Pest Control
This one may require a little 5e rules-knowledge. It does provide us with a useful thought experiment though, so I think it’s worth the hassle of mechanical minutia. Let’s begin by getting on the same page:
Polymorph
This spell transforms a creature that you can see within range into a new form… The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies… The target’s game statistics, including mental ability scores, are replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast. It retains its alignment and personality. The target assumes the hit points of its new form. When it reverts to its normal form, the creature returns to the number of hit points it had before it transformed. If it reverts as a result of dropping to 0 hit points, any excess damage carries over to its normal form. As long as the excess damage doesn’t reduce the creature’s normal form to 0 hit points, it isn’t knocked unconscious. The creature is limited in the actions it can perform by the nature of its new form, and it can’t speak, cast spells, or take any other action that requires hands or speech.
First of all, the actual preferred method for getting out of this situation is waiting for you allies to kill the caster. Once concentration breaks, you revert to your normal form, easy peasy. However, if the caster happens to be a short broom-ride out of range (or if your allies are otherwise preoccupied), the next best tactic is commiting critter seppuku.
This happens to be more than an academic exercise. I was in precisely this situation at my group’s last D&Doggos game. My beefy cane corso barbarian had just been turned into a dirty rat by some malicious fae. In other words, I was stuck in a classic metagaming conundrum. The encounter was taking place atop a peasant cottage, so the temptation was very real. All I had to do was rat-scurry off the roof, take 1d6 falling damage, and pop back into fighting form. Yeah it sucks to lose a turn and take self-inflicted damage, but it was still my best option given the situation.
There are some problems with this strategy though. For example, would a pit fighter untrained in the arcane arts know enough to attempt rat suicide? And even if it was late in the campaign and the nth time I’d been polymorphed, would a creature with “the mental ability scores” of a rat have the bandwidth to remember how to break the spell? Sure you can point towards the “retains its alignment and personality” clause, but isn’t that the teensiest bit against the spirit of the game? Then again, you wouldn’t insist that a sorcerer who’d transformed himself into a giant ape lay about indiscriminately, attacking friend and foe alike. Why would you go out of your way to restrict the rat’s action, especially when the spell clearly lays out what you can’t do (i.e. speak, cast spells, etc.).
So here’s the million gp question for today’s comic: How would you handle it? If you were trapped in A) the body of a rat, and B) this situation, would you take that flying leap from the cottage roof? Why or why not? Let’s hear all about your metagaming rationalization process down in the comments!
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Assuming I’d know what to do, I think I’d write out a message for my allies to do something about the caster.
Death is still a frightening concept. Especially so when inhabiting a body so much smaller than my own, with its flight instincts and whatnot.
After that, hide in an ally’s pocket as much as possible and ride events out.
Also? Witch should have sicced a dozen or so cats on Fighter. It’d be much harder to raise a shaved bugbear who’s separated into several different stomachs.
Fighter doesn’t get raised so much as his identical next-of-kin gets drafted. I think we’re on Fighter #90 or so by now.
sigh Yeah. There is that, darn the luck. And Fighter #91 would probably go on a cat-killing spree… 🙁
That, and I’m pretty sure Fighter went to Druid intentionally for the ‘cure’, if his way of handling other problems like this was any indication.
Though I’m surprised Druid doesn’t just use dispel magic, or her own baleful/regular polymorph.
Druid does seem to be Fighter’s preferred go-to person for serious ailments. Maybe the Priest and Acolyte have taken some creative revenge on him off-camera, or they’ve refused to add resurrection and regeneration to his insurance policy?
Druid must either not interact with Fighter much or lean very heavily on the G in her theoretical NG alignment to NOT want to take a free swing at him. Can’t think of any other character (except maybe Gunslinger), who would pass up this opportunity.
Alternative explanation: Druid really can’t stand the thought of unleashing Fighter on the world in humanoid form again.
Exactly my first reaction, yeah… even Druid shouldn’t be immune to the urge to take a cleaver to Fighter, given the opportunity. I guess Rock’s explanation is as good as any.
