[3.5 theoretical optimization] The Sacrificial Horse

[Zaq]

THIS IS THEORETICAL OPTIMIZATION. IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE BROUGHT TO A REAL GAME. IT IS NOT PRACTICAL.

Premise: There is something very, very stupid buried in the Ride (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/ride.htm) skill. Very stupid indeed.


Spur Mount

You can spur your mount to greater speed with a move action. A successful Ride check increases the mount’s speed by 10 feet for 1 round but deals 1 point of damage to the creature. You can use this ability every round, but each consecutive round of additional speed deals twice as much damage to the mount as the previous round (2 points, 4 points, 8 points, and so on). [DC 15]

This is... an uncapped doubling progression. 2^n. (Or I guess 2^[n-1], since it starts at 1.) That's insane. Ridiculous damage progressions like that demand ridiculous TO shenanigans in response.



VERSION ONE: LESS AMBIGUOUS, LESS FUNNY

Ingredients:

A very loyal horse you're willing to kill (mind control optional)
Sadism, BoVD
Beastland ferocity, SpC
Delay death, SpC
Something to do with an insanely high check result, such as the Sacrifice rules in BoVD
Minimum +14 Ride


Any mount can be used, but I'll just call it a horse for simplicity. It's probably easiest to get all the requisite spells on an archivist, but regardless of how you get them, this is what you do.

The basic ingredients are pretty simple. Sadism gives you a bonus to all attack rolls, saving throws, and skill checks equal to the amount of damage you dealt last round divided by 10. The venerable delay death + beastland ferocity combo hardly needs explanation, but regardless, delay death prevents the target from dying from HP damage until the spell runs out, while beastland ferocity allows them to continue acting at negative HP. Together, delay death and beastland ferocity mean that the target, in this case your sacrificial horse, will be able to absorb arbitrarily large amounts of HP damage and keep on living and acting until the spells expire.

Get your CL up by whatever method you choose. Honest leveling, recursive greater consumptive field bootstrapping, or anything in between. None of the spells involved are particularly high level, so Extend Spell (or a rod thereof) will go a long way.

By now I hope the plan should be clear. Cast sadism on yourself. Use the DD+BF combo to keep the horse upright. Use the "spur mount" option of Ride to make it go faster. (Note that the speed doesn't stack with itself. It's always just 10' over the base speed. This isn't the point.) Use "spur mount" over and over and over and over for as long as you can keep the spells going. As is the nature of uncapped doubling, this will cause you to deal sky-high damage after a relatively small number of doubles.

2^10 = 1,024
2^15 = 32,768
2^20 = 1,048,576
2^30 = 1,073,741,824

Whatever damage you're doing (divided by ten) translates to an uncapped bonus to whatever skill checks you like. If you can get the combo going for 31 rounds (see that 2^30 number above, and realize that you have to go one extra round because it starts at 1), you can be doing a billion damage to your poor magically-sustained horse, which translates to a bonus to all skill checks of over one hundred million. (Keeping it a tiny bit saner, even eleven rounds will get you a bonus of over one hundred. You know, if you felt like pretending that this could be in any way considered practical.)

What you do with that bonus is up to you! I recommend making this the culmination of a sacrifice from BoVD. Can't you picture it? The hapless victim is tied to the altar, helpless and at the celebrant's mercy. The celebrant solemnly mounts a horse, intones a few weird spells, and rides at full speed in circles around the altar. The horse looks worse all the time, a mass of blood and skin, but somehow it keeps going in defiance of all logic or reason. After about three minutes, the celebrant leaps off the horse, plunges a dagger into the victim's heart, and crows with evil power the likes of which has rarely been seen! A round or two later, the poor horse's spells run out and the unlucky animal vaporizes into its constituent molecules, but the celebrant's work is done already. (If you want to make it an unspeakably evil dressage routine, I'm not gonna stop you.) And yes, I know that the horse itself isn't the sacrifice (you need a separate victim because a horse doesn't have enough INT), but I like the term "sacrificial horse," so work with me.

Any other check which can be handled in one round could be done as well, since the bonus applies to all skill checks, not your next skill check. Knowledge checks, for instance. Just sayin'. Or if you feel like turning this into damage that you could direct at a theoretical target, the maneuver insightful strike (ToB) will let you turn a Concentration check into damage.

You will note that this is not actually an infinite loop! It's merely really really high unless you're already using infinite loops to get your CL/duration up arbitrarily/infinitely high. There is a cap. I don't know what that cap is! It depends on what tricks you have to get your CL up, which depends on your starting resources. I don't have all of the CL tricks memorized and I'm not currently interested in doing the work to see how high we can get the final score. I think just finding the core of the trick is interesting enough without actually doing that particular form of number-crunching.



VERSION TWO: MORE AMBIGUOUS AND POTENTIALLY FUNNIER

Ingredients:

An extremely large number of carefully spaced, very loyal horses you're willing to kill (mind control optional)
Sadism, BoVD
Something to do with an insanely high check result, such as the Sacrifice rules in BoVD
Minimum +19 Ride
Willingness to parse rules obnoxiously


Let's get a quick reference here.


Spur Mount

You can spur your mount to greater speed with a move action. A successful Ride check increases the mount’s speed by 10 feet for 1 round but deals 1 point of damage to the creature. You can use this ability every round, but each consecutive round of additional speed deals twice as much damage to the mount as the previous round (2 points, 4 points, 8 points, and so on). [DC 15]

Under this version, we're making the [RULES-SHAKY, WHICH IS WHY THIS ONE IS FLAGGED AS MORE AMBIGUOUS] argument that nothing in the Ride skill says you have to use "spur mount" on the same mount every round. Note that if you find this argument to be too shaky to fly, cool! Ignore it and focus on the unambiguous method above. I know it's shaky and I'm not interested in hearing why you wouldn't let it work. This is theoretical op and it's the second version for a reason. Still with me? Let's continue.

