The Big Guns
The alt text on “Stay of Execution” seemed to spark some interest amongst our readership. Let it never be said that the Handbook of Heroes fails to give the people what they want.
While it seems that Druid has successfully rescued her boyfriend from the gallows (and visited some turnabout-is-fair-play retribution on civilization), I’d like to draw your attention to the unbridled fury on that monke face. That’s the look of a gamer who’s finally got to cut loose with her biggest, baddest abilities. It’s an experience we all should savor.
Here’s where I’m coming from. If you’re in the kind of game where conserving resources is a concern, then it’s only natural to keep something in reserve. After all, you never know when you might face a last-minute encounter back at the dungeon entrance or get ambushed in camp later that night. These are the scenarios where keeping a few spell slots in the tank can make the difference between life and TPK. But bringing out the big guns goes beyond the basics of resources conservation. It goes beyond even the “blow all your best abilities” mindset of the 15-minute adventuring day. When it comes time to go full nova and buff yourself to the gills, we’re getting into anime protagonist territory.
You know the trope. Just as the forces of evil seem to have the upper hand, our plucky hero drops their training weights, powers up, and unleashes their strongest technique. Pick your point of reference. In RPG terms, this moment is all about putting your theory crafting to the test, pumping your numbers as high as they can go, and doing the most balls-out powerful maneuver your character can conceive. This looks a little different for every PC, which leads us into our question of the day!
What is the craziest thing your character can pull off? I’m not just talking “I have a high level spell” or “I use action surge,” but the kinds of overly complicated shenanigans and reserved-for-special-occasions ability combos that would make a mythic wizard blush. Hit us up with your own version of “giant ape riding a dinosaur with a tree-shillelagh” down in the comments!
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Well, RIP to a decent chunk of that town.
That’s the thing about Plotsville: It always rebuilds.
I once played in a kingmaker game (which got a bit crazy at the end, admittedly) where I, through combining downtime rules, trompe l’oeils, animate object, awaken construct, construct modifications, bombs (as in the siege ammunition item), trebuchets, homonculi, a ton of lead and a crystal ball created invisible, self guiding, self replicating, teleporting missiles.
I’d launch them from a shielded subterranean bunker with trebuchets at approximately mach 2 (after which they’d teleport on to target) and well, at the end of it all I was sitting on hundreds if not thousands of the things.
Ha! Somebody pulled it off in an actual game. Nice.
What did you actually use all that silliness against?
If I remember correctly I launched a couple of dozen or so against a raiding party relatively early as a demonstration, and sold a few more (in sealed containers, with instructions to detonate if fiddled with) to a tribe of barbarians in the west. Oh, and I did bury a couple of hundred of them around our palace in the capital as a sort of sentry mine after giving them a burrow speed, just to make tunneling into the palace a bit more of a hassle.
I never really had any reason to use them to the full extent, the campaign sort of fizzled out. I did have quite a bit more sillyness going on now that i think about it though. Like linking together trompe l’oeils of awakened animated tower shields with the shield wall feat to give construct air ships effective shielding, or, I think there’s a monster in the bestiary somewhere that replaces the eyes of things in order to see what they see, I never got around to implementing it but the next step was to set up a CCTV network utilizing that. You really can do a lot of truly goofy stuff with Trompe L’oeils, it’s not all about infinite solars.
Question for you: How would you go about GMing for such a build? When you’ve got that much power to manipulate the setting, how do you challenge the player without denying them their fun?
Well, I think it’s fundamentally about scope. I never brought them out when we were out adventuring as characters, because well, it would have trivialized absolutely everything. But in a sense that’s similar to how bringing even a regular, bare basics army with you in Kingmaker would trivialize a lot of things, 2000 farmers with longbows can make short work of a lot of encounters after all.
But on a plane of kingdom vs. kingdom it becomes a lot more… reasonable? It’s also worth noting that the build only really works because of the years and years of downtime that Kingmaker provides to begin with.
That said the downtime rules, the kingdom rules and the mass combat rules are all a horrible mess, and the way I would approach running a game with a concept like Kingmaker is to use a system other than Pathfinder.
I realize I’ve kinda skirted around the question a bit, but when it comes to well, true warfare (IE Kingdom on Kingdom) I imagine defending against it would look a lot like how one defends against modern artillery.
So, von Neumann probes, but violent and stealthy.
I may have simplified it a bit too much, strictly speaking the missiles themselves weren’t self replicating.
Rather I had through downtime constructed burrowing subterranean factories (out of gardens and alchemy labs), animated them (paying the extra to change the outer material of them to a common metal, in this case lead for cloaking purposes) and created I think Trompe L’oeils of Lunar Naga’s ( it was a fairly low level Naga variety at any rate) with the HD heightened through construct modification to give them the crafting feats necessary.
Each of these factories also served as both the fire base for the missiles (since they only had a 400 mile range on the teleport, needed to be launched from a trebuchet to arm and had to have some sort of way to be communicated with to give them a target. The factories also served as the repositories for the base paintings since Trompe L’oeils regenerate in their painting after a short while if they are destroyed.
Please, please tell us how this game went, and how it ended…
Hmm, it comes down to two choices, one practical optimization, the other theoretical optimization (that is, it requires some let’s call them “generous” interpretations of the rules, as well as favorable circumstances).
Let’s start with the practical.
Dante is a character I recently created. At level 18, he can buff himself with greater luminous armor and shield (both shared with his gen familiar), which alongside his Dragonscale Husk gives him stupidly high AC. When he expects a major combat ahead (within 180 minutes), he casts greater spell matrix and over the next three rounds casts steeldance into it 3 times with his standard actions. Greater spell matrix is also shared with his gen familiar, so on each of those three turns he casts an abjuration touch spell (which are swift actions for him thanks to the Abjurant Champion PrC) through his gen familiar, who then passes it into its spell matrix.
