+96 to skill checks

[Yak folklore]

Step 1: Buy a 1/day magic item that casts sadism for 2160gp ((3*2*1800)/5)
Step 2: Buy a 1/day magic item of chain lighting for 23760gp ((11*6*1800)/5)
(if you sell most of your stuff this should be accomplishable by 8th level)
Step 3: Hire some mercenaries, tell them that you will shoot them with lightning, then they will be given magical healing (from your party cleric or a hired one)
Step 4: Do the thing, getting an average skill check luck bonus of +24(11d6, average 38, 38+(11*19))
Make something valuable, tons of good options for this when you are at the DC 30-40 range, I would try on consecutive days until I rolled well and would make chaos ichor (poison) at DC 53, with a market value of 330,000 (but maybe use a mercane intermediary)
Step 5: Hire someone to capture 17 caged trolls for you, they can only ever be KO'd by lightning and will be ready again really in a couple hours
Step 6: Save up, and switch out for a maximized chain lightning magic item, giving you a guaranteed +96!!!
Step 7: Hire a wizard to polymorph you into a choker, make another maximized chain lightning item, double the bonus.
Step 7: Do anything you want, make a ludicrously complex lock, create a whole new material twice the strength of adamantine, brew godsblood poison worth 800,000 a pop, convince Sazz Tam to give you the read wizards?
I also want to stress the fact that while I'm sure there are other ways to get higher bonuses at lower levels, this really relies on very few twists of wording, and can be done paralleled to anything else, essentially just requiring gp.

[Drelua]

The only problem I can see trying to do this is that you'd need some fairly tough mercenaries to reliably survive a chain lightning. A level 1 warrior is probably not surviving that, and the ones tough enough to handle it won't let you zap them for cheap. You'd probably be forking over quite a bit of gold every time you do this. At a base cost of 3 silver per day, at least doubled for willingly getting blasted, probably multiplied a few more times for higher level people that won't just die. And that price goes way up if someone does die.

Hm, now I have an idea for an adventure where the plot hook is a lot of people going missing around the time this incredibly skilled craftsman showed up...

[Jay R]

On step 4, you get a luck bonus for the next round only. If I were the DM, I would rule that this bonus only applies to a one-round action. It cannot be used for a weekly action like Craft.

[Arael666]

On step 4, you get a luck bonus for the next round only. If I were the DM, I would rule that this bonus only applies to a one-round action. It cannot be used for a weekly action like Craft.

He could just switch to make daily checks.

[JNAProductions]

He could just switch to make daily checks.

That's still a lot longer than one round.

[NigelWalmsley]

All that stuff can be elided. The initial magic item of Chain Lightning is expensive enough that you could instead get a magic item of Wall of Iron or Fabricate or Flesh to Salt, any of which would allow you to cheese your way to step 5 faster.

But, frankly, "you can break WBL and then get very large skill bonuses" is just not that big of a deal. Step 4 isn't capped, you could just make an even more absurd pile of money and buy a magic item that gives you a +1,000 bonus to your skill of choice permanently.

[Yak folklore]

The mercenary thing is the biggest problem, but when you are dealing with crafting 300,000gp poisons, it's not so bad. As for the time on check, what I understand is that it's really unclear, is it a check at the beginning, representing your creative inspiration, and plan of how to do it, is it at the end, representing how well you have done (meaning that it would need to be an interruptible procedure for this to work), or does the check happen across the entire time, in which case being able to pause doesn't make much sense. In my opinion, the best argument for it being allowable is that something like the factotum's class agility would undeniably be useful for a time consuming check, and is really worded very similarly, it simply gives you a bonus to when you make a skill check, both happen instantaneously and don't last, the difference being that one of these sources has a different value based on the immediate past, should the ability to make a check really depend on if you would have a different bonus in the future?

[Yak folklore]

All that stuff can be elided. The initial magic item of Chain Lightning is expensive enough that you could instead get a magic item of Wall of Iron or Fabricate or Flesh to Salt, any of which would allow you to cheese your way to step 5 faster.

