The Gaming Den

Am I wrong to think that these some of the most ridiculously broken spells in the entire game of Dungeons & Dungeons Three Point Whatever?

These seventh-level spells seem more game breaking than almost every ninth level spell I can think of with the exception of Wish...which the Den has talked over very, very thoroughly.

They exist in four flavors, they allow no saving throw whatsofuckingever, and they make everything even vaguely anywhere near you on the battle matt (assuming you are even still playing with a matt at the point when these spells come out) that is not the right alignment...

Mildly inconvenienced if it's the same HD than the caster level.
Seriously nerfed if it's one less HD than the caster level.
Effectively dead (PARALYZED FOR 1d10 minutes for all but "Word of Chaos", which leaves you Confused, which might arguably be even worse than being paralyzed depending on if any of your allies managed to somehow survive the goddamn "Word of Chaos") if it's five less HD than the caster level.
ALL OF THE ABOVE PLUS "KILLED"* if it's ten less less HD than the caster level.

Two sub-points for the above:

How the fuck are they defining "killed"? Do they mean 0 hp? -1 hp? -10 hp? A PILE OF FUCKING DUST?

Related to the above, if "killed" is anything worse than one of the first two possible interpretations if in the infuriatingly vague "killed", how does the fact that you're DEAD AND PARALYZED AND WEAKENED AND DAZED make any fucking sense? Doesn't the first one of those things make the next three completely fucking irrelevant?

To repeat, ALL OF THESE EFFECTS ALLOW FOR NO SAVE. The one thing you DO get a save for is if you happen to be a summoned wrong-alignment outsider. Then you get to try a Will save which is at a -4 apparently BECAUSE FUCK YOU or be banished back to your home plane.

Double-ewe.
Tee.
Eff.

P.S. Oh yeah, these are all ALIGNMENT DOMAIN spells. Which means that the caster is almost guaranteed to have +1 CL, allowing her to fuck up even more powerful shit relative to her Caster Level.[/b]

Welcome to 16 years ago.

Oh, and to address your question about being killed. Being killed gives a status condition where you are dead. Spiritus exitus. You don't have HP because you are dead. You are now an object. This supersedes other status conditions since you are dead and no longer subject to those.

Welcome to 16 years ago.

Sorry, I've been playing D&D 3.X constantly for 12 years but only talking about it on the internet intermittently for about five. Most of the play has been at lower level, so I didn't actually see a blasphemy go-off until I was DMing last night, when one went off at CL 15 at the start of the fight, and then at the end of the fight, another one went off at CL 26 at the end of the fight. (The fight was against Takihisis, whose aspects in my campaign look exactly like Maleficient--not from Kingdom Hearts, not from the stupid Angelina Jolie movie, from Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Her form that looks like this can cast Blasphemy once per day at CL15.

Her form that looks like this can cast Blasphemy 3/day at CL26.

If anyone cares, I salvaged things so everybody still had a good time and no PCs were actually perma-dead or perma-fucked. But I was still left wondering why these spells even fucking exist HOLY SHIT (no pun intended) WHY DO THEY EXIST.

Oh, and to address your question about being killed. Being killed gives a status condition where you are dead. Spiritus exitus. You don't have HP because you are dead. You are now an object. This supersedes other status conditions since you are dead and no longer subject to those.

Then why the hell do they explicitly state that you are not just SUPER DEAD but ALSO paralyzed for 1d10 minutes, weakened for 2d4 rounds, and dazed for one round, like that AT ALL FUCKING MATTERS?

If the answer is "they are actually just that stupid" fine. I just need to go punch a pillow or something.

There are a metric fuckton of spells that don't offer saves and do something to people. Very few of them are huge problems. I supposed technically this one doesn't require a ranged or melee touch attack, but that's still small potatoes.

There is nothing conceptually wrong with no save spells that kill things 10 levels lower than you and defeat things lower level than you. I mean, Cloudkill exists. But the biggest problem is just the way Caster level works in 3.5 But that's just a CL problem.

Also, the way HD works in 3.5 (that actually makes PCs like, the strongest creatures at their HD, which means that they will never get to use this spell against enemies, but that when enemies use it against them, it TPKs).

But those are both problems that interact with lots of other things, not just those spells.

Get your pillow out. They're just that stupid.

More seriously, I think that getting the other status effects is included as a hedge in case there were a spell or protection against death effects... say Death Ward (a near mandatory buff at high level play). So you're still fucked, just not dead in such cases.

At high level play, death is supposed to be a speed bump, not a new character.

Losing a level is a hell of a speed bump, and you don't get true resurrection until you can cast NINTH LEVEL SPELLS.

But interesting point about Death Ward...I hadn't thought of that (and neither had my poor PCs prepared it).