So anyway, the basic idea is the same as above, but instead of making one horse able to withstand arbitrarily high amounts of damage before disintegrating, we use the "fast mount/dismount" rules to keep spurring on a series of horses. The wording is such that, under this reading, the damage is based on how many consecutive rounds you have been using "spur mount," not on how many consecutive rounds a specific mount has been being spurred.

Yes, I know this is stupid. I've said that like four times now. You're free to ignore this part if it's too stupid for you.

You will also note that nothing explicitly says that the mount actually has to run. It can just be spurred on, its speed statistic will temporarily increase, and it doesn't have to actually go anywhere. Is this dumb? Yeah, but no dumber than everything else here.

This one is a lot closer to being infinite/arbitrarily large because you don't have to invest in CL shenanigans. You just need a really large number of horses (which, okay, can cost money and therefore can theoretically be calculated given a specific budget, but there are also ways of earning money, so whatever—I don't feel like dealing with that), a way to keep them in range of each other, and a way of casting sadism before you mount what you've decided will be the final horse. You don't actually have to cast it before you start this whole nonsense. You just need it active before the end. So, you know, there's that. Or, you know, sadism is a valid Persist Spell target even before any particular shenanigans.

Net result is the same. Stupidly enormous amounts of damage translating into stupidly enormous bonuses to be applied in stupid ways.



Yes, this is all insane. That's how TO works. It's not practical. It's goofy as heck. But it's interesting in the way that goofy TO is interesting.

Floor's open, gentlefolk. I await your comments.


Couldn't find an elegant way to make a clockwork steed (MM4) affected by beastland ferocity since BF is mind-affecting. I liked the image of it on a clockwork steed, though. Yeah, spark of life or whatever, but that's a lot of work.
Couldn't find an elegant way of using a damage redirection effect (forced share pain, shield other, Dahlver-Nar's shield self, etc.) to inflict this on an enemy directly.
Couldn't find an elegant way of getting a jovoc (MM2) involved to use as the mount. The less said about that the better. Jovocs are stupid and their retribution aura is so broken it's barely even fun to abuse in TO. (No, quasits aren't tanar'ri. I checked that first, yo.)
Couldn't find an elegant way of using unambiguous rules to mount and use Ride checks on an arbitrary unwilling target, especially for the durations we're talking about.

[Unavenger]

The ride to death trick I've seen before, but I like the fact that you turned it from a killing trick to an actual buff power.

I guess I'm disappointed that the designated truenamer guy didn't do the obnoxiously high-level utterance + energy transformation field trick, but it's there if you want it: get +lots to your truespeak check, increase the level of an utterance by lots/4, use it to power an ETF, get lots/4(spell-level) copies of whatever spell you like in a single action. You don't even need to be an actual truenamer, mind, just to know a single utterance. Yes, I know, I know, garblers, but still.

EDIT: I guess with the ETF dealio you can actually use it to cast more mounts, which should allow you to use just a few horses to start off, then ETF of mount gets you some more, then you bounce on over to your ETF of Wish? Whatever, I'm just the ideas person here.

[Hellpyre]

For the the gold cost of the second method (or for arbitrary gold via Ocular Persistant spells or what have you), you might ride for a while prior to your final Craft check, or even the entire time you are crafting (per the rules, that can include directing laborers, and does not require you to make no other checks during), resulting in massive quantities of gold fueled by the suffering of the noble steed providing you with artistic inspiration. Added with the ability to increase DC to increase speed of crafting, and you could build entire mansions in an instant of sadistic insight.

You might use it (and yes, this is a bit of a nod to you, Zaq) to fuel Truenaming checks, vastly outstripping the increasing DCs.


You can explictly Gather Information without arousing suspicion by taking a -20 penalty, even though you do so on a horse galloping in an endless circle.

But most impressive of all, you can make a Jump check for a high jump. With a modifier of +100,000,000 you would be looking at a high jump of 25 million feet. The rules on jumping more than your movement make it clear that you finish on your next turn, no matter what. With one AU being roughly 490,800,000,000 (or more exactly 490,806,662,372.05 feet), you are looking at being able to jump straight to the Sun within a few minutes of starting your epic ride.

[AvatarVecna]

An artificer could craft an item of continuous "Delay Death" that is CL 4 (via Ur-Priest) and thus has a market price of 128000 - totally viable pre-epic, and makes this combo work forever. You could also craft items of continuous "Sadism" (for you) and "Masochism" (for the horse) to have the bonuses from dealing/taking damage also go forever.

Abusing the sacrifice rules is probably the best way to use this, naturally, but there's more that can be done there. For starters, the sacrifice rules limit you to one sacrifice benefit a day, so while you could certainly get a wish out of it, you'd only get one...unless you let somebody else take a turn riding the death-horse into a sacrificial victim. Beyond that...

This is obviously a really dumb low-effect use, but Iaijutsu Focus isn't Trained Only. You could get your bonus high enough to hit +9d6 on any check made with it within just a couple rounds. If you're high enough level to take the epic feat, then this can translate not only into infinite damage against the horse, but infinite damage against anybody else you happen to ride past.

Provided you've got the raw materials necessary, Epic Craft skills allows you to add 10 to the DC any number of times in order to increase the speed at which you finish. Provided death-horse has the CC to carry the raw materials and the final product, you could theoretically make just about anything basically instantly. Like...a razor sharp, perfectly balanced, ornate dwarvencraft greatsword from folded metal and with a blood groove is DC 50 to craft and costs 2550 gp to make. There are 100800 rounds in a week, so...if you have +3 to armorcrafting, and start crafting at the start of round 21, you can set the DC at 104870, take 10, and auto-craft 4 of those super-weapons (or just slightly less than 2, if you make them adamantine instead). And this just gets worse in the rounds to follow. As long as you've got the base materials, you can craft absurd amounts of basically anything you care to name.

