The Infinity Loops, and other tricks.

[Westhart]

So, I hear about them here, there, everywhere, and nowhere (please don't ask how... It's all rather complicated you see?). Of course, I can never find the damned things, but somehow my players always do, so we start the game, everything is going fine... Then combat hits and the (insert class) pipes up, "Oh, in case you guys need someone to stand in front I have infinite health... Anyhow, I thought we could compile a list of the things, for DM's to watch out for, or () players to use. Nigh Infinite type tricks can be added as well, along with any other little tricks (such as the DCFS).

Spoiler: Tricks

Show

Most of these were backed up from the links at the bottom of the page.

Spoiler: Screwin' With Time

Show

From Agita

The Thief-Acrobat PrC from Complete Adventurer (page 83) gets an ability called Kip Up at first level. This ability allows you to stand up from Prone as a free action, rather than a move action. Dropping prone is likewise a free action. And since you can take as many free actions as you wish on your turn, you can now drop prone and stand up again unlimited times within six seconds. Great, so what?
So each time you drop and stand back up, your body moves a certain distance. If you keep looping prone-stand up-prone etc. enough times in a round (6 seconds), your body will eventually move faster than the speed of light. Going by the common theory that going faster than the speed of light allows you to travel back in time, we have now got ourselves a time machine out of a single level in a somewhat obscure PrC.

Spoiler: Breaking the skillpoint max

Show

This one is pretty simple, just take the Favored and Primary Contact feats (Cityscape). Primary Contact has Favored as its prerequisite and gives you one extra rank in one skill, even if that would break the normal cap (Level+3). This helps you get into PrC's a earlier (8 skill ranks at 4th level).

Spoiler: Infinite (Limited) Wishes, Crafting XP & GP

Show

Requirements:Thrallherd (for the followers, don't take leadership), a decent modifier on your knowledge religion checks help.
Steps:

• Use your followers to sacrifice (look in BoVD), gaining whatever reward you wish/can make a high enough knowledge (religion) check for.
• Repeat as needed (you do not suffer a penalty for dead followers from thrallherd, which is why you take it over leadership.)

Note: I think you can only do this once per day due to the rules of sacrifice in BoVD.
From awaken DM golem, note added by me.

Spoiler: Salt Cow

Show

Requires: Able to cast flesh to salt, or a scroll of flesh to salt, a cow.
Steps: Pretty simple, cast the spell on the cow. Salt is worth 10gp a pound. Thus as long as your cow is over 12 pounds you are making money (that's assuming you are using a scroll)
From SorO_Lost

Spoiler: Locate City Bomb

Show

By SorO_Lost
Requires

• The desire to kill everything near you.
• Locate City (RoD)
• Snowcasting (FB)
• Flash Frost (PHB2)
• Energy Substitution (electricity) (CAr)
• Born Of Three Thunders (CAr)
• Explosive Spell (CAr)
• Cast Contingency(teleport when unwillingly moved 10ft. or more) before hand.

Process: Cast Locate City and apply said metamagic feats in that order.
Benefit:: Everything within (caster level) miles makes a reflex save (DC 11+ability mod) or is blown to outside the spell's effect taking (feet moved / 10)d6 damage.

Spoiler: LCB v2

Show

By JaronK

Use Locate City as the base spell, then use Snowcasting, Flash Frost Spell, Energy Substitution (Electricity), Born of Three Thunders, and Explosive Spell along with Arcane Thesis (Locate City) and Relicguard spell, and make yourself a necropolitan.

Now you did it with a first level spell, and you don't need the contingency. Whee!

Spoiler: Shadow Conjuration: Major Creation (for Black Lotus Poison)

Show

Major Creation can create Black Lotus Poison, but it's too slow and you have to use up a very expensive dose for it to work. Shadow Conjuration heightened high enough removes both those difficulties, so now your opponent is standing in a pool of the stuff and dies if they fail their will save to disbelieve. It's a great AoE killer, and for SCMs it's 100% real whether they pass or fail that save. By the way, 1 cubic foot of the stuff is around 996 doses, so it's MASSIVE overkill and a great AoE attack. Don't allow SCMs and this is basically okay.

