Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

Mr. Manchester said:
You know what happened? The first of my plans worked, and I blew up his monster. Isitoq guided missile, biggest barrier is create undead but if you're playing pathfinder you can pull this off as an 5th level necromancer WIZARD (not a faggot cleric who gets animate dead early and thinks they're the best at it because they're fucking not). Isitoqs are flying eyeball monsters and can speak, thus read common. Explosive runes explode in a 10 foot radius damaging everything, except if you're close enough to read them there's no save. So, simply have the little bastards fly where you want them, command them to read the rune and blamo. They explode. By the way, I knew this argument was going to happen and only used 10 of them. The text says 1 hd but in the stat block they're 2 and my control undead limit is 20 hd, so I only used 10,. reading Maximized Empowered Piercing explosive runes that killed them after. Thats 360+60d6/2 damage and I held back anything questionable. I did that because I knew a debate was going to happen and I already had my fucking ducks in a row, you know why?
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I think your math may have been off.

Base spell is 6d6.
Maximize sets that to 36.
Empower adds +3d6 (half of the normal roll). Per AoN: An empowered, maximized spell gains the separate benefits of each feat: the maximum result plus half the normally rolled result.

Still, ten detonations mean 30d6 + 360. Even with the relatively modest DC of explosive runes (it's a level 3 spell), still a good chance of the target failing one or more saves if your Intelligence modifier is high enough (DC 13 + Int modifier, plus any feat bonuses). Piercing reduces their SR by 5, which turns the spell resistance check into a formality (for comparison, a Balor has SR 31. Dropping it to 26 means a level 20 spellcaster beats his SR on a 6+ on d20 -- and that's assuming said spellcaster didn't take spell penetration and greater spell penetration).

The target now gets to make ten Reflex saves (since the monster is not the reader, he'll get those). Assuming it makes all of them (not a given; the aforementioned sample balor only has a Reflex save of +17), and you roll average on the dice, you'll deal (360+90)/2, or 225 damage. A balor has 370 hit points, so you've suddenly eliminated over half its hit points.

Of course, scribing ten scrolls of empowered maximized piercing explosive runes might get expensive, but y'know... it's only money. Cash is only good for what it can buy you. Magical gear. Castles. Permanent enchantments.

I've gotten up to shenanigans as just a sorcerer, I shudder at what I might wreak as a wizard.
 
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Joshua Connor Tomar said:
If the creator is 15th level or higher, the following spells have the same chance of functioning through the isitoq: read magic and tongues.
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You need to cast it ten times and find the boss before it wears off. Can you upcast in Pathfinder? I guess you could craft an amulet or something with your infinite money and have each isitoq wear one.
 
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Capsaicin Addict said:
I've gotten up to shenanigans as just a sorcerer, I shudder at what I might wreak as a wizard.
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Yeah, that was the nice version.

The much funnier version is that you spend a month or so stacking hundreds of Explosive Runes onto a single scroll, fling it over to the target, and then Erase it, triggering 70% of those spells all at once. You don't need to worry about readers at all that way. One of the big limitations on this is also SR; this lets you stack temporary boosts to caster level in advance, which helps, but lots of fuck-off-nasty things with high mythic ranks also have really high SR themselves, or, of course, a Contingent Globe of Invulnerability.

You can absolutely play some baller games of high-level Pathfinder rocket tag at higher levels, but it requires a lot of buy-in from all parties, and multiple stacked contingency plans, and awareness that your epic PC or world-shaking carefully-crafted grudge monster might wander into a simple effect that you didn't think to give them immunity for and have them unceremoniously die; my commendations to @Mr. Manchester for keeping their plans restrained to a few hundred HP of savable, SR-able damage, that could be pre-empted by having a flunky with Fireball ready to take a readied action when the swarm started to move in.

The Ugly One said:
You need to cast it ten times and find the boss before it wears off. Can you upcast in Pathfinder? I guess you could craft an amulet or something with your infinite money and have each isitoq wear one.
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It's a cantrip, so you don't need multiple spell slots, and it lasts for 10 minutes per caster level, so 200 to 250 minutes. Casting it ten times takes 1 of those minutes. That is definitely not the limiting reagent here.
 
IridiumDragon06 said:
It's a cantrip, so you don't need multiple spell slots, and it lasts for 10 minutes per caster level, so 200 to 250 minutes. Casting it ten times takes 1 of those minutes. That is definitely not the limiting reagent here.
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Read magic doesn't grant you literacy; it enables you to decode encrypted texts created by spells such as Secret Page or or Illusory Script, or any mundane encryptions as well. But if you can't read to begin with, it wouldn't make you literate. Now that I look at them, neither Tongues nor Comprehend Languages appear to grant literacy.