I think it has more to do with her inability to hurt a cute fuzzy woodland critter than any thoughts she has about Fighter.
I double checked with Rainier Wolfcastle. Can confirm, that’s the joke.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/012/132/thatsthejoke.jpg
Oh, we got the joke. It just feels like even a druid would weight up “fuzzy woodland critter” against “it’s Fighter” – and then reach for an axe. Because it’s Fighter.
Was Fighter’s Baleful Poly form the decision of a Patreon poll, or a sparkle-eyed artist?
Also, when’s the poll to see if this ends up being permanent? Because he’s adorable. He can adventure in the village of Brie!
Alas, your spontaneous Mouseguard game is hindered by the lack of opposable thumbs and an extra will save to not be a animal-brained (how did Fighter manage that one?).
Maybe if you polymorphed everyone into Ratfolk, and then shrunk them with a curse…
Shrinking them all would still allow an extra save (vs the shrinking).
The optimal solution is obviously to polymorph the party into Ratfolk and then enlarge the world!
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
This is specifically a joke about 5e mechanics, so the 5e mechanics are most relevant. There isn’t a baleful polymorph spell in 5e, there’s just polymorph, and very few spells in 5e require multiple different saves for different parts of the effect (or both an attack roll and a save, for that matter).
The result: There’s a Wisdom save to block the whole thing, which includes modifications to mental ability scores, but the spell explicitly does not modify alignment or personality. So Fighter would still be Fighter, just Fighter with a somewhat lower Intelligence and slightly higher Wisdom score (I think Charisma would be about the same).
Handling the situation, in Pathfinder:
If I fail the will save, I’m out of luck, as I’m now a scared critter who has to hide and scurry away. In a forest this can be game over as your partt has little hope of catching such an animal, barring amazing tracking checks or magic to find you.
If I retain my mind, hopefully we have a caster with dispel magic or break enchantment.
If I’m smart and expecting it, I’d splurge out about 900gp to get a Bead of Newt Prevention. Which unerringly counters it.
Otherwise, death is the only ‘reliable’ cure. Of note is that this works for any any shape shifting or polymorph creature, they automatically revert to their true form when the creature dies (like with Werewolves or Doppelgangers). This can only be prevented with the use of a magic item called a corpse puppet.
https://www.aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Corpse%20Puppet
In pathfinder you’re just out of luck, more or less. Baleful polymorph has no such provisos such as turning back on death, or blah
Wondering if you had a bit crossed over with D&D, I’ve looked and far as I can tell, there’s no specific ‘polymorphed turn back to what they were on death’ thing. None whatsoever
What is a thing is that it will only last as long as whatever spell they’re using does though. Most of them do have durations, and concentration spells will obviously drop instantly on death. But Baleful Polymorph is a) not actually the caster being polymorphed, and b) Permanent
I’d say you’re just completely out of luck with that
The Corpse Poppet’s existence implies that shapechangers, at the very least, revert to their true forms on death.
You seem to be right about the polymorph not being removed on death, though. Which is an odd thing, given that with melding equipment, that means a polymorph spell can permanently make a artifact or other important object inaccessible if it’s held by a polymorphed creature at the time.
In addition, there’s an odd clause with polymorph tagged spells – you can only have one in effect, and if affected by another, you can flat out decide if it affects you and replaces the existing effect.
Which is why Baleful Polymorph dispels any existing polymorph effects first and makes other polymorph effect not work afterwards. But anything that can’t mimic those extra clauses can be dispelled then by re-casting a poly spell of any kind.
Easy: continue fighting in rat form. If I’m a martial character if some level, chances are I can still use my extra attacks and try to harm the enemy. Or just do help actions. Plus Polymorph doesn’t remove class abilities: I may be a mouse but I am a mouse BARBARIAN, and thus can still rage, do reckless attacks, and depending on my archtype may even still do considerable damage. Gods forbid if I’m a monk: my martial arts die don’t suddenly vanish just because I’m a mouse. At worse my dex is worse than when I’m a humanoid. But a 1d4/1d6/1d8 is still damage.
