Helic's page

Selective Spell: Any time the spellcaster's initiative doesn't exceed the martial's at the beginning of a fight, most of your blasting and crowd control spells suddenly become non-options...unless you have Selective Spell!

This can be solved though, without any extra servers. Just push the rendered zip files to S3 and send the S3 link to the customer. They could easily expected these numbers. The bandwith for this is just too high for a normal company to handle, so just don't.

Wouldn't personalizing the file make this the same problem? Basically, Paizo makes every PDF unique to the purchaser.

Once, due to lycanthropy. It was basically impossible to remove at the time (no 12th level cleric, no wolvesbane), so we ended up executing the infected PC.

The Mary and Gary Stus of Eddings works are generally best treated as gods... pretty much beyond stats, given what the setting makes the characters capable of.

This is true of most written characters. Eddings made nods in the direction of random chance (and the books are all about having to fix something that went very wrong a very long time ago), but very few writers write as if their characters could die at any time to misfortune (no, not even in Game of Thrones, he just has fewer characters with plot armor than normal, and is willing to expand on characters that don't have plot armor).

Thing is, though, that Clerics casting spells is NOT proof that gods exist. While the players get to peek under the hood of a roleplaying game, the PCs and NPCs have no such privilege.

How can a character be an atheist? Simple, he has not personally met a god or being that could convince him of the existence of divinity. He thinks most churches are either entirely fraudulent or in some way deluded.

This doesn't stop him from being 'technically incorrect', but it's very hard to prove otherwise, unless you can Plane Shift and actually manage to make an introduction to a particular god. Also, since many gods are definitely NOT nice things worthy of being worshiped, rejecting the idea of actually worshiping a god is not an unusual idea.

And then there's the 'soft atheists', who just can't be bothered to worship because the rewards aren't tangible and immediate enough.

Toth's just a really strong dude. He didn't really do anything exceptionally monk-like that I could recall, he just didn't wear armor and carried only a staff(?).

Monk only fits for the whole 'no armor' part. If Pathfinder had a viable no-armor fighter archetype I'd go with that. Probably some kind of body-guard archetype or prestige class.

Sadi was a rogue, zero question, probably the Poisoner.

CeNedra is an Aristocrat.

Relg is some an Earth Sorcerer.

Barak was a Barbarian. He even mentions he's gone Berserk before. He wasn't a lycanthrope in Pathfinder terms even if he did turn into a bear.

Velvet is a rogue, probably Spy archetype, just like Silk. Zith was a domesticated snake to begin with.

Durnik is just an Expert.

Most characters in the books don't fit well into Pathfinder classes, though. Especially anything with magic. You've got:

Sorcerers using Will and the Word. Uber flexible but depends on strength of will and knowledge, and all the main sorcerers in the books are exceptionally good sorcerers. It's basically psionics.

Demon summoners. No special talent like Sorcerers required, just knowledge, a strong will to keep the demon under control, and massive disregard for personal safety. Basically nothing but Planar Binding.

Witches. Implied to be dealing with spirits to perform magic. These are probably the closest to Pathfinder style magic (probably sorcerer).

There were also other small practitioners of strangeness - the blind seer Marje(?) and the alchemy shenanegans, and I'm probably leaving something out.

Sorry for asking for confirmation. I sometime have an hard type reading tones.

In my defense, I did include a smiley, though it's a more eastern-based emoticon. ^_^

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

That was the joke, yes.

Thank goodness they at least got armor correct, right?

^_^

Throwing characters have one thing going for them over bows: melee synergy - you can Weapon Focus/Specialize in the same weapon for melee and throwing (except for shuriken?).

Trying to throw a variety of weapons is probably asking for trouble.

Throwing being feat/WBL heavy isn't a problem if you're not in a hyper-optimized campaign. If your campaign expects you to be putting out maximum damage-per-round, don't bother trying it. If your group doesn't optimize hard and the GM is willing to adapt the challenges/treasure to accommodate it, there's no problem.

