| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Did someone say they were serving cats?
I mean, they're not very filling, but if somone's offering it'd be rude to refuse.
-mondo!
Sacrificing living things has been a part of human culture since like... forever. It's a part of every major religion (that I'm aware of) including the Christian bible.
Death Knell is evil because it's explicitly named as such. Sacrificing a living creature for other purposes - say for a nature oracle's natural divination - is not necessarily.
Sacrificing living things has indeed been part of many major world religions*. Which doesn't mean that all animal sacrifice is automatically acceptable/normal/moral/non-evil in the fictional world we've created.
That said, even if we say that sacrificing animals isn't automatically evil, there's a difference between killing them and torturing them, and drowning cats isn't the most humane way to kill them.
*For the record, many of the religions that do/did practice animal sacrifice have regulations (shechita in Judaism, zabiha in Islam, jhatka in Hinduism, etc.) designed to ensure that the animal died as close to instantaneously as possible, and was not aware of what was coming, in an attempt to ensure that it didn't suffer.
So don't look to real-world religions to try to justify yourself here--both because this is a fantasy world and not the real world, and because most of those real-world religions would view subjecting even the animals they sacrifice(d) to that sort of slow, painful death as wrong.
Don't be a jerk.
I don't believe that Feral was being a jerk. Some people upthread said that all animal sacrifice was evil (which seems erroneous for the very reason of the humane sacrificial practices that you mention here.) He (Feral) was merely pointing out death knelling kittens is not the only form animal sacrifice can take, and that labelling all such acts as evil is a bit presumptuous, as some other posters have.
In that, I don't disagree with him. It does seems an outgrowth of cultural imperialism to label acts that don't fit easily into what that (imperialistic) culture takes to be normative as evil/wrong.
|
How about we take it a different way?
Odds are a given character attempting this at a given table will be trying to advertise what they are doing to the discomfort of other players in an effort to be 'edgy'.
So let's just walk past this misunderstood rules application and grow from what we've learned already and focus on something more positive?
^^That, I definitely agree with: "don't do things only to specifically upset the people with whom you spend time for the lolz."
Just say no to EdgeLords.
-j
|
If two copies of the same spell are separate sources, when would anything count as the same source? There would be no point to having a same-source rule.Death knell stacking is debatable. The caster level bonus is untyped and each casting is technically a separate spell (which can be considered a separate source). Expect table variation.
I don't disagree with you (notice I said later on that I don't think it's intended to work that way). But there are arguments made all the time about this subject, mainly because the CL bonus is untyped. It falls into the typical "do you parse the sentence in the least restrictive way?" debate. Some GMs may allow it.
|
I would say that this, excluding all the moral ramifications, wouldn't work and that it falls under the vampirism touch faq about temp hitpoints. For those who don't want to find it. It says that while the temp hitpoints from vampiric touch are untyped, they do not stack with temp from other uses of the touch. The reasoning for that rule seems to imply that an untypedal caster level bonus would not stack either.
|
I'm not sure the "same effect at different strengths doesn't stack" really applies in this case - I think that's more aimed at situations where mutiple Color Sprays don't give you a more severe blindness or stunnedness.
I do remember Mike making a ruling about the availability of NPC spellcasters with spectacularly high CL. For example, to Make Whole a destroyed +4 weapon you'd need a CL 24 caster. He said that an NPC priest could amp up his CL that high with a series of Death Knells.
However, that had the feeling of an intellectual exercise that happens between NPCs offstage to justify them being able to do something, not necessarily something PCs should be able to leverage for everything.
It would be amazing if you could find that post, so we can ask the Campaign Leadership to make a new one.
Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria
|
Mike basically signed off on handwaving an NPC casting Make Whole at the appropriate CL. He never mentioned anything about Death Knell.I'm not sure the "same effect at different strengths doesn't stack" really applies in this case - I think that's more aimed at situations where mutiple Color Sprays don't give you a more severe blindness or stunnedness.
I do remember Mike making a ruling about the availability of NPC spellcasters with spectacularly high CL. For example, to Make Whole a destroyed +4 weapon you'd need a CL 24 caster. He said that an NPC priest could amp up his CL that high with a series of Death Knells.
However, that had the feeling of an intellectual exercise that happens between NPCs offstage to justify them being able to do something, not necessarily something PCs should be able to leverage for everything.
It would be amazing if you could find that post, so we can ask the Campaign Leadership to make a new one.
Thank you for finding the exact post, that makes things easier and we can just assume, that there are plenty of fairy dragon sorcerers around or just enough witches with the coven hex... or just someone with a belt of "because I say so " ^^
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
I don't believe that Feral was being a jerk. Some people upthread said that all animal sacrifice was evil (which seems erroneous for the very reason of the humane sacrificial practices that you mention here.) He (Feral) was merely pointing out death knelling kittens is not the only form animal sacrifice can take, and that labelling all such acts as evil is a bit presumptuous, as some other posters have.
The "don't be a jerk" wasn't for Feral. It was echoing the whole idea that if you try this at a PFS table, you're being a jerk, so don't do that.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
