Optimization Anti-caster strike team! (But Mundanes only!) [Archive]

arkangel111

2016-02-10, 03:20 PM

Alright guys. I am doing some world building for a home campaign and am trying to stay true to the them for these "bad guys".

I need a "mundane" build that can take on non-mundanes (read mostly wizards and sorcerers). The problem is I have some serious requirements I am trying to work with. Basically these guys are the Nazi's of DND so ANY magic at all is not allowed.

Sources allowed: 3.P, using PF feat and skills. I use d20pfsrd.com for most of my PF material, if its there its legal. As for 3.5 I am allowing anything I can get my hands on so if its on the internet as a "printed" material its OK, unfortunately it does leave a lot of the Dragon mags off the table, but my understanding is a lot of those are barely balanced if that.

0. NO MAGIC, NO PSIONICS, NO DIVINE!
1. Must be a human or some very close human species. No half-orcs or such cause not human is bad.
2. PoW, or ToB stuff is ok but ONLY if it is mundane! so, this means most solar wind (fire) and Veiled moon (teleportation) isn't going to work, but things that make you hit harder may work as long as it is not supernatural in nature.
3. For fluff reason's this organization has a monopoly on any sort of mundane material that might help in the fight against caster's. so we can ignore special material cost. However their disdain for magic is such that magical items are not allowed. So the only enchantments allowed are gonna be solid +'s which I can easily refluff as superior crafting. and standard WBL is what I am hoping for outside of that. we can also ignore the price hike for enchantments that things like cold iron have since everything is actually a mundane improvement.
4. I am hoping to get as much out of each individual as possible but with wizard's being so powerful I know its going to require small strike teams so anywhere from 3-5 individuals is ok.
5. Assume full transparency between arcane/divine/psionics - so an AMF works against all forms of magic.
6. Su/Sp abilities will be on a case by case basis, obviously an Su ability that turns you invisible is magic, but an Sp haste might easily be described as an adrenaline rush.

I know wizards win but lets do our best, looking for ideas for character's at levels 5-10-15

Basically this is an elite organization that professionally hunt down caster's of all sorts. I am hoping to have a single strike team effectively be a game ending encounter for a single player, but there will likely be 4 PC's So I am hoping to have the strike team give them a difficult encounter.

I am hoping for some discussion and such so that we can pool ideas together and maybe finally find the perfect anti-caster build. So if you have any info that might contribute feel free to give your ideas.

JNAProductions

2016-02-10, 03:25 PM

I'm not sure this is possible. Casters just have too many toys compared to mundanes. But I will be following this thread with interest.

Hal0Badger

2016-02-10, 03:40 PM

If it is possible, your strike team should be higher level than the casters they hunt. Even then, they may not be successful after a level, probably where casters get their 4th level spells.

Try these:
Ranger classes with Favored enemy: arcanist. Favored enemy feats (like favored enemy power attack). Maybe a swift-hunter build.
Save boosting feats or ACF, I believe fighter has an ACF where he can reduce his BAB and increase his will save as an immediate action. Mad Foam rager comes to mind as well.
Monks: High speed, all good saves, spell resistance after a point.

I still think it would not be possible without accessing to some spells, but at low levels, your strike team should be able to get some arcane casters, especially if they are lower level than them.

arkangel111

2016-02-10, 03:43 PM

I know its rough. I am hoping for some crazy combinations of materials for weapons and armor that I just don't know of. I figure there should be some odd combo's between 3.0, 3.5, and PF. Maybe some awesome combo of classes that work together to make an anti caster team unstoppable.

I am thinking you're gonna have to go first so initiative boosters will be nice. Since its a strike team I think some teamwork feats will work well too.

I also have lurked on this board forever so I know a caster CAN do anything but fact is not every caster is going to have the same build, so while some caster builds may slip away not everyone will.

JNAProductions

2016-02-10, 03:45 PM

Okay, so how Optimized are the casters there guys are facing? Are they Pun-Pun or Khepri? Are they Mailmen? Or are they blaster-casters, who didn't even bother with Fly?

Extra Anchovies

2016-02-10, 03:56 PM

First off, you need to blanket-ban the Celerity chain - those spells can't exist for noncasters to get in on the rocket tag. I'd also recommend banning Abrupt Jaunt, Nerveskitter, and Wings of Cover, but those can be worked around.

To beat a caster, you need to get close to them, stay close to them, get past their already-active spells, and prevent them from casting more spells. If they cast even one spell, it's over - because that spell is Teleport, and they're halfway across the continent.

I'm currently away from my books or I'd have more specific advice, but initiators will be your friends here.

Gallowglass

2016-02-10, 04:09 PM

I don't think you are going to get much useful play in this thread with your limitation list. Its too limiting to do without home-brew.

In real life, Nazis were known to have interest in the occult, with an entire governmental division aimed at finding exploitable occult objects. So if these bad guys are like Nazis, why keep them from using magic items?

Without magic items, you are stuck with home-brew.

To combat a low level caster is easy: get initiative and have a way to start an encounter within charge range. Why not missile weapons? because protection from normal missiles is a low level spell and you have eliminated magical missiles from inclusion.

To combat a mid level caster is impossible with this limitation. Now they have teleports, contingencies, protections, ability to have DR that you can't overcome. And their damage output is generally better at damaging groups than individuals, which you are.

So you need to say "what are the strategies of the arcanes in this world and what would/could mundanely overcome them."

Start with teleport. In a world where arcanes are constantly on the run from these mundanes, dimension door, abrupt jaunt and other teleport effects are going to be commonplace. And without access to magic, how can you lock this down? Through homebrew (an exotic material that they make javelins and bullets out of that, when embedded in the caster, disrupt teleport magic) or through DM fiat (If you hit with a javelin and do a pin maneuver and the javelin is attached to a chain which is attached to a heavy weight, the weight the caster is now fastened to outweighs their maximum teleport weight, so they can't teleport. Or if you grapple the caster, it keeps them from teleporting. - many people are going to snort on about how neither of these work by rule... which is why I said DM fiat)

What else? Poison might help you. it tends to hit fort as a save (week point in arcane casters), but most poisons only do minimal attribute damage. So you are back to homebrew (concentrated drow poison to knock them out with a higher DC than normal) And, of course, protection from normal missiles is a low level prevent because you won't let the mundanes have magical missiles.

Despite theory-crafting about how a wizard is always going to win in a fight with a fighter, the reality is usually different. It all depends on who gets initiative and what the arena looks like, right? Most of my 8th-12th level mundane fighter types have the damage output to drop a wizard in one round IF they win initiative. But the wizard usually has a better initiative roll (more likely to invest in initiative feats, access to familiars with + to initiative) So your mundanes need to control the arena and make sure they get initiative.

They need to get intelligence about the arcanes through diplomancy and knowledge checks that is on par or in excess of what the wizards get through their scrys and arcane eyes.
They need to always get a surprise round when they find and confront an arcane.
They need a way to lock down teleport (even contingent and immediate action teleports) (without magic? doesn't exist in the books)
They need a mundane way to increase their will and fort saves
They need access to evasion and advanced evasion.
They need missile weapons that can pierce DR and protection spells.
They need melee weapons that can pierce DR and protection spells.

I guess I would start with using animal handling experts (spell-less rangers?) and monster hunters to entrap and ensnare and train various aberrations. Many aberrations have access to spell like abilities that will help. They can slip in and out of the ethereal plane, get access to dimensional anchor and the like. So i would pick out a few and make them trained pets of the mundanes. The Dogs of the military.

I would argue that Alchemy is NOT arcane magic and equip heavily with alchemists. Extracts can provide a lot of the things you need including initiative boosters and better saves. Alchemical items like tanglefoot bags and smoke bombs can shift BFC to your camp instead of the arcane's camp.

I would definitely build some lockdown builds. CMD is another weak point of most casters, so anything using a combat maneuver is preferable to an attack. Enough of your team beat initiative and with some specialized equipment, you can get the caster grappled, pinned, cuffed and gagged before they get an action.

Even with all of this, if it was my world, I'd be homebrewing some exotic materials to help cancel out typical escape hatches. This organization has endless resources? Then let them use it.

Also your mundanes are going to have to find a way to reach out and use diplomancy to befriend powerful planar entities so that you have your own planar help that's better than the planar help that the wizards are going to be gating in.

And, lastly, the first wizard that gets to 17th level is going to destroy your entire mundane organization in a single well prepared day, so there must not be any on this world. You can rule that this is because the mundanes have managed to keep anyone from getting so powerful, but as soon as one of the PCs gets there, this is all over.

Hamste

2016-02-10, 04:10 PM

Forsakers from 3.0 might help a bit if they get spell resistance from somewhere else. Note 3.0 source that have not been update are still ok for 3.5 and they fit quite nicely seeing their biggest drawback is they can't use or accept magic items or help. The damage reduction becomes just /magic however but against magic users not like it matters.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-10, 04:11 PM

It may be (barely) possible at level 5, but anything beyond that requires your casters to have a whole box full of idiot balls. Contingency alone makes any caster that has it incapable of losing to a group like that.
A mundane character without magic items is cannon fodder for any halfway competent caster.

Let's leave aside the fact that your "elite group" is screwed the first time a wizard casts Fly + Wind Wall or Lesser Ironguard or that they have no way to actually determine if someone is a caster unless they cast right in front of them.

They also have no defense against scrying, their saves suck so they're easy prey for illusions and enchantments and they have no healing and no way at all to deal with ability drain, magical diseases, curses or all the other stuff that's usually taken care of by your friendly neighborhood cleric.
And that's only to start with.
They don't have any enhancement bonus to strength or constitution. They don't have flight. They have no access to True Seeing. They have neither tactical nor strategical teleportation. They have no Freedom of Movement, Mind Blank, Death Ward or Protection from Evil. They have no Dispel Magic or Dimensional Anchor. They're lacking access to most initiative boosters, miss chances, save rerolls and special senses like Blindsight or even Darkvision. Their skills are going to be worse.

You may be able to get around one or two of these with class abilities, but you're never going to cover even the bare necessities without magic items or access to spells.
The problem is simply that D&D expects characters to be equipped with items appropriate to their level to get level-appropriate defenses, and those items are going to be magical. And even then mundanes tend to be easy prey for a well-built caster. Take the items away and you're just increasing the disparity.

Any mid-level caster could just sit in a comfortable room on his private demiplane while using Scouting Summons (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/metamagic-feats/scouting-summons-metamagic) and one of the longer duration summon spells or Astral Projection to fight your hunters together with scry & die tactics without ever putting himself in the slightest amount of danger, or giving away that he knows magic at all.

arkangel111

2016-02-10, 04:23 PM

I am assuming the caster's range in their optimization levels. Obviously a fully optimized (that is optimizing to not get caught by these guys) wizard will likely never be where they are through scrying and seeing the future and such. But I am looking at building an entire world where caster's are already outnumbered by mundanes (commoners) and any wizardry at all is likely to get you turned in with a reward for them.

These guys however are trained to take down mages. I am thinking a good tactic is to either go first (best case) and kill or incapacitate in the surprise round. Now abrupt Jaunting makes even this hard. I am hoping to find some sort of ranged AoO where you can maybe move up your surprise round and stop casting by readying an action to hit them when they start casting, then get your AoO for them casting essentially doubling your damage if you ready an action.

Is there anyway to force a caster to target a shield? like a ray blocking mundane shield?

Here is some thoughts I am having while Trolling for builds and such.

if the typical 3 man strike team can take out a single caster then a group of 5-6 should be able to give a 4 man PC group trouble.
in a 3 person team
I am thinking that Quickdraw is going to be necessary no matter the build. so that everyone has something to do on their turn if they can't close with them.

1. A dedicated archer-type character that can somehow threaten (for AoO's) at range. His main job is to ready an action if the target starts casting. Hoping for an interupt of the spell, and ideally also getting the AoO to get double damage. being ranged also makes the abrupt jaunters less useful. Bonus points if we can make this guy somehow do ranged pins or such to further mess with the casting of spells.

2. The next Guy I am thinking of having him have some sort of shield that is highly resistant to magic and maybe even force's the caster to target him, or even better the shield. Bonus points if he can fire a crossbow on his way up to the target. This guy should also have some way of keeping the caster in melee. perhaps step-up or such.

3. Again the crossbow tactic would be nice. But this guy is the follow up to the shield dude and should focus on restraining the caster or somehow enhancing the amount of damage that can be dealt. maybe even just a mobile flanker with a strong single hit. should also have step-up or the like to make sure they can keep the caster in melee.

Odin's Eyepatch

2016-02-10, 04:29 PM

Though I can't suggest any particular build, I can mention 3 feats that will be absolutely essential to this strike team: Mage slayer et al (it's 3.5, and in complete Arcane)

Mage slayer means casters can't cast defensively, meaning that they always provoke attacks of opportunity when casting spells. If your melee characters do enough damage consistently, this would mean that it will be practically impossible for casters to cast any standard action spell.

This leads on to Pierce Magical Concealment and Pierce Magical protection, which allow the character to ignore the AC granted by spells, and all form of magical concealment. You can even automatically dispel all the spells granting AC automatically. It won't get rid of all the protective spells (such as DR granting spells), but definitely some of them.

The problem with these feats is that both Mage Slayer and Pierce Magical Protection only work in melee, so you need to find a way to deal with flying characters, and teleport. Pierce Magical Concealment, however, works with ranged, so a Ranger Favored Enemy Arcanist is going to love that feat.

There is also a prestige class, called the Occult Slayer, that also grants bonuses against casters. Can't remember what it does, though.

As for team composition, I would suggest at least 1 ranged focused character, 1 melee focused (better as a lockdown build), and one mobile character (which would mean Monk, or scout) to try and keep up and annoy the casters as much as possible. Give them high initiative bonuses, and get the ranged character to ready an action to disrupt spellcasting. The main idea is that you have to plan out their tactics to prepare for as many eventualities as possible. That's going to be impossible, but it's your best bet.

Quertus

2016-02-10, 04:36 PM

4 5th-level rogues, 16 dex, max sneak, weapon finesse, improved init, masterwork weapons.

Hide / MS +11, Attack +7 (+9 with flanking), damage 4d6. Probably getting a surprise round, probably landing 12d6 (average 42 damage) in the surprise round. With init +7, probably at least 2 will win init in the first round, for another 28 damage or so. Not many 5th level wizards will survive 70 damage.

A good 5th level cleric tank could easily have an AC of 26 or more, and perhaps as many as... 60 or 70 hp, if he rolled really well.

One-shotting such a cleric in a fair fight would be difficult. Sneaking up on him when he is asleep / in the bath / otherwise out of his armor would be essential.

Reskin elven cloak and boots as mundane camouflage to make your assassins more likely to be able to take 10 and still get the drop on spellcasters. Feats like craven, or feats to improve flanking bonuses, would also help. The fighter variant with sneak attack instead of bonus feats would likely work better than rogue levels. Poisons could go a long way towards making these fights easy.

At mid levels, ingested poisons, or inhaled poisons delivered into a crowd, or otherwise attacking while retaining anonymity, would be about the only way to survive long enough to actually have high level mage hunters.

arkangel111

2016-02-10, 04:41 PM

Gallow I am liking some of your idea's. Is there any precedent for the chained spear thing? I'd like to avoid homebrewing too much mostly because its too easy to just go "because I said so" I'd like to stick to the rules as much as possible.

I am also liking some of the ideas about having some caster seeking "pets" as long as they are animal intelligence or close maybe (1-4) int creatures it would be good. This makes me wonder if there is any low int creatures that perhaps emit an anti-magic field? Also any creature's that perhaps eat magic? or naturally hunt magic?

@sleepyphoenixx I know its going to be hard but I doubt its impossible. Because it's hard I brought it to these forums. Already I am liking some of the ideas given. It's a Homebrew world so I know I can make some changes to make things work but ideas are what I am really seeking.

daremetoidareyo

2016-02-10, 04:54 PM

Alright, Let's attack caster's right in the spell components.

Somatic Components
Guy #1 and #2

Gnome battle cloak + shield sling + ranged pin + quick draw

A variant rule for fighters is that they can replace tower shield proficiency with any exotic shield proficiency. Choose gnome battle cloak.

Basically, throw a blanket over the casters, pinning them down, they have to blow a standard action to be unpinned. This cuts off any spell with a somatic element in pathfinder. If you cover up their head, their line of sight is blocked and they can't target you. Now throw as much splash weaponry as you can afford.

The wording of ranged pin is that you make a grapple check with a ranged attack. It isn't technically a grapple pin. But a second grappling ranged attack can be used to put them into a pin. If that is the case, Consider taking choke hold from oriental adventures, which can knock them out. Then coup de grace their helpless waste of a body. Otherwise, just spam them with ranged pins so they can't escape them all. They would have to rely on verbal component only spells.

Consider spellcasting harrier from the draconomicon and a weapon with extreme reach which you can quick draw to proc AOO when they try to cast a spell.

You need six feats by level 5 to get this going. Human Fighter 5 should do it.

Verbal Components
Guy 3 and 4
unarmed strike, throat punch, stunning fist, ring the golden bell (dragon compendium)

Basically a ranged silence. Ring the golden bell allows you to throw your punch from a distance. Fluff that however the heck you want. Throat punch (complete scoundrel) gives them 50% spell failure for any verbal spell for the next 3 rounds. You might even stun them if you use your stunning fist for the day.

You want monk 1/halfling thief 3/x

Material Components
Guys 5 and 6
Master pickpocket (city of stormreach) + high dex and sleight of hand score + masterwork item of sleight of handing + skill focus + maybe marshal aura motivate dexterity?
Steal spell component pouches as a free action. Doesn't matter if they spot you, cuz your allies are about to ranged throat punch them and grapple them with a blanket. You actually only need to hit DC 20 to steal an object off of them (3.5, I'm not sure about pathfinder) the opposed roll is agains the wizards spot, (they don't get that do they?) to see if they notice that you took it. DC 30 to do it as a free action. Which you should be able to hit more than 50% of the time at level 5. Especially if you have a way to take ten on the roll. You get a +17, or +21 if a marshal is around...

If you max out disguise, you should be able to walk by, rob them of most of the contents of their spell pouch as a free actions, then let guys 1-4 do the rest.

Rogue 3/marshal 1/rogue 2 should get you most of the way there.

Add poison to any of these, cuz spellcasters have crap fort saves.

Janthkin

2016-02-10, 04:58 PM

Ummm...put some shapeshifted Dragons or Demons into your strike teams? Maybe the whole org is rotten with hidden magical infiltrators, looking to twist the group to their own ends, and (since they don't use magic) the rank & file don't even know it?

Hail Hydra!

*ahem*

Have you considered refluffing Vow of Poverty? We all know it's suboptimal in a lot of ways, but it gives a lot of mechanic advantages that partially offset the lack of gear. Maybe not for every member of a strike team, but the unarmed swordsage brawler might find it useful.

Are you sure your organization isn't secretly a group of psionic types? That's totally different. ;)

daremetoidareyo

2016-02-10, 05:08 PM

Gnome artificers can craft items that cast spells as EX abilities. Consider making one of these items as an area dispel magic.

ATHATH

2016-02-10, 05:32 PM

Golems would probably be useful- fluff them as non-magical robots or something.

The Witchborn Binder and Defiant Prc's are normally regarded as terrible, but for this, they might be decent. Fluff the WB's anti-magic orb as an anti-magic grenade, and say that the Divine SR of Defiants comes from rigorous mental training (they let their guard down in anti-magic fields).

If your PC's fly, Raptorans could still be able to pursue them.

Alchemical Sprayers loaded with Aboleth Mucus are a way to get a solid hit off (Prestidigitation might be able to get it off, though). Optimized Sand Blasters (there was a thread about them here a while ago) could stunlock the PC's to death.

nedz

2016-02-10, 06:43 PM

You say that your Anti-casters don't like magic - well they should have some magic: specifically some item, or ability, which emanates an anti-magic field. This will, likely, have to be a custom item or ability.

The only difficulty they have now is finding the casters - and catching them.

This should help with the scrying also, though sadly not against conjurations. For the latter they need a very good touch AC.

Cerefel

2016-02-10, 07:01 PM

A PrC that's excellent for this would be the Witch Slayer from ToM that gets Slippery Mind, Mettle, and an ability called Momentary Disjunction which can shut down spells, SLAs, and SU abilities from 30 feet as a swift action. There are still some problems like getting that close in the first place, but it's a start.

Zetapup

2016-02-10, 09:23 PM

The Nemesis feat from Book of Exalted Deeds would be extremely useful for detecting casters. Automatically sensing the presence of arcanists (your favored enemy) within 60 feet should come in handy. You're prolly going to want to remove the exalted tag from that though.

Bloodstorm Blade (ToB) would come in handy to make your throwing attacks count as melee for the mage slayer line of feats. Throw that on an acid flask rogue with craven and you're doing some solid damage and should be hitting easily since you're targeting the square they're in, not the caster themselves.

You might be able to prevent teleporting by hitting them with harpoons with heavy weights that exceed the caster's maximum weight load. It's a bit fuzzy by RAW, but it might work.

For contingency/celerity/etc, you're either going to have to ban them or give your anti-casters great tactics/ways to get extra actions.

Against flight, the organization might be completely okay with utilizing grafts. There's a pretty cheap one (around 11,000gp, I think) that gives decent flight at the cost of slowly becoming evil. Another alternative would be to maximize the range of the archers they have, but then your melee units are next to useless.

Stealth should come in handy against any casters that aren't optimized for detection. If the anti-casters' hide checks are high enough, they can use the sniping rules from the player's handbook to avoid reprisal, although they'd need a way to lockdown the caster. Ranged pin maybe?

You may want to consider giving templates to the anti-casters to help level out the playing field. Fluff them however you want.

Finally, I'd recommend taking some stuff from the Indigo Springs series. In it, the anti-casters grind up magic items and turn them into alchemical potions which make them stronger/tougher/faster/etc. You could probably just use the alchemist class with the right refluffing.

Seward

2016-02-10, 09:47 PM

Basically you want high damage per round and the ability to defeat things like flight or battlefield control.

A well designed archer can do a lot of that - win init and kill somebody before they can act. If they get to act first, primary casters can shut an archer down, which leads to the next thing....

A monk can use his abundant step ability to drop another melee next to somebody, and kill them.

If you have several monks, they can even dim door out after ganking somebody, possibly even taking the body with them (it's actually better NOT to kill somebody at higher levels, because of things like True Rez)

At high enough levels things like Moment of Prescience can screw up most ambushes, so you have to do it in two steps - send in a team you expect to die, just to soak up the alpha-strikes (including time stop, etc). Wait 20 minutes for all the buffs to drop, then send in the real team. If it is a sorcerer with moment of prescience well, you have to send in the second team right away, and just cope with all the buffs that will be up.

