You do fucking win at D&D.

[Maxus]

My memory's slipping. CoP in its TO application?

Anyone mind explaining?

[Juton]

My memory's slipping. CoP in its TO application?

Anyone mind explaining?

Sure, maybe I did go a little heavy on the acronyms. CoP is the spell contact other planes, TO is theoretical optimization. You can use CoP to get a lot of information about the future, likel 'will I get ambushed on Wednesday?'. That's a little abusive since your ambushers can't do anything to counter it, they lose the element of surprise.

Contact other Plane can get extra abusive if you really exploit it, you can start with learning the spells your ambushers will use and their specific weaknesses. In another game which I wasn't a part of, a player used CoP so precisely the DM just handed him the BBEG's character sheet and his notes. Depending on how your DM handles time paradoxes you can basically play the battle out using CoP questions until you've got the right spell combination to win. Unless the enemy uses CoP too they have to play out their spells in that specific order, making the combat a forgone conclusion.

The real munchkins add things like parity questions to make sure the information they get from CoP is valid to a very high degree of certainty. In the above example where the player got the BBEG's sheet, he handed the DM an algorithm describing how his Wizard would get the information. People on the CO boards have made these before, to my knowledge the player did this all on his own.

I am a software developer by trade, I don't want algorithms to be part of my fantasy RPG experience.

[Stubbazubba]

I guess you play Internet Forum on easy mode.

Sigged.

[Chamomile]

Contact Other Plane carries with it a chance of blasting your ability to cast spells to pieces for a week or more, offers only short, terse answers, and even at level 20 only allows you to ask ten distinct questions (keeping in mind that the answer is basically always going to be "yes" or "no"). There is no guarantee that the entity in question will tell the truth, and the more likely the entity is to answer honestly, the more likely you are to suffer a month-long spell blackout just for making the attempt (before you even get your answers, and thus depriving of you getting them). You couldn't go through an algorithm complicated enough to determine all the necessary information without expending at least a few hundred 6th-level spells, at least 5% of which are going to randomly knock out your spellcasting for a week or longer. You can bash your head against the wall long enough to make this work, but it would take months, years, or decades depending on exactly how complicated that algorithm is.

Also, while it isn't ever said so explicitly in the rules, and indeed they heavily imply that only a d% roll should determine whether or not the entity you contact does or doesn't know, it is perfectly reasonable to say that hitting up random power brokers on the Elemental Plane of Fire for information on a specific Balor's defenses is just never really going to pay dividends, because that Balor is a planar creature who makes an active effort to stop hostile planar creatures from figuring him out and random middle managers on an unrelated plane aren't going to bother keeping track of him. That Balor might come from an infinite plane, but he has a finite list of enemies who care enough to go to the trouble of scoping him out. Questions like "exactly which spell will the BBEG use under these circumstances" are very reasonably things that no one can predict if your BBEG is the sort of CR 15+ villain I'd expect a party with 6th-level spells to have as campaign nemesis.

[Kaelik]

Cham, you are an idiot.

It's an Int check, not a save. You just use whatever the highest level you can is with a zero % chance of blackout.

So if you have a Level 12 Old Grey Elf Wizard with a starting 18 you have an Int of 18+2 Racial+6 Item+3 Level+5 Inherent+2 Age=36 Int mod of +13.

Then you cast CoP, and you talk to an intermediate deity, and you roll a 1 on your int check, and you get a 14, and you don't get blacked out ever.

It takes a lot of spells, sure, but it takes a day or two, depending on how much information you want, not weeks or months or years.

Now, if someone did it in my game, I would probably just give them a lot of information about how the BBEG is calling a Balor to send after them, and then if the next day they prepare more CoP instead of Balor killing spells, it is there fault.

[FatR]

I personally never thought about giving more information through CoP than lower-g gods and powerful outsiders might actually conceivably know. So, no seeing future and minimal, if any, information about well-hidden conspirations by secretive high-level BBEGs. What I actually find problematic is Divination (spell), which does read the future, thus opening a huge can of worms associated with resolving prediction stacks in a world where fate is observably not set in stone.

[virgil]

Or just wish spam before and never miss again, and +7 to all save DCs.

[Kaelik]

I personally never thought about giving more information through CoP than lower-g gods and powerful outsiders might actually conceivably know. So, no seeing future and minimal, if any, information about well-hidden conspirations by secretive high-level BBEGs. What I actually find problematic is Divination (spell), which does read the future, thus opening a huge can of worms associated with resolving prediction stacks in a world where fate is observably not set in stone.

Except that one of the specific people you can ask is Greater Gods. And all Gods have the ability to see all sorts of future events related to their portfolio.

