What happens if you cast Astral Projection while physically on the Astral plane?

[Aquillion]

By freeing your spirit from your physical body, this spell allows you to project an astral body onto another plane altogether.

Ok, so you seperate your body from your astral self and can project it onto other planes (away from the astral plane, ultimately) That part works fine.

You project your astral self onto the Astral Plane, leaving your physical body behind on the Material Plane in a state of suspended animation.

Uh. So if you cast Astral Projection while physically on the Astral Plane, your physical body is popped onto the Material Plane? For that matter, what happens if you cast it on another non-Material plane?

When a second body is formed on a different plane, the incorporeal silvery cord remains invisibly attached to the new body. If the second body or the astral form is slain, the cord simply returns to your body where it rests on the Material Plane, thereby reviving it from its state of suspended animation.

No it doesn't, if your body isn't on the material plane.

You and your companions may travel through the Astral Plane indefinitely. Your bodies simply wait behind in a state of suspended animation until you choose to return your spirits to them. The spell lasts until you desire to end it, or until it is terminated by some outside means, such as dispel magic cast upon either the physical body or the astral form, the breaking of the silver cord, or the destruction of your body back on the Material Plane (which kills you).

So what happens if your body is not on the Material plane when it gets destroyed?



EDIT: Also, a mostly unrelated question, but I didn't want to create two threads on Astral Projection...

To enter one, you leave the Astral Plane, forming a new physical body (and equipment) on the plane of existence you have chosen to enter.

You're not getting a 'reflection' of your equipment -- you're, uh, duplicating every piece of equipment you own. Which seems abusable, to put it mildly.

There's no description of whether or not that duplicate equipment is lost when your Astral Projection is killed/terminated, but let's assume it is. Even then... so I buy a Ring of Three Wishes. Then I cast Astral Projection. My projection has a Ring of Three Wishes. This is not the original ring -- this is a completely new ring. I use it up. The ring back on my physical body is unaffected. I end the projection, then cast the spell again, creating a new, fully-charged copy of that original ring...

[erikun]

I'm going to assume this was a responce to another thread, as it doesn't make much sense by itself. I'm not going to bother with whatever RAW should be, and just state how I would judge such a case as a DM.

First, when you cast Astral Projection, you leave your body behind and project onto the Astral Plane. The term "leaving your physical body behind on the Material Plane" seems to imply that you are on the material plane to begin with - if you were elsewhere, it doesn't make much sense for your body to suddenly teleport back to the Prime Material Plane. (Which is really RAI, but *shrug*)

Second, if you really want to cast Astral Projection while on the Astral Plane, I see no reason why not. However, you don't get to choose where you project, so you probably won't end up next to your unconcious body. Also, while you can find a portal to a specific plane in X hours, that's just finding A portal, not one specific portal. Don't expect to find your body easily.

Third, if you really wanted to go there with the Ring of 2 Wishes: any wishes cast from the projected ring end when the Astral Projection ends. Or, if you really insist on pushing it, I'm sure there is an "Astral Filcher" who would happily relieve you of that ring if you let your guard down. Don't be trying to munchkin me; it doesn't end well.

[nargbop]

Wonderful story possibilities here... You appear to mortal men, bound with a silver cord back to a floating POINT. Children laugh and tug on it...

This is a situation for... DM INTERPRETATION! Adjust the magic's stated rules to the unanticipated situation.

[RTGoodman]

You're not getting a 'reflection' of your equipment -- you're, uh, duplicating every piece of equipment you own. Which seems abusable, to put it mildly.

There's no description of whether or not that duplicate equipment is lost when your Astral Projection is killed/terminated, but let's assume it is. Even then... so I buy a Ring of Three Wishes. Then I cast Astral Projection. My projection has a Ring of Three Wishes. This is not the original ring -- this is a completely new ring. I use it up. The ring back on my physical body is unaffected. I end the projection, then cast the spell again, creating a new, fully-charged copy of that original ring...