You and your horse can run through Walls Of Force without any trouble, and the horse can squeeze through any 4in by 4in hole without having to bother to roll past like round 5.

You can spend a minute teaching the horse a new trick, or rearing/training some other animal you brought along on the trip with a similar timeframe.

Use your +NI attack/save/skills and your undying extra-fast mount to become the ultimate messenger. Spend a week riding your horse to not-death to make a Profession (Messenger) check and make 2100798 gp. You now own the multiverse.

Survival...Ride through a forest and forage for food. Come out with enough food to solve world hunger forever. Make a quick Survival check to know what the weather will be like for the rest of eternity in this area.

EDIT: Oh and if you're willing to allow for 3.P mixing, you can take Unchained Craft with 20 ranks in the craft skill and now you can use that skill to make magic items of that nature...at mundane crafting speeds. Normally, this is an absolutely garbage ability because mundane crafting can never be good enough to catch up with normal magic item crafting speeds, but...

[Kalkra]

If there's any way to give your mount regeneration, Dawn is a cantrip which heals enough nonlethal damage to make the target staggered instead on unconscious. Also, while not as good as Masochism, if your mount has Pain Mastery it can reach truly enormous Strength values.

For best results, have your mount be the party Druid.

[RatElemental]

Couldn't you just awaken the horse to give it enough int to act as an actual sacrifice too? Dominate animal could get it to go along with this lunacy despite being smart, too.

[Arkain]

Dominate Animal wouldn't work though, as an awakened animal becomes a magical beast, so you'd have to use Dominate Monster, instead. On the plus side, Dominate Animal's duration is only rounds/level, whereas Dominate Monster lasts days/level.

[Khatoblepas]

You could probably make use of both Sadism and Masochism with this if you use a Humanoid mount. It's -10 to your check, but it's still possible to do, hopefully.

Make your rider a Jermlaine Archivist. With +6 to Dex, they can ride with ease, and they can ride a Medium sized creature.

The rider a Human Wizard. Toughness and Trollblooded for regeneration, meaning that Beastland Ferocity can keep them conscious for as long as you need without killing them. Once you're done, cast Refreshment (BoED) to remove your NI nonlethal damage.

The rider casts Sadism, the mount casts Masochism, then they go to town on spurring until you have TWO people with ludicrous bonuses to rolls.

[Jack_Simth]

Couldn't you just awaken the horse to give it enough int to act as an actual sacrifice too? Dominate animal could get it to go along with this lunacy despite being smart, too.

Fox's Cunning is a 2nd level spell with no expensive components. Why use Awaken?

[Quertus]

How about getting someone else to awaken the house right before you sacrifice it?

[ben-zayb]

I see, so it has a little bit of the old Spur-to-death trick combined with a little bit of the Omniscificer tricks (except Sadism). I also remember, the second part with all the horses was what you were referencing in this fun thread. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?598061-Challenge-Make-a-character-that-can-see-the-moon)



The rider a Human Wizard. Toughness and Trollblooded for regeneration, meaning that Beastland Ferocity can keep them conscious for as long as you need without killing them. Once you're done, cast Refreshment (BoED) to remove your NI nonlethal damage.Beastland Ferocity has no effect on Regeneration. Nonlethal damage has its own rules.
Do not deduct the nonlethal damage number from your current hit points. It is not "real" damage. Instead, when your nonlethal damage equals your current hit points, you’re staggered, and when it exceeds your current hit points, you fall unconscious.


If you are to use a creature with regeneration as a mount with the RAW read obnoxiously, you can argue that you can still use Control Body power to move an unconscious mount. Don't forget to put Pain Mastery on your mount for it to gain enormous STR bonus to lift a continent or something.

[Arkain]

How about getting someone else to awaken the house right before you sacrifice it?

This is probably a simple typo or auto"correction" issue, but I just can't help visualizing the awakened house situation :smallbiggrin:

[Batcathat]

This is probably a simple typo or auto"correction" issue, but I just can't help visualizing the awakened house situation :smallbiggrin:

Seems like the magical version of a smart house. Perfect for any modern, urban wizard. It's compatible with most magical brooms and connects directly to a familiar of your choice.

[Telok]

... connects directly to a familiar of your choice.

Do not want. Rule 34. All the tentacle spells are enough.

Mooving along, how many tentacles can we add to the cows and is it a good idea?

[Telonius]

Do not want. Rule 34. All the tentacle spells are enough.

Mooving along, how many tentacles can we add to the cows and is it a good idea?

I think that this was supposed to be for the Cow thread, but the image of it works just as well here.

[Khatoblepas]

Beastland Ferocity has no effect on Regeneration. Nonlethal damage has its own rules.
Do not deduct the nonlethal damage number from your current hit points. It is not "real" damage. Instead, when your nonlethal damage equals your current hit points, you’re staggered, and when it exceeds your current hit points, you fall unconscious.


If you are to use a creature with regeneration as a mount with the RAW read obnoxiously, you can argue that you can still use Control Body power to move an unconscious mount. Don't forget to put Pain Mastery on your mount for it to gain enormous STR bonus to lift a continent or something.



If Beastland Ferocity doesn't make you immune to the unconsciousness of nonlethal damage, the spell does absolutely nothing. Because if you have 0 nonlethal damage, and -5 hit points, your nonlethal damage exceeds your current hit points, since 0 is higher than -5.

Pain Mastery is very, very good though. I'm sure there's a way to make it very cool, even without Consumptive Field CL raising tricks.

