Pun Pun, Sarrukhs and Manipulate Form

[Prak]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
The Pun Pun discussion began in this thread:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54081

...which I would merge to if I still had the power. It's the one thing I miss about BBboy.
[/TGFBS]


For reference, the Manipulate Form ability from the Sarrukh entry in Serpent Kingdoms:

So, there are literally no limitations on the Extraordinary, Supernatural or Spell Like Abilities. The physical alterations are examples, and it is essentially otherwise identical to the Despoiler of Flesh, possibly minus shit like "turn target's teeth into bees."
The only real "limit" is that you can't increase a target's ability score higher than your own. Even that is gotten around fairly easily with shit like "Shapechange"
Also, there is no errata concerning Sarrukhs. Because WotC uses errata for "oh, we left a comma out," and "this class is not shitty enough" not "oh shit, we wrote something broken."

Divine Rank cannot be granted (duh), because it's not marked out as any sort of ability. Divine Aura and Remote Sensing can be granted, as they are extraordinary and supernatural abilities, respectively. However, both would be useless to grant, because they don't do anything unless you have divine rank.
There is a technical loophole you can use to grant Divine Rank, which is the (extraordinary) Immortality quality of the Dragon Ascendant PrC in Draconomicon. I recalled it actually granting DivR, but all it really says is "the dragon ascendant is actually now a quasi-diety." Quasi-diety is a term used, in De&De, to refer to DivR 0 characters. I suppose if you actually get "Shapechange into Sarrukh, give viper familiar Manipulate Form, return to normal form, have familiar give me Manipulate Form" past your DM, then why the fuck not argue "well, this ability should totally grant DivR, and I should be able to increase that!"?

That's about it for limits "must be extraordinary, supernatural or spell like, or a physical change. If increasing ability scores, score cannot exceed own." So you can increase your Tiny Viper familiar to colossal size, so that it's str goes to 44, have it give you that 44 str, return it to tiny, increase it's str to 44, etc. You can do similar with dex and con. Mentals are more difficult, though you can get Wish as a spell like, and use elabourate chains of dominated awakened lizards to balloon your stats without using wish on yourself once.

edit: Ok, I saw the Divine Ice Assassin thing in the other thread. Sure, I suppose that technically works.

[Kaelik]

Okay, look Prak.

It says you can have an SLA.

Now, you find a level 5 ability on the class "Stupid Piece of Shit" this ability says:

Godify (Sp): You can grant any number of Divine Ranks to anyone.

Now, is that ability an SLA? Yes, obviously. Is there any way at all that this ability violates the rules of SLAs? No, of course not.

So why can't the Manipulate Form ability grant Godify to someone? Is it because Manipulate Form can only grant SLAs that already exist? Where the fuck did you get that idea, not from the Manipulate Form entry.

If giving yourself Magic Missile at CL 1 is possible, giving yourself Godify is also possible.

Now, the actual reason that Manipulate Form can't do that or anything at all is because it doesn't define all the needed variables.

Now, when you get to level 10 of the "Stupid Piece of Shit" class you get another ability:

Con Score Increases (Ex): Your Constitution score increases from what it is now to a higher amount.

What does that ability do? The answer, absolutely fucking nothing, just like Manipulate Form.

Because it is missing an essential variable, how much it increases, and when the text of an ability is missing essential information, you don't just fill in whatever you damn well please, you have a shitty ability that doesn't do anything.

Like Manipulate Form.

[Prak]

Yes, sure, you can make up whatever the fuck EX/SU/SLA abilities you like. Just like you can use a Candle of Invocation to call efreet or Rogue bonus feats to get epic feats or use abilities that say "when you [do thing], you get a +1 to CL" on a bunch of chickens to get a +400 CL. Which is to say "sure, the rules don't say you can't (except technically the rules do say you can't do the last one, because they consider multiple iterations of a source to be the same source)." But to keep things vaguely sane and not besmirchour own reputation (even further) with willful stupidity, I would personally only make definite statements about abilities in books. Which means I would not go around saying "yeah, you can use manipulate form to give 'Chuck Norris-ify (SLA): Target creature gets +500 strength and their divine rank increases by 1'" because I don't expect any GM to allow it. It works, by the rules, sure. But it would never fucking happen, unless your blowjob technique is so amazing that you should be attending treaty discussions and getting a Nobel prize for it.

[Kaelik]

No you dumbass, keep reading.

The rules do not allow you to do that. The rules do not allow you to do anything at fucking all with Manipulate Form.