And with all of that in mind, the easiest, quasi meta way to break out of polymorph: take an AoP attack. Now your DM has to decide the metagame: does his minions know not to take advantage of the fact the big brawler has been reduced to a tiny mouse and crush him, or will they just take a swing at the morphed front liner anyways? Are mooks now allowed to do grapples as attacks of opportunities even though the DM has never allowed you to do that before (and you aren’t allowed do by the rules Anyways). Metagaming can go both ways. If players are expected to ensure their characters aren’t allowed to know how things work in the game, then the same could be said of NPC baddies too.
Anyone else remember that bit in Dragon Ball where Buu got beaten up by a piece of candy? This is the magical equivalent of that. Except that Buu can undo it by landing a single punch.
That’s not how polymorph works, for the same reason that if your allied wizard turns the monk into a Giant Ape, they don’t get to keep all their monk abilites. Not to mention that despite this cute image, any gear you wear becomes part of the polymorphed form
If I’d previously experienced the efficacy of that solution and/or had it drilled into me my an arcane ally, then yes. Otherwise, definitely not.
There will be no roof-jumping lateral thinking from a rat with 2 INT. It will, however, heroically protect its friends and take on dangerous scouting/ambush missions until it reaches 0 HP, because 10 WIS is more than enough for combat tactics.
What about roofijumping vertical thinking?
It varies too much for any one decision, but I would argue that the Int dropping below 3 means that deliberately killing yourself is off the table. I would probably default to personality as the driving factor for my actions at that point. With heroic characters, it’s time to bite if possible. For my more cowardly characters, it’s time to hide.
As a GM, I would allow a charge off the roof if the intent is to attack and it was feasible, assuming the person had that sort of personality.
When I first saw the comic, I thought that Fighter and Witch were on the same side, against Druid. Like the polymorph was being used as an unorthodox defensive buff tailored to Druid’s particular weaknesses.
And I interpreted Fighter’s paws-on-hips stance as a defiant “Hah, you can’t hurt me! I’m too damn adorable!”
Reading the post, and other people’s comments, I now see that Fighter and Druid are allied against Witch, that Fighter has been debuffed and that Fighter’s expression towards Druid is impatient and frustrated rather than defiant.
I still like my original interpretation, even if it’s not what Colin and Laurel intended to show.
“You have to be stopped, Fighter!”
“Oh, really? Do you think you can stop…. A TEENY MOUSE?!”
Huh. Good catch. I though Witch and Fighter were teaming up on Druid too. But this makes much more sense.
That’s what I thought too.
So, what would I do if I was playing a rat with the personality of a dog 10 times my size?
Leeroy Jenkins! That’s right, charge forth at my enemy and tear into them like I’m a 2,000lb kodiak.
Best case scenario, I make critical hit or two before they smack me silly and right back to my proper shape.
Worst case scenario, I annoy the crap out of them as they try to maneuver around to other targets.
Heck, I’d go so far and try to climb Mt. Bad Guy and start clawing at him. Maybe I could get the DM to grant me advantage on my attacks.
Or perhaps they’d consider it a grapple. An easy grapple to break for sure. But it would still cost the enemy an action to do so.
“I can’t do it!”
“That’s fighter.”
“Bring me a bigger cleaver!”
Flying leap off a cottage roof isn’t gonna kill a rat.
A cottage roof is probably about 10-15 feet off the ground, and that’s enough for a single d6 of fall damage. Rats have one, maybe two hit points.
Sure, in real life an elephant would take more damage from falling five feet than a rat would from falling fifty, but that’s just how things turn out when you have damage/HP rules abstracted enough that humans can use them without relying on a computer to handle the ten thousand calculations, edge cases, etc.