Holes in the hull are BAD. Holes in the oxygen lines are worse. Fires are catastrophic.

Stabbing/clubbing things to death will still have a place in space adventure, at least when your dungeon's walls contain vital life support technology.

To improve efficiency the banks could hold most of the physical gold and record who owns what electronically, at least for transactions within the one economy. The physical transfer of gold could be reserved for inter bank transfers and trades between different economies.

Most economies probably have more 'money' in circulation than there is existing gold, but if you're bipping around in space, you carry your hard cash with you.

Gold therefore is an accepted inter-economy currency, as well as (likely) an accepted currency inside a particular economy. The gold piece becomes universally useful to the star adventurer - he can spend it anywhere - while the dirtsiders probably use the local fiat currency (credits, if you will) because it's not as heavy as gold.

It gets a bit more difficult when the adventurer wants to sell an item locally - he'll get credits which he has to turn into gold pieces, but any decent star port will have services for that.

The value of a fiat currency (including cryptocurrencies) is only as good as the trust in the body (government, bank) that backs it. It's almost impossible to have a universal, non-fluctuating standard currency in a space setting - unless - you have a very stable, dominant power, or a trusted, nearly omnipresent money exchange system (a galactic PayPal, if you will).

None of this helps if your space game is about exploring the universe and encountering strange things, who will regard your digital money as junk.

The nice thing about plain old gold coins is that gold is useful and will be regarded as valuable by any technological society. Who minted it is irrelevant when you can test for weight and purity trivially (any technologically advanced society).

Or just...they've been done. Why shouldn't a village buy Decanters of Endless Water to irrigate their crops?

And simultaneously WHY WOULD THEY use it to terraform the whole desert? It's not their problem (and makes it hella harder for bandits to get at them).

As one decanter can effectively handle (see above) 1/4 of a square mile of irrigation of crops, a DoEW would suffice for a small village, several for a decent sized one. Where a small village gets 9000gp is another question, but it's entirely possible.

Transforming an entire desert would require 4 DoEW per square mile. I have no idea the minimum number of square miles you'd have to manage before the climate takes a solid foothold, but presumably it's a lot. Ideally you'd start with desert-tolerant plants (just MORE of them) to do things like soil stabilization and the beginnings of building actual soil (as opposed to clay, silt, sand or pebbles), which would require a lot less water, but the problem of distributing that water (infrastructure) remains.

Control Weather and a reasonably high level Druid has far fewer problems attempting this sort of thing.

Thus my point about changing LARGE areas of the desert to have any effect on the climate. The math shows that magically conjured water is literally a drop in the bucket in terms of water requirements. If you're willing to divert rivers, you can make changes.

But it is consumed. It's consumed by vast numbers of plants as they respire, upcycling that additional water into the atmosphere. Some of that moves on to other areas by way of prevailing winds, some of that lingers as a more humid atmosphere and condenses upon nightfall as dew that further hydrates more plants and soil biota.

Keep this up for one generation and you no longer have a desert, you have a jungle. Couple it with earth-shaping to retain the water [as opposed to the deep channels that carry desert flash floods] and for so long as the region isn't deforested your jungle should remain.

You read too much Dune. Most deserts are deserts exactly because the prevailing conditions prevent rain from falling in significant amounts - such as a mountain's rain-shadow or great stretches of land that get all the rain first. Desert soil is also notoriously bad (as a result of winds stripping away stuff like topsoil), so only the hardiest of plants will get a foothold.

Irrigation can make a desert green, but it's still a desert. The moment you stop irrigating, it will revert unless the overall climate has been changed. It doesn't change the terrible heat (or cold, let's not forget cold deserts), the prevailing winds, mountains, altitude, etc., because you have to change LARGE areas of the desert to have any effect in this regard.

