is floating above a mutilated corpse in the fetal position. Tied to a rock with a long rope, like a mentally scared balloon.
https://media4.giphy.com/media/brqkBQV1qAFrO/giphy.gif
So I was playing an Echo Knight Fighter in a level 20 5e one-shot, and the final boss had pissed me off. I combined Action Surge and Unleash Incarnation to make 10 attacks in two turns after hexing the boss. I missed three attacks, crit on 4 and did something like 300 damage over those two turns. I did the second most damage, after the Storm Sorcerer/Tempest Cleric, who combined Meteor Swarm, Transmute Spell and the Tempest’s Channel Divinity to be ridiculous. I might still have done the most damage, because they were aiming at the ritual stones in order to prevent that monster from eating the sun.
I mean sure, the mage can deal more burst damage. But a fighter can put out those heavy hits all day long! Super useful in situations where a monster tries to eat the sun multiple times in the same adventuring day.
Well not quite all day. I had to use most of my resources to do that, but it was so very worth it.
I once did the exact action in this comic. Except my character was using his fists and we were on top of a lighthouse. I shoryukened that fool over the railing, and over the cliff edge. The lighthouse in question is a real one in Sweden, so we could look up exactly how far he had to fall. It was also the middle of winter, so he landed on ice and spread over a wide area. Did enough damage to kill the fool literally a dozen times over. Good times.
Goofy_Holler.exe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUL5w91dzbo
I did post that in the groupchat after the session, along with this: https://youtu.be/5HtVYr9aKRM?t=248
And this: https://youtu.be/Ip7GGf2_b6Y?t=102
I may have been gloating slightly.
I’ve not managed to pull them off personally, but I love theorycrafting big numbers so here’s my best two, both calculated with PF1e:
1) Level 20 Elemental Annihilator Kineticist gets a Blast called Omnicide. Basically a big blast that deals 10d6+10 damage each of 5 damage types (Bludgeoning, Cold, Electricity, Fire, and Force). Kineticists have an infusion available at level 6 called Flurry of Blasts, which lets you split your one blast into a scaling number of blasts (starts at 2, up to 5 at level 20, and you can add an extra if you have Haste or similar), but the blast damage is scaled down to their level 1 version (and if you focus fire each hit after the first gets an extra 1d6 damage). The key element here: Omnicide, being a capstone, doesn’t have scaling damage. Its damage is just the flat amount, meaning when you Flurry of Blasts it, every blast is dealing the same damage. So if you have Haste from a party member, or a Speed rune or something, you can level all 6 Omnicide Blasts at one target, and if all of them hit you’re looking at roughly 305d6+300 points of damage. Immunities will mess you up, but still. The drawback is the Burn and more notably the limit on how much Burn you can take at once, but if I remember my previous calculations correctly if you put literally every burn reduction option you get towards this you can pull it off for, like, 1 burn and a turn and a half of Gather Power.
2) This one’s a simple concept, but takes a looooot of time to set up. And it basically comes down to the interaction of a couple simple facts:
– Explosive Runes are permanent until set off
– Explosive Runes can be put on a piece of paper roughly the size of a US dollar bill
– You can fit a *lot* of US dollar bills in a suitcase
– Explosive Runes can be set off by a failed Dispel Magic attempt
– In PF1e you can voluntarily fail any check
– A level 20 PF1e wizard with maxed out Int can cast 40-some Explosive Runes a day if they devote all of their spell slots to the purpose
So what you do is you get a suit-case, a ton of paper cut into dollar-bill-sized blank talismans, a lot of downtime (like, probably a year or two), and every day during that downtime use every level 3 and higher slot to cast Explosive Runes onto slips of paper, then stick them in the suitcase. Once the suitcase is full you close it and keep it on hand until you get to the boss fight.
On the day of the Boss Fight, make sure you prepare a Greater Dispel Magic. Then you’ve just got to drop the suitcase next to the boss, and then get your entire party more than 10 feet away from it (make sure you stay within Greater Dispel range), then drop your Greater Dispel Magic in its 20-foot-burst form on top of the suitcase and intentionally fail the save. This will set off *every one of the thousands of Explosive Runes* at once, each dealing 6d6 points of Force Damage, to everything within 10 feet of the suitcase, which should include the boss. And if you managed to get it *just right* and the boss is “next to the explosive runes (close enough to read them)” it doesn’t even get a save. And even if it does, and even if it only fails on a nat 1, there’s enough of them that, dealing average damage, a 5% fail, 95% pass will blow the Great Old One Cthulhu off the face of the planet.
I must take pains to ensure that Laurel’s aether kineticist never reads this comment. O_O
As for the explosive runes, I refuse to dive into the rabbit hole of “intentionally fail a check” forum posts. I’m just gonna assume you’re right and order a replacement Cthulhu.
While working on a Silver Age Sentinels character (a defunct 3.5-based super hero system) I accidentally made my character able to do 32-86 damage to STR, INT, WIS, or CON, per attack. Or, if I don’t feel like getting fancy, 1d3+1+54d6+108 damage. Either way, the attack penetrates 50 points of armour or force fields, and I can first become completely invisible and silent to basically auto-hit (when a target can’t defend in SAS, their AC is considered to be 5 or something silly).
Alternatively, I could make the attack proc a DC 15 Fortitude save at -49, or be permanently incapacitated (in this particular case, I’d probably say paralyzed, though since it is an effect-based system, I could make the incapacitation take whatever form I felt like) until a fairly arbitrary condition is met. Maybe a kiss from a prince/princess, cause I like the fairy tale classics, but also options.
The scaling in SAS is so goofy.
“I can fly at 100 miles per hour!”
“I can run laps from here to my home galaxy!”
Also it turns out I was doing my math wrong; turns out I can push the damage up to 100d6+200, or 60-160 ability damage.
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FlusteredImpressiveArabianwildcat-mobile.mp4
As a DM, I do put some effort into making my descriptions (particularly of crits and overkill) pretty dramatic. We have heads being punched off, monsters being pulled apart with bare hands and crazy sniper shots.
Recently, a lot of these happened in our Level 16 not-a-oneshot. Notable examples include a froghemoth having its four limbs grabbed and pulled apart by a Colossal necrocraft (thus causing the PC it has swallowed to fell out unharmed) and the Rogue whose full attack reduced a foe to negative 400-something HP. The Rogue somehow stabbed every single one of their cells simultaneously and just disintegrated them.
There was also a time when a Paladin faced an evil cult leader. They did opposed Diplomacy checks to try and persuade the cultists to their side. The cult leader, a Bard, won and sent a mob to attack the PCs. The Paladin evaded this mob, critted the cult leader for 50-something damage and cut her in half. I then had him roll another Diplomacy (or maybe Intimidate check). He nat 20’d that too, and a massive silver holy symbol of his god appeared over him, informing everyone that this god was strongly with him. All of the cultists immediately switched to his side. It was great.