It's a nasty spell for super high level boss monsters with high caster levels specifically, but mostly, PCs don't give a shit about being able to curbstomp stuff 5 levels lower than them at near-melee range. The alignment matching may not matter if you know you're invading Hell, but makes it an uncertain prospect for dungeon crawling.

Revivify is a level 5 cleric spell which lets you undo death without level loss so long as you cast it 1 round after the unhappy event. Worth scribing a few scrolls of this.

In doublechecking the spell compendium for Revivify, I stumbled upon Righteous Aura. I wish I had found it years ago so I could've used it on infernal pengiuns to make prinnies. It's a level 4 paladin personal spell, but there's ways around all that.

Said spells are indeed ridiculous assuming the caster's CL is sufficiently high, and enemy outsiders can frequently waste PCs of the wrong alignment either through stunlock or instant death, assuming there's a level difference. Anything that can cast blasphemy with a CL higher than the party's level is potentially very dangerous.

Taking the rules as they are, however, there's a semi-viable 2nd-level spell defense:

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/silence.htm

YMMV as to whether using an object as a "silence bomb" or casting silence on an expendable ally like a summon on animated creature is a cool tactic or "immersion-breaking bullshit."

Also, characters slain by a Death Attack have -10 hit points, it's actually in the rules. It is, as noted, highly unlikely to matter.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilit ... athAttacks

Heh, I remember when I first got my PHB, no other books were out yet, and the back of the book had a few sample monsters. The most foolproof way I could think of to take out the red dragon with a single character was using a cleric with holy word and a wheelbarrow full of death knells on chumps to boost caster level.

Schwarzkopf wrote:Am I wrong to think that these some of the most ridiculously broken spells in the entire game of Dungeons & Dungeons Three Point Whatever?

Just 3.5, actually. The 3.0 version, like the AD&D version, doesn't scale by caster level with effects at CL/CL-1/CL-5/CL-10, it scales by targets' hit dice at HD 12+/8-11/4-7/<4, so even a blasphemy from Takhisis herself would only be good for for clearing out bunches of mooks.

Like many things in the 3.0 to 3.5 transition, it's a random untested change whose implications weren't seen until too late, most likely because CL-boosters were rare and limited in core so "Well, this spell is on the weaker side; why don't we make it scale by CL?" wasn't the obvious bad decision it would have been later on.

Speaking of CL 26 being hard to reach in 3.0, what set of stats are you using? None of the six or seven published versions of Tiamat's stats that I know of have a CL 26 for blasphemy; both the MotP and D&DG versions you mentioned in the Tiamatakhisis thread that you might want to use for Takhisis in your game only have CL 21 with [Evil] spells, and a difference of 5 levels in who gets auto-killed and who is merely paralyzed is kind of important. The only published Takhisis stats I could find are those for her aspect in Holy Orders of the Stars, which also has a low CL.

Well it's official, my memory is shit. I started wondering yesterday about my reminiscing because I thought my ultra attack involved harm too. I think it was harm with a boosted caster level to beat SR and quickened inflict. But clearly my recounting is suspect. Sorry looks like word spells have only been broken for 10 years.

erik wrote:Revivify is a level 5 cleric spell which lets you undo death without level loss so long as you cast it 1 round after the unhappy event. Worth scribing a few scrolls of this.

In doublechecking the spell compendium for Revivify, I stumbled upon Righteous Aura. I wish I had found it years ago so I could've used it on infernal pengiuns to make prinnies. It's a level 4 paladin personal spell, but there's ways around all that.

Where the fuck is Revivify?

Spell Compendium? Damnit, I wish I ever thought to look in Spell Compendium for DIVINE magic. But I never do. I only pull out the book when I'm thinking about arcane casters. Mental block, straight up.

Speaking of CL 26 being hard to reach in 3.0, what set of stats are you using? None of the six or seven published versions of Tiamat's stats that I know of have a CL 26 for blasphemy; both the MotP and D&DG versions you mentioned in the Tiamatakhisis thread that you might want to use for Takhisis in your game only have CL 21 with [Evil] spells, and a difference of 5 levels in who gets auto-killed and who is merely paralyzed is kind of important. The only published Takhisis stats I could find are those for her aspect in Holy Orders of the Stars, which also has a low CL.

This Aspect of Takihisis:

Has these stats:

Takihisis (Maleficient Dragon Form): Female old black dragon major aspect (Evil, Destruction); CR 20; Huge outsider (evil, lawful, native); HD 25d12 + 175; hp 475; Init +2; Spd 30 ft; AC 34, touch 12, flat-footed 32; Base Atk +25; Grapple +44; Atk bite +34 melee (2d8 + 18); Full Attack bite +34 melee (2d8 +18), two claws +29 melee (2d6 + 12), two wings +29 melee (1d8 + 6), and tail slap +29 melee (2d6 + 18); SA spell-like abilities, breath 50 foot cone of 16d4 acid (Reflex DC 29 for half); SQ damage reduction 10/magic, domain mastery, immunity to acid 15, resist cold 15, electricity 15, fire 15, spell resistance 25, frightful presence (Will DC 28 negates); AL LE; SV Fort +21, Ref +16, Will +20; Str 33, Dex 14, Con 25, Int 22, Wis 23, Cha 22.