[Username17]

I personally never thought about giving more information through CoP than lower-g gods and powerful outsiders might actually conceivably know. So, no seeing future and minimal, if any, information about well-hidden conspirations by secretive high-level BBEGs. What I actually find problematic is Divination (spell), which does read the future, thus opening a huge can of worms associated with resolving prediction stacks in a world where fate is observably not set in stone.

Except that one of the specific people you can ask is Greater Gods. And all Gods have the ability to see all sorts of future events related to their portfolio.

This.

Also this:

Moradin senses anything that affects dwarven welfarenineteen weeks before it happns and retains the sensation for nineteen weeks after the event occurs. He is similarly aware whenever dwarves engage in arts or crafts or make war.

The rules in Deities and Demigods are not only broken beyond belief, they are completely fucking insane, and if you use them with respect to contact other plane or gate you will break your campaign right in half. 3e's god rules were worse than not having any rules for gods. A lot worse.

-Username17

[FatR]

The rules in Deities and Demigods are not only broken beyond belief, they are completely fucking insane, and if you use them with respect to contact other plane or gate you will break your campaign right in half. 3e's god rules were worse than not having any rules for gods. A lot worse.

-Username17

Holy shit. It seems the authors haven't given a most basic of thoughts to what prediction of the future actually implies and why it is generally inherently bad for RPGs.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Holy shit. It seems the authors haven't given a most basic of thoughts to what prediction of the future actually implies and why it is generally inherently bad for RPGs.

B-b-but you are supposed to be able to fight fate! Nuts to prophecy, you're special snowflakes in which extremely specific omniscient proclamations of the future are not actually so! How in the world could this be bad for TTRPGs?

[Whatever]

Greater deities automatically sense any event that involves their portfolios, regardless of the number of people involved. In addition, their senses extend one week into the past and one week into the future for every divine rank they have.

Here's some example "portfolios" for assorted Greater Deities:

Boccob: Magic, Arcane Knowledge, Balance, Foresight
Nerull: Death, Darkness, Murder, the Underworld

So yeah. If you have plans that involve "magic" or "death" the gods know all about it, well in advance. Luckily Vecna is only a Lesser Deity, because his portfolio includes ultra-bullshit like "secrets" and "hidden knowledge."

[nockermensch]

Moradin senses anything that affects dwarven welfarenineteen weeks before it happns and retains the sensation for nineteen weeks after the event occurs. He is similarly aware whenever dwarves engage in arts or crafts or make war.

The rules in Deities and Demigods are not only broken beyond belief, they are completely fucking insane, and if you use them with respect to contact other plane or gate you will break your campaign right in half. 3e's god rules were worse than not having any rules for gods. A lot worse.

-Username17

Eh, I actually liked the portfolio sense rules. IIRC they are the only things that actually sounds transcendent and godlike among the divine powers. Everything else just made the gods look like very powerful spellcasters. If Moradin knows almost five months in advance when one of his Urists will get into a Strange Mood then that's something that a "mere" Epic Spellcaster cannot replicate (not without calling Moradin or another god for the answers, I mean).

Of course, these rules also kind of explicitly say that fate is something that exists in D&D-land and this can steers campaigns to all kinds of crazy places.

[Juton]

Contact Other Plane carries with it a chance of blasting your ability to cast spells to pieces for a week or more, offers only short, terse answers, and even at level 20 only allows you to ask ten distinct questions (keeping in mind that the answer is basically always going to be "yes" or "no"). There is no guarantee that the entity in question will tell the truth, and the more likely the entity is to answer honestly, the more likely you are to suffer a month-long spell blackout just for making the attempt (before you even get your answers, and thus depriving of you getting them). You couldn't go through an algorithm complicated enough to determine all the necessary information without expending at least a few hundred 6th-level spells, at least 5% of which are going to randomly knock out your spellcasting for a week or longer. You can bash your head against the wall long enough to make this work, but it would take months, years, or decades depending on exactly how complicated that algorithm is.

Also, while it isn't ever said so explicitly in the rules, and indeed they heavily imply that only a d% roll should determine whether or not the entity you contact does or doesn't know, it is perfectly reasonable to say that hitting up random power brokers on the Elemental Plane of Fire for information on a specific Balor's defenses is just never really going to pay dividends, because that Balor is a planar creature who makes an active effort to stop hostile planar creatures from figuring him out and random middle managers on an unrelated plane aren't going to bother keeping track of him. That Balor might come from an infinite plane, but he has a finite list of enemies who care enough to go to the trouble of scoping him out. Questions like "exactly which spell will the BBEG use under these circumstances" are very reasonably things that no one can predict if your BBEG is the sort of CR 15+ villain I'd expect a party with 6th-level spells to have as campaign nemesis.

