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Sneak into enemy home, cast it on one of the sheets of his roll of toilet paper.
Crimeo wrote: 1) You have not answered "readied action in response to what?" Well, I'm not Anzyr, but I'm pretty sure their response is "when the bundle of papers appears next to the target". Correct me if I'm wrong on that one. Without time stop, presumably it's "when summoned minion 1 is next to the target".
Crimeo wrote: 2) I said WITHOUT time stop. "You can't use time stop, because if we are talking about dudes with 9th level spells, this is not unbalanced anyway versus all the stuff people with 9th level spells can do" It's still infinite no-save damage if you do it right. Actual, by the rules effectively infinite damage instead of the pseudo physics stuff you posted earlier. Even with a save a 1 always fails (and you're rolling enough times you'll get 1 1/20th of the time).
Crimeo wrote: 3) "You can aim it well over someone's head and still hit the ground." Maybe. Unless somebody's minion / a familiar's assigned job was to have a readied action to throw a blanket on any written materials appearing in the critical area. Or various contingencies, etc. after you've pulled this trick once. The ability to GM fiat away something is always completely meaningless to a discussion. Magical Tea Party can make anything happen or not happen, it has no place in a discussion except as a footnote.
Crimeo wrote: 4) Or it can reach the ground, but all of your enemies are levitating/flying/air walking, which they should probably be tending to do anyway at level like 15-20. "You're not allowed to use 9th level spells! I'm totally allowed to assume that everything is level 15+!" And you can just summon a minion who can fly to carry the paper bomb. Not really a big deal.
Crimeo wrote: 5) Throw more minor spread out dudes at you in larger numbers if you love to throw all your resources into big multiday prep AoE attacks. Go ahead and blow one up. Right, you don't kill minions with this (well, except your own). You kill gods/eldritch horrors/demon lords/infernal dukes/anything with HP not immune to force damage. Actually, probably need to include "who you can beat SR on, if they have it". But with the right build, that's almost everything.
Crimeo wrote: 6) Improved cover, Shallow trenches with wooden trestles, arrow loops, etc. Unless this is a solid box with a single slit, the minion/minelayer can just go to the other side. And the dispel doesn't need to make a to-hit roll to go through a narrow space. It just happens.
Crimeo wrote: I just don't see it as being that great. It's not that hard to stop you from manufacturing 500 of them to begin with, it can be countered a bunch of ways, there's a very decent chance of blowing yourself up if you aren't clever enough, and by the time you can really do this well and get around most of this, you already have a dozen other ways to be just as powerful anyway. Oh also, the GM can simply use this against you by NPCs... if it really is so great and nothing works against it and you've used it 3 times now, everybody in the kingdom has now heard of this, and imitation is the highest form of flattery. Someone asked how to do it. We explained it. It doesn't matter if it's good or not. I've helped people build terrible ideas all the time (usually with advice against it, but that rarely stops them). If your only contribution to this thread is "you're all wrong and the GM can stop you anyway", well, then you're not contributing much. If at all.
That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat...
Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat... Also that what he thinks the DM's decision should be is RAW somehow. Wrap your head around that one.
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The banality of this thread goes to eleven.
lemeres wrote: You want to abuse them? As a player, or as a GM?
As a player...use the standard boring tricks you hear here.
As a GM? Realize that there is no limit on how many you can have- just a limit of time and spells per day. And as a GM, you can skip those by having multiple casters working in the background, constantly.
So how to abuse them? Flyer bombs. As in, having something fly over and drop hundreds, if not thousands of these things. And do it in a crowded area. You just caused a massive act of terrorism. And you just turned every set of eyes aged 7 to 70 in the area into a trigger- even if you keep your eyes closed, some poor fool next to you might not do so. And how can you avoid people if your eyes are closed?
This could end up being a cool opening where you are willing to throw out many, if not all of the character sheets. But for those that survive? They have a fairly good backstory- they are given a VERY strong reason to murder the people behind this. They are a survivor of the King's Day disaster (or whatever moniker you give the event).
And imagine trying to clean that place up? The entire district might end up abandoned since there are infohazard landmines in there.