[Quertus]

This is probably a simple typo or auto"correction" issue, but I just can't help visualizing the awakened house situation :smallbiggrin:


Seems like the magical version of a smart house. Perfect for any modern, urban wizard. It's compatible with most magical brooms and connects directly to a familiar of your choice.

Lol. Indeed, autocorrect has humorously modified my reply yet again.

Although, as was pointed out by the ninja immediately preceding my post, there are… "smarter" ways to turn the horse into a valid sacrifice.

[The Viscount]

It's not ironclad, but there is mention in the Deathshead that it "often climbs onto a dominated foe and rides it as though it were a mount."

The domination effect means it could command the mount to fail saves for something like a damage redirect effect. They are undead though, which means you're either using create greater undead and watching them do it instead of you or shapechanging (and shapechange is kind of overkill).

The real question for a jovoc mount is whether it preserves the damage types or not. If it does, a deathshead riding a jovoc would be immune to the effects, and could ride it to exhaustion with breaks for fast healing to recover. As you mentioned, getting them would require something like planar binding, and that's not really a cheap solution.

[daremetoidareyo]

ok. I see pain mastery and jovoc are being combined.

How many riders can you get onto a mount?

Follow up question: what happens when 4 or more riders are all spurring the same mount?

Because at level 1, a savant can give all of them a number of ranks in the ride skill equal to the savant's ranks in ride.

[Khatoblepas]

It's not ironclad, but there is mention in the Deathshead that it "often climbs onto a dominated foe and rides it as though it were a mount."

"A Deathshead that dominates its mount automatically succeeds on Ride checks to guide with knees, leap, spur its mount, and control its mount in battle, and the dominated creature is considered a war trained mount."

So Assume Supernatural Ability on a Deathshead form would allow you to spur your mount no matter how low your ride skill is.

So, undead spellcaster + Spark of Life + Polymorph, or anyone and Polymorph Any Object twice.

[Zaq]

The ride to death trick I've seen before, but I like the fact that you turned it from a killing trick to an actual buff power.

I guess I'm disappointed that the designated truenamer guy didn't do the obnoxiously high-level utterance + energy transformation field trick, but it's there if you want it: get +lots to your truespeak check, increase the level of an utterance by lots/4, use it to power an ETF, get lots/4(spell-level) copies of whatever spell you like in a single action. You don't even need to be an actual truenamer, mind, just to know a single utterance. Yes, I know, I know, garblers, but still.

EDIT: I guess with the ETF dealio you can actually use it to cast more mounts, which should allow you to use just a few horses to start off, then ETF of mount gets you some more, then you bounce on over to your ETF of Wish? Whatever, I'm just the ideas person here.

I kind of forgot that energy transformation field exists, to be honest! It's such shenanigans that it's not particularly high up in my mental library of op-fu. I suppose that a TO trick is where the dirtiest stuff comes out anyway, of course, so I like your suggestion of "okay, we can get a disgustingly high Truespeak check, so how do we make that relevant?"


For the the gold cost of the second method (or for arbitrary gold via Ocular Persistant spells or what have you), you might ride for a while prior to your final Craft check, or even the entire time you are crafting (per the rules, that can include directing laborers, and does not require you to make no other checks during), resulting in massive quantities of gold fueled by the suffering of the noble steed providing you with artistic inspiration. Added with the ability to increase DC to increase speed of crafting, and you could build entire mansions in an instant of sadistic insight.

You might use it (and yes, this is a bit of a nod to you, Zaq) to fuel Truenaming checks, vastly outstripping the increasing DCs.


You can explictly Gather Information without arousing suspicion by taking a -20 penalty, even though you do so on a horse galloping in an endless circle.

But most impressive of all, you can make a Jump check for a high jump. With a modifier of +100,000,000 you would be looking at a high jump of 25 million feet. The rules on jumping more than your movement make it clear that you finish on your next turn, no matter what. With one AU being roughly 490,800,000,000 (or more exactly 490,806,662,372.05 feet), you are looking at being able to jump straight to the Sun within a few minutes of starting your epic ride.

Wait, what? Let me read the Jump rules again.


Action: None. A Jump check is included in your movement, so it is part of a move action. If you run out of movement mid-jump, your next action (either on this turn or, if necessary, on your next turn) must be a move action to complete the jump.

Holy moly. That's insane and brilliant and I love it. Jump to the moon! Or the sun! Or basically anywhere!

This is like when you finish Super Mario Galaxy and you get to play as Luigi and your jump distance noticeably outstrips what the basic level design expects...



An artificer could craft an item of continuous "Delay Death" that is CL 4 (via Ur-Priest) and thus has a market price of 128000 - totally viable pre-epic, and makes this combo work forever. You could also craft items of continuous "Sadism" (for you) and "Masochism" (for the horse) to have the bonuses from dealing/taking damage also go forever.

Abusing the sacrifice rules is probably the best way to use this, naturally, but there's more that can be done there. For starters, the sacrifice rules limit you to one sacrifice benefit a day, so while you could certainly get a wish out of it, you'd only get one...unless you let somebody else take a turn riding the death-horse into a sacrificial victim. Beyond that...

This is obviously a really dumb low-effect use, but Iaijutsu Focus isn't Trained Only. You could get your bonus high enough to hit +9d6 on any check made with it within just a couple rounds. If you're high enough level to take the epic feat, then this can translate not only into infinite damage against the horse, but infinite damage against anybody else you happen to ride past.

Provided you've got the raw materials necessary, Epic Craft skills allows you to add 10 to the DC any number of times in order to increase the speed at which you finish. Provided death-horse has the CC to carry the raw materials and the final product, you could theoretically make just about anything basically instantly. Like...a razor sharp, perfectly balanced, ornate dwarvencraft greatsword from folded metal and with a blood groove is DC 50 to craft and costs 2550 gp to make. There are 100800 rounds in a week, so...if you have +3 to armorcrafting, and start crafting at the start of round 21, you can set the DC at 104870, take 10, and auto-craft 4 of those super-weapons (or just slightly less than 2, if you make them adamantine instead). And this just gets worse in the rounds to follow. As long as you've got the base materials, you can craft absurd amounts of basically anything you care to name.