I'd probably design a team around a spotter with very high stealth and hopefully archery abilities, likely a Ranger, and a "abundant step in and gank them" team, which will use its precious 1/day ability only if the archer (or archers) fail. If you can't make magical bows, then your shooter needs to be an Arcane Archer, assuming a single level of wizard is kosher. Or you just need to do enough damage to blow through the 100 extra hitpoints prot arrows gives. An arcane archer can also lead with an imbued dimensional anchor if you can manage a scroll and spell storing item, but that might be outside the spirit of this discussion. The reason for archery is that a very large number of caster abilities are short or medium range, or require targeting the enemy. An archer 300' away will be nearly impossible to pinpoint even when full attacking if there is any concealment, and will simply outrange a lot of dangerous counterattacks. Several archers in a ring around the victim is even better, because it is a lot harder to get under cover or take them all out with an area spell. If the archers don't think they can drop the person in one salvo, they instead ready to interrupt spells while the dim-door-in team starts its ginsu operations. Just remember the archers never get a second chance - something as simple as a quickened obscuring mist will 100% shut them down.

A third team on very fast flying mounts might give you an extra option, although I caution that such mounts are extremely fragile. Make them a ranger bonded companion to at least give evasion and some hitpoints.

Finally don't discount a team of people with just very good social skills and a whole lot of sneak attack. Killing somebody in their bathtub or while they're indulging in what they think is going to be a sexual encounter is easier than a lot of other circumstances. I had a group of PC's with two assassins once who were so good at ambushing spellcasters at weak moments that the party spellcasters had sayings like "always pay your goblin (assassins)" and got uncomfortable as they started to make a game of it. Their most creative kill was sticking a poison needle trap in the bad guy's super-elaborate cushy chair when he wasn't even in the area. Nobody ever discovered they had crept through his office and the trap killed him about a week later. (this doesn't work on the folks with 3.5 Hero Feast up 24x7, or people with raise dead etc on tap. Past level 9 you really need to get control of the body, past level 17 you need to capture them alive and imprison them in a place that is somehow immune to scrying or otherwise prevent their soul from returning with a true rez)

Ideally you go after the casters when they're sleeping, at their lowest ebb for spells and buffs running. The jerks with Contingency-teleport are always going to be a problem.

No matter what you do, the most important thing a mundane team needs to gank a caster is intelligence about the caster. What abilities does the caster favor? Where does he hang out? Where is his likely Word of Recall or Contingency Teleport location (station another team there). Expect to have casualties among your gank teams any time they fail to get the drop on the caster and kill them before they can act.

Bad Wolf

2016-02-10, 10:55 PM

Might I suggest using divine caster, and being anti-arcane instead of anti-magic? The Magic Domain gives you some useful goodies against maguc, and the Inquisition Domain power gives you a +4 bonus on dispel checks.

Something like this:

(Cloistered) Cleric 3 (Magic domain+domain of choice)/Church Inquistor 10/levels of choice (cleric or PrC). Get three (or four) domains, bunch of bonuses against magical effects.

arkangel111

2016-02-10, 11:34 PM

Bad Wolf

2016-02-11, 12:08 AM

Crake

2016-02-11, 12:59 AM

The ONLY possible way this could work is if the geoup culled off all casters before they reached a significant level. If any casters of 11th level plus exist nearby in your game world then its pretty likely that this organisation would have been disbanded at the very least, or completely massacred at the very worst. That's the point where casters get contingency which, against pure mundanes, makes them practically invincible. Just a simple contingent teleport->revivify->heal means that even if the caster is stabbed through the heart, hes back at full HP in his fortress by the end of the round, and there's nothing the mundanes can do about it

arkangel111

2016-02-11, 01:44 AM

I am getting a lot of negative responses, but thats expected. I know caster's are uber powerful. While looking for a way to lockdown caster's and prevent teleportation I came across the following:

Benefit(s) When a barbed arrow is attached to a length of silk rope and fired from a bow, the arrow's range increment is reduced to 30 feet, but it gains the grapple special weapon quality.

Grapple: On a successful critical hit with a weapon of this type, you can grapple the target of the attack. The wielder can then attempt a combat maneuver check to grapple his opponent as a free action. This grapple attempt does not provoke an attack of opportunity from the creature you are attempting to grapple if that creature is not threatening you. While you grapple the target with a grappling weapon, you can only move or damage the creature on your turn. You are still considered grappled, though you do not have to be adjacent to the creature to continue the grapple. If you move far enough away to be out of the weapon’s reach, you end the grapple with that action.

Now the special weapon quality unfortunately requires that it be a crit and not just a normal attack So I am wondering if anyone knows some ways to get the crit range on a bow through the roof. the reason I ask this is because combining the following.

Mage slayer
Benefit
You gain a +1 bonus on Will saving throws. Spellcasters you threaten may not cast defensively (they automatically fail their Concentration checks to do so), but they are aware that they cannot cast defensively while being threatened by a character with this feat.

And...

From DSP PoW Golden Lion discipline
By having a watchful eye on the flow of combat, the disciple knows when to spur an ally into a better position. As a swift action, the initiator may grant a move action to an adjacent ally. This ally may then use this move action immediately to move up to his base speed, as if it were a free action taken on the initiator's turn.

which means they are grappled, and the hunter's pet or other teammate is already in melee range and has not even taken its first action so can easily full attack and disrupt the spell.

Now of course this assumes the hunter goes first. trait for +2 initiative, feat for +4, Dex +5. If we can slip in the hooded champion ACF he can get another +2 for +13 total and as an added bonus is targeting touch AC with a panache point.

Poison is definitely something this group would use against caster's which can further hinder the reaction of said caster. Since technically the archer is now attached to the caster we can further hinder movement or at least force him to pull the grappled archer along.

I am having some difficulty finding a creature that can be used for a special pet that either emanates an AMF or has a similar ability to mental static aura (special ability of some psychic monsters in PF)

Is their any materials that have an AMF or cause difficulty casting around it? adding barding of such material would be an easy way to disrupt caster's as well.

Something I guess I never stated but probably should have is that there is FULL transparency between Arcane/divine/Psionics. So anti-psionic material or even anti-divine if there is such would work. I'll edit this in as well.

Malroth

2016-02-11, 01:53 AM

Lv 5, You're dealing with the likes of Fly, Invisibility, Wind Wall, Minor Image, Charm person, Glitterdust. You're basicly pitting Pre Nepoleon era ground troups vs a modern Mixed special forces special ops squad, It will be a slaughter, Yes your weapons are capable of killing them but they're dictating all the engagement paramaters most of the time and casters will win well over half of all engagements.

Lv 10 Teleport, Magic Jar, Dominate person, Greater invisibility, Polymorph, Divination, Heart of X, Planar binding. Times are very rough, weapons aren't working very well at all, Your troops spend more time as enemy thralls than they do loyal to your orginization and the enemies have near infinite reinforcements, Victories are rare and hard fought and sometimes temporary.

Lv 15 Greater Planar Binding, Create Greater Undead, Mass Suggestion, Trap the soul, Contigency, Contact other plane, Forcecage. The only reason you still exist is because your whole orginization serves one of the caster lords as their secret method of thinning out unworthy apprentices, you havent killed a real threat in years an only because that disjunction hit him from off screen.

The Glyphstone

2016-02-11, 01:59 AM

You've gotten the best answers you are going to really. This isn't some sort of collective willful blindness to the weaknesses of casters, it's a intelligent analysis that you have set so many handicaps on your mage-slayers that they are basically helpless against any mid-level caster with even the most basic magical defenses.

This is practical, but difficult at level 5, with the suggestions given. It is technically possible against a very stupid caster caught by surprise at level 10. It is flat-out impossible, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, at level 15.

At level 5 and under, squads of archers - probably Rogues for Sneak Attack - with the best Initiative scores you can get. Salvo arrows into them during the surprise round, have other archers with Readied actions to fire arrows if they cast and interrupt. Sneaking someone in to grapple can also work.

Freedom of Movement, alone, shuts down any hope of grappling or restraining a caster, so past level 7, they can just Fly away and soak a few arrows in the butt as they run. Past level 9, you must one-shot them before they get an action, or else they can move+Teleport to safety. At level 11, you can't even do that thanks to Contingency. Your organization must exterminate all casters before they reach level 7+, as someone suggested earlier. Any casters who make it past that point are invincible to anything the organization can do to harm them, and they can do nothing to defend themselves if a caster of that level range decides to go on the offensive against their membership or stronghold. And you can guarantee any casters who do survive your kill squads will have those spells, because the ones who do not were dumb and died before they could reach the break point levels - it's lethal social Darwinism at work, weeding out the spellcasters who choose poorly in spells known.

If you really want this to be practical, run your game in an E6 universe. No Freedom of Movement, no Teleport, no Contingency. None of the high-level tricks that make mundanes and mundane equipment superfluous. And as a bonus, it keeps your mundane PCs within contribution range of the PC casters too, so everybody wins. Seriously. Do this, and incorporate all the various suggestions people have made, and you're golden.

Crake

2016-02-11, 02:03 AM

I am having some difficulty finding a creature that can be used for a special pet that either emanates an AMF or has a similar ability to mental static aura (special ability of some psychic monsters in PF)

Since you seem to be focused around pathfinder, i'm not sure how you feel about 3.5 material, but the balhannoth from I think either MM4 or 5 has a 20ft dimensional lock aura and anything it grapples is treated as being inside an antimagic field. The creature itself is blind, but it can see all magic out to 120ft. They feed off magical items, so they seem like they'd be great pets to use to hunt magical users. They're particularly good at hiding with the camoflage ability and once a caster is in their grasp, they are basically dead at that point.

The only problem is that all of it's abilities are magical in nature, so that disqualifies it from ever being used.

I feel like you're gonna have to let up on the strict 100% no magic rule, or give up and accept that your organization either can't exist, or is a joke/pawn of high level magic users.

Edit: Or yeah, run e6, that also works. I actually ran an e6 game where magic was almost universally illegal, as it was the only way I could see it working. If casters get high enough level they just stop caring about governments or armies or anything so simple minded.

gorfnab

2016-02-11, 02:32 AM

Here is a Mage Slayer build I came up with a while ago that could be of some use.

1. Ranger - B: Track, Weapon Focus: Guisarme, Arcane Hunter ACF
2. Barbarian - Spirit Totem: Lion ACF, Whirling Frenzy ACF, {Optional: City Brawler ACF (Drg#349)}
3. Barbarian - Nemisis: Arcanists, Wolf Totem ACF
4. Warblade
5. Warblade
6. Warblade - Mage Slayer
7. Warblade
8. Warblade - B: Improved Initiative
9. Crusader - Blindfight
10. Crusader
11. Occult Slayer
12. Occult Slayer - Combat Reflexes
13. Occult Slayer
14. Occult Slayer
15. Occult Slayer - Pierce Magical Concealment
16. Witch Slayer
17. Witch Slayer
18. Witch Slayer - Stand Still
19. Witch Slayer
20. Witch Slayer

Note: The levels of Occult Slayer and Witch Slayer can be switched around as needed.

Warblade nets you the maneuvers Iron Heart Surge, Moment of Perfect Mind, and Action Before Thought. You also get Uncanny Dodge

Crusader nets you the Thicket of Blade Stance (combos nicely with Stand Still, Combat Reflexes, and a reach weapon; wear spiked gauntlets or armor spikes to threaten nearby squares) and some healing maneuvers. it also nets you Indomitable Soul.

Witch Slayer nets you Mettle and Slippery Mind.

If playing human take EWP: Spiked Chain and WF: Spiked Chain instead of Guisarme

Zetapup

2016-02-11, 03:12 AM

Now the special weapon quality unfortunately requires that it be a crit and not just a normal attack So I am wondering if anyone knows some ways to get the crit range on a bow through the roof. the reason I ask this is because combining the following.

Disciple of Dispater increases your crit range by a significant amount, but if I recall correctly, it only applies to melee weapons. You can solve that by letting it work on ranged weapons, or you could buy a bowstaff/bow-insertmeleeweapon. If you're going to crit fish, I'd recommend looking up some aptitude lightning maces builds and pick and choose from those.
Actually, never mind. I double checked disciple of dispater and it doesn't require melee. It combines with improved critical, so your crit range is quadrupled (from 20 to 17-20 or from 19-20 to 13-20, if I'm doing my math correctly). The disciple gives some spell like abilities too, but you can just ignore those and only use the crit range boost.

Another option is the barbarian acf that trades the DR for some charging bonuses, one of which is a +1 to crit range while charging at 7th level. Again, that might be melee only.

Yet another option is the mythic exemplar, which gives a +1 to crit range for a limited amount of time. It's a supernatural ability, but it should be fairly easy to refluff it mundanely.

The psychic weapons master does pretty much the same thing as disciple of dispater, but it requires manifesting, so that's a no go for your purposes.

Finally, there's improved critical. I'm fairly certain this stacks with everything mentioned above, but you might want to double check. Additionally, you may want to make your weapons out of kaorti for the x4 critical modifier (note that you can't combine that with disciple of dispater, as that requires your weapon to be iron/steel.)

Everything above is 3.0/3.5, since I have very little pathfinder system mastery.

Seward

2016-02-11, 03:13 AM

Ok - pure mundane party doesn't have to deal with contingency on non-arcane casters until they're up to Miracle (L17 cleric). So for warlocks, druids, sorcerers with other uses for spells known or whatever the basic concept of "kill them before they get an action" will still work, and thus this organization can get victories. Furthermore it isn't clear everyone is going to know both Contingency and Teleport if magic isn't really being shared, the arcane list isn't like Divine, you don't get every spell ever created just by leveling up.

Ambushes will either be with long range archery or short range social engineering+massive damage full attacks (with or without sneak attack) when, by definition of the ambush, no buffs except stuff kept up 24x7 are running (which leaves out most of the anti-archery stuff. Mage armor and false life, mantle of faith and contingency - not much else can realistically be sustained all day unless it's hour per level, done with permanency or using something like Persistent Spell, which may or may not exist in a world where magic is new).

The only way to deal with contingency->teleport is to have a second team wherever the teleport is going to land. Which means you have to have both kinds of ambush set up - a long range ambush to trigger the contingency and a social-engineered situation where the most trusted followers of the mage are the folks who kill him, rather than heal him up. (there are a few other options, like somehow infiltrating the stronghold to the recall point, after you somehow learn where it is, perhaps via another ambush earlier that triggered the contingency and spies in the stronghold. A mage who contingencies into a trapped area or an ambush is often a sad mage).

Given the situation where magic is new, an organization like this could get some victories even against the powerful, but probably only after a number of high casualty, failed attempts. A fairly good model for this is the Black Company series, where mostly mundane but mean and tricky mundanes could trap and kill run of the mill wizards pretty easily, but the Taken took a hell of a lot of work, and the deaths didn't always "take". In that world the supernatural was also super-tough. D&D is actually easier in that they rely on tricks rather than raw durability. Even a contingency won't save you if you go from full to dead in a single blow...your dead body will teleport into your stronghold, assuming it's still a valid target for the teleport spell. That kind of massive damage is hard to do but it does happen sometimes with crits from x3 and x4 melee weapons.

So pretty much if you want the campaign to be plausible, this org does need to be killing most of the casters before they get to the higher levels, especially arcane casters. (druids are reasonably mobile, but without contingency it's just a lot easier to screw things up). The casters, by contrast, are going to get into an arms race trying to figure out how to exist without ever dropping their defenses, because pretty much if they're ever caught without their buffs up, they're dead in some ambush or other. They're going to get very paranoid about their "help", using spells like divination, commune, charm, dominate, detect thoughts etc to try to find any potential spies or assassins. Successful strategies will probably leave them a lot like the Taken - weirdly durable at all times, and devoid of any friends with allies of convenience that come and go.

I think a campaign where the best strategies for doing magic are still being worked out would be a pretty interesting place. I also think that the hybrid classes (paladin, ranger, arcane archer, monks with SU abilities et-all) that do a little magic will be an interesting grey area. They'd be insanely useful for this organization, but if the org is pure, they're also all to be killed once they start manifesting magic abilities.

Pathfinder really doesn't have anything that expands crit ranges better than improved crit does. They're very careful not to let things stack.

Oh, and this organization needs to be 100% secret, decentralized with cell structures. Any target a high level spellcaster can identify, he can vaporize. This org is essentially a street level terrorist organization, where the high level casters are the equivalent of the US military, with drones, artillery, special forces teams etc etc. You can get victories, but your recruitment and training strategy has to take into account that casualties will happen and anybody captured will compromise anything they know. The one serious advantage for the org is sheer numbers. Unlike the US military they do not have near infinite resources to replace losses. If you kill a 15th level dude, you have killed a significant fraction of all the high level casters on the planet.

Ruethgar

2016-02-11, 03:26 AM

Well the Natzis had some great, though of course abhorrent, scientists and the Ravenloft Scientist PrC is officially licensed content for 3.5. They have access to all spells in the game as Ex abilities as long as they have a power source and addiquite level to have normally been able to cast it and have the resources to craft the items.

If that is a viable option, normal caster vs caster tactics should work, just know that CL boosting for the effects is practically impossible so dispell isn't going to be anywhere near as effective as a caster and wizards can get around Atimagic and Dead Magic if they want to.

Seward

2016-02-11, 03:35 AM

The Pathfinder alchemist class might work as well to expand the capabilities of the org. I don't know that things like Gunslingers really add much that archers don't already do, but there's that to look at as well, along with classes like Swashbuckler that get mechanical benefits from doing crazy things, but it isn't skinned as magic (and isn't as flexible/powerful as a spellcasting class).

Bombs are certainly within the ability of a mundane org (Gunpowder was invented in China and used for stuff well in the usual time ranges of a lot of fantasy). The infusion/mutagen stuff might be a bit much, but if you took things like invisibility off and stuck to the sort of things super-effective drugs might do (stat bumps, haste, durability) that could add some options. Alchemists are poison-users too, and can make all the alchemical crap+poisons that everybody else would want to use.

Does your organization require pure blood? Given orcs/elves etc are folks who had an accident with magic, you could possibly allow bloodragers (without spellcasting) allowing limited shapeshifting/growth or similar. Again, like Rangers etc this is an interesting grey area for the org. Do we kill people like that? Recruit them? Allow them to live if they never cast a spell? Let people only "dip" into Ranger up to level 3?

ben-zayb

2016-02-11, 03:57 AM

With that so many handicaps, you're best bets (unless the casters are played as though their mental stat is 1) are:

Use Diplomacy to let casters beat casters
Get Leadership to let casters beat casters

I mean, seriously, at some point, mundane weapons fully stop being effective against casters. Ranged weapon combat is pretty much hosed as early as level 1.

Seward

2016-02-11, 04:07 AM

I mean, seriously, at some point, mundane weapons fully stop being effective against casters. Ranged weapon combat is pretty much hosed as early as level 1.

Not when the archer shoots first.

Seriously, in actual play I've killed more spellcasters with my archer characters than all of my other characters combined.

You can outrange perception, you can outrange all but long range spells, you can do enough damage in a single volley to kill an equivalent CR enemy outright, spellcaster or no. (if you don't have a single sniper studly enough to do this, just add more lower level ones. With an arc of several hundred feet to surround the ambush point you can place a LOT of archers. There is a point where even if they only hit on 20s, enough low level archers can kill anybody unless it is absolutely immune to physical damage)

Spellcasting is only helpful if you actually get to cast spells, or if you are already buffed with something that shuts down archery BEFORE the archer shoots.

So yes, obscuring mist can shut down archery at level 1. Which helps not at all when you get gunned down before you can cast it.

Nobody disputes that if a caster gets to act, he wins or escapes, depending on the circumstances. This organization must operate on the principle that it sets up attacks that can kill the caster (or fully incapacitate) before the caster gets an action. Sometimes you can set up a situation that can tolerate some actions because you have enough action-economy to interrupt spellcasting in some way. (other tricks to allow extended combats with casters who are determined to flee require magic. Better to just do it all in one round).

For most casters, this is possible to set up. A close in ambush is harder to organize, but it can be done too, you just have to somehow set up a situation where your guys are in full attack range of the caster when the ambush begins. It's tough when you can't just teleport in a scry-and-fry team, but unless the caster wants to huddle in his strong-room alone all day, conjuring all of his needs from thin air (which is possible, but boring) at SOME point the person will do something social, or travel by some means other than teleport or do something which exposes him to something around the corner, or a trusted ally that is actually an assassin or whatever. Nobody is 100% perfect, and the org only has to get it right once, as long as it is willing and able to soak casualties and prevent captured people from unraveling it when they spill all they know.

Something else to consider. The caster's don't have much of a life if all they do is run away whenever they're attacked. They can't accomplish goals, they can't see new things etc. So the other way to kill a caster is to have them think they're in their normal mode, ie let them do their level-up stuff, clear a dungeon or whatever and hit them near the end of the process when they have a lot fewer resources and, in the case of prepared casters, many fewer options. Bait the trap with something they want, make it hard enough they have to work at it to get to the objective and have your ambush set there, when they're focused on the prize.

How many climactic battles for typical PC's revolve around interrupting a caster as they're doing something they want to do, be it a ritual, dominating the local government, stealing something, studying or trying to get to the artifact that will give them absolute arcane power etc.
If the PCs haven't advertised their presence, these casters don't have minute or round buffs up, and sometimes won't have 10-minute buffs up. This org is far more likely to be successful against unbuffed opposition. Learn about your enemy, and find the right time and place to attack.

Just to give a simple example of how mundane tactics can put a caster at risk - I had a party I was in attacked by a fully buffed, flying, invisible wizard vs our about level 7 party (level 10ish wizard). Nobody had any way of pinpointing such an enemy in the open, but we had just come out of a large manor-type building. The challenge was to keep the party alive while we went back into the building (this involved running through a wall of acid and sucking it up among other things). The wizard then had two choices. He could hang around outside and let his buffs wear off, he could leave or he could come in after us. Since he just blew about a third of his spells seriously injuring us as we retreated, he came in after us to try to finish us off. That got him into invisibility purge range and in reach of the party melees. Suddenly he was the guy who no longer wanted any part of this encounter, and he burned yet more resources escaping.

Now we had a time limit of 8 hours before he could be back fully loaded, so we had to finish our business and get the hell out of there. But this illustrates the kind of thing that the org could use. If his job was to kill people snooping around the manor, he fails if the manor gets searched thoroughly. The searchers don't need to kill him, just drive him off with enough spells burned that he isn't confident he can fight them. The key to it is knowing that the caster feels he needs to defend that place. Set it up so it looks like he is winning and you may be able to suck him into a vulnerable position, where ganking him before he gets to act again is possible. (yes you don't have invisibility purge, but flour bombs can accomplish much the same thing, as can immersing him in water)

Enguebert

2016-02-11, 05:49 AM

Fighting magic without magic is hard

it can be possible at low level and if number of magic user in the world is low.

Killing mages up to level 5 is not impossible. It will be hard for level 5-8 but as soon as they have spells like teleport, domination, it will be nearly impossible to kill paranoid magic users

To survive , your organisation need to have some ways to defend against mages

Some world specifications could help
- an antimagic zone where your organisation can build his headquarter. People in this zone will be protected against scrying, controlling and magical attacks
- in your world, some material could have special abilities that give protection vs magic (bonus to save, or some magic resistance)

Also, limiting the level of spellcaster can help. As magic is new, you can limit the max level and banish some spells

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-11, 05:56 AM

Not when the archer shoots first.

...