A Decanter of Endless Water could usefully irrigate exactly the area the water can spread in 24 hours. In Geyser mode it creates 300 gallons of water a minute. An acre of corn takes 600000 gallons of water to bring to maturity and takes 60-100 days to grow. Note that comes out to about 22 inches of rain over its growth cycle.

If we assume 100 days, that's 6000 gallons of water a day. It takes the geyser 20 minutes to produce that much water, so in 24 hours it can irrigate 72 acres of corn - assuming no time is lost in the water getting to the corn. You could get roughly twice as many acres of wheat from the same water, so 144 acres - still less than 1/4 of a square mile.

Create Water creates 2 gallons of water per level - that's 20 gallons of water per minute by a first level caster. Assuming he could cast that spell for 8 solid hours (every day), he's still 1/45th the output of the Decanter of Endless Water, so he could irrigate barely 3 acres of wheat. Note that simple weeds need plenty of water too, so just irrigating scrub-land is a monumental task.

So a full time water conjuring cleric could irrigate roughly 3 acres of wheat per level, while the Decanter of Endless Water can irrigate about 1/4 of a square mile (a village). That's not changing the climate of anything.

Deserts aren't a problem of availability of water - you can have a river running through a desert without it changing much of the surrounding territory. Deserts are a problem of water distribution - i.e. it doesn't fall from the sky over every part of the landscape and soak into the ground to be stored for deep rooted plants to access.

Create Water won't do jack for deserts, even if the water didn't disappear after 24 hours. Control Weather could do it, but that requires a much higher level caster, and won't change the climate factors that formed the desert in the first place - like the rain shadow formed by mountains or the prevailing winds. So you'd need on-going maintenance to keep it from turning back into a desert.

Pathfinder is simply a game where past a certain power level, mundane annoyances can be entirely removed. Create Water and Endure Elements make desert survival trivial - so what? You never lack for OTHER challenges.

People also often complain about magic 'ruining' mystery plots. This is because Pathfinder was designed to be about hitting monsters in the face. Mysteries isn't wrongbadfun, but Pathfinder wants you to be able to solve mysteries fast and get back to hitting monsters in the face.

More reasons for Comp. Languages to 'fail':

1.) The text contains concepts you cannot comprehend, like 6 dimensional geometry, or concepts only understood if you have multiple brains or could smell color.
2.) The text contains concepts your language does not have (but could comprehend with sufficient exposure), like emotions that humans don't have, or 15 kinds of genders.
3.) The text is insane gibberish written by insane people. More common than you might like.
4.) The text is not text, but a device such as a printed circuit or magical 'conduit'.
5.) The text is not text, but art that might be confused with text, like a decorative hem on a cloak.
6.) The text is not text, but a creature or part of a creature that mimics text as a disguise.
7.) The text was designed, from the ground up, to foil Comprehend Languages. Not sure if this is possible - as opposed to just coding the language - but if it was possible, you can send coded messages without the messy necessity of code, and only those that could read your language would understand.
8.) The text is incomplete or obscured in some manner - for example, half the lettering is present, or can only be read at the right time of day when the shadows are correct.
9.) The text must be spoken aloud to have any meaning or use - Comprehend Languages doesn't instruct how to pronounce the text, so a gibberish word that would serve as a command phrase for a nearby device would be unintelligible.

To me, most of this boils down to the reasons the PCs are attacking these groups in the first place, and the authority they have to deal with the problem.

If you've got sufficient evidence that these people are committing crimes and are given sufficient authority to deal with criminals, then many tactics like this can be justified.

In many fantasy settings, things like banditry and belonging to an evil cult bring the status of outlaw - meaning anyone can kill them without legal repercussion. In other words, just being a member of an 'organized crime syndicate' or worshiping an evil god is an automatic death sentence. Even more, it can be the responsibility of upstanding citizens to oppose - even kill - outlaws where reasonably possible.

This covers the 'lawful' part of the problem - maybe even the honorable part of it. Many codes of honor state that honor is shown to the honorable, and the dishonorable warrant no respect.

