How to kill a level 15 antipaladin as a level 8 party

[Kaiwen]

The campaign is 3.PF with 5e's action economy (2 standard actions/turn). All WOTC or Paizo -endorsed sources from 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, and 5e are allowed.

The level 8 good party (PF druid, PF rebirth psychic, 5e lore bard, 3.5 dread necro, PF katana duelist samurai) is traveling around with a chaotic evil level 15 PF antipaladin who I'm certain we'll have to kill down the road.

The DM describes him as "munchkined," which is never a good sign. We're told OOC that his saves are 25/20/25. His armor is epic level and protects him from nonmagical weapons as a starmantle cloak, as well as teleporting him away when he reaches half health. OOC we know that he has 9 unknown magic items on him besides his armor and sword.

How do you propose we kill him, or at least prepare to kill him?


(The antipaladin is a 3.5 character from our DM's edgy highschool days he dredged up and converted to Pathfinder.)

(Druid is primarily a spellcaster who spends all day as a bird, psychic has 1 floating wiz/sor spell known, bard spent a feat on getting 5e eldritch blast and spams it but has a perfectly decent spell list he doesn't use)

[denthor]

You need an anti magic field cast on him. That then means no teleport and normal weapons work arrow him to death.

The other way is to get him tossed over a ship into deep water. Does the teleport work if he is unconscious? Even word of recall has mile limit back to the alter. Not to mention if drowning just because you get out of the water does not mean you stop drowning. You need first aid from someone else to get the water out.

[Kaiwen]

I think the teleport would work either way because it's a special quality of his armor. We're nowhere near high enough level to access antimagic field aside from scrolls.

[denthor]

Pathfinder drowning summary

Any character can hold breath (no verbal activation). Can hold breath for double constitution. DC 10 after that each round increases by 1 DC full round action reduces time by 1 round per action. When failed you go zero hit points and unconscious.

So depending on the spell used at 1/2 hit points where it take the character(out of range spell fails). Verbal activation (spell fails). Still at zero hit points and unconscious(no action) no defense or spell casting(for healing).

Next round drops to -1 and is dying (not clear if you are not still in the water) third round dead in the water for certain. On dry land ?

[exelsisxax]

A: 2 standards a turn is unbalanced as hell and your casters could munchkin the hell out of that.
B: This feels familiar to a conversation I had with a DM about an antipaladin NPC. There were MANY red flags.

1: grapple. A basic grappling build can single-handedly lock down a high CR target and pound it to death. This is limited by casters having freedom of movement on hand and very large creatures being all over the place at high levels - neither of which apply for an antipaladin. A monk could nonlethal this guy down with ease, then set someone up for a CDG.
2: no-save spells. You have the simply stupid ability to cast 2 spells a turn, so abuse it. Ray of enfeeblement, touch of idiocy, enervation, etc. With good prep, you could stack so many automatic debuffs on someone to take them down so far your samurai should be able to solo him. Then use nonlethal damage to knock him out(or just more negative levels if you can manage it) and lay a CDG for automatic death.

And there's probably 900 different ways that 3.X could absolutely shatter this campaign, including the antipaladin, with trivial effort. Start wishcycling or some nonsense as soon as you can summon an efreeti.

[Kaiwen]

And there's probably 900 different ways that 3.X could absolutely shatter this campaign, including the antipaladin, with trivial effort. Start wishcycling or some nonsense as soon as you can summon an efreeti.

I really don't want to do this, and I don't think anyone in the campaign does either, DM included. I've been looking at stat damage and negative levels with the rest of the party, and we agree that it's an option.

[Efrate]

If you have an idea of what his stats are stat reducing rays (stupidity etc., or shivering touch) cast with true strike and possibly a rod of maximize. That is +24 at lvl 8 for a wizard to hit touch a.c. for 18 Dex damage. For 8 rounds they cannot move. Everyone Grab a heavy pick, each cdg for x4. The four of you hit 7x each for an average of (14*4*7). That is 392 damage, minus 14 for the person who or cast shivering touch, for 378 damage. That is with no strength bonus on everyone. Someone will have to remove his helmet or cast amf from a scroll after his dex hits 0.

If you each take a bit of profession executioner from BoVD and can cdg as a standard doubling that.

[AvatarVecna]

The real answer is that your DM is being a **** and sticking ylu with an NPC who will kill you if you try to get off the railroad. The correct response is to leave because no gaming is better than bad gaming, and a DM who stuck a 15th level anything in as a guide for an 8th level party has no intention of letting you beat him no matter what the rules say or how clever your tactics are. This is an out-of-game problem that cannot be solved with in-game power. The closest an in-game solution can come to existing is "my character refuses to take another step with this guy in the party", and it works best if you employ teamwork and get the other party members involved. Bonus points if the DM ends up dominating all your PCs into doing what the antipaladin says and the DM essentially just ends up running the whole party by himself.