From JaronK

Spoiler: Infinite Strength

Show

Requirements: Cancer Mage 1, Must be infected with festering anger

• You are immune to the negative effects of disease, so this gives you a daily (+2) strength

Spoiler: The haunt Shift trick for near immortality

Show

From jaronK

Okay, this one is complex, so you'll need to read the Libris Mortis entry on hauntings and cross reference to Animated Objects in the Monster Manual. Note that this trick requires a charisma of 17 and either good or evil alignment.

Hokay, so here's the basics. Haunt Shift is a spell, 6th level IIRC (it might be 5th, but whatever), that lets you haunt any object from Huge to Tiny size using undead. The important bit here is that the undead must have 8HD or less for the spell to activate, but all the really good abilities only work for 10HD or more undead with a charisma of 17. That's okay, we won't let that get in your way.

First of all, you need to create a new body for yourself. Pick whatever you like, but make sure to look over the Animated Object rules in the Monster Manual... various forms get various bonuses. My favorite is to look like a claw footed centaur with giant wings and chains running down the body (the wings won't let you fly, but they should count as sheet like in grapples, letting you blind enemies). Or maybe just make a statue of yourself. Whatever, your call. Now, you'll want a good material for this, and there are many options. Obdurium has a hardness of 30, so that's awfully useful, but watch out for Rust Monsters. Note that Stronghold Builder's Guide says that a 10'X20'X6" wall of the stuff (IIRC) is 4kgp in materials, so it's not even all that expensive. Ceramic is another great choice... the hardness is basically nothing, but then again nothing specifically attacks it, unlike virtually everything else. Glass too.

Okay, so you know what form you want, and you have your material... what now? Okay, cast Magecraft and Fabricate to build the thing with Dwarvencraft Quality. Isn't it fun being a Wizard or Archivist and being able to craft with the best of them, never having done it before? But with the +5 from Magecraft and your Int score, you should have little trouble when you take 10 and build this thing. As an Archivist, you could also use Divine Insight. Dwarvencraft Quality increases the hitpoints by 10 and the hardness by 2 (more on the hitpoints later).

Great, the object is crafted. Next step. Cast permanent invisibility (hey, it's an object, so this works). Cast see invisibility while you work for a bit... losing your body is REALLY embarassing. Now, get your caster level as high as you can (Consumptive Field is best for this, but not available to Wizards) and launch a Hardness spell, which increases the hardness of the body (as an instantaneous effect, woot!) by half your caster level. Awesome. Now cast Augment Object, which doubles the hardness for 1 day per caster level. If you can find a Psion, have them cast Matter Manipulation, which costs a trivial amount of Exp (so it shouldn't cost TOO much) and increases both the hitpoints and hardness of the object significantly.

Okay, now at this point you may be wondering how you're going to get in there if you're not undead. No worries, you're a caster, such trivial issues do not concern you. And more to the point, two spells in Spell Compendium make you count as undead for purposes of all spells, so just use those. Sure, you're only a legal target for a short time, but that's fine, spells only check when cast, and it's instant so it's not like it could come off later. Also, the HD issue. For this, you're going to need to craft a scroll of Haunt Shift and get some holy or unholy arrows, depending on your alignment. Just equip (hold) enough of them to drop your HD to 8 for purposes of all effects (that's what negative levels do) and use the scroll to haunt shift yourself into your nifty new invisible super hard body. Woot!

Okay, so what have you got? Well, first of all you can move your body any way you want. Nifty. And since you're now part of the object, you can still cast spells... note that the only rule for casting spells is that you can make the gestures. There's no rule about it being your normal hands that do it (though there is the rule that you have to actually have hands... you DID build your statue with those, right?). Hauntings explicitly can speak no matter what, so verbal components are fine too. Your vision is limited to only 60 feet, which is kind of annoying, so you might want to permanently Rory's Telepathic Bond with your familiar or use Chain of Eyes to deal with this issue. But more importantly, you now use the object rules for taking damage, which means such goodies as "can't take damage from piercing" and the fact that you now take half damage from darn near everything. Combine that with the hardness thing and you should have little to no trouble.

