*Alchemist fire and acid are both cheap, and cut through a lot of monsters’ special defenses.
*If you’re in a tomb of the damned and keep running into traps, use cheap summoning spells and send sheep and whatever down in front of you. Don’t walk directly behind them, in case there’s a lightning bolt, but they’ll set off just about any trap possible.
*If you’re getting through a fortress or something people actually use actively, then you can likely ignore any passageways filled with traps. Just go around and cut through another wall of something much easier.
*If you can detect a trap, you can bypass it. Skills are irrelevant as long as you know what’s going on. You just need a way to trigger it while you’re out of the picture, or just avoid the trigger if it’s magical and automatically.
*items to deal a magic missile every round automatically are shockingly cheap.
*Items which Cure Light Wounds 1/round are equally cheap and even more cost-effective than 50-charge wands.
*It usually doesn’t hurt to be polite to your enemies.
A group for which I was DMing pulled a clever bluff, once. One of their members got taken prisoner by orcs or some such who were planning to sacrifice him to their god. The player party was low level and had no chance of winning against them in combat. They took a dried tree limb, carved some runes on it, and added a few feathers and other decorations. They walked straight up to the orc village and announced that they either got their friend back or they would level the place with their fireball staff. The dice decided that the orcs were gullible that day, so they took their friend and unassed the area. I was really pleased they came up with something even moderately clever. That group tended to view combat as the solution to every problem.
If you take that attitude, then this entire thread is moot. We’re discussing clever hacks and loopholes in D&D. Broken things. You could respond to every single post with “I wouldn’t let that work if I were GM” and add absolutely nothing to the discussion.
Besides, I’m puzzled as to what he “wouldn’t let work”. The Harm spell? The Rapier?
“Oh, I’m sorry, I know I let you spend thousands of gold on that rapier, but I just realized I wanted this villain around longer than this one session, so I retroactively make your sword nonmagical. What, where are you going… ?”
If I pulled that tactic off in a game, and the GM decided suddenly to alter the rules or conditions so fundamentally under my feet, I’d insist on rewinding things back to the point in time where I’d made decisions, counting on the rules to be consistent, so I could make decisions that comported with the GM’s new sudden vision of the rules.
The first thing most RPG rulebooks say is that the rules are only guidelines (like POTC’s pirate code), they are there to help, not to hinder gameplay, the DM has absolute authority to alter, bend, ignore or do anything he wants with them.
You are not playing chess, you are trying to create a story, If the DM’s setting is harmed by your clever hack, it’s his duty to tell you you can’t do that.
Now a DM that abuses this power will rightly be deprived of players, if at all possible he should tell them beforehand what he will not allow, but sometimes that is not possible. He should also try to accommodate the player’s wishes and commend him for his/her ingenuity, may be see if he can allow something like the hack the player invented that is less setting/game/dignity destroying but it still rewards the player.
But in the end there is a difference between RPG games and other tabletop games, in a normal game, you win by looking at the rules and using them to your benefit, a “hack” is something good. In an RPG game you cannot “win”, you win by having fun and creating great stories, if your hack compromises that it’s the DM’s duty to disallow it.
Which is fine…as long as the players know about it ahead of time.
Dumping it on them in the middle of combat, while they’re relying on an expensive magic item that is designed explicitly to do what you just handwaved away, is pretty much assholery. Not least because it means the weapons expensive enchantment, which you either allowed them to buy, or flat out awarded to them, does absolutely nothing at all.
Would you also rule that a high-level barbarian who drops below 1 hp/level when his rage runs out is just fine? Because that risk of death is exactly the same, and exactly as intended by the writers.
That’s the trick. Discussing it ahead of time. All too commonly (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) the person comes up with a ‘trick’ and then tries to spring it on the DM in the middle of combat and then bludgeon/badger/guilt trip/threaten/whine their way to making it work that way.
It’s been pretty much universal in my experience on both sides of the table that this does not work with any DM who isn’t completely insecure.
Hell, I used to play Star Fleet Battles back in the day. Our group completely dissolved over one player repeatedly pulling that crap, and the entire sessions devolving into one massive argument about the rules. That is totally NOT COOL and I don’t respect when people do it in any game.
This is actually why I stay away from complicated RPGs these days. When you start writing down tons of rules, each of which has its own special effects and fringe cases, you end up with a horrible mishmash of stuff that can’t help but be FULL of stupid loopholes.
Simpler games with simpler mechanics encourage people to talk out how things would work because there isn’t any “No, really, it says that this spell does…” stuff to fall back on and argue about.
One approach (besides avoiding playing with the type of people who try to rules-lawyer through “loopholes”) is to just not give players game-mechanic information. Let them know what the characters know about opponents, spells, so on. This makes more work for the GM, of course, but it means you can welcome people who are, say, fans of genre stories but not dicehead gamers.
