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2019-01-11, 09:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Miracle can already happily duplicate raise dead or resurrection. It still costs diamond dust to do it but you can do it without even eating up your entire turn and for no exp cost. Going by the rules on hiring spellcasters to cast spells for you, the 5000 exp you burn on the given miracle is worth 25000 gold, enough to cast raise dead five times or resurrection twice. Getting a party's worth (minus cleric) of corpses back on their feet is actually pretty in line with the cost.
Last edited by RatElemental; 2019-01-11 at 09:12 PM.
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2019-01-13, 08:37 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2015
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Heh, I guess that's just terribly written. Because without any numbers in there, well... the first thing that comes to mind is always bringing back a ridiculous number of dudes back. Because as you said, it can already duplicate these spells, why would you pay extra XP to do so?
Attention LotR fans
Spoiler: LotRThe scouring of the Shire never happened. That's right. After reading books I, II, and III, I stopped reading when the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom. The story ends there. Nothing worthwhile happened afterwards. Middle-Earth was saved.
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2019-01-14, 05:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2014
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Well, it's basically Mass Raise Dead, and other spells have Mass versions to do the same thing multiple times with one higher-level casting.
But, yeah, RAW (but maybe not RAI) it has no limit, so you could raise an entire army as long as you could consider them "fallen allies". Hell, a sufficiently long-lived character could raise an entire ancient graveyard... (it also doesn't say anything about the dead characters having the opportunity to reject being raised. Or level loss)Last edited by Reboot; 2019-01-14 at 05:49 AM.
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2019-01-14, 07:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Attention LotR fans
Spoiler: LotRThe scouring of the Shire never happened. That's right. After reading books I, II, and III, I stopped reading when the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom. The story ends there. Nothing worthwhile happened afterwards. Middle-Earth was saved.
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2019-01-14, 10:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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- Lake Wobegon
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2019-01-14, 10:59 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2014
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Well, racial hit dice are directly equivalent to levels, no? (I believe PC monsters need to level up to get their full RHD)
And the idea with level adjustment is similar - L15 Vampire Durkon is treated as a L23 character for levelling purposes on the basis that the vampire template is equivalent to eight levels worth of power (so, he's effectively L15 Cleric/L8 Vampire). The alternative approach would be to take away eight levels of (in this case) Cleric and replace them with eight vampire RHD, and if you don't have eight levels to lose, you become either a lesser vampire (like a vampire spawn) who needs to level up to get full vampire powers, or just plain can't become a vamp and die instead.
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2019-01-14, 03:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
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2019-01-14, 05:47 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2014
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Last edited by Reboot; 2019-01-14 at 05:48 PM.
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2019-01-14, 06:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2017
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- Vancouver <-> Dublin
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Re: miracle - it can do very powerful things, but explicitly only with your deity's approval (read: DM fiat). "Raising fallen allies" could be interpreted as raising as few as 2 allies, or raising creatures only for the remainder of an encounter (after which they die again), or some other limitation.
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2019-01-14, 08:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2007
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- Indianapolis
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
It's the clerical equivalent of Wish; they're both supposed to be capable of things beyond any other spell with a degree of 'you can get anything you can think to ask for.' The main difference is that where Wish has explicit warnings and a long history of both myth and in-game tradition about how Wishes can backfire on the Wisher or otherwise not work as requested, Miracle is explicitly granted by something that is both positively inclined toward the caster and more powerful than mortals - it's a lot weirder to have that monkey-pawed or tell the caster 'your god isn't strong enough to do that, you get a reduced effect.'
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2019-01-14, 09:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
...I see. I don't get why you didn't just say that the LA replaced class levels, though.
And it still seems weird to me, however you cut it.
Pretty much.
The literary basis for wish is traced back to various legends and myths about mortals who asked for boons too great or ill-considered for mere mortals to handle, from King Midas to Faust. On the other hand, the literary basis for miracle is mostly traced back to the Bible, which tends not to have negative outcomes for its protagonists.
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2019-01-14, 10:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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- Lake Wobegon
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2019-01-15, 05:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
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2019-01-15, 06:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2014
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2019-01-15, 08:11 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2015
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Meanwhile, rogues, at lvl 20, get +1 BAB and +1 ref.
No, racial HD and LA are not the same. Sometimes they match, great, often they do not. Savage Species had a few examples of how to scale some monsters from "level 1". Creatures with LA usually had some RHD, but not always. Templates notably rarely add RHD, but almost always add LA.
Having free-form spells at lvl 9 completely invalidates the need to have any other spells at lvl 9, though.Last edited by Goblin_Priest; 2019-01-15 at 08:11 AM.
Attention LotR fans
Spoiler: LotRThe scouring of the Shire never happened. That's right. After reading books I, II, and III, I stopped reading when the One Ring was thrown into Mount Doom. The story ends there. Nothing worthwhile happened afterwards. Middle-Earth was saved.
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2019-01-15, 11:57 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2009
- Location
- In a castle under the sea
- Gender
Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
I will never claim that D&D is a well-designed game. It consistently works well enough at low levels, but...high levels are hit-or-miss. Especially in editions where the designers went "Screw it, nobody's going to be playing anything at this level, let's just make it cool."
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2019-01-15, 12:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Their existence is justified when the freeform "do something awesome" spell costs 5000 exp no matter what you do with it and it can't duplicate effects equivalent or better than spells one level lower without opening the door for the DM to get to play a game of "Jackass Genie."
Even miracle doesn't completely invalidate it, it still costs EXP if you do something other than duplicate weaker spells with it and if you want something more you get to play "Mother may I" with the DM instead.Last edited by RatElemental; 2019-01-15 at 12:40 PM.
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2019-01-15, 01:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2009
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- In a castle under the sea
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Re: The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.
Which gets us back to the "questionable game design" I was talking about a post ago. If wish/miracle just let you duplicate lower-level spells and didn't have a steep XP cost, cool; it trades power for versatility. But they need to include a single spell (well, one arcane and one divine) to let characters do any kind of awesome stuff, because that's something D&d has always had.