Upon entering combat, Dante activates his greater spell matrix as a swift action, automatically casting all three steeldances on himself and sharing them with his familiar, filling the air around them with 12 daggers that can each attack as a free action (ideally, these will be Colossal daggers loaded to the gills with enhancements and greater magic weapon casts, but really any dagger will do). With his move action, he moves into the center of the enemies, with his standard action he casts any AOE from his repertoire (using Sculpt Spell to give it one of four alternate shapes, one of which is actually four shapes to hit enemies four times, and Mastery of Shaping to designate safe squares for him and his allies) to damage and/or trap them with him, as a free action he attacks with his six daggers, and if any enemies try to cast a spell or SLA on him he counterspells it as an immediate action, which also reflects the spell back onto them (if there aren’t any spellcasters, he can use his immediate action to cast lesser deflect as a “you miss” button, but his AC is high enough that this probably isn’t necessary). His familiar (clinging to his shoulder) attacks with its six daggers and activates its greater spell matrix, casting the three buff spells it had stored on Dante, which also shares them with itself, and as a standard action can attack or use a magic item or whatever.
His first round now complete, Dante has likely killed several (maybe all) enemies, all his buffs are up for the rest of the fight, and he’s still got all but 1-2 of his high-level spell slots. If you want to get really crazy, you can repeat that greater spell matrix setup as many times as you have 9th level spell slots (or 7th for non-greater spell matrix), activating another one with your swift action on each subsequent turn of the fight. It’s a ridiculously effective opener when you know a big fight is coming.
CG Silverbrow Human Crusader 1/ Sha’ir 5/ Demonwrecker 4/ Abjurant Champion 5/ Archmage 2/ Sacred Exorcist 2/ Demonwrecker +1
And… it’s 1:30 here, and I’ve got work tomorrow. I’ll post the theoretical optimization build as a reply to this one. It’s been few years since I crunched the numbers for it, but IIRC it capped out at 32 hundred damage per round in the most favorable circumstances.
Funny how the opportunity to calculate how awesome your character might be in a theoretical context keeps your up at night. I might know that feeling. 😛
Was playing in a Pathfinder campaign with a Herbalism Druid. Herbalism let’s them make a ton of free potions, but as we’re approaching level 8 they haven’t used much besides Cure Light Wounds, Barkskin, and the occasional Spider Climb. Too much of a bother to divvy out all the different buffs for every fight, you know.
Anyways, the strongest martial character in our party got hit with a Dominate Person last session and really messed us up before escaping with the BBEG, so this time we’re pulling out all the stops to rescue him. We’re making plans, picking spells, discussing rules, and the Druid casually mentions that he picked up a feat called Dreamed Secrets, which gives him wizard spells. And not only that, but he has made potions of nearly every single 3rd level and lower buff spell on the combined wizard and druid lists.
Well, after quaffing them all we charged in at insane speeds as giant fey demigods, flying invisibly over walls and terrain, ignoring the mooks who could no longer touch us, even if they could see us, and took down the BBEG before they even got a turn, with the rest of the encounter quickly following suit. It was the definition of overkill, and also the most fun I had yet this campaign.
Did they ever do anything about herbalism druid in an errata sense? It always seemed so nuts to me that the phrase “we take a month and do some downtime activities” translates to “I have every potion.”
But then again…
…Maybe that’s the point.
I’m in one group that’s gone beyond 20th level, so the characters there are a little nuts power-wise to say the least. Of note is my lizardfolk wizard Klezin, who can be both paranoid and creatively cruel when it comes to setting up wards. In their personal chambers, they have several different sets of spell glyphs to ensure that anyone who enters without permission or tries to attack them will be simultaneously mind-wiped, turned into a small, harmless animal (the exact type depends on what set the wards off) and petrified, and also have ones that can bombard the area with attack spells at their command just in case. Put simply, you do not mess with an epic abjurer on their home turf.
That’s so tough to GM for… You want that mess to pay off so the wizard can feel like a badass for putting in the effort. But at the same time, as a GM you know that this ridiculous malarkey is in place and ready to KO whatever you send. At some point, it become a plot hook for “you have a new prisoner to interrogate” rather than an actual mechanical thing.
Still, you could always hostile teleport some enemy into “the blender.”
I’ve mentioned the shenanigans I pulled off with my Ratfolk wizard vs demilich encounter before, so I won’t repeat it here.
Most notable moment in that same game was when we had to intentionally summon a boss on our own terms, with the goal of killing them. We knew they were an extremely powerful necromancer/undead, so I bought some supplies special for them – named, Pyre Salts, a consumable that doubles the damage of any magical fires. I then had our Sorcerer’s Draconic Ally carefully wait to drop those Pyre Salts into a Wall of Fire I’d slam on top of the undead. Since the wall does double damage against undead, this caused it to do x4 damage with the pyre salts and deal a dramatic amount of damage to the baddie on the first turn. The rest of the battle was a fee hairy save-or-die casts from the baddie before we wore him down to true, final death with our prepared buffs.
Another similarly explosive ‘all-out’ moment was vs the APs BBEG, when our witch managed to confirm a crit on a casting of Harm on them, dealing the finishing blow to a extremely deadly foe and winning us the fight.
I never quite got to spell-strike with Harm as an Occultist with VMC magus. I always wondered whether that would be a TKO, as I could order Harm to go off ahead of the actual killing blow….
Our witch was an avid user of the prehensile hair hex and animate hair spell. It was surprisingly useful, constricting/grappling baddies on occasion and hitting them with touch spells. And she occasionally used her tail (she was a Kitsune) to carry party members about.
Poor druid, seems she had to stomp and burn down a few trees in the process of liberating her comedic-chewtoy husbando. Or are those trees doing the arson and destruction themselves?
Derp, now I see she’s wielding the tree as a club/quarterstaff/shillelagh.
It’s not exactly the march of the ents, but it is nice to see nature getting some of their own against all them houses.
All that’s missing is some sentient pigeons commencing an aerial bombardment.