Literally, Manipulate Form can "give SLAs" and Bigger The Spell can "give you a Strength score" but in fact, neither one of them can do that.

Because Manipulate form has no definition at all about granted SLAs, you can't get any SLA at all. Just like a spell that gives you a Strength score can't actually give you a Strength score, because a score requires an actual fucking number, and the spell doesn't define that number.

[Dean]

Baleful Polymorph says

You change the subject into a Small or smaller animal of no more than 1 HD (such as a dog, lizard, monkey, or toad). The subject takes on all the statistics and special abilities of an average member of the new form in place of its own:

That's all there is for restrictions! And since it never specifies the animal has to be naturally small or normally 1HD then if we can make an animal fit that descriptor we can become it. A Tyrannosaurus is an Animal, and if a T-rex took 17 Negative levels it would count as 1HD, and if it had the Dungeonbred template and was under the effect of Reduce Animal it would fit. So just throw a few Dispels onto your new Tyranapal PC and considering the permanent duration he should just pick up all those new stats and abilities.

Awaken says

An awakened tree has characteristics as if it were an animated object, except that it gains the plant type and its Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores are each 3d6. An awakened plant gains the ability to move its limbs, roots, vines, creepers, and so forth, and it has senses similar to a human’s.

Therefore since it specifies no other restrictions about what kind of animated object it is we can just go for the biggest one and you can turn your average sapling into a Colossal Animated object. Additionally since it says it gains the ability "to move" but never says how far this might mean it gains the ability to move at Nigh Infinite speed!

Fabricate says

You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created

But as everyone knows dead creature become objects. And the spell only says it can't make creatures not objects that once were creatures. As long as you have a chunk of anything carbon based you can craft basically any creature you want. You are one casting away from creating the minion of your dreams! Granted the creature will be dead but that's easily solvable. Since the spell doesn't specify what limits the creature-objects can have for abilities just give it Phoenix Resurrection or any ONE of the auto-revive abilities in the game.

That was 3 random spells. Look. Abilities are defined by what they say, not what they don't say. A painful enough reading of any english sentence could render almost any interpretation broadly feasible if the reader desires it hard enough and is willing to contort meaning far enough. When "Giant Vermin" gives a vermin a "larger form" it just makes that one spider bigger. It doesn't let you transform it into any larger vermin ever printed. Abilities are defined by what they say, not what they don't say. And the amount of house rule assumptions involved in Manipulate Form shenanigans makes them both intellectually uninteresting and not RAW within the framework of information we're given.

People like talking about Pun-pun because it's the -most-. I get that. But it has no place in actual optimization talk. It'd be like if everyone else was talking about who'd win a local battle of the bands competition, and I asked what the greatest band of all time would be if you could combine any artists of any era. That's interesting and I see how it would take up conversation. But it's not how the competition works.

[wotmaniac]

(a little reposting from the other thread)

The Divine Rank is indeed supposedly granted from your Ice Assassin (you use it to make a duplicate of a god that matches your alignment) -- except that the interpretation that gets you there is total bullshit.
You have to completely ignore specific existing text in both the spell's description and in the paragraph describing the bestowal of divine ranks.
It's a simple issue of a clash between the chains-of-command established by the spell and that which is required for bestowing divine rank (never mind the internal syntax error that is created within the spell itself when it is applied in this manner; not to mention the logicfail within the spell's description that creates an inherent internal conflict). Here's the relevant text from the 2 sources:

The ice assassin is under your absolute command.

A deity may invest 1 rank of its power (reducing its divine rank accordingly) in a single servant for as long as the deity chooses.

Definitionally, one cannot be in command of another entity while simultaneously also being its servant. Full stop.

[Kaelik]

That is really the worse possible argument against that I could imagine. Nothing about having command prevents you from being a servant:

1. One who is privately employed to perform domestic services.
2. One who is publicly employed to perform services, as for a government.
3. One who expresses submission, recognizance, or debt to another

Only 3 in any way even slightly conflicts with having control. An old infirm person has a servant who has total control over them.

The CEO is a servant of the company, but may have complete control over.

A public employee's acts are often binding on the government.

The main point is that if you can give yourself Ice Assassin at all, there is no reason you couldn't give yourself an SLA that just gives you Divine Ranks.

[Username17]

Prak: this is stupid and you should feel stupid. You are deeply into "nothing says I can't summon red dragons by waving my longsword, therefore I can" territory. I'll try to break this down for you into bite sized bits because you're obviously retarded.