You could do that, but that's not the only way to abuse it, especially if you're high enough level to have a ring of three wishes. If you're duplicating EVERYTHING, then you should make sure you've got all sorts of high-level expensive equipment on you when you cast astral projection. Then just have your friendly neighborhood high-level Cleric make a gate (the astral travel version, which costs NO XP) beside you, walk through, and get the copies of your equipment from your astral body. (I don't know anything about the Planes, though, so would they need any special equipment to grab anything on the Astral Plane and/or bring it back?)

Then they just pop back to real world and the two of you split the profit of your doubled goods. If you can get a lot of coins instead of magic items, that makes it even better since you don't have to worry about finding someone to sell high-level items to.

Anyone see any RAW problems with that?

[The_Snark]

You could do that, but that's not the only way to abuse it, especially if you're high enough level to have a ring of three wishes. If you're duplicating EVERYTHING, then you should make sure you've got all sorts of high-level expensive equipment on you when you cast astral projection. Then just have your friendly neighborhood high-level Cleric make a gate (the astral travel version, which costs NO XP) beside you, walk through, and get the copies of your equipment from your astral body. (I don't know anything about the Planes, though, so would they need any special equipment to grab anything on the Astral Plane and/or bring it back?)

Then they just pop back to real world and the two of you split the profit of your doubled goods. If you can get a lot of coins instead of magic items, that makes it even better since you don't have to worry about finding someone to sell high-level items to.

Anyone see any RAW problems with that?

Well, not RAW exactly... but I'm sure there's a type of inevitable strictly dedicated to keeping the fantasy economy relatively stable, or else it would have imploded by now.

[Frosty]

Fun things about DnD economy - excerpt from the Economicon. Read the complete thing here: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28547

The Economicon: Making Sense of the Gold Standard:

"100 pounds of gold for a house? How does anyone make rent without a wheelbarrow?"

Since time immemorial, D&D has used the "gold piece" as its primary currency. It is apparently a chunk of reasonably pure gold of vaguely standardized weight that people use fairly interchangeably in different cities populated by different species. In the bad old days, each gold coin was a tenth of a pound, which was hilarious and inane. In the current edition, each gold piece is a fiftieth of a pound. That's 3.43 gp to the Troy Ounce, which means that in the modern economy, each gp is about $171 worth of gold. Obviously, gold is significantly more common in D&D than it is on Earth, gold is also undervalued because its status as a currency standard drives it out of industrial uses and causes inflation. Further, populations in D&D are orders of magnitude smaller than they are in the real world, so the gold per person is higher even with the same amount of gold. So the gold piece is massively less valuable in D&D economies than it would be in Earth's economies.

Nonetheless, things are really expensive in D&D, and the high price in gold means that there's a distinct limitation of how much wealth can be transported by any means available. The economies of currency transaction are actually so unfavorable that currency as we understand the term does not exist. Things don't have prices or costs – all transactions are conducted in barter and a common medium of exchange is heavy lumps of precious metal.

Wish and the Economy

An Efreet can provide a wish for any magical item of 15,000 gp or less. A Balor can greater teleport at will, but can only carry 30 pounds of currency while doing so. Even in platinum pieces, that's 15,000 gp worth of metal. The long and the short of it is – at the upper end of the economy currency has no particular purchasing power and magic items of 15,000 gp value or less are viewed as wooden nickels at best. You can spend 15,000 gp and get magic items, but people in the know won't sell you a magic item worth 15,001 gp for money. That kind of item can only be bought for love. Or human souls. Or some other planar currency that is not replicable by chain binding a room full of Efreet to make in bulk.

Powerful characters actually can have bat caves that have sword racks literally covered in 15,000 gp magic items. It's not even a deal because they could just go home and slap some Efreet around and get some more. But even a single major magic item – that's heavy stuff that such characters will notice. Those things don't come free with hope alone, and every archmage knows that.