But, frankly, "you can break WBL and then get very large skill bonuses" is just not that big of a deal. Step 4 isn't capped, you could just make an even more absurd pile of money and buy a magic item that gives you a +1,000 bonus to your skill of choice permanently.

The difference is that no reasonable DM would allow that magic item to be made, it frankly doesn't make sense, where as two separate magic items each with a reasonable and common ability does. The other thing is cost difference, and the fact that this can be used on ANY skill, not one specific one. If we round up 96 to 100, and assume that you have the jack of all trades feat, and are a lycanthrope, a magic item that does the equivalent would be 2.2 million gp, not including the once a day thing, but still far more than 5x the price if you removed that limitation.

[AvatarVecna]

Mercenaries are expensive, chickens are where it's at. Chain Lightning is expensive, Widened Fireball is where it's at.

1) Build a cube chicken coop 80 ft to a side. Spherical with 20 ft radius would be more material-efficient, but is harder to make, so whatever we have a cube. Anyway, make sure each "floor" has mesh floors, such that they allow chickens to walk on them, but they don't actually block Line Of Effect.

2) If you fireballed into this enclosure, it would affect 1280 5x5x5 cubes. Chicken takes up 2.5x2.5x2.5 normally, and 1.25x1.25x1.25 squeezing. Using small "floors" in our chicken coop, we should be able to get 53 chickens per 5x5x5 cube, for a total of 81920 chickens. Each one costs 2cp, so the final price is 1638.4 gp - an absurd amount to spend on chickens, but then it's an absurd number of chickens. But let's save money with Leadership for Chicken-Infested Commoners. Really you only need 1 and they could fill it up in a round, but even more "reasonable" interpretations of "1 chicken summoned per round" just means more commoners gets things done quicker.

3) Cast Sadism.

4) Cast a 10d6 widened fireball into the chicken coop. Each chicken has at least 1 HP as part of being a living creature, and dies at -10. 10d6 has a 99.47% chance of rolling more than 21 damage, meaning that even the chickens that make their Reflex save will take 11 damage from basically any given fireball.

Now, there's four ways this work, depending on how two different questions are ruled. First: is Sadism based on damage dealt or damage taken? RAW appears to be dealt, but it's not an unreasonable for a DM to say that you can't "deal" more damage than a target can "take". Second: is the "damage dealt divided by 10" for the whole round, or per target? Again, RAW seems to indicate it's the total, but given how absurd Sadism gets with AoEs, it's not unreasonable for a DM to rule that it's per target rounded down, and then added together, just to make it slightly less absurd.

RAW/RAW means getting a bonus of +279347.

RAW/DM means getting a bonus of +237568.

DM/RAW means getting a bonus of +90112.

DM/DM means getting a bonus of +81920. This is the weakest interpretation for us, so let's use that one.

Now, the bonus only lasts for 1 round, so it's gonna be a bit tricky to actually get anything useful out of it. But still!

[JNAProductions]

Eh... The Factotum ability (assuming you mean Cunning Knowledge) explicitly applies to a single use of a check. It is NOT time-restricted.

Sadism explicitly only lasts one round. I think most DMs would rule that you cannot apply 6 seconds of bonuses to an 8-hour work day check.

[DrMartin]

So with that +81920 bonus, your sadist Exemplar starts a 25km jump and everyone witnessing him becomes a fanatic follower

[noob]

So with that +81920 bonus, your sadist Exemplar starts a 25km jump and everyone witnessing him becomes a fanatic follower
everyone witnessing him within a radius of 30 feet.
Please note that if you are jumping within a tower filled with people there might be a lot of people that are within 30 feet of you at some point during your jump.



The demonstration must be nonthreatening and intended to entertain and amuse the onlookers. Viewers must be within 30 feet of the exemplar, must be able to see her clearly, and must willingly pay attention to her actions. This ability requires at least 1 minute to perform, and it can affect a particular creature only once every 24 hours.