Spellcasting is only helpful if you actually get to cast spells, or if you are already buffed with something that shuts down archery BEFORE the archer shoots.

So yes, obscuring mist can shut down archery at level 1. Which helps not at all when you get gunned down before you can cast it.

...

Something else to consider. The caster's don't have much of a life if all they do is run away whenever they're attacked. They can't accomplish goals, they can't see new things etc. So the other way to kill a caster is to have them think they're in their normal mode, ie let them do their level-up stuff, clear a dungeon or whatever and hit them near the end of the process when they have a lot fewer resources and, in the case of prepared casters, many fewer options. Bait the trap with something they want, make it hard enough they have to work at it to get to the objective and have your ambush set there, when they're focused on the prize.

...

This all assumes that you actually get to act first when you get no initiative bonus from magic items, and that a wizard that's actively being hunted won't load up on long-term buffs when going out.
It also doesn't take in account abilities like the PF Divination school ability to always act in the surprise round.
Or the fact that most battlefields aren't wide open spaces. Wizards are probably city-dwellers, so there's plenty of cover to duck into to get that teleport off.
Or the fact that ambushing people who can cast divination spells is pretty damn hard to begin with if you don't have Mind Blank, Private Sanctum or at least Nondetection.

And all that still doesn't mention how you identify a spellcaster in the first place. In a world where wizards are hunted they'd have to be monumentally stupid to openly practice their craft, wear robes and pointy hats or easily recognizable component pouches.
Getting it wrong even once is a pretty good way to piss off the general population, which certainly won't do you any favors.
Even if you manage to identify one, all he has to do is cast Disguise Self before going out. Or use Magic Jar. Or any number of other options to go do whatever you want while disguised or your body is save at home.

And a wizard following a party into a building to finish them off comes right back to the idiot ball. That's just stupid when you can summon monsters, craft constructs, create undead or bind outsiders and elementals to act as meat shields for you, or just fill the entire thing with Cloudkill.
It's especially stupid if you consider that, unlike in your example, the wizard just needs to escape. His goal is survival, not to act as an encounter for a party of NPCs. If he really wants to kill you he has all the time in the world to rest up for new spells, because the organization has no way of actually finding him because they don't use magic.

Crake

2016-02-11, 05:58 AM

ThinkMinty

2016-02-11, 06:06 AM

Without being able to speak to crunch, on a fluff level, they won't be opposed to the powers themselves, just that anyone they don't approve of (IE, someone who isn't a court mage who will dance and ensorcell like a lapdog) would have those powers threatens the security of their power. They would want a monopoly on magical knowledge, especially at the upper levels, only allowing magicians who swore loyalty to them to have access.

Past that, you aren't going to achieve parity to casters with mundanes. You'll want them to not consider it heretical magic when they do it, or else fluff in some anti-magical material that can **** with magic for them to wear and/or lather themselves in.

Incorrect

2016-02-11, 09:04 AM

It's an uneven playing field, so lets try to tip the scales.

1 lvl 5 wizard of varying optimization vs 5 lvl 7 optimized mage slayers.
The mage slayers are loaded up with +2 weapons, armor and cloaks, tracking animals, and alchemical versions of utility spells. Such as a sticky powder designed to detect invisibility. At least one mage slayer is designed to investigate the specific caster prior to the attack, to determine time, place and tactics.

Not a guaranteed win for the slayers, but it's a solid shot.

nedz

2016-02-11, 09:21 AM

daremetoidareyo

2016-02-11, 09:30 AM

You need an alchemical dispel magic. If it does damage too, that's even better.

You also need to kill all the dire tortoises, cuz apparently wizards spend all time in public as them...

Seward

2016-02-11, 10:52 AM

And a wizard following a party into a building to finish them off comes right back to the idiot ball. That's just stupid when you can summon monsters, craft constructs, create undead or bind outsiders and elementals to act as meat shields for you, or just fill the entire thing with Cloudkill.

Give me a break. The perfectly prepared caster is a myth. It just doesn't happen in real games.

You can't craft constructs without a boatload of cash and time. Also quite honestly, a meat shield of any kind can be ignored until the spellcaster is dead unless it physically blocks access (such as being in the way of your melee gank team). The goal is to kill spellcasters. Once dead the planar bound folks will leave, the constructs are mindless and you can simply run from them, summoned critters can have their durations waited out even if you can't easily kill them. Without the caster to direct things, you can deal with such leftover toxic waste at your leisure.

You can't fill more than a single room with cloudkill, and not a very big room. It also moves which usually isn't an advantage. Antitoxin isn't magic and helps a lot.

Summoning takes away from other spell slots you might have, it's slow and it can be waited out if there is cover. It isn't a very good use of an action if you are under hardcore threat. It's a lot better if you are the one kicking down the door and is best if nobody knows you are even present, just crap starts appearing out of nowhere. Had the wizard we'd been fighting tried that approach, we again would have retreated into the building and quite honestly, nothing he could have summoned would have messed us up as badly as the spells he actually used. A mundane party would have died there, because we could not have managed the incoming damage and battlefield control he did get off before we were out of sight and under full cover, nor could we have been in any shape to continue the fight once he made the decision to come after us.

Planar binding has risks, especially long term open ended missions like bodyguarding. This guy had been there for months before we showed up and nobody had ever heard of us. We were literally hired from half a world away, so he had no way of knowing that today would be any different from other days. His ability to detect us, get safe and buff up when we arrived was perfectly adequate though. He just thought he could take us, and he was nearly correct.

It's especially stupid if you consider that, unlike in your example, the wizard just needs to escape. His goal is survival, not to act as an encounter for a party of NPCs. If he really wants to kill you he has all the time in the world to rest up for new spells, because the organization has no way of actually finding him because they don't use magic.

The caster had a reason to be guarding the place. Running away meant he abandoned an ally who was teaching him things he wanted to know, who couldn't leave the area in daytime and who was straight up destroyed before he got back. He had no reason to risk his life in a second encounter once his ally was dead, and we were in fact from half a world away ourselves. Said ally was in a confined area not suited to his own fighting style and defenses. We'd have had a much easier time killing him in the ally's room even with the encounter doubled-up than trying to fight him where we actually did, outside the manor and prevented from re-entering immediately by nasty battlefield control.

If the casters always run, the casters don't have much of a life. If casters can't leave their sanctum without running on a 10 minute per level buff cycle, they're confined to quarters for much of the day. Not every caster will have every spell that could be useful prepared or known. Even if they have the spell, it won't always be cast when they need it. It might even have been already cast and expired, although that's a pretty rare thing for normal play, it's something an org like this would try to set up.

Not every caster is a Pathfinder Diviner(wizard) or Pathfinder Divine Strategist (Cleric) who can act in the surprise round. Weirdly those guys are easier to kill when you do NOT surprise them, as you can in theory beat them in initiative and get a full attack, but those variants/archetypes also come with significant initiative bonuses. I'd put those guys with the folks who have contingency though. Once they have Teleport or Word of Recall, getting them without compromising their stronghold too is going to be nearly impossible, unless of course they don't immediately flee because perhaps, you know, they think they can win a fight from time to time and misjudge the situation. After all, they didn't get to that level by collecting bottlecaps. They had to engage in and survive many encounters, not just flee them.

The trick for the org then, is to make it look like this is an experience-earning encounter for the spellcaster, not a "oh crap" encounter. They'll have had hundreds of xp earning encounters and, by definition, none that actually killed them. Most encounters are not "lets just flee now with my first action" unless the opposition has already removed a chunk of hitpoints before they got to act. A lot of caster kills happen because they, say, cast a quickened buff and standard action summon (totem druid), a cloudkill or whatever their favorite encounter opener might be and then all the folks they didn't know about open up on them. Again, if you can learn something about how they fight, you can also mitigate that alpha strike, ensuring you a full round of actions to try to take the guy down without too many casualties.

Haveatya

2016-02-11, 11:37 AM

My group fought a bunch of casters and we were a monk, rogue and gunslinger in pf. Slinger saves action for interrupting shots, monk grapples and pins. Rogue gags 'em when grappled and coups them while pinned.

Simple, requires them being on the ground or within jump distance of a monk

Flickerdart

2016-02-11, 12:04 PM

Baatorian greensteel gives a +1 enhancement bonus to damage without being magic. It's not much but it helps.

I think your mistake here is focusing too much on the "hit squad" concept. This is an organization. They have lots of guys. Have some of those guys spread out in the world as spies and informants. All they do is track down spellcasters. Then you send fifty archers after the spellcasters. Some of them will roll 20s on initiative, and then they just ready arrows. As soon as the guy tries casting, he eats two or three arrows and has to make the necessary Concentration checks or lose the spell. And, you know, deal with the damage.

By the point that "bunch of dudes with bows" is no longer a tenable tactic, the casters have become too powerful to stop without your own magic and there's not much you can do.

Forrestfire

2016-02-11, 12:14 PM

Give me a break. The perfectly prepared caster is a myth. It just doesn't happen in real games.

No, they're not a myth, and yes, they do happen in real games. The fact that they don't show up often is not a bad thing (because competent wizards destroy campaigns from either side), but it's definitely a myth that perfectly prepared casters are a myth.

To use my own anecdotal evidence: I myself have used them and played against them in a couple campaigns, and they were always immensely frustrating (but generally interesting) fights. The reason they rarely show up is because they cause problems when used, as they're very nearly unbeatable—you may be able to push them off their goals, but if trying to actually remove them from the playing field? Good luck.

This organization being described isn't trying to push them off their goals, though. They're trying to hunt mages. I'm sure they have a decent amount of success, too! Not every mage is an optimized one, and not every optimized mage is a mid-high-level one. As Flickerdart notes, mages still go down to arrows pretty well. However, the problem arises when they try to take out someone who actually knows what they're doing and has the power to act back (which may well be a lot of mages, because mages tend to have exceptionally good mental ability scores, and in many cases are played stupidly thanks to DM fiat and ignoring their capabilities).

Forget contingency. What does the ambush do against a wizard with Defensive Strategist (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/traits/religion-traits/defensive-strategist) or some source of uncanny dodge and emergency force sphere (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/e/emergency-force-sphere), followed by a getaway spell? Sure, you might be able to cause problems with them, but how are you actually dealing with them? Since 3.5 stuff is in play, what if that emergency force sphere is just celerity into teleport, or plane shift? What happens when the wizard chills in a magnificent mansion except when he invisibly leaves and teleports somewhere to cover his tracks?

Heck, what happens when you successfully fight a wizard? Let's use the listed scenario. A smart wizard is forced to flee and his ally is killed. He's now out for revenge. What happens when the wizard decides to use magic to keep tabs on your organization? Starts striking from the shadows at your allies? Uses bird feather tokens (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/e-g/feather-token/bird-token) to unerringly deliver explosive runes to important people? What does this organization do when a being who does not have any set base of operations, can't be tracked down or struck back against, and can continue their assault near-indefinitely has a personal bone to pick with them? They don't have healing items or spells. They don't have magic to counter magical assaults or conditions. They're going to end up losing that battle of attrition.

All it takes is causing one smart, decently-leveled wizard to turn an eye towards this group of mage hunters to spell doom. Heaven help them if they piss off multiple.

Quertus

2016-02-11, 12:57 PM

I'll update my original post to further clarify some things.

NO MAGIC! of any kind, No Psionics, No Spell-likes, No divine. Things like Abundant step are magical. think of it this way... If a human in the real world cannot do it, its probably too much for this organization. With that said I know of few humans that can fire off 7 shots at 200 meter's with unerring accuracy but I am not counting that as magical, just highly trained individuals.

I know its a strict organization. Magic in this world has literally just been introduced. Many people suddenly discovered various powers (sorcerer's, elves, were-creature's all brand new) This world was literally just humans before the sudden introduction of magic. things like Orcs or elves are just a twisted magical power that transformed their bodies.

This organization formed because some BBEG decided to use his powers to take over the world. he was stopped and this organization gained a good following. Most people are scared of the unknown or the unnatural.

. just because this team can't kill every mage doesn't mean they can't be highly effective against various mages.

If the casters always run, the casters don't have much of a life. If casters can't leave their sanctum without running on a 10 minute per level buff cycle, they're confined to quarters for much of the day. Not every caster will have every spell that could be useful prepared or known. Even if they have the spell, it won't always be cast when they need it. It might even have been already cast and expired, although that's a pretty rare thing for normal play, it's something an org like this would try to set up.

Not every caster is a Pathfinder Diviner(wizard) or Pathfinder Divine Strategist (Cleric) who can act in the surprise round. Weirdly those guys are easier to kill when you do NOT surprise them, as you can in theory beat them in initiative and get a full attack, but those variants/archetypes also come with significant initiative bonuses. I'd put those guys with the folks who have contingency though. Once they have Teleport or Word of Recall, getting them without compromising their stronghold too is going to be nearly impossible, unless of course they don't immediately flee because perhaps, you know, they think they can win a fight from time to time and misjudge the situation. After all, they didn't get to that level by collecting bottlecaps. They had to engage in and survive many encounters, not just flee them.

The trick for the org then, is to make it look like this is an experience-earning encounter for the spellcaster, not a "oh crap" encounter.

If magic is new, then this organization is new*, so expect a lot of casualties, as they try out a bunch of tactics, and find that a lot of them fail.

Sigh. I guess I'll tell y'all why contingent teleport isn't really a problem: it requires a focus. Use pick pockets to steal the focus (while you're stealing their spell components), and they can't contingent teleport away. They can still teleport, though, unless you silence them, so you need to alpha strike them. Add a 5th member to my rogue team, with mage slayer / who holds his action to attack when the mage tries to cast, and you'll be ok for most encounters. This team would be effective against most of my PC spellcasters, up through mid levels at least.

But you have to hit the mage on the ground, at the time and place of your choosing. Especially true for the armored casters.

This makes it unlikely that any successful group would choose to attack a group of 4 PC wizards of their level without getting reinforcements.

* Unless it isn't. If it is actually some wizard / demon / etc from wherever, that knows how magic works, and understand the tactics of magic, calling the shots, then you're fine having this group actually succeed.

Starbuck_II

2016-02-11, 12:58 PM

What about soulmelds? They are easy to refluff.

Rageclaws are good example: they just make it so you don't die at -10. This isn't really much a magical effect, just you have guts!

Stay away from explicit soulmelds like Gorillan claws, blink shoes, etc

TheCreatorT

2016-02-11, 01:12 PM

Many people are telling you this is not feasible for your PC chars with higher level casters; maybe you could switch roles somewhat?

You still have Mundane only classes, and magic is taboo or unheard of, with some shadowy group or the governments of the area taking away people for no apparent reason. Your adventurers start to work with said group, but discover the innate power within them and are forced into hiding. They join the few spell casters that there are in a fight with said shadowy group.

Now you can use some of these ideas for the organization chasing you, but you should also limit the magic ability of all casters regardless if you stick with the original idea or not. As said before if all the casters do is hide, then they will not have much time to learn (if you do decide to switch roles you should limit levels in many magic class, like a singular level). Also, any spell casters who do live will most likely be afraid to act even if they are able to further said abilities to higher levels, and therefore will not be prepared for an assault like people predict.

I don't know I am just rambling.

daremetoidareyo

2016-02-11, 01:14 PM

You anti caster teams need to outnumber the wizards by about 10 to one, and have on average, about 4 more class levels than any given caster. You also need a mundane way to dispel magic. I know of none that aren't homebrewed. Otherwise...it'll get pretty nasty.

The previous poster was absolutely correct. A high level caster waging guerilla warfare is going to be far more potent than any other obstacle. And the only way to really manage them is to travel to another plane, planar bind those guerilla casters, and kill them off world. But...alas, no magic.

You're going to need EX mindblank. There is no way around that. I suggest getting you nazi doctors working on a brain graft for exactly that. Either that, or you need to house rule that lead protects against mind control.

Further, if they oppose the divine magic...good luck with that. I mean, try to stamp out religion without resorting to genocide. Especially religion that gives you true supernatural powers that manifest at your whim. Impossible.

Sun Tzu's logic totally applies. If you control the circumstances of the confrontation, you can defeat the opponent there. It's true on both sides of the supernatural divide, and only one side of that has to obey the rules of physics.

Janthkin

2016-02-11, 01:45 PM

No, they're not a myth, and yes, they do happen in real games. The fact that they don't show up often is not a bad thing (because competent wizards destroy campaigns from either side), but it's definitely a myth that perfectly prepared casters are a myth.It doesn't even take a perfectly prepared caster. One unoptimized Beguiler could rule this world. You'll never know what he actually looks like, because he's never going anywhere without Disguise Self or better, and never using the same disguise twice. Illusions & Enchantments are brutal against the mundane, and he knows his entire spell list, plus has a lot of spontaneous spell slots, plus eventually gets free Silent & Still spell, plus he has tons of skill points and access to mundane abilities like Hide & Disguise.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

GreyBlack

2016-02-11, 01:48 PM

Okay, so. First of all, you're going to need a Warblade: Iron Heart Surge abuse will probably wind up being your key to victory by RAW.

Secondly, a Diplomancer; have them schmooze the caster into being fanatic to them. This gives you some significant advantages.

Thirdly, you're going to want a PF Alchemist. None of their abilities are, technically, spellcasting, but are spellcasting so YMMV (depending on how you want to fluff it). Said alchemist specializes in poisons and debuffs.

SO! How is this going to go down? The Diplomancer and Warblade walk up to the caster, who will inevitably have already put their defenses up. Should anything be affecting the Warblade, he'll shout it down with IHS. The Diplomancer, then, begins talking to the caster. Hopefully, he'll be able to get past any Mind Blank effects that the caster has in place (get the caster to friendly, then convince him to let him make the necessary check to improve attitudes and/or dispel the mind blank). From there, the Diplomancer will take a beverage brewed by the Alchemist, which is an extremely potent ingested poison, preferably with an absurd DC to resist.

If any part here goes wrong, you're boned.

Flickerdart

2016-02-11, 02:28 PM

Secondly, a Diplomancer; have them schmooze the caster into being fanatic to them.
The problem with diplomancy is that it can't be used against PCs (which is OP's goal). Even then, without magic items and buffs it's difficult to get the skill high enough.

Silva Stormrage

2016-02-11, 02:58 PM

One additional useful template would be Vecna blooded from MMV. It makes you completely immune to all forms of divination.

Pair that with poison, lots and lots of high quality deadly poison. Don't ever engage a caster in a straight up fight as a mundane character, it won't usually end well.

If the casters know you exist and are gunning for them you instantly lose so you need to prevent that from happening :smalltongue:

Cosi

2016-02-11, 03:01 PM

One additional useful template would be Vecna blooded from MMV. It makes you completely immune to all forms of divination.

Don't you have to be a caster to be Vecna blooded?

Silva Stormrage

2016-02-11, 03:05 PM

Don't you have to be a caster to be Vecna blooded?

... I never noticed that

What you need is a slightly modified refluffed version of Vecna Blooded that is based off... manuvers? Or nothing really the template doesn't really have anything in it that really impacts spellcasting or similar except for one ability.

Malroth

2016-02-11, 04:06 PM

I think the solution to the problem at low and mid levels is actually Warlock, Certian brave indivuals sell their souls for the power to fight the magical menace on their own terms, gaining the ability so see the invisible, shoot through walls of wind, sense the presence of magic, dispel defensive enchantments, create magical gear for the society etc. These volunteers would have to be monitored at all times by their fellow society members but would be an incredible asset untill they had to be put down for their own good.

arkangel111

2016-02-11, 04:21 PM

Glad to see a little more discussion and support from the community. I'll keep the vecna-blooded template in mind. I am trying to homebrew as little as possible, I've already got a whole world I am constructing and the problem all homebrew has is that eventually someone will find a loophole that can destroy or undermine the entire system.

So would I be correct in saying that there is no material in 3.P that interacts with magic/psionics/divine spells negatively? I know the mechanics of noqual only affect the wearer. So if I have to I'll either change it or make a new material but was hoping in the 100+ sources available something would exist.

I planned for the headquarters of this organization to be centered in a magic deadzone, I was hoping to make the area deadzone due to some material which they mined and then made their weapons/armor out of.

A few people have been mentioning or at least implying that the wizard will have access to magic weapons while the group won't. Realistically magic items are an extreme rarity, +1-+5 weapons exist but I am fluffing them as not being magical just higher quality even than masterwork. You don't even need magic to craft them just sufficiently high skill.

Some might say that the wizard could craft his own, but think about it for a second, if he is crafting magic items he is far more likely to get caught. the market for magic items isn't there, no one wants to be caught harboring a mage or even using a magic item because they might end up a target as well.

Other things that seem to be forgotten on this board is that TO is not PO. The real-world is not all about #'s therefore I don't want my gameworld to be all about #'s. Most people are commoners, they have jobs, they have normal needs and wants. Most NPC's will have sub-optimal stats. When building a PC I don't usually grab swim or climb because I just have better places to put my few skill points. I'll often fluff my character with some mundane background, but rarely do I even have the points to spare to fill in the mechanics of it. I'll dump stats that I don't need. but in a living breathing world the NPC's don't have that luxury. Its actually one of the things that set PC's apart from the norm.

Most NPC spellcaster's aren't going to have a fully optimized list. Wizards are going to rarely have more than their level up allotted spells. Technically I would even go as far as saying a wizard is bumped to T2 maybe even T3 while a sorcerer and other spontaneous caster's might be bumped to T1. Its dangerous to let anyone know your a caster so how are you going to share spells? How many guides suggest getting scolls of X or Y because they are a must-have in a given situation but a waste of a spell slot normally? In this world if you don't have it then you don't have it.

Leveling up is dangerous for multiple reasons for these caster's. If a caster level's up and gets access to new spells he has to decide which spells he gets. If the situation he is in requires that he grabs water-breathing and he picks it up, well now that is what he is stuck with even if he never goes near water again for the rest of his life. You might say "well alter-self is better" yes but he didn't need alter-self he needed to breath water and that's what his mind gave him, perhaps he has never even seen a humanoid creature that can breathe water so it never even crossed his mind that something like that could be done with magic. By doing something that leveled him up he must have exposed himself in some way as a caster. Was there only 21 people in that building he just blew up? or did one escape out the back or only pretend to be dead, and now knows his face?

Warrnan

2016-02-11, 04:27 PM

Not that it matters much but the shielded casting feat means you don't have to cast defensively, therefore mage slayer doesn't work.

I hated it when I read this. Dang WotC makes sure that mundanes can't have nice things.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-11, 04:51 PM

It's like you're not even reading most of the answers. The caster doesn't need to be optimized.

He just needs 3 or 4 of any of dozens of spells, a lot of them core, to either be impossible to locate, nearly impossible to hurt by mundanes, capable of mind-controlling his way into an empire, capable of nearly unstoppable/untraceable murder, capable of teleportation or capable of fielding armies of magic-using minions who don't need a supply chain, are individually stronger than your guys (because magic), probably smarter than you and also utterly disposable.

So what if no wizard has all of those spells (he could, just from level ups, but let's assume he's not that smart despite his 16-18 Int score).
He doesn't need to, because any of those strategies is enough to stay alive and get more spells and more power to use them with, because you still have no reliable way to identify some dude as a spellcaster unless he's careless (and he doesn't want to be murdered, so he probably won't be).

