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I need help finding the correct ruling on the following.
A BBEG casts Wail of the Banshee on a group of adventurers. One of the adventurers has sonic resist 30 and a Scarab of Protection. The spell does 200 points of damage.
Assuming the character fails the save, what would be the outcome?
1. The player does not even have to make a save because the Scarab of Protection would absorb the death spell and it would lose a charge.
2. The player would take 200 points of damage but then resist 30 because the spell is a sonic spell therefore the damage is sonic.
3. The player takes 200 points of damage because the Scarab would not protect them and the spell does not state the damage is specifically sonic.
Please let me know your logical thought process and the SRD text to back it up if possible.
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Wail of the Banshee
School necromancy [death, sonic]
It is a death effect, so the Scarab will block it.
I would resolve the situation this way:
1) check if the caster bypass the Scarab spell resistance (SR 20 vs a caster 18+, not a problem);
2) the character make his fortitude Saving Throw;
2a) if he succeed there is no need for further steps
2b) if he fail the Scarab use up a charge and protect the wearer. The spell is canceled for that character and inflict no damage.
As I see it the scarab activate only after you are affected by a death effect, so after the Saving Throw. Other people could think that it activate before the ST, but it seem wasteful to have it activating against failed attacks.
Note that the Scarab would still activate against Slay living after a successful attack, as the spell would still function , even at a reduced potency.
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In pathfinder Wail of the Banshee was heavily nerfed without correcting the text, So there could be discordant interpretations on how it work:
Wail of the banshee inflicts 10 hp per caster level in all. It basically starts chewing through enemies, starting with the one closest to you, and then working its way out until it only does partial damage to the last victim. This does mean that the more folks who make their saving throw to halve the damage, the further the wail gets, which is weird.Wail of the banshee; does 10 pts of damage per caster level to 1 target/2 caster levels but those closest are effected first....
does that mean that the total is limited to say...200hp divided amongst the targets? or does it do 200/target and just effects those closest first?Eh? It has been nerfed beyond oblivion from a spell that would have been a serious danger for a high level party.
A level 9 spell that do 200 hp of damage is little better than a harm spell.I had always read it as: "it do 200 hp of damage to each target up to to 1 target level".
It has a Fortitude save to negate all the damage and with the hp of most characters at the level at which they will met it WoB is hardly a Save or Die spell.With a cap of 200 hp as total don't seem much more than a glorified Circle of death. Level 7 at most.
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Thank you for the reply.
I am assuming that because the spell has "Death" in the spell sub-type it is considered a "Death Effect"?
Also, if you could oblige - is the damage untyped, sonic, or sonic/death for the purposes of Resist/protection?
Thank you for your response!
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It is all at the start of the Magic section:
[Descriptor]
Appearing on the same line as the school and subschool, when applicable, is a descriptor that further categorizes the spell in some way. Some spells have more than one descriptor.
The descriptors are acid, air, chaotic, cold, darkness, death, earth, electricity, evil, fear, fire, force, good, language-dependent, lawful, light, mind-affecting, sonic, and water.
Most of these descriptors have no game effect by themselves, but they govern how the spell interacts with other spells, with special abilities, with unusual creatures, with alignment, and so on.
A language-dependent spell uses intelligible language as a medium for communication. If the target cannot understand or cannot hear what the caster of a language-dependant spell says, the spell fails.
A mind-affecting spell works only against creatures with an Intelligence score of 1 or higher.
Wail of the Banshee say: School necromancy [death, sonic]
So it is a death spell (and death spell are death effects, simply the death effects is a larger category)
and a sonic spell, so the damage it do is sonic.
The few pages at the start of the magic section are packed with informations, even after a few years of Pathfinder I still need to reference them every so often.
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Note that the Scarab would still activate against Slay living after a successful attack, as the spell would still function , even at a reduced potency.
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In pathfinder Wail of the Banshee was heavily nerfed without correcting the text, So there could be discordant interpretations on how it work:
Wail of the banshee inflicts 10 hp per caster level in all. It basically starts chewing through enemies, starting with the one closest to you, and then working its way out until it only does partial damage to the last victim. This does mean that the more folks who make their saving throw to halve the damage, the further the wail gets, which is weird.Wail of the banshee; does 10 pts of damage per caster level to 1 target/2 caster levels but those closest are effected first....
does that mean that the total is limited to say...200hp divided amongst the targets? or does it do 200/target and just effects those closest first?Eh? It has been nerfed beyond oblivion from a spell that would have been a serious danger for a high level party.
A level 9 spell that do 200 hp of damage is little better than a harm spell.I had always read it as: "it do 200 hp of damage to each target up to to 1 target level".
It has a Fortitude save to negate all the damage and with the hp of most characters at the level at which they will met it WoB is hardly a Save or Die spell.With a cap of 200 hp as total don't seem much more than a glorified Circle of death. Level 7 at most.
So what determines when it stops chewing through a person? They hit 0 HP, they hit negative CON HP? Either of those numbers seem arbitrary when you can continue to damage a body beyond negative CON.
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So what determines when it stops chewing through a person? They hit 0 HP, they hit negative CON HP? Either of those numbers seem arbitrary when you can continue to damage a body beyond negative CON.
With a normal spell, I would stop at 0, as it is a death effect I would stop when the affected creature dies, i.e. -con. But then the spell becomes even weaker if we use the interpretation that it delivers total damage equal to 10 hp per caster level.
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So what determines when it stops chewing through a person? They hit 0 HP, they hit negative CON HP? Either of those numbers seem arbitrary when you can continue to damage a body beyond negative CON.With a normal spell, I would stop at 0, as it is a death effect I would stop when the affected creature dies, i.e. -con. But then the spell becomes even weaker if we use the interpretation that it delivers total damage equal to 10 hp per caster level.
Actually did some tangential digging as I am running Mummy's Mask. It turns out it reduces them to -1 hp before moving on:
Those who fail to save against a greater banshee’s wail are slain immediately rather than being reduced to –1 hit points.
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Well, unless they're really hearty and have more than 150hp, then yeah they should be good as new after a heal.