• Manipulate Form does not tell you what the parameters of the Spell-Like Abilities it can grant are.
• Therefore, any (Sp) it grants requires a house rule to allow the parameters of that ability.
• House rules are made by the DM, not the player.
• So getting any Spell-Like Ability at all requires you to convince the DM that the (Sp) ability in question is one that Manipulate Form should be able to grant.
• The sample abilities that Manipulate Form references are all zero-level bullshit, so good fucking luck convincing any actual DM to house-rule in a Spell-Like Ability parameter stronger than the starting (Sp)s of Gnomes.

-Username17

[wotmaniac]

First, 2 things:
1) it says absolute command. that is a very key qualifier. You cannot simultaneously be a gods minion and have absolute command over him -- it's simply impossible.
2) the idea is that you are making a replica of a god (which causes syntax errors of it's own), and that the "god" is giving you the rank. syntax errors aside, it would never occur to any sane author to take in to account the goddamned rules for divine ranks when writing a sub-epic spell; so your last statement is a complete non sequitur.

Now, I went that way because I know from experience what a rabbit hole it is to go down the other roads I mentioned. And going the route of RAI is completely asinine, given the GIANT disclaimer front-loaded by pun-pun's author/creator.


Of course, I'm also the guy who contends that Cohorts can't take the Leadership feat (more accurately, if he does take that feat, he no longer qualifies as a cohort).

The point (and analogy) being that the RAI is actually written in the book(s) -- and is, thus, actually RAW ; it's just written in a larger contextual format as opposed to a line-item format.

[wotmaniac]

@ Frank:
you must be forgetting the CharOp culture of the old 339 boards. The fact that Rule 0 entered your argument makes it invalid by those standards

[Kaelik]

First, 2 things:
1) it says absolute command. that is a very key qualifier. You cannot simultaneously be a gods minion and have absolute command over him -- it's simply impossible.

1) it doesn't say minion, it says servant.
2) A CEO who also owns 100% of the stock in a corporation is simultaneously a servant of that corporation and has absolute control over that corporation. There is nothing essential in the definition of servant that makes it incompatible with absolute control. You could have absolute control over your cat and still be its servant.

it would never occur to any sane author to take in to account the goddamned rules for divine ranks when writing a sub-epic spell; so your last statement is a complete non sequitur.

You are going to have to replace "your last statement" with an actual statement here, and then explain your reasoning, because I do not see how literally any of my statements become non-sequiturs based on what "sane authors" do or do not consider when writing sub-epic spells.

EDIT: If I were to guess, I suppose you misunderstood my statement about Manipulate Form granting Ice Assassin. I am not saying "if you allow X, there is no balance reason to not allow Y."

I am saying "under the actual rules of Manipulate Form, if you can grant even a single SLA of any kind at all, then you can grant any SLA at all, including one you just made up" under the rules.

Because any argument you could ever make that RAW allows you to grant Magic Missile also allows you to RAW grant SLAs that don't yet exist, but grant Divine Ranks.

Now, I personally think that Manipulate Form straight up cannot give even Magic Missile at CL 1 once a day by RAW.

[Libertad]

2) A CEO who also owns 100% of the stock in a corporation is simultaneously a servant of that corporation and has absolute control over that corporation. There is nothing essential in the definition of servant that makes it incompatible with absolute control. You could have absolute control over your cat and still be its servant.

But Kaelik, corporations aren't people.

Sorry, I have nothing else to contribute.

[RadiantPhoenix]

2) A CEO who also owns 100% of the stock in a corporation is simultaneously a servant of that corporation and has absolute control over that corporation. There is nothing essential in the definition of servant that makes it incompatible with absolute control. You could have absolute control over your cat and still be its servant.

But Kaelik, corporations aren't people.

Sorry, I have nothing else to contribute.

A deity and a corporation share many attributes.

[wotmaniac]

First, 2 things:
1) it says absolute command. that is a very key qualifier. You cannot simultaneously be a gods minion and have absolute command over him -- it's simply impossible.

1) it doesn't say minion, it says servant.

Oh, goddammit, Kaelik ..... The Sub-chapter heading on page 54 of Deities and Demigods is titled "Divine Minions", and "Proxies" is a sub-section of that -- here, go read the whole thing, and then tell me what you think.

Now, in that context, I say that your second bullet falls down.

EDIT: If I were to guess, I suppose you misunderstood my statement about Manipulate Form granting Ice Assassin. I am not saying "if you allow X, there is no balance reason to not allow Y."

I am saying "under the actual rules of Manipulate Form, if you can grant even a single SLA of any kind at all, then you can grant any SLA at all, including one you just made up" under the rules.

