[3.5] Dolly the 8-round God

[Mango Eldar]

Introduction

This thought experiment presents a build which, as the title suggests, makes you nigh-invincible for 8 rounds.

Among other things, Dolly can kill the Tarrasque with a single unarmed strike, cast a thousand Miracles per turn, and wipe nations off the face of the map... in 8 rounds. To top it all off we will make Dolly without using infinity loops.

Some quick notes on writing style: where possible I have tried to prioritize making my point understood over detail. Each section and subsection first talks about how to achieve a certain objective in the most direct and easy to understand way, once this has been established I turn my attention to fine tuning details and optimization. As I reader, I suggest you try to take in each section in its entirety rather than nitpicking on the detail of one particular line (of course you should feel free to point out details which you feel make no sense).

For the sake of readability, I have tried to group all my rule mongering into one section at the end. If you are the kind of person who likes to check the validity of each statement before you continue you might find yourself flicking between the main text and this section. Apologies in advance.

Building Dolly

Building Dolly happens in two phases which I like to call splice and dice.

Phase 1 - splice

In this phase we will make copies of Dolly. We will then use these ‘clones’ to power our 8 round of dicing.

Books you will need:
Complete Arcane [CA]
Complete Divine [CD]
Epic Level Handbook [ELH]

Optional extras:
Complete Warrior [CW]
Dragon Magic [DrM]
Player's Guide to Faerûn [PGtF]

We begin our mitotic adventure with the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body (BOB)[CA]. We access Body Outside Body through the Extra Spell feat [CA]. To my understanding there is some argument over whether this method works so if you don’t like it you can always access BOB by dipping 2 levels into Wyrm Wizard [DrM], or by building Dolly on a Wu Jen base.

BOB creates several copies of the caster. These clones cannot cast spells but they can still use other class features like SLAs, supernatural abilities etc (see ‘Rulings’ section).

The Archmage PrC [DMG] High Arcana ability lets us cast one of our known spells as an SLA twice per day. We will select BOB for as an SLA. Any clone which we now create will also be able to cast BOB.

While finite, the quantity of clones that Dolly can create is astronomically high, it can easily reach millions, see ‘clones numbers’ for details. For now we will assume that Dolly has created X clones where X is arbitrarily high.

Now that we have our clones, the stage is set, It’s time to ascend to Godhood.

Enter the Void Disciple [CD].

The Void Disciple PrC has a supernatural ability called Moment of Clarity. Moment of Clarity lets us grant anyone any single feat or a number of ranks in a skill equal to the relevant modifier for that skill. The beneficiary need not have the prerequisite feats or skills. This endowment lasts for 1 round per Void Disciple level. Epic feats, as described in the Epic Level Handbooks are for all intents and purposes feats. Our clones will use Moment of Clarity to grant Dolly stackable feats. Moment of Clarity can be used twice per day with 4 levels of Void Disciple, and an additional time per day for each 4 levels gained thereafter. Dolly can use Moment of Clarity Y times, where Y equals between 2X and 4X depending on your build. The method of splicing which you chose might also affect your available uses of Moment of Clarity (see ‘Moment of Clarity Management’). Here are some of the options at Dolly’s disposal:

• Gain +Y to any Ability Score by stacking feats like Great Intelligence, Great Constitution etc [ELH].
• Gain +Y extra quickened spells per round by stacking the Multispell feat [ELH].
• Gain +Y extra spell slots, of up to level 9+Y by stacking the Improved Spell Capacity feat [ELH].
• Gain +Y natural armor by stacking the Armor Skin feat [ELH].
• Gain +2Y spell resistance by stacking the Improved Spell Resistance feat [ELH].
• Gain +3Y/- damage reduction by stacking the Damage Reduction feat [ELH/CW].
• Gain +3Y fast healing by stacking the Fast Healing feat [ELH].
• Gain +4Y to any saving throws by stacking feats like Epic Fortitude, Epic Will etc [ELH].
• Gain +10Y to any energy resistance by stacking the Energy Resistance feat [ELH].
• Gain +20Y hit points by stacking Epic Toughness [ELH].
• Gain +YZ to any skill where Z is your INT modifier by using the skill bonus feature of Moment of Clarity.