Wartime Economies Make for Shortages:

Many people wonder why a masterwork dagger goes for more than its weight in gold. That's a pretty valid question to ask; certainly I'm not going to attempt to justify the 600 gp price tag on a masterwork walking stick – that's just an example of simplistic game mechanics run amok. But to an extent the crazy prices can be justified by the fact that every settlement in every D&D world is on a war footing all the time. The idea that Peace is somehow a natural state is a fairly recent one, and based on the frequency of wars all over the world – it's obviously just wishful thinking anyway. War is the default position of every major economy in the world, and that means that weapons have an immediate, and desperate, clientele. Iron is still relatively cheap, because you can't kill people with it right now, but actual weapons and armor are crazy expensive.

That doesn't explain the fact that the PHB charges you over a quarter Oz. of gold just to get a backpack, and it doesn't explain the fact that the markup on masterworking a buckler is the same as the markup on masterworking a breastplate – that's just a game simplification that makes no real-world sense. But it's a start.

Coins are Big and Heavy
"How many boards could the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes got bored?"

From the standpoint of the adventurer, the primary difficulty of the D&D currency system is that the lack of a coherent banking and paper currency system means that there are profound limits to what you could possibly purchase even with platinum. But the currency system hurts on the other end as well. Untrained labor gets a silverpiece a week. That's 500 copper coins a year, which means that no matter how cheap things are they can only make one purchase a day most of the time. That's pretty stifling to the economy, in that however much gets produced, noone can buy it. Demand, from the economics standpoint, is strangled to the point where large production outputs don't even matter (remember that in economics Demand doesn't mean "what people want", it means "what people are willing and able to pay for", so if the average person only has 500 discreet pieces of currency per year, that puts an absolute cap on economic demand, even though the people are of course both needy and greedy enough to want anything you happen to produce).

What's worse, those coins are heavy. For our next demonstration, reach into your change drawer and fish out nine pennies. That's a decent lump in your pocket, neh? That's about one copper piece. Gold pieces are smaller (less than half the size, actually), but weigh the same. D&D currency, therefore, is more like a Monopoly playing piece than it is like a modern or ancient coin. There's no reason to even believe these things are round, people are seriously marching around gold hats and silver dogs as the basic medium of exchange.

Now, you may ask yourself why these coins are so titanic compared to real coins. The answer is because having piles of coins is awesome. Dragons are supposed to sleep on that stuff, and that requires big piles of coins. Consider my own mattress, which is a "twin-size" (pretty reasonable for a single medium-size creature) and nearly .2 cubic meters. If it was made out of gold, it would be about 3.9 tonnes. That's about eighty-six hundred pounds, and even with the ginormous coins in D&D, that's four hundred and thirty thousand gold pieces. In previous editions, that sort of thing was simply accepted and very powerful dragons really did have the millions of gold pieces – which was actually fine. Since third edition, they've been trying to make gold actually equal character power, and the result has been that dragon hoards are… really small. None of this "We need to get a wagon team to haul it all away", no. In 3rd edition, hoard sizes have become manageable, even ridiculously tiny. When a 6th level party defeats a powerful and wealthy monster, they can expect to find… nearly a liter of gold. That is, the treasure "hoard" of that evil dragon you defeated will actually fit into an Evian bottle.

There are two ways to handle this:
Live with the fact that treasures are small and unexciting in modern D&D.

Live with the fact that characters who grab a realistic dragon's hoard become filthy stinking rich and this fundamentally changes the way they interact with society.


But once you accept that the realities of the wish based economy, you actually don't have to live with characters unbalancing the game once they find a real mattress filled with gold. That's not even a problem once characters are no longer excited by a +2 Enhancement bonus to a stat or a +3 enhancement bonus to Armor. Which means somewhere between 9th and 13th level it's perfectly fine for players to find actual money without unbalancing the game. Really, you can stop worrying about it.