As to the 'good' part, good tends to minimize harm and suffering where possible. If you have no problem killing someone on their feet, there's not a ton of difference killing them in their sleep. This depends if the party is willing/able to take prisoners, but it also depends on what the eventual fate of the prisoners will be. Again, in the case of outlaws, dragging them off to the local magistrate has the exact same end point - helpless people (tied up) get executed, only this time it's by the magistrate (and the mob), probably after several days of abuse (being tied up and force marched to the magistrate, rotting in a cell, etcetera).

If the setting supports prison sentencing and/or forced labor camps or lesser penalties than death for outlawry, then capture becomes a more desirable outcome for a good character. At the same time, though, a camp full of sleeping enemies is one mistake away from being an armed mob, so entering and attacking a sleeping camp isn't a tactic without risk of failure. The point being that you CAN capture one sleeping enemy. When you've got multiple enemies, quietly capturing them without alerting the entire camp is nearly impossible (killing them quietly is pretty darn hard too) without the right kind of magical assistance (silence spells or sleep spells).

As you level up, the definition of helpless becomes foggy. You could attack a bandit camp in broad daylight and simply cloudkill the entire camp. For most bandits, it's an automatic kill, no save, no chance to fight back - even if you gave them the chance, the party might be able to fly, have magic protection that makes them basically invulnerable, and so on. Them being upright and armed or asleep make little to no difference, and in the case of outlaws, they know surrender = death from the local justice.

As to the less-than-combat worthy evil cultists...they're still evil cultists, which pretty much gives good players a free pass. "Evil Cultist" generally means part of a cult actively doing evil, so I don't see the problem with good players mowing down commoners who were sacrificing babies to dark gods as a religious practice.

It's on the group to decide if they want to deal with moral quandaries on a regular basis. If the group wants to play it as "evil deserves only extermination" and the GM makes it perfectly clear who the bad guys are, you're better off rolling with it.

Wasn't he also the guy who grew so horrified when he saw what Miranda caused that he let Mal and the knees go? I don't think he even knew what Miranda was.

Not 100% sure, but once the message was transmitted he had basically lost the fight and saw no reason to keep fighting (i.e. no need for vengeance).

Evil for a good reason, reminds me of the bad guy in Serenity. He was evil so other didn't have to be.

Meh. I loved Firefly and Serenity, but let's remember this guy was advocating all of humanity being brainwashed into submission. Sure, you'd have no crimes or unhappiness, but no happiness(*) either. Just an orderly world full of orderly drones supporting the ruling class. His vision seems pretty Lawful Neutral rather than good.

(*) Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Miranda project was supposed to make the people submissive, not happy.

When your solution to society's problems is 'mind control everyone', though, you're trending Evil in your intentions - disregard for the desires and freedoms of other people.

Okay, I will admit, those are bad examples, it was too late at night.

I do want to address the example given of raising the Undead as quardians.

There's the 3rd argument that animated dead are Neutral Evil and explicitly murderous if they get out of control. Many casters create far more undead than they can easily control - sealed chambers work fine to keep them in, until they don't. Then uncontrolled undead are loose to act on their limited instincts.

Let's consider the following situation. You are at the mercy of the BBEG. He has the group character's loved ones, and a few hundred people, each in a separate room that is unreachable by the PC's, and that to enter the BBEG castle to fight him, they have to choose to sacrifice one group of the other? Either way they sacrifice innocents to ultimately defeat the evil.

They are NOT sacrificing anyone, the BBEG is the one doing the killing. Pressing on in the face of a hostage situation isn't an evil act, it's a sad necessity in an unfair world. Not being able to save everyone is not the same as choosing to do evil.

Or to stop the war, they must kill an innocent child who was implanted with a magical artifact that sustains his life but also riles up the hatred in everybody for miles around him? Either they must choose to fight out the war killing hundreds, or kill the child who is not responsible for his actions.

