Smiting (celestial / fiendish templates)

[Richard McAteer]

Our first use of smiting in game happened the other day, and while I had done some examining of the paladin's smite (and it seems reasonable there), I was rather shocked at what happens when celestial and fiendish creatures are involved in the game.

The fact that the smite is 1/day doesn't matter much to a summoned creature or an enemy, since it'll only have time to use it once. A celestial dire tiger simply mauls whatever evil thing (or worse, undead evil thing) it manages to close with, and adding one of these templates to an enemy certainly feels like it adds more than CR +1.

In particular, I'm running Age of Worms (great campaign!), but there is a Fiendish Old Green Dragon in it. Since the CR in the adventure is ~20, I have to bump the green dragon a little to match in the HP department, and it ends up being about the equivalent of a Fiendish Wyrm Green Dragon (Cr 19 by the book). Holy smokes. +3 to hit and +25 damage on every attack versus a party member until they die? That's insane. It can tack 150 extra damage onto a round of attacks if they all hit.

I guess I'm wondering how others are using the smites - do you find that celestial/fiendish summons are out of line with the power of other summons now? Do you avoid using fiendish templates on enemies?

[Auspician]

I agree; the smite evil ability for celestial/fiendish creatures is even more powerful than a Paladin equal to the level of the summoner could accomplish by virtue of animals having more HD to balance their CR. The 1/day limitation also doesn't mean much for a creature that likely won't be around more than a single battle.

But a celestial dire tiger shouldn't be able to make mince-meat out of a boss purely because it can do an additional 70 damage above-and-beyond its normal in a single round with all five attacks.

In our games, we've house-ruled this to work like the old Paladin's smite ability from 3.5; the smite can only be used for a single attack. This is still more than enough considering the DR/good many of the potential smite targets already have.

[doctor_wu]

The smite of the summoned creature also does not ignore damage reduction which is important but it will likely break through it. It also does not get the bonus aginst undead for the first attack. It only does additional damage.

[leo1925]

doctor_wu wrote:

The smite of the summoned creature also does not ignore damage reduction which is important but it will likely break through it. It also does not get the bonus aginst undead for the first attack. It only does additional damage.

That.

The smite ability of summoned creatures is different (and weaker) than the paladin's smite.