The list above is hardly exhaustive. Go read through the feats of the Epic Level Handbook and smile to yourself as the possibilities dawn on you. Epic level feats let you do crazy things. Stack Automatic Quicken, Silent and Still Spell [ELH] with Ignore Material Component [ELH] to cast all your spells with but a thought. Stack Familiar Spell [ELH] to grant your familiar your entire spellbook as spell-like abilities… you get the idea.

One little trick you might find handy is to stack Arcane Knowledge [ELH] to add any arcane spell in existence to your list of known spells, then grant yourself Spontaneous Spell [ELH] to convert any of your prepared spells to these newly added but unprepared spells.

Finally, consider giving your clones at least one ability other than BOB. This will turn your clones into your own personal army. My personal favorites is Wish [PHB]. You can use Wish to change events that happened the previous round, this means that your opponent basically has to kill all your clones to kill you. Miracle [PHB] is another great one, add it to your list with the Arcane Disciple feat [CA] (selecting the Luck domain), you can also use Miracles to duplicate BOB. In both cases, the clones pay the XP for you… sweet! If you plan on using your clones in this way then give some serious thought to the Spell Stowaway feat. This little ditty lets you select one spell or SLA which you can draw the benefits from whenever cast within 300ft of you, even while flat footed. Since everyone has the same SLAs this means that everyone can affect everyone within range. One cast of Wish can buff everyone within 300ft, teleport everyone within 300ft… the possibilities are staggering. Combine this with some clever use of readied actions for unparalleled responsiveness. Take a look at the space management section for some tricks on how to further increase the number of clones you affect past the 300ft limit.

Clones numbers: defining X & Y

This section outlines some very rough parameters for how many clones we can create and how many times we can use Moment of Clarity. If you are satisfied that X & Y are huge and that the mechanism works, you can skip this section.

As a 20th level character with decent Intelligence, Dolly has 5, 7th level spell slots. Suppose we took 5 levels of Archmage, and sacrificed all our 7th level slots for the BOB SLA granted through the Archmage’s High Arcana. This gives Dolly the ability to cast BOB 10 times per day as an SLA.

Since Dolly must expand one use of BOB to create clone, the copies will appear with one less available cast of BOB. This ensures that we cannot create an infinite number of clones. A 20th level Dolly casts BOB to create 4 clones. These clones inherit the 9 remaining uses of the BOB SLA. Dolly also has 9 remaining casts of BOB. So now there are 5 casters with 9 remaining uses of BOB. Each of these casters casts BOB (remember, the clones can use SLA’s) to produce 20 additional clones with 8 remaining uses of the BOB SLA. Now we have a total of 25 casters with 8 remaining uses of the BOB SLA. We rinse and repeat until we have used up all our SLA’s. Here is a round by round breakdown of how many clones are created (large numbers rounded to 1dp).

1. 4 clones created + the original caster = 5 clones with 9 remaining BOB casts.
2. 20 clones created + the previous 5 casters = 25 clones with 8 remaining BOB casts
3. 100 clones created + the previous 25 casters = 85 clones with 7 remaining BOB casts
4. 500 clones created + the previous 85 casters = 625 clones with 6 remaining BOB casts
5. 2.5K clones created + the previous 625 casters = 3.1K clones with 5 remaining BOB casts
6. 8.5K clones created + the previous 3.1K casters = 15.6K clones with 4 remaining BOB casts
7. 62.5K clones created + the previous 15.6K casters = 78.1K clones with 3 remaining BOB casts
8. 38.5K clones created + the previous 78.1K casters = 390.6K clones with 2 remaining BOB casts
9. 1.5M clones created + the previous 390.6K casters = 2.0M clones with 1 remaining BOB casts
10. 7.8M clones created + the previous 2.0M casters = 9.8M clones with 0 remaining BOB casts

While this might seem like a lot of clones, this number is not even close to being optimized. You can increase this number significantly by using higher level spell slots to prepare BOB, taking the Incantatrix PrC [PGtF] to twin and repeat all your spells (you cannot do this for SLAs), crafting rods with BOB charges etc. I leave the task of full optimization with you.

