I was getting into a talk with one of my friends in my gaming group and stumbled across the Controller Archetype from the advanced players guide. The level 20 capstone of the ability "Force of Will" states that any enchantment spell that a target saves against, still effects them for one round. My initial response was "This makes dominate monster insane" but my friend cited this quote from James Jacobs on dominate and saves.
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Clarification
Yeah; if you force a dominated creature to do something against its nature, it gets that new saving throw. If it makes that saving throw, it throws off the ENTIRE dominate effect and gets to go back to doing what they want.
As for what constitutes "against its nature," that varies from creature to creature. For a PC, I would say that forcing a PC to attack another PC would normally be against a PC's nature and would allow a new saving throw (unless, of course, that PC has already displayed a propensity for attacking other PCs). For most monsters, it would depend. A lot of monsters are just violent anyway and attacking others of their kind is normal. It's left vague deliberately so each time it comes up, the GM gets to interpret it as needed for the specific target in question.
James Jacobs (Creative Director)
Thu, May 13, 2010
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His belief was that because the effect ends due to the free save against it's nature, that any attempt to get it to kill itself or attack his allies would still not work, because the effect ends before the creature is forced to act. However, my argument was that because of how Force of Will's capstone is worded
"At 20th level, any creature that succeeds at a saving throw against an enchantment spell you have just cast is still affected for 1 round if the spell has a duration greater than 1 round."
that the subject would still be forced to do one last action under the casters command before regaining control of his facilities.
The question I pose comes down to this, does the free extra save on dominate dispel the effect or simply act as if the subject had otherwise succeeded his save?
If it counts as a save, is this save somehow special and thus supersede the capstone of the controller spell school?
If the caster casts dominate, and it is resisted, but it happens for one round because of Force of Will,and then then the subject is put in a situation where he would make yet another save for an act against his nature, does it matter? Or rather does the Controller Capstone ignore any saves against a spell regardless of how many are made?
I do apologize if this was asked elsewhere, but I used every variation of "Dominate", "Controller School", "Enchanter", and "Wizard" I could think of and came up with nothing on this specific subject.