Note that your hitpoints aren't well defined, but the best reference is that you have the hitpoints of an animated object of the appropriate side (since Haunt Shift says you control the body like an animated object). The other option is to use the rules on hitpoints per thickness from various sources, but that gets a little funky as it's unclear which thickness to use.

Also, if your body is ever destroyed, it's a little unclear as to what happens, but most likely the lack of a haunted body ends the spell effect, so you'd pop out next to it as though exorcised. Probably naked though, so you might want a contingency for when that happens. Also, watch out for martial adepts (though they can't use those darn mountain hammer things unless they're on the ground) and the Shatter spell (make sure you're big enough to avoid that!).

Spoiler: Love's pain

Show

Requirements: Able to cast mind rape, along with love's pain
Steps:

• Cast mindrape on a commoner to make said commoner love whoever you wish to effect.
• Cast Love's Pain on the commoner to target said person.

From jaronK

Spoiler: Misc

Show

This is for all those random ones, that don't need a description, or can be summed up in a sentence.

• Shapechange for spellcasting: Take the form of something that racial gets spellcasting.
• Insane Leadership Score, Quick: Combine the below trick (arcane genesis) with the infinite strength trick and take Might Makes right (feat)
• Arcane Genesis for a Flowing Time 10,000,000 plane that's also Timeless

Contributors: JaronK

Spoiler: Infinite Wishes through shapechange

Show

Requires: Able to cast shapechange
Steps

1. Cast Shapechange to change into a Zodar (FF).
2. The Zodar can cast wish 1/year, so use your wish
3. Use your free action to shapechange into something else
4. next round shapechange into a Zodar, getting another wish.
5. repeat as desired

From Tshern on minmaxforum.com

Spoiler: Nigh Infinite Feats

Show

Requires: Familiar, Able to cast embrace and shun the dark chaos, or have someone else cast it on you.
Steps:

1. Have someone perform the DCFS on you while gaining alertness from your familiar. Trade away the alertness.
2. Have your familiar get out of reach (thus causing you to lose... Nothing, you don't have alertness) and come back (you now regain alertness, as it is a class feature that grants it to you.
3. Repeat Step 2, as many times as desired.

Benefits: With feats like toughness you can get nigh infinite health, proficiency with everything, infinite turn attempts (DMM anyone?), spells per day, prepare your spells without a spellbook, rages/smites/etc, and quite a few other goodies, especially if you play epic.
Objections:

1. Some say when your familiar goes away since you lose alertness you would lose the feat you traded it for.
2. Now, the GM can stop this at several points. He can claim you don't actually get the feat from the ability, shame that the text of the ability specifically says "the master gains the Alertness feat".
3. The GM can declare that losing Alertness when you've shuffled it away costs you whatever you shuffled it for.
4. The GM can apply some reasonable costs to repeatedly Embracing the Dark Chaos.
5. The GM can simply declare that having traded away Alertness, it is gone till you take it as a feat, ignoring the fact that Embrace doesn't say anything about the source of the feat.
6. The GM can houserule that the character after Shunning the Dark Chaos the character must be a character who could be legally built without Embrace/Shun.

Last 5 objections supplied by Doug Lampert, first by MaxiDuRaritry. Apparently somebody else already did this so while I found it, I can't claim it was mine, nor can I claim finding it first.

Spoiler: DCFS

Show

The Dark Chaos Feat shuffle is rather simple, you switch out any feat you possess (using embrace the dark chaos) for any Abyssal heritor feat (you have to qualify for it). Then you use Shun the dark chaos to switch said spells for "any other feat for which the subject qualifies (except an Abyssal heritor feat)."
Both spells are found in Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

Yes, We've all seen Pun-Pun . With that, commence the orbital bombardment cheese.

Useful Links:
Dirty Trick Handbook I
Dirty Trick Handbook II