Dealing i damage

[Warchon]

OK, so this thread is for something completely useless--you have been warned.
On the Barber (http://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/classes/prestige/alqadim/barber.shtml) page on Realmshelp, an amusing typo says that the PrC deals i extra poison damage per die on her poisons.
Assuming you take that completely literally, how could you translate that into a meaningful effect?

Venger has already suggested intentionally misreading a couple of weapons that provide critical damage multipliers in unintentional superscript, so that you could square i and deal 1 real damage, but there's still the problem of that being weapon damage and the bonus being for poison damage. Can any class convert between the two?

Are there any poorly worded mind effecting spells/abilities out there that might provide grounds for declaring i to deal 'imaginary' damage that might be shaken off with a will save?

Any other suitably bizarre ways to make this mean something?

[Venger]

Again, in the spirit of jocularly misreading superscripts as though they were algebra, by using some... ambiguous rules from factotum, you can add cunning insight on to the ability damage roll for your poison to improve it.

[Warchon]

Hmm...this would also make poisons deal i ability damage, wouldn't it? Hit yourself with it once, and permanently carry around imaginary, unhealable ability score modifiers that make it technically impossible for you to reduce a stat to 0 (and therefore die, go comatose, whatever).

[Warchon]

I'm not really familiar with Factotums, but reading the Cunning Insight block on their entry, I'm not immediately seeing where it provides the freedom to do imaginary damage? But coupled with that imaginary ability damage above, there it is!

[Venger]

I'm not really familiar with Factotums, but reading the Cunning Insight block on their entry, I'm not immediately seeing where it provides the freedom to do imaginary damage? But coupled with that imaginary ability damage above, there it is!

cunning insight lets factota add their int mod to damage rolls. it'd give you i+(int mod) damage from your barber poison, so an i would be in the mix somehow, similar to rendering yourself at 0+i, as you alluded to.

[Warchon]

Ahhh! I follow now.
Still, that's just adding and multiplying an existing i. Nothing so far to turn it into Real damage.

[Lapak]

Clearly this ability is meant for incapacitating imaginary opponents so that you can acquire impossible material components for ritual spellcasting.

"In order to summon the Wand Of Unliving Agrathex, you must offer the still-beating heart of a Phantasmal Killer!"

[zlefin]

I don't have any far realms material to look through, but given the nature of it there might be grounds for imaginary damage being more effective against them somewhere.

[Bronk]

Maybe it could let you fight off the monster from the Phantasmal Killer and Weird spells instead of resorting to a will save?

[EliDupree]

Y'all are not taking the rules NEARLY literally enough.

First off, check the rule for ability damage: "Lost points return at a rate of 1 per day unless noted otherwise by the condition dealing the damage." So, if I'm reading this right, as long as you have ability damage on you, you recover 1 ability point per day. But if you have i ability damage, then recovering 1 at a time never gets you back to 0 ability damage, so arguably, you keep gaining 1 every day FOREVER.

But! Now we have to look at the rules for ability scores in general. "Each ability, after changes made because of race, has a modifier ranging from -5 to +5. Table: Ability Modifiers and Bonus Spells shows the modifier for each score.". But the table doesn't give any indication of what to do when your ability score is a complex number. E.g. 14-2i technically isn't in the range "14-15" indicated on the table. This means that having any imaginary amount of ability damage makes your ability modifier totally undetermined – if I was the GM, I'd rule that you don't have any bonus or penalty. So the damage would be effective for removing an opponent's ability bonuses, or your own penalties.

Now let's get into more details! Unfortunately, most ways that ability scores affect things are based on your ability modifier. But there are a few rules that depend directly on the ability score. Your carrying capacity in particular is determined by your raw Strength score – on a table with only real-number entries, so anyone with imaginary strength damage has no carrying capacity. Although it's not clear whether that means you can't carry anything or whether you can carry as much stuff as you want.

If you can somehow finagle the rules to get an imaginary ability MODIFIER, things get much more interesting. For instance, your Constitution bonus affects your hitpoints, so you could have imaginary hitpoints. That would mean your hitpoints are never technically 0 or below (remember, non-real numbers are never greater than or less than real numbers!), so you can't be killed by damage. However, since the ability modifiers are defined by a table rather than a formula, I don't see a way to accomplish this.

[Telonius]

You deal 1 damage, but only if you state your action in Latin.

[EndocrineBandit]

I think the connection was found and I'm kinda sad no one noticed the connection of Roman numerals before

[Hiro Quester]

If it's imaginary damage, then it only affects phantasms. So ability damage to the phantasmal killer that is stalking you, reducing the saving throw needed to not die of fright?.

[Warchon]

I think EliDupree is "in the lead" right now, for having used the imaginary poison damage to make a Pun-Pun out of a goddamn hairdresser.

[Dimers]

i damage? All the poison attacks cause blindness?

i damage? All the poison attacks ruin Apple products?

i damage? All the poison attacks harm genial Scotsmen?

[Hish]

I vaguely remember a way to make yourself die at negative constitution rather than -10. If you have an imaginary con score, you'll never reach negative con.
If there's no way in 3.5, at least it'll work if you port the poison into pathfinder.

Edit: You still can fall unconscious due to nonleathal damage.