It's going to be like the witch hunts, with the people who actually die not being spellcasters but people someone wanted to get rid of for whatever reason.
Political rival? I saw him casting a spell! That girl your husband looks at? Witch! The shopowner down the street who does better than you with his business? Probably used some kind of enchantment! And you better hope that priest from the little church downtown isn't too pious, if you catch my drift. Otherwise it's the archer death-squads for him too!

And for finding other casters to trade or ally with? Detect Magic. Everyone who lights up is a friend, because they sure as hell don't want to be murdered by zealot commoners either, and two casters are better than one.

And that says nothing about druids or clerics, who have all the spells. Who are almost impossible to sneak up on, capable of flattening entire cities by the mid-levels and come with inbuilt allies.
I'd really like to see your totally mundane guys go hunt a non-retarded level 7-10 druid in the forest. Let me get my popcorn.

Don't get me wrong. It could be interesting to play in that world. But it's not going to be because those guys are actually a credible threat to your spellcasting PCs.

Not that it matters much but the shielded casting feat means you don't have to cast defensively, therefore mage slayer doesn't work.

I hated it when I read this. Dang WotC makes sure that mundanes can't have nice things.
Have you ever seen anyone actually take it? Because i haven't. It's ridiculously narrow in purpose (melee with Mageslayer you can't get away from with a swift action spell), so i'd say any caster has something better to do with his feat slots, no matter how many he gets.

GreyBlack

2016-02-11, 04:59 PM

Arcanist

2016-02-11, 05:34 PM

Wizards in 3.5 are obscenely difficult to counter because no two wizards plan the same or prepare the same way so you have to fight them as individuals. Universally however, spellcasters cast spells (obviously) and spells can be countered. Sadly mundanes don't naturally have access to access to Craft (Alchemy):

To make an item using Craft (alchemy), you must have alchemical equipment and be a spellcaster.

Now a common work around is to take the Magical Training feat giving you access to cantrips and therefore allowing you to make Craft (Alchemy) based items. Have some of your members on your team take this feat (or have all of them take it, you can take it at 1st level). Presumably, they are all Human and can thereafter spend their 2nd feat on Skill Focus: Craft (Alchemy). Presuming that you are especially generous, you can give these guys access the nonelite Array and go for the following build

Preface: Crafters and Suppliers often live together by day so they can better coordinate. Often this is under the guise of a married couple or landlord and tenant or whatever.

Human
Commoner 1

Human: Skill Focus: Craft (Alchemy)
1st: Magical Training: Arcane Mark, Mending, Open/Close

Str: 11
Dex: 8
Con: 9
Int: 13
Wis: 12
Cha: 10

Skills: Craft (Alchemy) +8, Listen +5, Profession (day job) +5, Spot +5.
Items: Alchemist's Lab (presumably provided by Organization), Toxic Tooth (Viper Snake Poison).

Note: This set up allows low ranking members to remain anonymous in their daily lives and gives them a out if they are ever captured. In the mean time, they spend their days crafting Thunderstones (Core) and Healing Salves (T&B) to be used by various members. These members are paired up with Organization Psi-Suppliers.

Human
Commoner 1

Human: Hidden Talent: Psionic Minor Creation
1st: Body Fuel

Str: 10
Dex: 8
Con: 9
Int: 13
Wis: 12
Cha: 11

Skills: Craft (Blacksmithing) +5, Listen +5, Profession (day job) +5, Spot +5.
Item: Masterwork Artisan's Tools (provided by Organization), Toxic Tooth (Viper Snake Poison)

Note: Rather basic, exist to supply crafters with supplies to make their various items. Given Body Fuel to give them additional uses of their power.

Human
Commoner 1

Otyugh Hole: Iron Will (presumably a trial towards being trusted as a Smuggler)
Human: Criminal Background (CoS)
1st: Hardened Criminal (Sleight of Hand)

Str: 10
Dex: 8
Con: 9
Int: 12
Wis: 11
Cha: 13

Skills: Bluff +4, Open Lock +4, Profession (Day Job) +4, Sleight of Hand +4.
Item: Masterwork Thieves' tools, Lead Lined Backpack (Hidden Flap), Lead Lined Hollow Boot Heels, various other hidden spaces as appropriate, Toxic Tooth (Viper Snake Poison)

Note: Smugglers, unlike Crafters and Suppliers, are made of a bit hardier stuff since they are the ones getting the Hunters what they need to do their job. They employ various means of resupplying Hunters, often in the form of deliveries. On the rare case that a suspected Spellcaster invites one of these agents into their dwelling is when they start performing subterfuge like the destruction of property and the like and gauging reactions. If these guys were made using the Expert class instead, they would be vastly better.

The Hunter can be fairly flexibly designed. The only feat they really need is Mad Alchemist and the prerequisite feats for it (keep in mind you CAN put ranks into Craft [Alchemy], without being a Spellcaster, but won't be able to fully benefit from it. Hunter teams come in groups of anywhere from 4 to 6, two of which are kept as spotters to neutralize the enemy spellcasters spells. At higher levels, I can imagine Hunters using stuff like Throat Punch to give that sweet 50% ASF

This is all fun in theory, but I think a relatively competent spellcaster can counter this type of approach. There are a lot of non-magical items that can be crafted to make this easier, but this is all rather on the spot. Try Shapesand for a more flexible tool in your Hunt for Wizards.

arkangel111

2016-02-11, 06:16 PM

@sleepyphoenixx Actually have read every post and except for sleeping have read all of them within minutes of being posted. I came to these boards because there is an overwhelming support for caster's being stronger. No one on these boards can spout how OP a monk is for more than a couple posts before being overwhelmed with arguments to the contrary. My home PFS group still spouts how OP a monk is and it just makes me laugh.
You are 100% correct on how the mass populace is going to act. Many innocents will die. This group is gaining followers partially through fear, and partially through belief. When a nearby village is leveled by caster, or even a group of orc barbarians you are bound to gain followers from those that lost loved ones. Druids and such are a major threat, I get this. I have actually been looking at trying to split this class in half or maybe disallow entirely, its effectively 3 classes in one and by far the most unbalanced ever created. With that said I am still looking for answers that will work at least partially.

@everyone else. Suggestions of refluffs are great and all, I am just hoping to get as much as I can from core before having to refluff or alter classes. There is several archetypes and substition levels that give up magic for bonus feats or other such. I plan on grabbing many of these and forcing them to be the default for my world.

So taking what we have learned so far:

1. Alchemist's are an easy refluff that can help level the playing field. Still needs quite a bit of work though, still don't want to give mundanes too many toys, only for story reason's though.
2. Barbed arrow's and spears with heavy weights (thinking of attaching to a tower shield) can be used to reduce teleportation effects
3. Going first and killing outright is the best defense (High Damage High initiative)
4. Abilities like IHS, evasion and Mettle are almost mandatory.
5. Mageslayer feats help level the playing field.
6. There currently is no known mundane material that negatively affects casters
7. Pets break the action economy (Nature Soul, Animal Ally, Boon Companion) I have thought about making a custom creature to help take care of a few of these problems.
8. No reliable way to detect magic user's.
9. Spy network is this groups best friend.

I have thought about using magic users to fight magic user's but my thoughts are that it likely will happen at some point, there is also likely to be some blow-back from it as well because zealous members would find it hypocritical and could then fracture the organization or more likely purge those who think such. I like the latter personally.

Is there a crystal or such that can drain caster's if it pierces them? Arrow's and spears tipped with such could easily take out caster's.

Zetapup

2016-02-11, 06:45 PM

8. No reliable way to detect magic user's.

Actually, the Nemesis feat combined with favored enemy (arcanists) lets you automatically detect arcane spellcasters within 60 feet. Pretty handy. I'm not quite sure how you'd go about detecting divine casters though.

With the scenario presented, it'd actually be very possible to kill a decent amount of casters. Since magic is new, the casters aren't going to know the exact best spell for each situation and there shouldn't be many, if any, high level casters. Most of the unprepared/non-paranoid casters would die out fairly quickly (along with quite a few unprepared members of the organization) leading to an arms race of sorts between the paranoid casters and the organization which now knows their enemy.

For the draining crystal thing, nothing nonmagical as far as I know, although you could use weapon crystals. I believe one of them drains health from an enemy on a successful hit and gives some hp back to you. If you're talking about level drain, I can't think of anything that does that.

Lans

2016-02-11, 06:56 PM

Is there a level up variant that requires characters to actually train to obtain there new level?

This will reduce a casters ability to learn new spells if they are too busy trying not to die to obtain levels.

I imagine this is a pretty low level campaign as magic and magical creatures are recent to it.

I figure the vast majority of things would be below an elephants CR

Sayt

2016-02-11, 07:00 PM

Hellcat Stealth+Darkhidden+Darkstalker makes you basically invisible without the downsides of invisibility, throw on Stealth boosting skill items.

Grab a Slayer, give them and dip monk or take Stunning Fist. Take Ki Straps, Ability Focus (Stunning Fist), Mantis Style and a Ki-Intensifying weapon. Combined with their Studied Target ability Stunning fist's DC becomes onerously high. Take the unerrata'd version of Merciless Butchery from the first printing, which lets you CDG certain enemies as a swift, instead of full (If you don't want to allow un-errata'd merciless butchery, have a Leadership'd identibuild to it).

This is a LOT of a high level build. (IIRC it basically fits into Slayer 17 without flaws) Walk up to the offending caster. Stun them. Coup-de-grace as a swift action. Hope you didn't trigger a contingency as there is nothing you can do about them.

You're not invisible, you can't be seen by detect invisibility or invisibility purge. IIRC the only things which can detect you are Mindsight and Lifesight and other equally abstruse vision modes.

I can throw up a more detailed build when I'm at home.

Crake

2016-02-11, 08:20 PM

I planned for the headquarters of this organization to be centered in a magic deadzone, I was hoping to make the area deadzone due to some material which they mined and then made their weapons/armor out of.

A few people have been mentioning or at least implying that the wizard will have access to magic weapons while the group won't. Realistically magic items are an extreme rarity, +1-+5 weapons exist but I am fluffing them as not being magical just higher quality even than masterwork. You don't even need magic to craft them just sufficiently high skill.

Some might say that the wizard could craft his own, but think about it for a second, if he is crafting magic items he is far more likely to get caught. the market for magic items isn't there, no one wants to be caught harboring a mage or even using a magic item because they might end up a target as well.

I would imagine he'd be crafting the items he wants, in his own personal extradimensional space of some kind. In fact, why would he even craft items for other people and give them the same advantages that he can enjoy.

Other things that seem to be forgotten on this board is that TO is not PO. The real-world is not all about #'s therefore I don't want my gameworld to be all about #'s. Most people are commoners, they have jobs, they have normal needs and wants. Most NPC's will have sub-optimal stats. When building a PC I don't usually grab swim or climb because I just have better places to put my few skill points. I'll often fluff my character with some mundane background, but rarely do I even have the points to spare to fill in the mechanics of it. I'll dump stats that I don't need. but in a living breathing world the NPC's don't have that luxury. Its actually one of the things that set PC's apart from the norm.

I have yet to see anything in this thread even approaching CLOSE to TO, if you think the things mentioned in here are TO, you need to re-assess your perspective on optimization, this is all pretty low end caster PO. Again, as others have mentioned (myself included) it only takes one high level mage to eliminate this organization. Even in a dead magic zone, a sufficiently high level caster has access to the incredible Invoke Magic spell, which will let him cast 4th level spells in the area, admittedly at a cost of 1000gp worth of diamond dust per spell, but lets face it, a 17th level caster has practically unlimited wealth, and it wouldn't take too much to tear asunder this organization, and realistically, even if their headquarters are in a null magic zone, their operations are not, so even a mid-level caster could cause them to have to permanently retreat to their headquarters just to survive. Also, null/dead magic zones don't stop an army of crafted constructs or undead from marching on the headquarters.

Most NPC spellcaster's aren't going to have a fully optimized list. Wizards are going to rarely have more than their level up allotted spells. Technically I would even go as far as saying a wizard is bumped to T2 maybe even T3 while a sorcerer and other spontaneous caster's might be bumped to T1. Its dangerous to let anyone know your a caster so how are you going to share spells? How many guides suggest getting scolls of X or Y because they are a must-have in a given situation but a waste of a spell slot normally? In this world if you don't have it then you don't have it.

Leveling up is dangerous for multiple reasons for these caster's. If a caster level's up and gets access to new spells he has to decide which spells he gets. If the situation he is in requires that he grabs water-breathing and he picks it up, well now that is what he is stuck with even if he never goes near water again for the rest of his life. You might say "well alter-self is better" yes but he didn't need alter-self he needed to breath water and that's what his mind gave him, perhaps he has never even seen a humanoid creature that can breathe water so it never even crossed his mind that something like that could be done with magic. By doing something that leveled him up he must have exposed himself in some way as a caster. Was there only 21 people in that building he just blew up? or did one escape out the back or only pretend to be dead, and now knows his face?

Again, as others have stated, the very existence of your organization is a form of darwinism. While the bad casters will be culled off, all that does is ensure that the higher level casters who DO survive will have the tools and arsenal available to make themselves untouchable, and, as stated above, it only takes one.

Hellcat Stealth+Darkhidden+Darkstalker makes you basically invisible without the downsides of invisibility, throw on Stealth boosting skill items.

Grab a Slayer, give them and dip monk or take Stunning Fist. Take Ki Straps, Ability Focus (Stunning Fist), Mantis Style and a Ki-Intensifying weapon. Combined with their Studied Target ability Stunning fist's DC becomes onerously high. Take the unerrata'd version of Merciless Butchery from the first printing, which lets you CDG certain enemies as a swift, instead of full (If you don't want to allow un-errata'd merciless butchery, have a Leadership'd identibuild to it).

This is a LOT of a high level build. (IIRC it basically fits into Slayer 17 without flaws) Walk up to the offending caster. Stun them. Coup-de-grace as a swift action. Hope you didn't trigger a contingency as there is nothing you can do about them.

You're not invisible, you can't be seen by detect invisibility or invisibility purge. IIRC the only things which can detect you are Mindsight and Lifesight and other equally abstruse vision modes.

I can throw up a more detailed build when I'm at home.

As far as I'm aware you cannot coup de grace a stunned opponent, plus there are a few nice and easy ways to avoid being stunned, including a fairly cheap magic item. Sure you need to not be flat footed to use an immediate action, but there are plenty of means to achieve that.

Deadline

2016-02-11, 08:33 PM

If you really want this to be practical, run your game in an E6 universe. No Freedom of Movement, no Teleport, no Contingency. None of the high-level tricks that make mundanes and mundane equipment superfluous. And as a bonus, it keeps your mundane PCs within contribution range of the PC casters too, so everybody wins. Seriously. Do this, and incorporate all the various suggestions people have made, and you're golden.

This is a solid suggestion. Once you enter the realm of 4th level spells, you pretty much fall by the wayside as a mundane. And that's WITH magic items. As an example, there is no mundane way to win initiative against someone polymorphed into a Dire Tortoise. Granted, in normal play that's odd, but when your very survival depends on using those tactics, you'll quickly find that 7th level and up casters will have minimal difficulty with your mundane opposition. E6 is a great way to go here, because while you'll still be facing stiff odds as a completely non-magical mundane, at least you have a shot.

And when you do wind up running things in your campaign world, you'll want to figure out a way for your kill squads to reliably defeat things like Shadows. Not having a magic weapon makes that very difficult (not impossible, unless you also decide they can't have things like Holy Water either).

One potential handy thing you might consider is to make your strike team be Karsites, rather than humans. They are in the Tome of Magic, and are basically humans who can't use magic items and come with innate spell resistance. That will at least give them an edge.

arkangel111

2016-02-11, 10:14 PM

I have considered E6 but my problem stems from it not allowing much in the way of build options for players. At most you'll get 1 level in a PrC. I personally like options as do my players. Ultimately I am hoping to make this work within the scope of an average game. My player's have asked for a 1-20 game. I have this game world on the backburner and am trying to leave behind the AP's.

@Crake Its TO to assume that any given class in a game will take options based purely on power. PO allows for non-optimal choices based on flavor. The wizard spell list is HUGE, especially when you consider the sources I am allowing. there is more worthless spells and redundant spells on the spell list than there is good spells. how many 4th level spells can be taken care of by a 1st level spell. Or even better just look at any of the handbooks and look at the plethora of crap spells on the list. As a player looking at the entire list we get the option of picking and choosing where as the NPC's don't. I have never once said they they are meant to take on merlin, they are meant to cull the flock. The ones that make it through the culling will likely be encounter's for other groups of PC's. Those that are good will probably just try to stay off the radar and help when they can. The evil ones will strike back and be good encounter's for PC's.

No one ever mentions that a dragon should not even be a threat to a city. 5000 commoners will not die on round 1. Lets be generous and say that the dragon kills 100 on round 1. that leaves 4900. The commoners pull out bows and crossbows and fire on round 2, 4900 commoners can still auto hit on a 20, thats 1100 dmg before factoring crits, more than enough to kill most dragons. but why do people fear them? Because they feel they can't take on something so large and powerful.

The Idea of this campaign is to set this organization up as the dragon. They need to be effective against the most amount of mages possible. Yes some will get away, others will hide. Few will fight back and take out large chunks of the organization. If the mage ever causes collateral damage it will just reinforce the organization and reinforce the negative stereotypes perpetuated by the organization.

My ultimate goal is to set up this organization against the PC's (likely partial caster's). These groups will constantly be a thorn in their side. Then I will introduce the real bad guy, the evil full caster. Even other caster's, and the PC's will recognize this guy as the real threat, probably starting some sort of Armageddon. Now the group is forced to hunt down another caster while still avoiding being caught themselves.

Seward

2016-02-11, 10:39 PM

No, they're not a myth, and yes, they do happen in real games. The fact that they don't show up often is not a bad thing (because competent wizards destroy campaigns from either side), but it's definitely a myth that perfectly prepared casters are a myth.

To use my own anecdotal evidence: I myself have used them and played against them in a couple campaigns, and they were always immensely frustrating (but generally interesting) fights. The reason they rarely show up is because they cause problems when used, as they're very nearly unbeatable—you may be able to push them off their goals, but if trying to actually remove them from the playing field? Good luck.
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In Living Greyhawk only the Bonehearts and the Circle of 8 really rose to this level, and the latter being epic don't really count for a discussion like this. The Bonehearts were designed to cheese out like a PC and were near epic. They were sometimes challenged, very rarely defeated and you only really get a shot at killing one if you've got some kind of ally giving you a power boost and they're forced for some reason to stand and fight to achieve an objective (I think that happened exactly once, after Hasbro announced the demise of the campaign - it was also an average-player-level 16 adventure)

The Bonehearts though were direct reports to an actual incarnate on-prime-material-plane deity. One would hope that a critter like them would only emerge after centuries of optimization against a threat of an org like this, not something that would spring full featured from scratch.

Heck, what happens when you successfully fight a wizard? Let's use the listed scenario. A smart wizard is forced to flee and his ally is killed. He's now out for revenge. What happens when the wizard decides to use magic to keep tabs on your organization? Starts striking from the shadows at your allies? Uses bird feather tokens (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/e-g/feather-token/bird-token) to unerringly deliver explosive runes to important people? What does this organization do when a being who does not have any set base of operations, can't be tracked down or struck back against, and can continue their assault near-indefinitely has a personal bone to pick with them? They don't have healing items or spells. They don't have magic to counter magical assaults or conditions. They're going to end up losing that battle of attrition.
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I'm with you all the way on this paragraph except for the last sentence. The world is full of people but doesn't have very many powerful mages. You can expect to have the hit team compromised at some point, which is why you need a terrorist-like cell structure, so no revenge crater gets more than its direct target.

If the org is good enough, and reasonably expects that such a wizard decided to take an encounter personally, such a team is perfect bait for the kind of assault that WILL kill the wizard. Hell, you even have some intel on how the wizard prefers to fight, first-hand, which is better than the usual situation. "Stalking Goat" has got to be a decent tactic for the org - and if it's at all successful then of course that will deter future wizards from trying revenge on a team that drove them off, because the chance it's a trap is too damn high.

In our own case, the fact that we were hired guns from halfway around the world meant that coming after us wouldn't really accomplish anything for that wizard. Also we're members of a quite powerful organization of our own that has plenty of high level casters and a rep for sending increasingly powerful teams out after any missing members of our organization. Taking something Pathfinder Society members do personally isn't a good way to stay alive, especially when the guy who really got your buddy ganked was a local potentate who called in a favor to get us sent in.

If he's really pissed, he needs to take it up with that guy. Going after the individuals who did the job is highly risky and doesn't address the root of the problem.

It's actually a bit of a joke in the campaign how often the mission is "Pathfinder XXX or team YYY went out to investigate something and didn't come back. Go find out what happened and save them or recover their bodies." PCs actually have ways to save up favors to get rescues or body recoveries of their own, so it works both ways. The most successful attacks on the organization are political or whispering campaigns, because the org really is meddlesome, prone to violence and tomb-raiding type activities and generally a PITA to have around, even if they're in theory working with or for you.

Had we been from a "Kill all Wizards" organization then the odds are we wouldn't have been there in the first place, or if we had it would be because we knew THAT GUY was there and there would have been some plan for dealing with it, not a mad scramble as we stumble into a fully prepared wizard trying to blast us to atoms.

Crake

2016-02-11, 10:41 PM

@Crake Its TO to assume that any given class in a game will take options based purely on power. PO allows for non-optimal choices based on flavor. The wizard spell list is HUGE, especially when you consider the sources I am allowing. there is more worthless spells and redundant spells on the spell list than there is good spells. how many 4th level spells can be taken care of by a 1st level spell. Or even better just look at any of the handbooks and look at the plethora of crap spells on the list. As a player looking at the entire list we get the option of picking and choosing where as the NPC's don't. I have never once said they they are meant to take on merlin, they are meant to cull the flock. The ones that make it through the culling will likely be encounter's for other groups of PC's. Those that are good will probably just try to stay off the radar and help when they can. The evil ones will strike back and be good encounter's for PC's.

You say this like TO and PO exercises require you to spend your entire character's resources on something for the outcome. As for the huge array of spells, you are correct, they could pick any of them, but would they? In a society that punishes magic like this, why would anyone ever actually bother to learn something like phantom steed over say, dispel magic, or haste, or slow. The abundance of spells would only exist in a society where researching incredibly niche, quality of life spells would actually be feasible. Nobody is going to pick up fabricate or stoneshape, and start doing masonry with it, because they would be found out and killed, so the likelihood of people picking up those spells would be minimal, unless they had time and resources spare to conduct their own research, or could reasonably share spells with other spellcasters in some kind of secret magical society (which would inevitably band together against this organization and crush it). And those who do spend their valuable resources on those kinds of spells are killed off anyway.

As many others have said, it's not that ALL wizards take these options, it's that it only takes ONE wizard to take these options.

