As quoted above, the Watcher’s journals record that William the Bloody tortured victims with railroad spikes. In a flashback in a later season, we see that William Pratt (the human who would become Spike) was a bad poet, and “friends” of his remarked they’d rather be tortured with railroad spikes than have to listen to it.
One easily imagines that shortly after Drusilla made him a vampire he gave those fellow the chance to make a more informed comparison, if you take my meaning.
That’s a +8, not a +3: He can and probably would cast it on both his armor and his shield. He only needs to cast each once per day, and third-level spell slots are cheap at his level. And he’s probably 16th level, so +4 from each casting, not +3.
Or maybe a +10, if he’s using a String of Prayer Beads before his morning buff routine, which is very realistic for a cleric of his level.
The C&LG thread concerns itself with the minimum proven, not with the most likely. He’s known to be at least 14, but I don’t think 16 has been ruled out, and it’s hard to see how he would be two levels behind Vaarsuvius.
Of course he does, he’s a high level Fighter. But at these levels, the point of AC is not to avoid the full BAB attacks, which are pretty much going to land all the time because BAB grows much faster than AC does. AC remains relevant to not get tagged by the second, third, fourth etc… attacks.
And to prevent your opponents from using Power Attack, or at least force them to use it for less. Except that in this case, the vampire’s AC is probably actually high enough that even Roy’s first attack doesn’t hit “pretty much all the time”.
To chime in on what is clearly the most significant element of this strip, Durkevil is definitely lying on either carpet or a decorative flooring; if you look closely at the floor of that upper level shown in the last three panels, it’s an even pattern unbroken by the window sides as you would expect if it were sunlight coming through the windows.
It’s more obvious if you look at other pages, where you can for instance see the pattern going up stairs, and visible on both the horizontals and verticals. Also a T-junction in the corridor, where there is a visible gap between the patterns in each direction.
Well, if folks are speculating on a “he’s in the sunlight/dispel magic/Durkevil gets toasted” end to this fight, that would be a strange and premature end to the Durkon plot line. There’s a lot of Chekov’s plot elements that have been set up since they left The Empire of Blood in terms of Durkon’s memories. And technically speaking, I don’t think Durkon has fulfilled the oracle’s prophecy by returning home in his posthumous state, and if he gets BTVS dusted, there won’t be anything to bring back.
Also, how would Roy dispel the protection from sunlight buff? It’s not in his skill set.
*The condition of the remains is not a factor. So long as some small portion of the creature’s body still exists, it can be resurrected, but the portion receiving the spell must have been part of the creature’s body at the time of death. (The remains of a creature hit by a disintegrate spell count as a small portion of its body.)
You can resurrect someone … who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed. *
Well, apparently with True Resurrection, you don’t even need the portion of body. But I’m not 100% sure that this works for the OOTS universe, because it seemed pretty clear that neither Malack (dusted) and Elan (stabbed and disintegrated) were coming back.
And a pile of dust is enough, but once that pile of dust has been scattered to the winds, you’re going to have an awfully hard time gathering it back up to target it. True Resurrection could still work, except that Rich has vowed to never use that spell, as he hates what it does to narratives.
Well, there’s that bit about “being part of your body when you died”. You can’t, apparently, just drop off a vial of blood in a safety deposit box before heading off to some colossal cave. So if you inconsiderately get your blood all over someone’s sword and then get killed by a tyrannosaurus rex seconds later, does that still count? What if you get killed by the same sword, but the cleric gets drops of blood from before you were actually dead?
Malack isn’t coming back because he doesn’t think the stupider, less wise and weaker creature he once was is an existence he wants to return to. As for Elan, I think the author decided that True Resurrection isn’t a thing in his story.
I know people were making guesses about blood on Tarquin’s dagger, etc (though that’s now Belkar’s dagger and was presumably cleaned) but the main reason Nale wouldn’t be returning is because his story is over. Even if Tarquin had the means, he wouldn’t see any value in bringing Nale back. After all, he killed him in the first place and it’s unlikely that a Resurrected Nale would be any more compliant or useful in the long term.