I recall an evil PCs game where our party had to eliminate/sabotage the forces of an entire fortress to allow an invading army to ransack it. It started with killing off their wizard in his sleep and nicking his spellbook/wand of fireballs, continued with poisoning their food, and concluded with interrupting a big theatrical performance they were having with blasting every tightly-packed soldier in the room with said fireball wand from a high vantage point. From there we merely mopped up the opposition as though it were a regular dungeon and made sure to kill off a squad of reinforcements that unexpectedly arrived after our carnage.
Because let’s be honest… Players want to actually fight some stuff as well. 😛
Overwhelming force is how we started the final dungeon of a lvl20 AP, freshly hitting that level.
We started with a fight with giants and a hellfire-ray tower that got collectively buried in rubble with Clashing Rocks, our sorceress possessing one of them to give herself a tanky expendable body.
We proceeded with a fight against more giants with a horrific construct, which I proceeded to wrest control of with Control Construct for three rounds, beating the BBEGs arcana checks to keep control of it and making them waste a mythic surge to regain control of it (by which point the damage was already done), and followed into a fight with some horrors and a demonic gunslinger, whos deadly weapon was disabled by being soaked by a Tsunami.
The rest of the dungeon was less flashy, up until the final BBEG fight where we knew we had to go all-in or die.
I’ve never pulled off object possession, though it always sounds hilarious. The image of a boulder rolling uphill to smack some dudes just makes me giggle like a mad gnome.
Take a look at the Animate Object spell. Witches are good candidates for it! Just find a bulky piece of furniture, statue or other sturdy thing and have it start punching baddies.
Mage Cannon is also pretty cool – just summon up a ship cannon that on the lucky crit gibs someone with x4 siege damage.
As for the possession, it was a greater possession spell that hit one of the giants – the Sorceress body winks out, making it effectively a soul jar without drawbacks of your helpless body being coup-able for the duration.
I always thought a nice padded sarcophagus would be a good candidate for object possession. It’s like construct armor without the ludicrous price tag!
The Mind Mage (Dragon #313) has the Focus of Discipline ability, which lets you prepare spells in lower-level slots by expending power points. It’s reasonably well-suited for novas.
Do you have a few days of downtime and thus power points to spend?
Why not prepare some Maximized Time Stops in your cantrip slots, à raison de 81 pp each?
Are all your low-level slots bursting with 9ths already?
Store some more into your spell-storing bolts—Astral Fire Searing Erupt is nice—and then move on to the rest of the party. I think you’ll agree that shuriken monks are much more fun when they have a three-thousand-foot-radius burst on every attack.
lol. That strikes me as the kind of ability that really, REALLY needs a “no more than X power points per level may be expended in this way.” Silly psions….
You cannot spend more power points than your manifester level on Focus of Discipline, so you need ML 72 to prepare a 9th-level spell in a cantrip slot (plus an extra 9 to add Maximize with the Compensation ability).
Fortunately, Mind Mages are well-equipped to reach high manifester levels, especially with the Psiotheurgist feat. There’s a little fiddling you can do with Mental Pinnacle, Fusion, and a psicrystal or familiar (i.e. fuse with a [polymorphed] familiar that’s had MP shared with it, to get around the “lose your casting” restriction) to boost your ML by your CL per iteration. Since Mental Pinnacle also provides a big batch of pp, this is a pretty cheap loop to run through (you actually restore some pp, even if you cast MP from cantrip slots).
Realistically, though, you’ll want spells of various spell levels, so you don’t need to stuff 9ths in cantrip slots—just move everything down a slot or two. With a free weekend, you can prepare a good thirty spells in slots two levels lower (that’s 480 pp over two days), and free up your highest-level slots for whatever spells you find you need on Monday.
One weekend of preparation is nice, but in a week of adventuring it won’t give you that many extra spells per day on average—this is all happening past level 15, after all, spells go by the dozen. If we’re talking “vorpal sword crafting” levels of downtime, though… well, the first lich you encounter after that may just find themselves slightly out-gunned :p.
Let villains fear the fifteen-minute adventuring month!
Sounds like it’s less an issue of power points expended per day, and more an issue of prepared spells not getting un-prepared when you sleep.
Well, the look on Druid’s face suggests she’s not gonna be calming down any time soon, Team Bounty Hunter have got another enemy on their hands from the looks of things!
Incidentally I was saving this for the end of To Catch A Killer but failed to predict when it would be, but I’m really loving the sort of story evolutions that have been taking place over these last few weeks! It’s really fun seeing inter- and intra-party dynamics change, and I can’t wait to see how Ranger and Inquisitor manage during this Dead Magus Arc. Ranger is of special interest I reckon, she’s been incredibly expressive throughout the whole last arc (with Part 2 being my favourite) and with just her and Inquisitor it seems like she might be forced to step up to the bat and out of her comfort zone, or at the very least get more screen time <3 Who knows what the two of em will look like by the end of this
Cheers, Senshi! It’s tough, because part of this comic’s appeal is that it’s accessible to newcomers. There’s a reason characters are named Fighter and Thief and such. When you start doing character-specific work and actual plot arcs, you lose out on some of that. The tradeoff is that long-time readers can see characters actually being characters rather than archetypes.
You picks your poison and you makes your choice. Suffice it to say that I’m trying to take a more balanced approach than I have in the past. 🙂
Piggybacking off this comment, one thing that the comic’s been doing recently that I really like is balancing drama and comedy. Kudos to Laurel for her amazing work at depicting Inquisitor and Ranger’s panic, rage and despondency over this arc and for keeping it from clashing with the (beloved!) usual tone of ironic ridiculousness.
Loving this arc and, of course, the comic in general!
Thanks for the kind words, Alaokru! Now I just need to figure out what we’re actually doing with this arc….
See, the biggest most complex thing I ever did was pretty simple all things considered. I bought a ton of Alchemist fire and Oil back at Sharn, and we knew we were being followed in a desert. I had a brilliant idea to take an empty sack, put almost all my alchemist fire and oil in it (Not all, but most) and throw it at the ambushers as soon as they arrived in a huge explosion (DM said i spent the entire day making the bomb).