No one ever mentions that a dragon should not even be a threat to a city. 5000 commoners will not die on round 1. Lets be generous and say that the dragon kills 100 on round 1. that leaves 4900. The commoners pull out bows and crossbows and fire on round 2, 4900 commoners can still auto hit on a 20, thats 1100 dmg before factoring crits, more than enough to kill most dragons. but why do people fear them? Because they feel they can't take on something so large and powerful.

Most dragons get DR 5/magic by young adult, and DR10/magic by mature adult. If 4900 commoners are still alive by the first round, assuming the dragon has DR5 (though a dragon that young probably wouldn't terrorize a city just yet, maybe a small village), then every 8 arrows will deal, assuming even spread of rolls, 6 damage, which means that those 4900 commoners are dealing (excluding crits) 183 damage per round. Stll a reasonable amount, sure, and most young adults can't handle that kind of damage in 1 round, but then you're assuming it's on a flat plane, and that every single citizen has a crossbow on hand within the first round of combat, and that the dragon isn't flying low to keep the number of attackers at any given time low due to buildings cutting off line of sight. If you up the DR to 10, then the damage becomes practically nonexistant, even the average damage of a crit will just bounce off his scales, and once you get to DR15 of a very old dragon, the kind that might actually start terrorizing a city, your commoners with crossbows are doing a massive 1 point of damage when rolling 2 natural 20s in a row, followed by 2 8s in a row on their crossbows. Unless you're saying that peasants in your world are carrying magical crossbows?

It isn't because they feel they can't take on something so large and powerful, it's because they actually can't take on something so large and powerful. If the dragon isn't old enough to have DR, then it's not old enough to even really be considered "big". Even the biggest class of dragons (red and gold) get DR5 a the same time they become huge, which is when their size starts to truly become daunting, but then, at the same time, those dragons are also 5th level spellcasters, meaning they're capable of casting a variety of spells that will aid them in assaulting a city (protection from arrows anyone?) if they really wanted to, not to mention their 10d10!! damage breath weapon and whopping 19 hit dice, meaning they have plenty of room to pick up feats like strafing breath weapon, which combined with their 150ft flight speed means they can hit a crazy huge area. 30ft or so int he sky makes a pretty massive circle, that can then be dragged along for 150ft- Look, ok, dragons are scary because they kill people, and they are good at killing people. 5000 commoners aren't going to do jack against a dragon, no matter how many crossbow bolts they fire.

Seward

2016-02-11, 10:56 PM

You say this like TO and PO exercises require you to spend your entire character's resources on something for the outcome. As for the huge array of spells, you are correct, they could pick any of them, but would they? In a society that punishes magic like this, why would anyone ever actually bother to learn something like phantom steed over say, dispel magic, or haste, or slow.
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Because Phantom Steed, especially the 3.5 version, is incredibly awesome? It is a flying motercycle that outspeeds overland flight by a fair margin and looks badass. Only Wind Walk is faster for exploring new areas and it's only a L3 spell slot per person, instead of level 6 slot, and you can fight while riding the steed, unlike Wind Walk where you have to shift back and forth.

(my Sorcereress took Phantom steed and never even considered haste or slow. Dispel, yeah, she took that.)

The abundance of spells would only exist in a society where researching incredibly niche, quality of life spells would actually be feasible. Nobody is going to pick up fabricate or stoneshape, and start doing masonry with it, because they would be found out and killed
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So again, these are incredibly handy utility spells. Fabricate means you can have all the comforts of civilization without actually risking spending time in civilization as long as you drop a handful of skill points into craft skills (with wizard intelligence one point per skill is enough to do masterwork stuff in most areas with Fabricate) Stone shape is an extremely important intrusion spell for those who like to go places they shouldn't, without the flash and risk of teleport spells.

I actually think in a world like this it is the combat oriented spells that would be slighted. If all I get for my efforts of being a wizard is 2 spells per level I'm going to take spells that make me comfortable and help me achieve whatever my goals other than "ultimate arcane power" might be. A politician might want enchantments, an explorer would want water breathing, a long duration swim spell, overland flight, various divination and sensory spells etc. The only reason most wizards stock up on combat spells is that in normal play you only get XP by killing things. In this world, killing things draws attention.

And those who do spend their valuable resources on those kinds of spells are killed off anyway.

As many others have said, it's not that ALL wizards take these options, it's that it only takes ONE wizard to take these options.

This is true enough and I believe that's what he wants to focus his campaign on. PCs are some of the exceptions who manage to thrive in spite of the organization, and the big bad is the first dude to actually build an optimized high level spellcasting survivor, who is fairly unsurprisingly embittered and evil by his horrible life.

I'll just say this. If I was offered a chance to play in this campaign, I'd jump at it. It's unusual and interesting, and it is perfectly ok if the PC storyline is in fact the arc of history that shows the anti-mage organization is fatally flawed once the cat is out of the bag.

arkangel111

2016-02-11, 11:32 PM

I think Seward nailed many of my points.

How would a wizard hide in society? probably grabbing small spells that can make him comfortable. Why wouldn't someone trying to seem an everyday herbalist, grab fabricate? Cover's those rare materials that the old man may not have the time or energy to go retrieve. Sure he can't build his business around just that but if he has regular deliveries already and then further enhances his materials with magic he could easily become a well off legitimate seeming businessman. His wealth then further opens up avenues into local politics where he slowly tries to make life easier for others hiding in plain sight.

The above scenario sounds more like a more realistic wizard than some one sitting in an extra-dimensional pocket of space content with living his entire life away from people, too scared to leave his safe area. Alone except maybe for his familiar and constructs. Slowly losing his sanity. This example sounds like a win for the organization. Effectively eliminated a powerful mage, never will he be seen again. If this same guy sends armies of constructs against the organization, how hard do you think it will be to convince the masses that he could take over them, crush them beneath his armies? That fear is another win for the organization.

Either way this discussion is turning away from the original point.

So lets adjust this somewhat so maybe we can get a few more build suggestions.

I ADMIT WIZARDS WIN 3.P. with that out of the way what is the BEST we can do against them at levels 5-10-15 using strike teams of 3-6. trying to stop as many of their tricks possible with the team using only mundanes? what can we do?

ATHATH

2016-02-12, 12:00 AM

I was going to suggest the Gnome Artificer PrC (from Magic of Faerun), but it requires a first-level Illusion spell. Does anyone here have a way around that? Can the GA dip Sorcerer and just never use spells?

There is a Spell-less Paladin variant out there, and an ACF that trades Detect Evil for Detect Magic (I think). Could you detect spellcasters with them?

ATHATH

2016-02-12, 12:02 AM

The Charlatan might also work, although you'd have to change its fluff (or not, if you want to infiltrate spellcaster society.

Seward

2016-02-12, 12:15 AM

At level 5-10, your 3-6 person strike team is all oriented around killing them before they get an action and are presumably backed up by really good intel. They use social skills, stealth, range, something to get an advantage.

At level 15, I don't think it can be done against a full caster with so few people. If you can lure them into a kill zone where hundreds of people are shooting at them something can be done. There was actually a Living Greyhawk scenario like this intended for tier 14-16 that I ran at a convention. The goal was to negotiate with a small army that had been surviving in an incredibly hostile blasted wasteland. Now granted they had some level 4-7 bards, wizards and clerics and a couple leaders in the level 10 range, but the PC's could get themselves into a situation where they fought the entire bunch at once, while pretty much being stuck in the exact center of them - think of a geometry something like a baseball stadium with the PC's starting right in the center. Negotiations take long enough that pre-cast buffs of shorter than 10 minutes/level won't still be running, and any spellcasting starts a fight, so no buffing unless you're silent/still etc.

I actually playtested this out, pregenerating a lot of die rolls to know who rolled a 20 on init, who rolled a 1, etc and focused pretty much on suppressing spellcasting. Readied actions when there was visibility, black tentacles+silence if they could be done in time, steady waves of blind firing and spells like fireball on people who had not moved yet if visibility was blocked etc. The army's melee combatants were in a close range ring and would do things like try to grapple anybody not in the kill zone if it seemed possible or would surround melee combatants and use a lot of "aid another" actions to let the heaviest hitter get a solid shot in. (these troops were supposed to be beyond elite, having survived an impossible environment for nearly a year, including big nasty extraplanar monsters. They'd leveled up a bit, the average grunt was about level 3-4 with PC class levels)

In general a level 16 party would have a really bad round and then somebody would succeed at a mitigating action and give them a slight breathing space - then the butchery would begin. I ran against randomized mixes of parties and not especially optimized builds (I found that playing at my own skill level plus the lack of surprise/panic in choices of actions gave enough of an advantage to the players that fairly generic builds and random party mix gave results similar to actual parties with players of varying skills and build optimization). I got a couple TPKs when the PCs just never got ahead of the suppression effects, but nearly always the suppression would encounter somebody too durable, subtle, something that would get their action off and do something like teleport the party away, or put up battlefield control sufficient to greatly reduce the incoming fire. Parties who wasted early actions on blasting, even very effective things like Holy Word (which would flatten all of the nearby melee combatants) got into more trouble.

Anybody who had not invested in significant AC/hitpoints was especially at risk, but the small amount of low-mid level magic support made a big difference in harassing the party. Once the party was no longer at the focus of a ton of attacks, they got second wind astonishingly quickly and started blowing huge chunks of the army away, with return fire being pretty much ineffective.

Now that said, you take away the spellcasters in the army, but have only one level 15 dude in the center of all that instead of 4-6 and postulate that he isn't something like a Pathfinder Diviner with a +15 initiative check or someone with Moment of Prescience who can automatically beat the entire army at initiative.....yeah, the dude might die.

Basically it's all about whether he can get a spell off if everybody who goes before him in initiative opens up with a readied action. (ideally the ambush involves a team focused on that, with everybody else just doing volley fire trying to kill him outright). You might be able to simulate the spellcasting support in various ways - swap the wizards with alchemists and you have the area boom covered. I don't know how you deal with verbal components lacking Silence, but a zillion thunderstones might at least deafen them and give a 20% failure chance. Some kind of tanglefoot bag barrage and nets might do a bit of what the Evard Tentacles did. For some kinds of casters, you'll succeed. You won't get anyone especially paranoid about the situation. As you can imagine setting up that kind of situation without making the caster paranoid is going to be a hell of a challenge, and it is still fairly likely to result in escape or the total destruction of your force. (if you win, you likely take no casualties. It's a very high risk/high reward kind of thing)

edit - 3-6 L15ish archers or chargemonkies might succeed IF they could somehow be equipped by proper wealth by level and went early. One problem with the whole setup though is that the wealth by level at 15 is so high I'm not sure you can properly equip a mundane at that level without spellcasting. The 1-10 game is a lot more plausible with "high craftsmanship" items and alchemist provided infusions that supercharge physical attributes, provide haste, etc.

Crake

2016-02-12, 12:37 AM

Because Phantom Steed, especially the 3.5 version, is incredibly awesome? It is a flying motercycle that outspeeds overland flight by a fair margin and looks badass. Only Wind Walk is faster for exploring new areas and it's only a L3 spell slot per person, instead of level 6 slot, and you can fight while riding the steed, unlike Wind Walk where you have to shift back and forth.

(my Sorcereress took Phantom steed and never even considered haste or slow. Dispel, yeah, she took that.)

The main point i was bringing up is that phantom steed is obviously magical to any outside observer (unless you stack it with some illusions), and so would be impractical to use due to the fact that you immediately reveal yourself to be a magic caster in a society that will kill you off for it.

So again, these are incredibly handy utility spells. Fabricate means you can have all the comforts of civilization without actually risking spending time in civilization as long as you drop a handful of skill points into craft skills (with wizard intelligence one point per skill is enough to do masterwork stuff in most areas with Fabricate) Stone shape is an extremely important intrusion spell for those who like to go places they shouldn't, without the flash and risk of teleport spells.

If the wizard is getting only his levelup spells (due to the fact that there is apparently no established society of magic, as, agian, if there were, it would have wiped out this organization), then why would they spend their valuable and limited resources of "spells known" on a spell who's usefulness will become practically 0 once you have finished building your base of operations or whatever else you might want to build. Once it's done, the spell is essentially shelved and left alone forever. On the other hand, picking up a spell who has a very vast array of uses (such as many of the staple spells of good wizards, polymorph, planar binding, etc, etc), or spells that have a niche you expect yourself to encounter very often (such as the niche of "survival", so teleport, celerity, contingency), will net you the ability to live long enough to have the luxury to actually research those other niche spells at your leisure.

Think in the mindset of a wizard who knows he will be hunted for his craft: will he focus on service and quality of life spells that make his life more comfortable, or allow him to exploit his magic for financial gain by offering casting services to others (who would kill him for it), or is he going to focus on spells that will ensure his survival first, and make sure he's able to still be alive a year down the track. Again, it's just darwinism, the starry eyed idealists get killed off, while the survivalists, well, survive.

I actually think in a world like this it is the combat oriented spells that would be slighted. If all I get for my efforts of being a wizard is 2 spells per level I'm going to take spells that make me comfortable and help me achieve whatever my goals other than "ultimate arcane power" might be. A politician might want enchantments, an explorer would want water breathing, a long duration swim spell, overland flight, various divination and sensory spells etc. The only reason most wizards stock up on combat spells is that in normal play you only get XP by killing things. In this world, killing things draws attention.

Oh, I very much agree, most wizards' arsenals in this kind of an environment would be based around subtle magic, either that, or using metamagic feats which misdirect their source, and skill tricks to make it seem like they aren't casting. That said, the idea is that once a wizard got to a high enough level, he could start to forgo that all, and simply start doing personal research for all the combat spells he could ever want.

This is true enough and I believe that's what he wants to focus his campaign on. PCs are some of the exceptions who manage to thrive in spite of the organization, and the big bad is the first dude to actually build an optimized high level spellcasting survivor, who is fairly unsurprisingly embittered and evil by his horrible life.

I'll just say this. If I was offered a chance to play in this campaign, I'd jump at it. It's unusual and interesting, and it is perfectly ok if the PC storyline is in fact the arc of history that shows the anti-mage organization is fatally flawed once the cat is out of the bag.

Now, if he wants this to essentially be the "first generation" of high level wizards, that's all well and good, but it would basically necessitate magic either being incredibly new, or some kind of cataclysmic event that somehow erased most/all magical knowledge very recently.

I'm honestly speaking about this from some level of personal experience, having run a game like this in the past (as I mentioned) though it was e6, essentially the only reason it was all possible. These oranizations quickly fell apart however, when the world transitioned from e6 to regular dnd (for in game reasons which I won't get into), as the organizations were quickly wiped out/taken over by even just mid level mages.

Honestly, without some context about your world and how this organization fits into it, I can't really say much about how it holds up from a logical standpoint, and that's personally what I always dislike the most about various plot points, when they don't hold up to logical scrutiny.

I think Seward nailed many of my points.

How would a wizard hide in society? probably grabbing small spells that can make him comfortable. Why wouldn't someone trying to seem an everyday herbalist, grab fabricate? Cover's those rare materials that the old man may not have the time or energy to go retrieve. Sure he can't build his business around just that but if he has regular deliveries already and then further enhances his materials with magic he could easily become a well off legitimate seeming businessman. His wealth then further opens up avenues into local politics where he slowly tries to make life easier for others hiding in plain sight.

That is until his competition calls him out for being a diabolical cultist for being able to grow such good herbs, he gets investigated, caught and killed. Quality of life spells would only realistically come into play in a society that would not kill you on sight for it. Especially since quality of life is one of the easier things to find out about. Once the third or fourth mage is captured and publically executed in any given city, the focus of magic will move away from comfort to misdirection and safety. Sure the early levels you wont have much to pick from, but at 9th level if your choice is between fabricate or teleport, only an idiot would pick fabricate. Fabricate cant help you when you hear your door being kicked in as the inquisition is calling for your head. Even at 4th level, stoneshape vs dimension door, which one ensures your survival, not stoneshape, I can tell you that.

The above scenario sounds more like a more realistic wizard than some one sitting in an extra-dimensional pocket of space content with living his entire life away from people, too scared to leave his safe area. Alone except maybe for his familiar and constructs. Slowly losing his sanity. This example sounds like a win for the organization. Effectively eliminated a powerful mage, never will he be seen again. If this same guy sends armies of constructs against the organization, how hard do you think it will be to convince the masses that he could take over them, crush them beneath his armies? That fear is another win for the organization.

The wizard isn't going to become a hermit in his extradimensional space! What's he got to be scared of? If he can cast mordenkainen's mansion, he's also got plenty of contingencies set up, and no magical competition. He only uses the extradimensional space as a safe place to prepare spells and sleep. Maybe also for some personal scribes to make him scrolls he wants, and a familiar with an imbued spell ability creating constructs for him while he goes out and picks up the materials, says hi to jeff on the way to the university he put together overnight with spells to teach the masses about magic. But only because he's high enough level to be safe.

The idea is that you get to be high level by picking the right spells, not that random people will survive to high levels and will have random spells. It's like evolution, if you impose conditions on survival, those who survive will have the tools to overcome those conditions. In this case, safe places to rest, with reasonable means to survive any mundane assault at any time.

Either way this discussion is turning away from the original point.

So lets adjust this somewhat so maybe we can get a few more build suggestions.

Well, something you never mentioned is whether Su or Sp abilities from classes count as magical? If so that rules out things even as mundane sounding as the monk, ranger and paladin, simply because some of their abilities are Su/Sp. Even some martial initiators are ruled out, and almost every prestige class that could be useful in taking out magic users, since most defenses against magic are magical in nature, so you're basically level with a mix between warblade, fighter, and lots of feats. Also gnomes would have been genocided, I hope they don't exist in your world, because every single gnome can cast SLAs innately, so they're magical and need to be eliminated.

arkangel111

2016-02-12, 01:21 AM

Gnomes do need to be eliminated. Part of the reason why the group is going to have trouble is because they are so racist. They have to fight on many fronts. The idea is that they will ultimately secure a good kingdom sized area from magic. Magic user's will come to power in various pockets around the world. However other than PC's someone can't normally just choose to be a caster, something sparks within them and they are a Wizard/Sorcerer/Cleric/Druid/Psion (the difference ultimately being how they "view" magic). They then have the choice of staying with those they love, probably hiding it from them and also risking their lives or they can make the dangerous trek across the kingdom and try to make a new life for themselves in another kingdom.

Of course none of this is where I plan on starting the group. The timeline I am choosing is when everything is still in its infancy. They'll have the greatest impact on the world at this point. They also have the chance to be the first high-level caster's. Next group I might have them be the Anti-mage groups. Ultimately the thing to remember is that this group is racist but not necessarily evil. Some spellcaster's have used their power's to control armies of undead and decimated entire villages, tried to set themselves up as monarch. Through dumb luck or crafty maneuvering this group has liberated the commoner's from their problems. Their main focus is on eliminating threats. However no one knows when a spellcaster will suddenly be powerful enough to destroy cities so they hunt and kill any they find, just to be on the safe side. Hell many spellcaster's are gonna be stuck at level one just because they fear the evil ability inside of them. Some will turn themselves in because they can't even trust their own abilities. Suddenly being able to blow up the barn with a fireball and killing her entire family, little Susie doesn't want to hurt anyone else.

Su/Sp abilities will be on a case by case basis, obviously an Su ability that turns you invisible is magic, but an Sp haste might easily be described as an adrenaline rush. I'll update the original post to make it clear, I honestly thought I had stated such.

The Glyphstone

2016-02-12, 01:30 AM

You had made the opposite clear, really, from your post on page 1:

NO MAGIC! of any kind, No Psionics, No Spell-likes, No divine. Things like Abundant step are magical. think of it this way... If a human in the real world cannot do it, its probably too much for this organization.

If you're willing to accept refluffing of certain abilities, such as some (Su) stuff, then that is a completely different paradigm and completely changes our available options. It still won't help in the level 15 range, except in the One Man vs. Army scenario Seward proposed, but below level 10 it does greatly increase potential answers to the problem.

(Aside, but (Su) is Supernatural and (Sp) is Spell-Like.)

Quertus

2016-02-12, 01:38 AM

A few people have been mentioning or at least implying that the wizard will have access to magic weapons while the group won't. Realistically magic items are an extreme rarity, +1-+5 weapons exist but I am fluffing them as not being magical just higher quality even than masterwork. You don't even need magic to craft them just sufficiently high skill.

Some might say that the wizard could craft his own, but think about it for a second, if he is crafting magic items he is far more likely to get caught. the market for magic items isn't there, no one wants to be caught harboring a mage or even using a magic item because they might end up a target as well.

Most NPC spellcaster's aren't going to have a fully optimized list. Wizards are going to rarely have more than their level up allotted spells. Technically I would even go as far as saying a wizard is bumped to T2 maybe even T3 while a sorcerer and other spontaneous caster's might be bumped to T1. Its dangerous to let anyone know your a caster so how are you going to share spells? How many guides suggest getting scolls of X or Y because they are a must-have in a given situation but a waste of a spell slot normally? In this world if you don't have it then you don't have it.

Leveling up is dangerous for multiple reasons for these caster's. If a caster level's up and gets access to new spells he has to decide which spells he gets. If the situation he is in requires that he grabs water-breathing and he picks it up, well now that is what he is stuck with even if he never goes near water again for the rest of his life. You might say "well alter-self is better" yes but he didn't need alter-self he needed to breath water and that's what his mind gave him, perhaps he has never even seen a humanoid creature that can breathe water so it never even crossed his mind that something like that could be done with magic. By doing something that leveled him up he must have exposed himself in some way as a caster. Was there only 21 people in that building he just blew up? or did one escape out the back or only pretend to be dead, and now knows his face?

The caster finds an extradimensional space, or just somewhere really inaccessible, and crafts items. No extra threat to craft. And magical weapons are about the last magical items most mages need.

(Now, RAW, as soon as someone sees his magical items, even on a failed appraise check, they know it is worth far more than any RAW mundane item, and he gets ganked.)

The caster casts spells to defeat monsters out in the wilderness, where no one is watching. No extra threat to level.

Or the caster fights like a mundane. No extra threat to level.

And all wizards get scribe scroll at first level. And detect magic. And run off intelligence. As others have mentioned, I think they'll figure it out - especially given the cost of not doing so.

So taking what we have learned so far:

1. Alchemist's are an easy refluff that can help level the playing field. Still needs quite a bit of work though, still don't want to give mundanes too many toys, only for story reason's though.
2. Barbed arrow's and spears with heavy weights (thinking of attaching to a tower shield) can be used to reduce teleportation effects
3. Going first and killing outright is the best defense (High Damage High initiative)
4. Abilities like IHS, evasion and Mettle are almost mandatory.
5. Mageslayer feats help level the playing field.
6. There currently is no known mundane material that negatively affects casters
7. Pets break the action economy (Nature Soul, Animal Ally, Boon Companion) I have thought about making a custom creature to help take care of a few of these problems.
8. No reliable way to detect magic user's.
9. Spy network is this groups best friend.

You seem to have missed (at least) stealth, theft, range, grappling (in various forms), and poison as integral parts of several (different) "gank them" plans.

Odd that you mention pets breaking the action economy, while seeking to use the same-sized group to tackle a party as attacked and defeated an individual caster. Which of these more accurately reflects the organization's mindset and policy?