First off, it's an Int check to resist taking ability damage. A DC 16 Int check, which you can easily take 10 on because you're not threatened, because threatened means something specific in 3.5 and I doubt anyone would cast this spell while an enemy was within reach.

You don't need a few hundred castings, and it's a fifth level spell not sixth. Literally 3-4 castings at level 10 gives you a unassailable advantage. If you use an algorithm you use one that branches and is recursive, and even then you're not limited to the algorithm, you can go back to get more information about certain points. You only ask questions that have a yes or no answer. You ask them of a greater deity that you know has the answer (see Deities and Demigods if you're unsure why), so any error can be attributed to transmission, which you can control for. You're not limited to one god, or even gods you like, by RAW any god will answer, even ones that hate you.

So you're just fucking wrong, there's not much more to say.

[Username17]

I just want to say that in a game of 20 questions, we once got "Is it the table the Magna Carta was signed on?" in 12 questions.

Car trips are long sometimes.

-Username17

[FatR]

Eh, I actually liked the portfolio sense rules. IIRC they are the only things that actually sounds transcendent and godlike among the divine powers. Everything else just made the gods look like very powerful spellcasters.

But that's good. DnD cosmology/deities paradigm sucks and makes writing gods that don't come out as dickbags very difficult (hell, a third of them are meant to be utter bastards), so if gods are mostly dickbags it's better for them to be very powerful spellcasters than transedent entities no one can do shit about.

Also, both unchangeable fate (the difference between abscence of free will and an observer outside of the time stream is rather irrelevant for game purposes here) and prediction wars need a transcedent, godlike GM to actually adjudicate, without ruining the game.

[K]

Well, Contact Other Plane is a divination spell, so there is a strong argument that something even as weak as Nondetection can foil it. Maybe the gods can see you and know your actions in the future, but the spell itself garbles the answer (or maybe the question to the gods).

[Juton]

Well, Contact Other Plane is a divination spell, so there is a strong argument that something even as weak as Nondetection can foil it. Maybe the gods can see you and know your actions in the future, but the spell itself garbles the answer (or maybe the question to the gods).

Actually no. For instance a Wizard has nondetection up and casts spells. The local god of magic knows exactly what the Wizard is casting. The Wizard can't cast those spells without the god's knowledge because they fall under the purview of the magic portfolio. Contact other Plane doesn't target or affect the Wizard at all, it gets in contact directly with the god.

Now in CoP's description it is mentioned that it is possible for the spell to be interfered with, but it never actually states how you actually do it. So the only to block CoP is with some Magic Tea Party. And that only works if your DM isn't crazy, in my case my DM thought using the combo of Active Shield Defense + Combat Expertise + Robilar's Gambit was more broken that CoP, so dialogues about balance quickly died.

[Chamomile]

GMs are under no obligation to use supplemental rules from supplements they don't like, so the rules from Deities and Demigods are things we shouldn't be worrying about in a game that people actually play, because there is nothing in that book worth salvaging. Likewise, auto-failing ability checks on a 1 and requiring you to roll instead of taking 10 on an ability check that effectively acts as a save are trivial rules edits to be made at an actual table, and not only that you are nearly guaranteed to see one or both of those house rules in effect at any game you actually play with real live people, and whinging about RAW is exactly as relevant to the conversation as grammar and spelling. The point here was never about RAW, it's about high-level divinations being a thing that can happen in actual games without wrecking the system.

[hyzmarca]

The Wizard can't cast those spells without the god's knowledge because they fall under the purview of the magic portfolio.

I would argue that this isn't true at all, otherwise Karsus would have been vaporized 19 weeks before he cast Karsus's Avatar.

[name_here]

I wouldn't worry too much about precognition of enemy battle plans; it's perfectly legitimate and sensible to respond to questions like, "Will the wizard cast cloudkill on the second round of combat if he successfully traps the fighter in wall of force" with "maybe" because controllable and detailed precognition, sentient creatures, and fixed futures make no sense. A DM would be well within their rights to refuse to give a definite answer to a question regarding an event that could be altered by the asking of the question. Theoretically, every single question about the caster's future could be answered with "maybe" because a definitive answer could falsify itself. But that's kind of a jackass way of doing things, so questions like, "If we depart on the south road at ten AM at normal traveling speed, will we encounter enemies before five PM?" should get a straight answer

I mean, I guess you could work through every possible situation in minute detail, asking every question three times so you can be reasonably confident you haven't gotten smacked by the 10% "god is fucking with you" result, but you get half your caster level in questions and it's a fifth level spell. Also, it's an ability score check, and the SRD says taking 10 is skill checks only. Commune has no jackass god possibility, no ability check, and twice as many questions, so it'd be easier with that.