Nevertheless, if we are going to attempt to create this many clones, there are some challenges we need to address.

Moment of Clarity Management: this turns out to be surprisingly tricky. Remember that if clone-A uses Moment of Clarity then any future clone made by clone-A will be able to use the ability one less time. This leads to an important insight.

If we are trying to beef up Dolly, we want to have our clones finish multiplying before they use Moment of Clarity. This way we do not lose our usage of Moment of Clarity in multiplication.

If on the other hand, we are trying to make an army of clones then we can use Moment of Clarity early in the process and have the future generations of clones inherit the relevant feats.

HP management: Each clone created through BOB has only one quarter the HP of its creator. After only several generations our clones run out of HP, but fret not, we can overcome this obstacle!

Dolly’s most simple solution is to have her clones grant each other the Epic Toughness feat. Epic Toughness grants +20HP or +30HP depending on whether we source it from the Epic Players Handbook or Complete Warrior respectively. The feat can be gained multiple times and that its effects stack. Whenever Dolly’s clones run low on HP, she will simply have them use Moment of Clarity to solve the problem.

While this method is the most simple it is also eats up our Moments of Clarity. Since every generation loses ¾ of its hit points, we need to make an additional use of Moments of Clarity every 2 generations (20HP divided by 4 twice is less than 1HP). At the cost of some additional complexity we can be more efficient. We grant ourselves the Spell Stowaway feat selecting one of our SLAs like Wish. We use Wish to cast any spell that grants temporary hit points giving the benefits to every clone within 300ft. By doing this we can use our SLA’s instead of Moment of Clarity to keep splicing. This is a good trade because it is easier for us to get SLAs. We also need to use much fewer of our SLA’s since we only need to use one SLA for every clone within 300ft.

Space management: One annoying feature of Moment of Clarity is that you must touch the beneficiary. This poses a problem in very large numbers as Dolly’s clones won’t be able to reach her. There are a couple of ways to solve this.

The Void Disciple’s Sense Void ability lets Dolly’s clones use their sense of touch by remote (see ‘Rulings’ section). Clones can sense void up to 1000ft away. Imagine a circle with a 1000ft radius and Dolly sitting in the middle, every clone sitting in this circle should be able to reach Dolly using Sense Void. A circle with 1000ft radius has an area of roughly 3.14M feet and can fit in it roughly 628K human sized clones. This number increases exponentially if you are allowed to extend the Sense Void table.

You can also increase this number by decreasing the size of your clones. Do this by granting your clones a Polymorph Any Object [PHB] SLA using the Archmage’s High Arcana. Once again, combine with Spell Stowaway for efficiency.

Reducing the size of your clones is also a method you can use if you don’t like my interpretation of Sense Void. By reducing their sizes, your clones and Dolly can occupy the same space and be in range for Moment of Clarity.

Time management: The title of this thread is ‘the 8-round god’. Our 8 round limitation comes from the number of Void Disciple Levels that we take which determine the duration of Moment of Clarity. The 8 rounds start when our clone’s use Moment of Clarity to boost Dolly. To get the most out of this effect, we want to have all our clones’ boost Dolly on the same turn, this way Dolly keeps the benefits of Moment of Clarity for the full 8 rounds. In build where you really try to maximize your available BOB SLAs this might not be possible as your clones will take more than 8 rounds just to splice. In this case there might be some lost time between when the first clones start buffing Dolly and when the last ones finish. This is honestly not a big deal, you really don’t need the full 8 rounds to exhibit your divine wrath. If 8 rounds doesn’t seem like enough then go and read the next section: Dice.