Arcanist-hunting rangers solve a third of the problem of finding non mundanes. Besides, shouldn't the organization like all the false positives its literal witch hunt mentality inspires, as that only serves to increase paranoia and the seeming need for its continued existence?

arkangel111

2016-02-12, 01:53 AM

Sayt

2016-02-12, 01:54 AM

As far as I'm aware you cannot coup de grace a stunned opponent, plus there are a few nice and easy ways to avoid being stunned, including a fairly cheap magic item. Sure you need to not be flat footed to use an immediate action, but there are plenty of means to achieve that.

Merciless Butchery and its prerequisite, Dastardly Finish specifically allow for the CDGing of Stunned enemies. Butchery also adds cowering, and makes it more action economical.

The Glyphstone

2016-02-12, 02:01 AM

As to the mindset of the group I am aiming for 3-6 because that forces better builds. If I Say 30 people will go against a level 15 then I'll end up with 1 of this guy and 1 of this guy and ....... Whereas more realistically the organization will be training them as strike teams of 3-6 members, should they need more, then I'll just send 2 or 3 strike teams comprised of members with similar builds. much easier to build encounter's with several of the same guys rather than 30 individuals.

Which makes sense. No one expects 30 unique builds, just that there will be at minimum 30+ people in the combined assault force if they want even a snowball's chance in Hell.*

*Not counting Stygia or Cania, as they are levels of Hell in which a snowball will do just fine.

ATHATH

2016-02-12, 10:26 AM

The Gnomish Artificer can actually be a Human.

Maybe a Human took a level of Sorcerer, was horrified, and turned himself in? He then refuses to use his magic, but can still take levels in the Gnomish Artificer PrC.

GreyBlack

2016-02-12, 10:45 AM

[QUOTE=Quertus;20414178
You seem to have missed (at least) stealth, theft, range, grappling (in various forms), and poison as integral parts of several (different) "gank them" plans.
[/QUOTE]

Casters outrange mundane, stealth is killed by various divisible, grappling a caster is impossible given Freedom of Movement, and poison is impossible given certain buffs they should always have active.

Waazraath

2016-02-12, 11:08 AM

Haven't read all post so far in detail, so if I double something, sorry. Some things might worth be mentioning after reading this:

1. Alchemist's are an easy refluff that can help level the playing field. Still needs quite a bit of work though, still don't want to give mundanes too many toys, only for story reason's though.
2. Barbed arrow's and spears with heavy weights (thinking of attaching to a tower shield) can be used to reduce teleportation effects
3. Going first and killing outright is the best defense (High Damage High initiative)
4. Abilities like IHS, evasion and Mettle are almost mandatory.
5. Mageslayer feats help level the playing field.
6. There currently is no known mundane material that negatively affects casters
7. Pets break the action economy (Nature Soul, Animal Ally, Boon Companion) I have thought about making a custom creature to help take care of a few of these problems.
8. No reliable way to detect magic user's.
9. Spy network is this groups best friend.

- Diplomancy: abusable just as well by mundanes as by magic users, get a lot of allies by making them helpful.
- More allies: buy animals and hirelings, get the leaderhip feat
- For ranged combat: the class Anointed Knight in Book of Exalted deeds can pick an ability to make an attack as a free action 3/day. Use it with an archer to get 3 extra attacks. Following a normal full attack, that should be enough.
- Especially if you use poison, lots of it
- depending on the level op optimization / sillyness you want to tolerate: have 'em buy ladders, cut them up and sell 'em as 2 ten feet poles. But if these kind of shenenigans are allowed, you've already lost cause if casters do the same, you never win.
- RAGE! There's a feat that allows a barbarian to go into a rage, even when flat footed. So you can act before you can act, very good.
- especially when your rage triggers other effects. Like fear. There are several feats and class features that make fear effects trigger when going into rage. If you loose initiative, at least the caster might be frightened or panicked. See the fear handbook 'Art of war'.
- I'm not sure about evasion and mettle. If you reach the point where you need them, haven't you lost already?
- There are several classes that specialize in killing casters (or at least, are supposed to), like the Witch slayer (ToM) and the Arcanopath monk (Dragon Compendium). Though their abilities that focus on disabling casters might be too 'magicial' themselves.
- There are mundane items that impair someone's hearing (I think 'thunderstone') or something from PHB, for 20% spell failure. Maybe there are more, which make it harder to use verbal and somatic componenents?
- is there somthing that can be done with range? Spotting the caster 1000 feet distance, and using heavy heavy crossbows, siege weapons or hurling hulkers to kill before the caster knows combat is about to start>?

Flickerdart

2016-02-12, 11:30 AM

- is there somthing that can be done with range? Spotting the caster 1000 feet distance, and using heavy heavy crossbows, siege weapons or hurling hulkers to kill before the caster knows combat is about to start>?
Any situation where you can see the caster, the caster can see you (since skill bonuses are easiest to get with spells and items). What you want to do is use artillery that doesn't rely on line of sight.

Also, here's a thought - are there monsters in this world? Can you just bait a dragon to go and eat the wizard for you?

Seward

2016-02-12, 11:38 AM

Casters outrange mundane, stealth is killed by various divisible, grappling a caster is impossible given Freedom of Movement, and poison is impossible given certain buffs they should always have active.

Stealth is actually quite hard to manage when done by skill instead of invisibility. Stealth combined with range is nearly unbeatable even with high level magic aside from Foresight and Momement of Prescience. Social skills are even harder to beat at close range. 100 feet of range cancels out a +10 perception item. No, the caster can't see you at bow ranges. I've taken advantage of this fact in real D&D against other high perception foes too, such as CR12-15 outsiders when they were in the open and I was fortunate enough to have range and concealment to work with. Siege equipment is harder to conceal, but it isn't impossible, at least for the first shot. The real problem is they aren't really designed to target an individual, Black Company vs Taken notwithstanding.

The main defense is to be a class that can't be surprised and gets large initiative bonuses, such as Diviner Wizard or Divine Strategist Cleric or have a well thought out contingency spell. High wisdom classes can be a problem for these tactics - you need to use the social team on the druid and the sneaky team on the cleric if you don't outlevel them by quite a bit or have feats like skill focus to boost numbers. Low wisdom wizards, sorcerers and such will be pretty vulnerable to these tactics as they just won't see it coming until it happens.

You have to be a cleric or druid of level 7+ or oracle of level 8+ to have freedom of movement and as a 10 minute/level buff it isn't running 24x7. Grappling will still exist as an option. What defeats it in the end is high concentration checks - a L15 caster can teleport out of a grapple very reliably. A level 10 caster is in the range where it starts being something that'll work a lot of the time.

Poison is ok against arcane casters (they really have nothing in their spell lists that helps) but useless against divine casters level 7+ (where slow poison runs for 14 hours and you have enough spell slots to keep it running whenever you are awake) and is problematic against level 3-6 divine casters in the same way freedom of movement is - you can keep it running a long time, and relative immunity to poison for most of the day is worth a spell slot or two in this environment.

ExperimentAlpha

2016-02-12, 11:51 AM

I don't think it strictly follows those rules but I know a guy who asserts that he can take any caster any day of the week with a straight fighter. I'll harry him for the build when I have a moment to do so, but it's less the build and more the mindset of the player and an adequate synthesis of crunch concept and the theology of martial perfection.

Eldariel

2016-02-12, 12:02 PM

The more-or-less-optimal approach requires similar builds. Mundanes are worse at complementing one another. E.g. stealth gets worse with multiple evenly skilled characters, let alone anyone worse than average. Melee options don't meaningfully boost one another outside ToB too. Tome of Battle Warblade or Crusader focusing on White Raven can be an efficient battlefield commander giving teammates bonus movement, attacks and things of that nature. One of those around is a must, as is everybody having access to White Raven Tactics (extra actions really help).

Like I mentioned earlier, the best bet is stealth. Melding into the crowd in cities or being unseen in the wilderness, if a caster is ever to be caught offguard (or at least forced to blow Contingencies), these people will have to get the first move. For stealth to be effective, you need everyone with stealth proficiency. The whole group should probably have Darkstalker [Lords of Madness], Hide in Plain Sight (plethora of sources) and Mind Blank (Occult Slayer is probably the only option within your range of limitations). If one is seen, the rest of the hiders aren't that impressive. At least one guy needs to have social prowess to rally mobs.

Probably a straight-up diplomancer in the high end; epic uses of skills can do amazing things (talk that Wizard into coming with you quietly and then killing himself as a sacrifice for the eldritch abomination Yglthl), except the rules make PCs immune to Diplomacy. Probably the leader type. Epic Spot and Listen can negate illusions and such. Defeat Illusion is DC80, which is rather hefty to hit without using magic though. Invisibility and its ilk are in the reasonable DC40 range, so that's probably something to aim for.

All in the group should probably have at least 1 Ranger-level (using the Arcane Hunter variant from Complete Mage) and the Nemesis-feat from Book of Exalted Deeds (refluff as necessary). That provides a radar that allows them complete awareness of all arcanes within 60' of them, and some other minor bonuses. The whole group needs some ranged combat ability. Preferably enough to be able to engage from stealth at distance and kill or incapacitate a careless enemy before any spells go off. This reduces the need for Spots or such to bypass most illusions.

It should go without saying that someone needs Spellcraft (probably all of them) enough to understand whatever the caster might be doing in case things go south. Knowledge (Arcane) as well as probably all the Creature Type Knowledges should probably be present to provide a reasonable fighting chance against the various summons.

Thus, I'd go with:
Int-type with Knowledges (plus Knowledge Devotion)
Wis-type with Spot/Listen/etc.
Cha-type with leadership abilities and skilled manipulation
Dex-specialist handling stuff like quickly stealing all of someone's possessions and such, or Str-specialist (see below).

All of them should have stealth abilities and that one Ranger level plus, come level 10, at least one Warblade-or-Crusader level for White Raven Tactics. The hard part is of course overcoming the various defenses a caster may have. A level 10 caster may well be immune to damage already. Poisons are a good one but their immunity is easy to acquire too. I might be tempted to include a Zhentarim Fighter or someone else with Imperious Command (the Cha-type perhaps) to Intimidate-lock targets. However, it's not impossible to acquire immunity to.

They need at least one Thinaun [Complete Warrior] per higher level attack cell, to seal away the souls of any casters they're lucky enough to take down. Can't have clones or contingent resurrections or such activate. And yeah, alchemical items plus drugs should be abused to all hell and back. If you want to bring some higher power level into the play, you could give one of them Cancer Mage [Book of Vile Darkness] levels. The first level, all you want, is purely Extraordinary as are its requirements. It's great for making extra mileage out of some disease, particularly Festering Anger and such. This provides essentially infinite stat boosts, which is convenient given the lack of magic items. Of course, for game balance reasons you should limit the numbers but still, this allows you to give them way higher stats than what you'd expect out of normal humans. Plus, the elite assault groups using essentially very dangerous supersteroids they themselves have developed an immunity to sounds just like the kind of thing you'd expect.

One nice build that could give them some extra muscle is Stoneblessed [Races of Stone] into Barbarian with the Goliath sublevels [Races of Stone] into Hulking Hurler [Complete Warrior]. This would allow for one to essentially hulk out and throw giant rocks (or other giant objects) at the caster which makes minor defenses like Windwall much, much less reliable. This is substantially high optimization for a mundane already though but one of the few ways for human to get access to Hulking Hurler without templates or magic. Though that class only really gets broken with size increases; these numbers would offer enough to bypass many ordinary and numeric problems though.

Things like Delay Death and Regeneration + Favor of the Martyr would be very hard for these guys to deal with regardless. There are some Strikes in ToB that can stun people (stun immunity is possible though) or rob them of their next actions or so (daze immunity can be acquired too so be careful though), so that's a way to temporarily incapacitate someone, and being able to Sunder magic items might help in case the caster is reliant on those: given these guys' stance on magic items, that's probably their modus operandi anyways. It doesn't actually take feats, though being able to Chain Sunder is nice. The fact that they probably have no way to break actual spell effects (unless you homebrew some anti-magic material; that might be a good course of action actually) could be seen as something of an issue. It's fully possible to acquire a set of buffs they simply couldn't break.

ATHATH

2016-02-12, 12:19 PM

ahenobarbi

2016-02-12, 12:23 PM

If those guys are Nazis they don't have to be sincere. Low rank members may indeed be restricted to actually mundane stuff but elite units use experimental devices (magic items, but it's not like they can Detect Magic). Higher ups can straight out casters pretenting to be able to break through magic with sheer willpower (still, silent, invisible dispells) and extremly capable (buffed in private).

Jormengand

2016-02-12, 12:24 PM

What level is the Fighter? Is he level 9999999 with every feat that he qualifies for?

Ehh. I could take that with a level 20 wizard.

Okay, I could take that with, like, a level 10 wizard. A truenamer I'd just about have to break out the level 20, though it would be possible to win earlier.

Quertus

2016-02-12, 12:44 PM

Which makes sense. No one expects 30 unique builds, just that there will be at minimum 30+ people in the combined assault force if they want even a snowball's chance in Hell.*

*Not counting Stygia or Cania, as they are levels of Hell in which a snowball will do just fine.

I broke out laughing at this one. I had a character bring itemized snowballs with him into hell; imagine his surprise when he wound up on an iceberg! He left one of his snowballs there, and whenever anyone said anything about a snowball's chance, he would just chuckle.

ExperimentAlpha

2016-02-12, 01:39 PM

He's requested that I not share his build. Oh well. Sorry for getting your hopes up. All I can say is that it is truly terrifying.

Flickerdart

2016-02-12, 01:42 PM

He's requested that I not share his build. Oh well. Sorry for getting your hopes up. All I can say is that it is truly terrifying.
Somehow I'm not surprised. We've had lots of threads with similar claims where the mundane side constantly refused to nail down a build, for obvious reasons.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-12, 02:24 PM

Stealth is actually quite hard to manage when done by skill instead of invisibility. Stealth combined with range is nearly unbeatable even with high level magic aside from Foresight and Momement of Prescience. Social skills are even harder to beat at close range. 100 feet of range cancels out a +10 perception item. No, the caster can't see you at bow ranges. I've taken advantage of this fact in real D&D against other high perception foes too, such as CR12-15 outsiders when they were in the open and I was fortunate enough to have range and concealment to work with. Siege equipment is harder to conceal, but it isn't impossible, at least for the first shot. The real problem is they aren't really designed to target an individual, Black Company vs Taken notwithstanding.
Disregarding that stealth works both ways (and the casters do it better), where are you finding these wide-open spaces with convenient, easily identified spellcasters readily available?
In the city where the wizards and sorcerers who aren't already dead take great pains to appear as unremarkable merchants and minor craftsmen and not stick out from the crowd until they're too strong to defeat?

In secluded cloisters and monasteries where clerics and archivists are pretty much indistinguishable from all the other monks and priests?
Where the people who surround them are far more likely to side with the guy with a direct line to their god than your hunters?

Or in the forest, where your "elite warriors" are hunting druids? Or rather, providing the druids with fertilizer, pet food and handy experience to level up with, because chances are they could walk right past one without even noticing while the druid can pretty much strike at will.

Don't even get me started on how you plan to get siege engines positioned in any of those places in advance without anyone noticing.

Social skills don't work against PCs. And even if they did you'll be hard-pressed to get anywhere with no skill boosters, no +cha item, etc.
We're talking base ranks and unboosted base charisma here, maybe with Skill Focus and a Marshal if you're lucky. You're not diplomancing anyone with that who wasn't already on your side to begin with.
In exchange you suck at combat, and social skills take time. Time you really don't have against enemies who can rather early learn to read your thoughts.
And like with stealth they're simply better at the whole social skill thing thanks to buffs, and that's without counting enchantment spells.

The main defense is to be a class that can't be surprised and gets large initiative bonuses, such as Diviner Wizard or Divine Strategist Cleric or have a well thought out contingency spell. High wisdom classes can be a problem for these tactics - you need to use the social team on the druid and the sneaky team on the cleric if you don't outlevel them by quite a bit or have feats like skill focus to boost numbers. Low wisdom wizards, sorcerers and such will be pretty vulnerable to these tactics as they just won't see it coming until it happens.
The main defense is not being an idiot and keeping your spellcasting ability to yourself until you're strong enough to survive being overt with it.
After that there's using your sky-high mental attributes to pick smart spell choices appropriate to your situation to get to that point faster.
Then come spells that let you avoid engaging in direct combat - Charms, compulsions, illusions, divinations and teleports to defuse, misdirect, predict and evade, and summoning spells to thin out your enemies without risk to yourself, all the while getting experience and power.
They're also winning by attrition, because summons refresh daily while every man you lose is gone, and possible another soldier against you if the caster engages in necromancy - and gods help you if he does, because chances are he'll go for the incorporeal ones that you're utterly defenseless against sooner rather than later.

Only then come spells like Nerveskitter or Sign, various familiars that boost initiative and spells and magic items that boost dex - again things that the hunters don't have.

And if you're using Skill Focus to boost your numbers into the barely acceptable you're not going to be killing anyone, because you really needed these feats for actual combat.

You have to be a cleric or druid of level 7+ or oracle of level 8+ to have freedom of movement and as a 10 minute/level buff it isn't running 24x7. Grappling will still exist as an option. What defeats it in the end is high concentration checks - a L15 caster can teleport out of a grapple very reliably. A level 10 caster is in the range where it starts being something that'll work a lot of the time.
You don't need teleport to defend against grapples. That's just the easiest way when there's so many items that grant immediate action teleports.
Remember how focusing on grappling isn't even a viable strategy when you're playing with full magic item access and a buffer? Defending against grappling is easy for spellcasters.

Poison is ok against arcane casters (they really have nothing in their spell lists that helps) but useless against divine casters level 7+ (where slow poison runs for 14 hours and you have enough spell slots to keep it running whenever you are awake) and is problematic against level 3-6 divine casters in the same way freedom of movement is - you can keep it running a long time, and relative immunity to poison for most of the day is worth a spell slot or two in this environment.
Every one of the primary spellcasters has something on his spell list that helps. It's called summoning. Seriously, take a look at those monster options sometime, starting at SM 2 or 3. You're basically summoning miniature clerics and sorcerers from the mid levels on.

Also every actually useful poison is expensive as hell, comes from creatures that your guys have no hope of defeating or super-rare plants (that'll probably eat you too) and requires craft checks that you have no hope of making without high levels or magical assistance.
What's left is the DC 10-15 poisons that even average people can deal with.

Flickerdart

2016-02-12, 04:16 PM

Let's try and do something - set a baseline for what these guys can kill. To this end, I will now produce three spell lists for a level 10 wizard with spells prepared completely at random from the SRD. Then we will see what the mundanes can do against them.

Rando the Wizard
Rando has an Int of 15, the bare minimum to be a 10th level wizard. He knows 7 first level spells, 4 2nd level spells, 4 3rd level spells, 4 4th level spells, and 4 5th level spells, and prepares randomly from these.

1: Feather fall, alarm, disguise self, detect undead, erase, enlarge person, endure elements
2: False life, pyrotechnics, spectral hand, hypnotic pattern
3: Stinking cloud, dispel magic, sleet storm, explosive runes
4: Greater invisibility, mass enlarge person, rainbow pattern, phantasmal killer
5: Waves of fatigue, feeblemind, telekinesis, cloudkill

Ignoring cantrips, his spells per day are 5/5/3/3/2/2. His random spells prepared today are:
1: Disguise self, alarm*2, erase, endure elements
2: Hypnotic pattern*2, false life, pyrotechnics, spectral hand
3: Stinking cloud, dispel magic, sleet storm
4: Rainbow pattern, greater invisibility, phantasmal killer
5: Waves of fatigue, feeblemind, cloudkill

You can't sneak up on this wizard because of alarm. He can create concealment, fascinate his assailants, or turn himself invisible to flee. He can cause fatigue in his pursuers, so they cannot run (but he can). He can permanently reduce one of the hit squad into a drooling moron, with a wave of his hand. As soon as he turns a corner, he is a completely different person or invisible, and you can't be sure he didn't just teleport away.

Without preparing specifically for a spell list, how does the hit squad deal with Rando?

Azoth

2016-02-12, 05:24 PM

Flickerdart

2016-02-12, 05:26 PM

or gear

What save-boosting gear are you expecting?

Azoth

2016-02-12, 05:32 PM

Sorry, I momentarily forgot that these guys/gals can't use magical gear. The saves are still adequate without gear.

Flickerdart

2016-02-12, 05:44 PM

Also, these guys are unlikely to be able to use Nemesis, as they are kind of evil and it's very much Exalted.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-12, 05:49 PM

Ranger1 Arcane Hunter ACF +Nemesis feat negates his concealment, disguise, and invisibility to a degree by allowing the NPC to know his exact square within 60ft.

Nemesis is an exalted feat. You know, "only intelligent characters of good alignment and the highest moral standards" can acquire them, and "only as a gift from powerful agents of good - deities, celestials and similar creatures" (BoED p. 39)?

I rather doubt the fanatic mage-murderer is going to qualify for the first part, and everything in the second is on his to-kill list because he's an anti-magic nazi.

Edit: Swordsage'd

Azoth

2016-02-12, 06:09 PM

The build still automatically detects all magical auras within 60ft. Auravision from Occult Slayer gives him that. If he knew he was raiding an enemy of notable strength, he could also throw up Mind Over Magic to give him 8 levels worth of spell turning.

LordOfCain

2016-02-12, 06:20 PM

ExLibrisMortis

2016-02-12, 06:42 PM

Also, these guys are unlikely to be able to use Nemesis, as they are kind of evil and it's very much Exalted.
While I agree that as written, these mage-hunters don't qualify for Nemesis, I don't think the feat is exactly the stuff of Goodness, and that it would not be inappropriate to have an equivalent [Vile] feat. Since there is some leeway for homebrew here, we should assume that the mage-hunters can use the Nemesis ability.

Hecuba

2016-02-12, 06:44 PM

Your best options are generally going to involve finding a way to make an overwhelming and unanticipated first strike.

If we need to be entirely Ex, a good option here will be Scouts.
You'll likely need different strike teams for Urban and natural environments (and you'll want to take the Cityscape web enhancement ACFs for the urban environments).
This will net you Ex Camouflage and HIPS by 8 and 14 respectively.

You'll specifically want at least a couple of them to be melee scouts with Mage Slayer, on the off-chance that this makes it past the surprise round.

Poisons are a good option, if you don't mind the RAW that they are always Evil: Con poisons in particular can help with concentration checks.
If you're comfortable with with waving the requirement only spell-casters can create alchemical items, there are several that can be used on unsuspecting casters as well. Thunderstones and Mad Alchemist can be particularly useful.

There are still plenty of ways around something like this for even a moderately optimized caster.
But generally, at that point you've reached a caster that is prepared to be ambushed at any time without warning- which is to say, a caster that is specifically working to beat these guys.
Since such a caster can reasonably arrange to be aware of the danger before it happens and/or always act first, you're not going to beat them unless you can come up with some way to keep them from simply teleporting away whenever you get close. And having a contingency to teleport away if they happen not to notice you getting close.

If, however, you're looking at people who happen to be casters and are trying to slide under the radar while living their normal life, it can work. You'll have to hand-wave how such a non-combatant leveled up even once or twice, but that's not unusual for NPCs.