Removing the artifact is a neutral action under these circumstances. Not even good will insist that an innocent life has infinite value. When something starts to become 'Necessary', moral choice gets removed. The evil here was committed by the person who hooked the child up to the artifact in the first place. They get to bear the moral burden of it.

I'm assuming here that things like Cure Light Wounds, Heal or Wish/Miracle can't save the child, given it's incredibly contrived to begin with.

Having to choose between letting the villain go or killing him and triggering a spell that his minions will cast upon his death that will kill an entire town? You either let the villain go so he can commit more evil, or doom an entire town to death.

Again, you are not responsible for the evil acts that the villain's minions commit. The villain could use the exact same tactic to threaten the players into surrender - or servitude.

None of these are salient to the point of a character being built to use Evil Powers for good purposes.

Command Undead (the spell) + Extend Spell (or Lesser Metamagic Rod of Extend) lets a caster control absolutely stupid amounts of undead safely. Literally 100s of HD worth.

Regardless of the numbers of undead, you're still stuck micro-managing them if they're mindless. If they're not mindless, every time they pass a Will save you've got problems. Animate Dead is the only spell AFAIK that allows the caster ongoing control without renewal issues.

The scheme basically requires selfless, non-evil intelligent undead who want to support their descendants. That's great, but the 2nd generation of these guys don't have the skills to support the 3rd generation because they didn't spend their lives working for a living, so as the population grows, the support base remains the same and the entire system becomes poorer and poorer until the living people enter the economy as producers again.

I forget what the thread was called and where it was posted, but there was a thread about a Benevolent Necromancer who rules over a kingdom. In this kingdom no one has to work for there whole natural life, but when people die he raises them to work for 100 years service.

The control scheme falls apart. Animated Dead need to be controlled, so you need a lot of spellcasters (basically, all of them) controlling the undead, all the time. Most other undead are free willed and will break control in rapid order.

Also, animated dead don't have Profession or Craft skills, so they can't produce anything of quality. The undead that do have these skills would have to be controlled rigidly, which requires even more, higher level spellcasters.

At best you can replace brute-force labor...which you can already do with animals. So you save a small amount of agricultural output in return for tying up your spellcasters. It works a bit better militarily, but every time a spellcaster goes down your military asset undead turns against your army.

Ok how about burning down a town to force the people to move. That way the dragon won't come and eat them. Perhaps you have to kill some people so that the beast can't feed off there souls. You must kill the leaders of [insert city name here] so that you can finish a ritual to keep the Tarrasque locked away.

If they won't flee if they know a dragon is coming (because you TOLD THEM), why would they flee if you burn the town down? They still don't believe you, and they'll fight the fires, exhaust themselves and then be unable to flee when the dragon does show up.

Why can't you help people flee this beast? How do you know this ritual works? What GM comes up with these kinds of contrivances?

I think you're missing my point. We're talking about a person deciding to employ evil means - in general - to achieve greater good. In this specific case, he wants to employ Necromancy and Negative Energy as his primary means to 'do good things'.

Helic wrote:

Now I want to hear the right reasons that would justify the use of evil means (not just unlawful ones). I'm willing to bet most of them break down to "It's more convenient to use evil than find another way."

Murder a city of thousands so that the plague won't spread and kill millions. Keep in mind in this situation you can't just cure disease.

Never heard of quarantine? If you have the capacity to kill thousands without the infected but otherwise healthy getting away to spread the disease, you probably have the means to contain the epidemic until it burns itself out. Murdering people wholesale is far more likely to cause the epidemic to spread (as people flee the murdering) than employing a quarantine.

Ending someone's life is an evil act

No, it's just an act. Most of the time it's an evil act, other times it is merely a neutral act. Killing in self-defense - and by extension in the defense of others - is a neutral act, not an evil one. That's how Paladins get away with it, otherwise they would fall every time they take a life - the Paladin's code does not care what your reasons for committing an evil act are.

