Prime Spinosaur
2017-02-26, 02:42 PM
This is a long post and a lot of it is me babbling incoherently but please bear with me.
Over a year ago now, we'd started a gestalt pathfinder game that was also a interplanar campaign. It was fun at first, but as it went on our GM got more and more frustrated with adjusting challenges, but then he just went off his rocker.
About two months ago we were around 11th level and we realized that the gestalt thing wasn't working out because simple combats were taking hours because there were just so many things to manage, so some story changes happened and now we're not gestalt anymore.
That's great and all, but our GM seems to have forgotten that our Average Party Level has gone down significantly. A lot of our characters are not built to be min maxed, at least three of us had built our characters to be, well characters with their own thing. Last night we had possibly the most bull**** encounter I have ever had in a tabletop game since middle school when my dm (also around middle school age) would just put us up against the hardest things in the monster manual for ****s and giggles.
So our interplanar game we were told that reality itself is in danger because the Ilithids are going to resurrect the dead overdieties and usher the complete wipe and end of the multiverse. So Bahamut gave us each a ring but in order for the ring to hold any power we have to absorb the essence of a dying esoteric dragon. So for each of these questlines we have to go through a challenging and dynamic dungeon and fight an ancient minimum esoteric dragon, or somehow convince it to let us kill it (and maybe true res it afterwards) in order to get it's essence.
Now I know what you're thinking: "What do these rings even do?" Well shucks guys I'd love to tell you but it keeps changing constantly. But one thing remains consistent: There's a HUGE detriment to activating the rings. After the ring has done it's job, for that encounter nobody in the party gets experience, and the person who activated the ring cannot regain spells, prepare new spells, actually fight in combat, is treated as exhausted and is basically helpless for a week. Now before yesterday the rings only lasted until the end of combat, and way before then, before we stopped becoming gestalt when activating the rings we got the god damn paragon template (holy ****). This was because we were supposed to fight the Lich Queen of the Githyanki and her whole entourage at level 11. After of which, all it did was give us a minor deflection bonus to AC and basically worked as a cloak of resistance and gave us spell resistance (which doesn't do jack or **** for us, more on that later), so activating the ring was almost entirely pointless for spellcasters because the detriment was still there and a lot of the thing the ring could do were meant more for like, say a frontline fighter, or in this case our already stupidly powerful paladin.
So we're doing these quests and after completing the first one, which has a bit of a twisted ending. Instead of finding an Occult Dragon in there, we found a gem, a souljar with the dragon's soul in it. Apparently at some point in his life some enemy of his had stolen his body and left him in this dungeon to rot for thousands upon thousands of years. So in breaking the gem, we release his soul and get the essence for one of the rings (mine actually). As it turns out the man or thing that had taken he Occult Dragon's body disintegrated upon the soul gem being destroyed right in the middle of a business deal with an evil wizard. This wizard pissed off as all hell at us, and says in order to make it up to him, we would need to do a slave run for him. Now then, the three party members he decided to propose this blatantly evil quest to were the Lawful Good Paladin, the Chaotic Good Wizard, and the Chaotic Neutral Summoner. The Summoner was more on the fence but the other two (I was the wizard) basically told him to go **** himself. So we made him an enemy.
I'm fine with consequences for our actions and I knew this would end up becoming an enemy later on. How it ended up playing out, I was NOT fine with.
So we continue our questline and go for the next dragon. We kill the dream dragon that was trapped on this weird stargate demiplane with us and when we got out our ship had been destroyed. So we learn the wizard did it and we go on a quest to kick his ass because he's sort of marked us as a mortal enemy. Alright at the beginning of this questline, what happened was we had the realization that we needed to change things up so we no longer became gestalted. The gestalted thing had a reason, to which the reason for it going away had to do with another character and his squad of gestalts taking over the Gith empire and killing Tiamat. So okay we don't do that questline anymore, but we still need to get the rings to fight the Ilithids.
So we make a plan of attack, and right now, we're with our friends who if I had to describe them, they're kind of like this Psionic research institute that's run by five Charles Xavier 20th level psions. They don't wanna get too involved but we formulate some plans there, and we sleep for the night. I mention this part right now because it'll be important later.