Let's try and do something - set a baseline for what these guys can kill. To this end, I will now produce three spell lists for a level 10 wizard with spells prepared completely at random from the SRD. Then we will see what the mundanes can do against them.

Rando the Wizard
Rando has an Int of 15, the bare minimum to be a 10th level wizard. He knows 7 first level spells, 4 2nd level spells, 4 3rd level spells, 4 4th level spells, and 4 5th level spells, and prepares randomly from these.

1: Feather fall, alarm, disguise self, detect undead, erase, enlarge person, endure elements
2: False life, pyrotechnics, spectral hand, hypnotic pattern
3: Stinking cloud, dispel magic, sleet storm, explosive runes
4: Greater invisibility, mass enlarge person, rainbow pattern, phantasmal killer
5: Waves of fatigue, feeblemind, telekinesis, cloudkill

Ignoring cantrips, his spells per day are 5/5/3/3/2/2. His random spells prepared today are:
1: Disguise self, alarm*2, erase, endure elements
2: Hypnotic pattern*2, false life, pyrotechnics, spectral hand
3: Stinking cloud, dispel magic, sleet storm
4: Rainbow pattern, greater invisibility, phantasmal killer
5: Waves of fatigue, feeblemind, cloudkill

You can't sneak up on this wizard because of alarm. He can create concealment, fascinate his assailants, or turn himself invisible to flee. He can cause fatigue in his pursuers, so they cannot run (but he can). He can permanently reduce one of the hit squad into a drooling moron, with a wave of his hand. As soon as he turns a corner, he is a completely different person or invisible, and you can't be sure he didn't just teleport away.

Without preparing specifically for a spell list, how does the hit squad deal with Rando?

If using the level 8 scouts above, the hit squad simply needs to wait for Rando to leave his house and goes out for groceries: they then kill him (or render him unconscious) in the surprise round.
Alarm wards an area of 20ft, so it is only an issue if they try to take him while he is relatively stationary (a bad idea for many reasons, alarm simply being the one that comes online earliest).

Crake

2016-02-12, 06:47 PM

Serafina

2016-02-12, 06:49 PM

Instead of refluffing magic weapons (and other stat-boosting items) as just really really good craftsmanship, consider using Automatic Bonus Progression (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/automatic-bonus-progression).
It doesn't even need refluffing to turn it's bonuses into "this person is just that good due to training and experience", and it provides nothing that can't be explained that way. The bonuses to weapons and armor are just because you know how to use them well, the deflection bonus is because you are experienced at defending yourself, the natural armor is because you got tougher, you get a resistance bonus due to experience and the attribute boosts are from training.

And hey, since the rules also cut WBL in half, it will definetly disadvantage the magic-users more than it will disadvantage the mundanes.

Azoth

2016-02-12, 09:35 PM

Auravision from occult slayer is clearly magical in nature, his own order kills him for his ability!

Per the build guidelines Su/Sp abilities are allowed on a case by case basis. His order may/may not kill him based on how OP rules it.

Alex12

2016-02-12, 10:55 PM

Y'all are chumps. Watch and learn.

First off, I'll direct you to Pathfinder's collection of Technological Items (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/goods-and-services/technological-gear), which are very much non-magical and yet capable of operating on the level of magic, at least in a number of ways, in particular damage. This is how you handle those guys who cast Flight+Wind Wall, with laser or gravity weapons.

Then, well, Pathfinder has this wonderful little thing called Blightburn Paste (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/goods-and-services/herbs-oils-other-substances#TOC-Blightburn-Paste). It's radioactive and disrupts teleportation within 60 feet- doesn't completely jam it, but it does take a DC 30 caster level check, which isn't exactly an easy thing to beat, generally.
Since the stuff is a paste, you should be able to take it out and smear it on yourself so that you are radioactive and disrupt teleportation. Now, normally slathering yourself with deadly radioactive paint is a terrible terrible idea, except that Technology Guide calls out radiation as a poison effect, and Blightburn Paste's effect is a disease effect. So you merely need to become immune to both those things.
The Disease Immunity feat from Heroes of Horror grants immunity to one particular disease, and makes all others less effective. Take that feat and pick Blightburn Sickness. Similarly, the Poison Immunity feat from Book of Vile Darkness (and a couple of other books) let you pick a disease to be immune to. Pick radiation.
Congrats, you can safely charge into battle with your teleport-disrupting radioactive body paint! But what's this? The enemy wizard turned incorporeal? Well, he's already irradiated, so there's that, but okay, you actually need to kill him- he might have a cleric buddy with Remove Disease or something. Well, you could use a technological force effect weapon (Vortex Guns are FUN!), but those run on batteries and are incredibly expensive. So instead you draw your trusty Jade weapon (special material from Oriental Adventures that grants ghost touch) and run him through. Oh, he polymorphed you into a ferret and threw up a wall of iron between you? Iron Heart Surge ends negative effects on yourself, and the Mountain Hammer line of maneuvers ignores hardness and all forms of DR, coupled with increased damage, so that wall of iron will quickly become a pile of iron rubble. Time to die, mage-boy!

"But wait, Alex12, how did I prevent him from Scrying on me?" I hear you ask, "Surely as a member of an elite strike force, I'm a person of interest to him." Why yes, yes you are. Which is why you are carrying several pounds of Urdrukar (Arms & Equipment Guide) on your person, every two pounds of which adds +2 to the DC to scry on you.

I'll also note that Alchemists and Investigators can fairly trivially be turned into nonmagical classes, if you just fluff their self-buffs as being due to stuff that's tailored to their biochemistry and disallow a few specific options.

Now, will this stop a level 20 Wizard from killing you to death with an Ice Assassin of an Aleax of himself? No, it will not, not even a little bit. Nor will it let you handle Pun-pun. But it will allow you to to effectively combat the average blaster caster or gish who happens to have some utility spells up the sleeves of his dressrobes.

Eldariel

2016-02-13, 04:49 AM

So instead you draw your trusty Jade weapon (special material from Oriental Adventures that grants ghost touch) and run him through.

Serrenwood Bow or Arrow works rather well for this purpose. Note that the arrows can also be used as improvised melee weapons with ghost touch should the situation come down to that. Also, an Elvencraft Serrenwood Bow is a ghost touch melee weapon. That said, the primary problem with incorporeality is their tendency and ability to sneak inside, and act inside walls. A combination of sufficient damage plus Mountain Hammer (or just overwhelming damage) allows breaking the section of the wall (with Nemesis locating the target) and getting to the ghostform inside.

ATHATH

2016-02-13, 12:16 PM

@Alex: Bravo! Those are wonderful finds!

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-13, 03:31 PM

Then, well, Pathfinder has this wonderful little thing called Blightburn Paste (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/goods-and-services/herbs-oils-other-substances#TOC-Blightburn-Paste). It's radioactive and disrupts teleportation within 60 feet- doesn't completely jam it, but it does take a DC 30 caster level check, which isn't exactly an easy thing to beat, generally.
Yeah, that DC 30 CL check is tough - if your enemy is incapable of moving away from it. You haven't exactly prevented anyone from casting Swift Expeditious Retreat yet.

It also causes 2d6 fire damage per round when you're touching it. The wizard doesn't need to do anything but wait, unless you suddenly got nonmagical fire resistance.
Blightburn Sickness also has a 1 day onset time, so you have plenty of time to get it cured - assuming you're a spellcaster. All your friends who aren't immune and all those civilians who got within 60ft of you are also irradiated, with no healing in sight - good job.

he might have a cleric buddy with Remove Disease or something.
Or maybe he learned Summon Monster. There's several who come with Remove Disease, Neutralize Poison and/or healing spells even in the basic spells, with more options if he's actually a specialized summoner and took the feats to get more options.

Oh, he polymorphed you into a ferret and threw up a wall of iron between you?
Yeah, and if you fail the will save on PF Baleful Polymorph you lose all special abilities of your original form, along with your mental stats. The only way to get out of that without magic is to get into a natural dead magic zone and IHS there. Not exactly an in-combat option.

And why would he target your (almost certainly) strong save? Charm or Dominate would be a much more effective option, aren't helped by IHS at all and it's unlikely you'll have much if any resistance to mind-affecting attacks. Watching you slaughter your friends is a lot more interesting than turning you into a ferret too.

"But wait, Alex12, how did I prevent him from Scrying on me?" I hear you ask, "Surely as a member of an elite strike force, I'm a person of interest to him." Why yes, yes you are. Which is why you are carrying several pounds of Urdrukar (Arms & Equipment Guide) on your person, every two pounds of which adds +2 to the DC to scry on you.
It's every 5 pounds, actually. Since for most non-casters will is a weak save and most divinations target that it makes it a little harder, but not exactly impossible to be scryed on, especially not by an optimized caster who'll throw save DCs in the mid-20s by level 10. Sure, you can carry even more Urdrukar, but if you're lugging 20 pounds of metal around in addition to your other gear you're probably not going to be chasing anyone, and certainly not stealthily.

You'll also still fail on a natural 1, and he only needs to get lucky once to know where you sleep. Or he could use no-save spells like Prying Eyes or or summoned Accuser Devils.
Or just a basic Gather Information check - the DC should be trivial.
Because lets face it, a wizard in stealth mode is just a guy in street clothes, while your guys on the other hand will be running around in heavy equipment if they want to have a chance at all. That's hardly subtle. All he'd have to do is listen to general gossip.

Dropping a bunch of summoned demons or a horde of undead on you is pretty trivial after that, and he can do it every night until you're dead.

Now, will this stop a level 20 Wizard from killing you to death with an Ice Assassin of an Aleax of himself? No, it will not, not even a little bit. Nor will it let you handle Pun-pun. But it will allow you to to effectively combat the average blaster caster or gish who happens to have some utility spells up the sleeves of his dressrobes.
If the average blaster caster is an Int 15 wizard with randomly chosen spells, sure. But if you're going to optimize your magehunters you should expect some optimization from your enemies too.
Your average blaster caster will be throwing enough damage to kill with one hit then. and the others will actually use effective tactics with some optimization of their own.
The gish you're hunting? Probably a Swiftblade, and he'll very likely eat a completely mundane 4 man group for breakfast unless he's really unlucky with his rolls.

GreyBlack

2016-02-13, 05:42 PM

If the average blaster caster is an Int 15 wizard with randomly chosen spells, sure. But if you're going to optimize your magehunters you should expect some optimization from your enemies too.
Your average blaster caster will be throwing enough damage to kill with one hit then. and the others will actually use effective tactics with some optimization of their own.
The gish you're hunting? Probably a Swiftblade, and he'll very likely eat a completely mundane 4 man group for breakfast unless he's really unlucky with his rolls.

Depends. I actually wouldn't expect any level of optimization, as I would expect this order of mage hunters to try and weed out the weak ones, especially if magic is something new. Any mage worth his salt is simply not going to be detected. I forget who said it, but the only way to become a level 20 wizard is to be one of the most absolutely paranoid SOBs ever, planning redundancies into your redundancies.

This order of mage hunters will have to try and just thin the herd, killing off the weak and vulnerable. I'd imagine them going from town to town, finding magic users the way the SS found people during WWII, then systematically exterminating them.

PraxisVetli

2016-02-13, 06:11 PM

Gallow I am liking some of your idea's. Is there any precedent for the chained spear thing? I'd like to avoid homebrewing too much mostly because its too easy to just go "because I said so" I'd like to stick to the rules as much as possible.

Stormwrack (i think) has harpoons, they should work, and their clause that they consume actions and cause damage should deter casters from removing them.
What happens if you hit a caster's astral projection-planeshift clone with a thinuan weapon?
I was probably ninja'd somewhere, haven't read whole thread cuz I'm at work.

ATHATH

2016-02-13, 08:16 PM

@sleepy:
Maybe the paste could be put in an alchemical sprayer? I think it will still block Abrupt Jaunt while it's in the sprayer.

Keep in mind that there are probably going to be ten or so people in each of these anti-caster squads. If they're all anthropomorphic bats (use Weapon Finesse), they'll get a +3 bump to their Will Saves and immunity to Charm/Dominate Person. It might be hard for the caster to kill them all at once before they get a hit off, especially if they somehow get the surprise round (which they'll need in order to apply the paste, anyway).

The bases of the anti-caster group are all in Null Magic fields, right? Wouldn't that block scrying?

Tetraplex

2016-02-13, 08:46 PM

Not sure if you'd be open to this, given that it's 3rd party, but replacing the standard magic system with Spheres of Power would alleviate most of the difficulties dealing with Divine magic as well as tone down the late game power of mages. Still not quite a level playing field, but your mundane a have more of a shot.

Lans

2016-02-13, 10:54 PM

Depends. I actually wouldn't expect any level of optimization, as I would expect this order of mage hunters to try and weed out the weak ones, especially if magic is something new. Any mage worth his salt is simply not going to be detected. I forget who said it, but the only way to become a level 20 wizard is to be one of the most absolutely paranoid SOBs ever, planning redundancies into your redundancies.

This order of mage hunters will have to try and just thin the herd, killing off the weak and vulnerable. I'd imagine them going from town to town, finding magic users the way the SS found people during WWII, then systematically exterminating them.

One thing the organization would have would be debriefing after encounters, so as time goes on there strategies get better and more optimized.

The casters seem to be largely on there own. Magic is new, there might be only one wizard with contingency and he might not have a teleport effect.

The summon monster list might be neutered.

charcoalninja

2016-02-14, 08:27 AM

For Pathfinder classs I'd go with the classic AM Barbarian. Superstision = incredible saves and he can punch magic so hard it breaks. Spell sunder solves the contingency problem.

Tetori monk = no Freedom of movement for you. And since you won't make the Concentration check to cast, I hope you have friends... Take Quingong monk to swap out magical class abilities for mundane ones like some feats.

All the PoW classes will wreck face.
A Hawkguard Defender Warden will threaten at range and can really ruin your day while protecting his fellows from casters by inturupting casting. Disruptive Shot and poison arrows / bullets will again wreck people.

Warlords handle support abilities via Golden Lion.

Archer Fighter grapples people with arrows and will ruin caster days if they hit even once.

There are a lot of options out there for challenging casters with mundanes.

The idea that a single level 5 caster can take on 5 level 7 anythings is utterly ubserd. I can't believe people here are so caster obsessed that this opinion has not been challenged. It's outright ridiculous. There is no set of long term buffs and a single level 3 spell cast at round 1 that will allow a single caster to match 5 level 7s. The game is not that broken.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-14, 09:14 AM

The idea that a single level 5 caster can take on 5 level 7 anythings is utterly ubserd. I can't believe people here are so caster obsessed that this opinion has not been challenged. It's outright ridiculous. There is no set of long term buffs and a single level 3 spell cast at round 1 that will allow a single caster to match 5 level 7s. The game is not that broken.

You're sure about that?
All the awesome archer skills in the world will not help you when every major caster gets access to Wind Wall. Unless you manage to go first, and most casters have an easier time boosting initiative than mundanes who aren't allowed magic items. And all that only counts if the caster in question actually consents to fight you directly, because he sure as hell doesn't need to.

Given preparation time, a 5th level cleric with the Deathbound domain is coming with 30HD worth of minions just from Animate Dead, and there isn't really a limit on individual HD in that aside from finding the corpses.
Even a 5 man band that has full WBL in magic gear will be hard-pressed to deal with two 15HD Fire Giant skeletons without any BFC at level 7, especially when you add on feats like Corpsecrafter and the bonus from Desecrate.
Even if you just fill up that capacity with normal animals of your CR +1-2 you'll have a pretty decent set of meatshields to keep them off the caster while he wrecks them with his spells or flees.

Arcane casters get access to Charm Monster a few levels later, but once they have it there's suddenly a lot of friends around to defend them. It lasts 1 day/level, even unextended. Or they wait until level 9 for Dominate Person, which replaces "friends" with "minions", controllable at unlimited range once they're under your power.
And god help you if your enemy is a Sorcerer with the Serpentine bloodline, because suddenly his compulsions have a lot more viable targets that are generally far more dangerous than mere humanoids.

A druid can, given time, turn any animal in the area helpful to him just with the 1st level spell Call Animal and Wild Empathy. The DCs aren't that difficult to begin with, it's cheaply boosted and you can, with feats or items, use it on different creature types too. Considering where druids tend to hang out (hint: there's usually animals there) that's a whole lot of - basically free - minions/defenders as long as you have preparation time.
A wildshaped druid is also pretty much undetectable in the wild without magical help, so he's free to resort to hit & run tactics and drain your people and resources (while his come back every day for free).

All three of them can also summon even more monsters, and none of these things increase their CR or ECL.

The reason you don't see these things in-game is that it's clunky, slows combat down and really sucks out the fun for everyone who is not the caster with all the minions, not that it's not possible.

With a bit of optimization and the right approach any one of the big three full casters can establish a small army in a matter of days, and even if your group of non-casters could defeat these they'll give their master more than enough time to either get away or dispose of you with his spells.
.

Alex12

2016-02-14, 11:33 AM

Hm. Let's take this a step back, look a little less at individual/small-group combat mechanics and more at the way the bad guys are structured.

First off, OP said mostly wizards and sorcerers are their targets. Okay, we can work with that.

Now, if the bad guys are a single nation, and the rest of the world is more magic-inclusive like most places in Faerun, Eberron, Golarion, or someplace like that, well, the dudes who don't have magic are going to have a bad time against the dudes who do have institutionalized magic. No magic items, no high-level casters, nothing of the sort. Small-group tactics are one thing, but, as has been pointed out, trained wizards and sorcerers, especially those with access to magic items, will absolutely wreck face.
For these guys to be a credible threat, they basically need to control the world already, and there needs to be certain assumptions.
First, the gods can't be actively involved much- clerics and druids and other people who prepare off their entire class list will be particularly devastating, since control over their spell list is basically impossible.
Second, there needs to be a fairly high level of supervision- something along the lines of directing people into permitted classes where they best fit. High Wis characters get directed toward Monk, Swordsage, Stalker, non-magical Ranger, and so forth, while high Int gets Rogue, Warblade, Warder, Factotum, maybe non-magical variants of Investigator or Alchemist, that sort of thing.
Thus, you generally won't have Wizards with every spell they need accessible, and there won't be a magic-mart. It'll be Wizards with the spells they managed to figure out themselves (and I'd suggest limiting those, perhaps to Core or something similar) and whatever they manage to scrounge up. Spell component pouches, scrolls, wands, and the like won't be things, and there'll generally be much more in the way of restrictions on casters and caster gear than on non-casters. Magic item crafting will also probably be difficult, since that generally requires something in the way of a workshop and tools that may well be hard to get.

charcoalninja

2016-02-14, 08:01 PM

I'd give them all the aquired item bonuses variant from Pathfinder Unchained and say it was a blessing to the people of the nation for their commitment to ridding the world of magic. That way they at least have the math to exist in the game without items.

Lans

2016-02-14, 10:56 PM

You're sure about that?
All the awesome archer skills in the world will not help you when every major caster gets access to Wind Wall. Unless you manage to go first, and most casters have an easier time boosting initiative than mundanes who aren't allowed magic items. And all that only counts if the caster in question actually consents to fight you directly, because he sure as hell doesn't need to.

Actually archery skills are largely transferable to thrown weapons, slings, and other ranged weapons, which will bypass a wind wall 70% of the time.

Given preparation time, a 5th level cleric with the Deathbound domain is coming with 30HD worth of minions just from Animate Dead, and there isn't really a limit on individual HD in that aside from finding the corpses.
Even a 5 man band that has full WBL in magic gear will be hard-pressed to deal with two 15HD Fire Giant skeletons without any BFC at level 7, especially when you add on feats like Corpsecrafter and the bonus from Desecrate.
Even if you just fill up that capacity with normal animals of your CR +1-2 you'll have a pretty decent set of meatshields to keep them off the caster while he wrecks them with his spells or flees.
I think you are underestimating mundanes here. A cloud giant skeleton has 110 hp and an ac of 13, at level 7 a melee character can have an attack routine of 14/14/9 and have each attack deal about 30 points of damage.

Also in this campaign i imagine will have very few giants in it.

All three of them can also summon even more monsters, and none of these things increase their CR or ECL.
This is one campaign where those spells are questionable in whether they even work. You can't summon celestial creatures if there are no celestial creatures to summon. I'm not going to say there isn't in his campaign, but it wasn't clear if there was

With a bit of optimization and the right approach any one of the big three full casters can establish a small army in a matter of days, and even if your group of non-casters could defeat these they'll give their master more than enough time to either get away or dispose of you with his spells.

I would argue that if a caster appeared with an army, then he wouldn't just be dealing with a small group, he would be facing one or more armies himself.

Sayt

2016-02-14, 11:25 PM

Furthermore, Wind wall is not the absolute defense it used to be. Cyclonic Arrows (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/magic-weapons/magic-weapon-special-abilities/cyclonic) will go right through a windwall. Thanks to JNAProductions for the note on magic items.

Dimensional Dervish on Zen Archers lets them just teleport to a different angle of attack.

Path of War's Feel the Wind (Boost, Second level) or Galebreaker's Stance (1st level) lets you ignore environmental effects, including windwall.

JNAProductions

2016-02-14, 11:26 PM

Cyclonic arrows are magic. That's not allowed.

Hamste

2016-02-15, 03:08 AM

I think you are underestimating mundanes here. A cloud giant skeleton has 110 hp and an ac of 13, at level 7 a melee character can have an attack routine of 14/14/9 and have each attack deal about 30 points of damage.

Also in this campaign i imagine will have very few giants in it.

A cloud giant could wear armor for what little that is worth (Generally, it will be quite unlikely to cause a miss but it does help). Make them bloody skeletons and I would suggest Dire Lions instead of Cloud giants which have 68 hp (plus desecrate bonuses and corpse crafter if the spells casters aren't stuck to just pathfinder), ac 14 (with out items or buffs) and three decent attacks. They would still get shredded pretty easily by level 7 characters but why would the caster care? As long as they didn't create them that day all they lose from the undead dying is money and if they can recover/keep the bodies they don't even lose that because of bloody. If the enemy takes up even part of their turn dealing with the undead then it is an advantage for the caster. If it wasn't for Tome of Battle I would suggest all 1 hd bloody undead with heavy armor, tower shields and max dex for the equipment, all fighting defensively. Most AoE mundanes can get requires either an attack or does such little damage that 8 hp undead could survive multiple of them before going down. I'm pretty sure Tome of Battle made a few that don't require attack rolls and do more than 8 damage on average, however; making that a much worse strategy.

Incorrect

2016-02-15, 04:33 AM

How do you beat the batman? By being the joker: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?99903-Batman-s-Bane-The-Joker
The thread does involve some magic, but also has some great ideas.
Take hostages and threaten innocents. Spread hatred and manifulate public oppinion. Scorch the earth in purifying flame.

What is our goal here? We will never catch every single heathen-witch wizard, but is 50% successful attempts good enough?
If so I think we have some pretty good ideas and builds, at least for levels 5 and perhaps 10.