It might be fair to say that killing someone is never a good act. This gets murky when Evil Outsiders are involved, because it is expected that Good opposes Evil (while Evil need not oppose Good).

Helic wrote:

Now I want to hear the right reasons that would justify the use of evil means (not just unlawful ones). I'm willing to bet most of them break down to "It's more convenient to use evil than find another way."

If the way to do the Right thing that has the highest chance of success is to use Evil means then that is the right way to do it. You cannot act like "convenience" does not indicate a higher chance of success and thus lower risk than those "other ways".

Go back to the OP, where he says he wants an Evil character who seeks the greater good. By definition, an Evil character will NOT seek the greater good, or they wouldn't be defined as Evil. An evil person doesn't care about the suffering of others, unless it affects him negatively somehow (like when his close associates have problems). An evil character might pursue a course of action that may achieve a net good for many others, but the evil person is doing what he does for his own, selfish reasons. This is how most Evil PCs sneak into 'good' parties; they have similar end goals but very different reasons.

A neutral character might use Evil power to achieve a good end. That is someone who can justify convenience over morality. These people tend to run afoul of 'good' characters because of the Evil powers they're employing.

As to Anti-paladins, the creation of one is essentially a rejection of all that is Good and a celebration of Evil, they will NOT care one speck about things like the 'greater good'. As far as they are concerned, everyone should embrace Evil and the rule of the strong over the weak, who should be thankful they are allowed to live.

Now I want to hear the right reasons that would justify the use of evil means (not just unlawful ones). I'm willing to bet most of them break down to "It's more convenient to use evil than find another way."

Take Profession: Masseur.

Wait, how do you sneak up on anything with brilliant energy whips? It's not a weapon you can sheath, and AFAIK the brilliant energy part is always active. Also, you lose a lot of the whip's utility (disarming, knocking around stuff) because it doesn't affect non-living stuff.

Also as you can see from Golarion as an example, the number of wizards that actually reach 20th level are as common as hen's teeth.

Remember, somebody who becomes a lich wants to avoid the afterlife at basically all costs. Dying is contrary to the plan until you've got a phylactery in place, so these kinds of people will generally level very slowly. There's a lot of potential death going from 11th level to 20th level, and would be liches generally don't have lots of friends or reliable associates.

Assuming wish-granting genies aren't stupid, they'll almost never have wishes available to grant. Efreeti, for example, love having slaves. Would they have a slave request an Efreeti-serving wish whenever a wish was available? You bet they would. Giving wishes away to foolish conjurers is a waste of their resources. Any decently smart Efreeti will have most of the Permanency spells applied, a good Contingency - probably one that breaks magic circles, because there is literally no reason they wouldn't have these things - they have the resources to do it. They would also have +3 inherent bonus on every stat (possibly +5 if they worked together) and may have daily applications of long lasting high level spells like Moment of Prescience to avoid being summoned at all.

Having 3 wishes a day make Efreeti terrifyingly powerful. All they need is a single non-genie to work with them (a slave or perhaps paid in the occasional wish) and the magical resources they can bring to bear is staggering. If an Efreeti goes missing (i.e. gets called up via Planar Binding), his allies use a wish to Discern Location upon him, then Plane Shift/Greater Teleport in to rescue him along with any required summoned allies - perhaps with their own Planar Allies (not Planar Binding) and lay waste to the foolish 'kidnapper'. They've had thousands upon thousands of years to work this out, after all.

I've thought a good way to model it is that magic items are art objects worth the amount it takes to create them (i.e. trade goods). Most of them will be owned and used by the people in the community, but when people start flashing around the cash (i.e. Adventurers are willing to pay double the cost to make the item), people sell them off, then use the money to commission a new item and pocket the difference.

Ultimate Campaign makes this more feasible from the crafter's perspective, as they can work to generate Magic Goods and thus profit even while selling magic items at 'craft' cost.