So we actually are able to teleport to his demiplane, or rather at first what we THINK is his demiplane. We later learn that somehow, this wizard (who's 18th level btw) had a bunch of Night Hags ****ing penetrate the defenses of a domain ruled by 20th level Psions, the one we were most friendly with being a ****ING TELEPATH and was able to rip out the dreams of one of my companions and figure out our plans. This should've also been impossible because our cleric was lawful good. So he made a deathtrap demiplane in response to us coming, where he could scry in and cast any spell he wanted wherever he wanted on the map. Pretty ****ing crazy right, so we go through this trap dungeon, and by the way, this wizard has an INT of 32 and most of his saves are around the 28-30 range (swell), and we're 12th level. So he casts a greater break on us, damaging most of our equipment. All of our bags of holding get broken which in the rules, nothing happens to them, but he then homerules that they no longer work while broken. Cutting off our alchemist from his bombs and potions, and me from my spellbook. Also any buffs that we've put on ourselves have been null and void because throughout this entire dungeon the asshat was spamming greater dispel magic at his level. The entire time btw, the only thing that has actually been at our normal CR was the damn welcoming door party. Everything else ranged around the epic for encounters.
On the subject of the house ruling. Our summoner got severely nerfed because our GM in the middle of the dungeon house ruled that the Summoner could not command anything against his alignment and that now Summon Monster instead of being able to control the monsters it was instead more akinned to the Planar Binding spell where you had to convince your summons to help you.
This was insanely detrimental because our Summoner was actually an archetype called Master Summoner, so for the rest of the dungeon he was near next to useless because he couldn't do what he was supposed to do. Our GM was having these knee jerk reactions to things that classes could do and yes, they're very powerful at doing that because that's what they're class is meant for. Our Alchemist was nerfed before hand as well, even with his insanely high check for Craft Alchemy, he can only make like maybe 3 tanglefoot bags in the span of seven days. Which is the most off time our characters have ever had period. Which sucks for me because my wizard, is primarily a crafting wizard so there's no time to do anything.
So almost all of our equipment broken, buff gone, the alchemist entirely incapable of doing anything even as a more gish style character (he was a gun toting Alchemist with two bullets left and a max damage of 13), our Summoner only able to really summon tigers, my spells worthless against these enemies because I can't roll spell resistance for **** and these guys saves are retardedly high, our cleric squirting all of his ****ing healing out on the first session of the dungeon (his poor girlfriend). We go to face this wizard dude. By the way the entire time this wizard has ****ing posed as Treerazer which he's not and this was a cool touch...
But before the wizard actually reveals himself (at this point he's just taunting us with illusions of Treerazer, good ****ing luck seeing through them unless you're the minmaxed Paladin or the Cleric who have saves up in the 20's), he's flooded most of his demiplane and sends five Omox demons to attack us. They immediately teleport and gank the summoner, making it impossible for him to do anything. I escape and I'm trying to buff myself up and by the second round our summoner is already dead. Everyone is either unconscious or dead except for me within five rounds. I'd come in and tried casting spells on the damn things, ranging from enervations to weaken them, disintegrates. I can't roll past their spell resistance and our GM has never rolled below a 15 against any of my save DCs. At this point the wizard sort of reveals himself at the top of a pedestal tower thing casting spells.
Our GM yells at us, and we tell him even with the rings it wouldn't have changed the situation and we note that literally combat could drop making me and the Cleric(the only other one with one of these rings activatable) useless and then the Wizard could attack. So he changes up the rings, and actually makes them viable, so they last for 3 hrs now, and they give us the spell casting lists of the ancient version of the dragon. So okay, I've got this now. I activate the ring as a swift (before it was as a standard action and you had to actually say the activation word which was useless as we were being smothered). So I use the limited wish to cast a cure spell on our dying cleric, who in turn casts the same spell and heals the ones going unconscious and we get back into the fight.
So remember how the wizard was spamming spells at us throughout the entire dungeon, high level spells?
As it turns out the wizard still hasn't wasted a single spell and proceeds to unload the full power of an 18th level wizard onto a bunch of 12th level characters.
Now in the middle of the fight, our GM learns that limited wish can be used to cast 5th level divine spells and for some reason, this knee jerks him. Now we can only cast one of each of the dragon's possible spells mid fight. And that spell resistance we had that was like SR 22? Ha, the wizard was 18th level and had spell pen. He just needed to not roll a 2 to affect the both of us. Which boy oh boy he did. I was hit by a Wail of the Banshee for 180 points of damage with a DC 30 fortitude save and was killed instantly even with the ring. Also he had spell resistance as well and just absorbed any spell we threw at him. Our Cleric was killed as well because when he healed from his ring's fast healing after being KO'd by the Wail of the Banshee he instead tried to turn invisible instead of healing himself so the wizard with true sight just ****ing maximized scorching rays on him.