You’re suggesting that 1d6 points of falling damage isn’t going to deal 1 hp? See me after class. We’re going to go over your answers on the worksheet together.
https://5thsrd.org/gamemaster_rules/monsters/rat/
But what if they highroll their hit dice and have 3 hp?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j6aeSSKv7Sg/maxresdefault.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/6fuHTZ8.jpeg
This reminds me of something from the “Continuing the Campaign” section of the very last book of the Pathfinder AP “Hell’s Rebels.” (SPOILERS, I guess, though not really anything major.)
There’s an artifact called a soul anchor that causes mortals that hang around it to retain their memories and personality after death, instead of fusing into their afterlife plane and potentially developing into an outsider like they should (unless you commit suicide, which nullifies the effect). One of the post-campaign options is that a psychopomp (afterlife-maintaining outsider) finds out about it and seeks to destroy it, ideally with the PCs’ help. But from earlier interactions, at least one of the PCs has been exposed to the soul anchor’s effect, and the psychopomp insists they be cleansed of it. The book explicitly says that the spells Miracle and Wish can fix this, but also that suicide and resurrection (even Breath of Life might be enough, now that I think about it) work just as well. And I find that hilarious.
PC 1: “The bad news is, you have to kill yourself.”
PC 2: “!”
PC 1: “The good news is that we’re at the level where death is less inconvenient than losing your sword. Now get to it – I’ve got a yoga session I want to get to.”
This is why you Polymorph your targets into blue whales.
Wouldn’t work I think. You can’t polymorph creatures into something that can’t survive in its current environment (e.g. into a fish on land, or into a rat whilst underwater).
Please show me where in the text it says that:
Besides; whales can survive for a time on land, it’s just that they’re immobile, and will die of dehydration without the ability to get to water.
Our group has four “main” casters (druid, bard, wizard, cleric) and three of them picked up Polymorph (mostly due to all of us having watched Critical Role and seeing the potential utility). It has come in handy more than once against a foe, but a few times helpful for us.
There are a few “simple” rules the DM uses in regards to the spell.
1: If you are casting it in a “friendly” way (the recipient knows what is happening and are not resisting, etc), you have a little more “understanding” of what is going on when you are in whatever form you are in… depending on the Int score of the creature you become. (anything less than 3 and you might struggle to retain any sense of yourself other than a simple “friend/foe” thought)
2: If you are the caster, casting it on yourself, you may have to roll some saves (Wisdom or Int, I can’t remember which, maybe either or both?) depending on what is going on to maintain your hold on the spell. It is a concentration spell, and maybe if you get too wrapped up in being the creature, you might forget you are concentrating on a spell… (also, can’t polymorph self into anything with less than 3 Int, you would forget instantly).
3: We actually ran into that issue as described and since we do have three casters of the spell and everyone in the group understands how the spell works, there was a moment where one of our group needed to not be a flying snake anymore, and the caster in question was unable to drop the spell (because they did not know the danger as they were on the other side of a situation), so… the polymorphed person flew as fast as they could into a wall… unfortunately it turns out flying snakes have more than 1 HP and the damage was only 1 HP (things turned out okay, but it was hilariously tense in the moment)
While we have not been in the situation yet, there is a general rule regarding if you can do that kind of thing when you do not choose to become the creature… that general rule is no. Since you did not choose it, you are not as “aware” of what happened to you, and therefore, you are unable to make your own choice to attempt to get out of it…
exception, if the creature you are polymorphed against your will has an Int score that is “high enough” (we do not know what that means yet, the situation hasn’t happened, but we have discussed it with the DM), then… “maybe”.
Also, turning something into a small HP slow creature (like a turtle), taking it up REAL high (over 500 feet) and dropping it… is a great way to end the creature 🙂
*at least in our games. We have homebrew rules regarding fall damage that make it so the higher you are in a fall, the more damage you end up taking, cause realistically, people turn into splatters in real life, and 20d6 is not nearly enough damage to have taken from a 500+ foot fall.
