The Order of the Stick

Well, I guess they're supposed to be powered by magic.

...And now I'm wondering if it's possible for a golem to "run out of juice", like a battery.

...And now I'm picturing an endurance match between a golem and the Energizer bunny.

I forget, what's the rest of the team doing at the moment?

Well last we saw them, Belkar turned down lunch with a gnome shopkeeper, Elan is unconscious, V is shopping for magic items and Roy and Durkon were trying to get Durkon destroyed and ressurrected, but that failed miserably.

Well, Roy is trying to do that. Durkula has some as-yet-unrevealed ulterior motive.

Wait, why would Crystal Golem be 500lbs? That's...really heavy.

Real world logic would dictate that the golem would be as heavy as the person it was made from.

D&D logic is that a flesh golem weighs 500 lbs whether it was made from a heavyweight boxer or a gymnast.

A flesh golem is a patchwork of body parts from a bunch of corpses. This special golem that Rich has invented runs into all kinds of inconsistency problems with the core rules.

edited 20th Mar '15 6:21:48 AM by Fighteer

Presumably the extra weight would be metal reinforcements and er, gear boxes, or something.

Golems weigh a lot. All that magic is heavy.

Flesh golems have this weird rule interaction with fire and cold spells.

The rules say they are immune to all spells that allow for spell resistance- which includes fireball and many other fire/cold spells.

However, the rules also state that certain spells bypass their spell immunity. Electricity spells heal them instead of damaging them, and fire or cold spells slow them- but the rules don't clarity if fire and cold spells do damage in addition to slowing, or instead.

Since the electricity doesn't have it's original damaging effect, I would think that they don't, but the rules aren't perfectly clear.

It's clear enough. Those spells inflict no damage, but the golem receives special secondary effects.

If the amount of physical material is an inherent requirement of the crafting process, then I'd imagine that Crystal has a bunch of other corpses (other ex-Thieves' Guild members, perhaps?) stitched up into her body.

edited 20th Mar '15 6:32:11 AM by Fighteer

While I agree with you, I can see someone arguing in the other direction.

Yeah, this isn't going well for Haley...

(I don't think anyone else has posted the new strip, anyway. Looked on the last page and didn't see anything.)

We've been talking about it the last two pages at least.

Crap, I didn't see that post, or don't remember seeing it.

I thought the discussion was just general stuff, not about that specific strip.

Since nothing really interesting happened in this strip, we could as well be talking about general stuff.

These golems seem kinda OP, to be honest. They're basically meat sponge juggernauts that completely No-Sell several classes.

Actually, rogues get completely No-Sell'd by multiple entire monster types. Yeah, golems are on the top of that list, but anything immune to sneak attacks is a nightmare for a rogue.

The way I remember it from my very little D&D playing, when it comes to open combat rogues are potentially a nightmare for anything they can sneak attack, especially if the person playing the rogue knows how to use them right and can get in on the flanks or back of a creature that's already engaged. If something isn't vulnerable to a sneak attack... then the rogue becomes about as effective as Bozzok and Crystal were against Belkar back in Greysky city.

Relevant Casey and Andy strip

It's why not splitting the party is so important. Lots of thing can completely shut down a given class, but very little can shut down the entire party.

Except for a railroad plot.

"[party's amount of fullcasters]+2 (with prep)" is one of those.

edited 20th Mar '15 8:49:02 AM by Adannor

Rich made a post at some point about that fight went, actually. The key factor that's no obvious in the comic itself the Miko's horse. Basically, they targeted Belkar and V and brought them down before they had a chance to do anything, Roy was limited by his lack of real weapon, Elan was useless, Durkon limited himself entirely to Diplomacy and Healing because he didn't actually want to fight, and then the horse stomped on Haley's bow and broke it.

But despite all that, they almost won. Roy ultimately surrendered because although he had a chance of beating her, continuing would have been risking the rest of the party dying.

Anti-magic and disjunctions, then, maybe?

What, against the Crystal Golem?

As we've previously discussed, anti-magic field disables spells and spell-like effects, but does not cause magical beings to go poof. The Crystal Golem would be unaffected by anti-magic for the same reasons Xykon would.

edited 20th Mar '15 9:56:51 AM by TobiasDrake