I think level 15 would need to be handled by "The Black Division", consisting of brainwashed spellcasters.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-15, 05:43 AM

This is one campaign where those spells are questionable in whether they even work. You can't summon celestial creatures if there are no celestial creatures to summon. I'm not going to say there isn't in his campaign, but it wasn't clear if there was

I would argue that if a caster appeared with an army, then he wouldn't just be dealing with a small group, he would be facing one or more armies himself.
Fair enough on the summons.
The army part however only works like that because of game balance. If you consider it logically the caster gets his army nearly for free and in a matter of hours, and they're pretty much disposable unless you're going the tree hugger with animals route.
Also every dead enemy is another possible minion if he's a necromancer, or just a terror weapon if you consider that the limit on Animate Dead is just on controlling undead - he can make as many as he has materials for and let them loose in the nations capital if he's so inclined.

The mundanes not only lack that endless supply of reinforcements, they also need to train, equip, feed and house their people. That's a pretty big task with purely mundane means. They also have no means to permanently destroy a bloody skeleton, because everyone who could do so is on their hit list.

A cloud giant could wear armor for what little that is worth (Generally, it will be quite unlikely to cause a miss but it does help). Make them bloody skeletons and I would suggest Dire Lions instead of Cloud giants which have 68 hp (plus desecrate bonuses and corpse crafter if the spells casters aren't stuck to just pathfinder), ac 14 (with out items or buffs) and three decent attacks.

Fire Giants have a couple of benefits over lions. They have reach, can use weapons and usually already come with armor and weapons.
Turning a normal Fire Giant into a bloody skeleton gives you a minion with 157 hp (with Corpsecrafter + Desecrate), AC 27 (the example wears full plate), immunity to fire and cold and an attack routine of +20/+15/+10 for 3d6 +15 damage and fast healing 7. They also get Improved Initiative for free, so chances are they'll go first (and charge) unless your melee is dex-based.
That's a pretty good deterrent for a level 7 melee character even unbuffed, all for a downtime spell slot and 375gp. And since you're a cleric it's doubtful that you'd use them unbuffed.

Okay, so it's pretty obvious that your DM won't hand you Fire Giant skeletons at level 5 in an actual game, just for balance reasons.
But that doesn't mean a necromancer can't sneak into a giant graveyard or battlefield and make off with two very beefy minions for very low cost from a worldbuilding perspective.
It's not like it has to be Fire Giants, there's any number of big, tough, high HD bruisers that make really good necromancy resources, and all that's stopping necromancers from ruling the world is DM fiat and encounter levels.

Seward

2016-02-15, 11:17 AM

Just a note on necromancy.

While you could create and control unlimited numbers of undead in 1st and 2nd edition, since 3.0 edition (and in Pathfinder) animating corpses or creating undead has a cost in black onyx. (generally 25gp per hit die in Pathfinder)

The first thing you do to prevent necromancer terror tactics is make it illegal to trade in black onyx, find all that you can get your hands on and simply destroy it (find a volcano or something. In a more normal world you could destroy it more easily by creating skeletons and bashing them with clubs...). Each use of such a spell reduces the amount available for later.

Controlling the undead once you've created it is also pretty damn restricted. Now there are probably archetypes, feats or something that help with both cost and control, but just turning level 5 doesn't mean you can make an army, even if you are a divine caster with animate dead on your spell list. It is in fact such a bad tactic, that most players don't bother, preferring to let other people animate the dead and using spells like Command Undead to grab control of monsters whose cost was paid for by the GM.

Most of the real power plays for minion armies involve using charm or control spells for critters intended to be opposition and thus are "paid" for by the GM. This campaign won't have a lot of undead, but the dominate lines of spells for animals and creatures have some potential for minionmancy.

For planar binding, the other popular route to power, you need actually three or more spells (planar binding, a magic circle vs alignment spell appropriate to the alignment and dimensional anchor). You need to be able to reliably beat the SR of the opposition with all 3, beat their saves and defeat them in a charisma check. They will inevitably betray you if the service is too open ended, and they may be pissed off enough about being bound that they'll come after you for revenge even if it was a simple service. I've always been skeptical of the planar binding route to power for this reason, it's too much like trying to make friends using the Intimidate skill - it works for a bit, then they hate you. And if the critter is worth binding, it is a horrible, subtle enemy.

Planar Ally doesn't have these problems but it is quite expensive in terms of cash in pathfinder or xp in 3.x. You're usually better off spending that wealth or xp buying or crafting magic items.

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-15, 11:40 AM

While you could create and control unlimited numbers of undead in 1st and 2nd edition, since 3.0 edition (and in Pathfinder) animating corpses or creating undead has a cost in black onyx. (generally 25gp per hit die in Pathfinder)

The first thing you do to prevent necromancer terror tactics is make it illegal to trade in black onyx, find all that you can get your hands on and simply destroy it (find a volcano or something). Each use of such a spell reduces the amount available for later.

Controlling the undead once you've created it is also pretty damn restricted. Now there are probably archetypes, feats or something that help with both cost and control, but just turning level 5 doesn't mean you can make an army, even if you are a divine caster with animate dead on your spell list. It is in fact such a bad tactic, that most players don't bother, preferring to let other people animate the dead and using spells like Command Undead to grab control of monsters whose cost was paid for by the GM.
Onyx isn't exactly rare. It's also pretty popular for jewelry. Getting rid of all of it is a lot easier said than done. Not to mention that anything restricted that's valuable to someone ends up on the black market anyway. And since when has making something illegal ever stopped criminals from using it?

And 25gp per hit die is cheap at the level where you get Animate Dead, unless you constantly have to replace them. If you consider that a purely mundane opponent has no way to destroy a Bloody Skeleton that gives you a really big bruiser to protect you for a one-time cost of a few hundred gp. That's a steal.

Controlling the undead is also not that restricted. Even with no resources invested in it a cleric can have 4 times his HD in undead minions from Animate Dead alone, and they're under your control automatically.

The reason most players don't bother are mostly metagame. Minions clutter up combat, they step on the toes of your other players and their main role as meatshields is often already taken by another player.
Then there are in character reasons like alignment (of you and your party) and the fact that most NPCs don't like it when you walk into town with your personal army of the dead.
None of those apply to someone who operates alone, is already hunted anyway and could really use those meatshields. People do worse to survive all the time.

Or he could just kill something with negative levels and command the resulting wight. Any spawn it creates are under its command, so that's your infinite army right there. And if they kill your boss-wight they essentially unleash the wightpocalypse, so it should make for a pretty good deterrent.

At level 9 he can use Summon Undead to summon a shadow. Have it kill someone, command that shadow and repeat the above, only this time they're incorporeal and thus impossible to kill without magic.

tsj

2016-02-15, 01:01 PM

Seems like you need a world where certain
things like black onyx among other things
are rare and doesn't occur that often or at all
in your world. ..

Same with a lot of spell components. ..
Maybe a lot of them just doesn't exist on your
plane/planet/whatever

Also ... tech as mentioned already. ..
It can be modern, sci-fi, steam punk ... but I guess
that steam punk would fit best

All steam tech are controlled exclusive
by the anti mage group

Steam tech can mimic any spell as "steam powered tech"... hell. .. I've even seen steam powered ufos...
Completely unrealistic I know

Then you need the ultimate mundane... like
Chuck Norris (ultimate Texas ranger level 20)

Maybe special abilities like

Chuck Norris and other Ultimate Texas Rangers are not
afraid/whatever of X. X is afraid/whatever of
Chuck Norris and the other Ultimate Texas Rangers

There are plenty of home brew Chuck Norris type mundane classes on this forum but none official ones AFAIK

PraxisVetli

2016-02-15, 04:31 PM

Quick question.
Everyone keeps specifying the skeletons are bloody.
Are we all british or is there a seperate template 'bloody skeleton?'

arkangel111

2016-02-15, 05:25 PM

Sorry guys, was out of town for a convention. I'll be reading through the responses and comment accordingly. already saw that variant rule for auto bonuses in PF. That is an amazing find. I think I'll use that for anyone that has no casting, maybe count your level as half for half caster's and anything other than human (setting reason's though I know it makes a little imbalanced so might need to tweak)

Looking through more... not dead...

Zetapup

2016-02-15, 09:38 PM

Quick question.
Everyone keeps specifying the skeletons are bloody.
Are we all british or is there a seperate template 'bloody skeleton?'

They're a variant in pathfinder that gives skeletons fast healing and keeps them from getting killed permanently unless some specific methods are used (killed with positive energy, remains sprinkled with holy water, etc).

charcoalninja

2016-02-15, 11:11 PM

sleepyphoenixx

2016-02-16, 02:33 AM

Even with fire giants, your cleric just gets ambushed by team arrow at his fortress anyway. He wakes up in the night to find all his undead are full of holes and on fire with nobody to be seen. Now you need more onyx, and have no minion dudes.

Course for the same cost investment the level 7 party just hires an army to fight your army while they ninja in and kill you from your roof the moment you show up.

People give skills and mundane tactics 0 pull in these threads. Let alone the fact that a smokestick stops your undead cold since they're mindless, no longer can see and certainly aren't hearing team Arrow kill everyone / set it all on fire (yay stealth!)

Even if they fought straight up. If they focused on the undead they'd kill the fire giant in a round from what 2 of the 5? You've already used a spell slot and 750gp on your minions which are now dead and the enemy party are full strength, outnumber you 5 to 1 and now you have 1 round in your wind wall to do something that matters before you flat out die. What spell does a 5th level cleric have that will turn the tide on 5 7th levels exactly?

Especially if spell sundering Barbarians are allowed.

Clerics get high wisdom. Your ninjas have nothing to boost their stealth. That makes sneaking up on him hard. You could get him with long-range archery, if you had wide-open lanes of fire, but only if you have the perception skills to actually identify him at that range. Sneaking up on him in his home is unlikely.
Also Fire Giant skeletons are immune to fire and have DR/Bludgeoning. And bloody skeletons need positive energy to kill (which you don't have).

750gp is below WBL for a second level character. I assume your guys would spend theirs on all that gear they need to actually get the ability to do something beside dying.

Mindless doesn't stop a creature from making spot and listen checks. I have no clue where you got that idea. See again in the first sentence for "you have sucky stealth, because no magic items, dex boosters, etc.". Also your sneaky ninjas have invested all their build resources in being sneaky (or they're not), so they won't exactly be damage wonders. Especially without magic items.

Spell Sundering does absolutely nothing to undead, because the spell that created them is instantaneous, not permanent.
It's also single target, once per rage and requires a pretty high roll to actually dispel something. That's a little hard to reach when you still don't have any magic items.

I also question where your stealthy, hard-hitting rogue-barbarian-ninja-archers get all those stats and skill points from that make them anything but a total failure at everything they try.
Especially without magic.

Because that's what it comes down to: A level 7 character is only a CR 7 threat if he actually has level-appropriate gear. In D&D and PF that means magic items at anything higher than level 2.

charcoalninja

2016-02-16, 10:21 AM

Clerics get high wisdom. Your ninjas have nothing to boost their stealth. That makes sneaking up on him hard. You could get him with long-range archery, if you had wide-open lanes of fire, but only if you have the perception skills to actually identify him at that range. Sneaking up on him in his home is unlikely.
Also Fire Giant skeletons are immune to fire and have DR/Bludgeoning. And bloody skeletons need positive energy to kill (which you don't have).

750gp is below WBL for a second level character. I assume your guys would spend theirs on all that gear they need to actually get the ability to do something beside dying.

Mindless doesn't stop a creature from making spot and listen checks. I have no clue where you got that idea. See again in the first sentence for "you have sucky stealth, because no magic items, dex boosters, etc.". Also your sneaky ninjas have invested all their build resources in being sneaky (or they're not), so they won't exactly be damage wonders. Especially without magic items.

Spell Sundering does absolutely nothing to undead, because the spell that created them is instantaneous, not permanent.
It's also single target, once per rage and requires a pretty high roll to actually dispel something. That's a little hard to reach when you still don't have any magic items.

I also question where your stealthy, hard-hitting rogue-barbarian-ninja-archers get all those stats and skill points from that make them anything but a total failure at everything they try.
Especially without magic.

Because that's what it comes down to: A level 7 character is only a CR 7 threat if he actually has level-appropriate gear. In D&D and PF that means magic items at anything higher than level 2.

Firstly Skeletons lose all defensive abilities and former traits of their creature and gain DR 5/Bludgeoning and immunity to cold, so a Bloody Fire Giant is immune to cold not fire. Blunt arrows beat the DR, pounding them into powder quite nicely. You are right though that Bloody skeletons would not be a resource drain if the muggles took them out in the night as they grow back in 1 hour. Course if they're destroyed, dragged away and set on fire they'd stay down for as long as the fire burns (awesome story hook and campaign element btw: a giant crematorium burning 24/7 to contain any regenerating undead).

In terms of clerics being "High Wisdom" and that somehow negating stealth, the mundie classes tend to get bonuses on skills like stealth.
A level 7 halfling Ranger could have: +4size, +4 dex +7 ranks +3 trained +2 favoured terrain +2 nightsuit (mwk stealth item) + 1 trait = +22 Stealth (+20 without the item), so I don't see how him not having magic is somehow crippling him. What does your cleric have for perception? 5 ranks +6 Wis for +11 total since Perception isn't in class, though you could spend a trait on it for +14. Your undeaders are not going to see this guy coming with their meager +14 perception, especially since he can ride his Dire Bat (Or giant beetle, or Pteranedon) animal companion around sniping everything from beyond the reach of most cleric spells and certainly any skeleton's attacks.

So team cleric can only see our halfling if he rolls a 1 (23 total) and they roll a 9 or higher. So I'm not sure what the odds of that are, but by far most of the time our ranger can come and go with impunity since his average is 32 vs your 24.

If I really wanted to make this guy a stealth master I spend a feat on Skill Focus Stealth for +25 stealth. Since he's a ranger he gets his archery feats as bonus feats anyway...

Spell Sunder was for the wind wall so that the rest of the party just turns the cleric into a pincushion.

And this is before Archetypes factor in. High level you'd have a point because the math starts lagging behind when you remove one of its core assumptions (magic gear) but at level 5? Not so much.

Now that I've addressed that, I'll stop talking about our little necromancer vs. team arrow side debate here as we could go back and forth forever lol. Basically build a group that plans ahead, has counters for the basic caster defenses like Wind wall (Big thrown weapons bypass it entirely) but honestly against thrown weapons it's only a 30% miss chance which isn't much and that's assuming you don't just move around the wall (or through it, my halfling just flies overtop of it and shoots straight down the barrier with a full attack and a shrug). The feats that let you grapple with ranged attacks will be especially good since that makes concentrating to cast spells really difficult.

GreyBlack

2016-02-16, 12:25 PM

How do you beat the batman? By being the joker:

Replying here because I remember a thread which had brought whether a level 1 commoner with something like 1 billion gold could defeat a level 20 wizard through sheer WBL-mancy. In that thread, I came up with the idea that the commoner could simply buy a cannon and aim it in the general direction of the wizard and fire copper coins until the mage died; most mages aren't going to have Contingency up to get them out of a hailstorm of copper coming down on their location from 6 miles away. As such.....

My big question is what your ruling on firearms will be. Do firearms exist? Firearms are magical weapons, RAW. So, do the muggles have access to firearms? If so, this could potentially be a huge workaround for them; while your odd mage will have a Contingency ready versus mundane means in this world, few mages will think to throw up a contingency versus magical weapons like firearms. Combine this with called shot rules from Ultimate Combat? The best way to beat a caster would be, "Bullet in the brain-pain. Squish!"

charcoalninja

2016-02-16, 03:10 PM

Where do you see that firearms are magical? Is that a blackpowder fluff thing?

Lans

2016-02-16, 06:22 PM

Firstly Skeletons lose all defensive abilities and former traits of their creature and gain DR 5/Bludgeoning and immunity to cold, so a Bloody Fire Giant is immune to cold not fire. Blunt arrows beat the DR, pounding them into powder quite nicely. You are right though that Bloody skeletons would not be a resource drain if the muggles took them out in the night as they grow back in 1 hour. Course if they're destroyed, dragged away and set on fire they'd stay down for as long as the fire burns (awesome story hook and campaign element btw: a giant crematorium burning 24/7 to contain any regenerating undead).

You are mistaken, the skeleton retains its non alignment subtypes, and thus its immunity to fire

charcoalninja

2016-02-16, 11:46 PM

You are mistaken, the skeleton retains its non alignment subtypes, and thus its immunity to fire

Huh. Neat. Missed that. Thanks!

Laughing Dog

2016-02-17, 01:23 AM

My suggestion for an anti-caster strike teamis stealth. With a side of stealth. Oh, and just to be certain, some more stealth. When dealing with something capable of overpowering you, you use guile.
From Arms and EQuipment Guide, we get Urdrukar, a metal that is resistant to divination magic, a +2 for every 5 pounds you wear. Mundane equipment such as silent shoes, black bodysuits, forester's cloaks, or other such items grant (small) circumstance bonuses to hide or move silently, helping you remain hidden until you attack. A ranged weapon, say a crossbow (hand if you have to get up close and personal) with a poisoned bolt, with say choldrith toxin (Injury, Fort save DC15, Initial Damage is Paralysis, secondary 2d4 Con) gives you an excellent first initial attack, especially if the mage fails their Fortitude save as paralysis is rather unforgiving, and grants you extra time to kill them. If alchemical items (some of which probably could be made in a modern day lab) are allowed, acid and alchemist fire are useful for setting up traps.

Seward

2016-02-17, 01:29 AM

Clerics get high wisdom. Your ninjas have nothing to boost their stealth.

minus 1 per 10 feet of distance if you have cover or concealment.

Cleric doesn't get to hide if he has no cover or concealment, so all that is needed is a cleric for a second stand out in the open with a light source or during the daytime where there is a clear field of fire for any significant range. Without things like dancing lights it is a bit harder to set up such a thing at night, but a simple sunrod at the wrong moment could set this situation up at night too.

A composite longbow has a range of 1100 feet if you're willing to just go for 20s to hit. You can literally outrange all detection in D&D with a bow, except for mystic "I am never surprised" types of abilities. (more common in Pathfinder than in 3.5).

Even at 110 feet, it doesn't take much stealth to beat the cleric raw wisdom+2 skill points+perception is not a class skill

Garktz

2016-02-17, 03:12 AM

I.ve been reaeing through all the post and besides de "sire, those are som bloody skeletons" off the rails thing, i feel like i need to put my opinion down.
As a word of advice, i would be really pissed of if i happend to play in your game as you are presenting it right now, besides the details on the specific builds of the anti-caster strike teams.
You are presenting a world where magic is pretty much a new thing and you are basing this whole organization on so much metagaming that is not even fun.

You say their base of operations is in a anti magic area, ok, but please, tell me,if magic is something pretty much unknown, and there are so few casters and all of them are hidding from the inquisition, how do they even know where is this anti magic zone? how they even know it works? or how it works?
by the time you have strike teams prepared enough (leveled enough) to counter wizards, they already have an edge on you.
Your gusy are not trying to go full po anti wizard builds untill they have seen a wizard at full potential.
I mean, you want to kill these guy with weird powers (lvl1 wizard) so your 6 lvl 1 warriors walk to him and strike him down with 2 hits, so, how are they going to try and counter something they dont know exists?
How can they counter teleport if they dont even know it exist?
you are the dm and you know it does, but, what about the people in your world?

this world of yoours remids me a lot to x-men comics.
You have a big organization of caster hating guys (us goverment) hunting down these new casters with weird powers they dont even know yet (mutants)
All they can do is use whatever they already know to hunt them and untill they learn how those powers work, they cant even pose a threat to them and by thetime they do, is already to late...

My recomendation is to advance past that really difficult point where every thing about magic is new and copy the x-men universe.
Go to a point where magic is already well know by the most influential part of the population, have some stablished high level wizards, have this organization already stablished but at the cost of already a lot of loses during the last 50 or 100 last years, have the good wizards (who believe in the mundanes able to live pacefully with them) fighting the bad wizards (who where hunted down and almost anihhilated and want to kill all people belonging to this organization) and have the organization allways hunting wizards but also 1 step behind. You can also add 1 squad super optimized being a real threat to the party because they are the most elite guys in the organization, but the rest of squads... they wont do anything actually usefull besides maybe scaring they party away just to avoid the conflict...

I dont know dude, but think about how this anti caster organization can know so much about magic and prepare so mucb to fight it if even the magic users dont know that much about it, because to me, it has so much meta gaming behind it that its awfull to play against it...

GreyBlack

2016-02-17, 12:29 PM

Where do you see that firearms are magical? Is that a blackpowder fluff thing?

Well, I seem to have misplaced my DMG from 3.5, but I recall firearms being magical due to the properties of black powder and gun powder being called out in the 3.5 rulebook. Combine this with the fact that, in PF, you can make bullets with magical properties like, "Tracer," a bullet property which exists IRL without magical intervention to my knowledge (I'll admit I don't have sufficient ranks in "craft/firearm" to tell you if they do, but I do have "knowledge engineering"), and I'd say that makes a pretty compelling reason to say that firearms are magical in the same way the Alchemist is: highly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

tsj

2016-02-17, 12:39 PM

GreyBlack:
Nomatter what the DMG might or might not say about black gun powder, it would be totally reasonable for a
DM to allow non magical black powder firearms in any game or setting

Alex12

2016-02-17, 06:33 PM

Well, I seem to have misplaced my DMG from 3.5, but I recall firearms being magical due to the properties of black powder and gun powder being called out in the 3.5 rulebook. Combine this with the fact that, in PF, you can make bullets with magical properties like, "Tracer," a bullet property which exists IRL without magical intervention to my knowledge (I'll admit I don't have sufficient ranks in "craft/firearm" to tell you if they do, but I do have "knowledge engineering"), and I'd say that makes a pretty compelling reason to say that firearms are magical in the same way the Alchemist is: highly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Well, in Pathfinder (which has slightly more comprehensive firearms rules (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/weapons/firearms) than the passing mention they got in 3.5) normal guns aren't magical. Also, RL tracer ammunition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracer_ammunition) is different from Pathfinder's Tracer Bullets (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/magic-weapons/specific-magic-weapons/tracer-bullet). RL tracer ammo is basically a bullet that's on fire enough to be visible to the naked eye so people firing machine guns can judge trajectory and adjust aim even without observing the impact of the bullet. They still deal damage, they basically just light up (and can sometimes ignite flammable things). Pathfinder Tracer Bullets (which actually isn't a keyword ability, it's a specific kind of bullet) deal no damage, and applies Fairie Fire to the target. Saying they're the same thing is no different than saying that, for example, all mirrors, or all shiny and well-polished shields, have the reflecting (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/magic-armor/magic-armor-and-shield-special-abilities/reflecting) property.

Also, barring refluffing (which I would be okay with, but is NOT Pathfinder default) the Alchemist is not advanced technology, it's magic. The class is specifically called out as infusing the stuff they brew with a tiny fragment of their own magical energy. It doesn't work in an AMF, Dispel Magic works on it, and so forth. This is different from advanced technology, which I will note that Pathfinder does in fact have (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/technological-equipment), that explicitly ignores AMF, cannot be dispelled, and in all respects counts as an Ex ability.