You and your horse can run through Walls Of Force without any trouble, and the horse can squeeze through any 4in by 4in hole without having to bother to roll past like round 5.

You can spend a minute teaching the horse a new trick, or rearing/training some other animal you brought along on the trip with a similar timeframe.

Use your +NI attack/save/skills and your undying extra-fast mount to become the ultimate messenger. Spend a week riding your horse to not-death to make a Profession (Messenger) check and make 2100798 gp. You now own the multiverse.

Survival...Ride through a forest and forage for food. Come out with enough food to solve world hunger forever. Make a quick Survival check to know what the weather will be like for the rest of eternity in this area.

EDIT: Oh and if you're willing to allow for 3.P mixing, you can take Unchained Craft with 20 ranks in the craft skill and now you can use that skill to make magic items of that nature...at mundane crafting speeds. Normally, this is an absolutely garbage ability because mundane crafting can never be good enough to catch up with normal magic item crafting speeds, but...

Wait. Masochism for the... horse... that's stupid and wonderful.

Explains why the horse goes along with it, too. Nothing feels better! *shudder*

But yeah, now all of a sudden the horse is hyper-competent at arbitrary stuff, too. That's, um, not terrifying at all, right?

Wait more. If we use a cow instead of a horse and give it masochism, then we can make a cow that can jump over the moon. Like, whoa, man.


If there's any way to give your mount regeneration, Dawn is a cantrip which heals enough nonlethal damage to make the target staggered instead on unconscious. Also, while not as good as Masochism, if your mount has Pain Mastery it can reach truly enormous Strength values.

For best results, have your mount be the party Druid.

Pain Mastery? Oh, that's terrible. You're awesome.


It's not ironclad, but there is mention in the Deathshead that it "often climbs onto a dominated foe and rides it as though it were a mount."

The domination effect means it could command the mount to fail saves for something like a damage redirect effect. They are undead though, which means you're either using create greater undead and watching them do it instead of you or shapechanging (and shapechange is kind of overkill).

The real question for a jovoc mount is whether it preserves the damage types or not. If it does, a deathshead riding a jovoc would be immune to the effects, and could ride it to exhaustion with breaks for fast healing to recover. As you mentioned, getting them would require something like planar binding, and that's not really a cheap solution.

Pretty sure that the jovoc's aura more or less specifies that the only way to be immune to it is to be a tanar'ri, regardless of whether you would have been immune to the initial damage. Honestly if you really feel like using the jovoc the best answer is probably just size-changing magic and going from there.


ok. I see pain mastery and jovoc are being combined.

How many riders can you get onto a mount?

Follow up question: what happens when 4 or more riders are all spurring the same mount?

Because at level 1, a savant can give all of them a number of ranks in the ride skill equal to the savant's ranks in ride.

I think that the damage is based on the rider, not on the mount. I don't think that it goes up faster when you've got multiple riders. I mean, it'll still trigger for each of the riders, mind you...

You folks are awesome. I'm so glad I shared this. Keep the commentary rolling, please!

[Quertus]

Keep the commentary rolling, please!

Are you sure? We've already got + lots to almost anything. Ways to sacrifice the horse, or keep it alive. And the cow jumping over the moon. Wouldn't continuing just be, you know, beating a dead horse?

[RatElemental]

beating a dead horse

There's an idea. Would this work if the horse was undead?

[Hellpyre]

There's an idea. Would this work if the horse was undead?

Not well without other optimization. Undead are destroyed at zero hit points instead of dying, so the beastland ferocity thing wouldn't help, but damage immunity shenanigans would get rid of the sadism bonuses.

[Zaq]

Are you sure? We've already got + lots to almost anything. Ways to sacrifice the horse, or keep it alive. And the cow jumping over the moon. Wouldn't continuing just be, you know, beating a dead horse?

Oh I fully intend to ride this bad boy into the ground.

[Doctor Awkward]

The rules on jumping more than your movement make it clear that you finish on your next turn, no matter what.

That's not at all what the rules say. The rules on jumping state that if you run out of movement mid-jump then you must spend your next action on a move action on this turn or, if applicable, on your next turn to finish it.

If you have a modifier that allows you to cover 25 million feet, but your movement only allows 40 feet per turn, then on the first turn you will move 40 feet and then run out of movement. Then the next turn you will travel another 40 feet before running out of movement in mid-jump again. Since it is still applicable, you must spend your next action to keep moving, repeating this process for an additional six hundred twenty-four thousand nine hundred twenty turns at which point you will have successfully traveled the full distance of your jump.

[Hellpyre]

That's not at all what the rules say. The rules on jumping state that if you run out of movement mid-jump then you must spend your next action on a move action on this turn or, if applicable, on your next turn to finish it.

If you have a modifier that allows you to cover 25 million feet, but your movement only allows 40 feet per turn, then on the first turn you will move 40 feet and then run out of movement. Then the next turn you will travel another 40 feet before running out of movement in mid-jump again. Since it is still applicable, you must spend your next action to keep moving, repeating this process for an additional six hundred twenty-four thousand nine hundred twenty turns at which point you will have successfully traveled the full distance of your jump.

I fully agree that that is the RAI, but the rules clearly state that you use your next action to finish your movement, not to continue it. It is much like drown healing in the regard that it has a clear intended use case, with poor writing.

[Mongobear]

I have no idea if this would even work, but its the first thing that popped into my head...