If you do that, that would be a place for magician's force - the pcs are the ones out of the crowd that lived.
And these explosive runes exploits are lame, and I agree heartily with the various reasons it doesn't work.
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I once knew an arcane trickster sniper, who added explosive runes to the butt of his bolts, added a high-mag scope to his crossbow, did not make himself immune to triggering the runes, and would read them himself through the scope after they impacted his target. A convoluted and dangerous method in attempt to stay viable.
After creating a minefield of runes against an invading orc horde, thwarted by their widespread illiteracy, he gave the scope to a defender that wasn't made immune to the runes, turning the dud mines into LoS remote bombs.
Nigrescence wrote: Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat... Also that what he thinks the DM's decision should be is RAW somehow. Wrap your head around that one. Anzyr is correct by RAW. Anzyr is a well know RAW RAW RAW guy... so yeah... Crimeo is wrong or Rule 0ing it.
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Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: Nigrescence wrote: Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat... Also that what he thinks the DM's decision should be is RAW somehow. Wrap your head around that one. Anzyr is correct by RAW. Anzyr is a well know RAW RAW RAW guy... so yeah... Crimeo is wrong or Rule 0ing it. *put on Kamina shades*
FIGHT THE POWER! FIGHT THE POWER!
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Anzyr wrote: Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: Nigrescence wrote: Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat... Also that what he thinks the DM's decision should be is RAW somehow. Wrap your head around that one. Anzyr is correct by RAW. Anzyr is a well know RAW RAW RAW guy... so yeah... Crimeo is wrong or Rule 0ing it. *put on Kamina shades*
FIGHT THE POWER! FIGHT THE POWER! DO THE IMPOSSIBLE! SEE THE INVISIBLE!
ROW, ROW, FIGHT THE POWER!
TOUCH THE UNTOUCHABLE! BREAK THE UNBREAKABLE!
ROW, ROW, FIGHT THE POWER!
Pixie, the Leng Queen wrote: That is all Crimeos contributions... the adamantine thread pretty much amounts to him saying GM fiat... I didn't say anything about GM fiat in this thread. I said it didn't seem that abusable. OP asked "How to abuse runes?" My conclusion is: "I don't think you can very much." You are welcome to a different opinion, but that is an answer. The most abusable (but IMO not really very abused) method is also spelled out if that's all he wanted to know, I dunno *shrug*
With a little GM fiat, I'm curious what can be done with a rune carved into a magically reinforced block of adamantine, with permanency on the rune. When the smoke clears, it gets read again, et cetera.
In PF, it's hard because there's no Amanuensis spell (0-level cantrip, Spell Compendium). How we pulled them off in v3.5 is...
Step 1: Be a wizard of at least 7th level.
Step 2: Learn the Explosive Rune and Amanuensis spells
Step 3: Get the Quicken Spell feat
Step 4: Cast Explosive Runes on a piece of parchment over and over for as many castings as one deems necessary.
Step 5: Prepare Amanuensis as a 4th level Quickened Spell.
Step 6: Throw the balled up piece of parchment (or case Launch Item) into a square with the BBEG and then cast Amanuensis on the parchment. This ignites the runes at once, causing 6d6 damage per casting of force damage (no save).
Step 7: Repeat.
I don't think anyone mentioned having multiple explosive runes on a single sheet of paper yet. Essentially, you just fill the sheet of paper with a bunch of runes, and then, have a minion (familiar, cohort, follower etc.) use a CL 1 wand of erase. As long your dispel DC is 22 or higher (from boosting your CL or being CL 11 natively), it is impossible for the wand to dispel the runes on the paper (1d20+1). Since erase targets everything on the paper all at once, it fails to dispel all of them, all at once and triggers all of them. Even just fitting 5 runes on a piece of paper means you're hitting someone for 30d6 points of force damage.