So because eventually it came down to our Paladin and our useless Alchemist being the last ones alive, he didn't even bother with the alchemist because at this point he was jsut a really sturdy commoner with a single bullet left in a revolver who'd also been permanently blinded by a Blindness/deafness spell DC 23, So I guess he was a blind commoner. Goody. The only reason we survived the encounter in the end was because our Paladin crit three times on the wizard with smite evil activated (at this point, I think our paladin's dice are loaded because this happens a ****ing lot).
So after getting our asses kicked, our spells drained, our equipment tarnished, and two of our party members useless, our GM put us up against a CR 16 then a CR 18 fight.
But right now our dead characters are being taken to a pool we'd found before our GM went insane, it was part of a character quest for our Alchemist who basically found a cooler version of the fountain of youth and had constantly been living different lives and forgetting his old ones each time he used it So what the pool allows us to do is to completely remake our character, we all leveled up and so we're gonna be level 13, it also will ressurect us from the dead though there's a percentile chance that our bodies and souls will be bioblierated in using the pool and using it more times increases the chances.
I really don't wanna have to min max my character, but I may need to because playing a wizard is pointless, because here's the worst part, it's always usually been like this where we're facing deadly encounters even when we were ****ing gestalted the encounters were way past the epic limit but this was just a new extreme of disparity where literally nothing I could've done would've prevented my death. I played this campaign for a story, and that story's now devolving into challenge runs.
This was a SIDE QUEST technically. God forbid he said it was just gonna get harder and harder from this point on.
We need help, me, the arcane crafter wizard, our alchemist and the summoner. We built our characters to be, well CHARACTERS and that's no longer helping us anymore. We need possible builds, advice on building such characters.
Because our GM is constantly changing the rules and changing his own houseruling to suit his own needs. We need a way around this. We need strategies, ideas, spell uses, how to best utilize time and such.
The idea I'd had for the alchemist was for my wizard constantly make scrolls of fabricate for him to use. Hopefully it will work out. The other idea was to get scrolls of create greater demiplane and make myself a crafting demiplane where time inside of it is faster than time outside of it. The ring I have currently gives me the passive ability to use any magic device I want to without a role, this is powerful, but I didn't have time to buy any good cleric wands or anything before **** started hitting the fan and I'd assumed the Cleric/Vitalist would get those wands for his use.
Anything and everything would be a great help.
Over a year ago now, we'd started a gestalt pathfinder game that was also a interplanar campaign. It was fun at first, but as it went on our GM got more and more frustrated with adjusting challenges, but then he just went off his rocker.
About two months ago we were around 11th level and we realized that the gestalt thing wasn't working out because simple combats were taking hours because there were just so many things to manage, so some story changes happened and now we're not gestalt anymore.
That's great and all, but our GM seems to have forgotten that our Average Party Level has gone down significantly. A lot of our characters are not built to be min maxed, at least three of us had built our characters to be, well characters with their own thing. Last night we had possibly the most bull**** encounter I have ever had in a tabletop game since middle school when my dm (also around middle school age) would just put us up against the hardest things in the monster manual for ****s and giggles.
So our interplanar game we were told that reality itself is in danger because the Ilithids are going to resurrect the dead overdieties and usher the complete wipe and end of the multiverse. So Bahamut gave us each a ring but in order for the ring to hold any power we have to absorb the essence of a dying esoteric dragon. So for each of these questlines we have to go through a challenging and dynamic dungeon and fight an ancient minimum esoteric dragon, or somehow convince it to let us kill it (and maybe true res it afterwards) in order to get it's essence.
Now I know what you're thinking: "What do these rings even do?" Well shucks guys I'd love to tell you but it keeps changing constantly. But one thing remains consistent: There's a HUGE detriment to activating the rings. After the ring has done it's job, for that encounter nobody in the party gets experience, and the person who activated the ring cannot regain spells, prepare new spells, actually fight in combat, is treated as exhausted and is basically helpless for a week. Now before yesterday the rings only lasted until the end of combat, and way before then, before we stopped becoming gestalt when activating the rings we got the god damn paragon template (holy ****). This was because we were supposed to fight the Lich Queen of the Githyanki and her whole entourage at level 11. After of which, all it did was give us a minor deflection bonus to AC and basically worked as a cloak of resistance and gave us spell resistance (which doesn't do jack or **** for us, more on that later), so activating the ring was almost entirely pointless for spellcasters because the detriment was still there and a lot of the thing the ring could do were meant more for like, say a frontline fighter, or in this case our already stupidly powerful paladin.
