Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Expanded Psion 02-06-05, 09:33 PM	Ok the search button is off so sorry to bother once again with this issue (i understand that this was discussed some times before). What exactly am i missing?? Can you Awaken yourself with a Druid that Wildshapes?The wildshape earns you the type animal for starters.Then if you cast Awaken on yourself (i didn't find anywhere any rule that says that Awaken works only on an animal with int of 2 or less).And bamf you roll int 3d6 gain +1d3 charisma and 2 HD (Magical Beast i pressume) ?!?!!? And for even more madness if you wildshape again afterwards you can do that again... P.S. For those that will jump to suggest that its a risky business because you may roll 3 for int i'll mention Maximize.
Tempest Stormwind 02-06-05, 10:00 PM	Long known and about as allowable as the 3.0 bag-o-rats fighter.
Expanded Psion 02-07-05, 05:27 AM	Care to argue abou how "broken" he is? Everytime you do that trick you gain ECL+2 while both your Wildshape and spells don't improve.Now if you gained bonus wisdom...
StoneTree 02-07-05, 07:32 AM	There's no need to argue, it's pretty impressively broken. If nothing else, you can have a druid cast it upon a polymorphing sorcerer. Besides, with metamagic rods, you can start whole DIFFERENT arguments on these boards on whether or not you can maximize and empower your way to 18 + 1.5d6 intelligence and a +4-5 to charisma. Besides, the hitdice arn't that big a problem, just level everyone up to, say, 15 or 16, and THEN cast the spell twelve times on the sorcerer. Sure he won't level again for 324 encounters (at 13.5 encounters a level), but who cares? His charisma is at least 90! A +40 charisma bonus means never having to say you're sorry, or needing level 9 spells. Plus, you gained +18 BaB, +14/+8 to your saves, +24d8 to your HP, maybe even some skills if you're especially adept at BSing the DM on your skill points.... and you'd better be, to get this far. Unrestricted Awaken is broken, broken, broken, and even carefully managed and only used as originally intended is considerably stronger than Wish or Miracle. I am, however, interested by the evocative reference to the "Bag O' Rats" fighter. What is it?
ff6shadow 02-07-05, 08:13 AM	If I understood the bag o' rats fighter correctly, he carried rats around in a bag, closed with an opponent, them dumped the rats from the sack. The rats would naturally try to move away, giving the fighter attacks of opportunity. He easily klls the rat, then cleaves onto the nearby opponent.
lokkesmadr 02-07-05, 08:38 AM	Yup, that's the one. Although there's also the .404 bag o' rats tarresque killer... Fill a bag of holding with rats; fly over the tarresque; drop the rats. 0.404% (or thereabouts) of the rats need to hit the tarresque to reduce it to negative hit points equal to its maximum. Dropping stuff is the single most deadly thing a flying character can do...
baoban sith 02-07-05, 09:12 AM	The bag o' rats fighter used the combination of Whirlwind Attack and Great Cleave.
StoneTree 02-07-05, 09:14 AM	Wow!
Tempest Stormwind 02-07-05, 09:29 AM	Yup, that's the one. Although there's also the .404 bag o' rats tarresque killer... Fill a bag of holding with rats; fly over the tarresque; drop the rats. 0.404% (or thereabouts) of the rats need to hit the tarresque to reduce it to negative hit points equal to its maximum. Dropping stuff is the single most deadly thing a flying character can do... Glee! ....Sorry, I'd quote my original post introducing that but it seems to have been pruned. The .404 came from figuring out a gold dragon's carrying capacity and shifting that to one-pound objects (a reasonable estimate for some decent-sized rats). The height was arbitrarily set by a previous poster to 500' off the ground, causing each rat to do 7d6 to our buddy the tarrasque. At that much damage, yes, only .404% of the rats needed to hit to get the tarrasque weak enough for the dragon to cast Wish to keep it dead -- in one round. The bag of holding was there to facilitate emptying them in one move-equivalent action, and, yes, to get it named a bag-o-rats. And yes, the original bag-o-rats fighter involved emptying the bag in melee, doing Whirlwind, and then using Great Cleave to get about a hundred attacks on his opponent. This could be done as early as 6th level, if I recall correctly, but it did rely on his wizard buddy with 3.0 haste and a very, very lenient DM to make it effective. In 3.5, I think the multi-awakened druid is the equivalent of the bag-o-rats fighter (yes, this trick was usable in 3rd ed, but Natural Spell wasn't core). Both are so cheesy that there isn't enough whine in the world to get them to be accepted at parties.
Expanded Psion 02-07-05, 09:47 AM	Bee Ar Oo Key Ee En... :OMG! Why oh why did i have to keep asking this kind of questions? :D P.S.: You do realize its nigh impossible to cast Awaken on the same target more than 3 times in a row without getting your Will save up?
StoneTree 02-07-05, 10:00 AM	Not if it voluntarilly fails its saving throw. Which you would do if you wanted free stat points and hit dice. In fact, it's hard to come up with a reason NOT to. Maybe you're a super-intelligent animal or plant wizard, and you don't want to have your int dropped to a mere 3d6.