If I am wildly off the mark and your DM is that once-in-a-blue-moon DM who puts a near impossible challenge in front of you with the express intent of playing strictly by the rules no matter what happens because he wants to see you accomplish the impossible and wants to give you that difficult-but-theoretically-beatable challenge, then your best bet at beating this guy is the BoVD sacrifice rules.

Figure out which player is most on board with rebuilding their character for the sole purpose of murdering the antipaladin. Buy as many chickens as you think you can reasonably keep within two separate 20 ft radius enclosure (44 squares on the ground...let's call it 44 chickens each?). Have a party member not being sacrificed who has a good UMD use a Wand of Sadism on themselves, then use their two standard actions per round to use a Wand Of Fireball twice - once on each enclosure of 44 chickens. DC 14 means you can expect maybe 53 chickens to take the full 5d6 damage, with the remaining 35 taking half. You have a 97% chance of rolling better than 9 for the damage roll, so those 53 chickens are taking 10 or more damage each, meaning the caster have at least a +53 to checks next round from Sadism. Have them use CdG on the willing sacrifice (who then deliberately fails the save to survive even if the damage doesn't kill them), declare they're making this sacrifice in the name of Pazuzu or whoever they think is appropriate, and get a free Wish outta the deal. "I wish the antipaladin in my party was struck dead".

(And again, this method only really works if your DM is trying to make things difficult but not impossible. If your DM is just using his high school edgelord's character sheet as a fleshlight, save yourself the trouble and either leave or refuse to play so long as the antipaladin is present. If he has no intention of playing fair, you are not obligated to play.)

[Ryton]

Being double your level and "munchkined" makes me think that the DM simply won't let you win. Sure, you may come up with a clever ploy ("Let's cast X while he's sleeping so he won't get a save!"), but something makes me think that his 9 nebulous magic items will just happen to perfectly counter your ploys and protect his DMPC. ("Sorry, your AMF set off the Invoke Magic Contingency and Dim. Door that he had from so-and-so.")

Might be best to talk about it not at the gaming table.

[Telonius]

If the DM is actually going to play this fair (as in, not fudge things to keep his antipaladin alive), I'd go for Shivering Touch. It's famously a dragonslayer spell, but it would work just fine against a Paladin. The armor apparently only activates on HP damage, so taking his (probably minimal) Dex score down to zero most likely wouldn't take more than two castings, no antimagic or dimensional anchor required. It does offer Spell Resistance, so if that's a concern, Assay Resistance right before you cast it. Get his dex to zero, take off his armor, then coup de grace. You're only in trouble if he happens to have Scintillating Scales up, which seems kind of unlikely.

[javcs]

The real answer is that your DM is being a **** and sticking ylu with an NPC who will kill you if you try to get off the railroad. The correct response is to leave because no gaming is better than bad gaming, and a DM who stuck a 15th level anything in as a guide for an 8th level party has no intention of letting you beat him no matter what the rules say or how clever your tactics are. This is an out-of-game problem that cannot be solved with in-game power. The closest an in-game solution can come to existing is "my character refuses to take another step with this guy in the party", and it works best if you employ teamwork and get the other party members involved. Bonus points if the DM ends up dominating all your PCs into doing what the antipaladin says and the DM essentially just ends up running the whole party by himself.

If I am wildly off the mark and your DM is that once-in-a-blue-moon DM who puts a near impossible challenge in front of you with the express intent of playing strictly by the rules no matter what happens because he wants to see you accomplish the impossible and wants to give you that difficult-but-theoretically-beatable challenge, then your best bet at beating this guy is the BoVD sacrifice rules.

Figure out which player is most on board with rebuilding their character for the sole purpose of murdering the antipaladin. Buy as many chickens as you think you can reasonably keep within two separate 20 ft radius enclosure (44 squares on the ground...let's call it 44 chickens each?). Have a party member not being sacrificed who has a good UMD use a Wand of Sadism on themselves, then use their two standard actions per round to use a Wand Of Fireball twice - once on each enclosure of 44 chickens. DC 14 means you can expect maybe 53 chickens to take the full 5d6 damage, with the remaining 35 taking half. You have a 97% chance of rolling better than 9 for the damage roll, so those 53 chickens are taking 10 or more damage each, meaning the caster have at least a +53 to checks next round from Sadism. Have them use CdG on the willing sacrifice (who then deliberately fails the save to survive even if the damage doesn't kill them), declare they're making this sacrifice in the name of Pazuzu or whoever they think is appropriate, and get a free Wish outta the deal. "I wish the antipaladin in my party was struck dead".