[Juton]

GMs are under no obligation to use supplemental rules from supplements they don't like, so the rules from Deities and Demigods are things we shouldn't be worrying about in a game that people actually play, because there is nothing in that book worth salvaging.

Are you blind or just dumb? I just told you how I was screwed over by those very rules in person in a real game. Not only that, these shenanigans where used by other players in other games. This shit happens in real games.

Likewise, auto-failing ability checks on a 1 and requiring you to roll instead of taking 10 on an ability check that effectively acts as a save are trivial rules edits to be made at an actual table, and not only that you are nearly guaranteed to see one or both of those house rules in effect at any game you actually play with real live people, and whinging about RAW is exactly as relevant to the conversation as grammar and spelling. The point here was never about RAW, it's about high-level divinations being a thing that can happen in actual games without wrecking the system.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I almost never get house rules in my games. Excepting the games I've run every house rule I have ever played with played in 3.5 deals with HD rolls at level up or starting gold, nothing about feats, classes or spells.

So in the 3.5 games I've played in CoP works rules as written. If it messes with a DM's plans it is much more likely that I will see rocks fall then any actual house rule. If you say a system works because people will fix it with common sense, that's the same as saying the system doesn't work.

[Juton]

I mean, I guess you could work through every possible situation in minute detail, asking every question three times so you can be reasonably confident you haven't gotten smacked by the 10% "god is fucking with you" result, but you get half your caster level in questions and it's a fifth level spell. Also, it's an ability score check, and the SRD says taking 10 is skill checks only. Commune has no jackass god possibility, no ability check, and twice as many questions, so it'd be easier with that.

You don't need to ask the question 3 times, you can do something like: today I asked you 5 questions, the answers to which are 2 yes, 2 no and 1 purple, is this correct? That's not even the most efficient way I think, but you get the idea. If the god says no (those are not the correct distribution of answers) you can do additional things to get better results. There are probably spells that work better than Contact other Plane, but it's the go to because it's on the Wizard's list and it doesn't have a costly material component.

Also you can take 10 on Ability checks

Ability Checks and Caster Level Checks

The normal take 10 and take 20 rules apply for ability checks. Neither rule applies to caster level checks.

Source

[Kaelik]

Likewise, auto-failing ability checks on a 1 and requiring you to roll instead of taking 10 on an ability check that effectively acts as a save are trivial rules edits to be made at an actual table, and not only that you are nearly guaranteed to see one or both of those house rules in effect at any game you actually play with real live people.

Hey Cham, you are still an idiot.

Those are not things that most people houserule. There is no fucking reason to houserule them at all. Great, we found out today that when you are fucking wrong you change the rules to make you right. No one cares. Most people don't make the CoP ability check auto fail on a 1, just like most people don't make skills auto fail on a 1. Because auto fail rules are stupid as shit when they prevent you from using your abilities instead of allowing lower level opposition to use theirs.

[K]

Well, Contact Other Plane is a divination spell, so there is a strong argument that something even as weak as Nondetection can foil it. Maybe the gods can see you and know your actions in the future, but the spell itself garbles the answer (or maybe the question to the gods).

Actually no. For instance a Wizard has nondetection up and casts spells. The local god of magic knows exactly what the Wizard is casting. The Wizard can't cast those spells without the god's knowledge because they fall under the purview of the magic portfolio. Contact other Plane doesn't target or affect the Wizard at all, it gets in contact directly with the god.

Who cares if the god of magic knows that you cast nondetection? It's the things that happen while the spell is on the character that are hidden and that matter.

Second, Contact Other Plane is a divination spell and spells like nondetection block divinations in a completely open-ended way. Just like most divinations can't need line of effect or targets to work, blocking-divination spells can't require line of effect or targets or else they can't work at all either.

I know that everyone plays with divinations as working perfectly all the time because they can't wrap their minds around facts like mind blank blocking true seeing or true strike, but letting divination-blocking spells actually block divinations regardless of targeting or LoS rules is literally the only way that divination-blocking spells can work at all. Otherwise, you might as well remove misdirection, nondetection, screen, mind blank, and sequester as well as antimagic like antimagic shell or globe of invulnerability.

Hell, nondetection lists clairvoyance as a spell that it blocks and that spell creates a magic sensor that lets you see an area as if you were there. It's a pure magic logic effect as written.