[Oslecamo]

Fake things about DnD economy

Fixed it for you.

Noowww, where should I start?

Ah, yes, the real world. Always a good starting point. A dollar will buy you a drink. A billion dollars will buy you a company or some high tech military vehicles and weapons. It doesn't matter that it's the same currency, you can buy both normal and uber awesome stuff with it. It's the whole idea behind money. It can be traded for any kind of product or service.

Now I highly doubt that the people actually carry around a billion dollars on their suitcases. No, they use other methods of transport, such letters of credit, reinforced cars, servants and stuff.

But of course, the authors of Ecomicon assume that when you go buy something you have to personally carry all the money. It's not like there aren't people willing to work for money. Money only good to fill bed matresses after all.

Not to mention that basing your assumptions in the earnings of untrained labor is a complete joke. Even a commoner has skill points, and he's gonna use them in some skill that can earn him money or die starving.


On the wish economy:

It doesn't work. Try it and:

A-You find there aren't enough efreetis on existence to answer all the casters trying to summon them, giving you an 0.0001% chance of ever seeing one.
B-The efreeti wishes you to become his slave, and another fool joins his army.
C-Wishes just have an awfull tendency of backfiring no matter how well you word them.
D-The plane of Mechanus is watching you. The only thing Inevitables do is seek and punish anyone who tries to mess up with the order of the universe (aka what they say is right). So if a someone actually manages to make some efreeti chain working, he can be guaranteed to be facing mighty arcane terminators in no time. If there is no Inevitables, then there aren't efreetis, or any kind of outsiders for you to abuse and everything is fine anyway.

So, for ecomicon to make any sense, you have to ignore 99% of the rest of D&D, the real world, economy rules and pretty much everything else.

Specially because if you have an infinite supply of 15000 GP items, you don't need anything else. That Balor will hoard up on scrolls of time stop untill it can auto win any battle. Every city will be ready to gate solars at any sense of danger. The party will be slaughtered in their first ecounter because that kobold army was fully equiped with +2 swords, +3 armors and candles of invocation.

It's pure fantasy, and could make for an interesting White Wolf game, but it isn't D&D anymore.

[Frost]

1) Yes Astral Projection Clones all your equipment. Yes this means that expended use items become super sweet. Yes you can abuse it horrendously with scrolls or Rings of Wishes or whatever.

2) Yes Astral Projection has many lines which serve only to prove the point that the WotC authors didn't even realize that Planeshift exists. You can either rule that casting the spell on any plane other then the Material is impossible or you can accept that all the "Material Planes" can just be removed from the text.

3) Something everyone should know about Astral Projection: Nightmares can cast it at will at CL 20 without using components as a suprenatural (IE non-dispellable) ability. This can be ruled as the ability to cast is (Su) and the spell is still a spell and dispellable, but still.

So what you do is:

Step -1: Have a level 9 Wizard in your party
Step 0: Be inside your super fortress
Step 1: Buff up the Wizard's Cha checks with items and spells
Step 2: Make a Magic Circle, Cast Dimensional Anchor in it, then Planar Bind a Nightmare.
Step 3: Have it's task be to cast and maintain AP on the party until the spell ends naturally (IE not him dismissing it).
Step 4: Project or Planeshift (level 9 Cleric needed) to wherever you want to adventure.
Step 5: Rest to regain spells.
Step 6: Enjoy you CL days of adventuring while immortal at level 9.

[Frost]

Fixed it for you.

Noowww, where should I start?

Ah, yes, the real world. Always a good starting point. A dollar will buy you a drink. A billion dollars will buy you a company or some high tech military vehicles and weapons. It doesn't matter that it's the same currency, you can buy both normal and uber awesome stuff with it. It's the whole idea behind money. It can be traded for any kind of product or service.

Now I highly doubt that the people actually carry around a billion dollars on their suitcases. No, they use other methods of transport, such letters of credit, reinforced cars, servants and stuff.

