Tainted Sorcerers and the Undead

[MeiLeTeng]

I've seen it mentioned a few times that playing an Undead character means you can ignore the drawbacks to taint and thus making Tainted Sorcerer an incredibly powerful PrC, which makes sense, you can't penalize Constitution if the character doesn't have a constitution. How are people getting around the penalty to Wisdom, however?

[Juntao112]

Sanity is for the weak. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xCdNPltksc)

[Kaje]

Undead make terrible tainted sorcerers because they can't use tainted metamagic.

[MeiLeTeng]

Sanity is for the weak. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xCdNPltksc)

I mean eventually you're going to be at 0 Wisdom. Which defeats the purpose of being able to pump your taint score.

[JaronK]

I'd never go Undead as a Tainted Sorcerer. Instead, I pump Wisdom (so I can absorb the penalty) and go nuts.

My favorite class for it is Archivist... plenty of spell types available, and I can regulate my taint score with spells. Plus it thematically works well, and when combined with the divine adaptation of Anima Mage I can have Anima Mage 10/Tenebrous Apostate 5 in the build.

JaronK

[Karnith]

The usual abuse with Undead and Taint rules is to use the Heroes of Horror Taint rules, which are significantly different from the earlier Taint rules in Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures.

Using HoH Taint, there is a (heavily-debated) rule that allows Undead to ignore the negative effects of Taint, which could allow a particular Undead creature to amass an arbitrarily high Taint score. In combination with Tainted Scholar (the HoH version of Tainted Sorcerer), you could then use said arbitrarily high Taint score as your casting stat.

In comparison, Tainted Sorcerer and Maho-Tsukai only ("only") give you extremely high casting stats, free metamagic, and the ability to ignore spells' material components. You can't easily reach arbitrarily high levels of Taint, and the classes are generally better on living creatures.

[The Viscount]

The best counter I've seen to the HoH taint rules and undead is to simply say that undead are capped at the number HoH says they automatically receive.