(And again, this method only really works if your DM is trying to make things difficult but not impossible. If your DM is just using his high school edgelord's character sheet as a fleshlight, save yourself the trouble and either leave or refuse to play so long as the antipaladin is present. If he has no intention of playing fair, you are not obligated to play.)

You don't need to spike your Knowledge(Religion) check quite that high.
You really only need to hit the DC ... 30 or 35 that gets you a free Planar Ally/Binding for a 3 Wish Efreet.
Could technically pull that off at level 1, if you took full advantage of the various modifiers. At level 8+? Should be pretty easy, though you might need to sacrifice multiple people (random NPC peasantry and/or captured intelligent monsters, ie goblins, kobolds, etc) if you roll particularly poorly. But you should be able to get away with at least taking a 10, so you should be able to make it automatically if you take advantage of some of the sacrifice modifiers.
I mean, sure, it's Evil, but it'll work.


Also, you should be careful when you word your Wish (and/or have one or more Wishes in reserve just in case), so that you don't run the risk of Wishing him dead, and having him turn into some kind of undead right away. Or leaving him in a condition to be contingent resurrected or something.
Best bet is to use the Wish for a Trap the Soul Item Trigger (thus no save, no SR), using something he'll touch without paranoia (write it down on a sheet of paper but don't show it to the DM right away if you're worried about it) as the item trigger (utensil, drinking container, loot, coin, dice, cards, game piece, etc). Then, using the BoVD Souls as Power for magic item creation rules, convert his soul into up to 10 XP for creating something you can do quickly, I suggest a scroll of something you can do in a single day. This will utterly destroy the soul beyond possibility of recovery, even without using the full 10XP potential of the soul.
Might need to use the Efreet method and spend the first Wish on a gem of sufficient quality.

[Heliomance]

Get the Bard to seduce him, burst in with the whole party while they're dancing the horizontal tango. You'll find he's a lot easier to kill without all his gear.

Source: Had a party do this to beat a level 14 Monk/Cleric at level 4. Somewhat derailed my plans as he was supposed to be one of the campaign Big Bads

[OGDojo]

pool your money together and buy a wish spell and wish him to one of the layers of hell :)

[javcs]

pool your money together and buy a wish spell and wish him to one of the layers of hell :)

That's a hefty price tag at level 8.

Especially when it's something you can get for the low price of a Knowledge(Religion) check and the sacrifice of some random peasant. Remember, they're Evil.


Or, if you're willing and able to soak the alignment change, you can pull the Pazuzu Wish trick.

Also, sending the problem to one of the layers of hell doesn't actually solve the problem in a way that can't come back to stab you in the back.

[JMS]

Also, sending the problem to one of the layers of hell doesn't actually solve the problem in a way that can't come back to stab you in the back.

I recommend a wish to remove him and all memory of him from all worlds, so that the worst is a vestige, so maybe a few binders to deal with?

[Anachronity]

The DM describes him as "munchkined," which is never a good sign. We're told OOC that his saves are 25/20/25. His armor is epic level and protects him from nonmagical weapons as a starmantle cloak, as well as teleporting him away when he reaches half health. OOC we know that he has 9 unknown magic items on him besides his armor and sword.

How do you propose we kill him, or at least prepare to kill him?


(The antipaladin is a 3.5 character from our DM's edgy highschool days he dredged up and converted to Pathfinder.)This sounds real sketchy. How do you know all of this stuff? If the GM is literally out-of-character bragging to you about how unkillable this guy is, and this isn't all being played for laughs or something, then it's a DMPC and the DM isn't going to let you kill him no matter what you do.

A DMPC is a character that the DM inserts into the campaign for themselves to play as, and then shows staggering amounts of favoritism to said character. They are always edgy and always overpowered.

So talk to them about it outside the game, or just quit. Or in the off chance you find the character tolerable to be around and are merely worried about betrayal, then don't worry. DMPCs are always right and won't betray anyone no matter how evil they're supposed to be. He's just an antipaladin because that's cool and edgy.


The real answer is that your DM is being a ****So, pretty much this.


If I am wildly off the mark and your DM is that once-in-a-blue-moon DM who puts a near impossible challenge in front of you with the express intent of playing strictly by the rules no matter what happens because he wants to see you accomplish the impossible and wants to give you that difficult-but-theoretically-beatable challenge, then your best bet at beating this guy is the BoVD sacrifice rules.And I can guarantee that this isn't the case because he was crazy enough to pull 5e into his rules souffle and give everyone two actions per turn. That's a "more and bigger is always better!" mindset that no skilled DM has.