So magic crafters spend most of their time making Magic Goods. They then make and sell items at creation costs to normal townsfolk willing to wait. Impatient adventurers buy those goods off the townsfolk for 'market rate', the difference is compensation for the inconvenience of going without you doodad for however long it takes to get a new one. It seems a terrible shame to have magic items sitting on a shop shelf; surely the merchant owing a +2 Ring of Protection will wear it until he parts with it, after all.

When adventurers sell items, they're selling to people who have a use for it. You don't sell a Crystal Ball to a shop, you sell it to the town guard who use it to keep track of patrols. At the same amount it costs to create one, because the town guard doesn't NEED a Crystal Ball, so they're not going to pay more than 'normal' value.

So 'Magic Mart' effectively exists in a community, without actually being a store. If you're going to hire someone to make something, they'll charge creation cost, but take the time to generate Magic Goods such that they make 50% profits.

Helic wrote:

Really confused as to why Blood Money doesn't cause CON damage instead of STR damage, though.

I figure that it is because spell casters tend toward having lower Strength scores than they do Constitution scores, so that makes the effective cost of the spell slightly higher... and it is not really all that likely in-character that someone out there would pursue the invention of a spell they could kill them self with and have that spell pass on to enough different people in-setting that all pursue learning it to justify it being in the books.

The spell writer in question is already doing damage to himself to cast spells; he probably wouldn't care if the spell has potential to kill himself if abused (the logic being that 'you don't abuse it too much!').

Still, most other blood loss in Pathfinder is CON damage, isn't it?

Ah, I misread the spell in the SRD, thought it was 1 STR damage just to cast the spell, but it's only when you go above 1gp that you start taking STR damage.

Really confused as to why Blood Money doesn't cause CON damage instead of STR damage, though.

Anyway, since the strength damage does not kill you, just arrange for your body to be cared for until it recovers. Probably cheaper than paying for Contingency and either another caster to supply a Heal or a Scroll of Heal.

/cevah

I don't think many would choose to forgo the Heal/Lesser Restoration. First off, it drastically slows down the ability to do this repeatedly (3+ times a day) , and secondly, who wants to spend weeks at zero STR?

This is basically a do-stuff-requiring-infinite-money-for-almost-free (there are startup costs like magic items for STR bootsing). Finding somebody to cast Heal on you shouldn't be a problem; you pay them with the almost free Wishes you're rolling in.

All in all, though, it requires a pretty lenient GM to pull off. Blood Money is a peripheral spell (from an adventure path) and getting to 52 STR requires a lot of other peripheral material (spells and magic items), and most GMs will balk at the whole 'free Wishes!' thing. If your GM is that easygoing, you've already gotten infinite money from Fabricate at 9th level or Blood Money + Masterwork Transformation at 3rd level.

@ Helic, no offense, but your post makes no sense. Blood Money + Wish is being used to make Simulacrums and Wish very explicitly covers 10,000 gp of the duplicated spells cost.

You discussion of heal is completely off base, since as mentioned in this very thread, there are several summons that can cast it for you.

So... ya you may want to read how the trick actually works before trying to put the brakes on it... just saying.

Seebs was speculating on how to cast Contingency with Heal, and I answered on that basis. Off topic, yes, off base, not so much.

Now if you have someone else on hand to cast Heal for free, life gets easier, I agree.

It seems to be RAI that the caster of Contingency supplies the other spell as well, though it's not explicitly stated. Scrolls + UMD seems to be a valid bypass, if an expensive one (minimum level scroll of Heal is 1650gp). Given that this was supposed to be an exercise in 'free' Wish/Simulacrum making, it would put the brakes on the scheme.

Anzyr wrote:

The answer is clear, if you don't lose it you keep it. RAW Magic Jar and Marionette Possession clearly allow you cast spells, since they don't disallow it.

And there I was thinking that RAW was "Rules as Written", not "Rules as Implied" or "Rules as Interpreted".