[denthor]

I once captured a troll in a game. Not only was I evil for the torture needed to keep the troll under control but needed a wagon and a specialized cage to keep it in for transport. Then I had to feed the thing. It ate quite a bit. Your expenses will be enormous with 17.

[Jay R]

OK, I have to ask.

Has anybody actually played with a DM who would allow this?

The defense against absurdity is always the DM's judgment. That's why the rule include this: "Good players will always realize that you have ultimate authority over the game mechanics, even superseding something in a rulebook." [DMG 3.5e, p. 6]

So really - have you ever seen an actual DM who would allow this?

[AvatarVecna]

OK, I have to ask.

Has anybody actually played with a DM who would allow this?

The defense against absurdity is always the DM's judgment. That's why the rule include this: "Good players will always realize that you have ultimate authority over the game mechanics, even superseding something in a rulebook." [DMG 3.5e, p. 6]

So really - have you ever seen an actual DM who would allow this?

I've had a DM who allowed to combine Delay Death and Autohypnosis to be incapable of dying from HP damage, in addition to Masochism where I got enormous bonuses to basically everything based on damage taken. Same DM allowed me to cast Chained Shield Other and Glory Of The Martyr on a group of civilians so that they took 0% damage in exchange for me taking all the damage they would've taken. The rest of the party was similarly borked in countless ways. That game lasted a year and a half with weekly sessions until scheduling issues became too significant.

On the one hand, that's anecdotal evidence. On the other hand, being anecdotal doesn't make it incorrect, nor does it make that DM not a true scotsman. Different tables just have different tolerances for these kinds of shenanigans.

Responding to the unstated point, though: it doesn't matter for online discussion if any true DM would allow any particular mechanical oddity to function as written. The whole point of discussing RAW is that rulings will vary from DM to DM. Even the most straightforward rules can be "ruling"d or houseruled or homebrewed out of existence, and even the most nonsensical mechanical mess can be approved, regardless of how written or intended or fun it is. So in the absence of a DM, we can take a guess at how many/most/nearly all DMs might rule on this or that, but we can't say that absolutely every DM would rule the same way on any given issue.

So for online discussions of mechanics, we work with RAW - without any DM to provide 'official' rulings, we can only work with how the rules are, and not how we think they were intended to be, or how we think they should work to be more balanced or fun or intuitive or in line with the fluff. It doesn't matter that I think Fighter is weak, I can't write up a Fighter build that gives them Paladin casting on the assumption that the DM will just be okay with it - even if there is almost assuredly a DM out there who would allow a homebrew Fighter that has a touch of casting. At least by default, you can't just pretend the game is different from how it is in discussions like this, for good or ill. You can sometimes get away with having your theorycrafting involve small and normally-reasonable rulings, but even that can get picked apart.

(And honestly for good reason: any argument that at stage 1 requires the DM to ignore RAI in favor of RAW even though RAW is stupid, and then later asks the DM to accept RAI over RAW because RAW is stupid, is a weak argument that's basically begging the DM to let something work that shouldn't. Breaking the game without breaking the rules is really easy when you get the DM to Rule 0 away the rules you broke.)

This might seem like a pretty obvious line of thought, and I think it is as well. But I'm mentioning it because it's my initial response whenever I see somebody jumping into a thread like this, asking the equivalent of if the OP has parental permission to break the game. Like, some people will see a thread like this and think "ah it's just somebody playing around with edge cases in the rules, but that's fine cuz if it ever sees real play - which it wont - the DM would only approve it if they're able to deal with it". And some people will see a thread like this and think "oh no some wannabe optimizer is using the forum hivemind to cheat themselves to godmode in an actual game! the only chance for this game I'm not sure exists to be saved from rampant munchkinry is for me to make a strongly-worded post reminding the OP that what they're doing might break the gentleman's agreement upon which their game is founded!"

And I think that's a very strange reaction. Do you think the OP was unaware that combos need DM approval?