Ah, okay -- that makes sense now.

I don't even bother trying to attack this thing from the Manipulate Form angle -- that thing is so poorly edited that it doesn't even warrant parsing.

[Kaelik]

Oh, goddammit, Kaelik ..... The Sub-chapter heading on page 54 of Deities and Demigods is titled "Divine Minions", and "Proxies" is a sub-section of that -- here, go read the whole thing, and then tell me what you think.

Now, in that context, I say that your second bullet falls down.

And you would be wrong. Again. All that is required is that some dumbshit serve a deity. Great, who the fuck cares.

If your definition of servant is mutually exclusive with parents serving their children (especially babies and infants) then your definition is wrong. If your definition is not exclusive of that description, then your definition allows for servants that have absolute control over the god they serve.

[Slade]

2) A CEO who also owns 100% of the stock in a corporation is simultaneously a servant of that corporation and has absolute control over that corporation. There is nothing essential in the definition of servant that makes it incompatible with absolute control. You could have absolute control over your cat and still be its servant.

But Kaelik, corporations aren't people.

Sorry, I have nothing else to contribute.

In America, Corporations have as much or more rights than most people. So they are people.

[Prak]

No one seriously says that corporations are living, breathing people. It is a useful legal fiction, that's it.

Kind of like gods.

[Ice9]

It should be noted that "abilities" aside, Manipulate Form is still a pretty stupid ability that can give you a moderate amount of broken stuff, in the form of arbitrarily high stats. This still isn't anything you could actually use in a game, of course.

Even as an example of TO, it's not that great - the trick boils down to "Manipulate Form is a badly written ability", with some other tricks that are mostly inapplicable to other usage. Some TO builds, like the Twice-Betrayer for example, have interesting components, even if the whole isn't something you'd ever use in a real game.

I have to say that I find TO less interesting than I used to though, due to the realization that the game designers often don't know what they're doing either. Therefore it's dubious how much difference there is between a TO-level build and just making some shit up.

[Mistborn]

Listen the plain text of Manipulate Form grants any of (Ex) (Su) or (Sp) ability that exist in D&D. This is incredibly stupid and noone is ever going to let you use it just like Wish loops.

Why are we still talking about this close to a decade after the fact

[Kaelik]

Listen the plain text of Manipulate Form grants any of (Ex) (Su) or (Sp) ability that exist in D&D. This is incredibly stupid and noone is ever going to let you use it just like Wish loops.

Why are we still talking about this close to a decade after the fact

Because you are wrong, and the plain text actually doesn't grant you any of those things.

Just like the a spell that "Your Strength becomes " doesn't give you a Strength score of anything you want.

[John Magnum]

Yeah. It's undefined which particular supernatural, extraordinary, or spell-like abilities a sarrukh is supposed to be able to grant. "All published abilities"? "All abilities anyone comes up with that classify as one of the three"? "Some restricted, thematically defined set that we never got around to actually writing"? As it stands, the text doesn't define which abilities it's able to grant, and there's no particular reason to assume that the default definition you should plug in is "any ability published in any D&D book on any monster".

[fectin]

But we know, at minimum, that published SLAs exist in dndland. We don't know that made up abilities exist (because they must be fiated into existence, so may or may not exist).

[John Magnum]

Hey--it didn't specify that the sarrukh can only grant SLAs that exist, so who's to say it doesn't grant SLAs that don't exist?

Again. It's undefined what abilities it grants. "Undefined" is not "any published".

[Kaelik]

But we know, at minimum, that published SLAs exist in dndland. We don't know that made up abilities exist (because they must be fiated into existence, so may or may not exist).

And we know that at a minimum Strength Scores can do from 1-45, but a spell that says "Your Strength Score becomes." Still doesn't actually change your Strength score to 1 or 45, much less whatever you want.

[Mistborn]

Because you are wrong, and the plain text actually doesn't grant you any of those things.

Just like the a spell that "Your Strength becomes " doesn't give you a Strength score of anything you want.

I thought the den didn't do this bullshit. It's just like Persistent Time Stop it totally works by what's actually writen in the rules no mater how hard idiots handwave.

A Sarruk may also grant the target an extraordinary, supernatural, or spell-like abillity or remove one from it

(Ex), (Su), and (Sp) abilites are a known quantity unlike your dumb strawman Kaelik. As long as an ability is listed as (Ex) (Su) or (Sp) it can be granted by manipulate form. I have know idea what the guy who wrote that ability was on but that's what it does.

Why are you so emotionally invested in this argument.