[Venger]

I vaguely remember a way to make yourself die at negative constitution rather than -10. If you have an imaginary con score, you'll never reach negative con.
If there's no way in 3.5, at least it'll work if you port the poison into pathfinder.

Edit: You still can fall unconscious due to nonleathal damage.

That's a pathfinder rule. There is no mechanic for that in 3.5.

[Sto]

This might be one of the greatest threads in history. Is there any ways to abuse i with a spell?

[Venger]

This might be one of the greatest threads in history. Is there any ways to abuse i with a spell?

I mean if you have the book on tape or something, I suppose you could explode an enemy's is with seething eyebane.

EDIT: you might also be able to target abstract concepts (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?560284-How-Does-A-False-God-Grant-Spells&p=23116731#post23116731) with imaginary damage

[Hiro Quester]

If you have an imaginary con score, you'll never reach negative con. .

I hate to be a buzzkill, but that's not how imaginary numbers work. -10-i is still a negative number. It's ten steps into the negative half of the plane (the left side of the diagram below), but just shifted off the line of real numbers one unit into the negative imaginary part of the plane (bottom left).

This only works if you interpret "negative 10 HP"or "negative con" as requiring no complex numbers at all (strictly on the line or real numbers, no deviations to the upper or lower pars of the plane of complex numbers). That's a tough argument to make.

But given that we just made pun pun out of a hairdresser, perhaps the most strictly not-realistic-at-all literal interpretation, one almost impossible to make stick in a serious argument, is what y'all are after here.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/ImaginaryUnit5.svg/480px-ImaginaryUnit5.svg.png

[Venger]

I'm not sure where you got the idea we were taking this seriously.

Unrelated, where did "hairdresser" come from? I scoured the post and feel like I'm missing something.

[DeTess]

I'm not sure where you got the idea we were taking this seriously.

Unrelated, where did "hairdresser" come from? I scoured the post and feel like I'm missing something.

A Barber is a hairdresser in modern english, iirc. In the past the term was also used for "doctors", iirc.

[Hish]

I hate to be a buzzkill, but that's not how imaginary numbers work. -10-i is still a negative number. It's ten steps into the negative half of the plane (the left side of the diagram below), but just shifted off the line of real numbers one unit into the negative imaginary part of the plane (bottom left).

This only works if you interpret "negative 10 HP"or "negative con" as requiring no complex numbers at all (strictly on the line or real numbers, no deviations to the upper or lower pars of the plane of complex numbers). That's a tough argument to make.

But given that we just made pun pun out of a hairdresser, perhaps the most strictly not-realistic-at-all literal interpretation, one almost impossible to make stick in a serious argument, is what y'all are after here.

[IMG]

Reaching -con means you have hp less than or equal to -con. Unless someone deals imaginary hp damage, your hp will never equal your -con, and as mentioned upthread, a real number is neither greater nor less than a real number.

If you can't do something to die at -con, use sassone leaf residue (deals 2d12 hp damage) so your hp is imaginary. Then your hp will never be less than or equal to -10. Also makes you immune to nonlethal, as your nonlethal damage never equals or exceeds your hp.

[Warchon]

A Barber is a hairdresser in modern english, iirc. In the past the term was also used for "doctors", iirc.

If you actually go to the class page for Barber (linked in the original post) and read the fluff, the class is both. It's basically built on the real-world historical barbers who were responsible for both haircutting and surgery.

"They have to mix their own tonics and lotions" is used as their excuse for getting to use the Alchemy skill (to make poisons, mostly) without knowing any spellcasting.

The concept as I read it actually leans pretty heavily on the "hairdresser" aspect of the history, and gossip and seduction(!) are key class concepts. The more 'serious' aspects are barely an aside.

[Pleh]

If you square i, you get -1. If by any means you can square your damage, squaring i damage makes the damage negative (unless you have an even number of pairs of i).

Positive damage reduces hit points. Negative damage should restore them.

[P.F.]

If you square i, you get -1. If by any means you can square your damage, squaring i damage makes the damage negative (unless you have an even number of pairs of i).

Positive damage reduces hit points. Negative damage should restore them.

Sadly, the barber adds i damage to the roll, rather than multiplying it, so if the damage were merely squared, it would result in a disappointing damage2-1.

[Telonius]

Sadly, the barber adds i damage to the roll, rather than multiplying it, so if the damage were merely squared, it would result in a disappointing damage2-1.

D&D multipliers add strangely, though; doubling a bonus twice makes it tripling the bonus. So if you had a bonus doubled and then doubled again, it would equal the bonus times 3, not the bonus squared.

[ericgrau]

Sadly, the barber adds i damage to the roll, rather than multiplying it, so if the damage were merely squared, it would result in a disappointing damage2-1.

(damage+i)2 is actually damage^2+2*damage*i-1. So we still haven't fixed the problem unless base damage is somehow 0.


D&D multipliers add strangely, though; doubling a bonus twice makes it tripling the bonus. So if you had a bonus doubled and then doubled again, it would equal the bonus times 3, not the bonus squared.
I think they were doing it via some over-literal reading of a 2 footnote.

[Nifft]

Some of the magic item pricing guidelines do feature (bonus^2) as a price element.

Could this be leveraged to create negative-XP / negative-GP prices for magic items?