Have an Intelligent mount, maybe a Cohort via Leadership, give it enough class levels to qualify for Frenzied Berserker. FB 4 gives Deathless Frenzy, which lets them stay alive similarly to Delay Death as long as the Frenzy is going, then boost Con and take Extend Rage feat to last longer. Use them as a Mount, and juggle multiple durations of DD and Frenzy to keep the doubling effect going.

Probably easier to just do it the original way listed, but it is a nice alternative to Delay Death. Also, would something like Spike Growth, or other long duration damage over times work during the build up rounds of Spur Moount? When youre doubling effects dozens of times, even a few d4s of damage from Melf's Acid Arrow or Flaming Sphere would do wonders if you actually need a modifier beyond +500 or so, or it could even shave a round or two off of getting to the target modifier, if youre aiming for something like a massive check for a Sacrifice.

Also, other goals for the massive check from Sadist. Exemplar to fascinate a crowd of people who watch you do whatever skill. ELH examples of some skills to totally shennanigans the world, Bluff so high you actually Alter reality, Diplomacy someone so badly that you convince the King to abdicate his crown to you, etc.

[icefractal]

I like the Trollblooded Human mount variant: non-fatal, gives more use to the mount's insane Masochism bonus, and makes foes feel uncomfortable.

Sudden Leap maneuver (on the mount) gives you arbitrary amounts of movement as a Swift action. Several other maneuvers benefit from extreme skills as well.

UMD would arguably give you NI CL with a staff.

[Doctor Awkward]

I fully agree that that is the RAI, but the rules clearly state that you use your next action to finish your movement, not to continue it. It is much like drown healing in the regard that it has a clear intended use case, with poor writing.

Exactly like drown-healing, this is a misreading of the text in order to accomplish something it doesn't say.

The drowning rules state that on the second turn your hit points drop to -1-- as in are subtracted to. Mathematically speaking, you cannot subtract from a negative number and reach -1, as subtracting from a negative increases the magnitude not decreases it. There are no Rules As Written to support drown-healing as it is popularly interpreted. In order for the rules to work that way, the text would need to read, "Your hit points are reduced to -1" (or something similar). This would cause the absolute value of your hit points to decrease, thus bringing them closer to zero regardless of whether they are positive or negative.

Similarly, the Jump skill plainly states that if the distance cleared by your jump check exceeds your movement for the round, you are required to use a consecutive move actions on either on this [current] turn or, if necessary, on your next turn to complete the jump. The "if necessary" creates a provision which permits the character to run out of movement again on his subsequent turn before completing the jump, at which point the process repeats, rather than immediately force the character to travel all of the remaining distance on the next turn. In order for your interpretation to be correct that specific text would need to be removed.

[Hellpyre]

The drowning rules state that on the second turn your hit points drop to -1-- as in are subtracted to. Mathematically speaking, you cannot subtract from a negative number and reach -1, as subtracting from a negative increases the magnitude not decreases it. There are no Rules As Written to support drown-healing as it is popularly interpreted. In order for the rules to work that way, the text would need to read, "Your hit points are reduced to -1" (or something similar).
They do, in fact, say something similar. They say that on the first turn, you fall unconscious, and then helpfully clarify that that puts you at exactly 0 HP.



Similarly, the Jump skill plainly states that if the distance cleared by your jump check exceeds your movement for the round, you are required to use a consecutive move actions on either on this [current] turn or, if necessary, on your next turn to complete the jump. The "if necessary" creates a provision which permits the character to run out of movement again on his subsequent turn before completing the jump, at which point the process repeats, rather than immediately force the character to travel all of the remaining distance on the next turn. In order for your interpretation to be correct that specific text would need to be removed.

You are adding in worda where there aren't any to try and defend your reading here. There are two actions available to you in a turn that can be used as a move action, either or both of which might have been used prior to or during the jump. You may or may not have a second move action available to you in this turn. But either way, you explicitly complete the jump with the second move action, rather than continue it. Which is important for a lot of things, like the jumping down action, which uses the jump rules and so could cause you to fall based on your movement speed, rather than, say, gravity's pull.

I feel like it's worth making clear again that I agree with you about how the rules are intended to operate, but not that they are written in a way that translates into that by strict interpertation. This thread is about RAW and all the glourious stupidity that comes with it. I wouldn't allow half the shenanigans in this thread in a game I was running, but it is still fun to work in a framework devoid of trying to respect the designer's intent.



Anyways, to avoid derailing the thread further, another suggestion. One of the epic uses for Use Rope allows you to animate any rope you hold, as long as you hold it, in an explictly [Ex] manner. It references a spell that limits that maximum length by caster level, but doesn't provide any way to translate a skill check into an effective caster level, so it may only affect 50 ft. of rope (as though you had CL 0) or it may simply apply to the rope you hold. Since the spell's duration also keys off of CL, it can't function if you need to assume CL 0, so presumably you can animate a rope of any length and coil it or loop it around things more or less as you please. Or you could tie someone in an unsolvable Gordion knot (bonus ppints if you are an Exemplar and use your masterful shibari skills to convert enemies to fanatical followers)

[RatElemental]

Mathematically speaking, you cannot subtract from a negative number and reach -1, as subtracting from a negative increases the magnitude not decreases it.

This is just mathematically incorrect, you can subtract a negative number from a negative number and get a result closer to 0.

[Zaq]

So my buddy did some calculations about the "cow jumping over the moon" thing and came up with the following numbers (which, I will admit, I have not been the one to verify):

Approx. 37 rounds to make a high jump over the moon.
Approx. 43 rounds for the sun.
Approx. 49 rounds for Pluto.
Approx. 62 rounds for Alpha Centauri.
Approx. 80 rounds for Andromeda.
Approx. 97 rounds to the edge of Observable Space.

Thanks, stupid uncapped doubling mechanic!