Aspect Traits: Immunity to ability damage, ability drain, disease, energy drain, petrification, poison, polymorph, mind-affecting effects, all weapons and natural weapons lawful and evil.

Spell Like Abilities (Sp): At will—inflict light wounds, shatter, contagion, inflict critical wounds, protection from good, desecrate, magic circle against good, unholy blight; 1st-4th Destruction; 3/day—darkness, harm, disintegrate, dispel good, create undead, blasphemy; 1/day—earthquake, implosion, unholy aura, summon monster IX. CL 25th (26th for Evil Spells), Save DC 15 + spell level.

Which I statted with Vanilla 3.5 coreset/SRD plus Holy Orders of the Stars, a divine-focused splat for Dragonlance that included rules for statting up Divine Aspects.

To summarize: divine aspects get the "Awesome" subtype and Domain spells as spell-like abilities, which scale with HD and have CL = HD. Not a problem unless the aspect is a dragon, which Takihisis's totally would be. Dragons--and this one was merely an "old" black dragon, I could have gone WAY crazier if I really wanted to kill all my players for some insane reason--have stupid fucking amount of hit dice. So yeah, CL = HD for SLAs is a big problem when with the aspect is a dragon, and black dragons, one of the "weaker" types, have (from old to great wyrm) 25 to 37 hit dice at Challenge Ratings of 16-22.

Fuck.

FWIW, the party was mainly ECL 12 at this point, and Maleficient "going dragon" was SUPPOSED to be an "OH SHIT WE CANNOT POSSIBLY WIN THIS" moment, for the party to have about one full round of utter panic before they they were going to get baled out of by some Not-From-Ansalon planeswalkers shooting Takihisis in the face and driving her off. The scene went over well and the player was pleased, it's just it made me notice how ridiculous the Holy Blasdictum spell quartet was at high enough CL.

I only intend to use Tiamat's stats for the final battle at Neraka when the party is level 20 and fully twinked out, which will probably be two, two and a half years from now. Making games for a living leaves me with shockingly little time to play them.

A house rule I heartily recommend is to tie everything that keys to HD to CR instead.

It would work better if CR wasn't a completely random number that WotC pulled out of their collective ass like 80% of the time.

Back in 3E, clerics were made ridiculously OP in hopes that more players picked them, given how the class was avoided like the plague because no one wanted to be the healbot.

Schwarzkopf wrote:It would work better if CR wasn't a completely random number that WotC pulled out of their collective ass like 80% of the time.

Ugh, this again. CR is a really fucking good metric of monster power and challenge. It's really really really really really good. If it wasn't really good, people wouldn't point to like 12 specific monsters as being just toooooo powerful. And always those 12, and not any of the 100s of other in all the books.

Yeah I mean, sure, there are a bunch of ground trolls who lose if you can fly, but even those numbers are way lower than people usually talk about, and if the entire party can't fly, then you still have to fight them.

Schwarzkopf wrote:To summarize: divine aspects get the "Awesome" subtype and Domain spells as spell-like abilities, which scale with HD and have CL = HD. Not a problem unless the aspect is a dragon, which Takihisis's totally would be.

Yeah, that would do it. Her section in Holy Orders says about her dragon aspect that "it is rare that she fully invests her power into this form without it being part of a larger plot to conquer the world" and her sample aspect on the next page is a 12 HD humanoid, so it's quite possible that the designers did realize that the CL = HD thing was a problem for non-humanoid-appearing gods whose aspects were likely to be powerful monsters of some sort.

So hey, at least the "Takhisis's dragon aspect shows up and everything dies" scenario in your game matched the given flavor, whether you intended it to or not.

Kaelik wrote:

Schwarzkopf wrote:It would work better if CR wasn't a completely random number that WotC pulled out of their collective ass like 80% of the time.

Ugh, this again. CR is a really fucking good metric of monster power and challenge. It's really really really really really good. If it wasn't really good, people wouldn't point to like 12 specific monsters as being just toooooo powerful. And always those 12, and not any of the 100s of other in all the books.

Yeah I mean, sure, there are a bunch of ground trolls who lose if you can fly, but even those numbers are way lower than people usually talk about, and if the entire party can't fly, then you still have to fight them.

Kaelik, let's do this up proper in another thread.