Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
Quote:
Originally Posted by
gooddragon1
Yes. I mean only with respect to his custom abilities. I do not care about any of the other ones. Only his custom ones.
You see, while he can attain nearly unlimited power, without the ability to define his abilities he's still limited. It's when he can go outside of the rules and create his own that he actually gains unlimited power. Or at least that's how I feel about it.
He doesn't have to define his abilities. They're already defined wherever it is they are written. The ability to gain them through manipulate form doesn't change that.
Pun pun does not require fiat to gain nigh-limitless power.
Example: pun pun uses manipulate form to give himself divine rank 12 and each of the prerequisite feats, then grants himself craft artifact. He can now create any artifact in print. No fiat, no rules interpretation of any kind. It's all right there in black and white on the pages.
"but what about material costs?" fine, he grants himself the alter reality divine salient ability. He can now create the necessary crafting materials to use craft artifact.
He can even grant himself the divine salient ability to create freakin' life.
Having already granted himself the tarrasque's regeneration he's nigh unkillable, and he has an arbitrarily high con score, so he has just as arbitrarily high HP's, to buffer him from unconciousness.
There is no fiat here.
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kelb_Panthera
He doesn't have to define his abilities. They're already defined wherever it is they are written. The ability to gain them through manipulate form doesn't change that.
Pun pun does not require fiat to gain nigh-limitless power.
Example: pun pun uses manipulate form to give himself divine rank 12 and each of the prerequisite feats, then grants himself craft artifact. He can now create any artifact in print. No fiat, no rules interpretation of any kind. It's all right there in black and white on the pages.
"nigh-limitless" not unlimited. Where they are written except the ones that aren't. Keep that in mind.
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
The only way to be truly unlimited is fiat. Even Pun-Pun has limits without it, and the author said as much years ago; they just happen to be limits that no other TO build has any hope of reaching. Being unlimited was never Pun-Pun's goal.
It seems to be YOUR goal, judging by the thread title, but you can't achieve it without fiat either. Thus there's little point in discussing it further.
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
Quote:
Originally Posted by
gooddragon1
"nigh-limitless" not unlimited. Where they are written except the ones that aren't. Keep that in mind.
It's long since proven that there's almost nothing that can't already be done within the rules as written. The few things that can't are so obscure that I can't actually think of any off the top of my head.
Create life: see the edit of my previous post
Create worlds: genesis.
Create souls: see create life or soulfused construct template or incarnate construct or clone + create undead + awaken undead
create any item ever printed: craft artifact and its prereq's
travel to anywhere and anytime: greater teleport, teleport through time, and an arbitrarily high enough knowledge check to know such a place and time existed.
Seriously, find me any one thing that can't already be done within the existing rules, and I'll concede that pun pun's power isn't limitless for all practical purposes.
Of course, by the same token, neither is your "I win stick." Since having limitless power requires you to have limitless knowledge.
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Kelb_Panthera
It's long since proven that there's almost nothing that can't already be done within the rules as written. The few things that can't are so obscure that I can't actually think of any off the top of my head.
If I recall correctly, I once made a thread to try to collect those sorts of things. Didn't get many replies.... Actually, no: a search shows it was for unsolved PO problems. A bit less restrictive.
Quote:
Of course, by the same token, neither is your "I win stick." Since having limitless power requires you to have limitless knowledge.
The Omniscificer would be useful here. <tangent> It was originally built to counter (the level 5 version of) Pun-Pun, incidentally.</tangent>
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
The problem with the Omniscificer is that the actual listed mechanical outcomes of an infinitely high Knowledge check by RAW are a lot more restrictive than what people usually want to do with it. It gets into a very ill-defined section of the rules. Granted, it does achieve 'actually infinite' in several things instead of 'nigh-infinite', which is impressive in its own right.
Without strongly mutually exclusive abilities, all asymptotic TO builds will eventually turn into the same combined build though, as there is nothing preventing Pun-Pun from e.g. performing the Omniscificer's trick or others.
One can in fact ask the question 'what things can be made truly infinite, and what things can only be made nigh-infinite or arbitrarily high?'. I don't fully remember the list, but I think all checks and caster level at least can be made 'truly infinite', whereas stats only get 'arbitrarily high', for example (due to being able to use infinite damage tricks via Masochism or Cosmic Descryer to boost checks or caster level, whereas needing to iterate a loop to increase stats). Though I guess this means that Wisdom in particular can be actually-infinite (via Owl's Insight, the spell that gives you CL/2 uncapped bonus to Wis).
I guess with Epic Spells and an infinite spellcraft check you might be able to hit actual infinite on all stats. I'm a bit murky there though, because I think that would require actually-infinite gold and xp, and I don't know if those are possible (gold I guess you can get via infinite caster level and PaO or something, but xp I don't know how you'd do it).
Re: Unlimited power with SRD only materials
OP: Fundamentally, this is the same as the Wish and the Word, as presented by Frank and K on the old Wizards boards. I.e. wish as a SLA requires no component, you can wish for magic items, and then you might just wish for a ring of infinite wishes.
I am not entirely convinced, though. Wish states that you can create or improve magic items, and states an XP cost for doing so. It does not actually say that you can ignore prerequisites for crafting magic items. However, you are not actually using any crafting feats. You are just benefitting from a spell effect, which happens to require XP based on what using the crafting feats would require. So I agree that using wish to create a magic item does not require you to meet prerequisites for crafting the item.
However, it does not say that you can create any item you want. It says that you can create a magic item. It does not list which items you can make, nor does it say that you can create, say, any magic item worth less than 25000GP, or any non-epic item, or any item defined within the rules. As such, which items you can create is not unbounded (as it would have been if it had said "any item"), it is just undefined. "Any item" is just as valid an interpretation as allowing the wish to create only pearls of power, or lyres of building. As I read it, undefined does not default to limitless. Moreover, in my opinion, this is one of many cases where the concept of pure RAW becomes useless, because without a DM to define the undefined "a magic item" into something well-defined like "any magic item" or "any magic item in the DMG", it simply is not possible to say whether RAW allows the staff of infinite wishes or I-win-buttons or not.