FWIW there's a very similarly worded spell in ACKS, and I did have a player try to use various Talmudic contortions to justify why his 7-INT character (7 INT in ACKS means you're illiterate) should be granted literacy by having it cast on him, and I told him, "No."
 
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The Ugly One said:
Read magic doesn't grant you literacy; it enables you to decode encrypted texts created by spells such as Secret Page or or Illusory Script, or any mundane encryptions as well. But if you can't read to begin with, it wouldn't make you literate. Now that I look at them, neither Tongues nor Comprehend Languages appear to grant literacy.

FWIW there's a very similarly worded spell in ACKS, and I did have a player try to use various Talmudic contortions to justify why his 7-INT character (7 INT in ACKS means you're illiterate) should be granted literacy by having it cast on him, and I told him, "No."
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*sprays the compound on the page that reveals the invisible ink*
...My god! I don't believe this... I CAN'T READ!
 
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The Ugly One said:
With an INT of 7, they might not be literate.
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Assuming they're illiterate, you could teach them to read over the course of about a week by retraining one of their ranks in stealth, or three weeks using bonus language rules. Shouldn't be too hard, given they're smarter than bearded devils. Share Language, communal would also work, or some scrolls of voluminous vocabulary.
Edit:
The ability in the statblock that allows for read magic suggests that the isitoq's master can see through its eye like a scrying sensor i.e. the actual creature is not subject to the spell, it is merely a conduit for the master to see through. The above methods definitively grant the isitoq itself the ability to read whatever text you've written.
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See the text from scrying.
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AnOminous said:
Maybe I was lucky but I had a small tight-knit group of players (we had all been friends before gaming) and nobody really had any qualms saying "don't invite that retard back" if someone showed up and was a retard. This happened I think twice that I remember. It was generally not a big deal.

I had the same in college, too. Basically nobody not in friend group welcome.

Xenophobia is sometimes a good thing.
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I also consider myself very lucky I have a tight-knit group of players. A lot of people who just want to give the hobby a try wash out in a month or two because they have zero interest in doing their homework on learning what their character does or even basic mechanics.

Also, has anyone else run into that guy at the table who instists on getting absolutely hammered and causing problems at the table? I have a friend who will occasionally play a second game with other groups and every time he's found a group there's always been one denegenerate alcoholic who seems determined to make it everyone else's problem at the table.
NiggerKing22 said:
Ok, genuine question because I didn't really grow with RPGs, why do you guys care so much about D&D? I only played 5e and took a gander at the lore and thought "Damn. This shit's gay and slow as hell.", even Warcraft expansions were less lame. I highly doubt actual interesting tabletop rpgs use it as a baseline, and that includes the polidicks. (The politics are mostly because RPG creators are either trannies or use xitter from what I reckoned)
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I actually haven't been playing D&D for over a decade. My group switched over to Pathfinder from 3rd ed (we tried 4th edition and just didn't like it). We've also tried a lot of different games other than Pathfinder since D&D, but it's kind of like how a lot of weebs got their start with Dragonball Z. You may have moved on from Dragonball Z, but you still watched the trainwreck that was GT and checked in on Super every now and then because it was your gateway into the hobby and you've got a soft spot for it.
 
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anti SJW said:
I'm at PAX East this weekend. WOTC has a booth. But it's all Magic the Gathering. No Dungeons and Dragons stuff is being shown.
The New rules just came out and the company that makes the game can't even be bothered to promote their own product.
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Well, yeah. What can they offer at this point that isn’t being offered by retroclones and third party creators? Combine that with the political tides turning (as seen recently, with Goodman Games reconnecting with Bledsaw Jr) and you have a masterclass in why you shouldn’t make your products political.
 
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Gingervitis said:
(as seen recently, with Goodman Games reconnecting with Bledsaw Jr)
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I heard about that. Are they still working with the Judges Guild after what happened? I only got some cliff notes on it but it sounded like some asshole leaked their private DM’s where they were joking about the holocaust or something.
 
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Allied-Mastercomputer said:
I heard about that. Are they still working with the Judges Guild after what happened? I only got some cliff notes on it but it sounded like some asshole leaked their private DM’s where they were joking about the holocaust or something.
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Back during the Summer of Love, when Bledsaw II said something edgy (no idea what it was, though it’s likely unjustified as usual), everyone made a big show of cutting ties with him. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, suspiciously close to the death of a certain troon, and now they’re releasing City State of the Invincible Overlord for… D&D 5e and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

They were that close to being based too.
 
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