We also need to be aware of a second clock, that is, the expiration date of our clones. Clones only last one minute. You need to make sure to boost yourself up before the end of the spell.

Sample build

Wizard 5/Incantatrix 2/Void Disciple 8/Archmage 5/

Why 8 levels? At 8 levels of Void Disciple we strike a balance between uses of Moment of Clarity, not losing too many caster levels and having enough levels left over for Archmage levels which is where we draw our SLAs from. We could also take 12 levels of Void Disciple which would give us more uses of moments of clarity, Void Release (which doubles the benefit of Ability Score gains), and Void Suppression (a no lose or save ability on all our clones). The lost Archmage levels and level 9 casting is not worth it IMHO.

This isn’t fully optimized. Optimizing Dolly’s build is a mathematically rich exercise which gives me a headache at every attempt. If you have the patience for it please go ahead and share your findings with the rest of us.

Phase 2 - dice

Having ascended to godhood, its time to have some fun. Lets revisit some of the promises we made earlier.

Kill the Tarrasque with a single unarmed strike. A strength score of 1M will let you kill the Tarrasque with a single unarmed strike. Check!

Cast a thousand Miracles in one turn: Using the Arcane Disciple (Luck Domain) we put Miracle on our casters list and we used High Arcane to make it an SLA which gets passed down to all our clones. We can easily make a thousand clones all of which can cast Miracle. Check!

Wipe a country off the face the map: Use Miracle to make 1 million erasers and…. no I kid. Recall that a High Arcana SLA can be used twice per day. After buffing Dolly, her clones use Miracle to teleport into every population centre in whatever country didn’t acknowledge Dolly’s power. They then use their second Miracle to replicate various AOE spells. The damage that several million clones can do in this rounds should destroy the vast majority of any nations population, effectively eliminating its ability to function as a nation. Check.

Dice to your hearts content, just make sure to be back before the 8 rounds are over.

Rulings

Interpretation of Body Outside Body: Dolly's power revolve around the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body. The spell creates several duplicates of Dolly, all of which gain her feats, skills and class levels but which cannot cast spells. By my interpretation, this means that they can use any of her abilities so long as this ability is not a spell (so spell like abilities are in, supernatural abilities are in etc).

Read as written, Dolly’s clones get her class levels. Class levels are the things that grant class abilities. If you somehow gained 5 Rogue class levels then the implication is that you also gained the ability to sneak attack. Ergo, a clones with class levels in Archmage should gain the Archmage's abilities, in this case High Arcana which grants an SLA.

Body Outside Body specifically names the exceptions to the benefits of gained class levels (spell casting). Other exceptions such as SLAs (and other su/ex abilities) are not listed as exceptions. This further reinforces the case for clones being able to use non-spell class features.

The entire build revolves around this interpretation and I will concede that a different interpretation renders the build ineffective. I have found several posts on these forums that seem to agree with this interpretation but you are of-course welcome to challenge it.

Interpretation of Sense Void: Sense void lets clones leave their body and extend their consciousness into the world, while doing so they can use their normal senses (touch is specifically listed), to perceive whatever area, person or thing they direct their attention to. Cutting out the senses we are not interested in we get “can use their sense of touch to perceive any person they direct their attention to”. I take this to mean that they can touch a person by remote.

On the definition of infinity loops: we set out to build dolly without infinity loops. Whether we have succeeded or not might be subjective. While strictly speaking we have no infinity loops in this build, it is certainly capable of infinity loops. We could build dolly on Sorcerer base, have our clones boost Dolly’s Charisma granting Dolly bonus spells with which to create clones, the clones then grant dolly more Charisma and the cycle continues. Versatile Spells like Wish and abilities like Moment of Clarity can surely be used to create infinity loops. We could combine Improved Spell Capacity [DMG] and Innate Feat [CA] to grant Dolly the ability to use BOB at will.