Remember that you've also got the same ginormous bonuses to other skills and also to saving throws. So, you know, if someone gets snippy about "hard vacuum" or "infinite mass" or "absurd multiples of c" or something silly like that, remember that you've got higher bonuses to saving throws than anyone has bothered to ever bring to the field.

If you happen to clip by a black hole en route to any of these destinations, well, I don't know the Escape Artist DC for that, but if you're rocking a bonus to checks that's 28 digits long and it's only DC 100 to get through a wall of force, well, you can probably do it.

All of the relevant spells are low enough level to put into wands, and again, the progression comes from the spur mount action, not from any of the spells. We can just recast the spells periodically to keep this going, meaning that we don't have to do stupid CL shenanigans. Yes, there's a Concentration check to cast while riding, but need I remind you that Concentration is a skill check and your skill check bonuses are best expressed in scientific notation?

If we feel like ignoring the delay death + beastland ferocity combo and we want to just use a mount with regeneration who treats this whole mess as nonlethal, what's the best way to keep them conscious? I'm not sure if Diehard works, and I'm a little unsure if the bloodtalons soulmeld would do a darned thing.

[Doctor Awkward]

They do, in fact, say something similar. They say that on the first turn, you fall unconscious, and then helpfully clarify that that puts you at exactly 0 HP.

Which again, if you head to the unconscious (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#unconscious) condition, you find out is incorrect. Mechanically the only effect being unconscious renders on your character is that they are "knocked out" and rendered helpless. (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#helpless) Merely being unconscious has no inherent effect on your hit points, but rather is the result of the current total of your hit points and/or nonlethal damage. The rest of the description lists the possible instances of when you can be rendered unconscious and, and the text very heavily implies that list is exhaustive. If it is, then the "(0 hp)" found in the drowning rules is utterly meaningless, as the rules for downing cannot rewrite the condition summary, which is the primary source for conditions that are referenced by the other rules. Neither is drowning attempting to make an exception to the normal unconsciousness rules, because as the errata documents state "exceptions to the rules are always called out as such"-- frequently with text that reads "Unlike other ways of falling unconscious, drowning causes..." or something similar. The most generous interpretation renders this a contradiction. Either way, this offending text is to be summarily ignored when interpreting the rules.

The more thoroughly you read and digest the text as a whole, the more you find that the vast majority of so-called rules dysfunctions within 3.5 tend to work like this. They are the results of selective reading, or starting from a conclusion and working backwards to find only the text that supports it.




You are adding in worda where there aren't any to try and defend your reading here. There are two actions available to you in a turn that can be used as a move action, either or both of which might have been used prior to or during the jump. You may or may not have a second move action available to you in this turn. But either way, you explicitly complete the jump with the second move action, rather than continue it. Which is important for a lot of things, like the jumping down action, which uses the jump rules and so could cause you to fall based on your movement speed, rather than, say, gravity's pull.

There are rules for how the jumping in D&D 3.5 works when a character wants to jump down (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/skills/jump.htm#jumpingDown) from a height and "use gravity's pull." If you are making a long jump or high jump you aren't using those. I wholeheartedly agree that many corner cases should be covered by similar rules and also by what makes logical sense. But not only does this line of thinking not help your argument, it also contradicts your later assertion of "using only the glorious studity of RAW" and actively ignoring common sense in favor of using only the exact words of the written text. Which means you aren't actually arguing for the "Rules As Written." You are arguing for "Rules As I Interpret Them And You Can't Prove I'm Wrong." And it is absolutely true that I cannot disprove your subjective interpretation of the rules. I can point out the gaps in your argument and the flaws in your logic as you present them.



This is just mathematically incorrect, you can subtract a negative number from a negative number and get a result closer to 0.

Subtracting a negative number, yes. But subtracting a positive number from a negative results in a larger negative number. The problem is that the drowing rules don't distinguish between positive and negative integers, and therefore the popular interpretation of "drown healing" is not supported by the Rules As Written and relies entirely on personal interpretation. My argument against that has never been that the rules disprove it, rather that that they don't support it one way or the other, and thus it requires a DM to make a judgement call if they want to allow it to occur or not. The moment that happens you have left RAW.

[Hellpyre]

Subtracting a negative number, yes. But subtracting a positive number from a negative results in a larger negative number. The problem is that the drowning rules don't distinguish between positive and negative integers, and therefore the popular interpretation of "drown healing" is not supported by the Rules As Written and relies entirely on personal interpretation. My argument against that has never been that the rules disprove it, rather that that they don't support it one way or the other, and thus it requires a DM to make a judgement call if they want to allow it to occur or not. The moment that happens you have left RAW.

I...I don't see how you can justify that the rules not spelling out how simple math works requires personal interpretation. Circling back to the drown-healing issue for a moment, if you argue that specific doesn't beat general in this instance, you can't be made unconscious by the first round effect at all, since the rules aren't telling you to do either of the things listed as ways to become unconscious (incidentally, I recommend against using the D20SRD website for RAW discussion, as they edit the text of some of the entries from what it was in the downloadable SRD available from WotC.) Since a DM judgement call obviously would need to appear in that case, would any discussion of drowning become non-RAW by necessity, even though rules exist for it specifically?

As a second, clearer example, the Marrush in MM2 has the taklif arrow, which reads

Taklif Arrow: Any creature hit by a taklif arrow must succeed at a Fortitude save (DC 14) or contract a disease similar to the marrash variant of filth fever (see Disease, above). The incubation period is 1 day, and the disease deals 1d3 points of Dexterity damage and 1d3 points of Constitution damage (see Disease in Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide). However, a creature that fails any Fortitude saving throw after its initial infection dies instantly, and neither raise dead nor resurrection can restore it to life. The corpse rises as a new marrash 1d6 days later.