That’s 70 damage on average, aka almost 20 times the average hit points of a normal person (depending on the edition). The unrealistic part of falling damage isn’t the calculation, it’s the general damage rules.
I agree, but also, people reach terminal velocity at or around 500 feet, while the rules say that you take 1d6 damage every ten feet… well, why stop at 20 if terminal velocity would make it 50 🙂
anyway, this is why house/table rules exist 🙂
I assume part of the reason is that D&D has a lot of things that go from 1 to 20. Another part is that you don’t want to make your group gather up 50 dice to roll at once; 20 is at least vaguely plausible. (And in line with a lot of high-level damage spells.)
Although, once you introduce realism, there’s also the fact that terminal velocity for a small animal is a lot less fatal than for a human being. An ordinary cat can survive a fall from literally any height most of the time; a mouse would probably do even better.
That line in Polymorph is great from the standpoint of making things simple at the table and giving polymorph et al a distinct combat role even when your fighter has more HP than anything you can turn her into, but it leads to conundrums when you use it as a debuff rather than a buff.
As for what I’d do…it depends on what options I’d have, and how much the table thinks taking on a rat’s mental ability scores would affect my decision-making. Also on how important the battle is; I’d be more willing to waste an action or two hiding in a rat-hole like a rat if the party was fighting some chump apprentice than if it was a debuff cast by the BBEG.
on the first time trying this as follows:
as DM: unless the player has displayed recklessness before this coming up, I‘d ask for a will safe to jump and for a second will save to not try and negate 10ft worth of damage (if that is still a thing in 5e)
as a player:
I have 2d6 marked as 50% dice (my Chaotic Choices d6es with red even and green odd numbers of dots) if my char knew about the possibility that this works, I‘d jump on „2 green up“ (or whatever will saves the DM might rule)
Polymorph hasn’t come up much at my tables. Mostly because few of my campaigns have made it to the point where it’s easily available, but also most of my friends play spontaneous casters with very limited spells known and for some reason haven’t taken the spell.
I honestly don’t know how I’d play that situation. I have a hard time not metagaming in that sort of situation and I’d probably ask the DM/GM when it happened what my now rat brain wants me to do. Run? Hide behind my allies? Running jump off a short pier? I don’t know.
So I’d rule it that you’re a rat and it is now time to do rat things. Critter sepuku is off the table. Scurrying away from big dumb apes that sometimes make their hands glow or bite and claw the ankles of same? Sure. More likely scurry, flee, gnaw on wood, and eat garbage… for the duration of the spell.
However, here’s the real conundrum to me, and it has to do with animal mental stats and Talk With Animals.
If you use Talk With Animals, the gamut runs from getting terse, but intelligible responses to purple prose. If your game is more on the purple prose side, doesn’t that basically mean the book stats for animal intelligence are just a suggestion that’s already been thrown out? In which case, isn’t it fair to say that you have full agency to jump your little fuzz butt off a roof?
This is why I polymorphed the boss devil into a turtle.
I recently encountered an interaction with polymorph myself…. in a party of entirely non-casters. We all, without discussion, just chose to behave as if we had no idea how the spell worked.
I’m not entirely how I would have played in a situation that was more dire and there was a caster in the party who would know about the spell though. I think for me it’s one of those “depends on the exact circumstances” things.
My natural inclination would be to play being polymorphed for laughs and act like I was whatever animal, which would likely mean frustratingly trying to get away from the entire combat. But I maybe wouldn’t do that in a fight against the BBEG or something.
And of course, in a party with a spellcaster who actually knew the spell and had ever cast it before I would probably just assume character knowledge about it had been shared and act in a more helpful manner. Depending on the form at least.
Though honestly I’m not sure polymorph is a big threat to PCs. There’s so many times where your spellcasters are annoyed by the fact that other party members are in the way of AOEs, that polymorph basically just gives them a nice excuse to use the fighter as point blank for a fireball since that’s where all the enemies are clustered anyway. =P
The actual troublesome thing in my recent encounter with polymorph was when the crazed pixies polymorphed our half-trained pet into a huge creature…. sinking our rowboat and making it a threat just due to its flailing about…. but we couldn’t just solve the problem by hitting it. Because A) it had a lot more hp than the pixies so why would we bother attacking it anyway and B) since it’s still an animal that was still being trained no less, there’s no way to explain to it why we just suddenly started attacking it.