It killed all the ambushers, alongside knocking me and the Pally out, almost killing us from the fire.
You and Sorcerer would get on famously:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
I have a level 5 cleric. I recently did this, cause I thought it was the final fight and it would be a long fight due to lack of party members.
So, while fighting an Ice Witch 3 levels higher, my dwarf was
Enlarge Person
Wearing Heavy Armor
Resist Energy – Cold
Prayer
Shield spell
Wizard cast some sort of damage buff, don’t know the name
Divine Power of a +1 to hits with my deities favored weapon
For a time, the large Size Dwarven Cleric with an AC of 28 was swinging around his now large size warhammer while attacking large size fiendish dire apes and ignoring the cold AoE.
It did not last. I couldn’t dispel the cold trap for the rest of the party and the bbeg got away until next session, where I’ll have to fight with no buffs other than resist energy and prayer.
As for my now retired illusionist, how would you like 30 clones of him acting independently while he has invisibility, two different types of 50% miss chance running and the ability to cast effectively shadow evocation 15 times or just make illusionary lava rain down from the sky which hurts no matter if you fail the save? Also, able to do a ranged touch attack of 6d8 every round for free as a full round action. He never pulled out all the stops because the one time it was needed he was too low on energy to do so, but his ability to do consistent damage one us the hardest fight we faced.
How did you like running a “shadow evocation” dude? I remember getting overwhelmed by all my options running a mythic archmage…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/mythic/mythic-heroes/mythic-paths-paizo-inc/Archmage/#Wild_Arcana_Su
…And the shadow spells always struck me as similar in spirit.
It was the spheres of power system and I was using A Fey Adept with Shadow magic. Relevant text below.
Destructive Blast
The fey adept may give substance to an instantaneous effect such as a burst of fire, a bolt of lightning, or another simulated effect. This creates a destructive blast as the Destruction sphere, which may possess any (blast type) talent and (blast shape) talent of the fey adept’s choosing. An instantaneous destructive blast cannot be extended through concentration or spell points as is usual with illusions, but a destructive blast with a duration (such as Energy Wall or Energy Sphere) persists as long as the illusion is maintained, to a maximum of 1 round per caster level.
Targets affected by an illusionary destructive blast who succeed at their Will save to disbelieve suffer only half damage and receive a +4 bonus to any saving throw associated with the destructive blast itself.
Shadow Magic
Benefit: You may mimic other spheres of magic by shaping shadowstuff. As a free action, you may spend 1 shadow point to grant yourself a temporary magic sphere or talent you do not possess from the following list: Alteration, Conjuration, Creation, Dark, Death, Destruction, Enhancement, Light, Nature, Protection or Weather sphere for 1 minute. For every 5 surreal feats you possess, you may grant yourself an additional temporary talent from the chosen sphere.
So it wasn’t just shadow evocation, it also did shadow conjuration. And I had a lot more than just that; illusionary weather, companions, some elemental stuff and shadowy objects.
What this meant was mostly using shadowy illusions to pull out nonsense but only one bit at a time. I had 5 surreal feats, enough to get Destruction and one other thing or to pull out Protection from Fire for a fight.
As for how I liked it… it was a blast. I made an excel sheet of common things I’d want in fights, useful notes on options for situations and kept tabs of all my options open to quickly find something.
Need to deal with a Magic Immune Golem? I got that; Stone Blast. Impossible to hit AC? I can help; Energy Sphere. Illusionary buffs at the start, Mirror Image ftw, solving problems with enough versatility that I could legit fill almost every party role at least a little while free action teleporting 55ft away… awesome.
Sure having less than half the HP of the fighter was an issue and if anyone so much as breathed on me I crumbled made it tough, but that’s the price for power sometimes.
It sounds powerful. I just worry that the “spreadsheet of options” style can get a bit heavy on the bookkeeping.
Did you use a digital character sheet or some kind of app to help track effects and buffs?
It was on Roll20 but I used google sheets. I make spreadsheets for a my job, so making a sheet with key words I could filter for was my solution.
And that, I suspect, is the real difference. I had the pfsrd open in front of me, scrolling furiously through spell descriptions during other players’ turns.
As DM, my favorite moment when a PC’s awesomeness managed to destroy my well-crafted and beautiful wickedness was when the leader of a band of ogre barbarians entered the fray riding a marble elephant. The party had witnessed him activate it, but only one PC, Druid, wrote down the partially-overheard command words. On his action, Druid asked if spellcraft would tell him if he could cast charm animal on a transformed figurine.
I prepared to explain why this wouldn’t work, then read out loud various phrases from the RAW like “to the…specifications of a true elephant.” Hunh. “Okay,” I admitted, “it looks like you can befriend it.”
“Good,” says Druid. He cast the spell, then proceeded to roll mightily on Wild Empathy, Diplomacy, and Handle Animal (talking being a free action) to persuade the elephant to stop trampling and goring his friends.
I rolled a reaction for the ogre chieftain–he freaked out and tried to reassert command of the elephant by shouting the command words again. The player then swiftly a) successfully parsed what each command was for b) pronounced them correctly c) said them in an original sequence to wrest control from the ogre and turn the elephant on the opposition.
(And yes, the command words were Tantor, Kreegah, Ungawa, and Bundolo. I couldn’t resist.)
As a player, my favorite moment was overhearing another player defend his own druid’s actions in a previous session, saying “…they weren’t celestial, dire, or giant. They were perfectly normal orcas, and there were only three of them.”
Wat elephants are tricky to control in our world. They’d be so much harder to use if the enemy could deploy druids.
I was just setting out to use Tarzan as an example of an “open work world” in a scholarly text. Funny old world, innit?
Great to see someone paying attention to command words. It always struck me as a potential Achilles heel for parties with flying carpets.
I agree, command words are fun and lead to many unexpected outcomes!
From an actual session:
Player: I point the wand of silence at the floor under the wizard, say “Shut up and fight!” [the command phrase–DM], then charge at him while drawing my sword and yell “By God!” [command phrase on his flaming sword]
DM: (warning the other players–including me–to silence with a meaningful glance) Could you repeat that, please. In Order?
