What to do with a living gate?

[Angry Bob]

As in, applying the living spell template to gate. I've checked, it's entirely legal, I'm just having a problem grokking how it works in combat, since the effect only fires if it slams or engulfs/grapples someone. I'm having a hard time picturing this ring-shaped portal to another dimension engulfing someone and a monster popping out.

How would you fluff it?

Also, aside from stacking high-level templates, giving it an INT score, giving it cleric(with the madness and portal/travel domains) levels, and calling it Yog-Sothoth, what would you as the DM actually do with such a monstrosity?

[Dragonsoul]

Instead of Gating things in-It gates you out:smallsmile:

Yes, it's not RAW, but Bite me.

[Moose Man]

My brain... Oof. Why must you subject my brain to such evil? Dear Lord, you've given me a virtual hangover.
As a DM, I'd get you to gate in a solar, and make it use it's wish for a good purpose, to cure my virtual hangover. /moan

[Scarlet-Devil]

Instead of Gating things in-It gates you out:smallsmile:

Yes, it's not RAW, but Bite me.

Isn't it though? Kind've... One of the uses of Gate, after all, is traveling between planes- it's as much an effect of the spell as actually summoning something. The spell even says that you can interpose it between yourself and enemies defensively (because if anything walks through it it would be taken to the other side).

[Hecuba]

As in, applying the living spell template to gate. I've checked, it's entirely legal, I'm just having a problem grokking how it works in combat, since the effect only fires if it slams or engulfs/grapples someone. I'm having a hard time picturing this ring-shaped portal to another dimension engulfing someone and a monster popping out.

How would you fluff it?

Also, aside from stacking high-level templates, giving it an INT score, giving it cleric(with the madness and portal/travel domains) levels, and calling it Yog-Sothoth, what would you as the DM actually do with such a monstrosity?

I would have it's effect send the engulfed person to a specific dimension and send a target therefrom back. If it exists on both dimensions (and the players aren't high enough to have easy access to planar travel), it gives a great excuse to run a two field combat, and a potential excuse to split the party (provided you work in an excuse to fill it out to two parties, one on either side, and run parallel plots.

[Zaq]

Isn't the Living Gate where all the Shardminds came from? Yes, I'm aware that that's 4e fluff, but you just made a friggin' living Gate spell. Dimensions crashing into each other is probably going to be rather common around this thing.

[Angry Bob]

Eh, figured it out. I'm making a living gate/disjunction/prismatic sphere, giving it sentry ooze, ELH pseudonatural template, the paragon template, giving it 20-odd cleric levels, and setting it loose on my campaign setting. If the NPCs aren't packing at least fifteen contingent resurrections apiece, that's their problem.

Living spell is Fun in the most "Losing is Fun" sense of the word.

[Yora]

I would make a living gate that exists in two planes at once. It has the appearance of boiling clouds, but there are constantly small openings in the ooze that let you see into the other plane. When you get engoulfed by the living gate and manage to free yourself from it, you end up randomly in one of the two planes it connects.
When damaged on either plane, it takes damage just the same as usual, and when it dies, the connection is gone and everyone is trapped on his side of the gate.

[Urpriest]

Calling creatures seems to fall under the "effect is already a creature" clause, so I would think you can only make a living spell out of the planar travel function of Gate. Since being in the Gate's normal effect means you are about to go through (you can't go halfway through planar portals, as established in Manual of the Planes and/or FRCS), the slam attack sends you to a different plane. Since you don't need to specify the parameters of the spell for the template, it could justifiably send you to a randomly determined plane.

What bugs me is that Living Spell can even be applied to rays, since most of them are Effect: spells that don't specify a target. So you could make a Living Enervation.

[Angry Bob]

Great. Now I'm stuck on the feats. Once it takes cleric, it obviously takes extra turning/divine metamagic/as many metamagic feats it can, but until then, it has 17 hit dice of ooze-turned-outsider, and all I can think of is ability focus(spell effect).

[Asheram]

I would make a living gate that exists in two planes at once. It has the appearance of boiling clouds, but there are constantly small openings in the ooze that let you see into the other plane. When you get engoulfed by the living gate and manage to free yourself from it, you end up randomly in one of the two planes it connects.
When damaged on either plane, it takes damage just the same as usual, and when it dies, the connection is gone and everyone is trapped on his side of the gate.

Wouldn't it be more that gate stretches out, traveling between worlds like an interdimensional slinky? It'd get more interesting if it had no "home" plane but could shift as it pleased

[Angry Bob]

What bugs me is that Living Spell can even be applied to rays, since most of them are Effect: spells that don't specify a target. So you could make a Living Enervation.

This means that if you can make living spells out of metamagic'd spells, this makes ocular spell even more awesome than it already is?

[Yora]

I think the living spells came into existance when they were cast inside a magical anomaly. The casting of the spell went well, but once it left the casters direct control, it did not do what it was supposed to do.