A good hack is either situational or is heavy on the entertainment/efficacy ratio (that is, it’s far more fun than it is effective).
Examples: escaping overwhelming odds by casting feather fall on a cart and fly on the draft camels and speak with animals to tell the camels to carry the cart to safety. Feather fall technically doesn’t work that way, but it’s so situational that a good GM can allow it.
Example: attaching a decanter of endless water to the end of a stick, sitting on the stick and casting levitate, and turning the water on for a flying broomstick. This is a little bit overpowered, but not that much (magic item + second level spell = third level spell effect), and it’s silly fun.
Bad hacks are magic bullets: loopholes in the rules that allows characters to overcome a huge variety of situations.
I think the harm + rapier of wounding (or whatever) trick falls in this category. Technically by the rules it’s legal; Con damage absolutely affects current hit points. However, it’s so ridiculously effective that it makes the game less fun. As a GM, I’d allow it to work the first time I learned about it, and then work with the player to give the rapier a different sweet power that didn’t result in a magic bullet combo.
Yeah well, half-dragon dwarven barbarian warlords are pretty inflated too… Any GM who pops up something like that should have to take any rules-pretzeling the players come up with.
In addition, sometimes it can be fun when a player concentrates on developing a character’s personality. E.g. maybe you have a stereotypical warrior guy, but your warrior is very itchy and impulsive and goes from 0 to hack-and-slash at the drop of a hat. He sees an orc, he cuts it up. So you play him consistently like that. It may work well oftentimes as you cut down enemies before they can call for reinforcements or sometimes even notice that you are there. At some time or another, however, your warrior acts impulsively at the wrong time and runs into a trap. Then he has to escape - or be rescued. Could be great fun.
Of course it still does something. CON drain reduces an enemy’s max hitpoints, does pretty decent damage too since at 1d6X hitpoints a pop where X is the critter’s hit dice your one touch attack could wind up doing 100+ points of damage, twice that on a crit. But more importantly, it does CON damage. I guaranfuckingtee the monster has less CON than hitpoints, and the monster is dead whichever runs out first. And yes, 3d6 is probably not dropping a dragon’s CON score to 0 on its own, but if the whole group gets in on the CON damage plan (with poisons, spells, crit feats…) that can become hella lethal.
Also, hitpoints can be healed, but CON drain is semi-permanent which matters in a run-and-gun battle where the Big Bad teleports away to his close-by sanctum or has mooks throwing Heal spells at him mid-fight and what have you.
*Also *also, his trick doesn’t work per RAW anyway :
[QUOTE=D&D SRD]
A hit point score can’t be reduced by Constitution damage or drain to less than 1 hit point per Hit Die.
[/QUOTE]
That’s the 3.5 SRD you’re quoting. I also looked, thinking there’s no way it works that way, but it seems to be the case in 3.0. Which is dumb, but I was never much of a fan of 3.x in the first place, so my mind ain’t exactly boggled.
Honestly, this is not the most efficient or reliable way to do this attack. Far better is harm+cause light wounds (or cause medium wounds if you’re worried about just dropping an opponent unconscious).
Advantages of using the spell:
-Cause medium wounds at 10th level or above (you must be 11th level to cast harm) does a minimum of 5 points of damage (1d8+10, save for half), enough to drop the enemy unconscious even if they save. The rapier of puncturing does a minimum of 0 points of damage (1 point of con damage vs. an opponent with an odd con score).
-Cause medium wonds is a far, far cheaper resource: even if you cast it from a scroll, we’re talking about 150 gp, compared to the rapier’s mult-K cost.
-Cause medium wounds has an unambiguous effect as part of this combo. The rapier’s effect is gonna lead to raised eyebrows.
That said, from my reading, the rapier combination would work in any 3.x game, including Pathfinder. When I think more about it, it’s really not that bad: once harm is cast, there are innumerable ways to do the last few points of damage. A friend casting magic missile, a fireball, anyone who can land an attack, etc. Harm is very close to a Kill The Bad Guy spell, and it’s supposed to be used in combinations like this.
Amusingly, the SRD correction means vampires, wraiths, etc. don’t work Because they kill by Con drain. If Con drain can’t drop hp to 0, then vampires can’t exist. WOTC was never any good at fixing logical flaws in their rules.
The real problem with that “hack” is combining a weapon’s touch attack with a spell’s touch attack, on a single player’s single action. Now that’s a no-no*.
*with the possible exception of splatbook prestige classes, which, again, are the DM’s responsibility to approve beforehand.
Incorrect. You still die instantly if your con hits 0. A creature with 0 constitution is not alive. Says so on the same page with the correction.
The point of the correction is to prevent the exact deal that the rapier “hack” accomplishes. Con damage can’t kill you outright, but losing all your con still can (any of your stats lowering to 0 makes you 100% helpless, though con is the only one that actually kills you outright).