Rats being so much smaller and lighter, giving them a greater coefficient of drag to weight, I wouldn’t think falling from a cottage roof would actually inflict them fall damage. I mean, I’ve seen real rats make a three-meter jump down and scurry away at full rat speed. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in On Being the Right Size:
“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”
I would hate to be on Haldane’s ethics committee.
I’d argue that not only isn’t mouse-sepuku not metagaming, in fact the opposition to it is purely metagaming.
The spell works the way it works, it’s not really an obscure power in world either (druid wildshaping works the exact same way too for instance). From the point of view of the people in the world, splatting an ally turned into a mouse or splatting yourself if you are the mouse simply makes sense.
It’s only us people with real life pop-cultural knowledge that want to stretch and reach for something else because we, for purely meta-reasons, do not WANT mouse-sepuku to be the rational response.
It’s aesthetically unpleasing and doesn’t fit what we see people do in cartoons or movies or read about in our myths. So we hemm and we haww and we come up with arguments for why characters shouldn’t be allowed to act on how their world works, often why this particular spell should be extremely less understood than any other spell (nobody would argue that a fighter that’s the target of a Fly spell would need to be proficient in Arcana to fly up and attack a dragon with their sword, or make monsters waste their turn attacking Arcane Swords).
Who says you have to stop attacking the caster?
Also could your teammates have just targeted you? Where were they?
Newest member of the Mouseguard patrol.
This wouldn’t be a problem at all if Druid still had uses of Wild Shape remaining, and/or an upcoming hot date with Arcane Archer…
Scooping up the field Fighter and bopping him on the head.
Party wiz PM’d a young green dragon on me not too far back, turned him into a pigeon. I ran his next turn as “angry, possessive, territorial pigeon” – fortunately the dragon was technically one piece of the muscle for an army, so the enemy commander, who I decided did have enough tactical knowledge, javelined the pigeon on his next turn and brought back a seriously pissed off dragon into the fight.
Good times.
Well hey, at least they got it out of combat for a round or two!
If there’s an excuse, it’s not metagaming!
Seriously though. If your barbarian was focused on combat, take a leap at whoever you can justify attacking and “accidentally” fall off the edge. He doesn’t even need to know how the spell works at all.
It really depends on how nice you’re being to the DM and how much the party can afford the loss of contribution from your character. Players aren’t just NPCs in a simulation run by the DM, they’re also legitimately CO writers of the game being played, and meta conversation about choices being taken are just as valid as method acting to make no choices except what the character would make using the knowledge they have been demonstrated/rolled into having.
The goal is to tell a good story.
Ah, the fun of 5e polymorph. With the mental stats vs. personality issue, I go by the following:
– you are the equivalent to an animal companion, with your past experiences dictating what “training” you have.
– you know who your friends are and can be directed by them against specific foes (assuming your character trusts them)
– you are unable to process abstract thoughts or complex orders
Thus, your rat would not be able to jump off the roof to end the spell, as that would require abstract thinking. However, I would allow one of the other PCs to order you to jump off assuming:
You trusted them before
Your character has previously survived long drops (which would help counteract the instinct to avoid them)
A handle animal check would also be allowable to get the idea across – however, you as the player would still decide if you followed through (ie, no controlling your character without your permission).
Absent orders, your rat would most likely want to attack the enemy just as your canine would have, but you could certainly take a different action appropriate to a rat (hiding makes sense).
As for the sorcerer example, he can certainly attack known enemies, those the party directs him against, or anything that hurt him. Of course, if said sorcerer normally avoided combat and ran away from melee enemies, there might be some problems with jumping into the fray ; )