The spell is terribly vague ('mental abilities') and pretty much requires RAI. Given how thoroughly the spell disallows using any of the target's Ex, Su, Sp and Spell abilities (because allowing them to be used on a case-by-case basis would require exhaustive listing), it's strange that they are extremely vague on the caster's abilities.

Whether or not the caster can use HIS Spells/Su/Ex/Sp is equally (or even more) important and should be clearly stated. Some of these are racially derived (Aasimar/Tiefling spells), some are feats (Kitsune Magical Tail), so they don't all fall under the blanket of 'Class Features'.

Certain magic items are class specific, also certain feats require certain levels in certain classes as prerequisites, which you'd lose the use of if you didn't retain your class - even if they were strictly mental abilities.

So yes, there is a use for class aside from class features.

And you didn't address my question, what does it mean to retain your level and class, if you don't keep your class features (ex. spellcasting)?

I did answer your question. Class and level determine BAB and saves. Yes, you can get them from racial hit dice too, which is probably why BAB and Saves are called out in addition.

Still not called out; Class Features. Only mental abilities. Some class features are bound to be mental abilities. The problem is that there's no description of which ones are mental and which are physical. The game doesn't make that distinction anywhere but this one spell.

Like I said, Magic Jar probably lets you keep your spells, RAI. Strictly speaking, however, RAW, it's not clear.

People in modern times have been stabbed dozens of times and lived; some with 5-6" knives that won't be much different from short sword wounds (I'd argue that sword slashes are deadlier than stabs, but that's neither here nor there). Modern medicine is pretty good and accounts for the huge difference in bullet survival rates between now and 200 years ago.

Going back to guns, Pathfinder fails to model the actual benefits of guns vs other projectile weapons; far easier to use than a bow, far faster and easier to reload than a crossbow, the ammo takes far less space than any arrow/quarrel, and you can put a knife on the end for close combat.

BAB and saves are not class features. They aren't listed as such.

Class and level determine BAB and base saves, period. You cannot calculate them (for a PC) without them. But BAB and saves special mention, along with 'mental abilities' - which is wonderfully vague.

Are all skills mental abilities (probably not; Climb/Jump/Swim)?
Which feats are mental abilities?
Which class features are mental abilities? Are the Exceptional/Spell-Like and Supernatural ones coming along?

Given that this is a spell being cast by a spellcaster, you think that the spell description would specifically call out whether or not the spellcaster carries along his spellcasting powers to the new body. It's kind of important.

Magic Jar is all kinds of badly written. Probably it was intended that the caster could still cast spells from the victim's body, but given how much attention is given to the target's Ex/Su/Sp/Spells and NOTHING is given to the caster's, it makes me wonder.

They specifically call out BAB and save bonuses, which are part and parcel of Class. Not called out - Class features; unless that's what they meant by 'mental abilities' (which presumably also covers skills and feats).

This actually seems like a huge problem, considering that the spell Blood Money exists.

Given this is a 'standard' wizard, an obscure spell from an AP is hardly standard.

Also, Magic Jar and Marionette Possession allow you to use 'mental abilities'. Does this include spellcasting? It doesn't say - not even the SRD says so, the Magic Jar entry denies you from using Extraordinary or Supernatural abilities of the host as well as the host's spells and spell like abilities, but doesn't explicitly allow you to use your own spells or spell like abilities.

Is there a FAQ on this?

Green stuff's not very expensive. I checked Gale Force 9's web site; those 2 tubes of putty cost $20. That amount goes a hell of a long way; I converted an entire Plague Marine army plus tons of other stuff and I still have 1/3 of the stuff left...after almost 10 years of using it. Obviously I'm not making minis out of it whole cloth, but if you're just converting it goes a hella long ways.

So yeah, it might cost 3-4x what some other stuff does, but IMO totally worth it. Just be sure to avoid Milliput and model airplane putty. They're both garbage.