Elzaban the Ethereal 02-07-05, 11:20 AM	I get visions of coupling this with the Feral template...
Expanded Psion 02-07-05, 11:55 AM	Not if it voluntarilly fails its saving throw. Which you would do if you wanted free stat points and hit dice. In fact, it's hard to come up with a reason NOT to. Maybe you're a super-intelligent animal or plant wizard, and you don't want to have your int dropped to a mere 3d6. Ehm its the caster who has to make the saving throw to succeed casting the spell.And the DC is 10+current Hd if its an animal. (10+HD that the plant will have after being awakened in the case of a plant) This is by no means an easy save to do at a 15th level sorcerer if you are 15 level.
DungeonMaster 02-07-05, 02:42 PM	The .404 came from figuring out a gold dragon's carrying capacity and shifting that to one-pound objects (a reasonable estimate for some decent-sized rats). There are no rules for hitting someone with a droped object. The DM will likely call for an attack roll, at the least. In 3.5, I think the multi-awakened druid is the equivalent of the bag-o-rats fighter (yes, this trick was usable in 3rd ed, but Natural Spell wasn't core). Both are so cheesy that there isn't enough whine in the world to get them to be accepted at parties. In 3rd edition you needed shapechange to get creature type but in 3.5 they made polymorph (and wildshape thus) give type. Not smart. Bag-o-rats really relies on great cleave and it's this feat that's the real problem in 3.5 as in 3rd edition. Just get a pile of dexterity, combat reflexes and great cleave. Drop the rats and as they move away hit them and cleave into your opponent. Or just have a wizard with mirror image run by you and strike down the images cleaving into your real target.
ninja1 02-07-05, 04:02 PM	There's also the issue of the "1 day" casting time. It didn't work with wildshape due to the ability's duration.
Expanded Psion 02-07-05, 07:34 PM	Hmmm i guess only level 25+ Druids can do it then :D
SigmaJargon 02-07-05, 08:10 PM	There's also the issue of the "1 day" casting time. It didn't work with wildshape due to the ability's duration.My suggestion to remedy that would be to get your awaken goodness from the Heir of Siberys PrC. After all, "A spell-like ability has a casting time of 1 standard action..." [SRD]. Plus, that way, you get to avoid the 250 exp component without having to bludgeon your DM into you to buy a Thought Bottle.
Faustus von Kai 02-11-05, 04:27 PM	I felt I'd join in since we're on the subject of using gravity to help in defeating creatures (and since someone's finally told me what the heck the bag-o-rats was). Right. We can apply a modern day formula to help with this. It works thusly: Mass times velocity squared = Force. Force divided by area = lbs per square inch (or milimeter in this case). Once we've got that, you can figure out how many times more the force is than the original weight, then multiply the damage dice by that number. Ok. Say we drop a spear from a height of 400 feet. The spear normally deals 1d8 damage, weighs 6 pounds, and the point has a surface of, effectively, one milimeter square (Assuming it's sharpened to around razor-ish). Now. The rate of acceleration is 32 feet per second, per second. So for every second, it speeds up another 32 feet per second. Say we don't throw the spear, just drop it. The first thing it'll do is drop 16 feet because of the half-second, and then each subsequent second it travels 32 feet per second more than it did the second previous. Now, that makes it 400 feet in 5 seconds (16+32=48+32=80+32=112+32=144. 16+48+80+112+144=400) so it takes one round to fall this far. We'll not worry about air friction since it's working with gravity, and the surface the air is striking is about one milimeter thick. Now velocity at point of impact is 400 feet per second. Squared, that's 160,000. Multiply by mass (6 lbs) that's 960,000, divided by surface (essentially nil), making for a total of 960,000 pounds of pressure into a point of one milimeter square. 960,000 divided by 6 = 160,000. So what this means is 160,000 d8 damage on a successful hit. Sound exciting to you?
Expanded Psion 02-11-05, 04:47 PM	There is a real world explanation of the "max height damage=20d6".Its is because at some point of the descent friction equals gravitational force and hence the object stops accelarating.So the speed of the object remains stable and thus so does the impact force.However the mass of the object is always tied to the result of the impact.This thing about a natural hazard...well it doesn't actually work this way.There is a rule about mass and how it affects damage caused in DMG.If a mountain falls on your head its gonna be more painfull than a 3-storied house.The rule is at page 303 of the DMG 3.5 (Falling Objects).The funny thing is that the object has to fall at least 10 ft in order to cause damage and thus a hurler could just hold his giant stone at 9 ft from his foot and be at no danger at all (LOOOOL) :D
Tempest Stormwind 02-11-05, 06:20 PM	Summary from the two poorly-formatted posts: 1) Objects of at least one pound can do up to 20d6 damage from their height. Moving the object higher will not alter the damage done at all. 2) Heavy objects do damage from falling based on their weight, plus extra from their height (the extra from their height is still capped at 20d6, but the damage from the weight isn't). Newton's Second Law plus the concept of terminal velocity. You have no idea how many people tried to say the Hurler was limited to 20d6... despite that being plain WRONG...