So we're doing these quests and after completing the first one, which has a bit of a twisted ending. Instead of finding an Occult Dragon in there, we found a gem, a souljar with the dragon's soul in it. Apparently at some point in his life some enemy of his had stolen his body and left him in this dungeon to rot for thousands upon thousands of years. So in breaking the gem, we release his soul and get the essence for one of the rings (mine actually). As it turns out the man or thing that had taken he Occult Dragon's body disintegrated upon the soul gem being destroyed right in the middle of a business deal with an evil wizard. This wizard pissed off as all hell at us, and says in order to make it up to him, we would need to do a slave run for him. Now then, the three party members he decided to propose this blatantly evil quest to were the Lawful Good Paladin, the Chaotic Good Wizard, and the Chaotic Neutral Summoner. The Summoner was more on the fence but the other two (I was the wizard) basically told him to go **** himself. So we made him an enemy.
I'm fine with consequences for our actions and I knew this would end up becoming an enemy later on. How it ended up playing out, I was NOT fine with.
So we continue our questline and go for the next dragon. We kill the dream dragon that was trapped on this weird stargate demiplane with us and when we got out our ship had been destroyed. So we learn the wizard did it and we go on a quest to kick his ass because he's sort of marked us as a mortal enemy. Alright at the beginning of this questline, what happened was we had the realization that we needed to change things up so we no longer became gestalted. The gestalted thing had a reason, to which the reason for it going away had to do with another character and his squad of gestalts taking over the Gith empire and killing Tiamat. So okay we don't do that questline anymore, but we still need to get the rings to fight the Ilithids.
So we make a plan of attack, and right now, we're with our friends who if I had to describe them, they're kind of like this Psionic research institute that's run by five Charles Xavier 20th level psions. They don't wanna get too involved but we formulate some plans there, and we sleep for the night. I mention this part right now because it'll be important later.
So we actually are able to teleport to his demiplane, or rather at first what we THINK is his demiplane. We later learn that somehow, this wizard (who's 18th level btw) had a bunch of Night Hags ****ing penetrate the defenses of a domain ruled by 20th level Psions, the one we were most friendly with being a ****ING TELEPATH and was able to rip out the dreams of one of my companions and figure out our plans. This should've also been impossible because our cleric was lawful good. So he made a deathtrap demiplane in response to us coming, where he could scry in and cast any spell he wanted wherever he wanted on the map. Pretty ****ing crazy right, so we go through this trap dungeon, and by the way, this wizard has an INT of 32 and most of his saves are around the 28-30 range (swell), and we're 12th level. So he casts a greater break on us, damaging most of our equipment. All of our bags of holding get broken which in the rules, nothing happens to them, but he then homerules that they no longer work while broken. Cutting off our alchemist from his bombs and potions, and me from my spellbook. Also any buffs that we've put on ourselves have been null and void because throughout this entire dungeon the asshat was spamming greater dispel magic at his level. The entire time btw, the only thing that has actually been at our normal CR was the damn welcoming door party. Everything else ranged around the epic for encounters.
On the subject of the house ruling. Our summoner got severely nerfed because our GM in the middle of the dungeon house ruled that the Summoner could not command anything against his alignment and that now Summon Monster instead of being able to control the monsters it was instead more akinned to the Planar Binding spell where you had to convince your summons to help you.
This was insanely detrimental because our Summoner was actually an archetype called Master Summoner, so for the rest of the dungeon he was near next to useless because he couldn't do what he was supposed to do. Our GM was having these knee jerk reactions to things that classes could do and yes, they're very powerful at doing that because that's what they're class is meant for. Our Alchemist was nerfed before hand as well, even with his insanely high check for Craft Alchemy, he can only make like maybe 3 tanglefoot bags in the span of seven days. Which is the most off time our characters have ever had period. Which sucks for me because my wizard, is primarily a crafting wizard so there's no time to do anything.
So almost all of our equipment broken, buff gone, the alchemist entirely incapable of doing anything even as a more gish style character (he was a gun toting Alchemist with two bullets left and a max damage of 13), our Summoner only able to really summon tigers, my spells worthless against these enemies because I can't roll spell resistance for **** and these guys saves are retardedly high, our cleric squirting all of his ****ing healing out on the first session of the dungeon (his poor girlfriend). We go to face this wizard dude. By the way the entire time this wizard has ****ing posed as Treerazer which he's not and this was a cool touch...