Player: Yeah. I say “Shut up and fight,” then charge up to him and activate my sword. (The other players facepalm.)
DM: Gre-ea-at. Okay, here’s what happens: the necromancer is silenced, you charge into the zone of silence with your non-flaming sword and begin mouthing emphatically.
Player: (ponders the order of his actions, then begins silently mouthing various profanities)
So easy to let the internal logic of magic disappear into a soup of ease-of-play. It can be refreshing (if frustrating) to be reminded of what’s actually happening in the game world. And occasionally, it can be hilarious.
I think I’ll just go with my original Magus for this, after her years of character development and build evolution to go from a squishy striker to an invulnerable tank:
Magus: “I cast Mirror Image and Displacement, activate Snake Style and prepare my 16 CON.”
Enemy: “What?”
Magus: “I said I cast Weapon Immunity. COME AT ME, BRO!”
I’m not seeing Weapon Immunity? What it is?
Also, help me remember how mirror image and displacement stack. I can never remember what the FAQ says. :/
Weapon Immunity’s not actually a spell, just a nickname for this situation. My table considered Mirror Image and Displacement to stack (as demonstrated when a boss used it against us), with the 50% miss meaning you didn’t even pop an image. So an enemy making conventional attacks would, on their first attack of a round, have to beat an AC of 1d20+25 (Snake Style), then win a coin flip (Displacement), then win a 1-in-6-or-so chance (Mirror Image), then beat their way through the second- or third-best HP block in the party. Any attacks after that first one would use my normal AC but still have to get through everything else.
What I’m saying is that if they had any sense, they’d be demanding I make saving throws. But ogres don’t have a lot of sense, do they?
I always figured that closing your eyes would give your better results against mirror image. Of course, I have no idea whether that strat would still poof the images. Bleh. Rules.
I live for making dumb builds that do meme combos. They’re my absolute favorite.
Recently, I built a character in the Spheres of Power 3pp subsystem for pathfinder who does the following combo as her default combat routine:
Capitalized are spheres features called Talents.
Step 1: charge, activating Slidekick to fall prone, but get a free trip attempt (at +47). This carries Bloodied Strike, inflicting 4 stacking bleed.
Step 2: get an attack of opportunity from And Stay Down! to get an AOO on the now-prone enemy, which activates Capoeira Spin, allowing her to immediately stand up again without provoking an attack of opportunity. This also carries Bloodied Strike, rising that bleed to 8.
Step 3: Mobile Striker activates, letting her use the rest of her charge to get away.
Alternatively, an npc construct I recently built:
Step 1: use the Shove ability to get into melee and inflict the Battered condition (A condition added by the subsystem) as a move action
Step 2: use Brutal Strike to attempt to inflict Staggered with the Heavy Swing talent. Normally, Heavy Swing only staggers on a failed save- but if the victim is Battered, it’s instead staggered for X rounds on fail, or 1 round on success.
Step 3: use Sweep Kick to knock the target prone after the brutal strike.
Result: The victim is now prone and staggered, meaning it’ll take their whole turn to get back up- and you can just do the combo again the turn after.
That construct can basically do an infinite combo, like it’s a character in a fighting game that didn’t go through rigorous QA.
I can never read the word “Capoeira” without imagining these guys:
https://cdn.britannica.com/79/191679-050-C7114D2B/Adult-capybara.jpg
It is a sickness of the mind.
I do appreciate that you’re building melee combos. Nice to see an alternative angle of attack to “I cast more spells.”
I have an example of the opposite.
For the final boss battle of Rise of the Runelords (spoiler alert, we were fighting a rising runelord), I picked out about a dozen buff spells for my mystic theurge to cast on himself before the battle, one of which was form of the dragon. At the last minute, I decided to leave off several of them, mostly to not take up too much of the pre-battle prep time.
My character died within two rounds, and almost immediately thereafter I realized I would have survived if I’d used form of the dragon. Ever since then, “I should have turned into a dragon” has been a minor running gag—it doesn’t come up often, but it’s funny when it does.
Always turn into a dragon.
Wisdom. We come to it through hard experience.
My summoner can do the impossible and traverse the multiverse at level 1.
So in the realm of dreams you can make charisma checks to become lucid. Once there you can do impossible magic with successful charisma checks. This includes spells outside of your level or class. So with this my character casts astral projection to get into the astral sea. (DC 19) then with his high knowledge planes he makes his way back to the material plane. There he gets into fights, befriends parties and if he dies he gets shunted back to the dream realm. I level up from the comfort of my own home.
Yo… I don’t want to be a level 1 caster in the Dream Realm. I’ve had too many run-ins with this guy:
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tatterman
My summoner was rather lazy and narcoleptic so he enjoyed naps and interdimensional travel.
It’s a good thing for Arcane Archer that Allie learned to distinguish him from Mr. Squeakers. 😉
Training is a fraught business. I recommend hiring an experienced ranger, cavalier, or Chris Pratt for the undertaking.
https://images.ctfassets.net/cnu0m8re1exe/1UDpAgGnK3wOXz5T9irpdF/108a13e33b640a6bb2fa8d32b1b5557e/raptors.jpg?fm=jpg&fl=progressive&w=660&h=433&fit=fill
Does it count how, during a Kingmaker game, my Winter Witch character managed to initially convince a tribe of Mites to a treaty by telling them trade would bring them all sorts of stuff they couldn’t steal?
Or how my Beastbrood Tiefling Bard swayed half the crew of a pirate ship to the side of the party so they joined for a mutiny by a few weeks of telling stories, singing songs, telling fortunes and all-around being a properly diplomatic Bard?
Depends. How dramatic was the reveal of your allies?
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b8/ef/4a/b8ef4ac260bb98ac4f8c2ad3316b729d.jpg
The first mate and his master of discipline, who had mutinied themselves by taking a ship they’d been entrusted to sell for the actual captain with its crew, sure seemed surprised when instead of getting to kill us on the spot, they were suddenly in the middle of a mutiny against them… not to mention the fact that they lost spectacularly.