[javcs]

I recommend a wish to remove him and all memory of him from all worlds, so that the worst is a vestige, so maybe a few binders to deal with?

Thing is, that's the kind of thing that even a non ******* DM is probably going to say "that's beyond the automatic/safe range for a Wish, so there'll be side effects/twisting".
Now, there's no way to guess what kind of twisting/side effects might happen, but since you're going for memory loss of the target, you could get hit with broader memory losses that aren't limited to the target - if the party is forgotten by the people who hired them, that's a problem or the party could suffer major memory losses that result in losing the advancement gained while the target accompanied the party. And that's without trying to be dickish about possible consequences.
And I'm not sure that the DM in this case wouldn't be incredibly dickish about it given the opportunity.

[Gurifu]

Defeat him with the power of love and puppies. When he learns the true meaning of friendship, he will place someone else's interests above his own and lose all his class features. :redface:

[Zecrin]

I, for one, recommend that you disable him with dust of sneezing and choking, an item which is not only relatively inexpensive at 2,400 gp, but is also very difficult to gain immunity to. If you can, make sure that you approach him under the effect of silence so that verbal contingencies cannot be activated and make sure you approach either stealthily or with high initiative bonuses so that he can't use immediate actions. Also, try slipping a true strike dimensional anchor in there or planting two spell blade daggers one for teleport and the other for greater teleport on his person. If you fight him at ninth level, employ several commune spells to determine what items may thwart the above tactics. Then be sure to sunder them, pickpocket them, or hit them with a rod of negation.

Also, I'm 80% sure that this is an unbeatable DMNPC, so victory is totally unachievable.

[EisenKreutzer]

How do you even play a 5th Edition class in 3.pf?

[Demidos]

Kaiwen,

As the other posters mentioned, this sounds like it could be either a jerk GMPC situation, or an awesome challenge, so I would figure that out before you plan IC, maybe talk with the DM OOC to ensure that he's planning on running this fair, and not adding abilities mid-fight since "that's something he'd have on him". If it's the former, you should TALK TO HIM -- resolving it in-game will probably backfire and get feelings hurt.

Assuming the latter, I agree with several of the other posters, plus I have a few extra thoughts --

Shivering Touch with True-strike is a great option.
Even if it's just a scroll, a scroll of antimagic could be invaluable. Even as a scroll it would still shut down the armor's magic (actually, if it's an artifact then it won't. Not positive about epic level magic). I think you might need to still hire additional help though, since a melee-focused 15th level character can be a beast, even without magic support. Perhaps hire some mercenaries to back up the katana fighter and the druid's companion?
Sleight of Hand is an awesome and underappreciated skill -- the roll to steal something is a flat 20 DC, with only a roll to NOTICE, not STOP the theft. This could be useful and is relatively easy to boost (especially if one of your high-charisma characters is willing to take a dip into 3.5 Marshal, which gives an aura that boosts dex checks (including sleight of hand, hide, and INITIATIVE!).)
Magic Missiles always hits and, as force damage, is hard to block. If you can get a bunch of minions who cast it together (via scrolls or wands), that's a great way to get some near-guaranteed damage on him.
Final Rebuke is a great spell for taking down single bosses (If you save, you're dazed 1 round, if you fail, you die). Might be hard to get a scroll of? Depends on your game.
Ego Whip is a great way to psionically deal ability damage, and it will also pull double duty by tanking his saves.
Consider celerity-type spells? It sounds like you'll likely have to overwhelm him all at once,
For your druid, snow-sight in conjunction with sleet storm or a similar spell will blind him while allowing your team to see -- this is quite valuable against melee types, and entirely achievable with your stated builds. Moonbolt also deals large amounts of strength damage, and is generally a great spell. Bonus points if the antipaladin is secretly undead.
Disarming melee types can often be a winning strategy. The spell Grease can both prevent him from moving (by requiring balance checks which should get a large penalty from his (presumably) heavy armor, and making him make a reflex save every time he swings his weapon or risk dropping it. He might have great saves, but everyone rolls a 1 eventually unless his build has EVERYTHING covered (which is rare).
This last one might be a bit silly, but...does he have a way to fly? If not, why not just get your whole party flying (via spells or levitating an object or getting flying mounts or whatnot) and just snipe away at him from 100 feet away? Many not-fully-thought-out builds often neglect to include a useful ranged option.


Anyways, just a few thoughts, I hope they help. :)