But before the wizard actually reveals himself (at this point he's just taunting us with illusions of Treerazer, good ****ing luck seeing through them unless you're the minmaxed Paladin or the Cleric who have saves up in the 20's), he's flooded most of his demiplane and sends five Omox demons to attack us. They immediately teleport and gank the summoner, making it impossible for him to do anything. I escape and I'm trying to buff myself up and by the second round our summoner is already dead. Everyone is either unconscious or dead except for me within five rounds. I'd come in and tried casting spells on the damn things, ranging from enervations to weaken them, disintegrates. I can't roll past their spell resistance and our GM has never rolled below a 15 against any of my save DCs. At this point the wizard sort of reveals himself at the top of a pedestal tower thing casting spells.
Our GM yells at us, and we tell him even with the rings it wouldn't have changed the situation and we note that literally combat could drop making me and the Cleric(the only other one with one of these rings activatable) useless and then the Wizard could attack. So he changes up the rings, and actually makes them viable, so they last for 3 hrs now, and they give us the spell casting lists of the ancient version of the dragon. So okay, I've got this now. I activate the ring as a swift (before it was as a standard action and you had to actually say the activation word which was useless as we were being smothered). So I use the limited wish to cast a cure spell on our dying cleric, who in turn casts the same spell and heals the ones going unconscious and we get back into the fight.
So remember how the wizard was spamming spells at us throughout the entire dungeon, high level spells?
As it turns out the wizard still hasn't wasted a single spell and proceeds to unload the full power of an 18th level wizard onto a bunch of 12th level characters.
Now in the middle of the fight, our GM learns that limited wish can be used to cast 5th level divine spells and for some reason, this knee jerks him. Now we can only cast one of each of the dragon's possible spells mid fight. And that spell resistance we had that was like SR 22? Ha, the wizard was 18th level and had spell pen. He just needed to not roll a 2 to affect the both of us. Which boy oh boy he did. I was hit by a Wail of the Banshee for 180 points of damage with a DC 30 fortitude save and was killed instantly even with the ring. Also he had spell resistance as well and just absorbed any spell we threw at him. Our Cleric was killed as well because when he healed from his ring's fast healing after being KO'd by the Wail of the Banshee he instead tried to turn invisible instead of healing himself so the wizard with true sight just ****ing maximized scorching rays on him.
So because eventually it came down to our Paladin and our useless Alchemist being the last ones alive, he didn't even bother with the alchemist because at this point he was jsut a really sturdy commoner with a single bullet left in a revolver who'd also been permanently blinded by a Blindness/deafness spell DC 23, So I guess he was a blind commoner. Goody. The only reason we survived the encounter in the end was because our Paladin crit three times on the wizard with smite evil activated (at this point, I think our paladin's dice are loaded because this happens a ****ing lot).
So after getting our asses kicked, our spells drained, our equipment tarnished, and two of our party members useless, our GM put us up against a CR 16 then a CR 18 fight.
But right now our dead characters are being taken to a pool we'd found before our GM went insane, it was part of a character quest for our Alchemist who basically found a cooler version of the fountain of youth and had constantly been living different lives and forgetting his old ones each time he used it So what the pool allows us to do is to completely remake our character, we all leveled up and so we're gonna be level 13, it also will ressurect us from the dead though there's a percentile chance that our bodies and souls will be bioblierated in using the pool and using it more times increases the chances.
I really don't wanna have to min max my character, but I may need to because playing a wizard is pointless, because here's the worst part, it's always usually been like this where we're facing deadly encounters even when we were ****ing gestalted the encounters were way past the epic limit but this was just a new extreme of disparity where literally nothing I could've done would've prevented my death. I played this campaign for a story, and that story's now devolving into challenge runs.
This was a SIDE QUEST technically. God forbid he said it was just gonna get harder and harder from this point on.
We need help, me, the arcane crafter wizard, our alchemist and the summoner. We built our characters to be, well CHARACTERS and that's no longer helping us anymore. We need possible builds, advice on building such characters.
Because our GM is constantly changing the rules and changing his own houseruling to suit his own needs. We need a way around this. We need strategies, ideas, spell uses, how to best utilize time and such.
The idea I'd had for the alchemist was for my wizard constantly make scrolls of fabricate for him to use. Hopefully it will work out. The other idea was to get scrolls of create greater demiplane and make myself a crafting demiplane where time inside of it is faster than time outside of it. The ring I have currently gives me the passive ability to use any magic device I want to without a role, this is powerful, but I didn't have time to buy any good cleric wands or anything before **** started hitting the fan and I'd assumed the Cleric/Vitalist would get those wands for his use.
Anything and everything would be a great help.