But of course, the authors of Ecomicon assume that when you go buy something you have to personally carry all the money. It's not like there aren't people willing to work for money. Money only good to fill bed matresses after all.

Not to mention that basing your assumptions in the earnings of untrained labor is a complete joke. Even a commoner has skill points, and he's gonna use them in some skill that can earn him money or die starving.


On the wish economy:

It doesn't work. Try it and:

A-You find there aren't enough efreetis on existence to answer all the casters trying to summon them, giving you an 0.0001% chance of ever seeing one.
B-The efreeti wishes you to become his slave, and another fool joins his army.
C-Wishes just have an awfull tendency of backfiring no matter how well you word them.
D-The plane of Mechanus is watching you. The only thing Inevitables do is seek and punish anyone who tries to mess up with the order of the universe (aka what they say is right). So if a someone actually manages to make some efreeti chain working, he can be guaranteed to be facing mighty arcane terminators in no time. If there is no Inevitables, then there aren't efreetis, or any kind of outsiders for you to abuse and everything is fine anyway.

So, for ecomicon to make any sense, you have to ignore 99% of the rest of D&D, the real world, economy rules and pretty much everything else.

Specially because if you have an infinite supply of 15000 GP items, you don't need anything else. That Balor will hoard up on scrolls of time stop untill it can auto win any battle. Every city will be ready to gate solars at any sense of danger. The party will be slaughtered in their first ecounter because that kobold army was fully equiped with +2 swords, +3 armors and candles of invocation.

It's pure fantasy, and could make for an interesting White Wolf game, but it isn't D&D anymore.

Where to start:

1) They are talking about the ridiculous weight of money, yes you can carry tonnes around, yes it is still ridiculous.

2) If 1/4th the people in the world could instantly create an infinite amount of dollars at will, or a drink, but no one could instantly create a company, then those 1/4th would own all the companies, and would be unwilling to trade any of those companies for any amount of money, since they can create that at will. They would only trade a company for something else that has value to them, which must be something that they cannot create.

3) Effertis are infinite in supply, because they live all over the infinite plane of fire.

4) Effertis can only grant wishes to mortals, not to themselves.

5) Wishing for someone to be someone else's slave is a DM fiat Wish. Yes someone could wish for only him to ever be able to Wish again, but we ignore the part that says "anything is possible" and we focus on only the things that Wish can very specifically do every single time without fail. Which is create any magic item in the game, or 25,000gp worth of non magic items.

[LibraryOgre]

Segfault.

The spell doesn't function if you're not on a plane adjacent to the Astral Plane.

[Frost]

Segfault.

The spell doesn't function if you're not on a plane adjacent to the Astral Plane.

Segfault, all planes are adjacent to the astral, and you are making that up because it is reflected nowhere in the rules.

[LibraryOgre]

Segfault, all planes are adjacent to the astral, and you are making that up because it is reflected nowhere in the rules.

The astral is not adjacent to the astral.

And, according to D&D's usual cosmology, neither are the elemental planes.

[shadow_archmagi]

Campaign concept: Maintaining the Balance.

Everyone in the party plays a Warforged. You hunt down mechanics abusers; everything from bucket-head peasants to bag-o-rats fighters and astral cloning wizards.

If the party screws up, giant green tentacle monsters start to break through the newly formed cracks in reality. If they continue to do poorly, even worse things appear.

[turkishproverb]

The astral is not adjacent to the astral.

And, according to D&D's usual cosmology, neither are the elemental planes.

where is that "adjacent" thing backed up by the rules?

[LibraryOgre]

where is that "adjacent" thing backed up by the rules?

Page 60 of the Manual of the Planes. "The Astral Plane cannot be reached from any of the inner planes. It can be reached from the Ethereal plane only through ether cyclones, which create temporary ruptures between the Astral and Ethereal."

