The Order of the Stick: Rules Discussion

I think the reason it's not active is just that he never activated it — he had the Protection from Law on him until the moment before he was dominated. But the item itself could still have the enchantment on it waiting to be switched on — my understanding is that to dispel a magic item in 3.5e you need to target the item specifically.

I'm wondering if anything stops him activating it now he's dominated? It doesn't conflict with "protect the elf", after all.

That is explicitly the case. We'd know if he was using the clasp. It generates a golden aura around him and he makes scowly faces from the burning.

If you look back over previous pages, Belkar has not had a golden aura and scowly face. As an example, here is Belkar with no golden glow or scowly face.

Hilgya explicitly said she was casting Pro-Law on everyone here, which is presumably why Belkar hasn't been using the Pro-Evil clasp. If Roy can activate the clasp, it should protect Belkar from following any further instructions from the vampires.

edited 12th Jun '18 1:55:33 PM by TobiasDrake

Does he even know about it?

Only in the most general sense. "Protection from Mind Whammy." Belkar never told him just which of his magic items does that. Of course, since I'm answering this two months later, it's a moot point now.

How do the Animal Companion rules work in 3.5? Can you only have one at a time or could Scruffy and the allosaurus whose name currently escapes me both count? & what does Scruffy gain from being a companion?

One at a time. And honestly? By the rules it's a special animal you gain, not one that you happen to find.

Of course, Animal Companions in 3.5 got turned into the Druid version of familiars and removed from being actually good for rangers, but...

It's literally impossible for a Ranger AC to get to Improved Evasion and Belkar isn't a high enough level for Multiattack. So, assuming that Belkar's in the vicinity of 12-16 ranger levels:

He has +4HD, +4 Natural AC, +2STR/DEX, some animal handling tricks, and the stuff outlined above. Not bad for a housecat.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 2nd 2018 at 2:30:21 PM

Bloodfeast, on the other hand, isn't an animal companion but just a tamed animal. He's still dangerous enough in full size, and due to a quirk of the way baleful polymorph works, he's actually surprisingly dangerous even in tiny lizard form. That was the point of that line about the vampire complaining about his teeth being way too sharp.

Really? After 1 day transformed, he should just be a plain ol' average lizard, per the spell wording.

Unless he made his Will save. The SRD doesn't have stats for an allosaurus, but if we go off the t-rex, he has a +8 Will bonus. Myron's baleful polymorph has a DC of around 18 (10 + 5 [spell level] + 3 [Myron's ability bonus, minimum +2 but rounding up]), which means that Bloodfeast would have about a 50% chance of making the save.

It's a little unclear if the victim of the spell has to make the save every 24 hours or just the first 24 hours. I'd guess the second one, since Rich has used poor wording to exploit the rules for a joke before. And I highly doubt it will actually become important, since even if he fails his saves he'll return to normal when the curse is eventually broken. They just haven't done it yet because they have nowhere to keep an allosaurus.

Still, all that would retain would be the HP and HD for the purposes of sleep etc. It wouldn't retain strength scores or BAB or the like.

BAB would be retained, because both an allosaurus and a tiny lizard are animals. The only difference is that the allosaurus has more HD, which gives it a higher BAB.

Specifically, an allosaurus has +13 BAB, meaning it gets three attacks at +13/+8/+3. A normal lizard would have a BAB of +0, and only one attack.

Edited by Discar on Sep 2nd 2018 at 8:41:09 AM

Yeah, just realised I misread the third line. It was talking about replacing e.g. class HD with racial HD effects. Whoops.

I know Rich published some alternative rules for Polymorph because he hated the way the core rules work. Can't look for the link right now but it's in the "That One Rule" section of GiantITP.

But that raises the question of whether he'd use his own homebrew rules (which you might think he would, but it could require a lot of explaining for people who are familiar with the usual ones), or just use the core rules he dislikes and take the opportunity to poke fun at them.

(And then take the opportunity to have Belkar lampshade that it's ages since the comic made any jokes about silly D&D rules.)

Found it. Well that settles whether he's using these rules in the comic: he's not, as he in fact proposes replacing the spells Polymorph and Shapechange with a bunch of other spells with more specific limitations.

I'm not sure that article really applies to Bloodfeast, because he was specifically hit by a Baleful Polymorph, a spell that can only change creatures into small harmless critters. I don't think it really has any of the abusable implications of Polymorph, Polymorph Any Object, or Shapechange.

Yeah, baleful polymorph is a textbook example of a polymorph spell done correctly. It has one simple change, with nothing particularly exploitable about it. Yes we're quibbling over some of the details, but that's inevitable. Far better than every other polymorph spell, which laughs at any attempt to balance your game.

In the next post down, in the Additional Spells folder, we find Burlew's modification to Baleful Polymorph: It's replaced by Turn to Frog, the most notable difference of which is that the Permanent duration is reduced to 1 day/level. Were that the case, Bloodfeast would be popping back into Allosaurus form in another week or so.

But that would ruin the old trick of siccing a high-level monster on your players when they Greater Dispel Magic in an area, and it turns out it hit a polymorphed enemy within the area.

I suppose you'd just have to have your bad guy remember to renew the spell every so often.

Sure, if it's meant to be a trap by the bad guy, but not if it's, like, a monster that was menacing a town that some previous adventuring party defeated with a Baleful Polymorph and called it a day.

Oh, I had a DM who did that. And the next adventure was to go yell at the idiots who left a polymorphed demon alone instead of just killing the lizard.

I've never seen that trick because it seems really impractical Like first it requires that your party spams greater dispel magic on everything

They only need to cast it once in an area with animals.

But why would they do that

Maybe you've convinced them there could be a giant invisible pyramid hiding a seal on a tear in reality.

Edited by shigmiya64 on Oct 28th 2018 at 4:03:48 AM