It is clear that the intent is to apply the death effect only to those fortitude saves relating to infection by disease. It is equally clear that the text doesn't do that, but rather, by RAW, means any creature infected by the arrow will thereafter die if it fails any Fort saves, for the rest of its miserable existence. Would you be arguing that this is a reading unsupported by RAW? I genuinely want to know, so I can get a better grasp on how you approach this topic.

(incidentally, since this is becoming a bit of a back and forth, if you'd prefer this be removed to its own thread Zaq, I would be happy to move it out of here to facilitate the thread getting potentially derailed by a discussion of what exactly RAW entails)

[Doctor Awkward]

It is clear that the intent is to apply the death effect only to those fortitude saves relating to infection by disease. It is equally clear that the text doesn't do that, but rather, by RAW, means any creature infected by the arrow will thereafter die if it fails any Fort saves, for the rest of its miserable existence. Would you be arguing that this is a reading unsupported by RAW?

That's a very strange case. As Monster Manual II is a 3.0 book I first checked my 3.0 DMG to see if anything regarding diseases was changed in 3.5. Aside from the damage dice of some of the listed diseases they appear to function the same. Upon reviewing those rules (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm#disease), diseases operate by first allowing a Fortitude save to resist initial infection. If failed, you then make an additional Fortitude save once each day to avoid taking repeated damage. The Disease (Ex) entry referenced by the Arrow ability makes mention that it includes a rider that if you do take damage you must make a second Fortitude save each day otherwise 1 point of the damage from that day becomes permanent drain. This is identical to how demon fever functions, which is listed in the DMG (and on the SRD). Despite the somewhat murky language, neither entry calls out any exception to the normal disease rules at any point, and so therefore would use all the normal disease rules: Fortitude save to ignore damage each day, a secondary save in the event of failure to prevent drain. Two consecutive successful saves ends the effect.

Things get a little silly when Taklif Arrow appears to take a hard swipe at the initial ability and attempt to rewrite the whole thing in its entirety by imposing a penalty of instant death for failure. I got curious so I did a little more digging and found out that Marrash first appeared in the 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendium Annual 1 under the entry "Marrashi." After digging that book out, I found it had this to say regarding that particular ability:


Marrash can increase their numbers by firing taklif arrows. These special projectiles infect their victims with a disease that appears to be identical to the one spread by the diseased arrows described earlier, although the course of the disease is always much swifter-- the victim of a taklif arrow dies in a day if untreated. [Description of treatment inserted here.] A marrashi never has more than one taklif arrow at a time, and these are almost always used on a human or demihuman targets; marrash bred from other races rarely survive.

The spirit of a victim struck by a taklif arrow is devoured by a growing marrashi presence, and when it is entirely eaten, the victim dies and a new marrashi begins to slowly transform the corpse. Victims of a taklif arrow cannot be brought back with a raise dead or resurrection, though a properly worded wish is effective. If simply buried, the body becomes a new marrashi in 1d6 days. If cremated the embryonic marrashi dies.

Much clearer. Sometimes I do miss the old days...
Anyway, this description is carried over pretty much word for word to the monster description in the 3.0 Monster Manual II that precedes the ability descriptions. Based on that, the function of Taklif Arrow in 3.0 is more or less the same as it was in 2E: kill something outright in order to make another marrash. And though it is not at all clear at first, the book does state that though the Taklif Arrow appears to be the same disease inflicted by the other arrows, it is really something much deadlier. Admittedly, this save-or-die rider renders the ability damage portion of the description rather meaningless and for that I have no explanation. I also checked all the errata I could find and the 3.5 accessory update booklet but this creature isn't addressed.

Based on that, no, your suggested interpretation is not supported by RAW. For one thing, the text of that ability, as with all descriptive text, pertains specifically to rules about that ability. It additionally references the disease rules directly several times, and so any mention of Fortitude save is clearly with respect to the general rules regarding how diseases work in D&D. In order to reach your interpretation, you are required to ignore the context in which that particular piece of text is presented, and then apply the equivalent of Biblical literalism to it. You must essentially pretend that it is the only sentence in the entire ability description. If you interpretation requires you to ignore large chunks or the text then you are quite clearly not reading the Rules As Written. You are, in fact, rules-lawyering. Any time you are interpreting text it is important to consider all of the relevant rules. Not just the ones that support a presupposed conclusion.


I...I don't see how you can justify that the rules not spelling out how simple math works requires personal interpretation.

Because on account of the specific language used you have no way of knowing whether or not the drowning rules were written with the assumption that the character will be at positive hit points when drowning is occurring. As I already stated, you cannot drop negative hit points of a greater magnitude than -1 and somehow reach -1. And that's not how math works. Mathematics doesn't do personal interpretation. It is a very precise language and certain words have specific meanings that do not change. That text only ceases to be gibberish if you assume your hit point total is positive when drowning occurs. Because the interaction between negative hit points drowning is not specifically covered by the rules it is subject to DM adjudication, and because of that drown-healing is automatically not RAW.

[Hellpyre]

snip

Thank you. Your answer enlightened me on where exactly our fundamental disconnect is on this issue. I'd be more than happy to debate finer points elsewhere in a thread more focused towards the specific topic of what constitues RAW, but I think this thread is not the proper place to continue this discussion.

Fait enough?

[The Viscount]

"A Deathshead that dominates its mount automatically succeeds on Ride checks to guide with knees

Now that's impressive! (I know that's the text in the chart, it's still funny)

I realize now that deathshead and jovoc are both small, so this combination cannot work without some size changing magic on as well.



For keeping your mount conscious, you might be able to extract use from When Two Become One. It's low enough to be a wand, and it doesn't discuss what happens with nonlethal damage, only becoming disabled or dying from lethal damage. We might be able to weasel out of the bind by saying the horse gets knocked out but the rider can keep controlling it since the minds are merged.
In case this wasn't weird enough.