[Frost]

Page 60 of the Manual of the Planes. "The Astral Plane cannot be reached from any of the inner planes. It can be reached from the Ethereal plane only through ether cyclones, which create temporary ruptures between the Astral and Ethereal."

Which has absolutely nothing to do with casting a spell that projects you to the Astral.

Would you say that Plane Shifting to the Astral is impossible as well?

[Paragon Badger]

The spell fizzles.

There, problem solved.

[Aquillion]

Page 60 of the Manual of the Planes. "The Astral Plane cannot be reached from any of the inner planes. It can be reached from the Ethereal plane only through ether cyclones, which create temporary ruptures between the Astral and Ethereal."

The Astral Plane is neither an inner plane nor the Ethereal plane, though. It's a Transitive plane, and not covered by any of the exclusion clauses you listed, so it can be reached from itself.

[Eldan]

I can only quote how it was done in Planescape, and that was AD&D and not technically legal anymore. Still, it explicitely said that you couldn't cast astral projection on the Astral, only on the Material plane. (I'm pretty sure you couldn't even do it on the outer).

[loopy]

You get an astral hula hoop, hilarity ensues.

[Waspinator]

If I was DMing, I'd probably have lightning strike right next to the Wizard and leave behind a note that says "Next time it will be falling rocks. Love, the Gods."

[Aquillion]

If I was DMing, I'd probably have lightning strike right next to the Wizard and leave behind a note that says "Next time it will be falling rocks. Love, the Gods."

Astral lightning? Astral rocks?

[Waspinator]

They're called "asteroids". :D

[arguskos]

If I were dming, I'd let it fly, but, your bodies go comatose right there... on the Astral... with all sorts of baddies just LOOKING for a free meal. Astral Dreadnought anyone?

Also, to the debate about where the Astral is coterminous to, the DMG in the planes section mentions that the Astral Plane touches EVERYWHERE. If it didn't, you couldn't plane shift certain places (ie. if it didn't touch the Inner Planes, you couldn't plane shift there, since all teleportation spells use the Astral as a conduit or catalyst for the spell to function. If the Astral doesn't go to the destination, neither do you).

-argus

[Ascension]

I might have Astral Projection be a two-way door... if you're on the Material when you cast it, you go to the Astral. If you're on the Astral when you cast it...

Welcome to the Material Plane in your Astral bodies! Oh, you want your physical bodies? They're still on the Astral Plane!

[Frost]

Welcome to the Material Plane in your Astral bodies! Oh, you want your physical bodies? They're still on the Astral Plane!

That's pretty much what everyone wants anyway, since Astral bodies are just like other bodies, only it doesn't matter if you die.

[Ascension]

That's pretty much what everyone wants anyway, since Astral bodies are just like other bodies, only it doesn't matter if you die.

Oh? Have they given any thought to what the various beasties on the Astral will do to their uninhabited forms? It'd be a race against time to get back to the Astral Plane before their physical bodies are destroyed.

[Aquillion]

Oh? Have they given any thought to what the various beasties on the Astral will do to their uninhabited forms? It'd be a race against time to get back to the Astral Plane before their physical bodies are destroyed.

What beasties? The Astral Plane is pretty empty. The most common beasties there are Gith, and they can kill you anyway, whether your body is actually there or not.

[Frost]

Oh? Have they given any thought to what the various beasties on the Astral will do to their uninhabited forms? It'd be a race against time to get back to the Astral Plane before their physical bodies are destroyed.

Have you never made or found an Astral Fortress? We totally build our own Super Astral Fortresses.

[LibraryOgre]

Which has absolutely nothing to do with casting a spell that projects you to the Astral.

Would you say that Plane Shifting to the Astral is impossible as well?

That does have to do with casting a spell that projects the caster into the astral, because you can only go into the astral from someplace adjacent to the astral. The Ethereal and inner planes are not adjacent. The Astral is not adjacent.