Meddle not in the affairs (love or otherwise) of druids, cause there’s a LOT of fire on that spell list!
This is very satisfying.
It is an appropriate and measured response to the blatant corruption of the Plotsville judicial system.
On godbound there ia power of the Sorcery word called The Excellent Pause, it allows to cast an spell but to trigger it at a later moment. Invocations of the Throne, think third circle magic on exalted, takes one day to cast slowly, three turn quickly at the expense of extra effort and instantly it takes committing effort for the day and taking 1d20 of damage. With The Excellent Pause any spell can be stored so when you need it you can just release The Grinding Teeth of God: “The adept drags the fabric of reality into the teeth of the celestial gears that support it, churning every solid object in the area of effect into a fine powder.” making 1d20 points of damage per ten turns and also maybe creating a portal to a dimension of twisted things if some artifact gets caught on the gears breaking them 😀
Even when that is good the trick i like the most is combining two powers from the Night word. Welcoming the Dusk allows to create darkness on a 30 foot radius on any configuration the player wants. Then the Darkling Stairs allows to fly inside darkness. Combine those two to create a giant raven made out of pure darkness inside which you can fly. How much cool/metal is that? 😀
Speaking of god bound, me and some other players are playing it in a biweekly campaign now for the first time. At the moment, we’re spending all our dominion basically on just boosting our faction, and between invincible iron general, magic weapons and armor, and elite training, our individual troops are around as strong as us besides having worse health and no magic, and we have city sized armies of them. We should be taking over nezdohva soon enough, and creating a new socialist utopia where all are equal, under us of course.
Nice. All the people will be equal, but some godbound are more equal than other 😀
You weren’t playing a bird man by any chance…?
https://myheroacademia.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Fallen_Angel
Nope 😛
I try to do my characters not copy or overly inspire them on something 🙂
Just thought you’d approve of the grim dark naming conventions. 😛
Nah, that name is too short. Unless it’s too long even for Abyssal exalted standards it’s too short for me 😛
I usually don’t do many complex strategies in fights, as I prefer to just get big reliable numbers, though I often go a bit more complex in my build to get those numbers. Still though, there are 2 main builds I’ve done, who have what I consider great going all out moments. The first was an old magus build from pathfinder 1e, which at level 20 I supplemented with like 40 pearls of power to just put every buff on the list on me and my companions before the final boss, reducing the bosses balor allies to just repeatedly trying to greater counter spell everything while I just did massive bursts of hundreds damage per round to the boss, which was cool. The second is what I am currently doing in pathfinder 2e. My current character is focused pretty hard on being a support. First, he has a ton of buffs, which often keep his allies numbers roughly as high as guys 1 or 2 levels above, which is massive in 2e, and secondly, he has ridiculous amounts of healing between divine font, the medic archetype, and the alchemist archetype. A repeated joke in our group is that I make us like those boss monsters in video games with multiple health bars, as while a monster might be able to bring someone down once, they then have to repeat that like 5 more times to actually take someone out of a fight, as I can bring out around over 1000 healh in healing daily, all while my character’s really high mobility and misinform elixir keep him safe from retribution. This goes to the extreme when we fight a major boss monster, as there the standard strategy is for our witch to repeatedly maze them while I just drop every buff I can, and then stand back and just heal people whenever they get a bit low.
I see you drank your aid.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/heroes-feast
These are mainly stories about my players.
I once had a psychic private detective overdose himself on drugs to boost his psychic powers so that he could use them to steer a spaceship. By moving the entire thing with his mind, rather then try and figure out how the controls works.
In another, a tiefling fighter got the brilliant idea of getting herself a pair of bag of holding and fill them with alchemist fires. Finally when they were at a ball that turned out to be filled with mindflayer assassins, she action surged and turned both of them inside out, creating a gigantic explosion. She barely survived, the sorcerer did not.
I once played a Battle Master Fighter (5e), who, after being hasted, used the pushing attack feature to push an enemy through almost the entirety of the the druids spike growth spell. Then I ran around to the other side and did it again.
And then there is of course also building a metal howdah for when the druid shapechanges into a dragon. Strap it to the druid and put the casters in it. Now all there is left is to air drop the barbarian on top of the enemy, while the others fly around raining death from above.
Finally there is of course also the wonderful combo known as Wizard casting prismatic wall, druid casting reverse gravity.
That was Laurel’s character in our Firefly game. She was the pilot, but at some point she got kidnapped by the hands-of-blue dudes and suffered mental experimentation. She more or less became the ship after that: linked to it, injured along with it, etc.
My group used wall of swords for this trick. IT SLICES, IT DICES!
Towards the end of a pathfinder kingmaker style game, we were up against the final enemies pretty much, fate of the world at stake, level 19
There was this magical font, which pretty much was the source of magic in the world. We’d found it a while earlier and realised it was nearly empty due to being broken, and fixed it up, and so it had been refilling since
Figured out a way to use that magical power in it to fire it off in a blast
So.. my character created her own demiplane, with an entrance portal straight above the font of all magic on the planet. Then, in the final battle, used the Gate spell to create another portal, this time from where we were currently at, to the other end of my demiplane
Essentially created a demiplane with time dilation to function as a firing and concentration chamber for pretty much all the magical energy stored up. Used it to fire into a portal to the enemy plane (who were creatures who had no magic and were out to destroy all worlds that had it, pretty much). So that we could then go through, and use magic to mess things up on their side of things
So.. yeah, as far as big prepared one offs go. That was one of them for sure.