Quote: Magic writing must be touched to be erased So it would seem to me to just blow up one of them when you touched it, destroying the sheet of paper with the rest in the process. If one whole block of text were one rune spell, then touching any part of it would be touching the spell's text, but if only one letter, aren't you then not touching any of the other runes' text? Also this:
Quote: With this spell, you can remove explosive runes, a glyph of warding, a sepia snake sigil, or an arcane mark Emphasis mine. Only includes the indefinite article for the arcane mark, but seems to imply it works on one spell at a time (you could also put 500 arcane marks on one sheet too. It would be quite odd if erasing 500 runes was totally cool, but only one mark at a time can be erased.).
This is all a bit circumstantial though, I could see it being interpreted to work, too.
Crimeo wrote: Quote: Magic writing must be touched to be erased So it would seem to me to just blow up one of them when you touched it, destroying the sheet of paper with the rest in the process. If one whole block of text were one rune spell, then touching any part of it would be touching the spell's text, but if only one letter, aren't you then not touching any of the other runes' text? Also this:
Quote: With this spell, you can remove explosive runes, a glyph of warding, a sepia snake sigil, or an arcane mark Emphasis mine. Only includes the indefinite article for the arcane mark, but seems to imply it works on one spell at a time (you could also put 500 arcane marks on one sheet too. It would be quite odd if erasing 500 runes was totally cool, but only one mark at a time can be erased.).
This is all a bit circumstantial though, I could see it being interpreted to work, too. According to the spell:
Quote: Erase removes writings of either magical or mundane nature from a scroll or from one or two pages of paper, parchment, or similar surfaces. And since the spell has a duration of instantaneous, you can assume it targets the whole thing.
Right, that's why it's ambiguous. The spell text simply contradicts itself. For example, I cast 27 arcane marks on one page of paper. The spell simultaneously says "erases one page" but then also says "erases AN arcane mark"
These are mutually exclusive instructions, since a page in this example would be more than one arcane mark.
Also touching a page is not touching text, necessarily. If the text takes up the whole page (obviously their intended usage they were thinking about when they wrote this) then the two things are the same. But if you have 27 different distinct bits of text assigned to different spells, it doesn't quite work the same way. This one isn't "contradictory" necessarily, but it is very ambiguous and confusing.
"An" doesn't necessary mean "one" any more than saying "this sword could behead an umber hulk" means it can only behead a single umber hulk. It's a statement of capability that might as well be written "this spell is able to erase arcane marks." It means the same thing in context.
Here's the comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to using explosive runes on things that can't read, starting at level 9.
Step 1, be a wizard(or other caster capable of casting explosive runes. If witches can do that, be a witch.
Step 2: get the following things: Tenbrous Spell, a +1 to explosive runes cl trait of your choice, Resilient Caster, Spell Focus: Abjuration, spell specialization(Explosive Runes.)
Step 3: Cast Tenebrous Explosive Runes(4th level slot) on something light, and put it in a bag that doesn't let light in.
Step 4: Repeat until satisfied with the size of the resulting explosion. Might take a few weeks worth of spell slots, but beware of diminishing returns as you add more ERs.
You now have a dark(on the inside, that is) bag full of small rocks with letters imbued with explosive runes. These are surprisingly hard to dispel, coming in at DC 19+base caster level. Supposing you are level 9 (high enough to cast 4th level spells) that's DC 28. Strictly speaking, everything above 25 is wasted, but ehh, what the hell.
Caution: Take care not to be hit with dispel magic while carrying. Depending on how your dm treats things inside extradimensional storage, you might be best served by stuffing the bag inside a handy haversack.
Step 5: scribe a scroll of dispel magic, caster level 5. This is your trigger. Note the low caster level.
Step 6: plant the bag where you want your explosion, & stand clear.
Step 7: Activate the scroll as an area dispel magic, making sure not to include lower-cl magic effects than those of the bag in the area.
Step 8: proceed to fail as many of the dispel checks as you can. For each dispel you fail, you get a nice explosion. Since you need to roll 20 to suceed, and the runes last as long as you want them to, meaning you can prepare hundreds in your off-time, that's a lot of explosions. Eventually you'll roll 20, but this can be fixed by having a friendly Witch use Misfortune on you before you set off the bomb.
Step 9: ???
Step 10: Profit. Or dead balor, whatever you prefer.
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