In these cases I like to refer to something I like to call ‘the law of minimum nerfing’. By this law, we nerf an ability by the minimum amount necessary in order to break the infinity loop. We rule out the use of certain combinations, rather than the use of the abilities themselves. Some people might say ‘this is not really a build that uses no infinity loops, it’s a build that simply chooses not to use the infinity loops available to it’. To these people I say… you are right… but you know what, 14th level Wizards with Polymorph are guilty of the same crime, they simply choose not to pun-pun their way into godhood. You would be surprised how difficult it is NOT to create an infinity loop in D&D using this definition of an infinity loop. If you nerf every ability that could potentially be used to for infinity loops you would be left with a very skeletal version of D&D.

Conclusion

Wow that’s it…. congratulations on making it to the end of this beasty post. That concludes the 8 Round God. This thread represented a 3 week project from me, drawing strange looks from my girlfriend who is only now coming to understand how truly nerdy I am. I hope you like my work.

[Mithril Leaf]

http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=5571.0

This seems to be rather similar to your Dolly. If you can get something similar to this rolling, then your BOB clones will have your SLAs at will. Good fun.

[Urpriest]

The numbers are convincing, but your interpretation of Sense Void is rather egregious. If touch spells worked that way, then any creature that lacked a sense of touch would be unable to use them.

[Cruiser1]

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=217819

This also seems to be rather similar to your Dolly. The way you have millions of clones (but not infinite) is similar to how nested Thought Bottles allow access to million of wishes (but not infinite).

[Qwertystop]

Nice! New superbuilds don't come up much.
However, I too disagree with "sense of touch" equaling touching something. Your sense of touch is what you use to feel that a lizardfolk is scaly. Toucing would mean that they feel your hand on their back.

[Kelb_Panthera]

if you make ghost hand one of your SLA's that should get around the touch range issue.

[SimonMoon6]

Now imagine if the DM makes you supply a miniature for every clone that you create. :)

[Qwertystop]

if you make ghost hand one of your SLA's that should get around the touch range issue.

No, Ghost Hand can't make touch attacks. It doesn't even make a hand. It's effectively light-object low-speed telekinesis.

[Qwertystop]

if you make ghost hand one of your SLA's that should get around the touch range issue.

No, Ghost Hand can't make touch attacks. It doesn't even make a hand. It's effectively light-object low-speed telekinesis.

[Tyndmyr]

Does MoP have a range limit? For large values of X, this might present a problem.

[Vladislav]

No, Ghost Hand can't make touch attacks. It doesn't even make a hand. It's effectively light-object low-speed telekinesis.

You're both wrong

Spectral Hand is the one that can make touch attacks.
Mage Hand is the low-speed telekinesis.

[Qwertystop]

Oops....

[candycorn]

I would also like to add that Embrace/Shun would work well to transfer any temporary feats to permanent ones. The new feats must be legal, granted, but this would give the build literally every feat it qualifies for. If that feat stacks with itself, then you can stack it as often as you want to do your combo, which is, even with restrictive rulings on touch, upwards of 100,000 per day.

Assuming 100,000 feats per day in this manner, toughness alone would give 300,000 HP per day. Two days of this would give you enough permanent HP to give every remaining clone at least 1 HP after 10 uses of BOB were used. It would also have the benefit of reducing your need for Epic Toughness.

You'll have greater spell focus in every school, the ability to shape any soulmeld (to a max of your con score -10), the ability to bind them to most chakras, a ton of essentia, the list goes on and on. In other words, you'll have a lot of feats.

[Kelb_Panthera]

You're both wrong

Spectral Hand is the one that can make touch attacks.
Mage Hand is the low-speed telekinesis.

I meant spectral hand. I was AFB.