Earlier in the campaign, the enemies had also tried to defeat us by pitching us against our alter egos. Each of us fought an alternate version of ourself pulled from some hypothetical future where the enemies had won. So kinda, evilly corrupted versions of ourselves pretty much
I stole their idea, used a quickened Wish and a Miracle (Wishacle, go!) to call for help from a future version of me from the future where we won instead. I forget what happened mechanically from that, I think it was just a temporary level up and all spells refreshed or something. But it felt neat to pull the “Turnaround’s fair play” on them
You fool! Listen to Crichton’s warning!
https://farscape.fandom.com/wiki/Wormhole_weapon
In 3.5 and to some degree also in Pathfinder 1e, there are loops.
As GM, I once had a Angel gate in another Angel who gated in another Angel… as part of narration. That quickly was ignored in-game and we went back to playing.
I’ve never played a character yet who’s destroyed a plane on a whim, but that’s probably close to #2 in the amount of theoretical power a character could wield in-game with (near-)infinite loops and deific status as #1 or thereabouts.
I guess that “gate” gets around the “a summoned creature cannot use any innate summoning abilities it may have” rules since it’s a calling spell. Seems strong.
I remember this FFRPG campaign I was running. The party was facing the end boss (an alien elemental spirit of gravity that had come to wreck their planet), with the usual backing and forthing. The end boss was about to unleash a charge-up attack, with just the party’s white mage having an action first.
Limit Break time. Appropriate enough timing, but what break did he choose?
Everyone in the party gets 2 actions immediately. This was a 9 PC party, and the rest had charged up their Limit Breaks too. You can imagine the action economy curling up in a corner and weeping.
18 actions of multiple damage-cap-hits, what few statuses the end boss was not immune to, and general environmental damage. Fortunately they were fighting on a moon that the planet could do without (though enough was left to pilot away, in the epilogue).
It was enough. The white mage’s Limit Break ended, and the boss’s HP were thoroughly depleted.
Get to high enough level, and eventually all RPGs become Exalted:
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b7/fe/23/b7fe23245394eee9dfa4881b42736105.jpg
One of the coolest things one of my Pathfinder characters has done is to use the scandalous amount of loot and knowledge we received from a quest to create a permanent demiplane. She then proceeded to hit the whole sucker up with a permanent mage’s sanctuary, making it scry-proof.
The party Cleric hallow‘ed our new club house, set it up to purge invisibility, and used stone shape to arrange the whole place into private rooms and public rooms.
It cost a bundle, but in the end we had a base our enemies could not find on their own, was warded to the hilt against intrusion by spies and assassins, was tailored to our individual needs, and that we could travel to and from with a single spell. I kept a scroll for that very spell handy, just in case.
Ain’t nothing wrong with a strong defense. Plus it’s great for peace of mind:
https://wildcards.fandom.com/wiki/Turtle
Played an Exalted game once, in which our Circle managed to pre-empt the fall of Thorns. And a big part of that was that my Twilight managed to open battle with not one, but two Solar Circle spells… casting Gaia’s Rebuke on Juggernaut, then following up with Light of Solar Cleansing.
So the Mask’s giant undead ambulatory fortress is flung into the air and comes crashing back upside down… and while everyone is figuring out what happened, a huge chunk of his undead army is incinerated by holy light. At which point my character flees (on artifact wings) back to the protection of his allies, completely tapped out.
“Well, that was fun, but don’t worry, I left the pissed-off Deathlord and his Abyssals for you.”
Laurel ran a sentai dragonblood game. Their warstriders combined to fight the Juggernaut. As memory serves, they tripped it and held its head in the ocean like a mean kid in an 80s movie performing a swirly. You know you might be getting into OP territory when the Juggernaut is getting bullied.
Well, that’s Exalted for you… especially 2e, which really amped up that crazy side of things. The system had its problems, but it was definitely a fun setting to be playing in.
Yeah it was. Makes me wonder what it’ll look like in live action:
https://www.exalted-tv.com/?fbclid=IwAR2etJ5_YLA451ph20Aza3-bJmaxG8qro09X5Rk-6SRXUeZOnscWyBgfCpY
The most metal thing I can think of doing in game was grappling Strahd in the sunlight given off from the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind for a few rounds. I didn’t manage to kill him, but the encounter went from probable TPK to Strahd Misty Stepping away to heal while we ran the fuck out of the castle (barely surviving the trap).
I’ve also made a Goliath Druid who can do absolutely ridiculous amounts of damage by abusing the Shikigami style feats, but outside of Giantslayer, it would be hard to come up with an AP where I’d be able to easily bring that character to life due to how massive they become.
Turning the “supposed to lose” encounter into a draw is my favorite part of the three-fight arc: get your ass kicked in the first encounter, fight ’em to a standstill in the second, and manage a narrow victory in the third. Strahd is great for this stuff.
It’s going to be so goddamn satisfying to smite his smug face with the Sunsword once we get it.
We’ve just got one big wrinkle pop up in our little plan of give Strahd the beat down he so badly deserves: Patrina. And she’s already made her way to the Amber Temple.
There is only one sun sword. You will have to ask nicely if you want to borrow it:
https://www.writeups.org/wp-content/uploads/Thundarr-Barbarian-Ruby-Spears-d.jpg
Heh. Have a few of them courtesy of my epic-level wizard. See, in our homebrew-world game, he often goes up against Orcus or Tiamat, so a lot of the standard-issue spells aren’t that helpful. This isn’t as much of a problem as it might seem, since my DM finds my creativity amusing, so often stupid things will work. Once.
Probably the most convoluted was using the time-travel the group had access to (long story) to track down Orcus while he was a mortal, polymorph him into a mouse, then trap him in a warehouse full of cats, resurrecting him each time he was killed, until he was basically catatonic with terror. Then mindwipe him from that experience (so as not to muck up the timeline too bad) with a command phrase to undo the mindwiping.
Pop back out in the present, open a portal to the demi-elemental plane of housecats, and speak the command phrase. Cue Orcus being hideously traumatised by a bunch of cats.
Other standouts being using a weapon that had been prepped earlier- namely, a set of telephone-pole sized tungsten rods that had been stuck between two portals near the local equivalent of Jupiter for several years, accelerating to a significant fraction of lightspeed. Moved the ‘exit’ portal to directly in front of Orcus and enjoyed the fireworks :p
Or turning Orcus’ eyeballs into ClF3- Chlorine Trifluoride. Gloriously nasty stuff- if your DM ever lets you introduce real-world chemicals into your game (for preference using Greater Creation or the like, since the stuff is a bugger to store), you could probably wreck just about anything you went up against, given that this stuff can set water on fire. Or asbestos. Or concrete. Or… well, honestly, the list of things that it doesn’t set on fire is MASSIVELY shorter. It also reacts explosively with an uncomfortable number of substances, gives off clouds of acidic poison gas while it burns everything, is a nerve agent that will stop your heart if you get it on you, and as a final **** you if you somehow aren’t killed by all THAT, it will give you cancer. Needless to say, Orcus was a bit unhappy to have that in his eyesockets :3
Engineering kids get to play D&D. They just have to play over in the corner, where they can’t hurt anyone else. 😛
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
chuckle
Ironically, I’m one of the only non engineers in my group.
Also, don’t know if you noticed, but I actually have a post on the comic you linked to, as well :p
Hey. Would ya look at that?
I finally responded to the other one. Sometimes the comments slip by….
By the end of his career my Inquisitor’s pre-breakfast routine was to grab his pairs of lesser and standard metamagic: extend rods and get the following going: greater magic weapon, magic vestment, heroism, see invisibility, freedom of movement, and resist energy: acid. Maybe a couple other spells I’m not remembering. He also had divine favor/power in his pocket if needed.
As far as actually going nova, that’d be the time where he was able to open up with judgement and righteous might then dimensional hop into flanking with the rogue in the first round while the cleric cast blessing of fervor.
The best part about flanking with a rogue is the feeling of childhood nostalgia.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/E6377K/pinatathree-girls-beating-a-pinata-at-night-E6377K.jpg
I think I determined that my vivisectionist’s super move was Heal. She was built to be a hardcore tank, and with her layered defenses, the restoration of 150 HP more or less on demand is basically morale crushing.
Oof. At some point you gotta just go for the TKO with grapple or hold person or whatever. I know that I always feel screwed with the bad guys know how to Heal.
I know I don’t… Like I’m not even the power gamer in that group. It turns out that Alchemist is just a very strong class when you play to its strengths and cover your weaknesses… that one was sort of a ‘happy accident’ more than any kind of deliberate build engineering.
Now our power gamer on the other hand was hitting so hard in that game that 150 HP heals weren’t enough to keep up with their damage output. I mathed out a theoretical match up between my Vivisectionist and his Monk… I COULD win, sure. It would require me to be LUCKY because I had no amount of good or Batmanning to overcome the sheer DPR and accuracy on that Monk.
If I could squeeze another 7 AC or so out, and layer on another +10 to hit or so, it’d be a much more even fight, but as it stood, even with a Strength of 40, I was reliant on True Strike to hit that character in a theoretical match up, and statistically they’d be likely to hit me 4x a round at my current theoretical max AC.
My hunter Irlana could crit on a 15 and shared Outflank and Paired Opportunists with her boar Mick. One time, I crit and started off the AoO chain. I crit 3 more times, repeatedly starting the chain over! The GM stopped me and said my opponent was dead because he didn’t want to do all the math. And I still had one round of AoOs and Irlana’s iterative attack left! Though by that time, I wouldn’t have been able to do any more rounds of AoOs afterwards anyway as Mick had reached his limit with his lower dex.
I also have a theory craft character that I doubt I’ll ever be able to play. I wanted to see if I could get every single natural weapon on him. He’s a Kasatha with 3 levels White-Haired Witch for the hair attack, 4 levels of Were-Touched Shifter with Deinonychus aspect for bite, claws, talons, and pounce. 2 levels of Barbarian (an archetype that can use armor, forget its name) with Lesser Fiend Totem Rage Power for Gore. Or Lesser Beast for claws if GM rules Shifter Claws won’t work once the level 4 ability kicks in. Helm of the Mammoth Lord will be used for Gore in that case. 2 levels of Wizard, needed for caster levels to grab Craft Magic Arms & Armor feat. Chaos Reigns feat for Slam. Evolved Familiar and Shared Evolution feat for Pincers. Mutated Shape feat for Tail Sting. Tentacle Cloak item for Tentacle attack and Dread Armor enhancement for Wing attacks. The only thing I can’t figure out how to get is Hoof and Tail Slap.
There comes a point where you want to let the player do the math just for the sake of bragging rights.
I did take a pic of the roll20 roll table to save it. Adding up JUST the attacks that crit, it was 195 damage. I don’t think all of the non-crits hit, but the total damage if they all did would be 312.
It took me a while to think of a good example for this one, in part because I tend to make builds more about sustainably large hits over going all in on a single shot. Then I realized I had a pretty unconventional one.
I played a character with profession (barrister) in an AP with some intrigue afoot, and wound up defending a falsely accused npc in court. Not wanting the opportunity to go to waste, I loaded myself down with long lasting pre-buffs and figured out some sneaky chichannery to slip myself some short term buffs, all to the relevant skill checks and wisdom/charisma from across the party.
I regret that I can’t recall the exact combo of bonuses I had, but it all totaled up to a +30-ish modifier to my profession checks and a I rolled incredibly well. While it was unfortunately no match for a forced confession via something that would qualify as plot spoilers here, the effort wasn’t in vain, as it made some NPCs who would’ve later been on the fence or more loyal to the antagonist much more willing to question things and be swayed.
Putting in one of my recent experiences:
My PC in one of my system’s mid-later game parts was able to, through his ancestry bonuses and chosen ability clouds, take 10+ actions every turn. And then also shoot energy beams from his blade slashes, and channel fey powers to royally mess up even elite soldiers with nanofields, etc. etc.
And could also fly.
There WAS a LOT more in that canpaign, but this is just a sample.
I hope the rest of the crew used the time to get a snack or stretch or something. Maybe read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings.
That’s just how it rolls, man.
It was also very exciting for everyone else involved!